The Most Erratic President in the World

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

He’s the rare kind of immigration hardliner who wants more H-1B visas.

 

He’s warned that illegal immigrants are taking “Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too” . . . and also proposed giving green cards to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. institution of higher education.

 

He added his own name to the Kennedy Center . . . and then shut it down for two years for renovations.

 

He pledged that the addition of a new ballroom to the White House “won’t interfere with the current building” . . . and then tore down the East Wing.

 

He’s convinced a deep state within the federal government rigged the 2020 presidential election against him while he was president in his first term . . . so he wants to end states’ running their own elections and for the federal government to take over the running of elections nationwide.

 

He began his presidency by beating Hillary Clinton after a furious, no-holds-barred campaign . . . and now says of the Clintons testifying before the House Oversight Committee, “I think it’s a shame to be honest. I always liked him. Her, eh, she’s a very capable woman. She’s better in debating than some of the other people, I will tell you that. She was smarter, smart woman. I hate to see it in many ways. I hate to see it.”

 

He’s the man who worked closely with the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo on his first three Supreme Court nominees . . . and who now contends Leo is a “sleazebag” who has ‘the legal system RIGGED.”

 

He understands the far-reaching consequences of the failures of the state government in Minnesota and lamented that current Governor Tim Walz is “so whacked out” . . . and he urged Republicans in that state to nominate MyPillow guy Mike Lindell as their gubernatorial nominee.

 

He’ll insist that the New York Times is “failing” and irrelevant, and then post three times in one night about one story in the paper about Harvard. He publicly rages about the newspaper being “fake news,” then granted the paper’s reporters a two-hour, on-the-record interview in the Oval Office.

 

He boasts of “restoring law and order” . . . while issuing pardons for 1,500 convicted January 6 rioters and 88 additional pardons so far, including for Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, and former Representative George Santos, sparing the convicted the costs of a collective $298 million in restitution that was supposed to be paid to the victims of their crimes. He then warned, “The biggest problem our Country has is that the Democrats are SOFT ON CRIME! They want to protect the Criminal, violent and vicious as they may be, at the expense of our great American Citizens and Patriots.”

 

He’s been infamously critical of the Germans . . . while adopting their system of capitalization.

 

He declared that illegal immigration coming across the U.S. border with Mexico constituted an “invasion” . . . in a statement celebrating a literal U.S. military invasion of Mexico during the Mexican-American War.

 

He spent much of 2025 warning that Zohran Mamdani was “a communist, a guy that’s going to take the money and throw it out the window” . . . and then after meeting Mamdani declared, “We agree on a lot more than we would have thought. . . . I feel very confident that he can do a good job. . . . I would feel very, very comfortable being in New York and much more so after the meeting.”

 

He pledged that America will never be socialist, Marxist, or Communist . . . and then arranged for the federal government to take an ownership stake in U.S. Steel, MP Materials USA Rare Earth, Intel, Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, Vulcan Elements, ReElement Technologies, Westinghouse, xLight, and Nvidia.

 

He promised “a dividend of at least $2,000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone” from the tariff revenues . . . and then told reporters that he didn’t remember making that promise.

 

He vehemently opposed the release of the U.S. Department of Justice’s documents about Jeffrey Epstein . . . until he suddenly endorsed the proposal and signed it into law.

 

He calls himself “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House,” but also contended that those protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot carry firearms: “With that being said, you can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns, you can’t do that.”

 

He boasts that he is “the most pro-life president in history,” but told House Republicans that they have to “be a little flexible on Hyde,” which bars federal funding for abortions.

 

On foreign policy, he sees himself as the consummate dealmaker and a peacemaker and yearned to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When he didn’t get it, he texted the Norwegian prime minister, threatening to annex Greenland.

 

He’s the man who bombed the Iranian nuclear program, setting it back two years . . . who is now sending his envoy Steve Witkoff to have talks with the Iranians about the future of their nuclear program.

 

He created a new international “Board of Peace” . . . and then invited Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to join as members.

 

He boasted that Putin had agreed to a cease-fire in Ukraine for a week . . . and then his press secretary said he was “unsurprised” that Putin had broken the cease-fire.

 

He has repeatedly lamented the terrible casualties of the Russian invasion of Ukraine . . . while insisting that “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed.”

 

He oversaw a near-perfect mission that took out Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro . . . and then left Maduro’s right-hand woman and vice president, the “terrific person” Delcy Rodríguez, in charge.

 

He is . . . the most erratic president in the world.

 

He never drinks beer, but if he did, it would explain a lot . . . and it would probably be Dos Equis. Stay stable and genius, my friends.

 

ADDENDUM: A rare moment of disagreement with Noah Rothman . . . I don’t think we’ll ever see any serious “Biden nostalgia” take root within the Democratic Party or its chattering class, nor the electorate. When the Harvard-Harris survey finds “53 percent said the economy is ‘worse than it was under Biden.’ And only 47 percent believe Trump’s economy outperforms Biden’s,” that strikes me as frustration with the current guy, the same way Iranian protesters were chanting “long live the Shah” as the biggest metaphorical middle finger available to the current ruling mullahs. The percentage of Iranians who genuinely want to see Reza Pahlavi returned to power, and/or have fond memories of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi are pretty limited — certainly not enough to overthrow the regime and establish a new form of government. But the percentage of Iranians who are so fed up with the Ayatollah and the mullahs that they’re willing to chant a version of, “You’re so awful, we miss the last guy who we thought we hated,” is considerably larger.

Our Roy Cohn

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

A recurring challenge when writing about the president’s advisers is resisting the “good czar, bad boyars” fallacy.

 

If you don’t know the term, you certainly know the phenomenon. Republicans in Washington have supplied daily examples of it for the past 10 years. It’s the idea that, in a monarchy, all credit for good developments is properly due to His Majesty while all blame for bad developments devolves to his deputies for having failed him.

