Mexico’s Yūshūkan Mindset

By Joshua S. Treviñoe

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

In 1613, the Keichō Embassy under Hasekura Tsunenaga set forth from Japan to the Viceroyalty of New Spain, landing at Acapulco and spending some time in Ciudad de México — not even a full century removed from its past as Tenochtitlan — before proceeding to Europe. The Japanese visit, including a retinue of samurai, was chronicled by the Nahua annalist Chimalpahin, who recorded armed conflicts between the visitors and their Spanish escorts. For a certain class of history buff, swordplay between a Spaniard of the Siglo de Oro and a samurai has the aura of a fantastical happening, but this episode was real. The outcome was a non-mortal wound for the Spaniard while the Japanese mission proceeded onward.

 

Spain’s interest in Japan had been sharpened 20 years prior with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s launch of the Imjin War versus Joseon Korea and Ming China — the Spanish Philippines were understood to be next on his list of aspirations — and the burgeoning ranks of Japanese Christians, reaching into the hundreds of thousands, lent spiritual connection to the strategic. A Spanish priest even traveled with the Japanese armies as a chaplain to some of Hideyoshi’s Christian soldiery, an unofficial Habsburg-imperium presence on the war-wracked Korean peninsula. The embassy nevertheless came to a fruitless end, with Hasekura failing to secure liaison between his daimyo and the powers of Europe, and Japan turning toward cruel repression of its Christians and instituting managed isolation from Europe that would last two centuries. In the end, its legacy was a grand-strategic moment missed for all parties, and a small community of descendants of the retinue in Spain, to this day bearing the surname Japón.

 

This historical episode comes to mind when considering events in Mexico now, illuminated by the lens of a recent sojourn in Tokyo in which this author visited a handful of the sites at which the Japanese memories of the 20th-century wars are kept. The Yūshūkan Museum at the (deservedly controversial) Yasukuni Shrine offers one version of that memory: There, the Japanese wars through late 1945 are cast as rational responses to events, and the Japanese leadership and conduct of those wars are positively interpreted, preposterously so, in some cases. (Hideki Tojo, for example, fought against racial discrimination in Asia; Manchukuo was a noble effort at multiculturalism; and though there is an entire locomotive from the infamous Burma railway in the lobby, there is not a word on the slaves who built it.) It’s quite easy to see how the place inflames sentiment elsewhere in Asia. Americans have the luxury of regarding the thing as a species of absurdity — the adherents of this sort of historical interpretation are also typically the most dedicated proponents of the modern U.S.-Japan alliance — but there is an unpleasant chill upon entering the hallway in which the kamikazes are glorified, and a restored Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka floats above.

 

The nearby National Showa Memorial Museum, focusing upon the wartime experience of the Japanese home front, tells it straight and is rewarding for the American visitor. It’s impossible to miss the parallel here with much Southern historiography on the American Civil War — these comparisons arise throughout the experience of Japanese memorialization of the war — but that doesn’t mean either case is wrong on its merits. Although not for the reasons the Yūshūkan curators would have it, Japanese wartime suffering in Japan was indeed tremendous, and in the final year became horrific, and a fullness of historical memory includes it. The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage — a very out-of-the-way (from a tourist perspective) and comparatively small museum — brings it home in full. This small establishment commemorates the Great Tokyo Raid of March 9 and 10, 1945, in which the B-29s of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force razed much of the city with incendiaries, plausibly killing about 100,000 men, women, and children. The hellish tableau of Tokyo wreathed in firestorm and charred corpses is a portrait of the bloody 20th century alongside scenes of Verdun and Stalingrad. To its immense credit, the center places the episode in its historical context — the visitor is informed that Imperial Japan was terror-bombing Chinese cities long before the coming of the Americans.

 

The thing itself was monstrous, but of course the American airmen flying the missions were not monsters. (I will plead partiality here: my grandfather was a B-29 gunner, although the war ended before he flew a single combat mission.) Neither were the Japanese families incinerated by the raid. It is altogether a good opportunity to reflect upon history and how we understand it. A modern progressive approach simply cannot do it, just as the patriotic militarism of the Yūshūkan is insufficient. Both enforce a stark binary that slashes downward through every element of human existence. A cause may be right or wrong, but to borrow from Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil passes through every human heart.

 

This brings us to Mexico, where that long-suffering country arrives at twin straits in short order. By the end of this month, it will reckon with the treaty-designated deadline for review of USMCA reauthorization. Simultaneously, it will soon have been 60 days since the American indictments of a host of Mexican senior politicians. Both concerns are existential. The Mexican economy, which staggers along at near-zero growth under the perennial mismanagement of its political class, requires both access to the American market and an influx of remittances to avoid contraction, and even collapse. The Mexican civic sphere requires a scouring of its prodigious narco-political class if it is to be the liberal democracy envisaged, but never actually achieved, by its founders (and re-founders in the eras of Benito Juárez and the revolution of the early 20th century). Hardly a decade after Mexican independence, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the Mexicans . . . took the Federal Constitution of their neighbors, the Anglo-Americans, as their model, and copied it with considerable accuracy. But although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to introduce the spirit and the sense which give it life . . . [and therefore] to the present day Mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism.” Thus then as now. One might think that the present Mexican regime of the leftist Morena party, which conceives of itself as the direct inheritors of Juarez and the Revolution both, would be eager to complete that work at last, bringing to Mexico a governance and a civics worthy of its own historic aspirations.

 

Yet it will not. USMCA may or may not be reauthorized, although the odds are in its favor; but the narco-politicians subject to U.S. indictment will probably not be surrendered absent pressure yet to be brought to bear. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum — not herself among the narco cohort — has publicly affirmed her opposition to their extradition and further accused the United States of using the indictments to undermine Mexican sovereignty. What could have been a case of binational cooperation against cartel criminality among the political ranks has been transformed by the Mexican side into a test case for or against Mexican independence itself.

 

All history is contingent, and very few things have singular causes. Yet we may acknowledge primary causes, and one of them here is the nature of Mexican historical memory. To borrow from the Japanese case, there is no parallel to the Showa Museum or the Center of the Tokyo Raids in the Mexican civic narrative. There is, however, a Yūshūkan.

 

Precision is necessary here. There is no Mexican record of world-historical crimes of the nation against other nations requiring acrobatic apologetics. This is not to say that terrible criminality within history does not exist in the Mexican narrative, only that it is mostly perpetrated against other Mexicans. (The horrifying Aztec record, the mass bloodletting of the revolution, and the nightmarish massacres of the present cartel wars all testify to it.) It is to say that within Mexican historical understanding as it coalesced in the 20th century, Mexico is wronged rather than wrong, Mexico is perennially menaced from without, and Mexico is a polity distinguished by its moral mission.

 

You see this conceit at the museum of national history at Chapultepec, for example, in which the Mexican defeats at the hands of Texans and then Americans in the 1830s and 1840s are cast as conspiratorial outcomes of a superior power versus one both weak and righteous. You see it in the museum of the interventions at Churubusco, in which the predations of invading powers are amalgamated into a singular phenomenon with many episodes all signifying Mexico as victim and virtuous resistance. You see it in the popular revision of the memory of the Spanish Conquest, which is recast as an aggression and a catastrophe. You see it nearly every day in Mexican officialdom, from the presidential mañaneras downward, in the invocations of soberanía deployed to preclude things like arresting politicians who take cartel bribes. This is all Mexico’s Yūshūkan mindset: What seems obviously wrong to all other nations is explicable and right if only one grasps the virtue of Mexican intentions, and the perfidy of her foes.

 

All this has the paradoxical effect of diminishing the Mexicans themselves, who are stripped of their vigor, their achievements, their deserved justice, and the complexity of their humanity. The real record of Mexico across history testifies to the opposite: Mexican agency and even victory across time. It was the indigenous peoples of Tlaxcala and elsewhere who provided the quantitative force that overthrew Tenochtitlan, not the Spanish.

