We Should Probably Stop Murdering People

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. military has murdered Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, popularly known as Niño Guerrero, a Venezuelan drug trafficker and leader of the Tren de Aragua crime syndicate.

 

This was—and ought to be treated as—a straightforwardly criminal act on the part of the American president and those who have carried out his illegal orders. Guerrero Flores had been charged with federal offenses under U.S. racketeering conspiracy laws. But there is no law authorizing summary execution of drug-crime suspects. There is no congressional authorization to carry out military attacks in Venezuela. Guerrero Flores may very well be everything the Trump administration says he is and more—though under the Trump administration the word of the White House is no more reliable than the word of a South American drug dealer—but, even if that were the case, there is no legal authorization for the preemptive extrajudicial killing of crime suspects. The Trump administration explains that it has “determined” that the United States is at war with drug cartels and that Guerrero Flores, like the boatloads of civilians the U.S. military has been massacring at sea for months, is a “combatant.”

 

Under the George W. Bush administration, the power of the executive branch to simply declare so-and-so an “enemy combatant”—in an open-ended war without a well-defined enemy or geographic boundaries—became an entrenched part of the presidential war-making power. Barack Obama extended this to authorize the assassination of American citizens—and their children—and carried out such assassinations, notably in the case of Islamist social-media propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, who rose to the attention of the American war-making machine owing to his high-profile position as—I hope this descriptor makes it into the history books—“the Osama bin Laden of Facebook.” George W. Bush is a decent and patriotic man, but the aggrandizement of the presidency during his time in office served the country poorly as the office devolved to Barack Obama, a seething would-be autocrat who looks like Dwight Eisenhower next to the man who succeeded him: Donald Trump, an ordinary criminal and would-be caudillo. Trump was succeeded in turn by the vegetative husk of Joe Biden, who had been a vain imbecile in his prime, and who promptly returned the office to Donald Trump, an ordinary criminal and would-be caudillo.

 

Trump, presumably writing with every color crayon in his box, declared: “Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have safe haven in Venezuela or anywhere else and, under my leadership, we will find these vicious murderers and drug lords anytime, anyplace, and send them to the depths of hell where they belong.”

 

That is, shall we say, beyond the presidential remit.

 

The president of the United States is the chief officer of the executive branch of the federal government. His job is to carry out laws passed by Congress. That is it. That is the executive function: to execute. There is a reason—an excellent, wise, experience-grounded reason—that it is Congress, and not the president, that has the power to declare war, levy taxes, spend money, ratify treaties, and make law. Trump’s enablers—and presidential imperialists of both parties—have cited the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as well as some supposed inherent powers of the presidency to justify everything from Trump’s global campaign of lunatic violence to Biden’s crackpot industrial policy to Obama’s decision to assassinate Americans.

 

The worst enabler of all, of course, has been Congress itself, which has invested the presidency with an ever more expansive capacity for imperial violence, not only through such explicitly military measures as the AUMF (part of Congress’s long and cowardly history of wanting wars to be fought without the political risk of declaring them) but also through notionally economic legislation such as the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which invests the president with the power to restrict imports on national security grounds and provides the supposed authority of the Section 232 tariffs (a plainly unconstitutional tax) imposed by Trump and Biden.

 

The Romans gave their dictators temporary emergency powers, expecting these to be held exclusively by such paragons of republican virtue as Cincinnatus. What they got was Julius Caesar, Augustus, and, soon enough, Caligula. As Brian Bethune observed in a review of Aloys Winterling’s biography of Caligula in Maclean’s:

 

The Roman Empire was founded by Caligula’s great-grandfather Augustus, who established his one-man rule by keeping to the outward forms of the moribund republic. He would pretend to be first among aristocratic equals and “suggest” measures to the Senate, which would pretend to debate them before doing exactly what Augustus wanted. But Caligula had no tolerance for double-talk: he was supreme ruler and wanted it openly acknowledged. That spawned ever more conspiracies against him and increasing paranoia and vicious reprisals from him. Inevitably, a plot did succeed in killing Caligula, a day before his planned move to Egypt—a culture open to the idea of a divine monarch.

 

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was known by his childhood nickname, “Caligula,” meaning “little boot,” because as a child he liked to play dress-up and pretend to be a soldier. Trump has a similar puerile fondness for military pomp and martial posturing—and, more to the point, his pretensions include both the divine and the monarchical. And, deepening the unfortunate trend originating with earlier presidents, he has leaned into the constitutionally undefined notion of the president as “commander in chief,” or, as the Romans would have put it, imperator.

 

Which is to say: This is not really about Niño Guerrero. This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in office when voted out, what are we going to do?”

 

I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

To quote the great economist Frito Pendejo: “I like money.”