 

It’s nonsense. But when your professional stature and possibly your personal safety depend on not offending the czar, it’s irresistible nonsense—especially after you’ve gotten used to it. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, for instance, still routinely resorts to “good czar, bad boyars” logic when criticizing the White House despite the fact that he’ll be out of politics in less than a year. For the GOP establishment, scapegoating Donald Trump’s aides for his mistakes long ago ceased being a matter of strategy. At this stage of their traumatic hostage ordeal, it’s Pavlovian.

 

And so, before we contemplate the influence of an unusually bad boyar like deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, we should pause to remind ourselves that no one is worse than the czar himself. If you doubt it, go watch this clip of Republican Rep. Ben Cline at this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast.

 

“We are reminded that leadership is not only about policy and power, but about character, conscience, and the recognition that all authority is ultimately accountable to God,” Cline said with a straight face to an audience of Christian Trump supporters—before welcoming El Salvadoran dictator and gulag operator Nayib Bukele to the stage. Bukele was an honored guest because he’s one of the president’s most dependable international cronies; when Trump took to the podium later, he made a point of praising the “very strong prisons” that El Salvador runs.

 

We will debate forever to what extent the total corruption of Christian conservatism was a top-down matter of Trump seducing a coalition of Pharisees to adopt an alternate morality or a bottom-up case of pre-existing moral rot within the movement surfacing as norms of political propriety dissolved. (Some of both, surely.) Wherever you land on that, though, there’s no blaming Stephen Miller for it. It’s the czar himself who’s bad. And many more of his subjects than any of us would have guessed a decade ago are pretty bad as well.

 

Still, advisers do matter.

 

It’s not “good czar, bad boyars” logic to note that the president’s second term has been more oppressive than his first, partly because he’s surrounded himself this time with deputies who won’t restrain him. The majority are yes-men who feel a duty to indulge his worst impulses, but a few, most notably Miller, are actually generating some of those impulses. And they are very clearly wrecking Trump’s popularity in the process.

 

A bad czar has become more despised than he otherwise might have been because one very, very bad boyar is giving him terrible advice, and there’s evidence that the czar has started to realize it. What will Trump do about his Stephen Miller problem?

 

Out of touch.

 

The “Stephen Miller problem” is actually three problems. (Well, four.)

 

Miller is the White House’s chief proponent for mass deportation, reportedly hellbent on removing 1 million illegal immigrants per year. Everything we’ve seen from the administration over the last six months flows from that—workplace raids aimed at rounding up illegals with no criminal record, legal impunity granted to immigration agents to encourage them to execute their mandate aggressively, and huge federal shows of force like the one playing out in Minneapolis to signal how important the issue is to Trump and his team.

 

That’s all Miller. Americans hate it.

 

A Quinnipiac poll published yesterday found 60 percent believe the administration is treating immigrants too harshly, while a nearly identical percentage said they favor giving most illegals a pathway to legal status. Trump’s job approval on immigration in the same poll dropped from 44 percent in December to 38 percent now, a trend replicated in other surveys. Nate Silver’s tracker had the president at -3.8 points in net immigration approval as recently as December 10, but today he’s all the way down to -11.1. Americans don’t like Miller’s deport-everyone priorities.

 

They don’t like the way immigration enforcement officers do business either. Last month, after Renee Good was shot but before Alex Pretti was killed, a New York Times poll found 61 percent of respondents believed Immigration and Customs Enforcement had gone “too far” with its tactics and another 63 percent disapproved of how it’s handling its job. This week’s Quinnipiac survey replicated that 63 percent figure, fueled by a remarkable 47 percent who said they personally know someone who’s living in fear of Trump’s deportation policies. A majority of 51 percent assessed that those policies—the linchpin of the right’s law-and-order message—are making the country less safe.

 

The true dagger for the czar and his bad boyar, though, is how their obsession with immigration has distracted them from Americans’ exasperation with the cost of living. Check any national poll and you’ll find evidence that voters are furious with the White House for not focusing on the economy. Yet instead of executive action on affordability, they’ve spent the last month drowning in dystopian scenes of an ICE crackdown in Minnesota that’s killed two American citizens.

 

Last month, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, respondents in a CNN survey rated the economy as the most important issue facing the United States. The same poll found just 36 percent of Americans believe the president has the right policy priorities, though, and an even smaller share agreed when asked if they thought he cares about people like them. That was the worst number of his five years in office.

 

Ditto for last month’s Times poll: “Overall, 57 percent of voters thought Mr. Trump was focused on the wrong issues—including a whopping 69 percent of voters under 30, more than any other age group.” Unsurprisingly, those who named immigration as their top issue did think Trump had the right priorities. Too bad for him and Miller that those people are a small-ish minority.

 

The extreme disillusionment that the Times found among young adults also turned up in a Wall Street Journal survey. Among nine issues tested, Trump’s single worst rating in the 18- to 29-year-old cohort came with respect to “having the right priorities,” on which he was 36 points underwater. “A lot of people expected him to address economic issues first,” one College Republican from Ohio told the paper, worrying that the president has spent too much time on immigration.

 

Trump and Miller have lost touch with the country, sidetracked by their fantasy of purifying the national “blood” by purging undesirables, and the public’s reaction is turning ugly. Fifty-eight percent in the CNN poll (conducted before Pretti’s death) called the president’s first year a failure. Forty-nine percent in the Times survey believe America is worse off now than it was a year ago, compared to 32 percent who believe it’s better off. New polling data from Harvard-Harris this week found 51 percent overall said Trump is doing a worse job than Joe Biden. Among independents, 56 percent said so.