 

Ulysses S. Grant, in his Memoirs, disagreed emphatically with the characterization of Mexico’s soldiery of 1846–1848 as intrinsically inferior, and the certainty of American war success was much more tenuous than it might seem: Taylor’s army never meaningfully advanced after Buena Vista, for example, and Scott’s army might have been entombed in the Valley of Mexico given a Mexican civics that was not in evidence in the 1840s, but was in the 1860s. The official Mexican memory of the Pershing Expedition focuses upon the putative injustice of it, but one almost never reads that, in 1916–1917, Mexican forces adeptly curbed and repelled American forces at engagements deep within Mexico. Mexicans are educated on the Niños Héroes who threw themselves to their deaths off Chapultepec in 1847 in the face of the victorious Americans; and they are mostly unaware of the heroic Mexicans of Escuadrón 201 who fought alongside the Americans in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. The heroic Mexicans of the military and law enforcement who give their lives today against cartels and criminals, numbering in the thousands across the past two decades, receive no memorialization whatsoever. Mexican civic narrative focuses sharply upon interventions against Mexico, and never seems to mention Mexico’s own record of the same against the soberanía of other peoples, from the Carrancista fomenting of insurrection in south Texas in 1915, to former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ham-handed interventions in American civics in 2018–2024, to the present-day role of Mexican consulates in aiding evasion of American immigration enforcement, and Mexican-state support for the Cuban dictatorship. One may assess these episodes as one wishes, justified or not, moral or not, but what they are not is passive.

 

This is the paradox and the pity of Mexico’s Yūshūkan mindset: it requires Mexico to be weak. The historical Japan of the real Yūshūkan is, despite its inevitable end, conceived as a strong and vital nation. The Mexican Yūshūkan discards that central quality but retains the victimization and righteousness.

 

A Mexican regime grounded in a confidence born of those qualities, and a full historical record rather than one adulterated and shaped for particular ends, might at least have a Yūshūkan mindset more like the Japanese, one in which the apologetics for the nation coexists with an ability to relate to the United States as a peer rather than a paranoiac. But that regime does not exist. The fullness of Mexican history illuminates two centuries of mismatch between the extraordinary capacities of the Mexicans and the ceaseless incapacity of their ruling elites. Mexico’s own Yūshūkan, then, protects the regime rather than the nation.

 

Four hundred years ago, the Keichō Embassy came to Mexico, and if one had to predict then which of the two realms, Japan or Mexico, would in the 21st century be cosmopolitan, and which would be parochial, one would likely have gotten the actual answers exactly reversed. Yet this illuminates a hope for Mexico, which is not condemned to its dysfunction, nor to its cartel-riven regime, by any iron law of history. That history is contingent, and there are always new choices to be made. Mexicans have been laboring for some time now to set up their own counters to the Mexican Yūshūkan: bereaved mothers demanding accountability for state and cartel murders, quiet laborers seeking to build a working civil society, and even the occasional brave politician who will speak plain truths. Perhaps someday they will constitute the majority. There is no alternative but to hope.

 

In the meantime, Mexico arrives at twin dilemmas at month’s end, and how it navigates them will tell us nearly everything about the Mexican future, and its rootedness in the Mexican past. In 1847, a Saltillo muleteer named Eduvige Ydrogo signed on to haul supplies for Zachary Taylor’s invading army, and the last record of him in history is condemnation to hard labor, and likely death, in the Yucatan, for aiding the enemies of Mexico. In 1941, a boy named Allen Brady Fincher from Van Zandt County, Texas, who joined the Marines to see the world, arrived at his own end by way of eight Japanese bombs, entombed in the USS Arizona. My direct Mexican ancestor and my distant Texas cousin were different men in different wars, and their memory lives in different ways.

 

Allen Brady Fincher, USMC, is not a live issue in U.S.-Japanese relations. He is a tragedy of history.

 

Eduvige Ydrogo, muleteer, is a current event in the two centuries of America and Mexico. He is, for them, a traitor even now.

The British Public Is to Blame for the U.K.’s Dysfunction

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

Keir Starmer has fallen. Long live Andy Burnham! Or Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting, or Yvette Cooper, or whichever other poor, downtrodden sod manages to finagle the job of prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for a few sweaty and bruising months before this interminable game of political hot potato chooses a new victim or, if interrupted by an election, lands in the lap of a different party. At this point, taking the reins of the British government is a little like becoming the drummer in Spinal Tap. You know that you’re going to be toast pretty soon; the only interesting question is how.

 

It would, I concede, be rather cathartic for me to list all the ways in which Keir Starmer was a historically terrible premier. But, as it happens, I have a different target to roast. Peruse the channels of sophisticated opinion in England today, and you will inevitably encounter some variation of the argument that the United Kingdom has of late become “ungovernable,” because its “complicated” electorate desires a set of public policies that cannot coexist. British voters, this supposition runs, want housing to become more affordable for the young and for the existing housing stock to retain its value; they want taxes to stop rising and for more money to be spent on the health service, on pensions, and on care for the elderly; they want the price of energy to go down and to achieve “net zero”; they want Britain to start inventing things again and for their island to retain its sprawling archipelago of regulations; they want to be welcoming and “diverse” and to acknowledge that the country’s infrastructure is already bulging at the seams. As a descriptive matter, this may well be true. As an excuse, however, it is thoroughly inadequate. Substantively, there is no real difference between it and the suggestion that the median voter in Britain is seven years old. Voters want everything, all at once, with no trade-offs or sacrifices to be seen? Of course they do. Who wouldn’t? But adults ought to know that this is not possible. Where are the adults in British political life?

 

I am not offering up a defense for any of the figures who have run Britain over the last two decades. Keir Starmer included, they are all craven mediocrities. Rather, I am attempting to lay the blame for that where it ultimately belongs — which is with the British public. Vote-seekers are professionally obliged to pretend that Britain has had seven prime ministers in ten years because there is something abstractly wrong with the “system” that the selection of the right leader will magically fix. I am not so obliged, which allows me to say without fear or favor that the real reason that Britain has had seven prime ministers in ten years is that the British public would rather blame its own lazy schizophrenia on the Westminster class than to look inward and acknowledge that it has routinely demanded its own decline. “Our doubts,” wrote Shakespeare, “are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.” They don’t want to hear it, but, in this instance, the doubts, fears, and treachery here are the voters’.

 

The numbers are stark. In 2008, U.S. GDP per capita was about 25 percent higher than the U.K.’s. Today, it is 40 percent higher, such that were Britain to become the 51st American state, it would be poorer than all of the existing 50 — including Mississippi. (Per capita GDP in Mississippi is $55,900; in the U.K., it is $53,200.) Since 2008, average household incomes in the U.S. have gone from about 36 percent higher than Britain’s to about 63 percent higher. Over the same period, real GDP per capita has increased by around 65 percent in the United States, and by about 3 percent in the United Kingdom; British productivity has been effectively flat; and American stocks have left their British counterparts in the dust, with the S&P 500 vastly outperforming the FTSE 100. In 2026, Britain has only a handful of innovative companies, an alarmingly limited ability to project military force, and, despite the fact that the Exchequer is on course to collect a larger share of national income in taxes than at any point in the postwar era, a raft of crumbling public services about which voters never stop complaining.

 

Given all this, one would expect to see considerable support in Britain for radical change — not simply in who is running the government but in the core presumptions that inform that government’s approach. And yet, incredibly, no such movement is afoot. “Growth” remains an alien word within British political life. Only 19 percent of Britons believe that taxes and spending should be decreased. No major political party will touch the National Health Service, and no major political figure has come out against the “triple lock” policy that guarantees that pensions will rise each year by whichever is highest: inflation, wage growth, or 2.5 percent. There has been no meaningful attempt to embrace a broad program of deregulation, even as regulation has become an increasingly significant constraint on housing construction, energy development, and infrastructure projects. The political consensus behind “net zero” has endured. Worst of all, the British do not seem to understand on a visceral level that their nation has become poor, sclerotic, and geopolitically irrelevant. Now, as ever, the smug reassurance that “at least we’re not America” obfuscates a multitude of sins.

 

Well, perhaps Britain should try being more like America for a while. It worked last time.

This Is What ‘Revolutionary Terror’ Looks Like

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

Two people are dead, including one police officer, after a gunman opened fire in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood. According to legacy media accounts of the attack, the shooter was inspired to murder by his proximity to the sexless and misogynistic “incel” movement.

 

But the killer’s targets and his stated intentions tell a grimmer tale.

 

Côte-des-Neiges is described in the Canadian press as a “multicultural neighborhood” and in the Jerusalem Post as a “heavily Jewish area of Montreal,” with many kosher markets and restaurants. According to Chabad.org, “At this time, reports indicate the shooter’s target was the police, not the Jewish community.” The attacker did kill one officer and seriously wound another. The lone civilian killed amid the attack has been identified as Michael Moshe Mizrahi, a “Jewish local and member of the local Chabad center,” said the Jerusalem Post, which noted that some “20-30 shots were reported to have been fired next to the Hilton Hotel.”

