America’s Lost Warfighting Doctrine

By Emma Isabella Sage & Charles Bauman

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran in February, they showcased the most expensive military force ever assembled. The cost of America’s opening salvoes alone may have exceeded Iran’s total defense expenditure in 2025. With its obvious firepower superiority and the swift decapitation of Iran’s leadership, the campaign was—as the White House continues to insist—a success by conventional measures of military performance.

 

It was also precisely the inverse of how the American military was supposed to be fighting by 2026.

 

For nearly a decade, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office has been developing the concept of mosaic warfare, a doctrine intended to replace the U.S. military’s reliance on a few expensive, highly complex platforms with vast networks of cheap, interchangeable systems coordinated in real time by artificial intelligence. The Pentagon published the concept openly, and there were few real detractors—the only question was how quickly and extensively to implement it.

 

Yet in February, when America went to war, it reached for the same tools as before. The mosaic doctrine was nowhere to be found—except, perhaps, in the adversary’s warfighting strategy.

 

Iran has spent the last two decades building something much closer to mosaic warfare. Meanwhile, America’s long-standing failure to translate strategic concepts into operational doctrine, weapons procurement, and policymaker decisions may both doom and outlive this conflict.

 

The rise and plateau of mosaic warfare.

 

The phrase “mosaic warfare” was coined in 2017 by Tom Burns, then-director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, and his deputy Dan Patt. They were attempting to design the ideal solution to a well-known problem in defense planning: American reliance on what the Pentagon calls “exquisite” platforms. These systems (like the F-35 fighter jet, the Ford-class aircraft carrier, and the B-21 stealth bomber) are extraordinarily capable, ruinously expensive, and impossible to produce at scale. Those lost in combat cannot be meaningfully replaced within the timeframe of the conflict.

 

The mosaic concept is the inverse. Burns and Patt argued that the future of warfare looks less like a chess set of irreplaceable pieces and more like a tile mosaic with hundreds of cheap, interchangeable components that could be rearranged in real time to suit mission requirements. For instance, where an F-35 attempts to fuse sensing, command, and weapons systems into a single, multimillion-dollar airframe, the mosaic doctrine would see those functions scattered across many lower-cost components manufactured at scale, knitted together by AI.

 

Burns and Patt foresaw a shift from “kill chains” to “kill webs”: a battlefield in which thousands of low-cost components could be combined and recombined in ways no adversary could fully degrade, making complexity a competitive advantage. The individual pieces were designed to be expendable, removing individual points of failure and rendering the network as a whole virtually impossible to defeat. Commanders would be empowered to assemble and substitute custom force packages from a long list of manned and unmanned options. DARPA argued that operationalization could begin immediately by linking existing systems in new ways.

 

Nearly a decade on, almost no progress has been made.

 

The Iranian approach.

 

Iran was already working on a defensive corollary of mosaic warfare before DARPA’s strategy ever appeared in print. In 2005, the then-commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced what Tehran calls defā'-e mozā'iki—mosaic defense. The strategy emerged from careful study of American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where decapitation strikes against centralized regimes had collapsed enemy command structures within days. Tehran drew the obvious lesson: Any state hoping to survive a confrontation with the United States needed to render decapitation strategically meaningless.

 

The Iranian solution, implemented in 2008, restructured the IRGC into 31 semi-autonomous provincial commands, each with its own headquarters, intelligence apparatus, weapons stockpile, and predelegated authority to act if Tehran were attacked. The system included a so-called “fourth successor” protocol—a series of preselected replacements for every senior position—designed to ensure no loss of leadership could halt operations. Its choice of weaponry is similarly decentralized, relying heavily on small, cheap and fast options, such as the “mosquito fleet” currently holding up traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

 

When the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior IRGC commanders in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, mosaic defense worked exactly as designed. Soon after the fighting began, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that provincial commands had begun operating under standing instructions.

 

Iran’s wartime strategy attempts to leverage the cost differential between the weapons of each side. Cheap drone and short-range missile barrages were launched to deplete THAAD and Patriot interceptors that cost millions of dollars apiece. Iran is successfully imposing precisely the same economic burden that mosaic warfare was designed to, and crowing about it in its own information operations and those of its allies.

 

The knowledge transmission problem.

 

How is it that the U.S. came to fight a war using exactly the platforms mosaic warfare was meant to replace, against an adversary whose doctrine was designed to not only counter but exploit this approach?

 

The fact is that DARPA’s doctrine never made it from Arlington to the battlefield. The agency appears to have done its job—to develop innovative concepts and hand them off—but the process broke down during the implementation phase. Mosaic warfare is an unusually good test of the American military innovation pipeline because of the well-documented and publicly known nature of the concept’s development and execution, and the stark opportunity to see it pitted against the execution of an adversary’s defensive variation of the doctrine.

 

The exquisite platforms may have performed as advertised, but the policymakers didn’t, hampered as they have been by intransigence and inertia. In the complex military planning and procurement ecosystem, it’s impossible to identify a single point of failure, but it is undeniable that a failure has occurred.

 

Perhaps the most inexcusable aspect of the situation is the yes-man culture that has been created around the commander in chief, leading Trump’s briefings to be anchored by daily two-minute strike montages of Iranian targets being destroyed. While this is as close to a confirmation-bias loop as one could ask for, and actively suppresses strategic reassessment, it is not the only way that strategic logic appears compromised. The focus on decapitation made the government appear blind to the Iranian regime’s long-standing efforts to fortify itself against such attacks. The Pentagon said it had achieved a 90 percent reduction in centralized Iranian missile fire within 10 days of the conflict’s start, but Iran kept fighting anyway, because its doctrine assumed centralized command would be lost.

 

The question of what victory looks like under this paradigm of diffuse warfare becomes more pressing by the day. The words of Henry Kissinger in the aftermath of the Vietnam War ring ever louder:

 

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

 

The Iran conflict may not be properly classified as a guerrilla war, but it is most certainly an asymmetrical one. It appears that the lessons learned in America’s long series of asymmetrical conflicts have not yet rendered a useful, tangible battlefield approach. The unsettling implication is that the same dynamic may continue to be exploited in any future conflict—including one against an adversary as capable and well-armed as China. The plan for such a war should be undergoing battle-testing in Iran right now, but it remains trapped in a set of policy papers.

The Easiest Test You’ve Ever Failed

By Seth Mandel

Monday, June 01, 2026

 

Democratic political operatives and intellectuals should, in theory, thank their lucky stars for the appearance of Graham Platner.

 

For there should have been no easier way on earth to prove that they could still put country over party, that they hadn’t gotten high on their own supply of negative partisanship, than to have the most easily condemnable candidate of the entire election cycle be a Democrat and to then condemn him.

 

So I am genuinely baffled watching people not only fail to denounce Graham Platner but become a sort of rapid-response team for an obviously unfit Senate candidate.

 

What’s more, Platner is running against Susan Collins, a moderate Republican who voted to convict Donald Trump. For any political animal seeking to retain a shred of respectability, Platner is manna from heaven. Rejecting him, with no obligation even to endorse his Republican opponent, is the easiest thing you will ever be asked to do. But you can’t seem to do it.