 

The cherry on top of this widening political disaster is that it was Stephen Miller who reportedly seized the initiative to defame Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and would-be “assassin” in the hours after he lay dead on the pavement. Not content to spearhead an agenda that Americans dislike and to carry it out in ways they despise, Miller cemented the White House’s role as villain in Minneapolis by smearing an innocent victim of state violence as the aggressor.

 

That’s the fourth “Stephen Miller problem” I mentioned earlier: his inability to restrain his impulses toward viciousness even when doing so would benefit him and his boss. The thought of making common cause with him will grow increasingly repulsive to all but the most fanatic and/or dissolute border hawks.

 

As the saying goes: The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Donald Trump might be nearing the point of admitting he has a problem with Stephen Miller.

 

Miller time.

 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the czar isn’t altogether happy with his most notorious boyar.

 

Cracks have appeared even in the Oval Office. The president, aware of polls showing that much of his immigration agenda isn’t popular, has told advisers he wasn’t comfortable with how far Miller has gone on some fronts, according to people who have spoken with Trump. The president has said that business officials are calling and complaining to him about longtime workers being thrown out of the country.

 

…

 

Miller pushed for sweeps at Home Depot and other spots where day workers gather, though Trump has at times been asked to temper raids at businesses. Following immigration arrests in September by federal agents at a Hyundai Motor factory in Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp called the president and asked for the release of 300 South Korean workers, according to administration officials. The president publicly said he opposed the raid and told Kemp privately that he didn’t know it was happening. He told aides repeatedly that he didn’t want any more sweeps at factories or farms, the officials said.

 

That’s not all. Trump also reportedly raised an eyebrow when Miller began giving television interviews on subjects beyond his portfolio, like the White House’s designs on Venezuela and Greenland. (“He doesn’t do foreign policy,” the president is said to have complained to an aide.) Ask Steve Bannon what happens when an adviser gets too big for his britches and starts crowding into a media spotlight that rightly belongs to one, and only one, man.

 

Seems like we have a solution in search of a problem, then. Fire Stephen Miller, pivot to a “deport the criminals first” strategy on immigration and a much lower profile for ICE, and spend the next eight months laser-focused on reducing the cost of living. That might not be enough to prevent a Democratic House takeover in November, but it could hold down losses, preventing a blue wave and potentially saving the Senate.

 

One Dispatch colleague even suggested to me that Trump could “declare victory” on immigration as a pretext for abandoning Miller’s deport-everyone strategy and pulling out of Minnesota. Why not? Crusty hardline nationalists like Bannon might object, but 90 percent of Trump’s supporters will believe anything he tells them. If he says it’s time to work on other things because the immigration problem has been solved, then the immigration problem has been solved.

 

And yes, I realize it’s almost unheard of in Trump 2.0 for an aide to perform so horribly that he ends up being axed for it, but it does happen. It’s a penalty reserved for the worst of the worst, it seems. Stephen Miller certainly qualifies.

 

In fact, at the risk of veering too close to “good czar, bad boyars” logic, it’s fair to say that in some ways the deputy is a more sinister figure than his boss. Trump is a fascist by instinct, but Miller is a fascist in full. According to the Journal, it’s Miller who’s been behind the most hair-raisingly lawless gambits of Trump’s second term, from shipping detainees to Bukele’s gulag without due process to blowing up suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean without authorization from Congress to the ICE rampage in Minneapolis that’s brought the judicial system to its knees.

 

Miller and his master share the goal of consolidating power in an autocrat but are driven to it by meaningfully different desires, I sense. Trump wants to be Caesar because he luxuriates in the grandeur of the role. Miller wants Trump to be Caesar because postliberalism needs that degree of unchallenged power in order to effectively subjugate its enemies. My guess is that he, more so than even Trump, would enthusiastically support overturning adverse election results this fall or in 2028 in the name of “saving the country.”

 

A Trump administration without Miller would be ruthless but less ruthless than an administration with Miller would be. And inevitably, I think, it would govern in ways that would improve its popularity. For all his mania, the president yearns to be loved and admired. He cares about winning elections, if only for narcissistic reasons. Miller, the ideologue, plainly doesn’t give a rip and possibly revels in being hated.

 

So you would think Trump would be willing to send him packing. But … it’s awfully hard to imagine, isn’t it?

 

‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’

 

For one thing, it’s hard to imagine how a Trump administration without Miller would operate. The Journal claims that Miller has either drafted or edited every executive order the president has signed in his second term. I repeat what I said last week: He’s “a sort of human operating system for Trumpism” whose dismissal would “amount to uninstalling the postliberal ideological software on which the entire administration runs.”

 

But Miller’s presence is existential for the White House in another way. What was the point of reelecting Donald Trump, and the point of postliberalism writ large, if not to empower authoritarian cretins like Stephen Miller and unleash them on the American people?

 

What would be left of this second term as a culture-war project without him? Would Republicans consider it a triumph if the president ditched his most ideologically committed aides, pivoted to a conventional Republican agenda over his last three years, and finished his term with a respectable-ish 46 percent approval rating without further meaningful achievements? Sure, some would (the immigration problem has been solved), but postliberals would be crushed. They would accuse Trump of having squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform American political culture durably into the sort of garbage third-world friends/enemies system they fantasize about.

 

This isn’t politics as usual. So why would personnel decisions about unpopular aides and their unpopular programs be made based on the usual political incentives?

 

Years ago, during his first term, in a fit of anger over the Justice Department’s investigation into his relationship with Russia, Trump reportedly exclaimed to aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn was an amoral lawyer and “fixer” with the distinction of having worked for the two most infamous demagogues in American history, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy and, later in life, a young Donald Trump. In asking “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”, the president was scolding the attorneys who worked for his administration for not being cutthroat enough about shielding him from the Russia probe. He needed aides who would behave ruthlessly, without apology, in the name of winning.