 

Setting out to murder police is less a calling card associated with “incels” and more typically a feature of political violence. While Montreal police have declined to establish a motive, the killer’s manifesto elucidates his objective: “The essential political conditions of a society in which capitalism/liberalism, and thereby, hypergamy itself, are not part of the established order of things, have mostly already been laid out by Marx, Engels, and others in works such as The Communist Manifesto.”

 

The missive, in which its author sees totalitarian socialism’s sexual conventions as a remedy for his celibacy, is replete with criticisms of the capitalist enterprise as well as calls for the abolition of private property and the state ownership of industry. It expounds on the most effectively propagandistic ways to murder elites, whom he describes as “the more virulent and filthy facets of the capitalist economy.” And it defends the moral and ethical nature of “revolutionary terror.”

 

The attacker seems to have been consumed with resentment toward women. But it was the revolutionary Marxist ethic and the vestigial Soviet-style attacks on the perfidy of the Zionist enterprise that provided this killer with a psychological permission structure for murderous violence. He also seems to have assumed that there was an audience for this sort of thing. And, given the recent outbreak of left-wing political violence (which I chronicle in my latest book), apparently there is.

 

Montreal police have warned that the attack could inspire copycats. But if police are on the lookout for killers inspired by “incel ideology,” and not radical Marxist revolutionary dogma, they will only contribute to what is clearly emerging as a threat to domestic security throughout the West.

‘Cubans Love Gold’

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

We begin with two quotes. They won’t seem related, but they are.

 

The first: “I would not support the Republican Party. There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party…. How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?... I’ve voted Republican my entire life … [but] I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

 

The second: “Cubans love gold.”

 

Quote No. 1 comes from Tucker Carlson; quote No. 2 comes from the president.

 

Tucker’s quote speaks for itself and will be received warmly on both ends of the American right. To postliberals, isolationists, Israel obsessives, and other creatures who inhabit the GOP’s chud wing, it’s a righteous cri de coeur against the White House’s foolish war in Iran. To classical liberals, hawks, Israel supporters, and the rest of what remains of the party’s negligible conservative faction, it’s a long-overdue matter of “good riddance.”

 

The only right-wingers dismayed by the thought of a Republican Party without Lindberghians will be Donald Trump and the sort of brainless tribal partisan who doesn’t care what the GOP stands for as long as it’s winning elections and keeping Democrats out of power.

 

Around 85 percent of the Republican electorate, in other words.

 

The president’s quote is more cryptic. At first glance it sounds like the sort of casual bigotry that any very old man from Queens might randomly interject in between naps. “Somalis have low IQs. Jews have dual loyalty. Cubans love gold.”

 

But Trump wasn’t speaking randomly. According to a new book from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “Cubans love gold” was his skeptical response when a visitor to the Oval Office wondered whether the next president might remove the tacky gilded flourishes he’s added to the decor.

 

Remind me: J.D. Vance isn’t of Cuban heritage, is he?

 

Evidence continues to dribble out that the president prefers his secretary of state to his vice president as the GOP’s next nominee. Maybe he resents Vance, who opposed the war from the start, for having gotten Iran right while Trump himself got it wrong. Or maybe he noticed the poll Emerson published a few weeks ago showing the VP’s lead over Marco Rubio in a 2028 Republican primary shrinking from 52-20 in February to 36-35 in May.

 

Either way, we need to consider the possibility that the artist formerly known as “Little Marco” emerges as heir apparent over the next 18 months and becomes president in 2029. More specifically: We need to consider whether there’s any possibility that it could happen.

 

Let’s see if I can talk you—and by you, I mean myself—into believing that there is. Two things need to occur, the first of which is relatively easy and maybe probable. The second? Not so much.

 

Sidelining Vance.

 

Rubio doesn’t need to beat J.D. Vance in a Republican primary and assuredly won’t try. All he needs to do is end up on the other side of the bet Vance is making on right-wing reaction to the Iran war.

 

The vice president is gambling that bad vibes from the conflict will whet GOP appetites for a leader who’s more isolationist than Trump turned out to be. If a consensus forms among Republican voters that the fatal mistake with Iran was choosing to go to war in the first place, Vance will look wise for having opposed that decision.

 

That’s why he’s made himself the face of a diplomatic settlement with the Iranians, as I explained last week. A right-wing base that trends toward Tuckerism in the aftermath of our national embarrassment will come to appreciate Vance as an avatar of peace. He doesn’t start silly, self-defeating wars. He gets America out of them.

 

That's what a winning wager looks like for the veep. Whereas a losing wager looks like this: Republican voters decide that the fatal mistake with Iran was failing to “finish the job” by using military force to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Doves like Vance are schmucks twice over, they come to believe, having first discouraged Trump from prosecuting the war to an honorable end and later selling him on a deal that will shower billions of dollars on a terrorist regime.

 

The vice president isn’t an avatar of peace in this view; he’s an avatar of American humiliation. The United States needs a leader who isn’t afraid to use military power and who’ll prioritize victory once he chooses to do so: If that’s where GOP opinion lands when the Iran smoke clears—and given the right’s faith in “toughness” and “strength,” it’s more likely than not—then Rubio will be the obvious beneficiary.

 

Which, in a way, is unfair to Vance. After all, Rubio wasn’t gung-ho for military action in Iran either, reportedly sounding “ambivalent” in Cabinet deliberations about attacking the regime before bombing began. “He did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal,” the Times alleged in April, “but his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war.”

 

Even so, his reputation precedes him. Rubio was an outspoken hawk in his pre-Trump incarnation as a Reaganite, was the face of the administration’s quick-and-easy decapitation of Venezuela’s communist regime, and is clearly angling to make the right’s longtime dream of Cuba libre come true soon. He’s the slam-dunk alternative to Vance if the Republican electorate concludes that the party’s next nominee needs to be more comfortable with using force than Trump was, not less.

 

Needless to say, the worse the Iran deal looks, the more likely they are to reach that conclusion—and already, less than a week in, it looks awfully bad. Forget the instantly infamous $300 billion reconstruction fund, which (supposedly) won’t be paid out unless the United States gets everything it wants from the regime. The Iranians are already disputing up-front, baby-steps concessions that the U.S. claims were promised under the deal.

 

Yesterday, for instance, Vance announced that Iran had agreed to let United Nations nuclear inspectors visit its enrichment facilities. We did not, Iranian diplomats replied. Trump later told reporters that frozen funds that have been released to Iran in the first stage of the deal must be used to buy agricultural products from the United States. We’re under no obligation to do that, the Iranians countered.

 

In a dispute between sociopaths, it’s impossible to tell which side is lying to seem tougher than it really is to its domestic audience. What is clear, though, is that you might soon be putting Iranian oil in your tank thanks to the magic of U.S. sanctions relief under the deal.

 

The more embarrassed Republicans are by the terms of the deal, the more they’ll come to see Vance as a gullible sucker whom they dare not trust with presidential power. That’s when we’ll start to see a meaningful Rubio boomlet on the right. And the coup de grâce, of course, would be the president himself confessing his regrets about signing it, which would function as a statement of “no confidence” in his VP.

 

I was skeptical of the rumors in March about Vance wavering on running in 2028, but they’ll seem more credible if/when the Iran deal becomes a complete debacle. If the VP believes he’s unelectable in the next cycle, whether because Republicans have turned on him or because Democrats are teed up for a comeback (or both), he’s young enough that he might choose to opt out and hope that the political tides swing back in his favor in 2032.

 

In the same way that Richard Nixon wasn’t finished after losing a presidential race in 1960, perhaps J.D. Vance won’t be finished in 2028—although Nixon never had to explain why he thought sending $300 billion to the Soviets was a good idea.

 

And if Vance does bow out, Marco Rubio will instantly become a prohibitive favorite for the GOP nomination, particularly if Trump is behind him. He will, almost certainly, win the primary.

 

But how does he win the general election? That’s where Tucker Carlson’s quote comes in.

 

Uniting the right.

 

I remain convinced by what I wrote in March, that Vance is more likely to unite the right than Rubio is. It will be easier for the vice president to persuade skeptical right-wing hawks to turn out for him in a general election, I think, than it will be for the secretary of state to persuade skeptical Lindberghians to do so.

 

The sort of rank-and-file Republican partisan who defaults toward hawkishness and who might resent Vance for the Iran deal will nonetheless faithfully prioritize tribal victory over Democrats in 2028. No amount of Trump blather in 2024 about “warmongering” by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will disabuse the American right of its atavistic fear that a foreign policy led by leftists will be dangerously weak relative to whatever’s on offer from the GOP.