 

Elon Musk likes money, too, though it is not always entirely clear why he likes money. He does not seem to have a lot of interest in ordinary rich-guy consumption—certainly not the kind of interest that would necessitate a net worth exceeding $1 trillion. (On paper, anyway.) I don’t know what one even does with $1 trillion—keep score, I guess. Trinkets and toys and trophies and such—that’s more Jeff Bezos stuff, I think. Musk is at his best—and also at his most pathetic—when it comes to those things that money cannot buy. The part of his character that is responsible for the rocket company is probably the same part of his character that is responsible for the idiotic, destructive, and at times probably criminal DOGE shenanigans, along with the social media buffoonery (both as a user and as an owner) and the political misadventures and the rest of it. I don’t have any beef with rich people per se—but rich people who want to be loved and need to be talked about and feel important very often end up being kind of gross and sad, or worse than that.

 

(When I think of the dumb things I would buy if I had dumb money ... I have a hard time getting up to more than $1 billion, to be honest: Maybe $100 million for the airplane, a little bit of real estate, possibly a new truck … I’d think of dumb ways to spend money, for sure, but it’d turn into some reasonably sober version of Brewster’s Millions pretty quickly. I would be happy to accept the challenge, should it come to that. But the part of one’s disposition that would make one entirely contented with the first $1 billion instead of $10 billion or $100 billion is the part that also keeps one from making the first $1 billion.)

 

About Musk’s new money (“I am nouveau riche, but then it’s the riche that counts”) a few thoughts:

 

First: Economics writers should stop comparing Musk’s notional wealth to national GDPs. I get it as a handy scale thing, but comparing stocks (a certain amount at a given time) to flows (the passing of a quantity over time) is, strictly speaking, a no-no. If Musk’s annual income exceeded that of his native South Africa, then the GDP comparison would be reasonably apt; but even if we take Musk’s $1 trillion-plus net worth as fixed, the proper comparison would be against South African assets, which of course amount to much more than GDP.

 

Second: People should probably stop writing about Musk’s payday as though it were a moral scandal. It isn’t. This is how things are supposed to work. Mostly.

 

Business management is one of the many places in public life in which we see the “principal-agent problem.” The problem is that when you hire someone to do something for you, or entrust someone with your interests, you almost always create a situation in which the interests of an asset’s owner (the principal) are somewhat at odds with those of the manager he has hired (the agent). The simplest example of this, which also happens to be the one more relevant to this discussion, is the question of executive compensation. The CEO wants to get paid as much as he can, whereas the shareholders want to spend no more than is necessary. Good management costs money, of course, as does good help in general, and intelligent investors know that, but it nonetheless is the case that every $1 that goes home in an employee’s pocket is $1 out of the shareholders’ collective pocket. Spending other people’s money always presents a temptation to corruption, which is why we have bidding and oversight procedures for government contracts and compensation committees and reviews in the corporate world.

 

Paying executives partly, largely, or exclusively in equity (which is to say, in an ownership stake in the company) or through payments tied to specific performance metrics is one way to try to align the interests of the agents with those of the principals. If I have 100,000 shares of stock and you have 1,000 shares, or 10,000 shares, or 1 million shares, our wealth may be different and our exposure to the price of those shares may be different, but our incentives are pretty well aligned, at least as far as that share price is concerned. The real world is complicated, of course, and there are all sorts of ways executives (and others) game different compensation systems.

 

(There is a reason it generally is illegal for a CEO to short his own stock.)

 

And, in the U.S. context, there is the added consideration that we tax income from long-term investments differently from how we tax salary income. If shareholders had just written Musk a check for $1 trillion, he’d have been liable for a 37 percent income tax on practically all of it; if he holds his shares before selling them—and why wouldn’t he?—he’ll pay the lower capital-gains rate. And he’ll pay that tax only on realized income—and he may never feel any particular need to realize most of that income, which ultimately would become an estate tax issue for whatever number of children and other heirs he leaves behind. That bugs the heck out of some people, though it shouldn’t.

 

There are all sorts of different ways we could handle this stuff as regards taxes and other issues. But it is worth keeping in mind that current practices emerged for good reasons, and the incentives that have been created were created for well-meaning and generally intelligent reasons. We could start taxing investment income at the same rate as salary income, and what we would expect to see would be a shift away from equity and performance-based compensation toward cash compensation: If the tax rates are the same, then $1 in the pocket today is more valuable than the uncertain possibility of $1 in the pocket tomorrow.

 

Maybe that gets us to a different number on the Gini coefficient one of these days. Maybe not. But I don’t think that should be our top priority. (In truth, I do not think that should be a priority at all; economic inequality is a non-issue, in my view.) One of the reasons the United States has the kind of innovative, high-tech economy it has is that a guy with a big idea and a guy willing to bet his own money on that big idea can get stupid rich in the United States, thanks in part to the way we do business and thanks in part to the culture that goes along with that. The average European Union country has a GDP per capita about half of that of the United States. Even the relatively rich countries lag behind more than you might expect: The United States is about half again as affluent as Germany, twice as prosperous as Italy, and going on three times as rich as Japan. Those are all nice countries with a lot of good things going for them—but they do not have anything like American economic performance.

