The Next Generation of Conservative Leaders Must Embrace Civility

By Mike Pence

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

Note: The following is an excerpt from Mike Pence’s forthcoming book What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience.

 

Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility. Since the American founding, we’ve suffered from bouts of incivility, from the sharp words of soundbites to much worse. When it happens, Americans often recognize it and demand more from themselves and their countrymen.

 

I have long believed that personal attacks have no place in public life, but I haven’t always lived up to my own standards. In 1990, during my second campaign for Congress, I participated in one of the most divisive races in Indiana congressional history. Even though I had come to a personal faith in Jesus Christ years earlier, I became willing to do almost anything to win and made decisions that I soon regretted. After I lost, I wrote a short essay: “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner.” And I made a promise to God and myself that if I ever had the chance to run for office again, I would run in a way that honored God, informed the debate, and put winning and losing after that. I resolved to do better no matter where life took me.

 

When the chance to run for Congress came around again, I had spent a decade seeking to grow in my faith and aspire “to do unto others” as I would have them do unto me. And throughout the ensuing twenty years in public office, I pray that I have done just that.

 

In our world of social media, politicians face the temptation to turn the public arena into a circus of insults — but all of us must do better. People of all creeds in public life should demonstrate the ability to disagree without being disagreeable or resorting to the personal invectives that have no place in the public square. “Manners are more important than laws,” wrote Edmund Burke. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize, or refine us.”

 

As Russell Kirk wrote, “politics is the art of the possible.” And civility makes the art of politics possible. That’s why politics in a democracy includes rules of decorum. During the most raucous arguments in Congress, for example, lawmakers will pepper their remarks with references to their partisan rivals as “my good friend.” These traditions may feel arcane, and they can break down in practice, but they also create ways to debate proposals rather than personalities. I can claim that an idea is bad without insisting that its author is a bad person.

 

Civility is how we can find principled common ground in America. Conservatives must never compromise our principles, but we can compromise on details.

 

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he became frustrated with some of his fellow Republicans: “They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take anything.” That’s not how politics works in a democracy — and Reagan knew it from his time in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was in fact the only union leader ever to become president. “I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for,” he said. “If you got 75 or 80 percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later.” Reagan also liked to quote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.”

 

Major legislative achievements throughout American history have come from bipartisan majorities, with both Democrats and Republicans joining to create Social Security in the 1930s and pass civil rights laws in the 1960s. More recently, though, too many politicians have favored partisan power over principled common ground. The passage of the Affordable Care Act — also known as “Obamacare” — became the first transformational law ever rammed through Congress on a party-line vote. Not a single Republican supported it, but it fundamentally altered health care for Americans. It’s no coincidence that it also made health care worse.

 

The failure to find common ground and generate a broad consensus on health care and so many other issues has led to our current period of political volatility. Voters have thrust parties in and out of power with whiplash speed. Since 2000, control of the House of Representatives has changed four times and control of the Senate has changed five times. This is powerful evidence of restlessness among the American people.

 

Incivility is at the heart of the problem. Liberals love to pretend that Donald Trump invented incivility, but he’s more a symptom than a source. Trump did not devise the personal attack in politics, though he may have perfected it. Sadly, Trump’s abrasive and combative style, once unique and jarring in the Republican Party, has been widely aped by right-wing populists.

 

Long before Trump, however, left-wing progressives rejected civility and compromise. They followed the advice of the activist and agitator Saul Alinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals, a 1971 manifesto on political confrontation. Among his thirteen rules, the most influential was the last: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Not surprisingly, the book includes an epigraph that praises “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

 

Many Democrats, most notably Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, became disciples of Alinsky and brought his methods of demonization into the politics of the 21st century. Progressives have relied on Alinsky’s playbook for decades. Democrats routinely attack and demean Republicans and other ordinary Americans. When he was running for president in 2008, Obama spoke at a fundraising event in San Francisco: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” he said. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Hillary Clinton also mocked regular Americans during her 2016 presidential campaign, at a fundraiser in New York City: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said, as her liberal donors laughed and clapped. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”

 

During my years in Congress, as governor, and as vice president, I grew accustomed to the demonization of my faith, my family, and my convictions by left-wing progressives and their allies in the media. I never liked it, but I learned to live with it. Yet it has troubled me to watch the coarsening of our culture from the normalization of foul language to the antics of the cowardly trolls on social media who hide behind anonymity as they shout their bigotry. This everyday cruelty has formed a grim backdrop to a worse and growing problem. As the Bible says, “you reap what you sow.” As progressives promote abortion on demand at any time and for any reason and increasingly promote unnatural deaths from euthanasia, they cheapen life and foster a culture of death. In 2025, a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia was revealed to have sent text messages wishing death upon a Republican politician and then saying he also wished the man’s children dead. Democratic officials refused to denounce him, and Democratic voters inexplicably rewarded him with an election victory.

 

Words matter, and today the rhetoric of many left-wing progressives as well as right-wing populists fuels a growing acceptance of political violence. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, protests ostensibly about police brutality descended into urban riots in dozens of cities. Months later, populists rampaged through the Capitol, in an attempt to overturn an election, assaulting police officers and vandalizing our seat of government. The violence kept on coming: A potential assassin stalked Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. Later, the governor of Pennsylvania saw his residence firebombed and a Minnesota state representative and her husband were killed in their home. During the 2024 campaign, President Trump narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and he survived another potential assassination on a golf course in Florida.

 

Political violence must be universally condemned, no matter where it comes from and no matter who it targets. Sadly, it has become disturbingly acceptable to young liberals. In a 2005 YouGov poll, 26 percent of liberals aged 18 to 44 said that political violence is sometimes justified. Among conservatives in the same age range, the figure was only 7 percent. (And among Americans of all ages and all political persuasions, only 11 percent said that political violence can sometimes be justified.)

 

We saw the tragic consequences of these sentiments with the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in 2025. I knew Charlie from the time I was governor through my years in the White House. One of my final speeches as vice president was in Florida for Turning Point USA, the organization he founded and led. Charlie was a good and godly young man, a devoted husband and father. He was dedicated to taking his conservative message to young people on campuses across the country, until an assassin’s bullet killed him. He gave his life defending freedom of speech. Our movement and our nation should ever remember him so.

 

The person responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk was the man who pulled the trigger. He must face swift and certain justice. Nothing will do more to ensure that this scourge of political violence comes to an end. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that those of us in public life have a responsibility to do better.

 

Three years before Charlie’s murder, I spoke at Utah Valley University, just yards from the site of his killing. In my remarks, I warned of mounting incivility: “If we allow radical voices to continue dumping toxic waste into the headwaters of culture, our politics will only get more poisonous over time.” The American people long for us to restore a threshold of civility in public life, but it will take a new generation of conservative statesmen to achieve it.