 

In the end, traditional hawks will convince themselves that J.D. Vance is the lesser of two isolationist evils on the presidential ballot, never mind that he championed a sellout to Iran that would have gotten him accused of being a terrorist sleeper agent if he were a member of the other party. Conservatives are a reliably cheap date on Election Day.

 

Rubio will have a harder time convincing Tuckerites that he’s the lesser evil in 2028.

 

Postliberals are less concerned with keeping Republicans in power than they are with mainstreaming postliberalism in the United States. Rubio’s nomination would be a major setback to that project. For all of his success in ingratiating himself with Trump and Trump’s inner circle, and for all of his effort in demonstrating that he’s a loyal servant of the president’s agenda, he’s conspicuously out of sync culturally with the sort of chud that dominates modern GOP activism.

 

Marco Rubio is not “based.” He doesn’t even pretend to be based. Unlike every other top-tier Trump deputy, I can’t think of a single case of him being trollishly provocative on matters involving race, sex, or religion to signal his commitment to transgressing liberal norms. The president likes him because he likes the president (or seems to) and serves loyally, but Tuckerites aren’t so easily impressed.

 

Postliberals will draw inferences from Rubio’s lack of based-ness, and I suspect their inferences will be correct. At the risk of complimenting a deeply degraded politician, President Rubio probably wouldn’t try to stage a coup to preserve Republican control of the government, wouldn’t pardon criminal degenerates just because they’re right-wing, wouldn’t assume that Ukraine is the problem actor in its war with Russia, and—importantly—wouldn’t insist that America’s relationship with Israel needs a wholesale rethink.

 

A party led by Rubio is a party in which postliberals would have considerably less influence than they would in a party led by Vance. His nomination would threaten their takeover of the GOP and his election as president might seal it. Politically, it would be a catastrophe for them.

 

And so I think postliberal ideologues like Carlson would rather see him lose. For one thing, they’ll inevitably be more aligned with the Democratic agenda on Israel in 2028 than with whatever Rubio might be proposing. Left-wing opinion has turned against the Jewish state so lopsidedly that the party’s nominee will have no choice but to take a skeptical, if not hostile, line toward Jerusalem. Even Vance won’t be able to get to the left of Democrats on the subject in the next cycle. But Rubio would be an especially hard sell as the lesser of two evils to a faction that tends to begin all discussions of evil with Israel.

 

Beyond that, it’s in their political interest for a non-chud Republican nominee to lose. The weaker the right is at the polls when postliberals are unhappy, the stronger the case becomes that the GOP can’t win unless postliberals remain in charge. That surely explains why Carlson is so eager to withhold his vote from the party: The “based” right will explain the expected bloodbath at the polls this fall as a disaster that would have been averted if only Trump hadn’t veered so far from postliberalism by doing Israel’s bidding.

 

And if that’s the postliberals’ attitude this November, it will also be their attitude in trying to engineer a Rubio defeat in 2028. That could take the form of a primary challenge, possibly from Carlson himself, with the secretary of state maneuvered into the dreaded establishment lane by a “based” demagogue of the sort Republican voters adore. But even if Rubio skates through to the general election, he might find himself the target of a far-right boycott that fall: If only the GOP hadn’t veered so far from postliberalism by nominating a Reaganite like Marco, you see, Tucker and other like-minded right-wingers would have turned out to vote.

 

Realistically, I don’t think there’s anything Rubio can do to win them over. He could try pandering to postliberals, declaring that the scales have fallen from his eyes and that he now realizes Jews are the instigators of all wars, but I doubt they’d buy it. His eleventh-hour “based” conversion would be too convenient. Besides, as I’ve said, for all his faults there are certain forms of soul-selling that Marco Rubio has refused to stoop to. It would be churlish to assume he’d stoop to this one now.

 

To neutralize the Tucker faction, he’s going to need luck.

 

Lucky breaks.

 

Three types of luck, specifically.

 

First, Rubio needs Democrats to nominate a far-left candidate in 2028 to bolster his case to postliberals (and to swing voters, of course) that he really is the lesser of two evils on the ballot. Lindberghians may have more in common on Israel with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with Rubio, but the thought of America being governed by a young socialist Latina will offend their cultural prejudices profoundly enough to get out the chud vote for Marco, I think.

 

Two, he needs Trump and Vance to continue to discredit postliberalism by governing like nincompoops. True ideologues like Carlson won’t be moved back toward conservatism by the White House’s failures, but there are doubtless plenty of young right-wingers whose interest in “based” politics is faddish and subject to change. Many liberals dabble in radicalism as young adults before disenchantment pulls them toward the center; there’s no reason the same can’t happen to Generation Trump, with Rubio poised to benefit.

 

The whole reason he’s emerged as a favorite with Republican voters is because he sounds like he knows what he’s doing, a rarity in this administration. The worse the rest of Trump’s term goes, the more the faddish elements of postliberalism might drift toward appreciating competence, or at least the appearance of it.

 

Lastly, he needs postliberal influencers to keep shedding influence and making enemies.

 

They’ve made a bunch lately. Figures like Carlson have been taking shots from Dispatch columnists for years, but lately they’ve begun getting it from pro-Israel populists like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin too. More importantly, by opposing the war they’ve picked a fight with the president—and fighting with the president tends to do bad things to your popularity on the right, as Tucker might tell you.

 

Some of the Jacobins have even started to guillotine each other, as happens in any revolutionary movement. The more fractious and embittered the various strains of right-wing postliberalism are, the more preoccupied they become with their own internecine grudges, the less likely they’ll be to unite in opposition to a mainstream nominee like Rubio or to muster meaningful opposition at the polls against him.

 

I still wouldn’t bet on a Cuban American in the Oval Office in 2029, though. The inevitable trajectory of the president’s final two and a half years in office will leave the electorate hungry for change, and “Donald Trump’s secretary of state” isn’t very change-y. But if you’re trying to envision a Rubio administration, I’ve given you the path. All it’ll take is deep, lasting disillusionment with postliberalism in government and right-wing infotainment by a party rank-and-file that’s spent 10 years being indoctrinated into an authoritarian cult. Good luck, Marco.

Miasma on the Mall

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

Every time I get asked by a TV anchor what I think about the drama of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, my favorite “historical” headline from The Onion comes to mind: “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg.”

 

And every time I do, I hear from defenders of the Trump administration complaining about the disproportionate media coverage of what should be a very minor story in the grand sweep of things. They have a point. President Trump has done some good work rehabbing Washington, D.C., where I live. But the reflecting pool has bedeviled him. Algae keep returning to the pool, despite the administration’s best efforts, and attempts to remedy the problem have yielded further problems. 

 

I can think of scores of stories that deserve more attention on the merits.

 

But there are two problems with this complaint. First, it was Trump who invited extensive scrutiny of the effort. “I’m very proud of it,” he said before the algae counteroffensive. “I’m very good at building things and constructing things, so I hope you go take a look at it.”   

 

Second, there’s the metaphor-on-the-Mall problem. The reflecting pool is a microcosm of nearly everything that vexes people about the second Trump term. We can start with the decision to ignore the usual rules and procedures to give a no-bid job to a contractor for the repair and paintwork. Trump said it would cost $1.8 million. The costs have grown nearly tenfold. To deal with the insurrectionist algae, he gave another no-bid job to a Mar-a-Lago crony, campaign donor, and convicted felon who looks like a villain from the old Dick Tracy comic strip.

 

The man who vowed to “drain the swamp” of D.C.’s corrupt cronyism used figurative swampy means to deliver literal swampy ends.

 

Another familiar aspect of the pool fiasco: A project Trump touted as proof of his genius and expertise becomes proof of unpatriotic enemies undermining him when it flounders. Without any evidence, Trump claimed that the only reason the reflecting pool’s paint is peeling and algae blooming is because anti-American “vandals” sabotaged it with a “300-foot long gash.”

 

How vandals evaded National Park Police, security cameras, and his own National Guard deployment remains unknown. Never mind how they put a 300-foot gash in a paint job Trump described as, “So very strong. You couldn't, if you had a knife—I don't want to give anybody ideas—if you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong, so powerful."

 

But the metaphorical meaning of the miasma on the Mall hardly ends there.