 

It’s not that I don’t understand what is happening. Having watched a similar process take place within the GOP, the entire political world knows exactly what it’s seeing: The base sees every character flaw in a candidate as a feature not a bug; defeating the other party becomes a matter of life and death and therefore justifies any behavior; the party’s institutions get in line.

 

All of it is inexcusable but uncomplicated to decode.

 

And so progressives have made Platner the hero of the hour, a living idol and a human litmus test. Je suis Platner, they seem desperate to cry out. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ floor leader in the upper chamber, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jointly announced they’ll ensure Platner has all necessary resources to bring his Totenkopf to the halls of the Senate. And professional ex-Republicans fall all over themselves to prove their loyalty to their new party by saturating the punditry with anti-anti-Platnerism whose irony is apparently lost on them.

 

But the truly wild part of all of this is that rejecting Platner was supposed to be the absolute least that was expected of them. Platner wasn’t supposed to be the “country over party” test because it was too easy to mean anything. You weren’t supposed to deserve credit for rejecting Nazi iconography.

 

This weekend’s latest additions to Platner’s long list of scandals is that he was sexting up to a dozen women while married and had an active account on a singles’ site with a reported reputation for lax age-limit gatekeeping.

 

To add this to what we already know—the Nazi tattoo, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the racist postings, the cheering of the killing of U.S. soldiers, the fascination with violence, and all of the dishonesty about it—is to realize just how insane the conversation has become. Ideally, a person who criticizes Platner would prove nothing except that they are still human. Yet somehow we got to a point at which Platner’s denunciators truly do deserve praise because Democrats seek the political destruction of these dissenters. When Rep. Jake Auchincloss had the temerity to say the Nazi stuff was disqualifying, it was Auchincloss who was put on the defensive and made to explain himself.

 

Democrats have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Republican abuse of power, but it turns out they are far more afraid of what the progressive left is capable of once in power. That, at least, is the clear message they are broadcasting.

 

And so we are left begging for crumbs of decency. Yes, we say, it is brave to denounce Platner. And it is—because his party has made it so.

From Smash to Grab

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

I’m old enough to remember when Bernie Sanders proposed a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

 

The Hill, March 25, 2026:

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) plan to introduce legislation that would bar construction of all new data centers until “strong national safeguards are in place.”

 

The pair announced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act on Wednesday, which aims to halt construction of AI infrastructure until lawmakers enact measures requiring government reviews of AI products, preventing mass job displacement and limiting increases in consumer electricity prices.

 

Now, however, there is this. Sanders, writing in the New York Times:

 

I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.

 

Yes, expropriation.

 

At a quick glance, these two proposals seem to contradict each other. The moratorium, self-evidently enough, is designed to slow down the roll-out of hyperscale data centers and, by extension, AI.

 

There may be cases where a data center is inappropriate for a certain site. But that is something to be sorted out on a local basis, not by a blanket, top-down moratorium, especially when that moratorium is “about” far more than ensuring, say, that new data centers place an undue burden on electricity bills or are too noisy or too bright for their planned location or (and this is not generally an issue that stands up to scrutiny) threaten water supplies.

 

Thus, the areas in which Sanders would like to see “guardrails” established before the lifting of his moratorium include measures to ensure “the economic gains of AI and robotics will benefit workers, not just the wealthy owners of Big Tech.” That looks like an invitation to a debate that could last years, which may well be the point.

 

In a press release explaining his proposed moratorium, Sanders also argued:

 

This bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.

 

The restrictions on exports are, if imposed intelligently, fine, but Sanders’s moratorium will not stop a “global race” to develop ever more advanced AI. It will merely concede it to China. We don’t know yet what the effects of AI on jobs will be, but, unless we move forward with it, we will not discover what jobs it can create here. But we will find out what how many jobs the U.S. will lose to AI-powered foreign competition.

 

As for ensuring that the U.S. does not develop an AI that “destroys the planet,” let’s just say that unilateral disarmament is highly unlikely to avoid the development (or attempt to develop) such lethal AI elsewhere. Best guess: it will merely ensure that if such AI is ever developed it will be by the Beijing regime, and that the U.S. will have no response.

 

Sanders’s proposed expropriation is not aimed at enriching the taxpayer (an aim somewhat difficult to reconcile with his moratorium), but it does look a lot like an alternative route to gumming up the development of AI in the U.S.

 

He writes:

 

The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.

 

It would take up an immense amount of space to list the ways in which big government could abuse that power. That its involvement would also slow down the development of AI would be inevitable.

 

The mere existence of such a proposal (and indeed the moratorium) is likely to scare off capital and talent from a technology that may hand the U.S. immense technological and geopolitical advantages. Why do that?

 

Moreover, some of that talent and capital could easily end up elsewhere. Doors would open in Beijing.

 

Imagine if Thomas Edison or Henry Ford had been obliged to contend with a Sanders. Or picture the moment when, sensing an approaching storm, Benjamin Franklin makes his big move only to be confronted by a time-traveling Sanders and told to step away from the kite.

Scott Pelley Is Ridiculous in All the Usual Ways

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

 

Is there a bigger chasm anywhere in American life than the one that separates the way in which mainstream journalists perceive themselves and the way in which mainstream journalists are perceived by everyone else?

 

Here’s Scott Pelley, formerly of CBS’s 60 Minutes, complaining about being fired for cause:

 

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

 

Where to start? First off, if Pelley cared about his job that much, he probably shouldn’t have behaved as unprofessionally as he did when he met his new boss, Nick Bilton. As the Washington Post reports, “Pelley laid into Bilton during a Monday morning ‘60 Minutes’ meeting, when he questioned Bilton’s qualifications” in front of a host of other staff. During that meeting, Pelley also insisted that Bari Weiss, his other boss, “has no qualifications for her job,” and, later, when Bilton organized a private meeting, Pelley continued in the same vein. In his letter firing Pelley, Bilton wrote that Pelley had

 

rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation — demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.

 

Which . . . well, yeah. There is simply no circumstance in which an employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed. A lot of journalists in this country seem to believe that they belong to an elect class to which the normal rules do not apply. They do not. Journalists are protected by the First Amendment, yes, but they are not more protected than anyone else, and nor do those protections afford them the right to behave like jerks in the workplace. CBS is a private company. It is not, at root, any different than Unilever or Ford or Home Depot. Scott Pelley attacked his boss in public and private. Scott Pelley was fired. Film at 11.

 

Perhaps Pelley believed that he was indispensable? Certainly, his rhetoric suggests as much. But that rhetoric is ridiculous, isn’t it? “I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” he claimed yesterday. “I have been in combat in Iraq”!

 

Oh come on. We all know what those words imply, and what they imply is untrue. If I were to tell people that I’d been “in combat” in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d know full well what I was conveying, and I’d expect to be mocked — or worse — in return. Pelley has visited Iraq and Afghanistan. He may even have been in danger in those places. But he was not “in combat.”

