Monday, September 14, 2026

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption

By Anne Applebaum

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

College Freshmen: If You Care About Justice, Beware the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement

By Marc Sarnoff

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

Members of the Class of 2030: Congratulations on starting a wonderful new chapter. College will inspire you to make the world a better place and give you the skills to do it.

 

But danger lurks on campus. You will be tempted by misguided ideologies that prey on that very yearning to make the world a better place. Indeed, you likely encountered one such narrative even before your first class. Nowadays many college freshmen get exposed to “Free Palestine” slogans from the moment they move into their dorms.

 

In the months ahead, you will hear that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is “occupying” the land of the dispossessed “Palestinian people,” while committing “genocide” in Gaza. Every element of this narrative is false, but it is a familiar and depressingly effective strategy. The Nazis portrayed Jews as alien intruders who didn’t belong in Europe, accusing them of heinous acts such as the medieval “blood libel” that Jews use the blood of murdered children in religious rituals. Germans — at that time, perhaps the most highly educated people on earth — fell for it, and the Holocaust was the result.

 

The two narratives are not merely similar; they are related. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent World War II broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Arabic from Berlin. After the war, Arab nationalists continued the fight for Judenrein (to be “free of Jews”). It was the genius of the Soviet-trained propagandist and terrorist Yasser Arafat to repackage this narrative for campus leftists in the West.

 

Most people with an opinion on the subject assume that “Palestinians” are a distinct nation and therefore have a legitimate claim to a state. But is that true? There are perhaps 500 million Arabs living in predominantly Arab states whose borders were carved out of the Ottoman Empire by European colonial powers. The Arabs of Palestine share with their neighbors a common language and ethnicity; they are as culturally distinct from Jordanians and Syrians as Texans are from New Yorkers. A Palestinian nationalist movement was born in the late 19th century, along with scores of other national independence movements — including Zionism — primarily in opposition to Ottoman rule. But not every group that thinks of itself as a nation can have a state. That is why you won’t see campus protests for the 50 million Kurds spread across the Middle East — an actual national group with its own language and ethnicity, but no state.

 

The term “Palestinian” came to have its current meaning only recently. For thousands of years, “Palestine” was a common name for the Holy Land, a region with many ethnicities. Even in the decades before Israel’s creation, Jews who lived in Palestine were identified as “Palestinian” on passports. Look up “Palestine” in an early 20th century edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will see a long article that mentions Arabs, Jews, and many others, but not “Palestinians.” Only after World War II and the creation of Israel did Palestinian Jews begin identifying as “Israeli,” while local Arabs appropriated “Palestinian” for themselves to reinforce their claim of primacy in the land.

 

The accusation that Israel is “occupying” Palestinian territory has equally dubious historical roots. Today’s “two-state solution” focuses on the West Bank and Gaza — which were captured from Jordan and Egypt, respectively, in 1967, in one of many wars launched by Arabs explicitly to exterminate Israel. “Occupation” under international law implies that some state has a settled claim to the land in question, but there was never a Palestinian state. Jordan and Egypt have formally relinquished their claims, so the status of Gaza and the West Bank under international law is most accurately described as “disputed” or, if you like, “TBD.”

 

The idea of an Israeli “occupation” has a more sinister origin. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 — before Gaza or the West Bank were even “occupied.” To Arafat, the PLO’s founder, “occupation” meant the existence of any Jewish state in the Middle East. Arafat appropriated the language of decolonization to cast Jews — an indigenous people returning to their native land, refugees fleeing persecution and genocide in Europe — as European colonists whose state must be extinguished. That is the meaning of the phrase, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

 

You will hear that Israel is an “apartheid state.” Yet 20 percent of Israelis are Palestinian Arabs, living freely in Israel with full civil rights. Israel is a multicultural exception in a region full of apartheid. Surrounding Arab states stripped ancient Jewish communities of civil rights and drove them into exile, but you won’t hear anyone clamoring for their “right of return.” Turkey — a NATO ally — has oppressed its Kurdish minority for decades, but you likely won’t hear about that during your time in college.

 

As for Gaza and the West Bank, the Arabs there have been offered a state of their own multiple times and rejected it each time because their leaders couldn’t accept the existence of a Jewish state anywhere in Palestine. Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely in 2005, but security measures continued because Hamas took over and turned Gaza into a platform for missile terrorism against Israel.