 

I do not know whether Musk’s space-and-AI business will thrive. Maybe investors will get hosed—or maybe they will look back in a few years and decide those shares were a bargain. What I do know is that it was Tesla that made Musk a billionaire (he was a mere $200 million guy before that!) and that Tesla has created a lot of nifty and valuable technology that helped drag one segment of the automotive industry into the future, and that shareholders who bought in 10 years ago and held would have made a total return of roughly … 2,700 percent, which is nothing to complain about. And they’re pretty fun cars!

 

Words About Words

 

“Words mean things,” as Rush Limbaugh often said.

 

The Trump administration, here personified by quondam pornographer/retired game show host/serially bankrupt Village People fanboy Donald Trump and Secretary of Thirst Pete Hegseth, argues that the Department of Don’t You Dare Call It a War (But, You Know, It’s a War) excludes applicants on gender-dysphoria grounds because such candidates lack the “honesty, humility, and integrity” necessary to serve in the U.S. military. I have some opinions about the transgender controversy that are very much at odds with the opinions of other people I like and respect and believe to be good-faith disputants. But if there is one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it is that watching the Trump administration make arguments based on “honesty, humility, and integrity” ought to make a mentally normal person throw up in his mouth.

 

Not since Jared Kushner’s push for a merit-based immigration policy necessitated seeing the words “Jared Kushner” and “merit-based” in the same sentence have I laughed so hard or so bitterly.

 

To quote Henry II (the cinematic one, not the historical one): “I would spit.”

 

Honesty. Humility. Integrity. Words used to mean things.

 

In Closing

 

In anticipation of the sort of response I am used to getting to newsletters such as this one, I will offer this: It isn’t catastrophizing; it is catastrophe. I am not raising the alarm about unlikely events that may come to pass in the future—I am pointing out what is actually happening, today, in this country, under a government of our own choosing. I will stop writing about how our government is murdering people when our government stops murdering people.

Who Does Donald Trump Think He’s Fooling?

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, June 13, 2026

 

On Thursday, Donald Trump announced the cancellation of a threatened round of airstrikes against IRGC positions in Iran, due to be launched in retaliation for a series of attacks on our regional allies. Once again, talks were about to be reopened, a marvelous “deal” was about to be signed and the war ended. “Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly.”

 

And pretty much everyone rolled their eyes and ignored it. “More mush from the wimp,” was my reaction, recalling a famous Carter-era Boston Globe headline. This circus — threatened strikes, strikes called off for talks, Iranian forces still shooting missiles at us and our allies — has been going on for months now, and here we go again.

 

But apparently it was for real, and few at this point doubt Trump’s desperate eagerness for a “deal” of any sort to extract him from a self-inflicted geopolitical blunder of lasting consequence. And Iranian media leaked the Iranian side’s claims about the “terms” of the deal: a series of claims so scandalous — nationalization of the Strait of Hormuz, release of billions in restricted cash flows, and yielding to Iran’s claims in Lebanon under the flag of Hezbollah — that as our own Noah Rothman wrote, agreeing to them would be tantamount to admitting defeat. The Iranians were obviously playing their own propaganda game in leaking these nonsensical terms, but they’re setting absurdly high demands — in a war Donald Trump keeps insisting they lost — because they know they hold the winning hand: They can play out the string for years if they want to, and they’ve done it before.

 

Yesterday, Trump was back at it again — on Truth Social, of course, spinning for the American public:

 

The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing. What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING!

 

Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!

 

It’s almost beyond commentary at this point, isn’t it? Instead, comic images come to mind: You almost imagine Trump shaking his fist in the air as he bellows: “You better shape up, Jack, or else!” Impotent threats aren’t going to bring the Iranian regime to heel, which — as Trump himself points out — is not dealing in good faith with the United States and never once has done so throughout their 47-year-long history. (They have even less reason to now.)

 

By Iran’s own understanding, it has been publicly at war with the United States since the founding of the Islamic Republic — the regime’s slogan is quite literally “Death to America!” and people have convinced themselves that it’s mere performative rhetoric, perhaps because to admit otherwise would be to admit that we lack persuasive options and face implacable religious realities in the Middle East.

 

Anyway, you cannot deal with these people — they are ideologically inimical to everything America and American foreign policy stand for, far beyond Israel. (Remember, in the political cosmology of the Iranian regime, America is the Great Satan; Israel is the Little Satan, a mere catspaw of the True Evil.) As Donald Trump himself, with almost perverse historic irony, once noted during a different administration, “The Iranians never won a war, but they never lost a negotiation.”

