The Return of the ‘Zionist’ Slur

By Daniel Schatz

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

When I first heard Zohran Mamdani rail against Israel and Zionism, I did not think of the war in Gaza. I thought of Poland in 1968. The political language I grew up hearing about from my parents and grandparents — the language that helped drive them from their country of birth — was suddenly echoing through New York, decades later and an ocean away.

 

My family was among the thousands of Jews forced out of Communist Poland little more than two decades after the Holocaust. They were harassed, humiliated, stripped of their place in society, and ultimately driven from the country for no reason other than being Jewish. The regime never called its campaign antisemitic. It called it anti-Zionist. That distinction made much of what followed possible.

 

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union and nearly all of its Warsaw Pact allies severed relations with Israel. In Poland, Communist leader Władysław Gomułka warned that Polish Jews celebrating Israel’s victory constituted a “fifth column.” When student protests erupted the following year, “Zionists” became the convenient enemy within. The significance of that word is difficult to overstate. Poland’s Jewish population then numbered around 30,000 in a country of 32 million. Yet government propaganda transformed the small number of Jews who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust into a network of supposedly disloyal cosmopolitans whose true allegiance lay elsewhere.

 

The word “Zionist” rapidly lost any precise meaning. A Zionist was disloyal, cosmopolitan, and connected to foreign interests: someone whose real loyalty supposedly belonged to another country. Then came the machinery. Tens of thousands of meetings were organized in factories, universities, and even sports clubs, adopting “anti-Zionist” resolutions. Jews were expelled from jobs, universities, and government institutions. They effectively had their citizenship revoked and were forced to emigrate.

 

In Łódź, Jewish journalists were dismissed as “Zionists,” while physicians were asked for baptism certificates. Communist propaganda recycled material from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic book. Within months, Jewish communal life in a city that had once been one of Europe’s great centers of Jewish culture was devastated, and the city was “Judenrein” — cleansed of Jews.

 

People were interrogated, humiliated, and professionally destroyed. Friends and colleagues stopped speaking to them. Families that had survived the Holocaust were branded foreigners in the country they considered home. Some could not bear it. Mieczysław Rakowski, later the last prime minister of Communist Poland, recalled a letter sent to Gomułka by a woman in Kraków with two sons and a sick husband. “Do me a favor and send some poison capsules,” she wrote. “I have no strength to live anymore. I do not want my sons to spend their whole lives paying for having a Jewish father.”

 

Jozef Dajczgewand, one of the leaders of the March 1968 student protests and now a resident of Sweden, was arrested that month, tortured, and sentenced to two years in prison. In an interview for this article, he recalled that during one interrogation, police forced him to undress while screaming “f*ing Jew.”

 

“I closed my eyes,” he told me, “wondering for a second if it was Poles who committed these acts or the same Nazis who had persecuted my parents.” When he emerged from prison, most of his friends had already fled. “I could feel the echoes of history,” he said. He ended up leaving, too.

 

The victims were made stateless. Their possessions and savings were confiscated through humiliating exit procedures. Most had never belonged to a Jewish or Zionist organization. Many had never been to Israel. But that did not matter: Their Jewishness made them suspect.

 

My parents and grandparents were among those forced to start again somewhere else. And throughout it all, the authorities insisted they had nothing against Jews. They were merely fighting Zionists.

 

That was the genius — and the obscenity — of the word.

 

The political vocabulary developed behind the Iron Curtain did not disappear when Communism collapsed. It spread through the developing world and the international left, eventually finding a home in parts of Western academia and progressive politics. Moscow and its allies helped popularize the idea of Zionism as racist, imperialist, colonialist, and fascist — an enemy not only of Palestinians but of progressive humanity itself. Communist propaganda compared Zionism with Nazism. In 1975, the Soviet bloc joined Arab and developing countries to provide the majority for the United Nations resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Anti-Zionism had become more than a position on the Middle East. In parts of the global left, it was becoming an identity.

 

The echoes of that time are difficult to miss today when Israel is again described as imperialist and colonialist. It is compared with apartheid South Africa and, with increasing frequency, Nazi Germany. Jews — the descendants of one of history’s most persecuted peoples — are recast as privileged oppressors. Palestinian violence is increasingly described not primarily as violence to be judged on its own terms but as “resistance” by a colonized people. Parts of the left have even found common cause with Islamist movements whose views on women, homosexuality, religious freedom, and liberal democracy contradict almost everything progressives claim to believe.

 

Zohran Mamdani did not invent this worldview, but he speaks its language fluently. In his 2017 rap song “Salaam,” Mamdani gave a shout-out to the “Holy Land Five,” leaders of a charity whose officials were convicted of providing material support to Hamas. During his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign, he declined to affirm Israel’s right to exist specifically as a Jewish state. Asked about the slogan “globalize the intifada,” Mamdani initially refused to condemn it. And at a Democratic Socialists of America gathering in 2023, Mamdani explained why activists needed to make Palestine “hyper-local” for Americans: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” With that sentence, Israel ceases to be simply a distant country whose policies he opposes. It becomes an explanation for injustice in New York. Perceived American police brutality and racism are folded into the indictment of the Jewish state.

 

For someone whose family lived through Poland in 1968, this mechanism feels unnervingly familiar: Stretch the meaning of “Zionist” until it becomes synonymous with “oppressor,” then, you can sort the Jews themselves. The “good Jew” is the Jew who condemns Israel loudly enough, repudiates Zionism, and demonstrates that his Jewish identity presents no obstacle to progressive politics. Such Jews are eagerly presented as proof that anti-Zionism cannot possibly become antisemitic.

 

The Jew who refuses that test gets different treatment. If Israel forms part of his family history, religious consciousness, or understanding of Jewish personhood, he is increasingly expected to explain himself. If he calls himself a Zionist, what may be a central element of his identity is transformed from a political belief open to disagreement into a moral stain. Once a political culture starts sorting Jews into acceptable and unacceptable kinds, history shows us we need to pay attention.

 

Mamdani is not alone. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, and progressive media figures such as Hasan Piker share much of this worldview. Bernie Sanders’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s enthusiastic support for Mamdani has helped move a politics once largely confined to the activist left closer to the Democratic mainstream.

 

This summer produced a pointed warning. On July 23, New York Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, publicly addressed Mamdani. New York’s Jews, she said, did not merely need police protection. They needed leaders to stop rhetoric that “demonizes Jews and the Jewish state and helps create the climate in which threats and violence flourish.”

