There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists

By Jonathan Chait

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

The general idea that Democratic Party loyalists seem to have about members of the Democratic Socialists of America is that they’re a lot like Democrats, but perhaps a bit more passionate. Voters in New York City are “not afraid of the term democratic socialism,” Joy Behar recently said on The View, to applause. “Social Security is democratic socialism. Partly, unemployment insurance is. The people who pick up your garbage, the people who take the fire out at your house—all of these things are democratic socialism.”

 

It’s true that the DSA has areas of ideological overlap with the Democratic Party, and would at least directionally support classic Democratic policies such as a higher minimum wage, defending social spending, and opposing the Trump administration. But the DSA’s version of democratic socialism goes far beyond routine public functions such as garbage collection and Social Security (which most Republicans, not to mention Democrats, support), or even aspirational policies such as Medicare for All.

 

The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.

 

The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.

 

These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone “woke” era. They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.

 

***

 

A tragic irony of history is that the Democratic Socialists of America was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.

 

The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.

 

A decade ago, the excitement generated by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign on the left and the frightening rise of Donald Trump spurred an influx of tens of thousands of young members. Some of the new recruits were Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw the DSA’s growing membership as fertile ground.

 

Sectarian conflict broke out among rival factions vying to steer the group’s suddenly growing membership. In 2018, some of the DSA’s older activists formed the North Star caucus, an internal group to defend Harrington’s antiauthoritarian principles from its newer authoritarian-minded entrants. “Principles of liberty and equality are indispensable to the self-government of a free people,” the new caucus proclaimed. “Denial of them renders a government a tyranny. While authoritarians on the Left dismiss this foundation of democracy as bourgeois, we defend it.” The North Star socialists grasped that the organization was in danger of surrendering its commitment to democratic principles. In 2021, eight founding DSA members similarly warned that far-left factions were attempting to gain control of the group.

 

The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world. Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the DSA opposed the invasion but blamed it on “the expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations,” and opposed any military aid to allow Ukraine to defend itself.

 

The break point occurred after October 7, 2023. Many pro-Palestine student-activist groups endorsed the Hamas attacks, and the DSA’s International Committee as well as multiple local chapters followed suit. On the day after the attacks, the New York City chapter of the DSA affirmed the Palestinian “right to resist” and joined a rally to celebrate them.

 

The DSA’s posture toward terrorism, which ranged from equivocation to outright support, drove away many of the organization’s remaining advocates of liberal democracy. Two dozen prominent old-line members announced their resignation the next month, conceding that “today’s DSA has driven itself beyond redemption” and had become “entirely wanting in its dedication to the moral principles that are the foundation of democratic socialism.”

 

Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left. In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.

 

The DSA’s Red Star caucus was formed the year after the North Star caucus, in an apparent rebuke. It writes that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.”

 

These left-wing factions have realigned the organization in firm opposition to liberal democracy. In 2021, the DSA joined the São Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network—a move that would, one DSA member protested at the time, “support authoritarian governments who systematically violate the basic tenets of democratic socialism.” It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world’s most despotic regimes.

 

The organization is still called democratic socialists, of course, but the term does not necessarily mean “liberal democracy” as Americans have traditionally defined it. Many socialist thinkers define what they call “true democracy” as a system in which capitalism has been overturned and the proletarian classes have seized political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves “democratic.”

 

***

 

This is not, obviously, how the group sells itself to the broader universe of left-leaning, mostly Democratic voters it is trying to attract. During the New Deal era, Stalinist organizers pitched themselves as “liberals in a hurry.” The Progressive Party, which ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948, was secretly run by Communist Party loyalists, but it appealed to standard liberals by touting themes such as civil rights, economic justice, and an end to the Cold War.

 

The DSA employs a similar formula, drawing voters in by denouncing oligarchy and genocide and promising to expand health insurance. Chevalier’s campaign, like those of other DSA candidates, has focused on affordability, fighting corporate greed, and similar progressive themes. When she was asked by MS NOW if she is a communist, she replied, “I’m not. I’m a democratic socialist,” and called questions about her adherence to totalitarian ideologies “a distraction.”

 

Hassan Piker—who, as one of the DSA’s most influential advocates, has campaigned for several of the candidates it has endorsed—said recently at an event, “I wish they’d stop calling me a radical. None of these people,” he said, gesturing to the crowd off-screen, “are radical. They just want health care. They want to end American militarism. They want to spend money on roads, on infrastructure, on schooling, on health care, rather than bombs overseas.”

 

Yet Piker himself has followed the DSA’s militant line, repeatedly praising authoritarian regimes such as China’s, Cuba’s, and Russia’s, as well as terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. He has said that his closest existing model for an ideal society is China—which does not have progressive social values or an especially generous welfare state but does have a Communist ruling party.

 

The DSA’s long-term strategy is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the “dirty break,” a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.

 

Not all DSA officials agree on the dirty break. Some still cling to Harrington’s vision of pushing the Democrats leftward. Others favor an immediate split into a third party (a “clean break”). But as Peter Sterne, a onetime DSA member who now reports on New York politics, has written, “The DSA’s current strategy is a ‘dirty break’: gradually build up the necessary partylike infrastructure to eventually break away from the Democrats entirely, while still running candidates in Democratic primaries for now.”

 

In the meantime, the organization has displayed patience. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the movement’s most valuable political asset, has moved cautiously in office and avoided dramatic policy changes, building political support that he has spent on backing DSA challenges to mainstream Democrats.

 

In the face of this threat, the Democratic Party’s establishment has wrung its hands. Yet its main concern appears to be that DSA challengers are threatening the jobs of loyal party regulars and dividing the base against itself. “Instead of us making sure we put all of our resources to fight Republicans and to fight Donald Trump, we’re using it to fight each other. It just doesn’t make common sense to me,” Representative Gregory Meeks complained to CNN. New York Attorney General Letitia James told CNN, “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.”

 

DSA supporters see internal division not as a risk but as a historic opportunity to seize power. As Ross Barkan, a writer and former candidate whose state Senate campaign Mamdani managed in 2018, wrote, “The establishment Democrats who revile Mamdani so much should understand 2028 is going to look like 2026. There will be more races to be run, more incumbents to replace. For a century, since successive Red Scares squelched socialism in this country, the left has been in a defensive crouch. Only now can the socialists hit back.”

 

The conflict is asymmetrical. One side is concerned with taking control of the Democratic Party, while the other just wants everybody within it to get along.

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, recently appeared on MS NOW, a favorite network for normie liberals, where she blamed Democratic members of Congress for discord with new left-wing nominees. “You,” she said, addressing her incumbent colleagues, “are creating the antagonistic dynamic that we do not need. These are two young, talented, intelligent women that got elected against all odds, against millions of dollars. Perhaps there is something we can learn from them.”