 

During a May 27 Cabinet meeting, Trump boasted at length about the reflecting pool job and then handed the meeting off to his secretary of defense. “I think, actually, your efforts on the reflecting pool are actually a great segue,” Pete Hegseth said.

 

“If you look at Washington and Lincoln, these are two men that faced monumental tasks and stood up in historic fashion and delivered for the American people,” Hegseth gushed. “And, when you step back and look at 47 years of what Iran waged … there’s only one man, over the course of both presidencies, who has stood up and said they will never get a nuclear weapon.”

 

As with so much Hegseth says, this is not exactly true. Every president since Bill Clinton has said that a nuclear Iran was unacceptable. It’s true that Trump is the only president to use massive military force in the name of preventing it. Whether his efforts have made the “never” claim a reality is, at best, an open question.

 

What isn’t an open question: Trump’s unilateral Iranian adventure did not go as planned. What began as another example of Trump trying to will into existence the reality he wanted, segued into a murky, embarrassing, and costly spectacle with no satisfying end in sight. Talk about metaphors.

 

That’s because, as the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote. Trump can bypass or ignore many laws, but not the law of unintended consequences. The defining feature of Trump’s presidency is his unvanquishable belief that laws, rules, and norms are impediments to his will and genius.

 

He expects, nay demands, Hegseth-like sycophancy and praise recognizing that alleged genius.  And when events conspire against Trump, the fault must lie in subversive vandals and lies from “fake news.”

 

The international order, like the domestic order, is not natural. They are more like a man-made garden constructed out of the wilderness of the human condition. When the garden is not maintained, when the rules go ignored, the jungle grows back. Just like the algae.

The Iran Deal Is a Countdown to Instability

By John Aziz

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

The U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding—signed by President Donald Trump at the palace of Versailles—is supposed to stop hostilities between the two countries, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and result in Iran’s commitment to never develop nuclear weapons. It’s a bargain made on an old hope that has enamored American diplomats and presidents alike for decades: that the Islamic Republic of Iran—the theocratic state where the leadership ritualistically chants “death to America”—can be coaxed, pressured, flattered, bribed, or frightened into becoming a normal state, with good relations with its neighbors.

 

It may be possible to believe that from thousands of miles away. Meanwhile, Iran’s neighbors have lived with the Islamic Republic. They know its leaders, past and present, far more intimately than American policymakers do. They are the ones living under threat from Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. They are the ones living with Iranian-backed militias on their borders: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Hamas in Gaza.

 

During the war—rather than solely firing on those with whom it was at war—Iran fired repeatedly on multiple other countries around it, including targeting civilian infrastructure in those countries. Saudi Arabia intercepted Iranian missiles and drones. So did the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Iranian missiles and drones were launched toward Qatar, and Qatari air defenses intercepted attacks. The war also threatened Qatar’s gas economy. Iranian missiles damaged Ras Laffan, the center of Qatar’s natural gas industry. Missile and drone attacks struck Kuwait International Airport, killing one person, injuring dozens, damaging a terminal, and forcing flights to be suspended or diverted.

 

Just months after these nations found themselves having to fend off Iranian aggression, their reaction to the 14-point memorandum has been mixed.

 

For Saudi Arabia, the war exposed the danger that Iran could drag the kingdom’s economy into a crisis it did not make itself. Riyadh has spent years trying to make the country less dependent on energy exports. It has attempted this by building new industries, attracting foreign capital, expanding tourism, hosting high-profile international events like boxing matches, creating private-sector jobs, and liberalizing restrictive social norms in the country, including allowing women to drive.

 

This transformation requires confidence. Investors have to believe that Saudi Arabia is stable. Tourists have to believe that the country is safe to visit—otherwise they won’t show up. Companies have to believe that their staff, buildings, supply chains, data centers, and other infrastructure will not be caught in a regional war.

 

The war with Iran threatened Saudi modernization even without Iran needing to fire a missile directly at Riyadh. When the Strait of Hormuz is disrupted, the Gulf region looks unstable. When shipping lanes are threatened, insurance costs rise, and investors start pricing in geopolitical risk. When Iran shakes the region, it reminds international investors that Saudi Arabia still sits inside a dangerous neighborhood.

 

That is why Saudi support for the MOU will be careful and conditional. Riyadh welcomed the agreement, but Reuters later reported that there was deep unease among Gulf allies about the deal’s failure to limit Iran’s ballistic missiles and the possibility that Tehran could gain leverage over security arrangements around the Strait of Hormuz. The kingdom stressed that the deal should lead to a permanent settlement that takes into account the “security interests of countries in the region.”

 

In other words, the Saudis want strict verification of and limits on Iran’s nuclear work, along with assurances that Tehran cannot use the same pattern of behavior again: threaten energy flows out of the strait, extract relief from its neighbors, and rebuild its military capabilities.

 

For the UAE, the war was a direct challenge to the country’s whole commercial model. The Emirati government—similar to the Saudis—wants the world to believe business can flow through the UAE safely and predictably. Disruption to the Strait of Hormuz attacks that promise at its root. Every tanker delay, shipping warning, insurance spike, drone incident, and rumor of escalation makes the UAE look less like an insulated hub for trade and more like a risky state trapped inside Iran’s crisis radius. The UAE welcomed the MOU. Its leadership is calling for an immediate halt to hostilities and freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

 

Jordan also hailed the ceasefire as a positive step toward “regional stability” and “lasting calm.” But lasting calm for Amman means more than a pause between Washington and Tehran. Jordan shares borders with Iraq, Syria, Israel, the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia. When Iran pushes weapons through Syria, when Iranian-backed militias operate in Iraq, when Hezbollah escalates hostilities with Israel from Lebanon, and when Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad act, Jordan feels it. Missiles passing through Jordanian airspace is one version of the problem. Weapons smuggling through Syria is another. Drug trafficking, refugee pressure, and unrest related to the Palestinian issue are others.

 

For Qatar, the war has been a test of its diplomatic credibility. Doha helped sustain talks to end the fighting between the U.S. and Iran and emerged as one of the few actors able to speak to both sides.

 

The Qataris’ own statement on the MOU called it an important step toward “enhancing prospects for sustainable peace and economic growth at both the regional and international levels”. Qatar also praised Washington and Tehran for their commitment to resolving differences through negotiations and peaceful means.

 

Because it shares the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran, Qatar also had the strongest material reason to want this war brought under control quickly. A wider conflict involving Iranian energy infrastructure, the strait, or the Gulf’s shipping lanes would threaten Qatar’s core national interest, so Doha is happy. The deal, more than anything else, preserves Qatar’s role as mediator.

 

The MOU is exactly the kind of outcome Qatar’s foreign policy is designed to produce: not the defeat of Iran, and not the dismantling of Iran’s regional networks, but the containment of escalation through a process in which Qatar’s involvement remains necessary. That is why Doha can sound much happier than its neighbors.

 

For Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan, the central question is whether any eventual agreement negotiated with the U.S. will restrain Iran. For Qatar, the immediate victory is that the United States remains dependent on Qatari mediation, and Doha’s balancing act survives another crisis.

 

But the real danger of the MOU is that it sends a message—both to Iran and to other bad actors in the region—that blackmail and terrorism work.

 

Iran fired across the region. It threatened the world’s energy supply. It hit or endangered countries that had nothing to do with the conflict, other than their proximity to it. It attacked airports, tankers, gas fields, refineries, and American military bases. Then it wore Donald Trump down until it received promises of more than $300 billion in private investment in the Islamic Republic, ostensibly from its neighboring countries.

 

The Trump administration wants to call this realism and de-escalation. But more realistically, what the Islamic Republic is getting is more time to prepare for the next round of regional destabilization. And time is what the Islamic Republic needs most.

 

Time to repair air defenses. Time to rebuild command structures. Time to replenish Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Time to reopen smuggling routes through Syria and Iraq. Time to rebuild missile stocks. Time, once again, to surreptitiously try to build a nuclear weapon.

 

Can Iran still threaten the Strait of Hormuz whenever it needs leverage? Can it still fire missiles and drones at Gulf states? Can it still arm militias on Arab borders? Can it still use Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza as pressure points? Can it still extract concessions by making the region unsafe?

 

If the answer is yes, then the MOU, and any more seemingly permanent agreement that may result from subsequent negotiations, amount to simply kicking the can down the road. It’s allowing a regime that is ideologically hostile to America and the West more room to cause more trouble, sooner or later.