 

Which is precisely why I said from the start that the Iran war was going to be a titanic error: Nobody wanted or was prepared for a “regime change” war and what that would have entailed in terms of American military commitment abroad, but that’s the only way you solve this problem. The regime has thoroughly murdered and imprisoned many domestic dissidents — recall, it was IRGC massacres in the streets of Tehran that first drove Donald Trump to publicly promise the Iranian people that “help was on the way.” It has survived the assassination of nearly its entire original leadership cadre, and yet maintained political and ideological continuity. Only revolution or civil war is going to remove the regime now, and they will be hankering for revenge against us.

 

We might as well just speak the hard truth: An ill-considered war of choice looks likely to leave America — as well as the global economy — in a worse position than it was when it began. I’m tired of withholding my judgment. That’s one reason both Trump and the Iranians prefer extended negotiations; so they can delay the verdict, and claim “the jury is still out.” It’s an incredibly bitter pill to swallow, and I won’t force it down anyone else’s throat. But however long this circus of talks and “terms” continues, the inescapable fact is that America is negotiating the particulars of our resignation in a war Donald Trump started without a plan to finish it.

 

So permit me to express my disgust about the entire situation. Far too many are enjoying watching Trump squirm right now. I’m not. I feel shame. I resent this as an American.

 

When Trump gets led around on a leash by the Iranians like a yapping puppy, I resent it intensely, because the shame doesn’t just fall upon him. It affects us all. I am deeply cynical about Donald Trump, about all politics really. I am deeply sincere about America, its greatness, and its role in preserving an international order that far too many seem happy to broom away in the dustbin of history. (You will not enjoy what comes next.) I resent the fact that Trump has put the United States in this position. It will have consequences in China, in the Middle East, and in Western Europe as well. America’s position as a superpower is material-interest, root-stakes stuff, not the vanities or vagaries of domestic politics.

 

And I resent the fact that Trump lies about it so effortlessly, with such carny-barker zeal. Donald Trump’s relentless gaslighting of the American public with respect to the state of the Iran war exists in its own special category of shamelessness, given the gravity of the situation. He probably thinks of the statements he makes as “salesmanship,” all part of the “art of the deal.” But who is Trump really dealing with in this situation? Is he trying to soft-soap the Iranians into accepting a tough deal? It feels a lot more like he’s working a different audience: The people he’s trying to swindle are you and me.

 

Are you buying it? Is this what victory in Iran looks like? Who does Donald Trump think he’s fooling anymore?

Americans Aren’t Too Interested in Democrats’ War Against Wealth

By John R. Puri

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

My colleague Charlie Cooke likes to point out an eerie pattern among Democratic politicians: Progressives tend to “download” an identical new position or talking point in unison, as if receiving a software update to their programmed ideology, while acting as if it’s the most obvious and eternal truth in the world. Their latest patch has Democrats turning their scowls, in one synchronized sweep, toward America’s wealthy.

 

Suddenly, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are headlining the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.” Support for a wealth tax is a litmus test for presidential hopefuls. Blue states are jacking up their top marginal tax rates. Insurgent candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner are surging to primary success on platforms of white-hot rage against rich people and corporations, who they allege have rigged the U.S. economy. Mainstream Democrats have embraced their rhetoric. The progressive-activist class is genuinely enthused for the first time in a while — to defeat Republicans, sure, but even more so to grind the wealthy into the dust.

 

There is nothing worse you can be in Democratic politics right now than a billionaire. Unless, of course, you’re a trillionaire.

 

On Friday, Elon Musk was minted as the world’s first trillionaire when the cutting-edge technology company he runs and largely owns, SpaceX, opened its shares to public investors at a current valuation of $2.1 trillion. Progressives were apoplectic. They flocked to the social media site X (without noticing the irony of who provides them with this service) to denounce Musk’s very existence.

 

Billionaires, let alone trillionaires, they declared, could not exist unless they swindled their wealth from the public. Musk didn’t earn his wealth, don’t you know? It was actually created by the government, so the public has a rightful claim to take it back. If only Musk’s money could be absorbed by the state, it could pay for everything good and just for mankind, instead of whatever useless “innovation” (reusable space rockets, high-speed satellite internet that blankets the earth) Musk is keeping his capital locked away in.

 

For anyone who knows the slightest thing about wealth, it need not be said that all this is nonsense. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world not because he pillaged wealth, but because he has produced far more economic value than anyone else. When the government has paid for a company’s service — a NASA rocket launch, for example — that does not mean it has produced the resulting wealth any more than it means grocery shoppers produce orange juice. And, most basic of all, Musk does not have a trillion dollars sitting in a vault. His wealth is not in cash that can be spent with a debit card. Mostly, his wealth consists of the physical activity of sending starships and satellites into outer space.

 

Economic illiteracy is not unusual for progressives. What’s interesting, however, is that Democrats think they have a winning political message in their war against wealth. Attacking billionaires, they believe, is the way to win the hearts of voters who despise this economy. Is it a smart play?