 

Less than a month later, violence entered her own synagogue. During Shabbat services a few weeks ago, a man disrupted the congregation, assaulted a congregant and a security guard, and damaged synagogue property. He was charged with assault and criminal mischief as hate crimes. Buchdahl had not been alone in raising the alarm; days earlier, ten New York rabbis had met Mamdani at City Hall. They raised the recent stabbing of a Jewish New Yorker and their concern that rhetoric surrounding Israel was increasingly spilling over onto Jews in New York.

 

There is no evidence that the synagogue attacker, or the man charged in the earlier stabbing, acted because of anything Mamdani said. That is not the point. Political leaders help set the boundaries of prejudice. They determine which ideas remain shameful and which become part of ordinary political conversation.

 

My family’s story taught me where that can lead. Poland’s antisemitic campaign did not begin with thousands of Jews standing at railway stations holding one-way travel documents. It began with words — in speeches, newspapers, university campuses, and political debates. A political movement discovered that it could say things about “Zionists” that would have sounded uglier if it had simply said “Jews.”

 

Then a colleague stopped saying hello, a journalist lost his job, and a professor disappeared from his university.

 

I do not believe Jewish New Yorkers are about to be expelled from their city. The danger today is subtler, and therefore easier to ignore: An old prejudice is being recast in a new moral vocabulary. Hostility toward Zionism is presented not merely as permissible, but as virtuous — and Jews are increasingly expected to prove their virtue by joining in.

 

History rarely announces that it is repeating itself. Sometimes it just swaps out the words.

Always Ready for His Closeup

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

“President Trump is one of the greatest showmen in history, and we fully expect to have a spectacular showing in Dallas and draw a massive viewership,” RNC spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre recently told Axios.

 

I’m sure Ms. Baldassarre is a formidable one. You would have to be, to go through high school with the first seven letters of your last name spelling out “bald ass.”

 

But such juvenilia aside, I’m not so sure. Ms. Baldassarre was responding to reported concerns that the upcoming GOP midterm “convention” in Dallas may struggle for its desired audience as it will be up against the opening games of the NFL season. Vice President J.D. Vance’s first night keynote will compete with a Superbowl rematch of the Patriots and Seahawks. Who can doubt that a man with such exquisite comedic chops will win the crucial battle for ratings?

 

“President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: How to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections,” according to The Atlantic.

 

The gurus debated different approaches, but Trump knew better. “The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself.”

 

Now, in the abstract, just because this is perfectly consistent with Trump’s narcissism—“America has a fever and the only prescription is more me!”—this isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Democrats are going with the time-honored strategy of making the election a referendum on Trump, so making Trump more popular has a certain logic to it.

 

The logic is even more compelling when you take into account that, at this point, it’s impossible to argue that a vote for a Republican isn’t a vote for Trump by proxy. Trump, more than any other president in American history, has turned his party into an extension of his personal brand. Traditionally, parties support their incumbents. But Trump has routinely intervened in primaries to make loyalty to him the litmus issue, endorsing challengers who vow to be Renfields to his Dracula. The only way the speaker of the House’s press conferences could convey his abject, supine, lickspittelry better is if they began with Trump wheeling out a kennel and having Mike Johnson emerge in a leather S&M onesie. “Gimp, say a few words for the fake news.”

 

There’s more resistance in the Senate, and Majority Leader John Thune deserves more respect and credit for it. But the Senate Republicans, for understandable reasons, keep their resistance very low-key, lest they invite too much of Trump’s wrath. Even the supposedly “YOLO” lame duck senators routinely couch their criticism in the Bad Boyar tradition, claiming that Trump is getting “bad advice.” As a result, the average voter draws the reasonable conclusion that the Senate, too, is simply an extension of Trump. So, again, if the midterms are a referendum on the president—as they pretty much always are, to one extent or another—getting Trump’s favorability out of the mid-30s makes sense in the abstract.

 

The problem is that Trump isn’t an abstraction—he’s been the dominant political figure for a decade. And he’s unpopular.

 

But I don’t think his unpopularity is his only problem.  He’s become boring. His “unpredictability” has become utterly predictable, for friend and foe and bystanders alike. He has no new material. It’s all variations of a very, very, familiar theme.

 

Yes, he can still make me mad. And he can infuriate Democrats. But his schtick is tired. He keeps trying to update the same material. He now says Lake Ontario is “Lake America.” It’s a dumb stunt, but it’s also unoriginal. He did this with the Gulf of Mexico already. That was dumb, too. But at least it was transgressive and shocking. It displayed a kind of confidence—confident asininity is still confidence. This feels more desperate.

 

I remember reading a profile of Bob Hope in his final years. He was making a made-for-TV movie and there was a scene in which a passing car was supposed to splash mud on him when going through a puddle. Hope told the director to make it a lot of mud, so it would be really funny. So, they followed his make-the-gag-bigger advice and had him drenched with gallons of mud. The quantity of the mud didn’t contribute much to the quality of the humor. It was a sad little vignette—the mud splash bit was a staple of an earlier era of humor, but sensibilities had changed.

 

That’s how “Lake America” feels to me. Hit the cowbell with a bigger hammer, the old logic went, and people will love it. Not so much anymore

 

The bigger problem for Trump is that he’s become the “establishment” and the status quo. His rebel-in-the-White-House schtick is now incongruous with the reality that he’s not the rebel anymore—he’s the empire.

 

You can see this playing out on the Democratic side. Numerous “Resistance 1.0” candidates lost their primaries because the old resistance movement worked on the assumption that Trump was an aberration, an unrepeatable fluke. But the fluke was repeated. And this time the “Deep State” backstabbers and Never Trumpers in the crumbling ancient regime were purged. His Cabinet has no John Kellys, Jim Mattises, Jeff Sessionses, Mike Pompeos, or Bill Barrs. It has abject loyalists for the most part, and a few tacticians who know that they can never say “No” to the president but also that they can maneuver how they say yes. He is the unitary executive in the executive branch, and the GOP. The new crop of Democrats still hate Trump, but they see Trump as the face of the status quo and the establishment. And so do Democratic voters, and a lot of independents, and a good number of Republicans.

 

The diehard MAGA types still talk like Trump is taking on the establishment, but where? Mitch McConnell’s hospital room? Mitt Romey’s poolside? Trump controls the party in power. He’s routed the resistance. The only people who earnestly use the phrase “Never Trumper” anymore are the people desperate to keep fighting old fights, to replay greatest hits, to hold onto to the self-serving frisson that they are the insurgents. Though some want to mine the reserves of anti-Never Trump hatred to create a “Never Vance” bogeyman.