 

The Islamic regime in Iran is not a normal government representing a normal national interest. It is an authoritarian apparatus that survives by coercing its own society. In 2025 and 2026, as Iranians protested economic collapse, corruption, and political repression, the regime answered with mass arrests, mass killings, internet shutdowns, secret detentions, and show trials of dissidents.

 

Trump promised that he would bring help to the Iranian protesters. But if the Iranian regime holds onto power and gets a chance to consolidate its grip on the nation, Trump has very much fallen short of what he claimed he would do.

 

What’s the alternative to giving in to the Iranian regime’s blackmail? Tell the Iranians to kick rocks, and engineer a way around the strait’s strategic vulnerability.

 

The United States, Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, and the Gulf states should treat dependence on the strait as a strategic vulnerability to be engineered away. That means a massive expansion of pipelines from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Mediterranean. It means more petroleum export terminals outside the Strait of Hormuz; more storage in Oman, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean; and more liquefied natural gas capacity that does not require Qatari or Emirati cargoes to pass under Iran’s guard. It also means long-term contracts that reward producers who can deliver energy without entering Hormuz.

 

And it requires Iran’s neighbors to build the military architecture to protect the transition: permanent mine-clearing forces, anti-drone coverage, missile defense, protected convoy lanes, and automatic penalties on Iran for every attempt to threaten shipping. The goal should be blunt: make the Strait of Hormuz less important every year until Tehran can no longer hold the world economy hostage from its shoreline. If Iran wants to be a normal neighbor, it can trade like one. Until then, the world should build as if the strait is already compromised.

 

That is the fault line under the MOU. Everyone wants the war to stop. Everyone wants the strait to reopen. But there are two ways that can play out. One is that the region can live with the Islamic Republic so long as the situation is managed and mediated. The other is that every payment teaches Iran that it is winning and that it can win more by escalating again, by building proxy militias across the region that launch regional wars, as Hamas did on October 7, 2023.

 

Washington may celebrate that as diplomacy. To many in the Gulf and the Levant, it looks more like a countdown to destruction.

The Democrats’ Time for Choosing

By Gregg T. Nunziata

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

As America celebrates its 250^th anniversary, its constitutional system is plagued by profound dysfunction. The elegant architecture of checks and balances constructed by the Founders has devolved into a Caesarist presidency, a supine Congress, and an overtaxed judiciary governing a people ungrounded in civics and helplessly divided by toxic partisanship. Whether one believes Donald Trump is the cause, an accelerator, or merely the product of this state of affairs, the end of his presidency will offer a historic opportunity to repair and strengthen the Madisonian design.

 

The next president will face a choice: to strengthen democracy for future generations or to fuel the forces that threaten its survival. The country faced a similar choice after the first Trump administration's disastrous conclusion—and chose poorly. The costs of those failures compound daily. To fare better next time, we must understand the mistakes of 2021 and begin charting a better course today.

 

The republic survived Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat at the ballot box in 2020 thanks to a handful of men and women who did the right thing under extraordinary pressure. But the country entered the Biden administration with shattered norms, weakened constitutional guardrails, and collapsing public faith in our institutions. The moment called for sober leadership and a reconstructive agenda, neither of which arrived. We continue to pay the price for that failure.

 

***

 

History will harshly judge Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and other congressional Republicans for enabling election denialism, flinching from impeachment, discrediting congressional inquiries into the attack on the Capitol, rehabilitating a disgraced former president, and delegitimizing attempts to hold him criminally accountable. The Supreme Court, too, in its poorly reasoned presidential immunity decision, shares some of the blame for our current predicament.

 

Much has been written in recent years about the failure of the right to defend our constitutional values, including by me. Less has been said about Democrats’ historic failure to meet the moment. Since 2016, Republicans have lacked courage, but Democrats have lacked commitment. As a presidential nominee, Joe Biden told the Democratic National Convention, “We have a great purpose as Americans … to save our democracy.” But Biden and his party catastrophically failed to strengthen democratic institutions when given the opportunity. Time and again, Democrats simply did not govern as a party that seriously believed its own rhetoric.

 

The flawed and partisan manner in which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats handled the second Trump impeachment, before and after Biden’s inauguration, set the tone. The decision, for instance, to delay delivering the articles of impeachment to the Senate explicitly placed the incoming administration’s agenda above the important national reckoning over January 6, allowing Republican resolve to fade. It also enabled the (flawed) legal argument that the Senate had lost jurisdiction to act once Trump left office, which Republicans would later cite to justify acquitting the former president.

 

In the 2022 midterms, Democrats actively promoted far-right candidates and election deniers in Republican primaries in service of short-term political gains. Worse, with a Democrat in the White House and a majority in Congress, they never prioritized the hard bipartisan work of strengthening democracy through serious legislative reforms. Nor did they hold their own accountable for breaches of democratic norms, not when Biden attempted to bypass Congress to forgive billions in student debt, nor when his CDC ordered a national eviction moratorium without legal authorization, nor when Biden left office with a flurry of pardons, including of his own family, nor when prominent Democrats espoused wildly reckless anti-court rhetoric in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

 

This failure to reinforce our democratic system cannot be blamed on an absence of ideas. During the first Trump administration, congressional Democrats championed the Protect Our Democracy Act (PODA), a package of reforms to strengthen Congress, reinforce presidential guardrails, and increase political accountability. The legislation included ideas with solid Republican pedigrees that could have served as a basis for much-needed bipartisan reforms. Separately, former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer and Bush Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith offered additional bipartisan ideas in After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.

 

Yet these ideas simply were not a priority for congressional Democrats once Trump left office; they showed no interest in partnering with Republicans on good-government reforms. Although PODA passed the House once (on a near-party-line vote) in the first year of the Biden administration, the energy behind reform quickly dissipated. Congressional Democrats, instead, put much more effort into the For the People Act, a wish list of progressive voting reforms, which predictably proved a legislative dead end.

 

The Biden White House also seemed to have its ambitions elsewhere. Rather than focusing on returning the country to normalcy and the presidency to its constitutional limits, the White House openly compared Biden to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, presidents who dramatically—and sometimes unlawfully—expanded the power of government and their own office. Never mind that Biden never had the congressional majorities or force of will that those two presidents enjoyed.

 

Congress managed one exception to this bleak track record: it reformed the Electoral Count Act (ECA), which governs how Congress tallies electoral votes and certifies the presidential election winner. Trump and his allies had exploited ambiguities in that old, poorly drafted law to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Importantly, Congress amended the law to clarify the limited, ministerial role of the vice president during the counting process. Notably, unlike the other failed reform efforts, this legislation began as a bipartisan project in the Senate, with the clear intention of strengthening democracy, not punishing or aiding any party or agenda.

 

Notwithstanding the ECA-reform exception, Biden-era Democrats did not prioritize fortifying our democratic institutions. Perhaps, with their man in office, they no longer saw the wisdom of restraining the presidency. Perhaps, with Trump disgraced, they thought the dangers to democracy had passed. Whether from hypocrisy or hubris, they missed a potentially fertile moment for meaningful bipartisan reform.

 

The decision to forgo bipartisanship and instead to seek praise from progressives had the further effect of breeding deep cynicism. Rather than a return to normalcy, the Biden years saw aggressive pushes left on social and economic policy, from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Democratic rhetoric about defending democracy rang hollow since Democrats in power did not prioritize it over the policy priorities of progressive activists. Moreover, after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, Democratic senators declared the court illegitimate and extremist. The president himself said the court had decided to “upend the scales of justice” and that the decision was “a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court.” Later, he would claim that “extremism is undermining public confidence in the court’s decisions” and call for imposing “reforms” on the court as a response. Democrats’ pleas for checks and balances are hard to take too seriously when that’s how they responded to an adverse decision from the one branch of government outside of their control.

 

Because of choices like these, Democrats during the Biden administration left the country more fragile, making Trump’s reelection more likely and his return to office more dangerous.

 

***

 

As the midpoint of Trump’s final term in office approaches, and his approval ratings sink to historic lows, Democrats reasonably foresee a return to power. They must begin thinking seriously about what they will do if they get a second chance to heal the civic damage done by Donald Trump. The American electorate deserves to hear those plans sooner rather than later.

 

Democrats must ask themselves what they object to most strenuously about this administration: that it pushed the country to the right or that it undermined the rule of law, checks and balances, and our democracy? If it's the latter, they must be prepared to prioritize spending political capital on reforms to strengthen our democracy over advancing progressive pet projects. The failure to do so would miss a historic opportunity and repeat the grave mistakes of the Biden presidency.

