The Simple Case for Arresting Don Lemon

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

The simple case for arresting and prosecuting Don Lemon for his role in the invasion of a St. Paul Church by a group of anti-ICE protesters is, well, simple: It seems that he probably broke the law, including a federal statute that forbids “nonviolent physical obstruction” of worship services.

 

Lemon insists that he was not there to participate in the protest action but to cover it as a journalist. In fairness, he did not claim to be there as a good journalist—a claim to which I would take some exception—but, in any case, that does not matter very much: Lemon entered the church, disrupting its business, and stayed after he was specifically asked to leave by the people in charge. We do not license journalists in the United States—thank goodness—and acting as a journalist does not give anyone any special license to break otherwise applicable laws. The First Amendment gives Americans the right to publish and speak, but it does not protect those engaged in publishing and speaking from being prosecuted for criminal acts, including criminal acts that frequently come up in the course of doing a reporter’s work, such as trespassing, receiving classified documents, or making audio or video recordings in way that might violate local laws requiring the consent of those being recorded. Journalists, like those engaged in civil disobedience, at times willfully break the law in the course of doing something they think important, and, like those engaged in civil disobedience, they must be prepared to bear the legal consequences for illegal actions.

 

The First Amendment protects protesters just as much as it does journalists. If the First Amendment were a shield against trespassing in the church, it would not matter whether Lemon were there as a protester, a reporter, or in some other capacity. A judge or a jury may see things differently when it comes to judging Lemon’s intent, a valid question that is beyond our remit here.

 

It is worth noting that many of the same nice liberals who are complaining about Don Lemon’s arrest were quite happy to see anti-abortion activists convicted of felonies for making secret recordings of Planned Parenthood officials that embarrassed the abortion industry. They, too, were engaged in First Amendment activity and considered themselves journalists making secret recordings in the tradition of 60 Minutes. I do not say that they were good journalists or good documentarians—claims to which I would take some exception—only that the First Amendment that protects their right to publish and to speak does not necessarily override laws against making surreptitious recordings.

 

In fact, one of the laws under which Lemon is being prosecuted was specifically enacted to make it easier to prosecute abortion protesters, creating a federal course of action against individuals and groups whose First Amendment activities go over the line and run up against what would otherwise be local trespassing cases at most. I do not think that this is a good law, for the same reason I do not think “shield laws” protecting journalists from being prosecuted for certain crimes are good laws: I believe in the American principle of equality before the law and therefore think it both wrong and unwise to create special protected classes of people and institutions. A country with a properly functioning criminal justice system would not need special laws that make murder or assault an extra-special, super-duper crime when the victim is a policeman—the laws that protect civilians must be good enough for the lawmen charged with protecting civilians, or else we are laying (as we have) the foundations for a caste system. Special protections for journalists—meaning, inevitably, government-recognized journalists—would be a step in the same direction.

 

The FACE Act—that is, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, another imbecilic congressional acronym—was celebrated by many of our progressive friends when it was being used by the Justice Department during the Biden administration to discourage abortion protests that were in the main a good deal less rambunctious than what we have seen in Minneapolis and elsewhere of late, just as many progressives cheered actions to censor anti-abortion speech in the form of graphic depictions of what the procedure actually does.

 

It is obvious that the FACE Act was meant to discourage anti-abortion protest per se, and not only trespassing or physical interference. Some linked the FACE Act to ordinary political speech, such as those embarrassing Planned Parenthood videos. Then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein, for example, expressly linked “aggressive tactics” such as “illegal filming” to the kind of thing the FACE Act was meant to prohibit and discourage. Feinstein also justified prosecuting the documentarians on the grounds that they had “longstanding ties to the anti-choice movement, including Operation Rescue, which is closely associated with clinic violence.” She argued that such speech, if unpoliced, would result in “the message being sent is that it is okay to commit crimes against Planned Parenthood, its employees, and its patients,” which is, of course, exactly what some of Donald Trump’s apologists say about anti-ICE protests: that the political speech should be suppressed because it could be understood as justifying violence or other criminal acts.

 

Lemon is also charged under a federal statute prohibiting “conspiracy against rights,” a post-Civil War measure that was targeted at the Ku Klux Klan and its terrorist campaign against the political and economic rights of African Americans. The statute is very broad, and prosecutors may be able to make a case that Lemon violated the letter of the law—but it is probably not a very good law. One of the sillier things I covered as a journalist was Lincoln University’s lawsuit against the neighbors of the Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, under the “Klan Act,” the civil-recourse version of the statute here in question. The episode involved residents of an upscale, liberal, largely Jewish neighborhood who complained that the art institution (which Lincoln controlled) was creating parking and traffic problems for the residential community in which it was located. These anti-Klan laws may have made sense in the 19^th century, but it is probably time to revise or repeal them.

 

And therein lies a lesson: Every time someone argues for creating some broad new power for the government—regulatory, criminal, defense-related, whatever—I want to tell them: Remember that the other side is going to win elections from time to time. The FACE Act seemed great when its advocates expected that Bill Clinton was going to represent the rightwardmost bound of presidential action. Democrats should always keep in mind that the American people are more than capable of putting such a man as Donald Trump in the White House, just as Republicans should keep in mind that the American people are more than capable of entrusting power to the likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Zohran Mamdani. Every time there is a change of administration, you are handing the other party a toolbox—you might want to think about whether you want to put a loaded gun in there.

 

Lemon will complain that the Trump administration is being vindictive because he is a critic, and, of course, he will be correct about that—after all, it was Trump himself who declared to his partisans: “I am your retribution.” Lemon will complain that the case against him is political (it is), extraordinary (it is), an example of selective prosecution (it is), a matter of bias (it is), etc.—but none of that means that he did not break the law. It is not a very good law. But, then, many of our drug laws are not very good laws, our immigration laws are not very good overall, our business regulations are, in many cases, positively terrible laws, etc.—and yet we expect, for good reason, that the laws will be enforced. Good citizenship demands that we forgo treating Lemon with the same gentle consideration that he and his comrades have extended to abortion protesters, that we give him the same First Amendment considerations that he would give to anti-abortion documentarians or right-wing provocateurs making secret videos or to a figure such as James O’Keefe or to a media entrepreneur more closely resembling Don Lemon, such as Tucker Carlson—it is always gratifying to beat an opponent with his own stick and hoist with his own petard, but the times we are in ask more of us.