 

Stephen Miller is his Roy Cohn. Miller may not be a lawyer, but he’s the near-Platonic ideal of the sort of character whom Trump and his movement extol as a “fighter”—blindly loyal, untroubled by laws or ethics, glowering with hubristic contempt for political enemies and palpably delighting in using power to impose his will on them. It took Trump nearly a decade to reach a place where he could install someone like that to run his government without meaningful political interference, but he finally reached it.

 

And now we expect him to change his mind?

 

I’ll believe it when I see it. The president has his Roy Cohn at last, and so the rest of us are stuck with him too. That’s worth a 37 percent approval rating to Trump all day long.

Jeff Bezos Isn’t Obligated to Subsidize the Losses of the Washington Post

National Review Online

Friday, February 06, 2026

 

This week, the media world recoiled in shock at the news of massive layoffs at the Washington Post, the primary newspaper of the nation’s capital and once a fierce competitor of the New York Times for primacy in the world of print news. Even those prepared by over a week’s advance warning were surprised at the extent of the cuts: Nearly one-third of the Post’s staff was laid off, including the entire sports and books departments as well as large swaths of the international and metro desks.

 

Whatever the longer-term future holds for the Washington Post, it has opted for retrenchment in the short run. The Post’s coverage horizons have undeniably contracted, and in its present state it is neither fish nor fowl as a newspaper: Having dropped both its aspirations to be a leader in national and global news coverage, as well as any local focus on the D.C./Maryland/Virginia metro region, it will need to decide what kind of paper it wants to be — and what kind of readership it seeks to cultivate. That will require a new identity.

 

But by the same token, the near-universal hysteria among media commentators about the Post’s layoffs is curiously misplaced. The cries are utterly predictable and notable only for their monolithic nature: Owner Jeff Bezos is truly to blame, not only for his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump” (in the words of ex-Post editor Marty Baron) but for his unwillingness to pay for these journalists to write work that goes unread. Why can’t one of the world’s richest men just continue to stroke checks to the Post’s reporters and be content with losing money? Hidden behind the complaint is the implicit idea that the Washington Post is a “public good” of a higher sort — like a waterworks or highway system.

 

It is not. Now is not the time to dissect the Washington Post’s various strategic mistakes. A proper accounting would begin during Baron’s editorial tenure, including the decision to recast the paper as a “Democracy Dies in Darkness” organ of “Resistance” to the first Trump administration. Suffice it to say that while the paper has dug itself a very large hole in terms of branding, it is under no obligation to continue to bleed money to satisfy the pieties of people who clearly aren’t paying to read it. If they were, the Post would not be losing money.

 

Of course, as a publication with our own long-standing mission and point of view, we are grateful to have not only subscribers but also donors. If the Post wishes to go that route, it can do so. It was founded as a Democratic Party organ, after all, at its origin in 1877. But that would not only require forfeiting the pretense of Olympian impartiality; it would also require a clearly defined mission and donors who share it. That is not the property Bezos bought, and if he wishes to remake it into one with donations of his own money, there can hardly be a complaint if he prefers a mission that reflects the values he wishes to promote, rather than those of his erstwhile employees.

 

Without a doubt, it is deeply unfortunate when people lose their jobs — particularly in an industry where there are fewer than ever to go around. But Jeff Bezos is a businessman. He is not required to absorb limitless financial losses, particularly to maintain an institution whose ideological focus he feels to be misplaced. Demanding that he act otherwise reeks of entitlement.

No, the Washington Post Was Not Too Right-Wing

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

If you spend enough time in journalism, you’re likely to have lost a job at least once. I have. Indeed, I came back from a brief trip during which I proposed to my wife to find that my employer had sold the magazine I helped edit out from under me. Welcome back! We’ll try to find a place for you. That was generous of my former employer, but, despite their best efforts, there wasn’t a place for me. I moved on.

 

That wasn’t a pleasant experience. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, even if it was, in retrospect, an advantageous career pivot point. Those of us who have lost our jobs due to the Olympian machinations of the managerial set can empathize with the hundreds of reporters who were let go from the Washington Post this week. Whether it springs from human decency or a prudential “there but for the grace of God” sense of personal peril, it is hard not to sympathize with anyone who is about to experience the hardship of temporary unemployment.

 

But within the journalistic ecosystem, there is a pervasive sense that this hardship was deliberately imposed on these reporters. Indeed, their unenviable circumstances are attributable to, if not an outright conspiracy, a variety of bad-faith initiatives. And it all ties neatly into the left’s political worldview. If the Washington Post’s restructuring arose from anything other than its owner’s pitiless outlook toward his own employees, it was because the paper became too right-wing.

 

“There is not a serious market for ‘hard news’ for conservatives,” Slate contributor Alex Kirshner wrote, articulating a version of Matt Yglesias’s self-satisfied and evidentiarily deficient claim that “conservatives don’t like to read.” To compel the Post’s scribes to cater to an ideologically right-of-center audience, too, is to ask them to do “an impossible job.” MSNOW host Chris Hayes agreed with Kirshner. “This is the fundamental truth that I’ve watched generations of media executives try desperately to avoid learning,” he scowled.

 

Many applied this salve to their wounded egos. Post owner and Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos pushed the paper’s editorial page to the right “to mollify Trump,” which drove “away much of its audience in the process,” the longtime political columnist Ronald Brownstein theorized. That decline, which was inevitable (perhaps even intentional), is then used to “justify further cuts,” which “Trump will also welcome.” It was, in sum, “a human sacrifice to” Bezos’s “courting of Trump.”

 

Even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into the mix:

 

Much of the progressive ecosystem long ago primed itself to conclude that the Post’s business failings were the result of its owner’s efforts to pivot the paper’s opinion and editorial side away from niche, identitarian, often “very online” content and toward something with broader appeal. They were primed, in part, by the paper’s own reporters — who, for the record, bore the brunt of this latest round of downsizing. By contrast, the Post’s editorial and opinion side — a millstone around the Post’s neck, according to its critics — has been expanding.

