Why Trump Didn’t Predict the Gas-Price Spike

By David Frum

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

On March 16, two weeks into his Iran war, President Trump assured reporters that he had the Strait of Hormuz problem well in hand. “And we’re hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, with more than 30 mine-laying ships destroyed,” he said. “We hit, to the best of our knowledge, all of their mine-laying ships.”

 

On March 31, the national average price of gasoline at the pump surpassed $4, the highest level since the post-pandemic shocks of 2022. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas usually flows through the strait, but hasn’t since Iran began impeding the waterway in early March. Yet Trump continues to insist that Iran’s partial closure of the strait isn’t a problem. Markets don’t agree with Trump, and neither do his poll numbers.

 

How did Trump get Hormuz so wrong? The answer reveals one of Trump’s most characteristic and most fateful mistakes: his steadfast refusal to acknowledge that Americans live in a world economy.

 

Here he is on March 16 again: “You know, we get less than 1 percent of our oil from the strait. And, uh, some countries get much more. Japan gets 95 percent. China gets 90 percent. Many of the Europeans get quite a—quite a bit.” These specific numbers are, as you might suspect, wrong. China gets about 40 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Still, the general point is correct. Gulf oil flows mostly to Asia, and vanishingly little goes to North America. But what Trump fails to understand is that these geographic details matter little to world energy markets.

 

Trump wishes for a United States economy walled off from the rest of the world. That’s why he loves tariffs so much—and why he refuses to think about what they mean to American producers, who now must pay more for inputs such as aluminum.

 

But with energy, there is no walling off. Most of America’s oil and gas is produced in the United States. American imports come overwhelmingly from Canada and Mexico. But American oil can be put on a tanker and sent to Japan or the European Union if the price across the ocean rises. The global process of buying and selling equalizes prices worldwide. Walling off the U.S. would mean America would have to stop exporting and importing oil. Trump does not want to do that. In fact, he endlessly urges other countries to buy more American oil and gas. As he said in his March 31 comments: “Buy from the U.S.; we have plenty.”

 

Trump’s inability to comprehend the relevance of Persian Gulf supplies to American motorists may explain how he stumbled into his Iran war in the first place. A threat to the Strait of Hormuz may be the most war-gamed problem in the whole U.S. military inventory. It’s thorny enough to have deterred American presidents from attacking Iran for nearly 50 years, no matter how provocatively Iran behaved.

 

“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” Trump announced as the first bombs dropped on February 28. But why did Trump go where every other leader had declined to tread? Maybe he was the first president to see this war as an answer because he was the first who did not understand the question.

What the No Kings Protests and Tea Parties Have in Common

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

I am not very comfortable being in the middle of the road, politically. It’s not where I grew up, personally or professionally. My instincts are not quite contrarian per se (contrarianism purely for contrarianism’s sake is one of the highest forms of asininity), but my instincts lead me to a certain contrariness all the same, because I often think the received or conventional wisdom is wrong in important ways.

 

I’ve written a lot about what we might call false centrism, or centrism wrongly understood. In my underrated second book I wrote:

 

The point is that sometimes the extreme is 100 percent correct while the centrist position is 100 percent wrong. But there’s something about being not as wrong as one of the other extremes that some people just find so enticing and seductive. I just don’t get it.

 

If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist, I’ll tell you that the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does. The extremists have a serious disagreement about what to do. The independent who splits the difference has no idea what to do and doesn’t want to bother with figuring it out.

 

I still believe that. And it’s often how I like to argue about things. Indeed, I’m really trying to resist going on autopilot and railing against the rhetorical trickery of the false choice, or the great snipe hunt of American politics, the vast reserve army of socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters, or dozens of my other standard go-tos. 

 

But I won’t.

 

I’m starting out this way because, in all honesty, I still feel some embarrassment and hypocrisy for lending aid and comfort to a very popular understanding of centrism that I dislike. For instance, I never loved Arthur Schlesinger’s mid-century “Vital Center” liberalism formulation because he—and his fans—smuggled in all sorts of assumptions about the infallibility of his own worldview by placing it between fascism and communism. Of course, if the choice is between those extremes, I’m signing up for the “Vital Center” of liberal democratic capitalism as he defined it. But the claim that the further you got from agreeing with him, the closer you got to one form of totalitarianism or another left me cold.

 

Damn it, there I go again. Must … resist … the self-baiting.

 

So, let’s get to it.

 

On Monday, I saw a segment on Fox News’ Special Report about the No Kings protests.