 

If we want orderly government, the way to achieve it is not to forgo law enforcement when enforcing the law is inconvenient—the way there is to rid ourselves of agents of chaos, from minor irritants in the private sector, such as Don Lemon, to major malefactors in the public sector, such as the men and women prosecuting Don Lemon. We need better laws, and we also need better people to enforce them.

 

And Furthermore

 

History is very short, if you think about it: For example, it took only 127 days for the Trump administration to go from extrajudicial killings of non-U.S. citizens in the Caribbean to extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. Some slopes really are very slippery.

 

Don’t you dare compare him to Hitler, the president’s apologists say. Trump’s wife (one of his wives) did claim that he kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside for inspirational reading, but—no, not Hitler. There are many ways to be awful short of being Adolf Hitler—and Hitler would have succeeded in taking Greenland. Don’t you dare call him a fascist, they say. Fair enough—fascism is infamously hard to define, but it is a school of political thought with some organization to it, whereas Trump’s political thought is not thought at all, nor is it organized—it is what Lionel Trilling once called conservatism: a series of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” I have a similar thought when people accuse Trump of being a racist: He is a dumb bigot, to be sure, but racism implies a perverted sense of loyalty, in this case to a race, and loyalty to anything is entirely alien to Trump’s character. Unless you count his sense of humor, Trump is a man without virtues.

 

Fascism is a rotten way of looking at the world, but it implies some intellectual discipline. If, on the other hand, you have ever heard Billy Bob Thornton talk about his dyslexia, then you will have an idea of what it must be like to be Donald Trump listening to a policy briefing and wondering when it is his turn to talk. Thus spake Billy Bob:

 

I’m as dumb as a bag of hair, [and] I grew up with severe anxiety disorder, which I still have. And I have severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. And I also was severely dyslexic. But for some reason, I’ve always been able to memorize things instantly. It’s like I’m dumb as hell on every other aspect of life. But I can see things—it’s almost like a savant thing. I can look at a monologue ... and I see two or three chunks. I don’t read left to right slowly like most people do. I look at something and I go, “Oh, okay. It says that.” It’s almost like some kind of weird science fiction movie where it goes into my head. ... I’ll tell you where I do have a problem is if there’s a scene that’s nine pages long and there’s seven or eight people in it, and I’ve got one line every other page. I sit there and start thinking about other shit. God, you can’t help it with my mental issues. But it’s really harder for me when I don’t have as much dialogue.

 

Fascist? Not in the classical sense, though his economic ideas are fascism-adjacent and his love of thuggery is fascist-aligned.

 

But there are many interesting lines on Donald Trump’s résumé: pampered and self-aggrandizing real-estate heir, spectacular failure in the casino business, spectacular failure in the hotel business, sycophant of Arab princelings, sycophant of Russian oligarchs, enemy of the First Amendment, man accused of rape by his wife (by one of his wives, she later recanted the claim), man found legally liable in a court of law for sexual abuse, man who has a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to sexual abuse allegations about him, social-media addict, enemy of the Second Amendment, game-show host, deadbeat, Putin suck-up, Xi suck-up, convicted felon, tie-taper, make-up enthusiast, Broadway showtune enthusiast with an especial regard for the big show-stopper from Cats, enemy of the Fourth Amendment, bit player in pornographic films, golf cheat, heretic, grandson of a German whoremonger and Yukon horse-meat vendor, pal of Jeffrey Epstein, fraudster, swindler, Enemy of the Fourteenth Amendment, serial bankrupt, serial adulterer, serial divorcee, serial liar, desultory coup d’état leader, draft-dodging coward, precisely the kind of creep who probably shouldn’t own a beauty pageant business, Hillary Clinton donor, Kamala Harris donor.

 

It is a little weird to think about what a man on the edge of 80 might be when he grows up, but if Trump ever grows up, a fascist is what he will grow up to be. That said, I agree it is unfair to call him a fascist today for the same reason it would be unfair to ask my dachshund to write a commentary on Aristotle.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

I wrote last week about the folly of capping credit-card interest rates. Interest rates are a price, and when you artificially lower prices, what you get isn’t low prices—it is rationing.

 

Donald Trump, who once crowned himself the “king of debt,” wants credit card interest rates capped at 10 percent. He has urged the industry to adopt that cap voluntarily—which is not going to happen—but also has suggested to Congress that it should impose such a cap through law. The effect of doing this would not be to save Americans money on interest payments. The effect would be to deprive many Americans of access to ordinary consumer credit, beginning with those who have lower incomes and lower credit scores.

 

Trump, of all people, is well positioned to understand how this works in the real world. During his time as an incompetent real estate developer, Trump made almost as many appearances in bankruptcy proceedings as he did on Page Six. Trump is a known deadbeat and a bad credit risk. When you are a bad credit risk, you pay higher interest rates and get credit on generally worse terms. And then, at some point, you simply cannot get credit at all, at least through ordinary channels. Toward the end of his run in real estate, Trump found it practically impossible to get loans from any of the major lenders with which he had been associated—often to those banks’ regret—over the years. Trump is, at the moment, legally prohibited from taking out commercial loans from banks in the state of New York after having been found by a court to have engaged in financial fraud.

 

But most borrowers are not as outlandish in their behavior—or as wealthy—as Donald Trump. Ordinary borrowers see their credit ratings dinged from time to time over things like unpaid bills or late payments, too much debt relative to their incomes or savings—all the familiar stuff. Interest rates charged to consumers take into account credit risk—the banks’ chances of not getting paid back or of having to spend money and time recovering money owed—but also things such as opportunity cost (Why lend anybody money at 3 percent when you could just park those assets in an index fund and expect to make more money?) and, of course, the ultimate arbiter of interest rates: the market. People with poor credit scores or low incomes pay higher interest rates in part for reasons having to do with risk but also because there is a lot more competition to lend money to multimillionaires with 840 credit scores. The old bankers’ proverb holds true: You don’t want to lend money to people who need it—it is far better to lend to people who don’t need the money.