 

Indeed, the paper’s fiscal troubles predated that change to its editorial voice. Even before the Post declined to endorse Kamala Harris (a cardinal sin in the minds of its loudest detractors), it was set to lose $100 million in 2023. Despite the influx of Trump-critical readers who flocked to the paper amid its anti-Trump branding initiatives, it could not monetize them. “The Post has struggled to increase the number of its paying customers since the 2020 election, when its digital subscriptions peaked at three million,” the New York Times reported that same year. “It now has around 2.5 million.” All this was before 250,000 subscribers abandoned the paper in a fit of outrage over its editorial choices.

 

Too many who resent the paper’s evolutionary trajectory have defaulted to a variety of rationales to explain a simple business decision. Its reporters talk about the place like it was a broken home — an erstwhile sanctuary destroyed by the introduction of a loveless steward. In the cascade of criticisms of the paper from its former employees, I didn’t see any provide an objective metric that would justify their employment. Others simply cite Bezos’s wealth as though deploying that non sequitur should prompt us to conclude that one of the wealthiest men in America owes his employees financial security. Perhaps the profit motive itself is to blame for the paper’s struggles. Democrats on Capitol Hill seem to think so.

 

Then there are those who want to believe that the paper’s failure was actually a rare species of success — one prematurely thwarted by their political adversaries. In much the same way that New York magazine’s Ross Barkan blamed San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s loss in a recall election on the Bay Area’s pervasive right-wing biases, the Post must have succumbed to some nefarious exogenous force. Any alternative conclusion might lead the paper’s defenders to look inward, and no one wants that.

 

The simplest explanation is the likeliest: The Post is a distressed asset, and its managers are treating it like one. That is not remarkable. Indeed, making reporting a profitable enterprise in an environment defined by more competition for eyeballs than at any point in the age of mass media has proven elusive. Everyone in this business is navigating that same thorny landscape.

 

It would be easier to conclude that the paper’s struggles are attributable to a betrayal at the top — that its reporters and editors could continue doing what they’d been doing in perpetuity, even at a loss. To maintain that outlook, it’s necessary to conclude that someone is to blame for all this. And, in a way, someone is, but it’s not Jeff Bezos, and it’s not Donald Trump.

Nationalizing Elections Is a Very Bad Idea, as It Was When Democrats Tried It

By Yuval Levin

Friday, February 06, 2026

 

When Joe Biden entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2021, the Democrats insisted that their first priority would be to nationalize American election administration.

 

A bill to do that, the so-called “For the People Act,” was H.R. 1 and S. 1 in the 117th Congress. In the immediate wake of a crisis of confidence in our election system created by a president who refused to accept his loss of a close election, the Democrats sought to have an exceptionally narrow Democratic majority in Washington take over key election-administration rulemaking in every state and impose new and often looser rules involving voter registration, ID requirements, eligibility, ballot harvesting, early voting, drop-boxes, mail-in voting, locations and hours of polling stations, voting by felons, campaign donations, and more. It was madness. Utter civic vandalism.

 

The problem wasn’t even that their doing this would change the results of elections. It’s unlikely that it would have. The problem was just that this would be a needless assault on public confidence in the system at a moment of already collapsing trust. But anyone pointing this out at the time was sure to be dismissed as a racist partisan hack (believe me).

 

The Democrats were persuaded that this was essential to saving American democracy. And for a time, they seemed ready to blow up the filibuster to do it — and so to nationalize elections with the backing of every Democrat in Washington and no Republicans at all.

 

Thankfully, the filibuster held, and not for the first or last time it saved us from a disastrous partisan mistake. The filibuster even helped push the two parties to work together on a constructive reform of the Electoral Count Act instead of a destructive nationalization of elections.

 

But four years later, we are looking at a kind of mirror image of that dangerous mistake. On February 2, on Dan Bongino’s podcast, President Trump was complaining about illegal-alien voting and said:

 

These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and it’s amazing the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, “We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places.” The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

 

Now of course, this mirror image is reflected in the carnival fun-house mirror that is the Trump presidency, and so this is a comment on a podcast and not legislation endorsed by every member of Congress from the president’s party. But it is wrong and dangerous for the same reason. And its fundamental foolishness is made all the more apparent by the fact that the other party tried to do the same thing but in the opposite direction when it was in power just four years ago. That very fact is one major reason why nationalizing elections would be a bad idea.

 

But even some critics of Trump’s move on the left don’t quite see the problem here. Richard Hasen, a law professor at UCLA and a widely respected authority on election law, had a piece in Slate the day after Trump’s comment titled “I Wrote a Book in Support of Nationalizing Elections. Trump Changed My Mind.”

 

Hasen described his earlier view in favor of nationally administered elections and then wrote:

 

Donald Trump has caused me to abandon this argument. As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: “What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles.” At this point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion.

 

This isn’t wrong. Trump does seem hell-bent on election subversion, and he has personally done more damage to public confidence in the American election system than any other individual in the history of our country.

 

But the party-line nationalization of election administration that the Democrats attempted four years ago would also have taken us down the same dangerous path. Their inability at the time to see how their partisan move would come to be used against them, and against their conception of what American democracy requires, is now mirrored in the inability of President Trump and his supporters on this front to see the same.

 

And some progressive backers of the last attempt at nationalizing the system evidently still don’t see the point: The problem isn’t just the ways in which you think the other side is dangerous. The problem is turning the infrastructure of our politics into a partisan football. The inability to see this is a function of the blinding short-termism that seems to afflict us all in this polarized age.