 

The norm that AOC is trying to create is a ratchet that pushes the Democratic Party ever leftward. The DSA is permitted to excoriate the party, but non-socialist Democrats cannot respond in kind. Moderate Democrats are permitted to exist, at least for now, but the ideological pressure runs in one direction.

 

At the most superficial level, the DSA influx has associated Democrats with a series of kooky beliefs and statements. Although Democratic voters approve of the DSA, voters as a whole do not. A national poll found the group’s approval at 21 percent, and 48 percent disapproved. (The same poll had 36 percent approval of the Democrats.) Its specific platform components are if anything less popular. The DSA’s leadership has approved a platform, set to be ratified at its convention next month, calling for “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” opening borders, moving to public ownership for the largest corporations, establishing a 32-hour workweek, and defunding the Pentagon.

 

The DSA’s disproportionate strength in New York City, the headquarters of the national media, means that its positions will have outsize weight in the national debate. Republicans will also, obviously, do everything they can to magnify them.

 

The DSA has little incentive to minimize this collateral damage. To the contrary, the smaller the Democratic Party, the more power the DSA wing can wield inside it. And it probably hasn’t escaped the movement’s attention that it has enjoyed its strongest growth during periods of Republican rule, but that its membership stagnated during the four-year Biden interregnum.

 

Under Republican presidencies, the DSA thrives on frustrated Democratic voters feeling that their party’s leaders aren’t fighting hard enough. During Democratic presidencies, which the DSA mostly spends denouncing the occupant of the Oval Office as a sellout, Democratic loyalists have less patience for factional complaints. Perversely, if the DSA’s slew of police-abolitionist, Hamas-apologizing candidates were to cost Democrats Congress in 2026 or the presidency in 2028, the group’s goal of discrediting and replacing the Democratic Party’s leadership would get easier, not harder. One can easily imagine a feedback loop in which DSA influence makes it harder for Democrats to win back moderate and Republican-leaning voters, causing the party to lose, causing its base to grow more distrustful of the party’s leaders, thus making them more likely to nominate DSA candidates.

 

But even to conceive of the DSA’s entry to the party as mainly an electoral setback, as some glum liberals appear to be doing, is to miss the deeper significance of the group’s influence. The costs of an alliance with the DSA are moral as well as political. The Democratic Party is waging an existential struggle to save democracy, the rule of law, and liberal norms. The DSA’s vanguard does not merely believe that its defense has faltered. It holds those values themselves in contempt as resistance-wine-mom frivolity.

 

What the DSA demands of the Democrats is not merely to advocate more generous social policies, or more cautious foreign affairs, but to welcome, or at least accept, authoritarians as their coalition partners. Democrats are likely to face the same kind of pressure that Republicans confronted with MAGA’s hostile takeover: first to ignore their allies’ sinister goals, and then to rationalize and eventually justify them.

 

As authoritarian elements gain strength, they become more essential to the success of a political coalition, and the price of confronting them rises. The Republican Party has long since passed the point of no return. The easiest time to draw clear moral lines against the encroachment of illiberalism within one’s own camp is at the beginning.

The Problem With the Marxist Mind

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

 

That’s from the Communist Manifesto. And it’s garbage.

 

We’ll come back to that. First, I remind you of (Kevin) Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple when you don’t know a f—ing thing about it.” This is a variant of the old line, “Everything’s a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” This in turn is closely related to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

 

I recently had Rana Dasgupta on my podcast to discuss his book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order. To say that many readers hated it the way my old basset hound Norman hated a certain gray poodle would be an understatement—and an incredibly obscure reference. Suffice it to say, Norman was a mensch of a beast, but that gray poodle enraged him to Cujo-level hostilities. I’ll never know why.

 

But the fact is a lot of people hated it, and I was very frustrated by it. I don’t mean by Dasgupta himself. He was a decent fellow and played along. But I was very vexed by my inability to articulate what bothered me about his perspective.

 

The core problem was that we basically couldn’t get to a common agreement on some fundamental ways we think the world works. Dasgupta says he considers himself a small-l liberal in many respects, and I believe him. But his mode of analysis strikes me as a kind of elite cosmopolitan Marxism. He talks about systems being designed to do this or that. He says that the nation-state system was “designed to concentrate wealth in a small number of centers.” And the modern nation-state system was “conceived” by “American elites, particularly in the 1940s, as a universal project that would transform the lives of everybody on the planet.”

 

I’m not saying there’s no truth to any of this. I’m sure we can find some great quotes from John Foster Dulles or Dean Gooderham Acheson or some other gray flannel luminary of the midcentury establishment that lends some support to this view. But, ultimately, I think this is closer to nonsense than not. The early nation-states—you know, those Westphalian agglomerations of dynastic powers constrained by borders determined by geography and war—were formed in part to concentrate wealth in the hands of monarchs and emperors, but not just to concentrate wealth in monarchs and emperors. It was also done to protect the faith, please God, deter enemies, pursue glory, and a dozen other things.

 

The modern nation-state system organized by the U.S. and her allies was created to do all manner of things. Near the top of the list: prevent another world war and stop the communists from taking over the world. But also on that list were things like promoting trade, defending liberty, and burnishing the résumés and biographies of bureaucrats and statesmen.

 

But you know what else led to a lot of stuff? Accidents, mistakes, coincidences, unintended byproducts of new technologies, screws falling out in an imperfect world. Whatever. If the driver transporting the archduke hadn’t made a wrong turn, Gavrilo Princip would never have sparked World War I by shooting Franz Ferdinand. If Napoleon hadn’t failed in Haiti, he never would have sold the Louisiana Territory to Jefferson. The Berlin Wall fell in no small part because Günter Schabowski screwed up a press conference.

 

Now of course, the Berlin Wall would probably have come down sooner rather than later. We might have gotten the Louisiana Territory later in the 19^th century, but surely at a greater price. Whether we would have had World War I absent the events of Sarajevo is unknowable, but a different start might have led to a different ending as well.

 

Accidents and contingencies matter a lot. So do human desires and foibles. Blaise Pascal’s famous line about Cleopatra’s nose comes to mind: “Had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.” But Caesar dug Cleopatra, and the rest is history. And one of the most important human desires or foibles is status. Elites compete with each other. They argue. They disagree.   

 

From the outside, institutions can seem monolithic. The institutions I know best are often described as collective nouns with monolithic intent. “National Review thinks this,” “AEI comes down on this side of the issue,” “The Dispatch says.” This is all perfectly defensible. We talk this way about Fox News and the New York Times, the Catholic Church, Major League Baseball, etc. It’s natural. But thinking this way often blinds us to the fact that many institutions have internal debates and disagreements.