 

The results came on the early morning of October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas fighters and young Palestinian men crossed into Israel to murder 1,200 Israelis and take more than 200 hostages. Attacking defenseless kibbutzim and young revelers at a music festival, Hamas then hunted down terrified women, children, and the elderly. They were given no evacuation warnings, no opportunity to surrender, and not the slightest sign of human mercy.

 

On campus, you may hear that anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. But in practice, it almost always is, just as it was for Arafat. No sooner had Hamas’s atrocities come to light than scores of university student groups publicly and solely blamed Israel, expressing solidarity with Hamas. The rape and torture of Jewish women was documented, but campus activists denied it and tore down posters recognizing the victims. Prominent Ivy League academics framed the murder of 1,200 Jews as legitimate “resistance.” Yale and Columbia professors defended the attack, dismissing Israeli victims as “settlers.” It didn’t matter that some of those communities were socialist peacenik kibbutzim that predated Israel itself: What made them illegitimate to those professors was not their connection to Israel, but that they were Jewish.

 

None of Free Palestine’s lies is more poisonous than the accusation of “genocide” in Gaza. This depraved calumny is the ancient blood libel updated for today’s leftists. The war that resulted from October 7 has been horrific, but it was Hamas that chose the war. By drawing Israel into densely packed urban areas, refusing to surrender, and often refusing to let civilians escape, Hamas chose the way the war unfolded and bears responsibility for the result, as surely as the Nazis bore responsibility for the devastation of Europe.

 

Perhaps 70,000 Gazans have died — far more than the number of Israelis killed on October 7. That is shocking, until you consider Allied bombing killed 500,000 German civilians in World War II, while the number of American civilians killed on American soil was zero. Much of Gaza lies in ruins, but the same was true of Germany in 1945. Yet only a Nazi would say Germany was the victim of genocide.

 

The ratio of civilian to combatant casualties in Gaza has been about 1.5:1 at most by the most reliable accounts. That is in keeping with urban counterinsurgency operations of this scale and remarkably low considering Hamas’s strategy of fighting from schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Why does Hamas use human shields? Because it knows many people will blame Israel.

 

What makes the genocide libel most despicable is the lengths to which Israel has gone to protect Gaza’s civilian population. Israel has issued evacuation warnings before major military operations, even sending text messages to evacuate specific buildings about to be struck. It has given Hamas fighters opportunities to surrender, as required by the Geneva Conventions, which Hamas systematically violates.

 

You will hear that Israel “indiscriminately targets” civilians. This is false. International law provides that Hamas’s placement of military assets in or under civilian infrastructure can strip those sites of their protected status. You will hear that Israel uses “disproportionate force.” Proportionality under international law is not determined by whether opposing sides use equal force; the force used must be proportional to military necessity. Here, that necessity is the disarmament of Hamas and the end of its rule in Gaza.

 

Gaza’s death toll is perhaps 3 percent of its pre-war population and is composed heavily of combatants. Actual genocides look like the Nazis murdering 60 percent of Europe’s Jews, the Khmer Rouge slaughtering 30 percent of Cambodians, or the Turks killing 75 percent of Armenians. Those millions were intentionally murdered, not merely civilian casualties of war.

 

Under international law, genocide is the attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or religious group. Israel is doing no such thing, and saying otherwise trivializes the real genocides of the past, as well as the genocide Hamas and its terrorist allies have pursued for decades.

 

Hamas leaders boast they would repeat October 7 “a thousand times.” Yet they get a pass on campus because “resistance to occupation” is framed as the noblest cause. By excusing its double war crime — the murder of Israelis and the callous sacrifice of Palestinian civilians — campus protesters unwittingly aid terror. Watching protesters’ routine intimidation of Jewish students, Hamas rightly brags, “We have our own people everywhere.”

 

In June 2026, eight students, alumni, and former employees of the University of Michigan were arrested for targeting university officials and Jewish businesses with intimidation and destruction of property. Once you connect the dots, you may realize that behind the veneer of justice and liberation, the slogans of “Free Palestine” are an incitement to genocide against Israelis and violence against Jews everywhere. And if you believe Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, many activists and sympathizers will not merely disagree with you. They will try to bully, intimidate, and silence you.