 

This is not pedantry. As a man of words, Pelley ought to be aware of how he sounds. And, no doubt, he is. In recent years, quite a lot of journalists have taken to portraying themselves in this manner — as firefighters or resistance fighters or soldiers for a noble cause. In almost every case — almost; there are a few exceptions — this is preposterous. Scott Pelley is a TV announcer. He works in an office, and, occasionally, in a studio. His description of his visits to Ukraine is a little less delusional — “I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast” — but it’s still silly, insofar as it suggests that we should all be grateful to him for his service. 60 Minutes is . . . fine. But Pelley is hardly Ernie Pyle. He provided light-to-medium entertainment, to be consumed by accident between the afternoon NFL games and Sunday Night Football, and he was paid $7 million a year for it. Thanks?

 

One must also wonder what the “therefore” is supposed to be in that sentence: “I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast” . . . therefore I am allowed to berate my boss in front of my colleagues and face no consequences? What, precisely, is Pelley’s claim? He made his decision. Now he must deal with the fallout.

The Monsters Come for Their Creators

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

Democrats can blame themselves for tolerating a species of “anti-Zionism” so radical that their voters are now willing to overlook a few contributions of material support to al-Qaeda.

 

The Democratic primary voters in New Jersey’s twelfth congressional district elected last night to back Adam Hamawy, a former U.S. Army combat surgeon who once volunteered in Bosnia with a group that was subsequently exposed as a “front” for the terrorist outfit that executed the 9/11 attacks. That was after Hamawy served as a witness for the defense in the trial of the “Blind Sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

 

Lest anyone conclude that Hamawy’s dalliance with Islamist terrorism was a youthful indiscretion, he defended Rahman in a recent interview with the New York Times even as he condemned “violent rhetoric and actions.”

 

“He wasn’t preaching death and destruction all the time,” Hamawy said of Rahman. “He had certain views that he spoke in certain forums, but that’s not what he did every single day.” It’s nice to know that the man partly responsible for six American deaths also had other interests.

 

Hamawy defeated his more conventional Democratic opponents with the backing of progressive firebrands like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — an endorsement he earned through his consistent opposition to the “genocide,” among his other far-left views. Democratic establishmentarians withheld their support for Hamawy, but that didn’t matter to the voters in New Jersey’s twelfth district. They knew who the true radical in the race was, and Democrats can chalk Hamawy’s victory up to their conspicuous toleration for a level of hostility towards Israel that often verges on the monomaniacal.

 

The party’s institutionalists cloyingly sought the favor of the mobs who never had any love for Democratic institutionalists (indeed, they tore at the security fencing and attacked the police who separated them from the Democratic lawmakers they despised). All the while, the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz bent over backward to lend moral authority to their tormentors. Hamawy’s likely election to Congress in November is a result of that calculus. Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination to the U.S. Senate in Michigan, after having agonized over how to handle the apparently somber occasion of Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Ali Khameni’s death, may be another.

 

The Democratic Party may regret unleashing the forces that are contributing to the rise of radical Islamist elements, but its leaders lack the spine to reassert their control over the party’s destiny.

 

Similarly, Republican voters in Iowa, of all places, put an end to the formerly unbroken series of victories enjoyed by figures who earned Donald Trump’s endorsement.

 

By the narrowest of margins, outsider businessman Zach Lahn defeated longtime Republican Congressman Randy Feenstra in the race for the Hawkeye State’s Republican gubernatorial nomination. It was a significant upset and a rare defeat for a candidate who portrayed himself as one of the president’s most loyal supporters.

 

The press is attributing Lahn’s victory to his backing by the “political arm of the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement.” As a candidate, Lahn pledged to “break up” the “monopolies” run by “big ag cartels” — presumably by adopting Elizabeth Warren and Lina Khan’s expansive view of the government’s anti-trust powers. In addition, he has called for an outright ban on Covid vaccines and a total moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Democrats are certain to make hay of the GOP nominee’s theories about the link between cancer and Parkinsons rates and pesticides, which he shared with Tucker Carlson.

 

Whoever convinced Donald Trump to endorse Feenstra was right to worry that Lahn would have a tougher time winning the general election. But the president has only himself to blame for incepting the MAHA movement into existence in the first place. That populist-inflected paranoid streak might have remained relegated to the fringes of the American left had Trump not thrown his arms around longtime Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Now, the monster he midwifed into existence is coming for its creator.

 

Indeed, the forces both parties have heedlessly unleashed are slipping from their control. Those forces are certain to shape our politics for years to come.

‘Acting’ Out

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

The most notorious interim appointment of the president’s first term was one that didn’t happen. Or did happen—but only briefly, before being hastily rescinded.

 

To this day, it isn’t clear.

 

Three days before the insurrection in 2021, desperate to find allies within his government who would help him cling to power, a paranoid Donald Trump came this close to naming “rigged election” crank Jeffrey Clark acting attorney general. Years later, Clark and his lawyer would claim that the president actually did make the appointment but changed his mind within a few hours when White House and Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse if Clark remained in the position.

 

The fact that no one can say definitively, even now, who was in charge of the DOJ during a Trump-made national crisis was a clue to all sentient beings that reelecting him would cause a civic catastrophe. Fortunately for the president, most American voters aren’t sentient.

 

Clark’s quasi-appointment may have been infamous, but it wasn’t unusual. On the contrary: During his first four years in office, Trump acquired a real taste for filling agency vacancies with interim appointees. In mid-2019, slightly more than halfway through his term, his administration was already responsible for more than a quarter of all “acting” Cabinet officials dating back to Jimmy Carter’s presidency. By February 2020, “acting officials in charge of top agencies and departments … accounted for one out of every nine days in those positions,” more than the total number of days served by interim officers across eight years of the Obama administration.

 

That wasn’t an accident. “I sort of like ‘acting,’” the president told reporters in January 2019. “It gives me more flexibility; do you understand that? I like ‘acting.’”

 

He liked “acting” so much that, true to form, he frequently ignored procedural niceties in conniving to install his preferred candidates in acting roles. If you can bear to read two columns by me in one day, revisit this 2022 piece and acquaint yourself with the legal drama involving Matt Whitaker, Kevin McAleenan, William Perry Pendley, and Ken Cuccinelli. One analysis published in 2020 found that no fewer than 16 acting Trump officials were serving beyond the statutory time limit for interim service set by federal law.

 

Four years later, his preference for acting officers was as strong as ever. Within a week of being reelected in 2024, he was encouraging Senate Republicans to adjourn in January and let him fill his Cabinet with recess appointees instead of holding confirmation hearings. Despite the fact that his own party would control the upper chamber and that the filibuster no longer applied to executive nominees, he still craved the power to staff up with whomever he liked without the consent of a friendly Senate.

 

His appetite for interim appointees is quietly one of Trump’s most authoritarian traits. It’s not just a matter of him resenting the need to seek approval from another branch of government; it’s a matter of him wanting to fill key positions with blatantly unfit toadies who answer only to him, and who would never survive quality-control vetting by the Senate.

 

Acting appointments are a useful tool when building a kakistocracy, and so Trump was destined to make use of them aggressively—again. Especially as he sinks deeper into the “YOLO phase” of his presidency.