Ken Paxton Is Actually Doing This

By Elaine Godfrey

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary runoff—so long that most people figured he’d never actually decide. Which is why, when Trump finally endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of Republican retirees at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from the MAGA heavens.

 

Paxton was due that day for a meet-and-greet at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, which had been vibrating gently with a selection of the Country Top 40, began blasting “Y.M.C.A.” People read Trump’s Truth Social post aloud from their phones and waved their arms in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man near me with slicked-back hair shouted into his phone, “We did it!” And by the time the next song came on—Thunderstruck! Ahh-ahh!—waiters were circulating with trays of free margaritas. “I have chills!” one elderly woman told me happily. Another lifted her plastic cup to the sky and shouted over the din, “What a time to be alive!”

 

It really is. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and the war with Iran have all systems flashing fire-engine red for Republicans in November. Yet here was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, impeached, and allegedly unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, D.C., Senate Republicans were apoplectic at the president’s casual betrayal of one of their own. But here at the Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was welcomed like a hug from Oprah or the title of “Sole Survivor,” an American prize of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way that they love Trump: wholeheartedly, with no questions asked.

 

By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his base’s—unwavering devotion. He is likely also guaranteeing Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in so doing, Trump may have cemented a set of very difficult circumstances for his party. If Paxton wins on Tuesday, Democrats will probably be better positioned to win statewide in Texas than they’ve been in the past 40 years.’

 

***

 

In the beginning, there was a pen. A $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, the writing instrument of choice for celebrities, heads of state, and other kinds of people who recognize the cultural cachet of a customizable gold nib. Paxton apparently knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, then–State Senator Paxton did see one—next to a metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney had accidentally left it behind. Paxton picked it up and pocketed it. Later, after a call from an officer, Paxton returned the pen to its rightful owner; it had been a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, a Paxton spokesperson said. But that didn’t stop the ads. “This is Attorney General Ken Paxton, rummaging through the metal-detector trays and stealing that $1,000 pen,” the narrator says in one from 2018.

 

Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.

 

Over the next decade, Paxton would build a rap sheet of legal and ethical entanglements so long and complex that it is difficult to quickly sum up. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a tech company. (The charges were dismissed after Paxton agreed to do community service and take an ethics class.) In 2020, some of Paxton’s aides reported their boss to the FBI, accusing him of using his office to benefit a particular donor; Paxton later fired those staffers, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge did find that the attorney general had violated the state Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, by suing to invalidate the results in four states that Joe Biden won.

 

By 2023, Paxton was the subject of a full-blown impeachment investigation based in part on the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including the majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s help. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life spilled out, including witness testimony that Paxton had cheated on his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton. Later, in 2025, Angela announced that she was divorcing Paxton on “biblical grounds,” which is the Baptist way of saying that Ken was at it again. (Paxton has denied allegations of an affair.)

 

Despite all of this, Paxton continues to win. He’s been reelected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but the rushing river of Paxton controversies is tough to channel. Earlier this year, the Cornyn campaign released a six-minute ad unpacking all of Paxton’s corruption allegations that no voter could reasonably be expected to sit through. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing an AI-generated spot centered on Paxton’s alleged infidelity that was both hard to follow and painfully campy.

 

Ask any Paxton supporter what they make of these accusations, and they will usually reply with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin can cast the first stone.” Many of them simply seem exasperated. “Who cares?” a man named Eric told me in Allen. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” The truth is that grassroots conservatives in Texas stand by Paxton because he has consistently stuck by them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against the deep state. As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

 

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, considering the quantity and credibility of all the allegations against him, is a bit like the fox giving the henhouse a lesson on etiquette.

 

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me. “He has no brakes.”

 

Voters I interviewed proudly made the same comparison. People thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016, a man named Doug Snyder told me after writing a $1,000 check for Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We’ve got the hats. And we’ve been to Mar-a-Lago,” he said.

 

Politics needs more leaders like Paxton and Trump, Diane Truitt told me at the same event—alpha males, she elaborated, like Bambi’s dad “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

 

***

 

Which brings us, as always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to endorse Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired politesse evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an apparently desperate effort to secure Trump’s affections, Cornyn tried to rename a highway after him. But Trump was not to be swayed. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

 

Paxton’s supporters can rattle off Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was slow to endorse Trump in 2016, and wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build the border wall. Worse, he voted with Democrats to pass a gun-control package after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. He is, in short, a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. Paxton’s advertising campaign against Cornyn has been ugly. This month, the attorney general put out an ad arguing that the incumbent senator supports “Muslim mass immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” a spokesperson for Paxton told me.)

 

Next week’s primary will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will probably give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will go up against James Talarico, a baby-faced state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign has centered on faith and economic populism. Talarico is, in some ways, eminently attackable: He has said, for example, that “God is nonbinary” and argued that opposition to abortion isn’t rooted in scripture. Paxton is already workshopping nicknames for him, including “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

 

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

 

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep kimchi, which is Korean for ‘shit,’” Jerry Patterson, a Republican, former Texas land commissioner, and Cornyn supporter, told me. (Patterson is evidently not a fermented-vegetable fan.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”

 

At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns and margaritas abound. “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity. At the Rancho, voters don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

By Robert Kagan

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

 

Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.

 

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

 

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

 

In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

 

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

 

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.

 

According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

 

Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?

 

Most likely, the new normal in the Persian Gulf will be chronic instability and frequent disruptions in shipping. That’s what happens when the hegemon cedes hegemony.

The BBC Has Fallen

By Becket Adams

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

If we’re going to spend the next five, ten, or 20 years investigating the radicalization of young men and women, we may as well also study the radicalization of the news media, because whatever happened to the BBC demands a thorough review.

 

For years now, the state-funded outlet has drifted further to the fringe left (“left” by U.K. standards; by U.S. standards, it’s Pravda with its pinkie out). But last week it outdid itself, publishing a feature that, through unrelenting emotional manipulation, tried to cast the Afghan men who sell their preadolescent daughters into slavery and child marriage as sympathetic characters, while portraying austerity-minded U.S. legislators as villains.

 

If that’s not a backward and radicalized way of looking at the world — choosing, out of sincere reverence for the church of multiculturalism, to blame Western conservatives for the matter of child brides rather than those arranging the marriages for profit — I don’t know what is.

 

“Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices,” the report’s original headline read.

 

The story opens with local color, painting a familiar tableau of poverty and desperation. “My children went to bed hungry three nights in a row,” one Afghan man told the BBC. “My wife was crying, so were my children. . . . I live in fear that my children will die of hunger.” The report cites United Nations figures showing that three in four Afghans cannot meet their basic needs and that 4.7 million are one step from famine. The story then swings back to on-the-ground accounts, quoting a choked-up father: “I got a call saying my children hadn’t eaten for two days. I felt like I should kill myself.”