 

Yet undeterred by the Biden administration’s costly missteps, leading Democrats have already expressed a desire to build on President Trump’s expansive uses of executive power—just in a progressive direction. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an early contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination, candidly admitted as much: “In order for us to correct the abuses that are happening now, we have to act the same in similar capacities that Trump has given himself.”

 

Failure to heal our institutions would be bad; doubling down on their destruction would be catastrophic. It would trap the country in a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation where every increasing norm violation is justified by the childish refrain, “They started it.” Worse still, a future Democrat might introduce purported institutional “reforms” designed not to strengthen democracy, but to entrench themselves in power for decades.

 

Famed Democratic strategist James Carville recently drew attention to this approach when he said on his Politics War Room podcast: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F—k it. Eat our dust.”

 

Carville’s typically colorful language reflects a real attitude gaining purchase in some Democratic circles: Should they return to power, they must change the rules of the game to keep them there. This is particularly evidenced by their reactions to court rulings concerning voting and elections. Leading Democrats have called for the next president to expand the size of the Supreme Court, with the obvious goal of netting more favorable progressive outcomes. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and likely next speaker of the House, made these intentions plain: “We’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court. And let me be very clear: everything is on the table. Everything to deal with this corrupt MAGA majority.”

 

These proposals echo the infamous “court-packing” plan of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, designed to create a rubber-stamp Supreme Court more hospitable toward the president’s agenda. A Democratic Congress rejected that plan, calling it a “direct violation of the spirit of the American Constitution” that would destroy the independence of the judiciary. In a warning that today’s Democrats would do well to heed, the Senate Judiciary Committee further wrote: “Manifestly, if we may force the hand of the Court to secure our interpretation of the Constitution, then some succeeding Congress may repeat the process to secure another and a different interpretation and one which may not sound so pleasant in our ears as that for which we now contend.”

 

Some progressives speak not just of packing the court, but also of stacking Congress to favor Democrats. The party has long championed statehood (and two U.S. Senate seats) for the District of Columbia, where Democrats regularly net more than 90 percent of the vote in presidential elections. Breaking with its historic position, the DNC recently approved a measure to add Puerto Rico to the union, no doubt driven by the expectation that it will also become a reliable Democratic-voting state. And Senate Democrats increasingly express an eagerness to abolish the filibuster, which historically protects the political power of the Senate minority. Relatedly, former and perhaps future presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris indicated her opposition to anti-majoritarian protections in our system, saying there is “real shaking up that we have to do of the rule and the structure” and seemed to support left-wing voices calling for the abolition of the Electoral College.

 

Taken together, these “reforms” constitute a plan for dominion, not democracy. If Democrats go down this road, they will not only fail to repair the damage done by Trump, they will accelerate the collapse of American democracy. There’s a better path forward.

 

***

 

If Democrats truly believe that the Trump administration has embraced authoritarianism and they wish to oppose it, they must govern that way. That means committing to restoring norms and limited government, paring back executive power, and revitalizing checks and balances. Doing that in an effective and durable way requires working with Republicans. And it will mean prioritizing democracy over progressive policy goals.

 

Substantively, a post-Trump democracy and rule-of-law agenda offers a multitude of opportunities for bipartisan collaboration. Americans across the political spectrum oppose the weaponization of government to target political enemies, corrupt pardons, and self-enrichment by politicians, to take a few prominent examples. Democrats appalled by President Trump’s abuses of emergency powers might consider the leading legislation to address this problem, the bipartisan Article One Act, long-championed by Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee. The parties disagree, of course, about where the blame lies for past transgressions. But, at least in theory, they could agree on reforms preventing them in the future. This is urgent work.

 

The next administration may also propose more structural reforms to strengthen our system. Limiting gerrymandering to once a decade would be a modest but salutary step. Reforms to improve the appointments and confirmation process, including the abuse of the Vacancies Reform Act, which allows the president to bypass confirmation entirely, should be on the table. Adjustments to Senate procedure that might reform, but not end, the filibuster are reasonable. Even reforms to the court, such as mandatory retirement ages or term limits, might be part of a bipartisan policy agenda. But any structural reform that yields an immediate partisan advantage should be dead on arrival. And if an otherwise sound proposal would yield partisan advantage if adopted today, it should include delayed effective dates, leaving the party that ultimately reaps its benefits to chance.

 

Democrats, back in power, will also hear loud calls from their constituents that Trump and members of his administration should face a reckoning for abuses of power they may have committed while in office. Abuses of power should, indeed, have consequences if we do not wish to invite more in the future. On the other hand, punitive efforts may well seem disproportionate or vindictive in individual cases and raise the risk of a tit-for-tat cycle of “lawfare.” Criminal punishment should be a last resort (and may be foreclosed on the federal level by pardons), and a preference should be given to less punitive measures: civil accountability, bar discipline, and, more fundamentally, clear documentation and a public record of wrongdoing designed to shame and dissuade future abuse. The healing and future stability of the country must take precedence over score-settling, even if it means less-than-satisfactory costs imposed in specific cases.

 

Self-interested electoral politics should also encourage this approach. A Democratic presidential candidate who fights for the American system, not just his or her coalition, has the prospect of winning a comfortable majority for the first time in 20 years—potentially breaking the toxic cycle of polarized politics that has regrettably taken hold. Other countries that have reversed democratic backsliding have often done so through grand coalitions, as recent victories for democracy in Poland and Hungary demonstrate. Our two-party system makes such an approach challenging, but there are ways Democrats can capture its spirit. It’s likely too much to ask that a Democratic presidential candidate consider a Republican as a running mate. But promising to appoint Republicans to key positions, including and especially in the Justice Department, would be an important olive branch.

 

But personnel is not enough. A Democratic candidate who wants the support of right-of-center Americans must paint a vision of the future that includes them. He or she must, at a minimum, forswear any attempt to pack the Supreme Court, which is vital both to constitutional stability and an important concession to those skeptical that Democrats would ever unilaterally disarm. An even more powerful concession would be to endorse a constitutional amendment permanently setting the size of the court at nine members. This would take court-packing off the table forever and would be an enormous sign of good faith. Such a move could even be paired with another reform that might find more enthusiastic backing from the left. Democrats, of course, would remain free to criticize the current court and work to fill vacancies that arise in due course with nominees more reflective of their jurisprudential preferences.

 

***

 

A Democratic presidency in the immediate aftermath of the Trump administration might find uniquely fertile political ground for reform: Republicans may suddenly rediscover the utility of guardrails around the presidency, and Democrats, so recently traumatized by the Trump years, might be willing to impose them even when they hold the White House.

 

Donald Trump’s inability to understand his role as head of state, representing all Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—has led to our current crisis. Any Democratic candidate for president who truly wishes to heal our republic must be ready to put our democracy ahead of his or her party. And that means embracing a system that has a meaningful place for the voices of those who lose the next presidential election. Such a president would inevitably disappoint the left, but generations to come would owe them a debt of gratitude.

Water Damage

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a sort of moron-populist version of Chernobyl. In both cases, the government’s incompetence and corruption created a vexing ecological problem. And in both cases, the government undertook to cover up its culpability in the matter.

 

The difference is that the problem that vexed the Soviets was a cataclysmic nuclear meltdown. The problem that’s vexed the White House is algae.

 

The pool saga began as a project to beautify the structure by making its water a glistening blue. From the jump, per the New York Times, the White House cut corners by not addressing the real problem, the pool’s pipes. Instead it awarded a no-bid contract for a quick fix to a firm owned by a Trump donor—except that the quick fix, applying sealant to the pool’s bottom, didn’t solve the issue of water leaking between the concrete slabs.

 

Days after the renovation was finished, the pool had more algae in it than at any point in June over the last five years.

 

Workers were dispatched last week to dump hydrogen peroxide and “advanced nanobubbler technology” into the water to kill the algae. In short order, pieces of blue material from the newly treated bottom began peeling off and floating to the surface. The algae? Still not dead.

 

This weekend the president admitted that contractors will “probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs.” But it wasn’t a botched job that he blamed for the embarrassment; it was “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE” who had “seriously vandalized” the pool by supposedly ripping off chunks of the blue sealant.

 

Former Fox News talking head turned U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro dutifully vowed zero tolerance for pool-peelers. And she meant it: One man arrested by Park Police on Friday claims he did nothing more than touch a piece of floating debris before the cuffs were slapped on. At last check, armed members of the National Guard had been hastily deployed to stand watch over a basin that’s now almost as green as the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day.