 

Which is how we ended up this morning with Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence.

 

Mediocrity.

 

Last month the New York Times reported on new research into how Argentina’s authoritarian government recruited so many willing accomplices within the state bureaucracy during the 1970s and 1980s. The conclusion: “Frustrated and mediocre” workers are easy pickings.

 

“It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere—the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion—can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms, and even basic morality,” the paper noted. Accomplices “are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.”

 

The banality of evil, one might call it. I thought of Jeffrey Clark when I read the piece, remembering that he was a nebbishy no-name environmental lawyer at the DOJ before nearly riding his “rigged election” devotion to fascist stardom. But it applies to Bill Pulte, too.

 

Sort of. Pulte isn’t exactly a “middling worker”: He’s the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the head of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, having appointed himself to the latter two positions. Before joining the government, he was a big shot at an investment firm and the grandson of a much, much bigger big shot in the home-construction industry.

 

But he shares two traits with the Argentine paper-pushers. He is, very charitably, mediocre at his job. And he’s very, very eager to get a better one by doing anything that the man in charge asks of him.

 

Pulte’s primary job at FHFA appears to be sifting through mortgage documents filed by the president’s political enemies in hopes of finding an error that would create a pretext to prosecute them. He’s looked into paperwork filed by Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, New York state  Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, knowing that the conviction and imprisonment of any one of them will endear him to the president forever.

 

He’s 0 for 3. Two separate indictments of James ended up being tossed out of court; undaunted, Pulte filed two new criminal referrals against her with the DOJ in March, alleging homeowner’s insurance fraud. He also filed a criminal referral against Cook, which was all the excuse Trump needed to try to fire her and create a vacancy on the Fed board for one of his own appointees. Cook was never charged with a crime, however, and is challenging the firing on constitutional grounds. Pulte has been reduced to assuring the Fox News faithful that she’ll be indicted eventually, although how he can know that isn’t clear.

 

As for Schiff, not only has he not been charged with anything, even the famously corrupt Trump DOJ appears to be uncomfortable with Pulte’s role in investigating him.

 

If all of that wasn’t embarrassing enough, Pulte was reportedly the genius who convinced the president to promote the idea of a 50-year mortgage, a concept so idiotic that MAGA influencers joined in dunking on it online. “Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first f—ing thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” a source close to Trump complained to Politico at the time. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50-year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”

 

His days were not numbered.

 

As of today he’s officially Tulsi Gabbard’s replacement as director of national intelligence—in an acting capacity, of course, the way the president likes. Stupid, servile, fiercely committed to persecuting enemies of the regime: A mediocrity like Bill Pulte was a prime candidate for a major promotion in this sort of government, and he finally got it. The fact that he has no background in national security or espionage is icing on the cake.

 

Politically and legally, it makes all the sense in the world.

 

‘Acting’ the part.

 

Pulte was confirmed by the Senate to lead the FHFA. That’s important.

 

It’s important because, under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the default choice to fill a vacant position in an acting capacity is the “first assistant” (i.e., the deputy director or highest-ranking undersecretary). But there’s an exception: Any Senate-confirmed officer serving anywhere in the government can fill the position temporarily instead if the president desires.

 

You can understand why Congress wrote the law that way. Naively, lawmakers assumed that anyone nominated for a powerful position and confirmed by the Senate would necessarily have the competence and integrity to serve in another powerful position briefly, while a permanent appointee is chosen.

 

That the president might nominate henchmen and that a compliant Senate might rubber-stamp them seems not to have occurred to them—but it did occur to law professor Jack Goldsmith, who warned in 2024 that Trump would game the vacancy process in this way. The fact that Senate-confirmed appointees are legally permitted to play musical chairs in filling vacancies under the FVRA “raises the stakes for every Trump appointment before the Senate,” he wrote.

 

Confirming Bill Pulte—or Todd Blanche or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel—to any position effectively meant confirming them to every position, at least on a temporary basis. No matter: Every Senate Republican voted yes on Pulte’s nomination to the FHFA anyway.

 

And when I say “temporary basis,” I’m speaking very loosely.

 

As noted earlier, the president was in no hurry during his first term to replace acting appointees with Senate-confirmed replacements, often keeping them on beyond the period specified by statute. But even if he were a stickler for the law (giggle), the FVRA is remarkably generous in extending the time that interim officials can potentially serve. It permits an acting director to remain in the job for up to 210 days, then for an additional 210 days if a nominee to replace him is rejected by the Senate, and then for another 210 days if a second nominee is rejected.

 

In other words, Bill Pulte can lawfully hold the position of director of national intelligence for the rest of this year—and then for all of next year, provided that Trump is willing to nominate two unconfirmable putzes in succession to replace him. Here again, the authors of the FVRA were naive in their assumptions, believing that a president would feel obliged to quickly submit a capable permanent nominee to the Senate rather than let an unqualified placeholder linger in the position indefinitely.

 

They didn’t anticipate an autocratic executive who “likes ‘acting.’” And so here we are in June 2026, with an acting attorney general who seems downright eager to commit impeachable offenses to show the boss how eager he is to stay on the job indefinitely and a new director of national intelligence who will doubtless behave the same way.

 

It’s a coincidence, I’m sure, that two positions with outsized potential for abuse in harassing the president’s critics are now held by two of the biggest Trump chuds in the government, neither of whom was approved by the Senate for their current jobs. Just as it must be a coincidence that this is an election year and the White House clearly expects both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to play influential roles in preventing, ahem, fraud at the polls this fall. In Bill Pulte, the president now has a figure who’ll wield that influence enthusiastically.

 

On top of everything else, naming Pulte to a position this sensitive is Trump’s way of extending a middle finger to a Senate that’s begun to resist his most loathsome impulses.

 

Recently Republicans in the chamber blocked money for his beloved ballroom, then turned around and tabled money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to protest his slush fund for MAGA-friendly criminals. The DOJ promised on Monday to abide by court rulings that have enjoined the fund (for now), but that wasn’t enough to reassure a conference that’s rightly suspicious of the White House’s willingness to kill the program permanently. Majority Leader John Thune believes the president is so committed to the fund that he might veto the immigration bill if it includes language that restricts it—although, as of late Tuesday, Blanche was swearing that the fund is well and truly dead.

 

In short, Trump’s own party is now interfering with the “YOLO phase” of his presidency. He’s given up on trying to please voters and is chasing his autocratic whims, however unpopular they might be, only to run into unlikely resistance lately from his own Duma-fied Republican Congress. Putting an unfit crony like Pulte in charge of national intelligence feels like an act of defiance under those circumstances: If the Senate GOP won’t make him happy, he’ll make himself happy by filling a key vacancy with a putrid loyalist appointment whom he surely knows they disdain.

 

And thanks to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, there’s nothing they can do about it. Or is there?

 

Countermeasures.

 

“If the president decides they’re going to install a secretary of defense that isn’t actually confirmed, and Congress isn’t going to try to respond with their powers and try to stop that, I think the reality is that there’s not much that you can do.”