 

For more than 500 words, readers are immersed in anecdotes about fights over food, desperation, tears, threats of self-harm, pity, and grief, all clearly designed to generate sympathy for these Afghan fathers.

 

It’s only after all this — roughly a third of the way through the 2,000-plus-word article — that the authors finally address the headline’s shocking claim. Only now do we learn that the men the BBC has spent more than 500 words asking us to grieve with are, in objective terms, evil. We learn that these men are not just “selling children,” but specifically selling their preadolescent daughters as domestic slaves and child brides.

 

If you feel contempt for the BBC for stringing you along, just wait. It gets worse.

 

The report continues:

 

Abdul Rashid Azimi takes us into his home and brings out two of his children — seven-year-old twins Roqia and Rohila. He holds them close, eager to explain why he’s making these unbearable choices.

 

“I’m willing to sell my daughters,” he weeps. “I’m poor, in debt and helpless.”

 

“I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread.’ But what can I give? Where is the work?”

 

Abdul tells us he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work. “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” he says.

 

He hugs Rohila, kissing her as he cries. “It breaks my heart, but it’s the only way.”

 

The BBC then tries to soften the horror of what the reader has just absorbed — the complete commodification of female children by their own fathers — by chalking it up to a mere difference in cultures:

 

The choice to sell daughters over sons is because, culturally, sons are widely seen as future breadwinners. In Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, this is even more pronounced.

 

Additionally, there is a tradition in which a marital gift is given to the family of the girl from the family of the boy during marriage.

 

In the universe of evil euphemisms, saying “marital gift” in place for “cash for little girls” has got to be right up there with “gender-affirming care” instead of “mutilation of prepubescent bodies”

 

Still, there is more.

 

One subject, Saeed Ahmad, self-pityingly recounts how he hawked his five-year-old daughter because he couldn’t pay her medical bills (she had appendicitis and a cyst in her liver). The little girl is sold to a relative and expected to marry one of his sons when she turns ten. The BBC none-too-subtly emphasizes that the buyer is a relative, as if to reassure readers: “It’s not as if she was sold to a total stranger.”

 

In reality, the fact that the buyer is a relative makes it even more grotesque. On top of being the type of people who buy and sell children — relatives, at that — the men profiled in the report are evidently also the type who refuse to help family members during a time of famine and destitution. How are we supposed to feel reassured about the child’s purchase when the buyer chose to bid on her rather than help cover her medical costs?

 

The obvious conclusion the reader is forced to confront — that these are bad men making evil choices — is probably why the story quickly pivots to its “real” villain: the Trump administration, which cut as much as $500 million in aid to Afghanistan in 2025. Later in the report, the BBC half-heartedly and begrudgingly concedes that the Taliban also bear some responsibility for the suffering of the Afghan people.

 

What happened to the BBC?

 

The story of Afghan suffering is obviously worth telling, but it calls for a style of difficult and unflattering journalism that the BBC is evidently unwilling to apply — either out of fear of blaspheming “diversity” at home or because of a sincere reverence for “multiculturalism.” A journalist unencumbered by progressivism’s slavish devotion to its articles of faith would have included the voices of everyone involved in the situation, not just the self-pitying Afghan fathers whom the BBC portrays as martyrs. And, boy, do we hear plenty from the fathers. We hear their thoughts; we read about their tears and their woes. We also hear a great deal from the BBC itself.

 

Yet, we hear nothing from the mothers. We hear nothing from the buyers. We certainly don’t hear anything from the tiny human beings who are being traded from man to man like cattle. Better journalists would have spoken not only with the fathers but with those who suffer the consequences of their choices. Better journalists would’ve also asked at least a few questions of the people who buy five-year-old girls, even if those people refused to comment.

 

There was a time when Englishmen such as General Charles Napier, William Sleeman, and Winston Churchill called evil by its name, with no thought of cowering behind the soft pillow of moral relativism or an all-consuming fetish for multiculturalism. The English once possessed the moral clarity and will to recognize and accept that they were ethically bound to force an end to barbaric practices such as sati and to meet the Thuggees with overwhelming force.

 

Now, British state-sponsored media cannot even bring itself to criticize the Afghan men who buy and sell preadolescent girls as slaves and brides.

 

The sun must set on everything, including an empire that at one time knew nothing but light. The BBC isn’t unique in its decay, it’s just a symptom of England’s overall rot.

 

It’s all profoundly sad. Then again, should we really be surprised that the organization that protected Jimmy Savile for so many years would also shed tears for the men who sell their children into bondage?

The Analogy Wars

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

For a decade, we’ve been awash in analogies between America in the Age of Trump and Germany in the two decades following World War I. The central feature of these analogies, of course, is that they inevitably lead to the likening of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. I’m so old that I remember when Ronald Reagan was the second coming of Hitler and George W. Bush was too, but the Trump-Hitler analogizers assure me that this time it’s different. Oh, how they long for the Republicans of an earlier era whom they or their predecessors in the Establishment slandered and reviled at the time! No, see, this time, these intellectually disingenuous folk insist, democracy really is at risk. This time it’s on the verge of being overtaken by a dictatorship.

 

Now, let me stipulate for the record that I believe Trump’s response to the 2020 election and his encouragement of the riot on January 6 are among the most sordid turns of any modern presidency. But all I see, through thick and thin, is that our system is holding the line against the efforts Trump and his people have made against the good working order of the Constitution—as it did, by the way, when Joe Biden and his people also used “emergency powers” and non-existent authority to suspend basic American rights during Covid. All this is exactly what did not happen in Germany, which barely had a system in place anyway after World War I because its form of government had been destroyed.

 

But lately, an analogy between the United States today and Germany 90 years ago is beginning to haunt me. In recent months I have read two extraordinary novels originally published many decades past, retranslated from the German, and rereleased in the past two years. Recovered from their obscurity, Effingers and The Oppermanns are among the most affecting works of literature I have ever read—in part because of the unexpected and unfortunate resonance they have with the present.

 

They were rediscovered, as their translators tell us in their introductions, because their portraits of rising authoritarianism in Germany reflect our moment. These translators, and their publishers, believe these books are warnings of Trump before Trump, and we must therefore read them in horror and either gird ourselves for a dark dystopian future or man the barricades to prevent that future.

 

But these translators and publishers have it backward, because Trump is exactly the point at which the analogy breaks down.