 

Again and again, partisans persuade themselves that this particular moment is the very hinge of history, and therefore the rules that restrain us need to be pushed aside for the sake of saving the country from imminent doom. When it manages to secure a little tiny majority for a moment, each side behaves as if this is its last chance to save the republic and therefore all the rules that make us a republic in the first place need to be abandoned. No one seems to think about what the other side will do with that precedent of abandoning the rules the next time it gets its own little tiny majority, which is likely to be very soon — since, after all, the republic is not doomed at all and we will have another election in just a couple of years in which the plainly evident asininity of the party now in power is awfully likely to get the other party elected.

 

This gets us toward the very core of the argument for substantively neutral procedural rules in a liberal society.

 

There is a philosophical path that can get us to that core: The fundamental moral premise of American public life is that all men are created equal. That we are all equal means no one has any inherent right to rule anyone else. That means our government requires our consent. But that we are all equal also means that everyone has some basic rights that no one — and no majority — can trample. So we need a system of government that empowers majorities to rule and protects minorities from oppression at the same time.

 

But there is also a much more practical path that can get us to that same core, and it begins with an appropriately long-term view of our public life. It is pretty likely that every one of us will find himself in the majority and in the minority at some point in the coming years. And that means we all should want a system that functions in a way that balances the imperative for facilitating majority rule with the imperative for securing minority rights.

 

That’s not an easy balance to sustain. It requires a complicated system with all kinds of restraints and counterweights. And that is why our system of substantively neutral procedural rules looks and works the way it does. The critics who say this system is morally vacuous are exactly wrong. It’s actually an expression of our society’s deepest moral commitments, which begin from the premise that all men and women are equally made in the image of God. And the critics who say that this system keeps us from taking the actions essential to protecting our democracy from the predations of those terrible people on the other side of the political aisle are exactly wrong too. This system keeps us from blindly marching toward self-destruction because it takes a long-term view of our political future even when we are all inclined to fall into delirious short-termism.

 

None of this means that a system of national election administration is somehow inherently wrong or unworkable. There are certainly decent arguments for it in principle, and maybe over time our political culture will slowly evolve in a direction that makes it more appropriate. But given where we are, it is absolutely not somewhere we should go — not just because the other side might use it badly, but because the rules and norms that stand in the way of our pursuing it are protecting us from our worst selves.

The Second Death of Charlie Kirk

By Yair Rosenberg

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

At the close of 2025, just a few months after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, thousands of his followers came together in Phoenix for AmericaFest, the annual convention of Turning Point USA. A casual observer might have expected this gathering to serve as an opportunity for conservatives to regroup, celebrate Kirk’s legacy, and recommit to his fight against the left. Instead, one by one, MAGA’s leading lights took the stage and began shivving one another in public.

 

“Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger,” warned Ben Shapiro, a co-founder of The Daily Wire. He lambasted right-wing “charlatans” who “traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” And he named names. Shapiro slammed Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most popular conservative commentator in America, for mainstreaming pro-Nazi sentiment, and dubbed the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon “a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein,” the convicted sex criminal (fact-check: mostly true). “These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time,” Shapiro said. Awkwardly, several of those people were scheduled to speak after him.

 

“Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads,” retorted Bannon the next day from the same podium. “I just got here, and I feel like I missed the first part of the program,” quipped Carlson, who went on to accuse Shapiro and his allies of practicing “the style of debate where you prevent the other side from talking or being heard,” conflating the latter’s criticism of his conduct with censorship.

 

When Kirk was killed, conservatives believed that his death would galvanize his cause. “Millions of Charlie Kirks were created today,” declared Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. But as it turned out, Kirk’s assassin didn’t kill just one man; he destabilized the entire Trump coalition by removing a pivotal person who had been holding it together. In doing so, the killer helped unshackle dark forces—chief among them anti-Semitism—that now threaten to overtake the conservative movement.

 

***

 

Before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet, Charlie Kirk was trying to save the conservative coalition from turning on itself. To liberals, the late activist was known for debating left-wing students on college campuses. But on the right, Kirk was waging another battle, against people on his own side.

 

For years, Kirk was dogged by the overtly racist followers of the young white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. An avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, Fuentes sought to subordinate racial, religious, and sexual minorities to white Christians. “The problem is that Jews run America,” he said in a representative livestream. “And the only reason we have Muslims here is because Jews are letting them in.” His supporters, known as “Groypers,” badgered Kirk with anti-Semitic and other bigoted questions at Turning Point events. “Charlie Kirk is a fake patriot, a fake Christian, and he hates his people, he’s anti-white,” Fuentes told his online audience.

 

Kirk recognized that this crude conspiracism was poisonous to his project of popularizing the conservative cause. When a caller to The Charlie Kirk Show asked why he wouldn’t debate Fuentes and his faction, Kirk responded: “We succeed—we win; they blame the Jews.” But Kirk also saw that Fuentes had real appeal, especially among disaffected youth, and so he tried to split the difference, repeatedly rebuking the Groypers themselves while partially co-opting some of their talking points. “If you are blaming less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population for all of your problems, that is not going to be good for your soul,” Kirk said shortly before his death. “Any young person that goes into this hyper-online brain rot, you are serving yourself over to your own demise.” Before he was killed, he drafted a now-best-selling book about the benefits of observing the Jewish Sabbath. But Kirk also blamed “Jewish donors” for being “the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.”

 

An exchange during one of Kirk’s final campus tours illustrates the tenuous nature of this balancing act. At Illinois State University last April, a man confronted Kirk to claim that the U.S. government had been “infiltrated by the Jews.” He proceeded to blame pornography, “the transgender movement and the LGBT community,” and the 9/11 attacks on Jewish culprits. For 16 minutes, Kirk deconstructed these and other conspiracy theories, patiently demystifying complex aspects of Judaism such as the Talmud and the biblical Noahide Laws before attempting to explain his fundamental disagreement. “I actually think the people who control our government are secular leftist Marxists in the deep state,” he said. “The people actually controlling our country are not ‘the Jews’”—at this he made a mocking gesture with his hand. “It’s a combination of people that want to see the United States of America cripple and fall.” But before Kirk could finish the sentence, his questioner emphatically interjected, “The Jews.”