 

That’s what one expert told the Washington Post—in 2022, for a piece speculating about what a second Trump term might look like. Senate Republicans behaved with characteristic cowardice by doing zilch during the president’s first term to punish him for repeatedly ignoring their “advice and consent” power. What can they do now to make amends?

 

One thing they could do is amend the FVRA to prevent appointments like Pulte’s, provided they can find 20 Senate Republican votes to override the inevitable Trump veto. But they can’t: The caucus of disgruntled GOP lame ducks, while big and growing, ain’t that big. If there were 20 civic-minded conservatives in the chamber, the president would have been convicted and disqualified from holding future office five years ago.

 

Another thing they might do is declare that no more Trump nominees—including judicial ones—will be confirmed until a permanent replacement is named for the national intelligence job. Only four Republicans would be needed to join with Democrats to roadblock nominations (well, five, thanks to crypto-Republican John Fetterman), and there certainly are enough lame ducks to facilitate that.

 

But I doubt the Senate GOP has the stomach to see it through. If polling shows a blue wave inbound in November, would Republicans really let conservative judicial nominees languish unconfirmed, leaving a Democratic Senate to decide their fate next year?

 

As for executive nominees, the president might actually welcome a Senate roadblock. It would be a perfect excuse for him to lean in further on naming acting officials to lead agencies. I don’t want to do it, but they’ve left me no choice. The government needs to function, he might say of Republican obstructionists. Under the FVRA, he could staff up with all sorts of Pulte-esque flunkies and face no legal trouble for it until 2028.

 

The best leverage Senate Republicans have is probably the $72 billion immigration enforcement bill that was en route to passing before the president YOLO’d them into a political corner with ballroom money and the slush fund. That bill is the last major White House legislative priority of the year and potentially the last of Trump’s presidency if either house of Congress flips in November.

 

If the John Cornyn-Bill Cassidy lame-duck caucus were to tell him that it won’t pass until a new attorney general and director of national intelligence are confirmed, what would Trump do? Is having Todd Blanche and Bill Pulte in those roles worth more to him than a truckload of money for his highest policy priority?

 

My guess is … yeah. That’s what “the YOLO phase” is all about. Forced to choose between moving his agenda and maximizing his power to govern abusively, the president would follow his heart and trust the MAGA base to inundate Republican lame ducks with death threats until they cave and pass the immigration bill anyway.

 

But I don’t blame you if you think my entire line of argument here is silly.

 

There’s no strong reason, after all, to believe that a Republican conference that tolerated a parade of acting directors during Trump’s first term and voted for Bill Pulte unanimously to lead the FHFA will object to handing over national intelligence to a postliberal hatchet man. Even the lame ducks might plausibly convince themselves a nasty intra-party vote over the appointment isn’t worth it, as it would risk demoralizing right-wing voters before the election.

 

Pulte will likely serve for as long as the president wants him to serve, and not a day less. Just one more thing to celebrate next month as we reflect on the greatness of American democracy.

How Trump Left Himself With No Good Solutions on Iran

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.

 

I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality. 

 

On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”

 

The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of Donald Trump’s own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No, we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!

 

This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.

 

The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on February 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

 

I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.

 

Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.

 

By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose—particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic—a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.

 

So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.

 

But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment has proved—so far—to be greater than Trump’s and that of our Gulf allies. Militarily, we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO, or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.

 

But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay—militarily, economically, politically—what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.

 

The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.

New Jersey Democrats Should Stop Adding Fire to ICE Protests

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim is distraught.

 

In a video message to his constituents, the senator denounced the “chaos in the streets that ICE has unleashed,” amid ongoing violent demonstrations against the Newark-based detention facility Delaney Hall.

 

“I’m going to do everything I can to try to stop this chaos,” Kim insisted. Nonsense. If anything, the senator has encouraged the civil disorder that descends almost nightly on this facility.

 

For nearly two weeks, New Jersey’s Democratic lawmakers — from Governor Mikie Sherrill herself to much of the state’s congressional delegation on down — have bolstered the violent anti-ICE demonstrators gathering around the facility.

 

Those Democrats maintain that they have been denied access to that privately run facility, alleging lurid tales of the abuse and inhumane conditions that persist behind its walls. The Department of Homeland Security denies the allegations. To the extent that Democrats’ access to the property was only temporarily restricted, that was because of the “riots outside the facility.”

 

Clashes between keffiyeh-clad anti-ICE agitators and security escalated throughout late May (Senator Kim got indecently tear-gassed at one point). Last Friday, state and local police deployed around the facility, and a curfew was imposed. Yet, on Saturday night, the activists precipitated the worst violence yet.

 

Dozens of demonstrators were arrested; acting Attorney General Todd Blanche demonstrated with some graphic photo evidence that officers were beaten and even bitten by the rioters.

 

The demonstrators are driven by the conviction that Delaney Hall is basically an American Dachau.

 

“It’s a concentration camp, and they are disappearing people,” said Hetty Rosenstein, a former organizer with the Communications Workers of America. That sort of hyperbole has been echoed in the far-left press and by Democratic lawmakers. Kim himself has alleged that the roughly 800 detainees inside that facility experience “horrible conditions.” But in a recent interview with New York Magazine, Kim noted that the “main thing” that concerns detainees “is the fact that there’s just no movement when it comes to their cases.” That’s a far cry from the activists’ claims that migrants are being denied medical care and proper nutrition.

 

Indeed, Kim himself noted that he and his Democratic colleagues do have regular access to the facility. That has not stopped media outlets like CNN from spreading the idea that they can’t get in.

 

There’s more where this came from.

 

As one unnamed House Democrat confessed to Axios last year, the party’s base is fed up with the Democratic Party’s commitment to traditional civic engagement in this moment of emergency. “Some of them have suggested,” the Democrat added, “what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.” Judging by New Jersey, the party’s elected leaders aren’t going to do anything to disabuse them of this notion.

On Voting for Terrible People

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

With the victory of Ken Paxton in the Texas Republican Senate primary and a torrent of bad press about the misbehavior of Graham Platner ahead of his presumptive victory in the Maine Democratic Senate primary next week, a question that has bedeviled our politics since Bill Clinton, and especially in the era of Donald Trump, has resurfaced: how to approach voting when at least one of the major-party candidates is a terrible, immoral person.

 

I’ve written variations on this topic many times by now, from retrospectives on Clinton to the relative character of the 2008 candidates to Trump, Roy Moore, Herschel Walker, and David Vitter. Some of those lessons apply as well to confirmation votes, as with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth.

 

The Platner revelations coming so swiftly on the heels of the Paxton nomination is what makes this fresh, because it has caught Democratic partisans on the horns of their own rhetorical fictions. The argument about the moral limits of voting for candidates of bad character has almost always been either an intra-Republican debate or a mere posture wielded against Republican partisans. Now, Democrats who have ducked the issue for years have to face the music.