 

The two novels are about families who prosper in the 19th century due to entrepreneurial energy and zeal, at which point they must contend with modern forces and new ideas that separate them from their roots and tear them apart. The startling commonalities between the two books are the direct result of their reliance on a common literary model, Thomas Mann’s multigenerational family novel called Buddenbrooks. But there is a key difference between the rise and fall of the Buddenbrooks family and the fates of the Effingers and Oppermanns. Mann’s novel ends with the family in ruins in the 1880s due to self-inflicted wounds. The Effingers and Oppermanns must contend with an outside force determined to ruin them. For they are Jews, and the Nazis are coming.

 

The author of Effingers is Gabriele Tergit, and her novel was published in 1951 to very little notice. It is a highly detailed, extraordinarily realistic, and astonishingly clear-eyed account of three generations in the life of a family, and it concludes in 1948 with a description of the now-devastated Berlin, emptied of all Effingers and their kin, their homes blasted to pieces. No one is left to remember them at all, though there is one relative who survives—a daughter of the family who moved to Palestine in 1938.

 

A solitary Zionist girl is also a character in The Oppermanns, the work of Lion Feuchtwanger, one of Germany’s most famous and successful writers in the 1920s and 1930s. While Effingers is a small masterpiece, The Oppermanns is something larger, something grander, something far more uncanny. It’s like a work of prophecy. Feuchtwanger wrote it in real time, during the year 1933. He and Tergit both describe the tightening of the Nazi noose brilliantly, but Tergit was describing a past she had lived through and come out of on the other side. Feuchtwanger was chronicling in detail, as though to a daily diary, how the Nazis came to power, consolidated power, and systematically destroyed the institutions of power to replace them with new ones of their own.

 

And he showed terrifyingly uncanny foresight about where it would all end.

 

The book’s concluding section is about a man who is sent to a concentration camp. Remember, his book was written and concludes…in 1933.

 

The Oppermanns is a book about the Final Solution published a decade before the world would learn that it had been put into motion. From the quotidian practices of the nascent Nazi regime, Feuchtwanger saw how it would work and how it would all end, years before the Nazis themselves came up with the systematic plan for it.

 

There are three Oppermann brothers. One is a renowned doctor. One is a celebrated scholar and bon vivant. One runs the family furniture business that pays for their extraordinarily comfortable life. Over the course of the novel, the furniture business is slowly but surely squeezed and then taken over by an Aryan “partner.” The scholar is kicked out of his club, denied the right to publish, loses his home and his art collection, and is driven into exile. The doctor, who had created a revolutionary method of administering anesthesia, is driven from his hospital by a Nazi raid targeting 24 Jewish physicians.

 

The son of the businessman is targeted for abuse by a Nazi teacher at his high school for supposedly defaming a great German hero of the past. He is told to be reasonable, to recant, to apologize. These people just need to get their way, and there’s no harm and no foul if you try and give them a little of what they want. This is what happens, page after page, in both novels—the efforts to accommodate, make peace, find a workaround for the hatred. But there can be no workaround. There is no way to live as reasonable and civilized people when the people who have the truncheons and the guns and the power to write laws are determined to drive you low, drive you down, drive you out, and are happy to see you dead.

 

The schoolboy sees the future unfolding before him. And commits suicide.

 

Again, written in 1933.

 

So what here resonates so strongly for me, then? The analogy the book really offers is about the accommodation of evil—and in our day, not of those to the right to Trump, but of the liberal establishment to the unambiguous political violence being embraced by their fellow progressives. This is evidenced by the peculiar hunger to change the topic and ignore the ramifications of the assassinations of a young political speaker on a college campus and a health-care executive getting a cup of coffee on a New York City street. And that, in turn, is mirrored and matched by the mute impotence with which they are greeting the takeover of their ideological bubble by people who are actively scapegoating Jews and blaming us for the evils of the world.

 

It is a short distance from the unwillingness of House Democrats to censure an anti-Semitic congresswoman in 2019 to the apparently successful Democratic primary candidacies of an open supporter of the Hamas slaughter of Jews in the Michigan Senate race and a well-to-do WASP with a Nazi tattoo in Maine. The failure of one effort to cauterize a suppurating wound ends up seven years later with an entire party in a state of sepsis—one of the two major political parties in the most important country on earth.

 

The establishment, we now realize, has been standing by for decades. I’m talking, just to take one example, about the Harvard admissions officers who have seen to it—because the outcome could only have come about due to conscious design—that their undergraduate classes have no more than seven Jews out of every 100 students. They do not trumpet this, for after all, their consciences are clear, because they believe they are acting on behalf of worthier causes; admitting different kinds of people from different kinds of groupings is their mission. And what is unspoken, but known, is that Jews are trouble. No, not because Jews protest and make demands, but because they lead others, the ones they want to let in, to protest against Jews and make demands against Jews and blame the university for it all. And that’s very unpleasant. Best not allow Jews in; you keep the peace without them.

 

This is how it starts. This is what happens to the scholar in The Oppermanns. And the student in The Oppermanns. And the businessman in The Oppermanns. And the doctor in The Oppermanns. This is how they come for us.

 

And this is where the translators and saviors of The Oppermanns and Effingers have it exactly wrong. The analogy to 1933 is there, because the mob is there, because the Jew-haters are there, because the genociders are waiting for their chance. But miraculously—and I think I mean that literally, that “miraculously”—there is a force staying their hand.

 

And it isn’t the monster of their nightmares. It’s the president himself, who has empowered his Justice and Education Departments to fight for the rights of Jewish students on campus. It’s the president himself, who targeted the worst anti-Semite in Congress for defeat in an Arkansas primary. It’s the president himself, who has become the best friend the Jewish state has ever had.

 

He doesn’t like the restraints of the Constitution. He seems unbothered by people in his ambit using his power to enrich themselves. He wants to use the justice system to punish his enemies. All these things are bad—very bad. But he is fighting for and alongside and with Jews. So anyone who, after all this time, continues to look at Donald Trump and see Hitler—well, that person can go straight to hell.

Most Democrats Don’t Like Israel Any Longer. Period.

By James Kirchick

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

‘No more U.S. military…financial assistance by the taxpayers for Israel.” So insisted Rahm Emanuel on a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. The former congressman, White House chief of staff, and Chicago mayor elaborated that the Jewish state is “a country like all other allies of ours, Japan, South Korea, the Brits, the Germans,” in that it’s a “very wealthy nation” that can defend itself on its own. Hoodwinking the United States into launching an attack on Iran amounted to a “violation of a rule it had for 78 years” that “the United States should never spill any blood for the State of Israel’s security.”

 

Coming as they did from the most pro-Israel of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates, these comments represented yet another ominous sign of the party’s distancing itself from the Jewish state. They were also fundamentally dishonest. Unlike the treaty allies Emanuel mentioned, whom the U.S. is bound to defend by law, Israel does not have thousands of American troops stationed on its territory at a cost that can be weighed in not only treasure but potentially blood. If Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, or Germany were attacked, American soldiers would have to put their lives on the line. Israel defends itself by itself.