 

Most Americans Have Other Concerns

 

This isn’t the first time Democrats have lined up to endorse taxing the rich. During the presidential primaries in 2019, when the economy was humming along nicely, virtually every candidate advocated raising taxes on high earners and corporations. Several supported a federal wealth tax. But these proposals were presented in service of the field’s main agenda: a laundry list of new entitlements to health care, childcare, college “education,” etc.

 

Things are different today. Democrats’ anti-wealth animus is self-supporting; pure class envy is the point. What the money from new taxes will go toward funding is an afterthought.

 

Presumably, the party believes that Americans would not just like to seize billionaires’ wealth for this or that government program. Rather, they simply want billionaires to not exist. That’s what all this economic doom and gloom is really about, right? If billionaires’ wealth magically evaporated, or if corporate ownership were less concentrated, people would rejoice.

 

It’s an odd theory, given that the economic discontents of most voters have nothing whatsoever to do with billionaires. Americans are worried instead about things that normal people care about. They want the things they buy to cost less, or at least for them not to cost so much more year after year. They are probably displeased that consumer prices have risen more than workers’ average earnings over the past half decade — for some, by quite a lot. Households aren’t in love with their record-high debt.

 

Say that every penny’s worth of value owned by U.S. billionaires disappeared. It would help precisely no one. Nobody else’s income would be any higher; no one’s cost of living would be any lower. We know this in part because, between Friday morning and that evening, no one was made any worse off by Elon Musk’s becoming a trillionaire. Hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth were created — or, more accurately, existing wealth was recognized at a higher valuation — and, unless you were following the news, you didn’t notice. If SpaceX’s stock collapsed today and Musk was no longer a trillionaire, there would be many financial losers, but no winners.

 

Why are Democratic politicians so obsessed with billionaires, then? Because their base electorates share the obsession, even if few others do.

 

As part of a project for my last college quarter, I wrote a section of a nationally representative survey conducted by More in Common, a nonprofit polling agency. With two questions, I sought to identify Americans’ principal economic concerns and policy priorities. In the first question, I asked whether respondents’ greatest obstacle to their financial well-being was the high cost of living, a lack of good-paying jobs, or an “unfair economic system that privileges certain groups over others.” In the second, I asked whether respondents thought the government’s priority should be reducing costs, creating jobs, or “reducing inequality between the richest and poorest Americans.”

 

The results showed that about 20 percent of Americans are primarily concerned with structural unfairness or inequality, far behind the cost of living and job creation. Unsurprisingly, this group was driven by those who described themselves as liberal. For the largest ideological group — self-described moderates, whom Democrats must persuade in general elections — inequality was a distant third priority at 19 percent of respondents, after reducing costs (53 percent) and job creation (28 percent). Gallup polling backs up my findings: Just 3 percent of Americans say the “gap between rich and poor” is the country’s top problem.

 

Progressives are down the rabbit hole on wealth distribution. They are increasingly conspiratorial on the matter, insisting that billionaires are inflicting pain despite offering no logical thread between some people’s wealth and everyone else’s living standards. Such a connection does exist, but in the opposite direction to what progressives claim: One’s lofty net worth is usually evidence of immense value creation for other people.

 

Adjacent to the grassroots-led hatred of billionaires is an equally confounding trend among progressive intellectuals furious at corporate bigness. The Atlantic reported on this “antitrust theory of everything,” popularized by left-wing think tanker Barry C. Lynn:

 

Lynn is the intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement, which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States. “It is vital to understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters, “that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our society today.”

 

When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”

 

Like the trillionaire commentary, this is lunacy. And politically foolish, because most Americans know that companies like Amazon and Google are not the source of their financial strain. Believe it or not, they appreciate the corporations that offer free shipping and free web products.

 

If the Democrats’ anti-wealth crusade were a sound political ploy, it might be minimally respectable. But it’s not. It is just progressive fan service that strikes nearly everyone outside the party as irrelevant to real economic problems at best, and a bizarre derangement at worst.

 

ADDENDUM: Americans should cheer SpaceX’s initial public offering because it means they can nab a stake in a breathtaking firm. We can call that popular ownership of the means of production — no socialism required.

 

Sadly, most people did not get a chance to invest in SpaceX before last week because it was funded entirely through private capital. Many other firms have taken the same path: The number of publicly listed companies has fallen sharply since the dot-com boom.

 

One positive reason for this trend is that the federal government deregulated the process of raising private capital in the 1990s, reducing the relative cost of remaining private. Years later, however, Congress increased regulation of public securities after a series of accounting scandals. The aim of this policy divergence was to protect unsophisticated stock-pickers from fraud, but researchers have found that the unintended consequence was to block retail investors’ access to many successful companies for longer periods. If progressives wish to spread corporate wealth to more hands, they should work to make it easier for regular people to buy in.

Release the Text of the Iran Deal

National Review Online

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

On his 80th birthday on Sunday, President Trump announced that a long-discussed, often-delayed peace deal has been finalized with Iran. The problem is, we don’t have the actual text of the deal, which has already been signed electronically.