 

The campus left prides itself on fighting hate but ignores — and indeed often shares — the all-consuming hatred that Israel’s neighbors have shown the Jewish state since its founding. Campus activists who claim to stand for the rights of women, gays, and other minorities make common cause with Islamists who persecute those same minorities. The world is full of minorities facing persecution on a massive scale without a single banner being raised on their behalf on campus. Around 32,000 pro-democracy protesters were murdered in Iran in just a few days this year, but activists mostly blamed the U.S. and Israel, when they could be bothered to care at all.

 

There is a simple lesson here: Don’t believe something simply because “everyone says” it’s true. The Israel–Palestine conflict will test your ability to distinguish cause and effect, right and wrong, victim and aggressor. A dismaying number of your classmates will fail that test. Don’t be one of them. Read, think, and decide for yourself — and stand up for what you believe.

Trump’s Reckless $5,000 ‘Dividend’

National Review Online

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

During his address to the Republicans’ novel “midterm convention,” President Donald Trump plucked a new political promise out of the air. If the GOP keeps control of the House and the Senate, he vowed, he will send every American adult a $5,000 check.

 

As is his habit, Trump waved away any objections to this plan. Asked later if he would need Congress to agree to the payment, he said, “We think not.” Asked if it would add to the deficit, he said, “I’m not at all worried about that.” Asked why he couldn’t do it now, given that the Republicans already run Congress, he said, “Because they can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it, because with them it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.”

 

Glad we cleared that one up.

 

Not to be outdone, Vice President JD Vance got in on the action with nonsense of his own. Asked by Bret Baier about the potential consequences for the “deficit and debt” and “inflation,” Vance insisted that the checks could be paid for from tariff revenues. “We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue,” he said.

 

None of this is true. In his speech, the president described the potential payout as a “Trump Dividend.” But this is a brazen misuse of that term. Were his plan to come to fruition, it would be good old-fashioned government spending — nothing more, nothing less. Under the U.S. Constitution, that spending would have to be authorized by Congress, not by the president. And, because the federal government is running multi-trillion-dollar deficits, that spending would have to be borrowed, which would increase the debt. If President Trump’s vow is to be taken literally, the cost would be between $1.3 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Adding that amount of money into the economy would undoubtedly make inflation worse, and, because it would eventually be paid back unequally via our highly progressive tax system, it would represent precisely the sort of “socialism” that Trump spent the rest of his speech in Texas denouncing. As for Vance’s preposterous claim that the project would be covered by the revenues from tariffs? The projected tariff haul in 2027 is $125 billion — less than 10 percent of the cost of Trump’s plan.

 

Reflexive apologists for Trump’s proposal have tended to focus on the sins of the other party — pointing, for instance, to the unnecessary and inflationary stimulus checks that the Democrats issued in 2021, and to President Joe Biden’s illegal attempt to forgive student loans. But this isn’t a defense, so much as a confession. Those policies were bad, and the Republican Party opposed them. That they were attempted was a disgrace; it was not a catch-all excuse for further reckless behavior. Whatever problems may exist in the American economy in 2026, there is no need for a round of debt-financed $5,000 checks. The central problem of our political era is the persistence of inflation and the associated increases in the cost of everyday goods. Trump’s suggestion would worsen, rather than improve, that issue.

 

The role of the federal government within the U.S. economy ought to be to provide a stable framework within which free people may thrive. When it taxes, it ought to tax predictably and consistently, with the purpose of covering its spending. When it spends, it ought to spend on those functions that only the national government can fulfill. President Trump’s proposal cannot be squared with the federal government’s proper role — nor, for that matter, can it be justly described as “policy.” Had he contrived it on the fly as he spoke in Dallas, it would look no different. This is no way to run a country.

Everything Trump Wants to Do Causes Inflation

By David A. Graham

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Just call it the Five-Grand Old Party. This week, at the Republican Party’s midterm faux-convention, President Trump announced something called (inevitably) the “Trump Dividend.” The premise is simple. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

 

Problems abound. First, this is wildly inappropriate, for obvious reasons: It’s an attempt at using taxpayer money to bribe voters into supporting the president’s party. Because Trump is not premising the supposed payout on individuals’ votes, it might be legal, though the White House would presumably require congressional approval for the estimated $1.3 trillion cost. A Republican Congress might sign off; a Democratic one might be more inclined to start impeachment proceedings.