 

As a former ambassador to Tokyo, Emanuel is aware of this distinction. That he obliterated it to score a cheap political point illustrates the degree to which anti-Israel sentiment is becoming mainstream within the Democratic Party. Last year, 15 Democratic senators voted for a Bernie Sanders–sponsored resolution that would have blocked arms sales to Israel during wartime, a significantly more drastic measure than ending military assistance. When Sanders reintroduced the resolution this past April, that number jumped to 40.

 

Democrats keen to maintain at least a veneer of their pro-Israel bona fides insist that they bear no hostility toward Israel per se, just its right-wing leadership. “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has sacrificed Israel’s interests in the United States,” Amos Hochstein, an Israeli-born former adviser on energy issues to Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. Netanyahu has “destroyed” Israel’s bipartisan support, Hochstein averred, “because he has decided to become not just part of the Republican Party, but he’s decided to become just an appendage of Donald Trump.” Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, another potential Democratic presidential contender, uses similar language, saying that Netanyahu is “destroying the bipartisan nature in terms of support for Israel.” Rarely does a Democrat mention Israel these days without a perfunctory jab at the country’s leader.

 

As critical of Israel as elected Democrats have become, they are not nearly as hostile as their party’s base. According to an April Pew poll, 8 out of 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have a negative view of the Jewish state, a historic low. “I’ve never seen public opinion change as fast on any issue, including gay marriage,” Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, yet another presidential hopeful, recently said. As the House’s most desperate attention-seeker, he knows of what he speaks.

 

There has always been a portion of the far left that’s implacably hostile to Israel. What’s more concerning is the collapse in support among average Democratic voters. Until recently, American support for Israel was a bipartisan affair, with Democrats and liberals often outshining Republicans and conservatives in their affinity for the Jewish state. Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson were stalwart supporters of Israel; so too was Bill Clinton. Apportioning culpability for the rupture between Democrats and Israel is therefore a bit like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg.

 

One man looms larger over this question than any other. Besides David Ben-Gurion, no Israeli leader has been as consequential as Benjamin Netanyahu. The country’s longest-serving prime minister and one of the longest-serving democratically elected rulers in history, he’s a figure for whom the word “polarizing” does not even begin to do justice. To insist, therefore, that he shoulders no blame whatsoever for the deteriorating relationship between Israel and the American left, as many of his supporters in both countries do, is fatuous.

 

No matter how correct Netanyahu’s message may have been, his 2015 speech advocating against the Iran nuclear deal before the U.S. Congress, undertaken at the behest of the chamber’s Republican leadership against the express wishes of the Obama White House, was needlessly provocative. His exhortation about “Arabs voting in droves” during the Knesset election that year not only alienated Israel’s Democratic friends; it was demagoguery unworthy of the leader of a great democracy. Though Netanyahu apologized, the apology was clearly insincere, as demonstrated by a recent AI-generated campaign ad for his reelection in which opposition figures Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett peel off their faces to reveal themselves as Arab party leaders in disguise. His inability or unwillingness to crack down on settler violence against West Bank Palestinians—a problem exacerbated by his inclusion of two far-right ministers in his coalition—is shameful. His 2023 attempt to push controversial judicial reforms through the Knesset, which generated the largest protests in the country’s history, was opposed by Israelis across the political spectrum.

 

One does not have to be a left-winger to find any of these actions noxious. But Netanyahu does not exist in a vacuum.

 

To pinpoint the moment when the divorce between Israel and the American left became inevitable, one can go as far back as the Six-Day War. Literally overnight, the Jewish state went from being a plucky underdog beloved by socialists all over the world to a colonialist occupier of downtrodden subalterns. But the modern form of Israel-hatred that has overtaken wide swaths of the left did not kick into high gear until after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which Israel was simultaneously accused of orchestrating and inspiring others to orchestrate due to its brutal policies toward the Palestinians. A conspiratorial way of thinking prevalent in the Muslim world started to permeate Western political discourse, with fervent talk about the purported machinations of a maleficent clique of Jewish American government officials and intellectuals acting on behalf of the Israeli Likud party becoming de rigueur in left-wing publications and intellectual salons.

 

The conversation about Israel became increasingly absurd. Achievements that liberals lauded just a few years earlier were portrayed as cynical diversions from monstrous crimes. New concepts were invented out of whole cloth to delegitimize the state. Israel’s status as an oasis of tolerance for gay people in a region where homosexuals are tortured and murdered? “Pinkwashing” aimed at disguising its crimes against Palestinians. Its promotion of environmentally conscious technologies? “Greenwashing” to serve the same malignant purpose.

 

The election of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 signaled a significant shift in Democratic Party thinking. In the Middle East, Obama’s policies were premised on ideas that any Israeli government would have opposed. Reorienting America’s strategic posture away from its traditional allies in a way that emboldened the revolutionary regime in Iran, respecting rather than resisting Tehran’s “equities” in Syria and Lebanon, warming to the Muslim Brotherhood in places like Egypt and Qatar—these moves deeply unsettled not only Israel but the Sunni Muslim states as well.

 

Broader trends have also played a significant role in deepening the divide between Democrats and Israel. Since the end of the Cold War, American politics have become increasingly polarized ideologically. (See the dwindling existence of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.) The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exacerbated that polarization, with Israel increasingly coded as a “right-wing” cause. Along with Russia and Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Israel became a red state. Every Israel-friendly initiative Trump undertook encountered knee-jerk opposition from Democrats, from his moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem (a policy supported by every American president since 1995) to the assassination of Iranian terror-master Qassem Soleimani.

 

Then there’s the unavoidable fact that while Israel has become more conservative over the past quarter century, the Democratic Party has lurched left. In 1992, Labor and Meretz won a combined 44 percent of the Israeli vote. The Oslo Accords followed, a sovereign state was offered to the Palestinians, and they responded with the second intifada. Today, neither Labor nor Meretz exists, and the number of left-wing members of the Knesset can be counted on two hands. Across the Atlantic, the party of Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton now endorses the “Squad,” Zohran Mamdani, and the Totenkopf-branded Graham Platner. Courageous Democrats like Senator John Fetterman and Congressman Ritchie Torres find themselves alienated for defending the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. Despite saying that Netanyahu is “one of the worst leaders of all time,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was asked by Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential-campaign vetting team whether he was an agent of the Mossad.