 

And just because the public doesn’t see these schisms doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that they don’t matter. As monolithically liberal as I think the Times is, I am nonetheless certain that there are internal debates where one side loses to another side, pretty much on a daily basis. Sometimes the fights don’t really matter (“Fine. The cafeteria will offer a second vegan option.”). But sometimes they surely do. If a different faction at the Times had won the internal argument over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, Bari Weiss probably wouldn’t be running CBS News today.

 

Heck, we put on our blinders even when we can see the schisms. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is riven by profound—documented—disagreements. Yet an amazing number of people fall back on saying the court is a partisan “rubber stamp” for Trump.

 

The Marxist way of thinking about capitalism, or the liberal international order, or the modern nation-state, is so abstract that the role of happenstance and accidents evaporates, and the importance of human agency and leadership melts away, too. I don’t think “Marxist” is the best term for this way of thinking. Marxism is merely a very prominent example of it. But lots of modes of thought work this way, including conspiracy theories (which was what I was trying to get at in that earlier G-File). If you start from the premise that the system is rigged to reward the ruling class, the patriarchy, the oligarchs, or the Jooooooz, then internal disagreements in a society become a shadow puppet show for the rubes.  

 

According to the reified, teleological, dehumanized theories about neoliberalism, or the nation-state, or globalism—pushed by the left for nearly two centuries and by the right more and more—the “elites” are this monolithic bloc who not only know their own interests, individually and collectively, but they have the skill and agency to see them seamlessly satisfied. Every four years America tears itself apart fighting over the “most important election in our lifetimes.” But according to this “systemic” worldview, aren’t these national debates and decisions meaningless?

 

How is it that the system was designed to reward elites (however you define them) in perpetuity generation after generation, and yet the elites in every generation can’t agree on anything and can’t predict what will happen in the next week, never mind the next century? I reread Linton Wells’ memo on “Predicting the Future” at least once a year. Wells pointed out that since 1900, the world that security policy planners had expected to deal with over the subsequent decade had made fools of those planners. But the Big Plan behind The System has been working as predicted for centuries? Really?

 

That’s what’s so dumb about Marx’s line in the Communist Manifesto about the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” That wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The bourgeoisie in the mid-19^th century was divided on questions of nationality, religion, and politics. Different factions wanted different things. Some factions won—and then failed to get what they wanted. Some factions lost and ended up getting exactly what they wanted anyway. Or maybe the kaiser declared war and all the factions changed their plans.

 

Conspiracy theories are a form of this kind of systemic thinking. Marxism, of course, is in many respects a conspiracy theory (and Marx was definitely a conspiracy theorist). And the biggest problem with conspiracy theories—other than that they’re usually stupid lies—is that they breed fatalism or radicalism. When the real Powers That Be are always behind the curtain, pulling the strings and rigging the system, if every contrary piece of evidence is received as proof that the conspiracy goes even deeper, and if every event is proof that the Man always wins, and the system never fails, you’re left with two options. You can just surrender to the idea that you can’t change anything, and just not get out of bed or do anything with your life. Or you can decide to become some kind of heroic martyr in pursuit of completely tearing down the system. Both of these are stupid options.

 

Most people can see how the first option is a cop-out. But so is the second. The radical surrenders his judgment and agency to a theory—ironically a theory that says judgment and agency don’t matter. The radical decides to become an actor who simply reads from a script rather than think for himself.

 

The more exciting and rewarding course is to accept that the future is unwritten, the system is not rigged, and that your actions matter. The downside: This is the harder path. If what you do matters, then you are at least partially responsible for the consequences of what you do. You can’t blame everything on the system or outsource your agency to cosplay. The upside: Your arguments and actions matter, and you can have at least partial authorship of your life’s story.

Stephen Miller’s Wrecking Ball

By Michael Warren

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

One of the most striking facts about Regime Change, the expertly reported new book on President Donald Trump’s second term from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is how much White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller dominates its pages.

 

The 40-year-old senior Trump aide is so central to the administration’s policy, messaging, and image that he has more entries in Haberman and Swan’s index than virtually every member of Trump’s Cabinet, including Vice President J.D. Vance and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Only Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former President Joe Biden, and Trump himself have more entries. That’s powerful company, and Miller fits right in.

 

So it’s notable that the reader’s introduction to Miller in the book is a description of one of his early screw-ups in this second Trump term. In the second week of the administration, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo ordering a temporary pause on all non-Medicare and Social Security funds disbursements. The idea was to disrupt the woke priorities and initiatives of the Biden administration and the deep state with a big, shocking flex of power. This kind of thing was right up Miller’s alley.

 

The authors report that a member of Miller’s team, May Mailman, had pushed OMB to issue the memo, reflecting the new deputy chief of staff’s overarching desire to move—and move quickly. Miller himself was publicly defending the memo as necessary for achieving the new president’s goals of dismantling the previous administration’s woke goals.

 

But in the real world, the broadly written memo was causing confusion and panic. Money for programs like Medicaid was frozen, prompting a bevy of lawsuits. On the same day Miller touted to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the OMB’s memo was “clear as day,” a federal judge blocked its implementation. Suddenly, Miller’s orchestrations were a big problem, and he began damage control—for himself. Haberman and Swan describe a series of duplicitous machinations straight out of Game of Thrones.

 

“Miller distanced himself from the memo so thoroughly that some senior West Wing aides thought he had no idea it was in the works at all,” they write. “With his new purview firmly established, Miller could scarcely afford any early missteps.”

 

Miller would later tell colleagues that his team never saw a draft for the OMB memo before it went out, directing the blame to Mark Paoletta, the OMB general counsel who had edited but not drafted the memo. The president’s outrage about the public-relations headache the memo caused, stoked further by the White House’s “weak” decision to rescind the memo, prompted conversations about whether someone should be fired for the snafu. Paoletta’s name was mentioned as a sacrificial lamb, but figures like Vance and OMB Director Russ Vought pushed back.

 

Incredibly, nobody mentioned Miller and his team’s role—despite the fact that he had pressured OMB for the memo, demanded maximalist language, and prioritized taking action over checking and double-checking the details. Trump’s attention soon turned to offering up a new distraction, while Miller escaped without a scratch.

 

The incident provides a more complete and complex picture of Miller, with the authors describing his actions as more chaotic and far less meticulous than they may seem from the outside—puncturing the “evil genius” persona that he himself actively cultivates.

 

The reality is that Miller, much like Trump himself, crashes through roadblocks and hurdles, paying no heed to the rules—not the rules of government, and not the rules of collegiality. He’s less of a mastermind and more of a bully, less a crafty strategist and more an unstoppable blunt force. His methods recall the children’s book about a family going on a bear hunt and facing various obstacles along the path. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. We've got to go through it!