 

Second, the payments almost certainly won’t happen. (If you disagree, I’d be happy to sell you a nice bridge in Brooklyn if you sign your Trump Dividend over to me.) Trump has promised to cut checks to Americans before and not followed through, and this proposal appeared to catch many of Trump’s advisers, as well as Republican lawmakers, by surprise. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rival for the 2024 GOP nomination, quickly criticized the pledge.

 

Third, injecting more than $1 trillion into the economy wouldn’t just blow up the deficit and national debt—it would also drive up prices. Giving every American $5,000 to spend would create demand that couldn’t immediately be met, encouraging sellers to raise prices. I could quote lots of economists from left, right, and center who have already said that the payouts would be inflationary, but you could also just take it from Trump himself, who has repeatedly blamed inflation on high spending during the Biden administration—including in the same speech where he floated the dividend.

 

A paradox of this moment is that inflation is a big reason for Trump’s cratering approval and his party’s sinking odds in the midterm elections, but nearly every one of his signature policy ideas is inflationary. The basic challenge is not novel to this president—voters hate inflation, yet most anti-inflation measures the government can take will hurt the economy, which voters also hate. But Trump’s strategy seems to be to commit to new proposals that would drive up costs.

 

In some cases, inflation is incidental to the president’s goal. When Trump launched the war in Iran, he apparently believed that it would end quickly—and might even result in the United States gaining control over Iran’s huge oil reserves. Instead, the war is dragging on into its seventh month, with no end in sight. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, have strangled shipping of oil as well as other goods, driving prices higher. The average price of a gallon of diesel fuel in the U.S. topped $6 today for the first time, and because so many goods move via diesel trucks, the rise drives further inflation.

 

Trump’s efforts to crack down on immigration also have the collateral effect of pushing prices up. The administration has not only tried to secure borders and deport unauthorized immigrants; it has also revoked legal status from more than 1 million people who were permitted to live and work in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. Many of these people were employed in industries such as construction and health care that are difficult and low-paid; for example, more than 20,000 Haitians with TPS worked in caregiving last year. Housing shortages plague many parts of the country, and more building could alleviate them. Perhaps Americans will be willing to take these difficult jobs, but with unemployment rates already low, that will likely require higher salaries—which will mean higher costs, and therefore higher prices.

 

Other Trump policy ideas are directly and explicitly inflationary. For decades, Trump has espoused protectionism, saying that the United States should impose tariffs in order to close trade deficits with some partners. Regardless of the other merits of this plan (and they are dubious at best), tariffs are by definition inflationary. The goal is to raise prices on certain products. A tariff is a tax on goods, and someone has to pay it.

 

Faced with economic headwinds and voter dissatisfaction, Trump has at many times dismissed voter concerns, but he has also pressured the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Trump attempted to oust former Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the board member Lisa Cook, and made clear that he expects his newly appointed chair, Kevin Warsh, to lower rates. By law, the Fed is required to promote maximum employment and stable prices. (It aims for 2 percent inflation.) Trump wants lower interest rates because they encourage economic growth, but they drive inflation for the same reasons: Lower rates encourage borrowing, which produces spending, which has a similar effect on prices as sending every American adult a $5,000 check.

 

Writing off Trump’s pursuit of inflationary ideas as cynical is tempting, if only because so much of what he does is cynical, but years of evidence suggest that Trump actually has little idea how economics works, as the journalist Steve Benen recently noted. The president’s obsession with trade deficits is nonsensical; Senator Rand Paul memorably quipped that because he gives money to his grocer and gets food in return, he’s running a trade deficit with the supermarket. Last week, Trump perplexingly suggested that the United States could simply cut off commerce entirely: “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries.”

 

Perhaps Trump doesn’t understand that his ideas will drive up prices. Perhaps he does, but concludes that dangling free money in front of voters is worth the hit. Either way, new numbers released today show that inflation rose 3.4 percent from one year ago. Trump’s policies are working.

When Every Jew in the World Is a ‘Settler’

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

Andy Burnham has decided to begin his term as prime minister by fundamentally reshaping Britain’s relationship with Israel. For the worse.