 

It’s a rule in ideological media that it’s more fun—and more profitable—to be on offense than defense. National Review always got more traffic and subscribers when Democrats were in power. Rush Limbaugh was at his height when he was the “leader of the opposition.” The Nation surged under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and shrank under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s just easier—and more fun—to play the armchair general than to be in the trenches, responsible for your choices or your team.

 

It’s no surprise that the MAGA infotainment complex is reeling. Megyn Kelly is flailing for relevance, chasing edgelord content to hold attention. Benny Johnson’s views have cratered since the election. Take a gander at this:

 

Source: The Righting.

 

Defending Trump is even harder than a normal president because his predictable unpredictability makes it impossible to make a consistent argument in defense of his policies when his policies can change on a dime. As I’ve argued many times, this has caused a lot of people to revert to a blanket “In Trump We Trust” approach, defending his genius and instincts, rather than his ideas. But that gets hard when the schtick gets old and prices keep going up. Trotting out the talking points about his virility doesn’t work as well when he’s falling asleep at Cabinet meetings.

 

Trump is becoming a Citizen Kane figure before our eyes, increasingly spending his waking hours trying to turn Washington into a Xanadu that will outlive him. When Susan mocks Kane for spending all of his time collecting baubles and trinkets in his monument to himself, Kane responds “You may be right—I sometimes wonder—but you get into the habit.”

 

For Trump, the habit he’s retreating into is talking about marble and gold and how he knows how to build things better than anybody. He knows more about grass than anybody, so let’s talk about the lifespan of grass, rather than the lifespan of the war in Iran. If he has to talk about politics, he’d rather talk about his “landslides,” like Al Bundy talking about his four touchdowns in one game.

 

Yesterday Howard Lutnick removed his cranium from Trump’s sphincter long enough to explain to the press why he has to be allowed to renovate the Kennedy Center.

 

The president works all day, every day. And there are two things that he does for enjoyment. He plays golf on the weekend, and he builds. He loves to build.

 

So, this—like, why are we talking about this? This is what he enjoys. So late at night, 11 o’clock at night, he calls me and wants to talk about things he’s building because it’s fun for him.

 

...

 

And the one thing he likes to do during the week is construction. So I am helping him so he can enjoy constructing the Kennedy Center.

 

And, according to Lutnick and the DOJ, if he can’t figure out a way to put his mark on the Kennedy Center, we might just have to tear the whole thing down.

 

What I love about Lutnick is his natural gift for saying dumb stuff as if it was smart. Remember when he suggested withholding Social Security checks in order to out fraudsters? “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”

 

The key to understanding Lutnick is that he speaks for Trump’s id, not Trump’s ideas or political interests. He says to cameras what everyone else whispers to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. So while the professionals want to argue that Trump is focused on Iran or affordability and deny the “fake news” that 70 percent of Trump’s brain is occupied by renovation projects, Lutnick wants to make the case for letting the baby have his bottle. If he was the spokesman for Louis XVI, he’d be telling the press that the king’s obsession with locks and clocks was something to celebrate even as the sans culottes were building the scaffold and sharpening their pitchforks.

 

There’s always been a King Lear quality to Trump. He wants all the pageantry and esteem of the presidency, but not the responsibilities. He likes to have Natalie Harp post charts designating him the greatest president of all time, but cannot muster the energy to even be a serviceable one if it gets in the way of selecting bathroom tiles. This kind of schtick worked when it was new and shocking, it’s now old and pathetic, aimed more at reassuring himself—and the handful of true believers he thinks represent the silent majority. Never trust a man to make good decisions when the only counsel he listens to is flattery.

 

Making the midterms a referendum on Trump is what Trump wants. He cannot fathom the idea that he’s not actually popular or that Trump fatigue is setting in, even among the faithful. He recently told Michael Cohen that if a presidential election were held today, he’d win by 25 points. No wonder he thinks the solution to the GOP’s problems can be found in more rallies, more greatest hits, more clanging cowbells about the enemy within. Let’s have another chorus of “Free Bird,” or in his case, another shake-weight dance to “YMCA.”

 

Like poor old Norma Desmond, he’s always ready for his closeup.

Anti-Trumpism Is Driving the Media to Cheer Hostile Powers

By Becket Adams

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

There’s a great scene in the 1991 film The Rocketeer in which the seemingly amoral gangster Eddie Valentine (Paul Sorvino) turns on the Hollywood star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) after learning the actor is a Nazi spy.

 

“I may not make an honest buck, but I’m a hundred percent American,” Sorvino growls, looking like an angry English bulldog. “And I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.”

 

It was a rousing scene when the film debuted and for many years afterward, not least because it affirmed the noble belief that self-interest, like politics, stops at the water’s edge.

 

Today, Valentine’s pang of conscience feels quaint. This is because we now live in an era of total partisan warfare, worse than anything in the past several decades save for perhaps the quasi-religious political activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

It’s nothing new for the American commentariat to look overseas and compare the U.S. unfavorably, especially when the commentariat’s team is out of power. But in years past, its praise for foreign regimes would be at least somewhat moderated, couched in enough “to be sures” to bury a small town. This is no longer the case. For much of the pundit class, there is now only the party; there is only the movement. Everything else is an asset or an obstacle, depending on the moment. Even one’s own country.

 

This sad fact revealed itself again last weekend, when MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell promoted Iranian state propaganda at the expense of the White House.

 

It’s the latest example of one of the more disheartening trends of the Trump era: the news and entertainment industries’ eagerness to elevate, normalize, and even aggrandize some of the world’s worst regimes, so long as doing so hurts the opposition.

 

The O’Donnell episode began amid the White House’s aimless war with Iran, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the United States was “entering the endgame” and that “at dawn begins an economic D-Day” of crippling sanctions. Asked why he would not impose the sanctions at once, Bessent said, “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

 

Handlers for Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, replied on social media: “Him: ‘Economic D-Day.’ Also him, five seconds later: ‘[lol] why would I want to blow up the global financial system?’ Sir, this ain’t Normandy, this is improv night and you forgot your own script.” The post ended with a clown emoji.

 

O’Donnell didn’t treat the post as vapid bluster meant to needle the White House, nor did he notice the sloppiness of a metaphor involving a script at “improv night.” Rather, he was awed by its supposed moxie and tone; little surprise from a man partly responsible for what passed as dialogue on The West Wing.