 

Not every problem is an economic problem with an economic solution. When we have division, convulsing debates over wars or abortion or education, “Let markets work!” is not usually the answer to the questions at hand, even though many of those concerns have economic concerns wrapped up in them. (If you think education is only about ensuring that businesses have workers and that young Americans can get good jobs, then you have a crude idea of what education is and is for.) But sometimes, “Let markets work!” is exactly the right answer. When Americans are unhappy about the price of something—gasoline, houses, college tuition—it is never the case that the problem is the price per se: The problem is always something else that the price is trying to tell us about.

 

Listen to prices!

 

Words About Words

 

Headline: “A Traitor’s Worst Enemy Is Themself.” That and grammar, apparently. Themselves would be ungrammatical, but what the heck is a themself? As often is the case, the homepage headline and the article headline are slightly different. It may be that the homepage copy is generated by a particularly illiterate AI. But, then, artificial intelligence is no match for organic stupidity.

 

A rhetorical tic exemplified in Slate: “It’s Time to Face the Big Question About Trump That No One Wants to Ask.” The question is whether Trump is “losing it”—i.e., the big question pretty much literally everyone wants to ask. Pretending that “no one wants to ask” a question or that “no one wants to talk about” an issue is a way for a writer, or his headline writer, to give him an unearned glow of courage or to add a synthetic flavor of originality to bland commentary. It is similar to the politician who boasts of his courage in “standing up to” this or that supposedly powerful group that everybody in his coalition detests and despises, making “standing up to” that group profitable and popular rather than an act of courage.

 

From Uncrate, a shopping site, a blown chance to use tetradecagon in writing about a new Zenith watch: “Its octagonal stainless steel case measures 37mm and is topped by a 14-sided bezel.” I mean, that opportunity doesn’t come up all that much. (If you read the entry, you’ll also see that they wrote “allied” when they meant “applied.”) Nifty-looking watch, with a tetradecagonal bezel, bezel from the French biseau and the Old French besel, meaning a sloped edge or chamfer, related to bevel. And do you know who knows the proper names for a great many of the polyhedra? Dungeons & Dragons dorks, that’s who.

 

From the New York Times: “On social media, Mr. Macron’s sunglasses were seen as a political statement, projecting a tough image in the face of Mr. Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on French wine and champagne and to annex Greenland.” Champagne is wine. Writing “wine and champagne” is like writing “cheese and cheddar.”

 

You all can, I think, imagine what my poor wife has to put up with. When the waiter, insipidly trying to cultivate a little cheap familiarity, asks: “Have we decided?” I have to stop myself (and don’t always succeed) from asking: “Are we f—ing plural?”

 

Speaking of “you all,” that Texan contraction is “y’all,” not “ya’ll.” And, of course, the super-plural form is “all y’all.”

 

In Closing

 

Donald Trump wants you to believe that Alex Pretti was an “insurrectionist” and an “agitator,” agitator being the dumb man’s word for “protester of whom I do not approve.” Never mind the irony—though “irony” seems too mild a word—of Donald Trump complaining about insurrectionists after giving a blanket pardon to the most significant group of insurrectionists in recent American history.

 

Let’s pretend we’re stupid and take Trump at his word: Even if Pretti was an insurrectionist, do you know what we do with insurrectionists? We do not shoot them while they are unarmed and presenting no serious immediate danger to anybody. We arrest them, charge them under the relevant law, and put them on trial. I do not think that Donald Trump, of all Americans, should want to legitimize the precedent of just shooting insurrectionists.

 

Pretti seems to have been a big ol’ rage-monkey, which is no surprise: If you have ever been to protests of the kind we’re seeing in Minneapolis, then you may have noticed that they neither attract the happiest and most well-adjusted sort of people, nor do they bring out the best in the people they attract. (Do you know who else should know that? Donald Trump and every boot-licking sycophant in his orbit and employ.) I do not know whether Pretti was a bad man. It does not matter. Murdering a bad man is still murder, whatever the moral illiterates on your favorite social-media app have to say about it. Murdering a good man is not extra-special, super-duper murder—it is just murder. As a wise man once said, “Murders stay murder.”

 

Donald Trump once got nicked by a bullet—and he did not seem to enjoy the experience. We do not shoot people for being shmucks, a fact for which Donald Trump should be profoundly grateful.

Modern Progressivism in One Embarrassing Nutshell

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

Thank goodness for San Francisco. Without the city and its officials’ determined commitment to maladministration, conservatives might sound hyperbolic when they warn of the consequences that flow from the left’s policies and priorities.

 

On the last day of 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie demonstrated the bankruptcy of the progressive project when he signed into law a measure that he regards as unworkable and that he will not enforce. He signed it only because he dared not invite the wrath of the activist left.

 

“The bill, which was passed unanimously by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors earlier this month,” the New York Post reported, “creates a fund to accept private or public money for a controversial reparations plan that calls for cash payouts of $5 million each to eligible black residents, debt forgiveness, 250 years of tax abatements, and income subsidies.”

 

In writing, San Francisco has fulfilled the activist left’s desire to provide America’s black population with monetary reparations to make amends for the legacy of slavery. In practice, San Francisco has no intention of honoring the obligations to which the city has committed itself.

 

“We are not allocating money to this fund,” Lurie told reporters. Indeed, “with a historic $1 billion budget deficit,” he added, “we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner.”

 

What a perfect illustration of progressive governance. City officials seek credit only for their noble intentions. Those intentions are measured in astronomical dollar figures by a constituency that regards spending alone as a metric by which individuals and institutions can be judged. But because San Francisco’s administrators know their constituents don’t care nearly as much about results, they have not even made a pretense of their intention to follow through with their self-set obligations.

 

This episode would contribute to a narrative that Republican lawmakers should spend every waking moment between today and the November midterm elections promulgating. It is in keeping with the Covid fraud scandal engulfing Minnesota, which is only part of a much larger campaign of Covid-era fraud that Democratic lawmakers have seemed to care little about, despite the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars lost to it.