 

That’s not due to any shortage of Democrats of bad character. Quite the contrary. Just looking at statewide candidates in the past decade: Bob Menendez barely survived a hung jury on his first corruption indictment before his 2018 reelection. Sherrod Brown beat his then-wife. Mike Espy was rotten with corruption that got him indicted. Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. Cal Cunningham cheated on his wife in the middle of his campaign. Andrew Gillum was trailed by a string of corruption investigations, before his even sleazier side emerged into public view. Terry McAuliffe’s long, sordid history as a bagman was exceeded by his thirst for stolen-election theories — and both of those go double for Stacey Abrams. Then there’s Jay Jones, now Virginia’s attorney general and the legal point man on the state’s redistricting litigation, who texted a Republican to defend his view that his political opponents’ children should be murdered, and who did “community service” — by doing work for his own PAC — for being caught driving 116 miles an hour.

 

And that list is aside from the ethical baggage train of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, or the whole era of the Clinton presidency, or Ted Kennedy being the most powerful figure in the party for decades, or the House Democrats, or the morass of corruption and vice that is the governance of so many blue-run cities. Look at how many decades they let Michael Madigan run Illinois like his own personal crime family.

 

Yet, the class of public Democratic partisans — pundits, intellectuals, flacks — never argues against voting for these cretins when the alternative could be the loss of an office to a Republican. Something like the Never Trump movement, or House Republicans voting to expel fellow Republican George Santos when that cost them a seat, is simply inconceivable on the Democratic side. At most, you get Democrats dumping blue-state officeholders when they are sure to be replaced by their own party, or shivving somebody like Eric Swalwell in a primary when it was in their partisan and ideological interests to do so. Nobody ever argued against reelecting Andrew Cuomo. Maybe when the opponent was David Duke, there was righteousness to the slogan of convicted felon Edwin Edwards: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” But if you never have a problem voting for the crook, that’s a choice.

 

For those of us who take seriously the idea that politics and government should be about something besides pure partisan lust for power, it’s worth thinking through these questions seriously. Over the years, I’ve developed some principles for doing so.

 

First: It’s important to have principles. If you change your tune on a dime on the same questions depending upon which party a particular creep belongs to, people will notice. As well they should. “Character doesn’t matter, only issues do” is a principle, if not a great one. But if that’s your guiding principle, then you probably should sit out debates about the duty of the other side to vote down people you dislike on character grounds — at least, if you expect anybody to take you seriously as an advocate rather than an activist. The people who this week are singing a tune on backing Platner that’s diametrically opposite the tune they were singing last week about supporting Paxton? They’re shills, and everyone can see it.

 

Second, and relatedly: Be honest. If you’re going to make the case for voting for a bad person, at least be candid with your audience that the candidate is, in fact, a bad person. Ken Paxton is an awful human being and a crooked public official. The evidence of this is copious and wide-ranging. Any discussion of supporting him should begin by respecting your audience enough to acknowledge this reality. At the same time, if you are persuaded that a candidate is so personally bad that you have a duty to vote against your own party, own the full consequences of that choice. If you’re a Republican voting for Talarico, don’t try to whitewash him into something other than a left-wing radical who has declared himself open to Court-packing and other revolutionary stances. On the other hand, if you’re a Democrat sticking with Platner, don’t pretend away the fact that Susan Collins has the most moderate and least partisan voting record of anyone left in the Senate.

 

Third: Principles are a compass, not a straitjacket. They don’t relieve us from the hard work of applying them with prudence. Don’t let your slogans do your thinking for you; take the principles as the starting point of every analysis rather than trying to boil all decisions down to single-input syllogisms that disqualify this candidate or compel support for that one. Conservatives are conservatives in good part because we acknowledge that nearly all choices involve tradeoffs. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and these things don’t change — but individual situations frequently involve balancing a range of rights and wrongs. Any decent moral analysis of any hard voting choice will count some factors pointing in one direction and some in another. That’s also why you need not only a set of principles but also some sense of proportion in how to rank them.

 

It’s simply realism to observe that sometimes you can defend one principle only by betraying another. Before you do that, it’s important to consider both the relative priority of principles and the triage questions of which principles are under greater threat at any moment. Abe Lincoln believed in honest government, but he was willing to look the other way at some crooked deals done on his behalf to pass the 13th Amendment and get rid of slavery. Just four years before, he’d been willing to enshrine slavery in the Constitution to keep the Union from shattering. In neither case had his principles changed; he just knew which things mattered more than others, what was possible and what wasn’t, and what was more threatened and what wasn’t.

 

Fourth: Character always matters. The minute you start pretending otherwise, or retailing Clintonesque theories of “compartmentalization,” you are swimming against the tide of everything we know about human beings. Elections are never just about voting records; there will always be more decisions down the road that we can’t foresee when we are pulling the lever. Nobody in 2018 knew that they were voting on pandemic policy; nobody in 2000 knew that they were charting the course of the War on Terror. Voting in a representative constitutional republic is inevitably an act of trust in flesh-and-blood human beings.

 

Fifth: Elections really are binary choices in nearly all cases. One of the two major parties will win, and one will lose. Even independent or seemingly independent candidates for Congress will give control of the chamber to one side or another — or at least will remove support from one of them. I reject the view that this relieves us from all moral analysis. But it also means that there are real costs to not casting your vote in favor of the party that supports the things you believe in, when the choice is one that strongly opposes those things. The more uniformly your views align with one party against the other, the higher the cost in choosing against your own side. That cost will often be measured in human lives lost and ruined and damage to our civic order, our Constitution, our national security, and our civilization. These are not small things.

 

Sixth: The office matters. Executive and judicial offices involve a lot more opportunities for the exercise of unilateral power and judgment than do legislative offices. So there’s nothing hypocritical about applying a lower moral bar to legislators. Similarly, it matters whether — and for how long — a particular legislator’s election is apt to decide partisan control of a chamber. It was easier for conservatives to abstain from supporting Roy Moore in 2017 because Republicans then held a fairly strong position in the Senate, he was running for only a three-year Senate term, and it was highly likely that Doug Jones would lose at the next general election in 2020 (as he did).

 

Seventh: Not all questions of character are the same. Genuinely bad character tends to emerge in repeated patterns and surface in multiple ways, as it has with Clinton and Trump, with Paxton and Platner, and with characters such as Gillum. But character is ultimately the test of the whole person: In evaluating their sins, we should look at their overall record of offsetting virtues and opportunities to learn and clean up their act. Sometimes, that’s borne out by the record, and sometimes, it’s not. But it again defies simple syllogisms that purport to be a substitute for judgment.

 

Eighth: Clean up your own messes. Just because we may feel cornered into backing a bad candidate in this race, or withholding support from one in that race, doesn’t mean that the job is done. There’s always another season of primaries to try to get it right next time. And we have less reason to complain about bad people as our nominees if we didn’t make our stand against them in the primary when we had the chance.

 

I’ve voted for, or supported from afar, some dreadful people. I once voted for a literal blood-drinking pagan for New York City Council, without whom there would have been no Republicans at all outside of Staten Island. That worked out badly: He later got indicted for selling access to the Republican primary to Democrats. On the other hand, while I haven’t voted or urged support for a Democrat in any election in this century, Trump was a bridge too far for me, and if I’d had a vote in Alabama in 2017, Roy Moore would have been, too.