 

“The most striking response to Scott Bessent’s childish threat came from the speaker of Iran’s parliament who taught Natalie Harp and Donald Trump a thing or two today about devastatingly effective social media posting,” O’Donnell gushed, “exhibiting a fluency in American culture that no one in the Trump White House has with Iranian culture.”

 

Intense partisan hatred is as old as the concept of governance, but O’Donnell’s gripes with the president should pale beside an Iranian regime that is worse by every measure.

 

“Should” being the operative word.

 

The cable anchor then turned the discussion over to former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who once quipped that the idiots in the news media who take him at his word “literally know nothing.”

 

Truer words were never spoken.

 

Sadly, O’Donnell is not alone in his hunger to elevate anything anti-Republican, even a medieval death cult. He is merely one sample of that larger hyperpartisan sickness. And there are many samples from which to choose, including the media’s fawning over Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong-un, at the 2018 Winter Olympics merely because she gave Vice President Mike Pence the side-eye. There are also the heroic eulogies published after the death of the Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani.

 

But none is so egregious as the press’s mindless embrace of Chinese and Russian Covid-era propaganda.

 

China claimed in early April 2020 that, for the first time since January of that year, it had “no new coronavirus deaths.”

 

We were asked to believe that China, a country of 1.4 billion people, where the virus originated, where the Chinese Communist Party allowed international travel despite knowing the risks, and where the party worked feverishly to cover up the pandemic’s origins, going so far as to jail potential whistleblowers, went from an already questionable peak of 150 deaths in a single February day to none by early April.

 

A more responsible press would have questioned China’s alleged success. We are not so lucky as to have such a press. Instead, reporters and pundits in the U.S. swallowed the CCP’s slop whole, many of them marveling at China’s supposed super-governance while bemoaning the Trump administration’s incompetence.

 

“China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid,” mused The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum. “The U.S. has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower?”

 

At NBC News, then-anchor Chuck Todd asked, “How uncomfortable is it that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this?”

 

The question made no sense. “China’s authoritarian ways” had not prevented the pandemic in the first place.

 

That same year, CNN published a report that was remarkably similar in spirit and tone to a CCP press release that praised the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s efforts to contain the coronavirus and contrasted them, unfavorably, with the U.S. Navy’s.

 

There was a lot of this to go around: the ludicrous idea that China was a model of responsible governance.

 

“China Bought the West Time. The West Squandered It,” read a New York Times opinion headline published in March 2020.

 

Chinese authorities were aware of the virus in December 2019, when it first appeared in Wuhan. Instead of taking precautions and sharing information and warnings, the Chinese government engaged in a massive cover-up, hoping to escape culpability for the spread of a virus that has so far killed some 7 million people worldwide. The CCP suppressed relevant information and arrested medical professionals who tried to warn that a SARS-like illness was spreading.

 

“This isn’t blanket praise for an authoritarian party-state,” Guardian columnist Bhaskar Sunkara said in 2020, “but thank God this pandemic started in a country with a strong state that took serious public health measures. Imagine if China was run by the GOP instead of the CCP.”

 

That is blanket praise.

 

CNN also reported uncritically in March 2020 on Russia’s claim that its efforts against the outbreak had been largely successful.

 

“Does Russia have coronavirus under control?” the network asked in a headline. “According to information released by Russian officials, Putin’s strategy seems to have worked.”

 

It is even worse — if only slightly — than when the Heritage Foundation sought to tear down President Obama by building up Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

 

The willingness to prop up hostile regimes also speaks to a bigger problem: Partisan opposition today is not merely political. It’s cultural and civilizational. These people are so untethered that they will root against themselves and elevate those who want them dead so long as it displaces a stateside political opponent. They’ll even cheer brutal theocratic dictatorships and communist regimes with a record of human-rights violations Trump could hardly match even if he devoted every remaining minute in office to the endeavor.

 

It’s all rather ironic, given how much faux-patriotic chest-beating accompanied the ludicrous, multi-year “Russian collusion” saga that went nowhere.

 

It’s blind partisanship, it’s rank ignorance, and it’s all deeply destructive.

Europe’s Misguided Plans for Pursuing Digital Independence

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

After years of living in denial, the European Union has seemingly finally noticed that it lacks something the U.S. has: a vibrant tech sector. Europe’s lack of a tech industry has increasingly left it dependent on America and Silicon Valley. Two new initiatives aim to mitigate this issue and take Europe toward “digital independence.” Sadly, they are both misguided.

 

The first is EuroStack, an initiative that originated from a multiparty conference at the European Parliament in September 2024. Out of this came a policy report envisioning a way to break European dependency across raw materials and chips, networks, cloud, software, data, and AI through €300 billion of investment across ten years.

 

In parallel, the industry-led EuroStack Industry Initiative began its work lobbying policymakers to create artificial demand for European tech through public procurement (its pillars are “Buy European,” “Sell European,” and “Fund European”). EuroStack has been publicly endorsed by several European leaders, as well as by the European Parliament’s industry, research, and energy (ITRE) committee.

 

While one cannot fault the European tech sector for looking for a bailout, it is unlikely it will be able to grow as long as the regulatory attitude toward tech remains hostile. The EU itself is the main culprit through regulations such as the GDPR, Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, and AI Act. It is, perhaps, quite telling that the EU tech sector seems to have given up hope that these regulations may be lifted and instead seems to simply aim to have some of the costs of compliance reimbursed through public procurement contracts.

 

Yet, the idea that €300 billion over ten years would bring Europe anywhere close to digital independence is ludicrous. In Silicon Valley, this kind of money is spare change. Spread across an entire continent’s technological supply chain, it looks more like miserly alms to the impoverished EU tech sector.

 

The industry wing has conceded as much and made it clear that the €300 billion figure is not the real prize, going as far as to say it’s become a “distraction.” What they most want is a slice of the demand that Europe already sends abroad: most importantly, the roughly €260 billion that European organizations spend on U.S. cloud and software annually.

 

Most of the €300 billion would not be a single new line on the EU’s budget. Yet, for contrast, over the 2021–2027 period, the EU has earmarked approximately €661 billion to be spent on the climate transition. Clearly, nobody in Brussels anticipated the AI race when going all in on climate. Now, with so much of the budget already dedicated to a transition that is leaving Europe less technologically independent by the day, options to genuinely support the continent’s tech sector in a meaningful way are far more limited.

 

Beyond deregulation, Europe’s best chance is — for once — to follow Sweden’s lead: As one of the only European countries that is punching above its weight in producing “unicorns,” Sweden could teach the rest of the European Union a lesson on facilitating venture capital growth. For a high-tax economy, Sweden’s treatment of start-ups and serial entrepreneurs is shockingly libertarian, with highly preferential tax treatment of employee stock options and angel investors. And of course, we don’t have silly things like wealth taxes.