 

To test the Democratic claim that Netanyahu is to blame for Israel’s unpopularity, one must try to imagine how a leader more palatable to Democrats might have acted over the past 25 years. Israeli conduct during the war in Gaza is correctly cited as the driving factor behind its fall in global support. But an overwhelming majority of the Israeli public backed the war, and a more centrist government would not have conducted it in a manner all that different from the way the current coalition did. None of the leading candidates for prime minister supports the immediate creation of a Palestinian state, a policy embraced by most of the world, which, in the meantime, recognizes an imaginary one. In large numbers, Democrats blame Israel for having duped the U.S. into war with Iran and for committing a “genocide” in Gaza, the affirmation of which is bound to be imposed as a litmus test on the party’s presidential candidates.

 

With any relationship, there often comes a time when one or both parties decide that it should end. Unfortunately, we seem not far from the point when most Democrats admit that their problem isn’t with Benjamin Netanyahu but Israel itself.

The Attention Whore Dilemma

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

I’m just gonna start typing and see where this takes us.

 

One of the reasons I think my brain is defective—it’s a long list—is I’ve always been mildly obsessed with homonyms. I think maybe it’s because in third grade we were all asked to make a list of words that sound identical but are spelled differently and I beat everybody. I mean I had the most words, not that I went around and bludgeoned my classmates. That came later. I don’t know if it was the rare moment of praise for academic distinction that made me interested in homonyms or if my interest occasioned the moment. Causality can be hard.

 

Regardless, I will often listen to the news and wander off like Joe Biden at a photo op thinking up homonymic phrases for what I just heard and then converting that into synonymous rephrasing. You probably need an example. What do you call heterosexuals dedicated to the bovine exhortations of prostitutes? The Straights of Whore Moos. 

 

Okay, enough of that.

 

Massie exodus.

 

But speaking of whores, attention whores that is, Rep. Thomas Massie lost his primary this week, which I consider an unalloyed good thing. Massie is a Jew-baiting troll. He’s good at it. In his concession speech he joked with his coprophagic grin that he had a hard time getting his opponent on the phone because he had to track him down in Tel Aviv. Get it? His opponent, Ed Gallrein, a Kentucky farmer and retired Navy SEAL, is a tool of the hummus-gobblers!

 

Last night I lost my temper at Carrie Prejean Boller, a former beauty pageant contestant who recently converted to Catholicism. Remember the Seinfeld episode when Tim Whatley converted to Judaism “for the jokes”? Apparently, Boller thinks that if you convert to Catholicism you get to spew and defend antisemitic crazy talk (she’s a huge Candace Owens fan).

 

Erika Kirk praised Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s campaign ads—which are pretty great—and Boller responded:

 

Why didn’t you say the same thing about your late husband’s favorite congressman? I’m starting to see now why they took Charlie out. They wanted to take out his voice and his influence. Charlie would have undoubtedly campaigned alongside Thomas Massie publicly and unapologetically. Your silence speaks volumes Erika. The more people watch this, the more obvious it becomes why Charlie had to be removed from the equation. Charlie would have been boldly campaigning alongside @RepThomasMassie against billionaire donor Miriam Adelson.

 

“They took Charlie out,” “Charlie had to be removed from the equation.”  The “they” here, of course, is the Joooooz.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre is often believed to have said, “the anti-Semite doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.” I can’t find any evidence he actually said this, but he did say in his essay “Anti-Semite and Jew”:

 

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

 

Look, I get that some of the anti-Israel conspiracy stuff is sincere. But a lot of it isn’t. I am sure Massie knows he was lying when he told Tucker Carlson that “everybody” in Congress—except for him—has an “AIPAC babysitter managing their votes.” I am also sure that Tucker knew this was a lie.

 

The point of these kinds of comments isn’t just to dogwhistle to antisemites and “anti-Zionists.” It’s to force Jews to complain about the obvious antisemitism, which is the rhetorical equivalent of asking them to turn out their pockets.

 

In response to my criticism of Boller, a bunch of folks (some surely bots) insisted that it’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel. Um, okay. But maybe it’s antisemitic to insinuate—without any evidence, I mean literally none—that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk to keep him from campaigning for Massie (it’s also incredibly, seismically, stupid). To be clear, the outlandish claims aren’t necessarily antisemitic, but the desired result—make the Jews squirm, complain, and deny—is rooted in antisemitism. If I went around claiming that Ireland is a nation of drunk, bog-dwelling pederasts, I am sure that Irish-Americans would be rightly offended. If I dismissed their complaints by insisting that being critical of Ireland isn’t anti-Hibernian, few people would buy it.

 

A lot of people said, reasonably, that I shouldn’t give Boller the attention she craves. The dilemma that the attention whores present is that if you don’t complain, the lies don’t merely take deeper root, the whores are encouraged to say ever grosser nonsense to get the reactions they want.

 

Before Israel was founded, and for a few decades after, it was commonplace to insinuate—or declare!—that Catholics couldn’t be trusted because they had “dual loyalties.” The platform of the Know Nothing “American Party” proclaimed that “Americans must rule America,” and that no one should hold office if they have “any allegiance or obligation of any description to any foreign prince, potentate or power.” You can defend that text all you like, but everyone knew they meant the insidious forces of Popery. In 1960, Norman Vincent Peale convened a conference of fellow Protestant clergy at which Peale warned that “Our American culture is at stake. I don’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.” What, specifically, was the threat to our culture? A Catholic president. “It is inconceivable that a Roman Catholic president would not be under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church to accede to its policies with respect to foreign interests,” he said. At Peale’s conference, the executive editor of Christianity Today warned that Catholicism was akin to communism. Another pastor, Harold J. Ockenga, said that John F. Kennedy was to Catholicism what Nikita Khrushchev was to communism. Each was “a captive of a system.”

 

That was gross. And I’m glad that Christians—even of the Christian-lite variety of Peale’s prosperity gospel—have largely shed that nonsense. But the animating passion that drove that garbage has been sublimated to Israel and Jews.

 

Back on the whores.

 

Donald Trump endorsed Ken Paxton for Senate this week. Senate Republicans are furious. They spent $90 million in the GOP primary in support of the incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, who would have almost surely defeated Democrat James Talarico. Now, in order to save a safe seat, Republicans will have to spend at least that much all over again on a guy none of them want to serve with, never mind defend. But Trump doesn’t like Cornyn and he apparently thinks Paxton would win the primary, and he loves to endorse winners in primaries.

 

The problem is that while his endorsements in primaries are very powerful, they can be an albatross, or simply ineffective, in general elections (see Mike Warren’s excellent piece on this point). Just ask Sen. Herschel Walker. The people for whom Trump’s endorsement matters a great deal are a shrinking minority in the broader electorate. Actually, I should rephrase that. The people for whom Trump’s endorsement matters as a positive thing is a shrinking minority. It’s quite possible that the number of people who think his endorsement is a negative thing is growing.