 

Iran, both publicly and through its various state-controlled media outlets, has boasted of achieving a major victory. Under the Iranian description, the Islamic regime has committed to very little beyond agreeing to negotiations on the nuclear issue over the next 60 days, while unlocking $12 billion in immediate sanctions relief, and a promise that the U.S. will present it with a $300 billion plan for reconstruction after the war. While Trump claimed that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened on Friday “for the purposes of mine removal,” Iranian outlets have reported that it will take 30 days to reopen and will remain under control of Iran and Oman, with plans to charge tolls in the future.

 

In the run-up to the deal, Vice President JD Vance decried “fake information” about the looming deal, claiming that the Iranians would not receive cash and that economic benefits would flow only if they comply with it. He reiterated this on Fox News after the announcement that a deal was completed. In the same interview, Vance claimed, “We have solved a problem that has plagued this country since before I was even born, which is a terrorist-supporting Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon.” And yet, other reporting suggests that the memorandum of understanding does not address the nuclear program, much less Iran’s support of terrorism.

 

In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said the deal ensured that the Strait of Hormuz will be “permanently toll-free.”

 

There is a huge difference between a deal that provides billions of dollars in immediate financial relief to help Iran rebuild and allows Iran to maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz, and a deal that provides for the important body to be permanently free, with no sanctions relief until Iran meets its commitments.

 

It was discouraging to see that Trump told the New York Times that on the nuclear front, he would support allowing Iran to enrich uranium for “non-military purposes.” This is a far cry from his position going into the war of zero enrichment and his boasts that all enriched uranium would leave Iran. In reality, low-level enriched uranium could be further enriched to military grade. This also leaves unanswered the question of Iran’s ballistic missile program and its threats to regional stability through its funding of terrorist proxies. All told, there is the possibility that Trump would return the U.S. to Obama’s failed Iran deal that Trump rightfully tore up in his first term, which would have all the makings of a humiliation after all of the president’s tough talk.

 

Of course, it’s possible that the MOU is much less than is being described by either party — effectively, an extension of the cease-fire that suspends the embargo in exchange for an opening of the Strait of Hormuz, while punting on the thornier issues to the 60-day negotiation period.

 

The only way to clarify which it is, however, is to just release the text that was agreed to. Trump launched this war in the wee hours of the morning without getting approval from Congress or making a case to the American people. Now, he (or Vance) is trying to end it by signing on to an executive agreement that commits the U.S. to certain provisions without revealing what’s in it.

 

If what is being reported about the agreement is fake news, then the administration should release the full MOU and let the American people debate what is in it.

Will Obama Get the Last Laugh on Iran?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

Former President Barack Obama told the hosts of ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday that he’s “doubtful” Donald Trump’s negotiating team can improve on his nuclear deal with Iran. It’s unlikely, Obama speculated, that this president will hammer out terms with Iran that represent “a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and had worked for, for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it.”

 

Trump shouldn’t want to give his predecessor the satisfaction of being right. But to hear the president and his administration’s officials talk about the deliberations with Iran that will follow the implementation of an emerging cease-fire agreement, Obama may get the last laugh.

 

For now, though, talk is all we have, and pronouncements about what is and isn’t in the cease-fire vary depending on who is doing the talking.

 

The Iranians insist that they’re getting up-front financial relief in the form of unfrozen assets. Trump administration officials disagree. Tehran appears convinced that a postwar $300 billion reconstruction fund is a done deal. The president’s representatives insist that provision could be a possible sweetener, but it is contingent on Iran’s compliance. Everyone seems to believe that Israel’s defensive operations against Hezbollah will cease and the IDF will withdraw from Southern Lebanon — everyone, that is, save the Israeli government.

 

It seems that the Trump administration isn’t even clear on the terms it negotiated to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In a Sunday interview with the New York Times, reporter David Sanger confronted Trump with the Iranian interpretation of the memorandum of understanding, which the Islamic Republic claims only suspends tolling on the strait for 60 days while a new status quo is established. By contrast, Trump insists the contested waterway will be “permanently toll-free.” But Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on Trump’s definitive pronouncement.

 

“Well, our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term,” he told CNBC, “and that’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations.” What was the point of a negotiated cease-fire but to relieve the Trump administration of the obligation to restore free navigation through the strait by force, as the U.S. had done in the past?

 

The contradictions and inconsistencies on offer from the Trump administration deprive good-faith observers of confidence in the administration’s willingness to impose desirable terms for a more durable peace in forthcoming talks over Iran’s nuclear program. Already, seasoned foreign affairs observers, like Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, see shades of Obama’s JCPOA in the emerging contours of a final deal within the cease-fire.

 

“It does look very similar to the JCPOA, which Trump scrapped,” Ignatius said Monday. “Some of the provisions may even be somewhat weaker.” Subsequently, the vice president lent some credence to that pessimistic assessment.