 

Limiting public procurement options through “Buy European” rules is likely to have the opposite effect: Unable to simply purchase digital services from whoever offers the best quality, public sectors throughout the union would become less efficient, giving taxpayers even less bang for the large buck they pay in taxes in most of the EU. It is also debatable if such rules will even prove to be compatible with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement — not that anyone seems to care about the WTO anymore.

 

More troublingly, a tech sector kept alive through the life support of taxpayer money would not be a tech sector that could meaningfully innovate in a way that contributes to productivity. Instead of optimizing for everyday users, businesses will optimize for tenders. Once businesses are on the receiving end of bureaucratic chest compressions, their goal turns from pleasing consumers to pleasing the bureaucrats pounding on their ribcages. Of course, considering the EU’s hostile attitude toward tech, it may not view an enthralled tech industry as a bad thing; at least it will be easier to regulate.

 

Which brings us to EuroSky, a project launched publicly in April this year by the Netherlands-based Modal Foundation, providing a European-hosted infrastructure for the AT Protocol, which is the same open standard that Bluesky runs on.

 

While a separate initiative from EuroStack, it too seeks to bring digital independence to Europe by creating a European social media ecosystem with data servers based in Europe and a shared layer of social media infrastructure. Among its founders is Sebastian Vogelsang, who also founded the Bluesky-based app Flashes.

 

With all EuroSky social media platforms based in Europe, the shared content moderation envisioned by its founders would by necessity have to align with EU law. Apparently not seeing the irony, Robin Berjon, another one of its architects, described EuroSky as a way to get around “authoritarian infrastructure providers.”

 

While he did not explicitly name Elon Musk as the “authoritarian” in question, Musk has a long-running conflict with the EU, with European policymakers repeatedly threatening to ban X. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the very first homegrown EuroSky social media app is a microblogging platform, Mu.

 

Of course, on its own, any EuroSky social media platform will fail for the same reason that Bluesky, Threads, and all others did: The number of people willing to abandon a thriving platform because they dislike the owner’s political views is small. Competitors therefore almost automatically become intolerable leper colonies full of bitter people who use their competing platforms for little else than just complaining about the other platform and posting stuff that would not be allowed or would not be prioritized by the other platform’s algorithm.

 

Prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, several right-wing alternatives like Parler failed like Bluesky to gain widespread adoption because their initial user bases of angry political radicals scared off any users other than those on the fringes of politics.

 

That is not to say that EuroSky platforms may not play any role. One reason European policymakers have failed to ban X and other repeat offenders of the Digital Services Act is that they know there is no alternative they could direct users to if these platforms were geoblocked. Without an alternative, the political price of taking away platforms that users have come to rely on for years would just be too great. This is where EuroSky would come in.

 

While digital independence is a serious issue for Europe, neither EuroStack nor EuroSky offers serious answers: Europe does not lack for engineers, capital, and market size. What it lacks is a political class willing to let go of its “regulate first, ask questions later” attitude toward tech innovation. Neither public procurement nor a “safe space” social media ecosystem will ever replace the successful formula that once built Silicon Valley: allowing people to build things that the state has not already approved.

Mike Collins and the GOP’s ‘Ironic Nazi’ Problem

By Seth Mandel

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

Mike Collins has a growing list of ex-staffers with anti-Semitism scandals, which is itself a scandal for the Republican Senate nominee from Georgia. And while Collins must answer for his own lapses in judgment, the problem is much wider than one Trump-backed candidate’s vetting process.

 

The Republican Party has an absurd number of young staffers and potential staffers indulging in the right-wing “ironic Nazi” social trend. And toxic feeder streams pollute the whole river.

 

All of which means the GOP has a Mike Collins problem of its own creation, and containing it is only going to get more difficult.

 

The Washington Post reports that 24-year-old Preston Parra spent two months as a Collins intern in 2024 and then worked for several months in 2025 as a contractor for Collins’s political-action committee.

 

In the past, Parra has described himself as a “twink fascist” and posted a picture of a swastika made out of repetitions of the word “twink.” He also used AI to make a picture of himself in KKK-style robes.

 

Parra seems to have made his social-media account private around the time he went to work for Collins, so both men are likely telling the truth when they say Collins hadn’t seen the posts. But it also appears that Parra is par for the course.

 

In May, an ex-staffer named William Paul (the son of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul) reportedly launched a 10-minute anti-Semitic tirade at Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who isn’t Jewish. Two months later, Collins fired chief of staff Kip Talley when it came to light that Talley was in a chat group with prominent white supremacists.

 

Collins had to fire one of Talley’s predecessors, Brandon Phillips, over social-media misbehavior and an ethics investigation into a possible Phillips conflict of interest. “In his work for Collins,” the Washington Post notes, “Phillips was known for spearheading a social media strategy of ‘casual trolling’ and a ‘comms philosophy of shock factor,’” as described to the Post by another former staffer.

 

It was that “shock factor” that attracted Parra, who told the Post that he likes “the edginess” but “didn’t think it was edgy enough.”

 

That, in a nutshell, is the GOP’s juvenility problem.

 

And virtually every leak of young GOP group chats adds more evidence to the pile. One such chat log was revealed by the Miami Herald a few months ago. Someone had the bright idea of starting a Miami-Dade County Republican Party student chat. The results were predictable:

 

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as ‘whores,’ used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

 

The key part of that story comes in response to one chat member who “posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people.”

 

An official with the College Republicans responded: “How edgy.”

 

Being edgy, I suppose, is like acting: You can’t make it look like you’re trying to be something you’re not. You’ve just got to embody the character.

 

But what happens when the character is a twentysomething Nazi poseur? In the future, perhaps he’ll go to work for a Senate Republican candidate.

 

The 2025 version of this chat leak came via Politico. It wasn’t much different: a ton of racism, a heaping of misogyny, and a few servings of anti-Semitism/Nazi posing.

 

Some lost their jobs, and all were roundly condemned by Republicans. But something was missing in the framing of these stories. Politico’s lede: “Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.”

 

Did they worry, or did they “worry”? I’d say it’s clearly the latter. Of course these folks didn’t want to lose their jobs, but how many of them secretly wanted the texts to get out? More than a few, I would wager. Later in the story, Politico reports that the chat logs provided “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.” Yet my concern is that this is how they talk when they know others are listening. And that includes future employers in the world of Republican electoral politics. Right, Mike Collins?