 

Paxton is easily one of the most obviously corrupt politicians not currently residing in the White House. If he gets the nomination, the corruption narrative already deservedly plaguing the White House will metastasize to the broader GOP. Trump doesn’t seem to care much, and any concerns in that regard are outweighed by the satisfaction he derives from treating the GOP like the chained up “gimp” from Pulp Fiction. Speaking of Caligulan excess, it’s probably not true that Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate, but he probably did threaten to do it because he loved to mock the aristocratic pretensions of the senate. Paxton is a different kind of attention whore, but he’s the kind Trump appreciates, because they share a disdain for anything that might pass for republican virtue. You do whatever you can get away with that serves your own purposes and rejoice at watching normies turn out their pockets to defend it. That’s part of the point of Trump’s slush fund scheme. It’s not the main point, but one of the joys of his brazenness is watching Republicans eat the sh-t sandwiches he serves them.

 

And most of them do it, with big bites. South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said yesterday that the January 6 riot was a “made up issue,” and “a staged, uh, thing from day 1.” Back on January 6, 2021, he had different things to say about the rioters who chanted “hang Mike Pence.” But that’s before Trump added heaping bowls of fecal fare to the menu.

 

The overriding political lesson, for me at least, of the last decade is that civilization is more fragile than I once took for granted. That was the point of my last book, after all. I’m not a catastrophist; indeed I think the greatest threat to civilization is, ironically, catastrophism. But when I see people like Norman embrace lies for political convenience, when I see hordes of whores play these games with conspiracies and bigotry for fun and profit, I appreciate the fragility of decency and the institutions that depend on a decent respect for the truth.

 

It almost makes me think Sartre was right.

 

I am not a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre’s. He was wrong about so many things: communism, Maoism, anticolonial violence, the Munich massacre, even metaphysics. Sartre was an existentialist, believing that “being precedes essence.” This is the idea that there is no objective moral truth outside us. There’s no metaphysical, theological, or moral backstop that will prevent us from going off the rails. He famously said, “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be.”

 

I don’t think we’re about to embrace fascism, because say what you will about the tenets of fascism, at least it’s an ethos. But I do think we’re flirting with the idea that having an ethos at all is for suckers.

Hyperextended

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

I’m excited about our new regime-change operation in Cuba, mostly as a matter of morbid curiosity.

 

Specifically, I’m intrigued to see what happens to an unpopular president’s support when he starts an unpopular war that no one saw coming while struggling to resolve another unpopular war he started that no one saw coming.

 

Having grown bored with the stalemate in Iran, a “frustrated” Donald Trump reportedly complained to advisers this month that the White House’s plan to squeeze Havana into submission is progressing too slowly. He and his team have decided to move things along by dusting off the Venezuela playbook—indicting the enemy’s leader on federal criminal charges as a pretext to remove him, positioning naval assets off its coast to warn its leaders against resisting, and asking everyone to believe that a banana republic that can’t feed its people is a threat to the United States grave enough to warrant immediate military action.

 

That’s going to take a lot of persuasion. Per YouGov, Americans currently split 15-64 on whether the U.S. should go to war with Cuba, with 21 percent undecided. (Among those who take a view one way or the other, 81 percent are opposed.) Meanwhile, disapproval of the Iran War stands at 60 percent, and disapproval of Trump’s job performance is knocking on the door of 60.

 

Rarely, if ever, has America had a president whose own policy priorities have diverged so sharply from those of his constituents, and it’s certainly never had one who cared less about that divergence. That’s why I’m excited: The Cuba takeover will amount to a novel political experiment to gauge how voters react to a democratic leader all but formally notifying them that their opinion no longer matters to him.

 

Although, now that I think about it, I suppose he’s already given that notice.

 

I’m also excited to see the president and his deputies try to explain the dire risk that Cuba allegedly poses to the U.S. That wasn’t hard with Iran given the regime’s nuclear ambitions and decades of menacing its American-allied neighbors; it will be more challenging with respect to the desiccated corpse of Castroism. Stephen Miller tried in an interview this week, warning Fox News viewers that “Cuba, positioned just a 45-minute flight from American shores, has been a staging ground for America's adversaries for decades.” But which adversaries?

 

Russia and China? I’m sorry to have to tell you, but postliberals don’t feel adversarial toward either. And even if the president does, his willingness to accommodate them on their own expansionist priorities should ensure that they’ll make no trouble for him in Cuba.

 

That’s what a “spheres of influence” worldview is all about.

 

There’s one more interesting facet to Trump starting a war with Havana before our war with Tehran is done. It’s the latest confirmation that no matter how much political trouble he encounters from overextending himself, he continues to do it.

 

Battle royal.

 

You would think he might have learned after last year’s “Liberation Day” debacle.

 

Moving forward with tariffs amid an affordability crisis continues to be the biggest mistake of his presidency, but the public might have tolerated levies imposed specifically on nations that have gobbled up American manufacturing (i.e., China). That’s not what Trump did. He tariffed everyone—well, almost everyone—and then had to hit “pause” just a week later after bond markets began to wobble.

 

He overextended himself. Instead of picking a fight whose damage he might have been able to contain, he started a battle royal and was caught off guard by the backlash.

 

The same thing happened recently with Congress.

 

Republicans have narrow majorities in each chamber—53-47 in the Senate and 218-215 in the House, tricky business even for a man who wields cultlike control over his party. Moving legislation with majorities as thin as those requires a deft touch politically. That means not attacking lawmakers whose support you need and not making their lives harder by thrusting them into needless new political controversies.

 

Trump did the opposite. He turned Bill Cassidy into a lame duck who no longer owes him anything, then promptly did the same to John Cornyn. (Assuming Cornyn loses next week’s primary runoff in Texas, that is, which is likely.) And then, with Senate Republicans already seething, he dropped two flaming bags of dog sh-t on their porch, launching a new taxpayer-funded slush fund for his criminal cronies and demanding that lawmakers give him $1 billion for a ballroom while voters are screaming about the cost of living.

 

He overextended himself. He might have gotten away with any one of those provocations, but insisting on a battle royal came back to bite him again. The ballroom funding now appears to be dead, and the slush fund is in deep trouble, with one senator whispering to Punchbowl News, “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.” Things are so bad in the House that GOP leaders had to cancel a war powers vote on the Iran conflict yesterday because Democrats were poised to win it with help from disgruntled moderate Republicans.

 

Now here we are with the president about to overextend himself again, starting a new war before the last one has finished. Although, to be fair, he’s trying hard to wrap things up in Iran before throwing a punch at Cuba.

 

Maybe too hard, it turns out.

 

An overextended military.