 

I could not vote for Ken Paxton for an executive office such as the one he currently holds as attorney general, but if I had a vote in Texas, based on what we know today, I’d hold my nose and vote for him over Talarico. It’s not the easiest of choices, but Paxton is (unlike a fair number of MAGA populists) a sound conservative on most of the issues, even if I gag at his foolhardy and destructive advocacy for breaking the Senate filibuster. Far more important: Talarico is a radical leftist; he’d be a vote against any Supreme Court nominee in the next two years, especially one devoted to the Constitution; and most important of all, he would hold office for all four years of the next presidential term, a moment of maximum peril for our constitutional order, in which he’d be apt to support every manner of destructive bid by progressives to restructure the American system permanently.

 

Surely, Democratic partisans will make their arguments for Platner. In most cases, the outcome will be predetermined: They’ll do exactly the same thing they do in every situation: whatever it takes to maintain or increase their political power. And then they’ll lecture the rest of us for only sometimes doing what they never do.

Working-Class Hero

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 01, 2026

 

Among his many other talents, our friend David French might have the gift of clairvoyance. “Against [Ken] Paxton. Against [Graham] Platner. LFG,” he declared—on Thursday, two days before the latest scandal involving Maine’s presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate emerged.

 

A cynic would say that was less a case of clairvoyance than of David hearing whispers around the watercooler of what his colleagues at the New York Times were about to publish. But my guess is that neither theory is true: There are so many skeletons in Platner’s closet that, purely by chance, any public criticism of him is likely to coincide with another tumbling out.

 

On Saturday the Times and the Wall Street Journal separately reported that, in addition to everything else, Platner has a (virtual) zipper problem. According to his former campaign manager, his wife told aides last year that she had caught him “exchanging sexual messages with as many as a dozen women.” Not true, a current campaign official indignantly countered: “Up to” six women had been involved.

 

The “sexting” supposedly stopped before the candidate launched his campaign. But, per the Journal, “Platner also has an active account on Kik, a popular, private messaging app. Platner’s profile shows a mirror selfie of him shirtless with a towel wrapped around his waist. Many of his tattoos are clearly visible in the picture.” So they are.

 

Team Platner’s damage-control efforts afterward were pitiful. First the campaign posted a nearly five-minute video of his wife calling it “shameful” that the press would spread “gossip” before admitting in the same clip that the couple is in marriage counseling for unspecified reasons. It’s an old and sleazy political tactic to have a wronged wife vouch for the candidate-husband who betrayed her; Platner, the fresh young insurgent progressive, is a traditionalist in this regard.

 

Later he spoke to a reporter (with Mrs. Platner by his side, of course) to echo his wife’s disgust at the coverage. “The Wall Street Journal and New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer,” Platner complained. “I’m sorry, that’s, frankly, journalistic malpractice.” Presumably no one on his staff told him that someone on the campaign had already confirmed to the Times that “sexting” went on.

 

It’s clear at this point that Graham Platner is a chud. Opinions differ only with respect to the genesis of his chuddery. Is he a toxic narcissist? Is he a “man-child” suffering from poor impulse control and “light misogyny”? Is he a “failson” who’s secretly ashamed of his downward mobility? Is he a Nazi, as many Republicans insist?

 

I’m skeptical of that last one, as it’d be strange for a populist who’s deep into white tribalism to gravitate toward Democrats when there’s another party that caters to that niche. (If Platner had to face a degenerate Republican primary electorate, the scandal around his infamous tattoo would be that he bowed to “wokeness” by having it effaced.) But it’s also true that the evidence that he’s soft on antisemites extends beyond the Totenkopf on his chest.

 

Any way you slice it, he’s unfit for office. In that sense, “against Paxton, against Platner” is as morally unassailable as most of David French’s political opinions are.

 

But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. There are two arguments for why “against Platner” isn’t as easy a call as it might seem. One alleges that his moral flaws aren’t political flaws, the other concedes that they are but insists they’re the lesser of two evils.

 

The populist argument.

 

The essence of the 41-year-old Platner’s appeal is authenticity. He’s poised to crush geriatric establishmentarian Janet Mills in the Democratic primary and will most likely take on an almost-as-elderly five-term Republican incumbent in the general election. He’s young and new to politics, he’s a Marine and oysterman by trade, and he talks endlessly about the rising cost of living that’s grinding down voters in his state and beyond.

 

He looks, sounds, and acts like the average person far more than either of his two opponents in this campaign do. And in a democracy, shouldn’t the people be represented by those who look, sound, and act like them?

 

For better and, sometimes inevitably, for worse?

 

The Democratic Party desperately needs to rebuild credibility with working-class voters, especially the kind of white working-class voter who voted for a fascist in the last three presidential elections. Now they’ve got a guy in Platner who connects with that cohort—so much so, it turns out, that he reflects many of the average joe’s own petty vices. He sh-tposts obnoxiously online. He gets ill-considered tattoos. He slides into the DMs of random women despite the fact that he’s in a relationship.

 

It’s not that any of these things are “good” politically, rather that they’re a matter of taking the bitter with the sweet. If you want an authentically blue-collar senator, you’re going to get authentically blue-collar behavior, and not always in a commendable way. And voters understand that. The candidate’s support hasn’t budged despite his many scandals, River Page argues today at The Free Press, “because Platner’s flaws are familiar and forgivable to many of the middle- and working-class Mainers who make up most of the electorate.”

 

Which should remind us of another successful populist, no? Donald Trump and Ken Paxton have succeeded in Republican primaries because of, not despite, their many vices: Populist voters who yearn to overthrow “the system” (however they define that) are drawn to candidates who behave transgressively, viewing their personal norm-breaking as a proxy for how willing they’ll be to barrel through political norms once in office. Platnermania may be a left-wing version of that attitude emerging after years of relatively scandal-free leadership by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

And so when David French hollers “against Platner!,” a progressive might reply by asking him which is morally worse—a senator who sexts other women but votes against “selling out the working class” or one who behaves with perfect rectitude while enabling it? How can one compare Platner, who has an actual policy agenda that many find virtuous, to a slug like Ken Paxton, who’ll rubber-stamp any nonsense his mafia-boss master places in front of him?

 

Character is destiny.

 

The populist argument for Platner appeals to my cynical heart in this sense: It shows real contempt for the average American voter, a feeling in which I luxuriate every day.

 

Tell me that we should expect an “authentic” man of the people in 2026 to have a Nazi death’s-head tattoo, to act like a 15-year-old edgelord online, and to cheat profligately (or at least try to) on his partner, and I’ll tell you, “Yep, that sounds like ‘the people,’ all right.” No Democrat makes the moral case against populism, or the civic case for repealing the 17^th Amendment, as eloquently as Graham Platner does.

 

But there are problems with treating personal flaws as, if not political virtues, mere imperfections that are redeemed by one’s policies. For one thing, doing so would theoretically rationalize any amount of chud behavior by a candidate provided that his agenda is virtuous enough. Character isn’t everything in leadership, but it ain’t nothing. When we excuse moral flaws in our lawmakers, we normalize those flaws and remove a deterrent to further vicious behavior.