The Spiritual Roots of JD Vance’s Populism

By Patrick T. Brown

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by JD Vance (Harper, 304 pp., $35)

 

Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985) follows a group of teenagers who grow up to influence the course of history. One posts under an alias on an online message board and ends up becoming a persuasive writer and an influential politician. Another, Ender Wiggin, is trained in the art of warfare through a series of immersive battlefield simulations — which are finally revealed to have not been simulations at all.

 

Vice President JD Vance has already run through the first path to influence. His trajectory from the downscale Cincinnati suburbs to the Naval Observatory would have been impossible without the power of his pen, which he used first as a pseudonymous blogger and then as a contributor for publications such as this one before writing his exceptionally successful memoir Hillbilly Elegy. His second book, Communion, is many things: a spiritual memoir, a tease at a likely presidential run, a reflection on how fatherhood can change a self-admitted “striver,” an apologia for his oft explored conversion from strident skeptic of President Donald Trump to his second-in-command. But perhaps above all, Communion captures the youthful “New Right,” of which the vice president is unquestionably the leader, at a crucial moment. Like Ender, the young and enthusiastic populists on the right are learning that there is no such thing as a dry run when it comes to governing. Podcasting and posting can’t achieve durable policy wins. It’s far easier to command attention in today’s media environment than to focus on the unglamorous work of changing policy and seeking converts. To defeat his adversaries, Ender had to learn to understand them; today’s right-wing populists may need to learn the same lesson.

 

In his book, Vance grapples with the difference between rhetoric and responsibility — though a glance at his X feed suggests the process is incomplete. Communion is a moving portrait of a Millennial atheist who rediscovers the personal and civilizational value of faith and family. How that discovery might shape a potential presidency makes Communion worth interrogating.

 

It’s not the first time we’ve read a version of this love story: A young, scrappy, and hungry lawyer’s pursuit of the brass ring is turned upside down by someone unexpected “I will marry this girl,” he remembers telling friends upon meeting Usha Chilukuri, “or I will be a lifelong bachelor.” The story of their courtship, marriage, and early life together is genuinely touching: “I didn’t deserve her. But still she stuck around.” One can sense her nudging her husband to get serious, settle down, and sand off his internet-sharpened edges. (His mea culpa for the “childless cat ladies” line that will haunt him for the rest of his political career is a welcome dose of contrition from Vance the author that Vance the politician can have a hard time expressing.) As was true of his friend Charlie Kirk, Vance seems to have taken on the weight of family and fatherhood in a way that changed him: Communion reveals a Vance different from the man favored by the very online crowd.

 

Vance’s unhesitating defense of devoted fatherhood, and his argument that conservatives must escape the gender roles of the 1950s as well as the hustle culture of the 2010s, constitutes one of his book’s most compelling chapters. He has thought a lot about how careerism is bad for men and women, and why the “having it all” debates feel hollow. He wants to see more husbands sharing “the burdens of household labor with their wives” and spending more time with their children. If he does succeed in leading the right, this version of Vance might prove the most attractive.

 

In an afterword, Vance says he worked on Communion intermittently over the course of his conversion. This on-again, off-again approach might explain the book’s occasional interludes on his gripes with modern economics, which can feel underbaked. But elsewhere, the writing is lyrical, even profound, capturing the grandeur of Europe’s empty, magnificent churches and the temptation to despair that there will be no generation to inherit them. The closest he has to a road-to-Emmaus moment is when he sits alone with a sleeping toddler in a Burgundy cathedral at dusk (italics in the original):

 

In that moment, I felt a strange sense of possession. This church, in a foreign country, empty but for me and my family, felt like it was mine. I owed something to it, and it owed something to me. Maybe it’s all decay and decline. Maybe I’ll raise my kid in this faith and he’ll think I’m a simpleton or an imbecile. But if the Titanic is going down I’d rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat. . . . Another realization hit me: Man is capable of creating astonishing beauty and real good in this world, when he tries, however imperfectly, to reconcile himself with Christ.

 

Only the reader without the merest instinct of conservatism can read such passages without sharing Vance’s fear of what we’ll lose if our patrimony disappears. Much of his political energy draws from his dread that we’ll hand on to our children a culturally lesser world than the one we were bestowed. At times, this urges him to place too much weight on organized religion as social glue or civilizational scaffolding rather than spiritual reality. It is inarguable that regular church attendance has pro-social benefits and helps preserve our cultural patrimony, but the ultimate question is not just whether a given religious tradition is useful, but whether it’s true.

 

Certain parts of Vance’s memoir foreshadow his political trajectory. He remembers his stepmother saying, “Republicans don’t care about working people. . . . But if you give me a choice between a party that stands for the rich and a party that refuses to stand for the unborn, I know my choice.” There will always be debate on whether populist policies meant to benefit working people end up doing so. And some in the pro-life movement, unable to vent their justifiable frustration against his boss, hold Vance to a standard that exceeds any vice president’s power. But Vance is clearly motivated to resolve this tension: to make the Republican Party economically populist and culturally conservative. When writing about a referendum that struck down Ohio’s abortion restrictions, Vance shows that his heart is in the pro-life fight in a way the current administration’s priorities don’t allow him to fully express. Similarly, Vance’s writing suggests his true-blue economic populism has had to be hidden under a bushel, as has his restraint-oriented foreign policy: “We confine Christianity to the most private of questions — relations between husbands and wives, reproductive decisions — and are then surprised when kids like me grow up in the faith and then discard it.” How well that approach to religion fits into the current administration’s politics is left for a future volume.

 

We need not take Vance’s word for it. In Regime Change, their behind-the-curtains look at the second Trump presidency, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contrast Vance’s commitment to family affordability with Trump’s. Vance, they say, has been “obsessed with the challenge of making it easier, more affordable, for younger Americans to own homes and raise families.” Meanwhile, “Trump could be persuaded to talk about his affordability policies but as he read the lines with boredom from the teleprompter it was evidently not where his heart was.”

 

Still, if Vance’s evolution from “self-professed atheist and meritocrat” to champion of deeply held principles is to bear political fruit, it has one final stage to attain. He recognizes that, early in his career, he was animated by “the arrogant desire to rise above others,” and he points an accusing finger at other elite strivers for prizing “achievement over duty.” But in his eagerness to distance himself from the elite circles to which he once sought entry, he sometimes displays a similar lack of empathy. He is quick to scorn the achievement-obsessed types he met in New Haven and Silicon Valley. But while anti-elitism can build a political coalition, it cannot by itself form a governing agenda. Communion sometimes suggests that Vance is sure of the desired direction of policy but can be too quick to dismiss his opponents’ differences, implying that they are grounded in a different level of concern about the working class rather than in different ways of calculating trade-offs.