 

That gets Miller what he wants, but only to a point, and often at great long-term cost to the cause of Trumpism. A strategy of fear, intimidation, and a refusal to ask permission can mow down quite a bit of opposition, but when Miller runs up against more immutable barriers, such as federal judges or public outrage, he finds a way to slink out the back and let someone else take the blame. Miller’s posture is to be all-powerful, and, failing that, fade into the wallpaper. In this way, he is a purer, more refined version of the man to whom he has dedicated the past decade of his professional life.

 

Take immigration enforcement, Miller’s primary and nearly single-minded concern. His approach to implementing Trump’s restrictionist platform is described in various places in the book as “applying immense pressure” on the government agencies to pump up their arrest and deportation numbers. When the results failed to live up to his standard of arresting 3,000 illegal immigrants a day—as it turns out, deporting illegal immigrants in the interior of the country is a lot harder than it sounds—he resorted to yelling at officials on phone calls and threatening to fire everyone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.

 

All the while, in private conversations with administration colleagues that the authors reported on, Miller was seeding the idea that Kristi Noem was the source of the frustrated progress. The homeland security secretary and her deputies were bungling the procurement of detention facilities. Noem’s messaging about targeting the “worst of the worst” violent criminals was muddying the mission. Noem’s incompetence, not the goal of mass deportation itself, was the problem.

 

The secretary had, of course, done herself no favors during her tenure at DHS, from her expensive, silly TV ads urging illegal immigrants to self-deport to her frequent travel, aboard a private jet, with her aide and rumored boyfriend Corey Lewandowski. So when the Miller-driven maximalist approach to arresting and deporting illegal immigrants deep within the country reached its bloody end this past winter—when federal officers in Minnesota in two separate incidents killed two American citizens protesting the government’s actions—it was Noem and DHS who took the blame.

 

“[S]hortly after the two shootings, Miller told associates he was furious—not about the overall restrictionist immigration policy or the efforts to shut down liberal protests, which he had driven himself, but about the way it had all been carried out,” Haberman and Swan write. “The immigration agents were supposed to be there to create a ‘barrier’ between protesters and immigration arrest teams, he would say publicly. In private, he laid the blame at the feet of Noem, who for a year had answered not just to the President, but also to Miller.”

 

One of the central themes of the book is that, unlike in the first term, Trump has a better understanding of where his own powers have no or only weak limitations, and he is exploiting that knowledge to do more of what he wants. Unencumbered by the sort of internal guardrails that sometimes fenced him in, Trump is taking bigger swings, acting even more on gut and instinct. The same appears to be true, only more so, with Miller.

 

But if Trump and Miller were different men—less monomaniacal, more methodical, more introspective about what stymied them during the first term—this blow-by-blow account of the first 18 months or so of Trump 2.0 might be a happier story from their perspective. As it stands, the president’s approval rating is hovering just under a dismal 40 percent. His efforts to dramatically force his will through executive actions are frequently thwarted by the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. His party risks losing its majorities in this fall’s midterm elections thanks in large part to his attention to pet obsessions like tariffs and a war with Iran at the expense of the pocketbook concerns of inflation he ran on.

 

The Trump-Miller approach of taking a wrecking ball to our civic infrastructure rather than trying to co-opt or outsmart the opposition may have successfully destroyed much of what has so infuriated the MAGA populists about Washington. But there’s been practically no permanent reconstruction atop the rubble, no lasting new edifices on which Trump will be able to credibly slap his name, no lasting legacy of what Trump’s governance has wrought.

 

If this is how the Trump era ends, the things that the president so loves about his most intense aide—what Haberman and Swan describe as Stephen Miller’s “bulldog mentality, his instinct to turn the dial up on controversy, and his way of framing issues and acting on them with blunt, Godfather-inflected language”—will have been a big part of why the Trump project failed to deliver on its promise for a new golden era.

Injustice Toward Barrett

National Review Online

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Criticism comes, rightly, with the territory of being a Supreme Court justice. Hysteria shouldn’t.

 

With the conclusion of the 2025–26 Supreme Court term and Donald Trump’s defeat on birthright citizenship, we have been treated to another round of abuse from right-leaning commentators directed toward Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The immediate trigger of their ire is Barrett’s joining the Trump v. Barbara majority (along with Chief Justice John Roberts and, on the outcome, Justice Brett Kavanaugh) striking down Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Barrett critics also cite her majority opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee, which allowed states to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day for up to five days later, as well as her vote (along with Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch) to strike down Trump’s “emergency” global tariffs and her rulings against Trump in a few of last summer’s torrent of emergency decisions on deportations.

 

It’s the intemperate vitriol of these attacks, and their utter lack of perspective, that appalls us. Critics brand Barrett a traitor, a DEI hire, and a left-winger who has doomed the country. They complain that she makes poor decisions because she is a woman and a mother of adopted children from Haiti. Perhaps more ominously, there is much muttering that future Republicans should fill judicial vacancies with fewer people devoted to the law and more who will be mere party apparatchiks, voting in the results-oriented fashion we traditionally associate with the liberal justices.

 

The abuse of Barrett by the right mirrors the extent to which she has uniquely triggered the left over the years, from questions about her religion at her first judicial confirmation hearings to fresh charges that her recent votes in favor of Trump immigration policies are some sort of betrayal of her adopted children. As usual, anything done in imitation of the activist left is apt to be mixed with toxins.

 

Leaving aside the indecency of some of the critics, we object on two grounds. First, the predictable, faithful rule of written law is a positive end in itself, and a pillar of the good society. If judges are to be loyal to a party or impose their own preferred ends, they may as well be elected, and most of their powers given over to the other branches. Instead, we expect them to apply as best they can the work of the people’s representatives who made the Constitution and make the laws. That this sometimes puts them at odds with the best results reflects on the lawmakers, not the courts. That this sometimes puts them at odds with  political leaders and popular opinion is a relief to anyone who might someday find themselves in the crosshairs of either and will need to stand upon the guarantees of law.

 

Second, Barrett is an outstanding justice and a key contributor to an outstanding Court. No, we don’t always agree with her, or with the Court’s decisions since her arrival in 2020 formed the current 6–3 majority. Nor, for that matter, do we agree every single time with any of her distinguished colleagues. The Court’s cases are often hard, and its justices fallible. That’s why there are nine of them.

 

The quality of her work shames any suggestion that Barrett makes decisions from emotion or from cowardice. Perfect Olympian impartiality is impossible for even the greatest of jurists, but Barrett’s opinions, and her questions at argument, consistently show the same thorough diligence, even temper, and stickling for detail and proper procedure that characterized her long career as an academic. The only occasions when she has flashed any emotion have been in pointed debates with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over questions of methodology and consistency in the majority’s approach. If there is a fair critique of Barrett, it might be that she’s occasionally too devoted to process, especially on issues of standing to sue — but that is by far a lesser sin than its opposite. We wish one could say of her critics that they suffered from too much equanimity and concern for the law.