 

In the age of tribal politics, progressive politicians cannot be trusted to properly administer the expansive welfare state they want. Those lawmakers care only for the dollar figure they can shovel out the door — the higher, the better, they seem to think. It matters little to those officials whether those funds find their way into the right pockets or stand up the public services those funds are supposed to finance. The spending is the point. Indeed, the left increasingly regards profligacy as its own virtue.

 

As Joe Biden used to say, with monotonous frequency, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Spending patterns are a terrible way to gauge moral values. One can budget for pathologies and addictions, too. One can be extorted as well as persuaded to part with one’s wealth.

 

That’s what happened to San Francisco, and nobody seems to care — not the targets of the activist class’s coercion nor those who are supposed to be mollified by the city’s capitulation. It’s all theater, the foremost purpose of which is to indemnify San Francisco officials against the charge of anti-black racism.

 

Between this story and the ongoing exposure of the Covid-era graft over which Democratic officials presided, it should not be hard for Republicans to argue what conservatives have long maintained: big government is an elaborate patronage system for the connected, not a service provider. Given the public’s growing distrust of America’s governing institutions, there might be more appetite for the kind of “frigidity of rugged individualism” than populists on both ends of the American political spectrum believe.

 

Getting government out of your way may not cosset you in a comfy taxpayer-funded blanket. But allowing you to succeed on your own or encounter the important lessons that accompany failure has some advantages. Foremost among them, it’s fair.

Grandeur Amid Decline

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

Exciting news broke this weekend on Twitter amid the usual glut of white-nationalist propaganda and AI-generated revenge porn: The Justice Department is hiring.

 

When I was a law student, the DOJ didn’t need to advertise job openings. Everyone who wasn’t already set on a lucrative career in Big Law wanted to work there or was considering applying. It wasn’t just the romance of getting to prosecute bad guys or the glamour of gaining courtroom experience or the promise of elite professional connections that attracted ambitious applicants. It was a prestige thing.

 

The Justice Department drew an exalted degree of intellectual talent, operated (sometimes) according to an admirable ethical code, and enjoyed a measure of independence from politics that most federal agencies lacked. Even a conservative disposed by ideology to look down on government employment couldn’t ignore the appeal of working there.

 

So imagine how I felt when I saw someone from the Trump administration reduced to soliciting resumes on behalf of the DOJ from the general public—in, of all places, Elon Musk’s virtual Nazi bordello. It was like spotting Robert Mueller wearing a sandwich board and handing out “Apply now!” fliers in a red-light district.

 

But that wasn’t the worst part. The solicitation itself, posted by former Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle, read: “If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA [Assistant U.S. Attorney], and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me.” Support President Trump?

 

I don’t remember the DOJ of my youth rejecting talented aspiring prosecutors because they voted the wrong way in the previous election, let alone doing so in a manner as amateurish as “DM me.” Being smart, dedicated, and willing to pursue criminals was enough. Nor was there any need to affirm your support for an “anti-crime agenda.” If you’re signing up to work for the Justice Department, you support that by definition, no?

 

Andy McCarthy and Ed Whelan worked for the DOJ before becoming legal analysts and were mortified by Mizelle treating partisanship as a job requirement. “If support for [the] incumbent … president is now a condition of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund DOJ,” McCarthy declared dramatically. “DOJ should only exist if it’s nonpartisan. Too dangerous to liberty otherwise. If AG [Merrick] Garland’s office had posted this, MAGA & GOP would be calling for impeachment.”

 

He’s correct on the ethical merits, needless to say, but the pragmatist in me is left wondering how a Justice Department whose prestige has been smashed to bits is supposed to fill its vacancies without appealing to tribal loyalty. Why would any attorney of McCarthy’s or Whelan’s caliber stoop to work for an agency that’s spent the past year being converted into Donald Trump’s law firm, his personal Department of Retribution?

 

Any ethical person employed by the DOJ in 2026 runs a real risk of being asked to do something unethical for the president that will force them to choose between being fired or having to resign. That’s what Mizelle meant when he referred to supporting Trump’s “anti-crime agenda,” I assume—not that new hires should want to prosecute crimes, which is a truism, but that they should be willing to abuse criminal law to carry out personal vendettas and politicized cover-ups.

 

The story of the second Trump administration is the story of a White House systematically wrecking government institutions and then scrambling to deal with the consequences when those institutions inevitably hemorrhage prestige. Mizelle’s tweet is an example. Respectable people don’t want to work for a DOJ that functions as consigliere in a mafia family so cronies like him now have to slum it on Twitter to drum up public interest, like a “tube man” blowing around outside a car dealership to attract attention.

 

Lowering recruiting standards is one way for an institution to cope with shedding prestige from being mismanaged, and of course, the Justice Department isn’t the only example of that in Trump’s government. But there are other ways. Sometimes the president does something close to the opposite, papering over the grubbiness of the government he’s created by manufacturing phony grandeur.

 

Ice cream and dog feces.

 

Take, for example, the Kennedy Center—or, if we must, the “Trump Kennedy Center.”

 

The artist boycott of the institution that picked up after its name was changed in December has continued, with composer Stephen Schwartz pulling out of an event he was supposed to host for the Washington National Opera in May and composer Philip Glass canceling the premiere of his new symphony (Lincoln) in June. Increasingly it looked like Trump would spend the rest of his term trying and failing to recruit elite musical talent to legitimize his vanity project by performing there, guaranteeing a yearslong stream of bad press. The writing was on the wall.

 

So he’s knocking the wall down. Last night the president announced that the center will close its doors on July 4 for “for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” that’s expected to last approximately two years. The renovation, he said, “will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.” He ruined the institution’s prestige by taking it over—but don’t you worry, the grandeur to come will knock your socks off.

 

His decision was supposedly made after a year of consulting with experts about whether reconstruction would or wouldn’t require a shutdown, but three staffers at the center told the Washington Post that “they had not been previously notified of any plans to close the center, though some had long speculated a shutdown was possible.” There’s no word on how any currently existing contracts with artists to perform there after July 4 will be dealt with. (The organization’s website has events scheduled for August and September as of this writing.) And of course there’s no indication that Congress will have a say in the center’s renovations despite the fact that it was created by federal statute and continues to be federally funded.