 

Kirk similarly tried to walk a tightrope when it came to Israel. Despite pushback from Zionist members of and donors to his own organization, including prominent evangelical Christians and conservative Jews, he hosted debates about the merits of American political and military support for Israel at Turning Point events. And he continued to invite Carlson to participate in them, even after the former Fox News host began airing Hitler apologetics alongside his critiques of the Israeli state. Toward the end of his life, Kirk himself became more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership; he publicly opposed U.S. strikes on Iran and, according to his podcast producer, wanted the Gaza war to end. In this way, Kirk sought to decouple criticism of Israeli policy from anti-Semitic conspiracism, and to contain conflicts over Jews and their state within the conservative tent, rather than allow those arguments to collapse it.

 

But when Kirk died, so did the hope of a brokered MAGA consensus on this and other incendiary issues, because no one else had the credibility or charisma to sustain one. A frantic scramble for control of the Trump coalition commenced—and all of the tensions that Kirk had tried to tame were unleashed. Bit by bit, the conservative kingmaker’s former friends began dismantling his life’s political work.

 

Candace Owens, a popular far-right podcaster whom Kirk once hired and raised from obscurity, began claiming that he had been murdered not by Tyler Robinson, the man detained by authorities, but by an Israeli conspiracy that included Kirk’s own lieutenants in Turning Point USA—and possibly his wife, Erika Kirk, now the organization’s CEO. “Candace Owens Honors Charlie Kirk’s Legacy by Doing Everything in Her Power to Destroy It,” cracked The Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative publication.

 

In his speech at Kirk’s funeral, Carlson blamed Jews—sorry, people “eating hummus”—for killing Jesus, and insinuated that a similar cabal killed Kirk. Days later, Carlson began releasing The 9/11 Files, a five-part video series that suggests Israel had foreknowledge of the al-Qaeda attacks but withheld the information from the United States. “‘Israel did 9/11’ is a rather anti-Semitic thing to say,” Kirk had told the questioner who had suggested as much at Illinois State.

 

Carlson put the final nail in Kirk’s coffin seven weeks after his death by inviting Fuentes, the activist’s nemesis, onto his show—perhaps the most popular podcast on the American right—for a cordial conversation. Over the course of 138 minutes, Fuentes praised Joseph Stalin and railed against “organized Jewry,” all while his host largely failed to challenge his Nazi-adjacent views.

 

Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was not only a betrayal of Kirk’s memory—it precipitated the very MAGA meltdown that Kirk had worked so hard to avert. Conservative institutions quickly came under pressure to condemn Carlson for his softball sit-down with the David Duke of the digital age. This proved too difficult for Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the most influential right-wing think tank in Donald Trump’s Washington. In a video posted online, Roberts denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and defended Fuentes’s right to free speech—without using his own to substantively criticize anything that either man had said.

 

The reaction to the video was seismic. “No to the groypers,” Shapiro declared on X. “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.” Shapiro released a special 41-minute episode of his podcast detailing Fuentes’s career of calumnies against Black people, Indian Americans, Jews, and women—and called out Carlson’s refusal to confront the young white supremacist about any of it. “If this is the Republican Party, or this is what the Republican Party becomes, then I’m not part of it,” Ace of Spades, a pseudonymous pugilist who once won the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Blogger of the Year award, wrote. “I did not sign up for this bullshit. I will not become a Nazi to ‘own the libs.’”

 

“In the last six months, I’ve seen more anti-Semitism on the right than I have at any time in my life,” Senator Ted Cruz told the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November. “It is growing. It is metastasizing. There are about a half-dozen vocal apostles, and it is in particular finding purchase with the young.” Soon after, the Princeton professor Robert George, once dubbed “the reigning brain of the Christian right,” resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s board. Dozens of staffers reportedly left the organization. One month later, Turning Point’s flagship conference descended into recriminations over the very controversies and conspiracies that its founder had endeavored so assiduously to suppress.

 

***

 

On one level, this conflict is about Jews and Israel. But on another, this debate is downstream from something much bigger: a power struggle over who will define and control the MAGA movement once Trump is gone. By painting rivals as tools of the Jews, hard-right influencers such as Carlson and Bannon hope to delegitimize the competition not by besting their ideas, but by slurring their loyalties and identity.

 

For years, Carlson has assailed Shapiro, the country’s most prominent Jewish conservative, casting him as a foreign subversive opposed to the national interest and “hostile toward White, Christian men”—even as Carlson himself has whitewashed anti-American authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin on his show. “I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America,” Carlson said of Shapiro in 2023, “because he doesn’t, obviously.” Carlson also recently insinuated that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is controlled by Netanyahu. Bannon, similarly, regularly labels his critics as “Israel-first”—including in disputes that have nothing to do with Israel.

 

Kirk sought to construct a conservative populism that did not get mired in the morass of anti-Jewish conspiracism. He did not succeed. But many of those who have rushed to assume his mantle have no desire to try. They see anti-Semitism not as a weakness to be avoided but a weapon to be wielded against ideological opponents—including the president.

 

These far-right actors hold no love for Trump and see his iron grip on the Republican base as an impediment to their ambitions. Indeed, Carlson has privately called the president “a total piece of shit” and a “demonic force.” Bannon repeatedly derided the president in text messages to Epstein. Fuentes refused to endorse Trump in 2024. Implying that Trump is controlled by Israel or his Jewish donors is a convenient way to drive a wedge between him and his supporters. “Pushing that anti-Semitic button in far-right Republican politics is a way for some MAGA-aligned figures to try to create a version of MAGA that Trump doesn’t control,” the historian Walter Russell Mead told a Tablet magazine podcast. For Carlson and company, anti-Semitism is a means to an end, and Jews are simply collateral damage.