 

Far more often than not, Barrett has stood courageously with her colleagues in one landmark conservative victory after another: overturning Roe v. Wade amidst threats to the justices’ safety, fortifying the Second Amendment, ending racial preferences, rejecting transgender ideology, protecting religious liberty, expanding space for school choice, reining in the administrative state, closing down avenues to attack secure elections, restricting nationwide injunctions by rogue district judges, swatting down lawfare that sought to jail Trump and throw him off the ballot, and blocking one after another of Joe Biden’s overreaches. This term has been no different, with Barrett joining decisions ending racially gerrymandered districts, allowing Trump to fire agency heads at will, protecting girls’ sports from male transgender athletes, and defending the religious free speech of crisis pregnancy centers and counselors against gender transition. We are almost, but not quite, sick of all the winning. When Roberts and Kavanaugh voted with the liberals to create extra-constitutional protections from Trump for the Federal Reserve, Barrett dissented.

 

Some justices have been known to be good in some areas but not so reliable in others. Yet aside from her devotion to process and methodology, it is hard to find a pattern of issues in the cases where Barrett breaks with conservative outcomes, or with Trump. Before the birthright citizenship decision, for example, she had joined most of the Trump wins in immigration cases on the emergency docket and joined the trio of end-of-term decisions insulating Trump’s Temporary Protected Status decisions from judicial review, allowing immigration authorities to interdict potential asylum applicants before they reached the border and strengthening the power of border authorities to deny admission to criminal aliens. Before Watson, she voted with the majority on most election-law cases. The same could be said of her record in gun cases or on presidential powers.

 

The birthright citizenship case was a hard one; both sides had serious arguments on birth tourism, but the dissenters were not of one voice on what the standard should be, and none of them offered a serious defense of the administration’s position on the children of illegal aliens. Watson was disappointing, but it left open challenges to votes not provably cast by Election Day, and Barrett’s argument was a plausible reading of federal law and respected the primacy of states in regulating elections. In the tariff case, she was clearly in the right, and the president in the wrong. We could say something similar about most of her controversial decisions in five and a half years on the Court.

 

A good justice will never please everyone. But our advice would be to tune out the intemperate critics, because trying to appease them will only make things worse. Fortunately, that seems to be Barrett’s approach. Keep up the good work.

The Counterterrorism Lessons America Can’t Afford to Forget

By Emma Isabella Sage

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

America may be done with its latest war in the Middle East, but in the minds of violent ideologues, the conflict is far from over. Terrorism does not distinguish between active conflict and a ceasefire, any more than it distinguishes between combatants and civilians. The danger is that foreign terrorist propaganda will combine with domestic grievances and ethnic hatred to trigger more attacks, while the government systematically weakens the institutions built to stop them.

 

A great deal has changed for the U.S. intelligence community over the past year. When I first saw the National Terrorism Advisory System warning on June 22, 2025, of a heightened domestic threat related to the military action against Iran, I was skeptical. After all, America had spent 25 years building an extraordinary machine for detecting and disrupting exactly this kind of threat, and counterterrorism agencies have stopped at least 17 Iranian plots in the past five years.

 

All signs pointed to a weakening of Iranian proxies and to a breakdown of the command structure by which Iran directs their actions. Indeed, despite all that was made of the danger of Iranian sleeper cells, they turned out to be somewhat of a ghost story, although paradoxically, a concrete network would have been preferable to the real threat of dispersed and unpredictable self-mobilization. Either way, American counterterrorism officers have specialized in Islamist threats so deeply, and for so long, that I thought the agencies would have the capacity to keep intercepting the vast majority of plots.

 

But I now fear that the intelligence community has taken its eye off Islamist terrorism during a time of surging threats to the American Jewish community.

 

Our degraded capabilities.

 

The shooter at Old Dominion University, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, had a previous conviction on terrorism-related charges: He pleaded guilty to providing material support to the Islamic State a decade ago, and in 2017 he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Before he was arrested, not only did he attempt to send money to ISIS, he also bought an assault rifle with the intent to carry out a shooting like the one that killed 13 people at Texas’ Fort Hood Army base in 2009. At the end of 2024, he secured early release, and would go on to commit his shooting less than 15 months later.

 

The Old Dominion attack occurred in the context of a severely degraded American intelligence community. The Department of Homeland Security went without funding from mid-February to the end of April due to a political dogfight. Early in March, just days after the U.S. began strikes on Iran, news broke that the Trump administration—specifically, FBI Director Kash Patel—had fired key counterterrorism officers over a partisan vendetta. And that is neither the beginning nor the end of the ways in which the intelligence community has been cut down and redirected since Trump returned to power.

 

The vast, expensive, meticulously constructed counterterrorism machine built since September 11 should have ramped up prior to the Iran war. But instead, Americans were left to wonder how much had been sold off for scrap.

 

What a functioning intelligence community can do.

 

To understand what we are losing, one must understand what was built.

 

The American counterterrorism apparatus that existed on September 11, 2001, had no Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration, National Counterterrorism Center, or Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It also had a foundational problem that seems impossible in retrospect: Almost no one in the intelligence community could read al-Qaeda’s communications.

 

The pre-9/11 CIA and NSA were built to oppose the Soviet Union, and it showed. Russian speakers were plentiful; Arabic speakers, vanishingly rare. Those who existed were not often proficient at operational levels, let alone fluent in key regional dialects. The 9/11 Commission documented this problem, and the response over the following decade was substantial. Strong knowledge of either Arabic or another Muslim-world language—like Farsi, Dari, Pashto, or Urdu—became a prerequisite for counterterrorism work.

 

The shift went well beyond language proficiency. A generation of analysts came of age studying content like al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, with its notorious article “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” (The Boston Marathon bombers cited the piece as one of their key resources.)

 

Reorienting the human capital of the intelligence community toward a new threat didn’t come cheaply, quickly, or without controversy. Detractors from outside the field made much of the fact that terrorism killed far fewer Americans than heart disease, falling furniture, or cows. Detractors from inside the field pointed out that in more than half of the years between 1994 and 2019, right-wing extremism killed more Americans than jihadist terrorism.

 

But both critiques, rather than proving the pivot’s futility, evidenced its impressive track record.

 

Between 2013 and 2019, at the height of the territorial control and propaganda reach of ISIS, American law enforcement disrupted 46 jihadist plots in the U.S. while 27 attacks succeeded—a disruption rate of roughly 63 percent. Another crucial metric is the drop in lethality: Compared to around 3 deaths per attack at the peak in 2017, lethality fell to an average of 0.4 by 2025. While the full reasons are unknowable, diminishing lethality and improved detection and intervention may have contributed to the decrease in attempted attacks. As the number of attempts dropped, the disruption rate increased further: Data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C.-based think tank, showed a 100 percent disruption rate in 2023.