 

The episode reeks of a spoiled child taking his ball and going home because no one wanted to play by his rules, but it reveals something important about the president’s relationship with prestige. “It’s the equivalent of his thinking he can extort someone else’s Nobel Prize on an institutional level,” Vox editor Benjy Sarlin said of Trump attaching his name to the center. “He wants the prestige from elite institutions, but the prestige is derived from the institutional history and disappears when he wrecks it.”

 

Precisely right. The same thing is happening at the DOJ. Despite its gold-plated brand, Trump’s law enforcement agency now struggles to attract talent because under his leadership the qualities that made it prestigious no longer remain. He dirtied it up by appointing cronies to key positions, tasked them with carrying out his grudges, then watched as his deputies steered the department into predictable embarrassments. As with the Kennedy Center, I think he assumed that the traditional public esteem in which the Justice Department has been held would legitimize his dubious plans for the organization. Instead the opposite happened: He delegitimized the institution by politicizing it so brazenly and ruined its prestige.

 

As the saying goes, if you mix a pint of ice cream with a pint of dog feces, the result will taste distinctly more like one ingredient than the other. The president keeps whipping up concoctions along those lines at institutions like the DOJ and Kennedy Center, desperately hoping everyone will tell him they taste like Ben & Jerry’s, then seems caught off guard when people start vomiting it up.

 

But closing the center is only half the story. It’s also revealing that Trump’s response to once again being denied the prestige he craves is to wreck and rebuild the structure, one of several ambitious construction projects he’s undertaken. We all know about the empty space where the White House’s East Wing once stood, still awaiting a presidential ballroom that seems to get bigger by the day. The Post reported last week, though, that the president is now also hoping to erect a 250-foot-high “triumphal arch” across the river in Arlington, Virginia, in time for America’s 250^th birthday this July.

 

He’s even posted mock-ups of three designs to his social media account. Given his usual taste in decor, I have a guess as to which of the three is his favorite.

 

“I’d like it to be the biggest one of all,” he told reporters of the arch, referring to similar structures in countries like France and India. After all, “we’re the biggest, most powerful nation.” (The biggest?) That argument has begun to turn up on his Truth Social account too. Size matters, it seems.

 

But why? Why all the focus lately on architectural grandeur?

 

The gilded age.

 

One not very interesting answer is that it’s his usual grandiose narcissism at work, nothing more or less. This is a guy whose gut reaction on 9/11 after watching the World Trade Center fall was that he now owned the largest tower in lower Manhattan. Building the biggest arch, the best ballroom, the most amazing performance-arts center is just who he is.

 

Besides, each project is destined to be a monument to him personally to some greater or lesser (i.e., greater) degree. Each will bear the Trump name in conspicuous ways, I’m sure, with the new “Trump Kennedy Center” especially likely to have his fingerprints all over it in order to make it harder for his political enemies to remove all trace of him after he’s gone. Chiseling his name off the facade is too easy. He’s going to splatter it on the walls, the rugs, and the ceiling.

 

Another answer is that his monument projects reflect his imperial ambitions.

 

That’s also grandiose narcissism, of course, but of a particular kind. All emperors aim to leave their mark on history and one facet of that is leaving their mark architecturally by building gleaming marble memorials of their reign. No president in American history has aspired to be Caesar as plainly as Trump has, from his habit of gilding everything in sight to his thirst for conquest in Greenland and Venezuela to his grotesque autocratic domination of Republicans in Congress. To be a proper Caesar, you need proper grandeur. That includes public works.

 

The Kennedy Center is his amphitheater, the White House ballroom is his palace, and the triumphal arch is, well, his triumphal arch. It’s a “RETVRN” fantasy come to life. God only knows what self-aggrandizing stunts he has planned for the 250^th anniversary of American independence this summer, but I admit to being morbidly curious. Nothing would capture the perversion of our founding ideals as succinctly as turning the semiquincentennial into a glorification ritual for a monarch whom 55 percent of the country dislikes.

 

There’s a third possibility. Perhaps the president’s recent binge of architectural grandeur betrays his awareness that he, and America, are in decline.

 

Probably not—or not consciously. Trump is the last person you’d expect to engage in self-reflection, and if he did, his ego would find any evidence of diminishment intolerable. But he’s conscious of his mortality, at least, political and otherwise. He’s doubtless aware of how much his opponents detest him, he must realize that most of his policies can and will be reversed by executive order in time, and he might grasp that America under his leadership is less esteemed abroad than it used to be. (Whether he cares is another matter.)

 

If I were Nero in twilight, anxious that posterity would remember my reign chiefly for its grotesquely rapacious corruption and my calamitous stewardship of Rome, I might also resolve to carve a grand legacy for myself into the landscape. Historians might impugn me, my successors might disavow me—but my arch would stand forever.

 

The absurd grandeur of the projects he’s planning is a confession of national decadence even if Trump isn’t aware of it, I think. The “biggest, most powerful nation” somehow managed to become the biggest, most powerful nation without turning its executive mansion into a palace or building a tacky faux-Roman tribute to its military victories. Small-R republican America didn’t need the paraphernalia of imperial power to feel assured of its greatness. The fact that we do need that paraphernalia now, per our elected leader, suggests we’ve at last reached a point of decline where reassurance is necessary.

 

Chad Mizelle’s tweet, the Kennedy Center shutdown, and the Arlington arch are each reactions to losing respect—of the legal profession, of patrons of the arts, and of a population that doesn’t believe America is being made great again. We chose a grubby kakistocracy to govern us, it’s predictably turning the United States into a third-world country, and the best it can do to replace the grandeur that it’s squandered is to start slapping gilt on stuff. To atone for wrecking the prestige that American institutions spent centuries amassing, postliberal populists are humbly offering to build crapola built with marble. After all, marble is prestigious.

 

It’s the material of which ruins are made, perfect for an administration trapped in a nostalgic fantasy.