 

During his Monday media blitz, Vance told CBS News hosts that the U.S. seeks a final agreement that “ends” Iran’s nuclear program, deprives it of its enriched uranium stockpiles, and is backed by a robust verification regime. But, he added, there is no resemblance to the JCPOA here. “We have comprehensively destroyed their nuclear program,” Vance told CBS News.

 

“What this agreement does is say to the Iranians that you don’t have access to the money to rebuild that nuclear program,” Vance clarified in his sit-down with CNBC. How? Apparently, through an unfalsifiable construct. If Iran wants access to the “world economy,” it will have to “give up the long-term nuclear ambition.” If they don’t do that, “they’re never going to have the resources to rebuild it from where it is today.”

 

How that assertion comports with the Trump administration’s openness to “unfreezing” the Iranian economy as well as a Gulf-region-funded reconstruction fund is probably subject to interpretation.

 

Vance is correct to observe that the conditions that prevail on the ground in Iran today cannot be compared with the status quo in 2015. The JCPOA flooded Iran with cash, compelled the regime only to mothball (not destroy) its nuclear bomb program’s components, and included terms that legitimized Iran’s pursuit of advanced uranium enrichment capabilities when it sunset. With the destruction of much of the Iranian nuclear program and its defense industrial base, the Trump administration couldn’t recapitulate those Iran-favorable terms even if it wanted to.

 

Yet, Trump told the Times that he was contemplating an agreement in which he could settle for an Iranian commitment to suspend domestic enrichment for 15 or maybe even 20 years — a far cry from his initial objection to any uranium enrichment on Iranian soil ever. Now, that enrichment must only be “for non-military purposes,” Trump said after he apparently entertained revivifying the JCPOA’s farcical “caps” on enriching uranium beyond the grade necessary for use in civilian reactors. In addition, Trump is “in no rush to get the near-bomb-grade fuel out of its underground sites,” Sanger’s report continued.

 

After all, the final backstop ensuring Iran’s compliance is America’s willingness to go back to war to ensure that Iran never digs out the bomb-making material entombed in its devastated nuclear sites.

 

But the United States demonstrated unequivocally over the last two months that it is not willing to go back to high-tempo combat operations against Iran, even to conclude the conflict on terms unambiguously favorable to America and the West. “Fundamentally,” Vance insisted, “we have the leverage; we have the diplomatic, economic, and military leverage.” That’s little more than a self-affirming mantra if the U.S. isn’t willing to apply the leverage it is holding in reserve.

 

Many will be tempted to draw definitive conclusions about both the war that brought us to this juncture and the trajectory of events that they are certain will follow it. Those conclusions would be premature. To the extent the terms of this agreement are known and not contested by the parties it supposedly binds, it is an agreement to keep talking. And that would be fine if the U.S. and Israel intended to proceed with the plan for this war that they articulated at its outset.

 

“Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach,” Trump said in a message to the Iranian people at the war’s outset. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.” He and his subordinates restated Trump’s premise more than once that there will be a “clear signal” to the Iranian people “for you to be able to come out” and take down the Iranian regime.

 

Of all Trump’s departures from the JCPOA’s framework, that was the most important. He rejected the logic of a deal that recognized the Islamic Republic as a permanent feature of the regional landscape. In his interview with Sanger, Trump warned only that if Iran’s leaders slaughtered protesters again, Tehran might forfeit access to sanctions relief.

 

This might be the most humiliating of the apparent retreats to which Trump may have committed the United States. The threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran will not abate until the Islamic Republic of Iran ceases to exist. If Trump has forgotten that central paradigmatic feature of successful efforts to contain and roll back the Iranian menace, he will fail at the negotiating table.

The Iranian People Are Forgotten

By Elliott Abrams

Sunday, June 14, 2026

 

Many aspects of the Iran deal announced on Sunday are unclear, or nonexistent: They will have to be negotiated over the next 60 days. What exactly will happen to the highly enriched uranium in Iran? Is its missile program covered? Will it be allowed to charge tolls in the Strait of Hormuz if it calls them service fees or otherwise hides them? Must it stop arming and financing Hezbollah and Hamas?

 

But one key aspect is now crystal clear: The American agreement with Iran completely abandons the Iranian people.

 

In December and January, Iranians took to the streets again in huge numbers, as they had in 2009 and 2014. In 200 cities, there were significant protests, and they were not limited to university students; in fact, they started with bazaaris — business people. This was a major challenge to the regime. It responded with mass murder, shooting unarmed demonstrators and killing somewhere between 7,000 and 35,000.

 

In response, President Trump posted on Truth Social, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!!”

 

But the deal that the United States has now entered with Iran abandons that position and the Iranian people. Last Saturday, Trump again took to Truth Social: “Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous administrations have had . . . . We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future.” On Sunday, in an interview announcing the deal with the regime, Trump said, “As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change. This is the third group we’ve dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet.”