 

That’s Trumpism in one sentence. In 2015 you reassured yourself that it’s fine that your favorite candidate dislikes John McCain for having been a POW because that candidate is promising to build a wall on the border. Eleven years later, you’re stuck explaining to skeptical friends why using taxpayer money to make January 6 gangsters rich is fine.

 

When leftists tweet things like “Platner could’ve sexted my mom and I’d still vote for him,” it should remind all of us that we’ve seen this movie before. Character is destiny, certainly personally and often politically.

 

The other problem with the populist argument is that Graham Platner actually isn’t very authentically populist.

 

His military service is his one impeccable salt-of-the-earth credential. Beyond that, he’s a prep-school kid with affluent parents who helped him pay for his home and whose mother’s restaurant is the biggest customer of the oyster farm he runs. He’s a child of privilege. But he “looks working-class, talks working-class, and has, at least at some points in his life, worked blue-collar jobs,” Page writes in his Free Press piece, explaining why blue-collar voters relate to him. Like John Fetterman in 2022, Platner’s working-class cred is largely vibes-based.

 

If that’s so, though, his scandals are less an unwelcome side effect of his working-class identity than a basis of it. He doesn’t behave like a chud because he’s a bona fide average joe, subject to the same vices; he was a well-off kid who happens to have the same vices as average joes, and therefore many voters infer that he must be one himself.

 

Graham Platner is not as morally repulsive as Ken Paxton. (Few politicians in America outside the West Wing are.) But if we’re now measuring populist authenticity by how much low-rent behavior a candidate engages in rather than by his or her life experience, David French’s Paxton-Platner comparison is more apt than any Democrat should like to think.

 

The moral argument.

 

A better argument for Platner, and one I struggle with, is this: What if not voting for the deeply flawed candidate this time leads to a worse outcome for the country?

 

What’s a conscientious person to do when one candidate on the ballot behaves immorally but also seems more likely than his opponent to restrain immoral behavior by the government if elected?

 

Texas voters don’t need to worry about that dilemma. Between Paxton and Democrat James Talarico, there’s no conflict between who the worse person is and who’s more likely in office to facilitate rampant lawbreaking by the Trump administration.

 

But Maine voters have a conundrum. I’m stumped to recall even one case in her 30 years in the Senate in which Susan Collins has embarrassed her constituents with personal misbehavior, yet I’m also stumped to recall one case where she cast a vote that thwarted the president in something terrible he wanted to do.

 

She deserves credit for having voted against Trump at his second impeachment trial, of course. But she’s also the only one of the seven Republicans who voted that way to represent a blue state, which is to say that she was the only one who arguably improved her electoral position by doing so. And she cast her vote knowing that the Senate had nowhere near the 67 votes needed to convict the president, assuring that her ballot would do him no real harm.

 

Over the last 16 months she’s voted to confirm 22 of 23 Trump Cabinet nominees, opposing only Pete Hegseth and doing no real harm in that case either. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among others, got the Susan Collins seal of approval.

 

You’ll frequently find her expressing her “concern” to reporters about the president’s latest insane behavior when they buttonhole her in a Capitol hallway. And she continues to take occasional strategic votes against the White House in matters where she knows the public is emphatically on Democrats’ side. But she’s never betrayed any sense of real alarm about the branch in which she serves being reduced to a Duma as Trump carves off chunks of its constitutional authority for himself.

 

There is little doubt that if Samuel Alito resigns from the Supreme Court tomorrow and Trump puts forth Aileen Cannon to replace him, Susan Collins will not cast the vote that sinks that nomination. If it comes down to her, as it essentially did with the (vastly more qualified) Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, she’ll be a good soldier for her party as usual.

 

“The most urgent priority in American governance, not just at this moment but in my lifetime, is checking Donald Trump’s monarchical pretensions before they grow more ambitious,” I wrote last week. “And one cannot do that by continuing to elect Republicans.” There’s a chance that Maine will decide whether Democrats have the seats they need in the Senate next year to check those pretensions, which means voting against Graham Platner could mean two more years of a bigger, more dangerous chud running roughshod over Article I.

 

“Against Paxton, against Platner” is a fine statement of civic principle. So is “against Paxton, against autocracy.”

 

The Flight 93 election.

 

That’s the case for holding one’s nose and choosing the sexter with the Nazi tattoo over Susan Collins. But it’s an uncomfortable one: After all, this too is the logic of Trumpism.

 

The moral argument for Platner is simply “The Flight 93 Election” warmed over. Our side has a deeply flawed candidate—but it doesn’t matter, you see, because the other side will destroy the country if it prevails. Michael Anton’s loathsome 2016 essay remains the supreme statement of negative partisanship in modern American politics, a playbook Republicans have since followed to rationalize every form of depravity the president can muster. Nothing that our candidate has done or will do is so terrible, the thinking goes, that it would justify empowering the other party to carry out its existential threat against America.

 

That’s functionally the same case that I just made for the man with the Totenkopf ink in Maine. “Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives,” Anton wrote of the president’s Reaganite critics 10 years ago. “It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults.” Many progressives would say the same, verbatim, about Platner. The right obsesses about his tattoo because they can’t answer his arguments on Medicare for All.

 

As the campaign wears on, we’re destined to see both parties embrace the logic of the “Flight 93 election,” I think. Democrats will point back to it to remind Republicans that Platner voters are merely playing by the rules that Anton articulated and MAGA embraced in 2016. The right has spent a decade granting moral carte blanche to the miscreants in its ranks in the name of advancing its agenda; now liberals in Maine will give them a taste of their own medicine.

 

Republicans, meanwhile, will point to Platner’s abiding support as evidence that Democrats are no better than they are. The left caterwauled for 10 years about GOP voters abandoning their morals, but once they found a charismatic populist preaching radical change of their own to swoon over, they decided that Anton was correct about there being more important things than character. Vindication for right-wing sociopaths at last.

 

If I lived in Maine, I would take the weasel’s way out and look for every possible excuse not to cast a ballot in the Senate race. Maybe it will turn into a blowout for one candidate or the other (this surely isn’t the last Platner scandal we’ll hear of) or maybe control of the Senate will look like a fait accompli by Election Day regardless of what happens in Maine. Either would be a good excuse to avoid voting.

 

But if the election were tight locally and nationally, I would feel pulled morally to vote for the Democrat. The difference between Anton’s “Flight 93” fantasy and our present reality is that the lunatic at the controls really is willing to crash this plane, especially as his senescence deepens. He’s trying to put his face on the money. He’s turning the 250^th anniversary of independence into a political rally. He treats trade policy as a royal prerogative, declares major wars without congressional input, has deputized the Justice Department to persecute his enemies, and impugns any election result that reflects badly on him as illegitimate.

 

Six years of Graham Platner in the Senate would be mortifying, but two more years of unified GOP control in Washington would be full-tilt banana republicanism for the United States. Not all chuds are created equal.