Gavin Newsom Is Fooling No One

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

What’s that old Nietzsche line about gazing long into an abyss? Gavin Newsom would do well to recall it. Eventually, Donald Trump turns all of his critics into an ersatz version of himself, and, evidently, the governor of California is not immune. It is common to hear Newsom described as an oleaginous man, but, at this point, he might better be compared to sand. Sand absorbs oil, and retains its color in the process. Of late, Newsom has absorbed an Exxon Valdez’s worth of Trump.

 

It’s not just the all-caps tweeting, or the acid mockery, or the hypocritical demands that everyone but him must play nice that Newsom has assiduously copied. It’s the chutzpah. This week, Newsom tweeted that “nothing is sacred in Trump’s America — not the First Amendment, not the Second, not even life itself,” before vowing, “We, the People, will not allow the Trump Administration to erode our rights.” An admirable sentiment, in a vacuum. But surely the “we” in the sentence cannot include Gavin Newsom?

 

The Second Amendment? At present, Newsom is engaged in a national effort to repeal it, so that it can be replaced with a version that focuses on gun control rather than gun rights. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom urged the city’s Board of Supervisors to impose “the maximum penalty under state law” on residents who violated San Francisco’s (now struck-down) total ban on handguns and — twice — joined amicus briefs that argued that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right. As governor of California, Newsom has signed a bill that bans concealed carry at the protests he now lionizes; signed a bill that bans Glocks, the most popular handgun brand in the United States; signed a bill (now enjoined) that gutted the Bruen decision by defining “sensitive places” so extensively as to render carry impossible for millions; signed a bill (now struck down) that was intended to prevent those who challenge California’s gun laws from obtaining attorney’s fees; and signed a bill (now struck down) that regulated what could be said about guns in print if it were possible that a minor might see it.

 

The First Amendment? In 2022, Newsom signed AB 587 (now partially enforced, following a settlement), which required social media platforms to submit periodic reports to the state about how they enforce rules on categories such as hate speech, extremism, and disinformation, and the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (now enjoined), which imposed default-setting requirements on any online service that was likely to be accessed by children. In 2024, he signed SB399 (now enjoined), which barred employers from requiring employees to attend meetings or communications whose primary purpose is to convey the employer’s views on politics, religion, or union organizing, and AB 2655 (now struck down), AB 2839 (now struck down), and AB 2355, which broadly regulated the same election-related AI and digitally altered political content that Newsom frequently traffics in on social media.

 

As for “life”? Come now. Under Newsom’s leadership, California has adopted some of the most extreme abortion laws ever seen in the United States. Among the initiatives Newsom has spearheaded or signed are a bill to furnish medication abortion at every public university in the state; a series of bills that provides civil and criminal liability to anyone receiving or providing abortions; a bill that allowed abortion providers in Arizona to operate in California; a bill that required health plans in the state to cover mifepristone, irrespective of its FDA-approval status; and a constitutional amendment (Proposition 1) that renders abortion as a fundamental right and, in practice, outlaws parental consent, waiting periods, and ultrasound, and allows abortion up to the point of birth. Had Kermit Gosnell put together a legislative record, it would not meaningfully differ from Newsom’s.

 

The United States is a big country, and it is inevitable that, somewhere, it will play host to a Gavin Newsom. But it would be better for all involved if, where they must exist, the Gavin Newsoms among us would have the good manners to be honest about their preferences. Despite his pretenses, Gavin Newsom is not a champion of the First Amendment, of the Second Amendment, or of life, and he is not interested in moderation, decency, or respect for his critics, either. Within hours, Newsom will complain that Trump’s rhetoric is inappropriate and tell anyone who disagrees with him that their “knee pads are in the mail.” Concurrently, he will insist that he is a champion of the right to bear arms and sell his plan to remove that liberty from the Bill of Rights. Simultaneously, he will describe his state as a haven for freedom and embark on yet another attempt to micromanage the internet in the name of fighting misinformation. Ezra Klein, Newsom’s fellow Californian weathervane, has described this tendency to go “in two directions at once” as “fascinating.” I disagree. It is pathetic, cynical, and Trumpite — and that, in this particular case, it is being delivered by someone who has good hair and a lupine smirk does not alter that one whit.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Stumbles into Populism’s Blind Alley

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

At a time when most Republicans still support the president and endorse “all or most” of his ideas, the conspiracist and now ex-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is making a bold play for her political future by attempting to convince the GOP that the president has betrayed them.

 

The promise of populism, she contends, will be unrealized in this presidency because Trump has allowed MAGA to fall prey to flatterers, rent-seekers, and well-connected influence peddlers.

 

“Those are the people that get the special favors,” Greene told the provocative radio personality Kim Iversen. “They get the government contracts, they get the pardons, or somebody they love or one of their friends gets a pardon.”

 

It’s amusing to watch as Greene’s self-serving journey of intellectual discovery has led her to conclude that a political theory with no fixed principles beyond majoritarianism (and majoritarianism within only one political faction, at that) might be uniquely susceptible to corruption. But who is it, precisely, who is doing the corrupting? I bet you can guess:

 

“It’s the foreign countries. They are running the show here,” Greene alleged. “It’s the major big corporations and what is best for the world. That’s really what MAGA is.”

 

Ah, but what foreign countries and which moneyed interests are influencing American policy? Those in the control of the Jews, of course.

 

“We are seeing war on behalf of Israel, we are seeing the people in Gaza, innocent people in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of them completely murdered so that they can build some new real estate development,” Greene continued. “Money can pour in, and everybody can get rich there in the new Gaza.”

 

Little that MAGA stands for today has much to do with “America or the American people,” the former lawmaker declared. Rather, the “whole plan” that is being implemented by Trump and company “is really a new world order” initiative.

 

Ah. We might have suspected that a theory of social organization predicated on the idea that a nefarious, ill-defined cabal of rapacious elites would also be responsible for populism’s failures.

 

There are those in the MAGA firmament — Vice President JD Vance, most prominently — who seem convinced that the most paranoid, suspicious, and ignorant elements within the online (and, really, nowhere else) right must be placated by any figure who could conceivably succeed Donald Trump at the top of the GOP hierarchy. Greene has demonstrated why that enterprise on those terms will fail.