 

So much for “help is on the way.” This looks instead like the “Venezuela option”: The regime stays in power and is strengthened by the lifting of sanctions and the arrival of new income flows from oil exports. At least in the Venezuelan case, official U.S. policy (reiterated recently in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s testimony to Congress) calls for a transition to democracy as its final phase — however long-delayed that may be. In the Iran case, U.S. officials never use the word “democracy.” When the president said “I never cared about regime change,” he was being completely honest.

 

This is a strategic error of the greatest importance. It’s obvious to Iranians, and should be to us, that the Islamic Republic is unreformable. Despite Trump’s repeated statements that some new “group” of Iranian officials are more “rational,” Iran’s rulers are the people who murdered thousands of their fellow citizens in cold blood a few months ago and more recently struck at economic and civilian targets of all their Gulf Arab neighbors as well as Israel. There is zero evidence that the brutal repression of the Iranian people will cease.

 

Ignoring that is a strategic error because the only long-run solution to Iran’s aggression and repression is in fact popular sovereignty. The Trump administration argues that its new agreement will change the Middle East, but it will not — because the Islamic Republic will always remain at the heart of the region’s violence and instability. It is folly to think this regime will stop intervening in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Its ruling elites — who are the same now as they were in January — have shown again and again that “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are central pillars of their belief system.

 

But the United States, Iran’s neighbors, and Israel have one great ally against the Islamic Republic’s policies: the Iranian people. Their hatred of and opposition to the regime have been demonstrated for decades despite the heavy price they have paid in blood and ruined lives. When the people of Iran can govern themselves, the United States and Iran can be friends and partners.

 

That is what makes President Trump’s line that he “never cared about regime change” so offensive. Compare it with Ronald Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, which never promised to overthrow the regime, but made common cause with those in Russia and the Soviet empire struggling for freedom, offering them moral and political support (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) as well as help for organizations like Solidarity and Andrei Sakharov’s Committee on Human Rights in the USSR. To acknowledge our limited ability to help Iranians achieve democracy is one thing; to dismiss their aspirations disdainfully is another, and it is both strategically blind and morally repugnant.

 

We are but weeks away from celebrating our own revolution to gain popular rule. The least the United States should be doing now is letting Iranians know we understand and support their struggle for basic human rights and for democracy.

Patriotism Should Not Be Another Partisan Costume

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

According to NBC News, “America at 250 is riven with doubt and pessimism.” The assessment is fueled by the outlet’s latest poll, which found that a “record-low number” of respondents “are extremely proud to be Americans.”

 

The NBC-sponsored survey found that just one-third of poll takers said they were “extremely proud” to be American. Another 23 percent are “very proud,” while an additional 22 percent say they’re merely “moderately proud.” By contrast, just 11 percent said they were “only a little proud.” One in ten respondents said they were “not proud at all.”

 

While being “extremely” or “very proud” to be an American is a majority proposition, NBC’s Steve Kornacki noted that the outlook is increasingly exclusive to registered Republicans and senior citizens:

 

 

Not all seniors, of course. As the actor Robert De Niro ranted in his appearance at a depressing, Boomer-dominated attempt to counterprogram Donald Trump’s UFC fight on the White House lawn, his love for the country of his birth is conditional.

 

“I hate to say it, but loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser,” he told a crowd of true believers. “I can’t love a country that’s led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant. And let me just say it, I can’t love the country that’s led by Donald Trump. And a sycophant Congress.”

 

The fact that patriotism among Democrats is contingent on the party in power is nothing new. “As might be expected given the partisan trends,” the pollster Gallup reported last year, “Democrats are largely responsible for declining U.S. pride within each generation.”

 

Comparing data from the past 10 years with the prior 15 years, pride among Democrats in each birth cohort has declined by at least 10 points, with larger drops of 21 points for Gen X Democrats and 32 points for millennial Democrats. . . .

 

Republicans in the older generations have essentially the same high degree of pride today as they did in the earlier part of this century. Gen Z Republicans are far less proud than their older fellow Republicans; however, they are still much more likely to be proud than Gen Z Democrats and independents.

 

Some on the right see an exploitable political advantage in the Democratic Party’s desire to cater to constituents whose patriotism, such as it is, is both provisional and parochial. And perhaps the president agrees. Trump has been forced to scale back his ambitious “Tribute to America” events slated to coincide with America’s 250th birthday to such a degree that he has now been reduced to celebrating the Fourth of July with another forgettable “Trump rally.”

 

It’s hard to imagine a Trump-hosted event celebrating the nation that his critics wouldn’t scold for being excessively partisan, but the president is abandoning all pretense here.

 

If we regard the decline of patriotic sentiments as a problem rather than just another social phenomenon to be leveraged in the political arena, Republicans should do their utmost to make celebrating America an inviting prospect.