 

But today, in a moment of déjà vu for the intelligence community, al-Qaeda is once again releasing Inspire-branded content, ISIS is back in the news, and the U.S. is once again embroiled in the Middle East. Two crucial factors differentiate the present moment from the past: an administration that seems intent on undermining its own intelligence community, and a shift in terrorist targeting which is increasingly focused on specific groups. Instead of the whole-of-society attacks of the 9/11 era, one community is now facing a disproportionate share of the violence: Jews.

 

Jews as a perpetual and growing target.

 

Islamist terror organizations have previously embarked on campaigns against the civilian population at large to gain public notoriety before narrowing their targets to specific groups. And there’s a growing body of evidence that this shift is well underway.

 

The Anti-Defamation League has reported an 893 percent increase in antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism over the past decade. 2024 marked the highest number of incidents since the advocacy group began its tracking in 1979, while 2025 showed a 39 percent increase in assaults with a deadly weapon (with American Jews being targeted an average of 17 times per day).

 

Worldwide, the violence is coming from both the left and the right: In America, the far left bears responsibility for attacks including the lethal 2025 shooting of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., while the far right spawned the single deadliest attack in the history of Jewish life in America—the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue—and the imitators that followed.

 

Even at peak performance, the U.S. counterterrorism community would have struggled to handle the sky-high threat of antisemitic violence coming from multiple ideological directions simultaneously. In its diminished current capacity, the situation is unbearable. Jews have not sat idly by amid the growing danger, pouring resources into organizations like the Secure Community Network and JReady to defend Jewish communities and institutions. But none of those efforts can replace the protection of a functioning government security apparatus.

 

The attacks have sent a clear message: Publicly or privately, one participates in Jewish life at one’s own risk. Around the globe, Jewish holidays have become staging grounds for one lethal attack after another. The October 7 Hamas attack in Israel was carried out on Simchat Torah. The Boulder firebombing that killed one and injured 12, including a Holocaust survivor, occurred on the eve of Shavuot. An arsonist set a Jewish governor’s Pennsylvania residence aflame on Passover. The Bondi Beach shooting in Australia fell on the first night of Hanukkah. In Manchester, a car ramming and stabbing attack killed congregants on Yom Kippur.

 

The American counterterrorism community is still one of the most capable in the world. Its achievements are genuine and hard-won, but it now appears visibly weakened and unfocused. I believe it is possible to protect the public. But I’m not sure this government will do what it takes.

Roe for Dummies

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

For connoisseurs of postliberal histrionics, the tantrum that followed yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship was *chef’s kiss.*

 

Even those whose contempt for the modern right is a matter of record sounded surprised by how ugly the reaction to the decision was. And I share that surprise—to a point.

 

To hear the usual suspects wail, you would have thought the court had struck down a longstanding ban on natural-born citizenship for illegal immigrants. “I at least got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America,” Daily Wire blowhard Matt Walsh lamented. “The fact that my children are having that opportunity stolen from them fills me with rage so deep I can’t describe it. I truly hate the people who have done this to us.”

 

Walsh is a rhetorical drug dealer who’s gotten rich peddling rage to populists, so he was professionally obliged to have a conniption when the ruling didn’t go his way. But for the record, as dozens of people reminded him in replying to his tweet, nothing about immigration policy changed yesterday. The country that “looks and functions something like America” that he spent 40 idyllic years living in has recognized natural-born citizenship for children of aliens since 1898. All the Roberts court did was rubber-stamp the status quo.

 

If you’re intent on making America great again and your idea of when it was “great” falls somewhere within the last 128 years, that period of greatness included birthright citizenship for immigrants’ offspring.

 

Walsh was restrained compared to other MAGA drug pushers, though. Some likened the decision to Dred Scott. Others proposed policy workarounds such as the “Dissolution of the Union” or, less ambitiously, requiring “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.” More than a few took the cherchez la femme approach by giving Amy Coney Barrett, the lone Trump appointee to join the majority opinion, the David Souter treatment for her unforgivable betrayal.

 

Can Americans trust a judge who adopted Haitian children to rule impartially in a case involving nonwhite immigrants, some asked? (Barrett voted to let the president end temporary protected status for Haitian refugees literally a week ago.) Can Americans trust a judge with two X chromosomes, period? “The real problem is that women make great mothers, not civil magistrates,” one pastor sniffed, ignoring the many—many—wins for the right that Barrett has delivered in her brief time on the bench.

 

It is a little surprising that the Supreme Court upholding a precedent set before many Americans’ grandparents were born, in a case that every legal analyst expected the president to lose, would trigger the Chudpocalypse. But it ain’t that surprising.

 

For one thing, imagining an idealized America that never actually existed and then getting mad that modern America doesn’t look more like it is basically Populism 101. I can’t think of a court ruling more likely to antagonize the phony nostalgia and knee-jerk catastrophism of Walsh et al. than one that reminds them that immigrant children born in America have been receiving citizenship since before the Good Ol’ Days.

 

Beyond that, remember that postliberal nationalism is a tribal revolutionary movement. Its purpose is to defend the traditional preeminence of the white, Christian, male-dominated majority in American life. Yesterday’s ruling cut to the bone of that cause—affirming the mostly nonwhite native-born immigrant population’s claim to American identity; issuing from a right-wing court that was expected to share the base’s cultural anxieties; and spearheaded by support from its four women members, including Trump’s handpicked replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

 

It was a grievous disappointment to the sort of person whose interest in Republican politics is coextensive with their interest in “the Great Replacement,” which describes a lot of Trump voters. And it’s no answer to tell them that the decision did nothing more than uphold the law as it’s stood for ages. The point of the revolution is to overturn the law as it’s stood for ages. What do you think the word “postliberal” means, exactly?

 

Yesterday’s ruling is destined to become a rallying cry for the right, a supposed stain on American law that Republican judicial nominees must commit to overruling by interpreting the 14^th Amendment more sensibly than the current court has.

 

Which sounds … familiar, no? At last, the postliberal right has its own Roe v. Wade.

 

‘Hanging by a thread.’

 

That explains why the presumptive Republican nominee for president sounded oddly upbeat about the decision on Tuesday night.

 

“I do actually think there’s a really big silver lining here,” J.D. Vance told Fox News, “and that’s the simple fact that a lot of legal experts expected this case to go the wrong direction by 7-2 or even 8-1. The fact that this case was a 5-4 decision, effectively, means that the concept of birthright citizenship, which is an absurdity to the 14^th Amendment, that concept is hanging by a thread.”