 

Anyone who tries to meet the aggrieved-populist true believers in the middle on this one will be outflanked by a genuine kook. Those who make the attempt while trying to avoid going so far overboard that they alienate conventional conservatives will either be goaded by the kooks into a self-destructive game of one-upmanship or give up the effort entirely.

 

It’s not a game worth playing.

Pete Hegseth Delights in Violence

By Missy Ryan

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

Even before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had declared Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist, Pete Hegseth was online trashing his home state. Hegseth, who grew up north of Minneapolis, took to social media in the hours after masked immigration agents shot the ICU nurse with a stark calculation: “ICE > MN.”

 

“We have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country,” the Pentagon chief told immigration agents in an X post. “Shame on the leadership of Minnesota—and the lunatics in the street.” Hegseth didn’t define the we. He and fellow Cabinet members? The 1.3 million service members he commands? The troops he put on standby for potential deployment to Minneapolis? He hasn’t said. But if there was any doubt about how Hegseth would wield military might if troops were sent to check unrest or dissent in U.S. cities, there’s your answer.

 

Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a National Guardsman before becoming a Fox News weekend host, has repeatedly blamed “woke” and “weak” military leaders for imposing overly restrictive rules of engagement that, he believes, cost U.S. lives and prolonged America’s “forever” wars. Since taking office, Hegseth has been an ardent supporter of Donald Trump’s expanded use of troops in U.S. cities and his aggressive immigration operations. When federal immigration agents surged into Minneapolis, Hegseth put troops on prepare-to-deploy orders in North Carolina and Alaska. Trump has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow troops to conduct law-enforcement activities.

 

In standing with ICE’s hard-line tactics against the citizens of Minnesota, Hegseth not only overstepped his jurisdiction as secretary of defense (he prefers to be called the “secretary of war”); he gave a glimpse of the belligerent approach he might take were those troops to be opposed by citizen protesters such as Pretti and Renee Good. It is one thing to defend your troops as they face enemies abroad. It is quite another to suggest that troops—or other armed government forces—have a free hand to do whatever they want on America’s streets to American citizens.

 

Asked about Hegseth’s comments, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said in an emailed statement that the secretary’s mission was to execute Trump’s orders and protect the United States: “We will do everything in our power to stop those who seek to harm Americans and the brave men and women defending our homeland.”

 

***

 

I’ve covered every secretary of defense since Bob Gates, who served George W. Bush and Barack Obama. No Pentagon chief then or since has embraced the jocular yet intimidating rhetoric that Hegseth has employed about the military’s use of violence. At times, uniformed leaders have spouted off in public. Jim Mattis, the retired Marine general whom Trump referred to as “Mad Dog,” made tough-guy quips about how “it’s fun to shoot some people” and the need to “have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” But Mattis turned out to be a check on—rather than an accelerant of—Trump’s most disruptive instincts. Pentagon leaders have almost always publicly couched the military’s use of violence in decorous euphemisms designed to show the solemnity of lethality. Insurgents are “eliminated” or “taken off the battlefield.” Public gloating, in an institution as storied and upright as the U.S. military, is viewed as unseemly.

 

Not so for Hegseth. His tone and vocabulary regarding the use of force are gleeful, juvenile, and crude. He has posted doctored children’s-book covers that show a turtle named Franklin hanging out of a helicopter, shooting at drug boats. He embraced a phrase that the White House is now touting as Trump’s doctrine for the use of force: fuck around and find out. And he has celebrated lethal strikes on suspected drug traffickers in small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. After the initial strike in September, he told reporters, “I’d say we smoked a drug boat and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean—and when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate.” In November, hours after The Washington Post reported that commanders had killed two survivors of that strike, Hegseth posted, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing by the military and has not announced any internal investigations or reviews.

 

Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller and the president himself employ similar cruelty when discussing what they see as America’s urban pathologies (Trump has described an “invasion from within” and said U.S. cities should be used as “training grounds” for the military). But it’s unusual, to say the least, for someone who sits in the top office at the Pentagon, a department focused on conflict outside the U.S. In theory, Hegseth is supposed to be setting an example for the world’s most powerful military, responsible for a large nuclear arsenal and the life-and-death decisions of a massive global force.

 

Hegseth’s regular demonization of domestic opponents (the “lunatics” he referred to are the same American citizens the military is duty bound to protect) also gives a glimpse into how he would view the power dynamic were troops to be deployed domestically. (In contrast to Hegseth’s swagger, when Minnesota state leaders deployed the National Guard to assist local law enforcement this week, Guardsmen handed out coffee and doughnuts.)

 

Peter Feaver, an expert on civil-military relations at Duke University, told me that the top Pentagon officials responsible for the nation’s sons and daughters in service, and the weighty matters of war and peace, generally have tried to stay out of public political squabbles as much as possible. Hegseth, instead, “has adopted a messaging posture that breaks with that tradition, perhaps reflecting his own background as a partisan commentator on Fox News and thus his comfort with the hot takes and rapid-response mentality of that medium,” Feaver said. “Having the secretary be so prominent in partisan sparring can put pressure on the nonpartisan military, whose professional ethic requires them to stay out of the fray.”

 

Staying out of the fray is exactly what U.S. troops—the National Guard and a small contingent of active-duty Marines—have done over the past year as the president and his allies deployed them to assist federal agents, fight crime, or respond to unrest in cities including Los Angeles, Memphis, and the nation’s capital. Military experts say that’s because military personnel have more extensive training and better discipline than ICE or Border Patrol agents.

 

But Hegseth’s firing of the top Army, Navy, and Air Force lawyers suggests a different potential problem in any further domestic deployments, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. Hegseth, who, before taking office, advocated for the lenient treatment of troops convicted of war crimes, might simply override the military-justice system if any violence occurs. “There’s always somebody who acts inappropriately, even criminally, in a moment of stress or frustration and needs to be held accountable,” Cancian said. “That will be a test.”