 

We know Vance can find common ground: He recalls feeling a surprising degree of empathy toward the elder statesmen with whom he disagrees at the Munich Security Conference. But judging by his social media behavior, he is often just as comfortable taking the low road. Whether Vance’s conversion taught him to see political adversaries differently — or mainly confirmed to him that his political instincts are right — remains an open question.

 

In Card’s novel, Ender eventually learns that the game is being played with real bullets: “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” The same realization awaits Vance and the movement he leads.

Laughingstock America

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

Today marks six months since our four-to-five-week war on Iran began. The president’s approval in the matter has sunk below 35 percent. Emboldened by America’s provocative weakness, Russia may be preparing to attack NATO. Yet, somehow, Donald Trump is preoccupied with …

 

… actually, we’ll come back to that. A proper analysis pegged to the current news cycle of how pathetic the United States has become under populism should start not with the Great Lakes but with the Pentagon.

 

A few days ago the Washington Post supplied new evidence in the curious case of Gen. Randy George, the respected Army chief of staff who was fired in the thick of the war earlier this year. The New York Times alleged in April that George was ousted in part because he wouldn’t rescind the recommendations for promotion he had made on behalf of several officers, two of them black and two of them women, which in Pete Hegseth’s “anti-DEI” military made them presumptively unqualified. The defense secretary allegedly wanted them taken off the promotion list, George refused, and that was that. He was gone.

 

According to the Post, though, there may have been another factor in his dismissal: “Days before the Army’s top officer was abruptly fired earlier this year, he was advised by a fellow general now vying to replace him to stop the military’s investigation into an unauthorized helicopter flyby of musician Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate, three people familiar with the matter said.”

 

That fellow general was Chris LaNeve, who’s advanced meteorically up the ranks since January 2025 by distinguishing himself as an enthusiastic Trump ass-kisser. LaNeve allegedly told George that Hegseth was unhappy that a probe into the Kid Rock flyby had been opened and wanted it canceled, which “troubled” George per the Post’s sources. But it was canceled, and the defense secretary trumpeted its cancellation on social media.

 

Then, a few weeks later, he celebrated again by commandeering a pair of Apaches for him and Kid Rock to joyride around in.

 

Punishing Randy George for resisting the culture of impunity that Hegseth hopes to instill in the military is evil stuff, one of several reasons the latter is the worst defense chief—and plausibly the worst Cabinet member—in U.S. history. What elevates the incident from standard-issue fascism to a vignette about America’s new global laughingstock status is that it revolves around a tawdry celebrity has-been whom no one without a political motive to do so pretends to take seriously.

 

Firing a capable officer like Randy George is bad. Firing him because he didn’t show proper respect for Kid Rock is so unbearably humiliating for the United States that I feel it in my chest.

 

“Shameful” isn’t the right word, as shame implies a sense of guilt over some serious offense for which you feel directly or indirectly responsible—and, to be sure, the Trump administration routinely acts in ways that fit that bill. The George episode isn’t so much shameful as it is pathetic. It betrays a bratty juvenile fatuousness that’s only possible in political leaders who fundamentally don’t grasp, or actively disdain, the concept of dignity.

 

America has had periods of weakness in my lifetime (whatabout Jimmy Carter?), but it’s never been a laughingstock, let alone one that regularly and gratuitously communicates to the rest of the planet why it shouldn’t be respected. Until now.

 

Which brings us to “Lake America.”

 

Bookends.

 

Formally changing the name of Lake Ontario (within the executive branch, anyway) is the presidential preoccupation du jour to which I alluded above. War, inflation, a mushrooming public panic over AI data centers: All of it had to wait yesterday as Trump bore down on the more urgent task of rechristening the smallest of the Great Lakes “Lake America.”

 

It wasn’t the first time that he’s undertaken to rename a local body of water in a flourish of nationalist chauvinism and, if some of the noisier chuds in his fan base have their way, it won’t be the last. But not every right-winger received the news as enthusiastically as they did the “Gulf of Mexico” rebrand last year. One Republican candidate in a northern border state reassured voters there that he’ll continue to refer to the lake as “Lake Ontario.” And a major influencer in the chud space complained that it was silly for America to disclaim a moniker that’s existed longer than America itself has.

 

The “Gulf of America” and “Lake America” episodes are actually useful bookends to Trump’s presidency (so far).

 

He issued his order renaming the former on Inauguration Day 2025 as a gesture to mark nationalism’s triumphant return to power. In hindsight, it was an early warning from the president about how he intended to throw the United States’ weight around in its near-abroad even if doing so overturned tradition. If he was willing to erase the Gulf of Mexico, he seemed to imply, he might be willing to act boldly in other ways that our neighbors—like Venezuela, and Cuba, and Greenland, and Canada—wouldn’t like.

 

The posture for the “Lake America” nonsense is different. If the “Gulf of America” rebrand was a declaration of triumph, the targeting of Lake Ontario is a declaration of defeat. It was inspired, of course, by the stupid-even-for-him new trade war the president has launched against Canada. Canadians are emphatically behind Prime Minister Mark Carney in prosecuting that conflict while Americans, just as emphatically, are not behind Trump. As politicians across the spectrum up north mock him for his childishness and invite him to kiss their ass, the only U.S. politicians who seem to want to take sides in the matter are Democrats. Who are … also mocking him for his childishness and, more or less, inviting him to kiss their ass.

 

Under those circumstances, changing the name of Lake Ontario reeks of impotence and humiliation. It’s transparently an act of spite by a man-baby who’s lashing out after failing to get his way. And it’s a boost for his domestic opponents on the left, who already planned to campaign this fall on the idea that the president is too absorbed with trivial idiocy like ballrooms—and now lakes—to address the problems he was elected to solve.

 

The “Gulf of America” trolling was an act of strength at a moment when Trump’s approval was above 50 percent and before he’d disappointed anyone. The “Lake America” idiocy is an act of pitiful weakness at a moment when his approval is below 40. It’s “cover your eyes”-tier pathetic, and the muted reaction to it in Chudworld suggests that even they know it. If there’s a trace of dignity left in right-wing populism after 10 years of degradation, the president might have at last found a way to wound it.

 

Which is amazing when you realize that changing the lake’s name wasn’t even the most pathetic thing he did yesterday.