 

Not exactly. There might be four votes on the court against citizenship in cases of “birth tourism,” i.e., when a pregnant woman enters the United States to give birth with no intention of staying here after delivering. But Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch sounded open to extending natural-born citizenship to children of immigrants who do intend, however unlawfully, to remain domiciled in the U.S. permanently.

 

That’s the scenario that “Great Replacement” obsessives worry about. And, contra Vance, that scenario doesn’t appear to be hanging by a legal thread.

 

But it’s in his political interest to say so. In the same way that the prospect of overturning Roe motivated ambivalent conservatives to turn out for Donald Trump in 2016, overturning birthright citizenship might plausibly motivate various right-wing factions who feel ambivalent about the vice president to show up in 2028. Do you find Vance too dovish or antagonistic toward Israel for comfort? Do you find him not dovish or antagonistic enough? Do you simply dislike him on a gut level because he’s unlikable, as cynical, uncharismatic climbers tend to be?

 

Well, he’s going to put justices on the court who’ll cut the thread by which birthright citizenship for illegal immigrant children allegedly hangs. How do you feel about turning out for him now?

 

If that’s not enough to convince you that yesterday’s decision is likely to become a Roe-level litmus test for the right, consider the somersault being performed by Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz is likely to challenge Vance in 2028, presumably under some cockamamie too-clever theory that he’ll prevail as the conservative in a three-way race once a Tucker Carlson-style upstart jumps in and divides the postliberal right. But Cruz suddenly has a problem: In 2011 he flatly insisted that “the 14^th Amendment provides for birthright citizenship” for the children of illegal immigrants—on camera.

 

On Tuesday morning he belatedly but hastily reversed himself, describing the court’s ruling as a “travesty.” For the moment, he’s limiting himself to calling on Congress to “restore the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause”—which won’t work, as he knows. (Although there are things Congress can do to reduce births by immigrants in the United States.) But, come 2028, for the sake of keeping pace with Vance, Cruz will surely have moved on to vowing to appoint justices who’ll overturn the decision. He has a keen eye for must-pass populist litmus tests (usually) and already grasps that this is one he can’t afford to fail.

 

Conservatives might pipe up indignantly at this point to note that their objections to Roe were quite different from postliberals’ objections to yesterday’s ruling. The Constitution famously doesn’t mention abortion, after all; the Supreme Court divined that unwritten right from the penumbras and emanations and whatnot of the 14^th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Originalism gained traction among Republicans because it demanded that interpretations of the constitutional text be based on something sturdier than the “aura” of particular provisions.

 

Birthright citizenship is right there in the opening words of the 14^th Amendment, on the other hand, with the only question having to do with what it means for a newborn child to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Jonah Goldberg is correct that the new right’s difficulty with that language resembles the left’s difficulty with the Second Amendment more so than conservatives’ difficulty with abortion: “It can’t mean what it says because I really don’t want it to!”

 

There’s another difference between the original Roe and its new postliberal analogue. Conservatives didn’t shoot themselves in the foot strategically before that earlier decision the way Trump and his supporters did before yesterday’s ruling.

 

As others have pointed out, it was extremely stupid for the president to force birthright citizenship before the court via an executive order rather than try to build popular support for legislative action on it. Had Congress taken the lead, claiming authority under Section 5 of the 14^th Amendment to limit the practice, it might have given John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett something to think about. The six Republican-appointed justices like to see major questions of policy handled through Article I, you know.

 

They were never going to let a right as momentous as citizenship be altered by royal diktat. But Trump insisted on trying and his fans went along, and the dopey legal posture they took ultimately led to five votes in favor of birthright citizenship not merely for the children of illegal immigrants but for the children of birth tourists.

 

To repeat a point often worth repeating: Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results. Rather than address birthright citizenship by embracing a methodical process, as conservatives did in championing originalism, postliberals counted on the court to dispense with the legal argle-bargle and find some pretext to arrive at the result they wanted. Roberts’ lengthy originalist defense of citizenship for anyone born in the United States in Tuesday’s majority opinion was the difference between success and failure.

 

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

 

Whatever the legal distinctions might be, there are obvious political similarities between Roe 1.0 and Roe 2.0.

 

For starters, turning birthright citizenship into a right-wing cause célèbre will polarize voters around the issue the same way Roe polarized them around abortion. A colleague reminded me today that, in the early 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention supported legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, and whenever there was “carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” After the court guaranteed abortion on demand a few years later, the swelling pro-life backlash on the right carried the SBC along with it.

 

The fact that birth tourism now enjoys similar constitutional protection will similarly radicalize Republicans who were formerly torn about natural-born citizenship for immigrant children.

 

Likewise, in the same way that there were “weak-form” and “strong-form” conservative opponents of legal abortion, there will be “weak-form” and “strong-form” postliberal opponents of birthright citizenship. Many conservatives spent the Roe years urging the court to return abortion to the states so that democracy could do its thing; no way, said devout pro-lifers, who wanted the court to find a right to life in the 14^th Amendment that would bar blue states from legalizing the practice.

 

We’ll probably see something like that with Roe 2.0 too. Some Republicans with their eyes on public opinion, like Vance and Cruz, might call for yesterday’s decision to be overturned so that Congress can set policy on citizenship. No way, devout chuds will counter: We want the court to hold that the 14^th Amendment excludes children of noncitizens from natural-born citizenship. This subject can’t be left to the devices of a legislature that’s slowly turning commie.

 

Then there’s this observation from Jonah in his column yesterday:

 

The court’s decision has not spared us an ugly debate over birthright citizenship any more than Roe v. Wade spared America an ugly debate over abortion. Indeed, I suspect the debate will be uglier now, precisely because modest, incremental, legislative reforms have been put out of reach of the conventional political process. Instead, there will likely now be a fight for a(nother) constitutional amendment. Moreover, as with abortion, members of Congress can now take extreme positions precisely because they have been stripped of power and democratic accountability on the issue. The parties polarized over abortion for the same reason: There was no price to be paid for taking a zero-sum position on abortion.

 

I agree—again, to a point.

 

Nearly 50 years of democratic paralysis over Roe brought us Democratic politicians mindlessly treating abortion as contraception and Republican politicians mindlessly insisting that only a total ban will do. Jonah’s right that Tuesday’s ruling will encourage similar low-stakes extremism—although, given the postliberal trend in both parties, I’m guessing each would be pretty extreme on the subject even if the court had left them with room to legislate. Zero-sum positions like “citizenship for all” and “brown people out” are just how politics is now.

 

Jonah’s analysis is anachronistic in one way, though. The reason legislators felt powerless to change abortion law during the Roe era is because, under the prevailing liberal norms at the time, neither party dared attack the problem directly by packing the Supreme Court with justices who shared their position on the issue. They could have, but I don’t recall any serious talk of such a thing until the last 10 years.