 

***

 

Hegseth’s attitude is rooted in his disillusionment and disappointment over his experience in Iraq, people who know him say. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth boasted about instructing members of the platoon he led to disregard their rules of engagement, a shocking admission and one that now looks especially ominous should the Trump administration deploy troops in new ways within the United States.

 

Hegseth described his time in the 101st Airborne’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team—the camaraderie, stress, and euphoria of combat—as transformational. He emulated then-Colonel Michael Steele, a Black Hawk Down veteran and brigade commander who he felt was wrongly held responsible for attacks on civilians that occurred under his watch, one of the people who know Hegseth told me.

 

Those rules of engagement are handed down from commanders who are advised by military lawyers, called judge advocates general. Their aim is to ensure that operations comply with U.S and international law.

 

Hegseth has dismissed JAGs as “jagoffs” and complained that their decisions led to U.S. troops “fighting with one hand behind our back” in Iraq and Afghanistan. “When you send Americans to war, their mandate should be to lethally dominate the battlefield,” he wrote. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.”

 

Hegseth’s approach at the Pentagon has reflected those convictions. Since taking over a year ago, Hegseth has fired top generals and flag officers and vowed to empower the trigger-pullers. Speaking to senior uniformed leaders he summoned to a Marine base in Virginia last fall, Hegseth said the military would fight wars to win, not to defend, and  would end “stupid” restrictions on the use of force. “We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country,” he told hundreds of officers. “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement; just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters.”

 

Hegseth has company among some other veterans of the post-9/11 wars in believing that restrictive rules of engagement led to the U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, because troops were prevented from killing more insurgents, Jason Dempsey, a former Army officer who served two years in Afghanistan, told me. Dempsey described Hegseth’s attitude this way: “There should be no standards on the battlefield because it’s all us versus them, black versus white, good versus evil, and there are no innocent or undecided people in between.”

 

The importance of projecting strength and toughness is a deeply held belief for Hegseth, one of the people who know him told me. At the same time, Hegseth takes his cues from Trump, whose support is key to him keeping his role. In recent days, the president has distanced himself from his subordinates’ hot-blooded response to Pretti’s death, and his “border czar” has promised to wind down the federal immigration surge in Minnesota. In this case, Hegseth may be out of step with what his boss now wants.

Latin America Is Shifting Right and Toward the U.S.

By John Fund

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

Sunday’s landslide victory of Laura Fernández, the 39-year-old conservative candidate for president of Costa Rica, is welcome news. But it’s part of a clear trend sweeping Latin America: Conservative parties are winning elections and then pursuing closer ties with the U.S.

 

The pattern has been consistent and clear. It began in late 2023 with the election of libertarian Javier Milei — an ally of Donald Trump’s — in Argentina. Since then, Milei’s free-market approach has paid huge dividends. Inflation has declined from 300 percent a year to just 30 percent, the budget deficit is now zero, and the poverty rate has plunged from 52 percent to 31 percent.

 

As both Argentina and the U.S. turned toward conservatism in the past year, country after country in Latin America has followed suit, moving to the right.

 

Ecuador: Daniel Noboa, the incumbent conservative president, won reelection in April of last year, defeating leftist Luisa González with 56 percent of the vote. Two years earlier, he had beaten González with only 52 percent.

 

Bolivia: In August, with the victory of conservative Rodrigo Paz, the Andean nation repudiated the socialist MAS party that had dominated its politics for 20 years. MAS’s economic incompetence and corruption led to it losing all but two of its seats in Congress.

 

Argentina: Midterm elections in October ratified the public’s confidence in Javier Milei’s policies. His coalition won majorities in both houses of Argentina’s congress and will now have the votes to pursue even more-vigorous reforms.

 

Honduras: Conservative Nasry Asfura won November’s election in part because of an explicit endorsement from President Trump.

 

Chile: December’s election saw free-market candidate José Antonio Kast win in a landslide, with 58 percent. He will oversee a huge policy shift from the left-wing administration of Gabriel Boric.

 

Even Britain’s left-wing newspaper The Guardian acknowledges the trend, conceding that Laura Fernández’s victory “confirms a rightward lurch in Latin America, where conservatives have ridden anger towards corruption and crime to win power.”

 

Security issues have soared to the top of voters’ priority list all over the region, as migration and the stepped-up activity of drug gangs has heightened fears about crime.

 

In El Salvador, populist President Nayib Bukele has built maximum-security prisons where gang members are treated harshly. This has led to calls in other countries to emulate his security policies, though none have militarized their country to the same extent as El Salvador or ignored the term limits as Bukele has.

 

In Costa Rica’s elections, security was a huge issue. But so, too, was the economy. Fernández, a former minister of economic policy, built on her record in office, which saw growth of 4 percent to 5 percent a year, an unemployment rate of just 7 percent, low inflation, debt reduction, and investments in education. She promised to continue to “fight tirelessly” to promote economic growth, saying it was a necessity to diversify the country’s tourist-driven economy and lift people out of poverty. Bloomberg News reports that she campaigned on an ambitious agenda:
“Fernández has called for closer economic ties with the US, says she opposes all new taxes and wants to ‘cut the fat’ off the state.” She also supported selling two state-owned banks and placing term limits on judges, who, she said, were too often lenient with criminals.

 

Of course, there is no assurance that the winning streak of conservative parties in Latin America will continue. Three major countries will vote later this year: Peru in April, Colombia in May, and Brazil in October. The most recent polls show that a conservative candidate is likely to be competitive or an even bet to win in each country. In Brazil, the biggest country in Latin America, with 213 million people, leftist President Lula da Silva is promising to run even though he will turn 81 just two days after any runoff election. The latest poll shows him with 45 percent, trailing the combined total of the four conservative challengers, who are likely to force him into a runoff.

 

If the conservative trend continues, it will vindicate the belief of President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Latin America has spent too long in the backwaters of U.S. foreign policy.

 

Recent elections are a clear gauge of success for America’s reengaged Latin policy. But even more impressive results may come if nations that haven’t had free elections in decades — Cuba and Venezuela come to mind — start changing the course of their foreign policy under the influence of either gentle or sharp elbow jabs from the United States.