 

A case study.

 

The essential point about the “Lake America” episode, though, is that it isn’t a departure for Trumpist government. It’s a case study of its pathologies.

 

Renaming things is a logical expression of the same impulses that have caused the president to devote 70 percent of his mental energy toward building monuments and ordering renovations around the capital, in the estimation of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. His desire for a legacy that can’t be expunged by his enemies after he’s gone has led him to focus on changing landscapes and maps, and his fetish for dominance has led him to be imperious about it. The cost of living might be important to you, but being remembered is important to him—and guess whose priorities come first in that scenario.

 

Be happy he’s not giving it the Kennedy Center treatment by changing the name to “Lake America, as presented by Donald J. Trump.”

 

It’s also a case of Trump using state power to try to coerce changes to the culture, one of his most authoritarian traits. That’s a core premise of postliberalism: If you can’t persuade businesses and schools to drop racial diversity programs or support for transgender rights, you can win control of the government and squeeze them by the throat financially until they do. That’s what separates yesterday’s patheticness from the right’s embrace of “freedom fries” to spite France in the early days of the Iraq war. “Freedom fries” was an informal grassroots (and ultimately failed) attempt to change the culture by pressuring people not to use the word “French.”

 

But “Lake America”? That’s an official order from the president. Let the culture take note.

 

And of course, Thursday’s stupidity was also an obvious example of the president letting personal pique drive policy. Scrubbing the name “Ontario” off a body of water to try to antagonize Canadians isn’t going to make them more agreeable to trade concessions. The opposite: It’s an attempt to injure their national pride, the same way the “51^st state” jabs are, which will cause them to dig in. To call it bad strategy is to pay it a compliment. It isn’t strategy at all. It’s a middle finger.

 

And it may have consequences for America in the long-term. Chatter has picked up in Ottawa and overseas about Canada potentially joining the European Union; if that happens, and if the United States continues on its postliberal trajectory, in a few decades we might have an understandably hostile liberal adversary on our northern border that’s backed by the military might of a fully rearmed Europe. Play out that scenario however you like.

 

Petulance, narcissism, and bullying that, as often as not, ends up with us punching ourselves in the face: Those are the hallmarks of how a thoroughly undignified nation does business now, and not just with respect to the Great Lakes. Pathetic. A laughingstock.

 

Luxury nationalism.

 

It’s fair to ask here whether the “Lake America” embarrassment is due to something inherent in populist nationalism or something specific to the president himself. Not every prominent nationalist, if handed executive power, would stoop to such pettiness, right?

 

I do think that’s right. In many ways Tucker Carlson is an uglier figure than Trump, yet I can’t imagine President Tucker bothering with juvenilia like renaming Lake Ontario to try to irritate Canadians. (Although “Lake Russia” does have a ring to it.)

 

Even President J.D. Vance would probably be above such things. One can’t be sure about that, as the vice president also regularly embarrasses his country by behaving in aggressively undignified ways. But I suspect that he too wouldn’t trifle with trollish stupidity like renaming bodies of water, or at least wouldn’t do so as frequently as Trump does.

 

Partly it’s a function of personality, as the president is immensely vain and unusually fragile. In the same way that I doubt President Vance will have a “human printer” following him around to keep him constantly apprised of people praising him, I doubt he’ll resort to grabbing a map and pulling out a Sharpie every time he doesn’t get his way. Trump is a 5-year-old psychologically; the vice president is at least 11 or 12.

 

But there’s also an ideological reason that I think Vance and Carlson are less inclined to bratty ineffectual stunts than Trump is. They’re actual nationalists whereas the president is a luxury nationalist.

 

As noted here a few days ago, actual nationalists don’t fear that their policies will cause hardship. They welcome it. Popular suffering is the price of restoring the nation to glory. That can mean financial suffering—as would be caused by, say, ending the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency—or it can mean more visceral kinds. Either way, committed nationalists aren’t squeamish about sacrifice and immiseration. If they wanted to fight a trade war with Canada, they’d go a lot further in escalating than hollow gestures involving lake names.

 

Trump is squeamish, though. His brand of “luxury nationalism” comes packaged with a con man’s promise that Americans will suffer no enduring hardship from his agenda. He couldn’t be any plainer than he’s been this summer about how frightened he is by what protracted economic suffering caused by his policies might do to his legacy.

 

True to form, his new trade war with Canada is being sold to Americans with assurances that it won’t affect them at all. “I think the market knows that at the end of the day, this is 5 percent of imports from Canada. It’s 0.06 percent of our overall consumption in this economy. So there’s no possible way it can really affect U.S. well-being, right?” the White House’s trade representative, Jamieson Grier, told CNBC recently. That’s “luxury nationalism” in a nutshell. All the benefits of nationalism with none of the costs!

 

That’s the sort of mindset that might foreseeably lead to something as stupid as “Lake America.” Keen to pursue his trade war but terrified by how voters might be affected should it escalate rapidly, Trump needs ways to look tough that won’t cost Americans anything. Erasing the word “Ontario” from the Great Lakes was a no-brainer. Think of it as zero-calorie nationalism—unappetizing, unsatisfying, but chauvinistically nourishing with little downside.

 

Struggle without struggle.

 

After I wrote about luxury nationalism on Monday, I thought of Francis Fukuyama’s famous prediction from The End of History about why liberalism would decline in the West:

 

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

 

That explains most of the last decade in politics in a few tidy sentences. What Trump recognized or intuited, though, was that a people as accustomed to luxury as Americans are would be willing to struggle against liberalism only so much. There’s a reason nationalism tends to spring up abroad in times of privation: Convincing men to struggle for the greatness of the nation isn’t a steep ask when they’re already struggling. The dilemma the president faced in 2016 was convincing people to struggle for the greatness of a nation that was already the wealthiest and most powerful on Earth.

 

His solution was simple, even elegant: He wouldn’t ask them to struggle. The greatness of the nation could be secured by simply electing him and letting him follow his bliss on policy. Indiscriminate tariffs, mass deportation of illegal immigrant workers, gratuitous alienation of allies: Those policies would have no trade-offs.

 

You can draw a straight line from the childishness of that fantasy to the childishness that’s reduced America to laughingstock status 10 years later, of which the Lake Ontario fiasco is a notable but ultimately minor example. Only a pathetic and ignorant people would have fallen for it, and only a really pathetic and really ignorant people would have fallen for it twice. Say what you will about Trump, but don’t ever say that he hasn’t delivered what Americans voted for.