 

On Wednesday Axios reported on a phone call between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu that allegedly left the Israeli prime minister with his “hair on fire.”

 

Details are thin, but the gist of the disagreement is clear. The president wants to sign a deal with the regime that would end the war and “launch a 30-day period of negotiations on issues like Iran's nuclear program and opening of the Strait of Hormuz,” according to the outlet. Netanyahu “wants to resume the war to further degrade Iran's military capabilities and weaken the regime by destroying its critical infrastructure.”

 

Israel’s leader sees what’s coming. The United States is poised to accept a strategic defeat by walking away from the conflict, Robert Kagan explains in a new piece for The Atlantic, and that strategic defeat will empower Iran while isolating Israel.

 

As usual, it comes down to oil. The White House continues to say that Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is unacceptable, but the rest of the world is moving on: Iran and Oman are apparently discussing new “fees” they intend to extract from tankers transiting the strait and, per Kagan, several nations that import oil through the channel are negotiating with the Iranians to allow safe passage for their fleets. As Tehran cements its control over global oil commerce, nations large and small will be forced to make nice with its leadership; sanctions on the regime will inevitably be lifted, and further Israeli attempts to dislodge it will be angrily opposed.

 

If a deal to end the war causes a rift between the U.S. and Israel, the Jewish state might come out of this with no friends left at all.

 

The president might answer all that by claiming that he’s trying to end the war because America can’t afford to let it continue—and, for once, he might be right. It’s not just a matter of oil shocks causing economic pain for Americans and political pain for him, either.

 

It’s that he’s overextended himself militarily.

 

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that “the U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iran than Israeli forces used themselves.” That problem will get worse if the war resumes, allegedly, because some of Israel’s interceptor batteries are currently down for maintenance. America would need to pick up the slack until they’re back online.

 

The U.S. had already spent down its supply of all sorts of air munitions in this war, as noted here recently, and that deficit will take defense manufacturers “years” to erase. Not only has that affected our ability to fight on effectively against Iran, it’s affecting our ability to deter China: The acting secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, told senators Thursday that the Pentagon is pausing arms sales to Taiwan “to make sure we have the munitions we need for [Operation] Epic Fury.” That could be a lie manufactured to conceal some sort of corrupt bargain with Beijing—but given how worried America’s allies in the Far East have been about the U.S. diverting assets to the Middle East to battle the Iranians, it could also be the painful truth.

 

The president overextended the armed forces by starting a war that he assumed would be a cakewalk and for which he had no contingency plan if it wasn’t. He’s at risk of overextending them further by starting a new war with Cuba before peace with Tehran has been nailed down. We’re on the brink of another battle royal. And don’t look now, but Greenland also might be about to rejoin the fray.

 

Why does Trump do it?

 

The great man.

 

I don’t think there’s any mystery to it. Almost the opposite: When, throughout history, have megalomaniacs trusted with immense power not eagerly bitten off more than they can chew?

 

Last month, citing those in a position to know, The Atlantic alleged that Trump was no longer comparing himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in private conversation as often as he used to. Being one of America’s greatest presidents has become too modest for his ambition, it turns out; he’s begun to view himself as a world-historical figure in the mold of Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great.

 

All of whom were emperors and whose word was law, coincidentally.

 

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” a source told the magazine. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.” His deputies and allies in Congress might worry about where that leads, “but for Trump, the costs have been outweighed by what he views as the opportunity before him, a chance to transform the world in a manner that few historical figures have ever even approached.”

 

He’s in an “I don’t give a f—” mood, another source explained to The Atlantic for the piece, titled “The YOLO Presidency.” Which sounds familiar.

 

Isn’t that what all of this hyperextension boils down to? The president’s hubris about his own alleged invincibility is so overweening that not even hard experience has been able to contain it. Anger at home and abroad over his trade war failed to put him off using tariffs as coercive leverage to settle petty grudges. Thin congressional majorities and terrible midterm polling failed to deter him from declaring jihad on GOP Senate incumbents and saddling them with grotesque excesses like the ballroom and the slush fund.

 

When you regard yourself as the most powerful person to ever live, when you imagine the only obstacle to getting your way is your own restraint in insisting upon it, the idea of being “overextended” must be unfathomable. You won’t learn your lesson about it because you literally can’t.

 

That’s how we ended up in this Strait of Hormuz mess, not surprisingly. Despite being warned that Iran was no Venezuela, “Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable, and that he had a chance to topple Tehran’s theocracy, a prize that had eluded his predecessors,” another piece in The Atlantic recently recounted. “He was redrawing the world’s maps and expected a victory to come in days, a week or two at most.” He didn’t need a strategy, or so he thought. He had dominance instead.

 

I won’t insult the intelligence of learned Dispatch subscribers by explaining why it’s dangerous that the United States is led by someone with messianic delusions of grandeur, who believes there’s no prize he can’t have if he’s ruthless enough about claiming it. But I will say this, to return to a point I made at the start: For probably the first time in its history, this country is now under the authority of someone whose interests are completely divorced from the interests of the people he ostensibly serves.

 

That’s not to say those interests don’t overlap. They do in some cases: The president wants to limit illegal immigration at the border, for instance, and so do most of his constituents. When I say that they’re divorced, what I mean is that how Trump governs is no longer being influenced in any meaningful way by what Americans want. From petty matters like the ballroom and the slush fund to grand initiatives like attacking Iran and subjugating Cuba, everything he’s doing—and will do going forward—is aimed at enhancing his own sense of historical stature, not accomplishing popular priorities.

 

The United States is still nominally a democracy in the sense that it continues to hold elections. (I think.) But insofar as democracy is a mechanism to ensure that elected representatives strive to implement the will of their constituents, it no longer is. The most powerful official in the country could not make it any clearer, especially after this week, that he’s using his power to serve his own interests, not Americans’. If that means that the United States ends up overextended in all sorts of ruinous ways as he chases his dreams, that’s your problem, not his.

 

It was always going to end this way. Nothing was clearer when the president ran again for office in 2024 that his second term would fundamentally be about him, not about “making America great” or whatever jingo right-wingers are using now to reconcile themselves to fascism. He was candid about it on the trail, too: The name of the game in Trump 2.0 would be “retribution,” he warned us, and he’s kept his word. The abiding horror of his second term is that the con he pulled during his first about being a “public servant” was completely exposed by how that term ended—and Americans reelected him anyway. They opted for a president whom they had every reason to know would put his interests above their own, always. They chose overextension.

 

And so, while I hate to end two newsletters in a row on the same point about what Americans deserve, sometimes it can’t be avoided. Enjoy the billions of dollars in new debt we’re about to be saddled with to fund Cuba’s transformation into some sort of Trumpist Riviera for rich Floridians. I know I will.