 

Burnham is trying to prevent any further exodus of anti-Zionist politicians from his ruling but floundering Labour Party. Keir Starmer, his predecessor, came into office on a massive electoral wave, which he promptly squandered. To get out of the hole Starmer left London in, Burnham has picked up a shovel and begun to dig: He is simply doubling down on Starmerism.

 

And the first order of business is to institute a boycott of Jewish towns and businesses in Judea and Samaria.

 

That’s going to cost Palestinians jobs, but the Gaza Left is unconcerned with actual living, breathing Palestinians. Burnham too, apparently.

 

Why is Burnham instituting discriminatory policies against Jews while making Palestinian lives harder? Because he has been convinced by the “settler violence” narrative.

 

Now, violence orchestrated by a few dozen extremist Jews has risen. But by the most recent annual statistics we have, that violence still does not reach the number of attacks originating in Judea and Samaria by Palestinians against Jews.

 

Still, violence moving in the wrong direction is a problem. And there are two ways that Israel’s allies have sought to address it. The first is the approach taken by President Trump. Along with Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration’s team has real credibility with the Israeli prime minister and the segment of the Israeli population most affected by, and implicated in, disorder in Judea and Samaria.

 

The result: Recently Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the removal of several illegal settler outposts, and the IDF dismissed a soldier who prayed with settlers who besieged an Arab home, despite it being election season, a time when Benjamin Netanyahu is usually more hesitant to anger the right wing.

 

The Trump team won Israel’s trust and got some concessions.

 

The other strategy, the one pursued by Burnham, France, Canada, and other Western countries, was the opposite: reduce cooperation, reduce trust, and remove all possible diplomatic influence over the Israelis.

 

The results: Israel closed the British consulate in Jerusalem and removed Britons from West Bank Palestinian military training and from the Gaza postwar coordination team.

 

The removal of the consulate in Jerusalem is overdue. The UK uses it as a diplomatic post for Palestinians but keeps its Israeli embassy in Tel Aviv. The UK is now free to move its Palestinian consulate into the state of Palestine that it recognized.

 

The other result of all this will, of course, be increased anti-Semitism. If you want to understand why Jews are uncomfortable with the suddenly ubiquitous “settler violence” narrative, it’s not only because it paints all Jewish life beyond the armistice line as illegitimate. It’s also because of stories like the following, from the Times of Israel’s New York correspondent:

 

The flyers went up in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood last month, plastered onto lampposts, bollards, building walls and traffic control boxes.

 

“Beware: Talmudists are trained to cheat,” said one of the flyers posted in opposition to a housing redevelopment project.

 

“Locals vs. Rothschilds,” another said.

 

While those flyers echoed age-old antisemitic tropes, others deployed Israel-related or anti-Zionist rhetoric, decrying “dirty zionist money” and comparing the redevelopment project to the Nakba.

 

“Stop Zionist occupation of Manhattan. NYCHA residents must keep their homes,” one said, referring to the New York City Housing Authority, at the entrance to an apartment building.

 

Progressive DSA-types have been nurturing this particular globalization of Jewish evil for a few years, but it has really taken off now. In a June Democratic primary debate, Darializa Avila Chevalier specifically equated gentrification in New York with West Bank settlement and suggested the same “institutions” are responsible for both. It was an absolutely crazy thing to say, true bottom-of-the-barrel Jew-baiting. But Chevalier wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to say it.

 

A group called Crown Heights Bites Back is part of this activist campaign. Last year it put out a statement that said: “Black people in Brooklyn are violently exploited via rents to then feed their genocidal land grabs in Palestine.”

 

One of the major figures in New York’s anti-Semitic incitement industry is Nerdeen Kiswani, who, as the Times of Israel notes, accused “Zionist landlords” of “exploiting Black communities here and building settlements with it in Palestine.”

 

Do I even need to mention the popular “Israelis are colonizing the world” videos and the constant attacks on Israelis traveling abroad?

 

The point is that Jews understand that when the progressive political dogma holds that all Jewish Israelis are settlers, the lie soon gets applied to Jews anywhere at all. Andy Burnham is reacting to this ugly campaign by rewarding it, and thus feeding it. And he’ll continue to do it after seeing the consequences for Jews around the world.