 

It’s all so stupid. And because it is, there’s no way to write about it without being seduced by metaphor or drawing Grand Lessons About Trumpism from it.

 

Our friend Andrew Egger drew one last week. Plowing ahead with a suspiciously easy solution to a complex problem and making a preposterous mess of it explains the war in Iran as well as it does the reflecting pool, he observed. The secret sauce of kakistocracy is ignorance paired with hubris, the belief that all policy failures can be remedied by a bold leader eager to impose his will, and that’s what we’ve gotten on both fronts—with predictable results.

 

Another lesson from the pool fiasco arrived this weekend when the Guard was dispatched, the ideal finishing touch on a renovation process that had already been distinctly Trumpist in its method. Scapegoating phantom “vandals” for the peeling sealant and calling in the military to deal with them is an unwitting self-satire of strongman fragility, inventing enemies and turning an absurd problem into a quasi-emergency because the president can’t bear to accept blame for having screwed up the project so badly.

 

You’ve heard of Hanlon’s Razor? The White House has its own version: Never attribute to one’s own stupidity that which is adequately explained by another’s malice.

 

There’s a third lesson, and this one also points back to Iran. Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now.

 

The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.

 

The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.

 

‘America cannot do a damned thing.’

 

The negotiations in Switzerland this weekend advertised a major intangible benefit for the Iranians. They’re going to have many opportunities to humiliate the president and his country in the months ahead. And they’re going to take them.

 

Celebrating the impotence of the United States has always been important to the regime. Ruhollah Khomeini famously crowed during the hostage crisis of 1979 that “America cannot do a damned thing,” a line that became a revolutionary slogan. Another hostage crisis played out this year in the Strait of Hormuz and again America couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do a damned thing to end it.

 

When, during the endless negotiation process to come, the Iranians get the occasional chance to remind the world of it, they’ll seize it. They already have.

 

They did it on Sunday via stagecraft when their delegation arrived for talks with J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff. The Americans were allowed to enter the room first, inadvertently (but accurately) signaling that our country is more eager for peace than the enemy is. When the Iranians finally showed, they were supposed to pose for a handshake and photo op with the vice president—but refused.

 

Then, after the event began, they walked out.

 

The walkout was their response to new comments by the president, who’s losing his mind at hawks here and in Israel condemning his deal as a Munich-tier sellout by a feckless weakling. On Saturday, with the summit looming, Iran announced that it had closed the strait again to protest new Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. That made Trump look like a schmuck and he knew it, and he let it all out the following day in a phone interview with Fox News.

 

“We’ll take over the rest of your country…. I’ll blow the s—t out of them,” the president reportedly said of the Iranians, sounding every inch like the talk-radio call-in guy from Queens that he is at heart. At one point he fantasized about the U.S. seizing control of the strait and charging 20 percent tolls on transiting oil tankers, leaving it ominously unclear whether he meant Iran’s tankers or all tankers. He went on to warn the enemy that if they close the strait again “you won’t have a country,” then threatened the regime’s diplomats in Switzerland: “You won’t even make it back to your f—king country.”

 

That’s when the Iranians left the summit, the diplomatic equivalent of extending a middle finger. (They did eventually return.) What was stopping them? Trump has given them every reason to believe he won’t restart the conflict, even admitting that he sought peace because he feared the standoff in the strait would cause a global recession if it persisted. Iran can afford to flout his belligerence. America cannot do a damned thing.

 

Well … America could exit the deal, I guess, if the ongoing humiliation became too much for Trump to bear. At some point his enormous vanity will supersede his desire for lower gas prices. For Iranians, the trick in embarrassing the president is to limit themselves to minor insults that hurt U.S. prestige while continuing to participate in negotiations, giving the White House an incentive to let those insults slide.

 

That’s why they returned to the summit after their walkout, I’m sure. They’ll never get a deal from the United States sweeter than the one they’ve just received; sanctions on the country’s oil exports have already been waived and some frozen assets have been returned, per the Iranian foreign minister. They’d be fools to let their interest in showcasing Trump’s impotence alienate him to the point that he quits negotiations.

 

So instead, I expect, they’ll casually belittle America whenever possible, bait its leader into pathetically and ineffectually threatening to restart a military campaign that’s already failed, and keep talks going at all costs to try to extract extra concessions. Call it the art of the deal, Tehran-style.

 

The most artful element, though, is the wedge it’s driven between the U.S. and Israel.

 

Israel cannot do a damned thing.

 

Humiliating Trump wasn’t Iran’s core goal in severing the White House’s interest in peace from the Israelis’ interest in security. Its goal was strategic: The regime wanted to weaken its most dangerous regional adversary by creating a rift between that adversary and its more powerful patron.

 

And damned if they didn’t succeed. It’s a master stroke.

 

For all the hype about the $300 billion reconstruction fund that hopefully won’t ever happen, the greatest long-term victory for the Khomeinists under the deal was getting the U.S. to agree to include Lebanon in its terms. That incentivizes the White House to use its leverage over Jerusalem to restrain future Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Going forward, Trump could have peace or Israel could have its right of self-defense, but it’s one or the other.

 

Guess which one he’s going to choose. “The president told me he is disappointed Israel can’t put Hezbollah away,” Fox News reporter Trey Yingst reported after interviewing Trump on Sunday. “He went on to say, ‘They can’t do anything without knocking buildings down’ and that he is close to giving it to Syria. He is talking about empowering Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to actually go into southern Lebanon and fight Hezbollah.”

 

In fact, the biggest news out of this weekend’s summit was an agreement between the U.S. and Iranian delegations to create a “deconfliction cell” that includes Lebanese representatives—but not Israelis, it appears—to “ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.” In other words, the U.S. will be responsible for restraining a sovereign nation from acting in its national security in parallel to Iran restraining a non-state terrorist proxy that acts at its direction.

 

All of that is in Iran’s strategic interest, needless to say. But it also serves the Iranian goal of making a spectacle of American impotence. How many countries have lost a war so decisively that they functionally switched sides as part of a peace deal, shifting from working with an ally to weaken a mutual enemy to working with that enemy to weaken that ally?

 

Vance has even begun to jab at Israel and its supporters in his frequent public appearances defending the deal. “What is your exact proposal?” he wondered, addressing the hawks in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet. “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” In another interview he scolded advocates for the Jewish state by pointing out that “it’s just not the case that every criticism of Bibi Netanyahu’s policy decisions leads to antisemitism or is antisemitic.”

 

He even gave Israel the Zelensky treatment during his remarks in the White House briefing room on Friday. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally I have anywhere in the entire world,” Vance warned, reminding Israelis that “over the last few months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” Has Israel said thank you once?

 

Vance has his own political reasons for pitting himself against the Jewish state. It puts him on the right side of American public opinion; it reminds his anti-war Israel-hating Lindberghian base that he’s still one of them; it ingratiates him to the president by reframing Israelis’ justifiable shock at the mortifying terms of the Iran peace agreement into selfish ingratitude toward Trump; and it earns him some goodwill from the Iranians whose cooperation he needs for this deal not to blow up in his face.

 

But there’s no way around the fact that the vice president aligning himself with critics of the White House’s ally in this conflict is a remarkable testament to U.S. impotence in 2026. Because America cannot do a damned thing to force Iran to reopen the strait, our least bad play is to keep the Iranians happy by making sure Israel cannot do a damned thing either.

 

It occurs to me that the United States under Trump now has, or will soon have, no very close allies left. For most of my life, Canada, Great Britain, and Israel each had “special relationships” of various sorts with Washington; upon being reelected, the White House immediately set about destroying the first, is hard at work on destroying the second, and seems increasingly willing to risk the third if Iran’s hostage-takers demand it. If it’s true that you can’t be a superpower without allies, our national impotence in this moment is more severe than it looks.

 

That’s also why a silly story like the reflecting pool has captured the imagination of so many Trump critics otherwise preoccupied with war and peace. Whether in Iran or at the Lincoln Memorial, the president’s supposed grand fixes to longstanding problems keep making those problems considerably worse. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, then doesn’t know how to undo what he’s done, and then inevitably defaults to blaming others for sabotage—whether that’s Israel or reporters allegedly “vandalizing” the pool by handling pieces of sealant debris floating on the surface.

 

In the case of the pool, all that’s missing is offering the algae $300 billion to withdraw.

 

How does a strongman behave once the entire world, save for about a third of his own country, loses all confidence in him? We’re going to spend the next two and a half years finding out. But probably not well.