 

Forced to choose between tolerating a constitutional right of abortion and destroying the judiciary’s prestige by expanding the court to produce certain desired rulings, conservatives spent decades choosing normal process over results.

 

Postliberals don’t work that way. Legislative reform of birthright citizenship isn’t out of reach for Congress, they would tell Jonah; all Republicans need to do is add a few justices who’ll agree to revisit the issue and vote Alito’s way. “Pack the court,” Federalist CEO Sean Davis proposed yesterday alongside his suggestion about requiring foreign visitors to be sterilized. “If Roberts wants to be a politician who writes laws instead of a judge, then he can fight with 10 more unelected legislators in robes.”

 

Postliberalism’s core conviction is that any policy problem can be solved with sufficient ruthlessness. If the Republican Party’s members in Congress aren’t ruthless enough to solve the new problem of birthright citizenship for illegal immigrant children, maybe a new party will be. Or maybe the left will solve it for them: If Democrats open Pandora’s box by packing the court themselves in 2029, an outraged GOP will have all the excuse it needs to pack the court in its own favor—replete with a new judicial litmus test about who gets citizenship and who doesn’t—the next time it controls the government.

 

And you can guess what kind of justices Republicans will be packing it with. Not the Amy Coney Barrett kind, who vote based on their earnest understanding of the law even when they know they’ll be vilified as turncoats by their own party for doing so. The other kind.

 

Conservatives wouldn’t want a court full of hacks and chuds but postliberals would welcome it. That’s the key difference between Roe 1.0 and Roe 2.0. And if that strikes you as yet another dopey shortsighted strategic preference by the new right that’s likely to backfire and sure to damage America, I regret to inform you that that’s all they’ve got.

An Opening for Trump to Secure Peace in Ukraine

By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

President Trump often touts the number of wars he’s ended, and notes that ending Russia’s war against Ukraine has been harder than he thought. The root of the problem is that Vladimir Putin is ideologically committed to his hostility against the United States and the West. This is why Trump’s strategy hasn’t worked. He has sought to appear impartial and demand that both sides compromise, focusing on territory in the Donbas, as if the war is a violent real estate dispute between feuding personalities.

 

But Ukraine (and Volodymyr Zelensky) is neither at fault for the cause nor for the continuation of the war, and if he surrendered the territory Russia demands, the war would continue and end in Ukraine’s total defeat. Only Putin can end the war by, at the very least, accepting a cease-fire. Ukraine and NATO could then focus on rebuilding their stocks and defense industrial capacity to deter further Russian aggression, especially as the U.S. urges Europe to help carry more of the burden of defense.

 

Trump has shown a willingness to adapt when his plans don’t work, and now is the time to shift the strategy. The only way for Trump to help end the war is by applying pain and pressure to Russia and encouraging Ukraine and the rest of NATO to do the same. For a while, Trump seemed convinced that Ukraine couldn’t hold back Russia. But flouting the Russian argument that Moscow will inevitably succeed, Trump noted in September of last year that he thought Ukraine may be able to retake territory Russia occupies, that the Russian economy was faltering, and that Putin should make a deal. Since the president observed this, developments have presented an opportunity for a new diplomatic push.

 

First, Ukraine is winning. In recent weeks, the nation struck more than 1,500 miles deep into Russian territory with attacks on oil refineries in Siberia and Moscow. Ukraine has also successfully targeted Crimean bridges and energy infrastructure, which fund the war. Last month, the Ukrainian military liberated more Ukrainian territory than Russia seized. U.S. officials affirm this new battlefield reality; Ambassador Dan Negrea, representing the United States to the U.N., stated recently, “Russia is taking 40,000 casualties per month” and “time is not on Moscow’s side.” Ukraine’s bold and daring attacks against Moscow’s legitimate military targets, while avoiding Russian civilians, bring the war much closer to the homes of Russians who may blame Putin for the fear and chaos. Ukraine’s recent attack in Moscow came with a foreboding promise from President Zelensky. “If Ukraine is going to burn, your Moscow will burn too,” he said, adding that the attack was meant to push Russia to stop. “It is time to end the aggression, time to end this war.” The United States should encourage, not restrict, Ukraine’s bolder operations and should exhort NATO nations to continue supplying Ukraine with weapons, including by purchasing key systems from American companies.

 

Second, Ukraine has proven itself a net contributor to the strength and security of the U.S.-led West. Ukraine has received air defenses, guided bombs, medium- and long-range strike missiles, and other weapons. Ukrainians have adapted the way they use them, have improved the missiles’ technology, and have made Ukraine a coveted location for Western arms producers to test their weapons and tactics against a sophisticated adversary. Ukraine’s success in the current phase of the war, which primarily uses drones, has made it a world leader in unmanned warfare. Ukrainians created the Sting drone, which can intercept Russian suicide drones at a fraction of the cost of traditional interceptors. The country’s advanced indigenous drone capabilities led the U.S. State and War Departments to form a framework for a joint drone production deal. The United States should look for more ways to take advantage of this alliance, Ukraine’s drone warfare ecosystem, and its battlefield experience.

 

Third, the Russian economy is veering toward crisis. Russia’s budget deficit skyrocketed in the first four months of 2026, going well beyond the desired annual target of 3.79 trillion rubles to 5.87 trillion rubles (approximately $81 billion). Russia is facing a wave of corporate defaults and increased risk for consumer lending and bonds, along with a 5.52 percent inflation rate. The Russian public is feeling the biting pain of a war that until recently has been kept mostly out of sight. Russian households are suffering from 18 percent higher food prices, sky-high utility bills, and gasoline shortages. The United States has allowed its sanctions waiver on Russian oil to expire, and it should go further and embrace Congress’s effort to pass secondary crushing sanctions against Russia, while cracking down harder against Russia’s shadow fleet.

 

Ukraine has agreed to every cease-fire Trump has announced. Ukraine will compromise enough if it agrees to a cease-fire along the current lines of contact, as long as the temporarily occupied Russian territories are never recognized as de jure Russian. Russia has thus far refused to alter its original objectives and still seeks the total subjugation of Kyiv, though its aggression has inspired Sweden and Finland to join NATO and has made Ukraine an even stronger, more robust military power with increased national cohesion and proud identity.

 

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted earlier this month, “All of our sanctions are on Russia and all the aid that we’ve provided has been on the Ukrainian side. . . . We are not an impartial mediator here. We clearly are supporting one side over another.” The U.S. strategy should more overtly reflect that reality if it is to be effective. The United States should lead our allies to increase the pain against Russia now and sharply to make it clear: things will only get worse for Russia, and Putin should take the deal.