 

Men like Bannon, Carlson, and Fuentes represent a small, internally divided faction that cannot itself win national elections and repels many of the voters needed to do so. But they are able to extort the broader conservative coalition by threatening to sabotage or leave it. Politicians such as Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and any other contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, will have to decide whether to accommodate or anathematize the coalition’s anti-Semites.

 

Some of those pushing anti-Jewish invective on the right are opportunists. Others are true believers. But the outcome is the same: a conservative politics that is more fractious and more overtly anti-Semitic, in which the place of Jewish people in American public life is openly up for debate.

 

Charlie Kirk tried to avoid exactly this. He aspired to forge a broad conservative coalition that could outlive Trump and bridge the traditional Reaganite GOP with the rising new right. As Kyle Spencer, the author of Raising Them Right, a book about Turning Point’s ascent, put it: “Charlie Kirk arrived on the scene as a kid who just graduated from high school in 2012, saying, ‘I have a vision. It is possible. This party is stodgy. It’s outdated, it’s old white men. We need to attract young people, Black people, Latinos.’” In 2024, when Kirk quarterbacked the Trump campaign’s ground game, it looked like he had finally pulled that off: The former president made major gains among nonwhite and low-propensity voters, and he finally won the popular vote.

 

Today, the president’s hold on his MAGA base remains ironclad, but Kirk’s dream of a broader coalition is slipping away. Last month, polling released by The New York Times found that “the major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back.” In fact, the paper continued, “young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his support among older and white voters.” That same month, Carlson welcomed his show’s first guest of 2026, a conspiracy theorist named Ian Carroll who, after Kirk was killed, told his 1.3 million X followers that “Israel just shot themselves.” The real plot against Kirk’s legacy and work—perpetrated in part by the two men in the studio—went undiscussed.

The Reaper Visits the Washington Post

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

The day of reckoning finally arrived for the Washington Post. It has been known for weeks that D.C.’s primary newspaper was set for major layoffs, as it desperately seeks to reposition itself in a rapidly mutating (and shrinking) news industry. This morning, during a remote Zoom call — no sense coming in to work if you don’t have a job, after all! — it became official: The Post is axing a third of its staff, including the entire Sports department and Books section, as well as most of the people at the International and Metro desks. One way or another, the Post’s news horizons are shrinking.

 

The reactions — from all sides — are thuddingly predictable. My readers are doubtless shedding few tears, and I know for a fact that some of them are outright celebrating. (I know this because I talk to them.) I’ll admit I find that in poor taste; a man’s got to put food on the table, after all, and celebrating the job losses of others feels a bit like carelessly tossing a dangerous karmic boomerang into the darkness. (I’m not above a little grim sarcasm, however: “All those DoorDash bills are really going to sting now,” emailed one veteran politico, and I’m quoting him because most of the other reactions I received included curse words.)

 

Needless to say, journalistic wails are keening across the online landscape. Since the media world has been on notice that this would happen for well over a week, the disgusted postmortems have already been prewritten; this morning the Atlantic was out with 4,000 anguished words from a former Post reporter about “The Murder of the Washington Post.” (Give it credit at least for its subtle opening line: “We’re witnessing a murder.”)

 

Over at the New York Times, Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker passed judgment with the sort of intense smugness that comes from airtight job security: “No struggling newspaper ever saved itself by becoming a worse and less essential product. But what’s happening today at the @washingtonpost is not just the latest devastating contraction of the news industry; it’s the gutting of an American institution vital for a healthy society.” Easy enough for him to say, knowing he’ll never be forced to walk the gangplank of his wooden ship.

 

But the longest lament came from former Post editor Marty Baron: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” he began in a statement that ran three pages. Baron blamed, among other things, a “gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election” and owner Jeff Bezos’s “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump” for the Post’s travails.

 

It’s understandable that Baron, who slapped “Democracy Dies in Darkness” onto the masthead of the Washington Post back in 2017 — and turned the paper into an explicit journalistic organ of the “Resistance” — would cry like a man seeing his pet taken out behind the barn and shot. After all, it’s his vision that is being rejected here. But Baron remains, even to this day, seemingly in complete denial about his role in all of this. He is the man who directed the Post down a blind alley at 70 miles an hour and turned them into the all-politics-all-of-the-time one-note organ they became. It wasn’t under the current leadership that the Post’s Sports, Style, and Metro sections all withered and died; that slow fade was already underway during Baron’s tenure (2013–2021), and only accelerated during that time.

 

And when the Post’s brand became inextricably intertwined with the politics of “Resistance,” its fortunes became enslaved to the fickle (and mindlessly partisan) demands of that audience — an audience noted for its intensity but also its relative smallness in absolute size. The Baron-era Post picked up those readers — and in chasing them so intensely, shed many more.

 

That kind of readership has all the characteristics of a mob: Baron laments that the paper lost thousands of subscriptions when it declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, and never for a moment does it occur to him to ponder what that says about the position he left the paper in: dependent on a petulant, childish readership that demands it be flattered above all else.

 

The Post has a host of larger problems: It is competing in a media environment where newspapers are becoming defunct, as the Old Media world of print essentially centralizes around the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a few smaller survivors. But its proximate problem is its brand, a brand toxified by nearly a decade under Baron’s stewardship. For a brief period, its readership was swollen — not by people with any interest in evenhanded or well-reported news coverage of the Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. area, but by blue-state progressives who demanded a certain kind of coverage. By chasing that transient high, the Post drove away its core subscribers; now that they wish to pivot, they find that rank partisans are only interested in rank partisanship, and the rest of us moved on long ago.