 

My old friend Bret Baier opened the segment by noting that a “network” of some 500 groups was behind the protests and that “some critics are doubting the sincerity of that movement.” Fox Digital reporter Asra Nomani conceded that there were some “well-intentioned people” in the protests, but claimed the “command and control” of the protests were these 500 groups with a supposedly shocking combined “$3 billion budget.” (This averages out to a less-than-shocking $6 million budget per organization, by the way.)

 

In some follow-up commentary, Brit Hume came on—introduced by a clip of some idjit commie kids chanting about “communist revolution”—to opine on the No Kings protests. With his hallmark sarcasm, Brit said we have to count these protests as a “great success.” After three of these No Kings marches, “We don’t have any kings … and so they’ve won.” He went on to note the “absurdity” of these protests and dismissed with a chuckle the suggestion that Donald Trump might have any kingly ambitions.

 

So, in short, the gist of the report and commentary was that the No Kings protests were of dubious sincerity, ideologically silly on the merits, infiltrated by dangerous radicals using the protests as cover for more nefarious and in some cases violent ends, and largely funded by a network of shady organizations and sinister billionaires. In short, it was a dismissible exercise in astroturf politics, reflective of a tiny and negligible “minority” of Americans.

 

I’m open to all of these claims.

 

For starters, it’s fine to question the sincerity of some of the No Kings crowd in at least one regard. If a Democratic president were abusing the system comparably to how Donald Trump is, the composition of these protests, if they happened at all, would be very different. Partisanship is obviously part of the motivation, and Hume is surely correct that a major driver of these protests is anti-Trump sentiment, not a serious objection to executive power run amok. 

 

To which I say, “Okay.”

 

But rather than mock the protests, I think it would be much better for the country and conservatism to encourage the protesters to think through their newfound horror at presidents exceeding their authority.

 

It’s a bit like the progressives who suddenly discover the merits of federalism when Republicans are in office. Rather than bebop and scat on their hypocrisy, it would be better for everyone to foster some buy-in to the idea that might last into a future Democratic administration.

 

Second, as a rule, I don’t like protests. (At least not in the democratic West. Protests in authoritarian countries are very different.) A big part of my dislike is not ideological or political but psychological and aesthetic. Finding comfort in large mobs of people is, simply put, a bit creepy to me. I’ve written about the seduction and false transcendence of crowds many times.

 

Regardless, what struck me watching the combined segments was how familiar they felt. I thought, “Wasn’t this pretty much exactly how the mainstream media covered the tea party protests?” Instead of George Soros (who was name-checked in the Fox report) the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. harped incessantly about how the tea parties were funded by the Koch brothers and various astroturf right-wing organizations. They’d “question the sincerity” of the tea parties—or outright deny it.

 

These outlets also focused on the freaks, weirdoes, cranks, and characters who inevitably sign up for any mass movement and suggested they weren’t marginal but representative. As the Los Angeles Times noted back then, “At MSNBC, commentators Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews wrote off the demonstrations as the work of nothing more than crackpots or political stooges.” Others insisted that the tea parties literally fit the textbook definition of fascism. Some haven’t let go of this conviction.

 

The symmetry isn’t perfect. Mainstream media and various progressive groups were obsessed with the idea that the tea parties were racist, sometimes even likening the tea party to the KKK and Herman Cain as an heir to the Klan.

 

There hasn’t been anything like that, that I’ve seen, from the right with regard to the No Kings demonstrations. Though Scott Jennings did do a bit of amusing opportunistic nutpickery.

 

But the claims that the No Kings protests were a Trojan horse for communists just doesn’t feel all that different from the claims that tea parties were cover for fascists.

 

As for the scorn for the idea that “No Kings” is a silly slogan—which I’m marginally sympathetic to—I think it’s worth noting that the whole idea behind a movement built around the ideas that inspired the Boston Tea Party is not so very different. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against, well, a foreign king. There was other stuff involved of course, but conceptually the similarities are far more obvious to me than the differences.

 

And if we’re scoring for hypocrisy and insincerity, where the fudge are all the tea partiers these days? Trump’s fiscal incontinence, crony capitalism, and fetish for bailouts and taxes are certainly no better than Barack Obama’s. I attended many tea party events where speakers waxed eloquent about the Constitution and attendees carried little pocket Constitutions. If the No Kings crowds are hypocrites because they didn’t mind Joe Biden or Obama’s excesses but hate Trump’s, the same charge of hypocrisy works the other way around.

 

I mean, Trump has literally levied taxes on tea! He’s done so without the consent of Congress. Strictly speaking, this is taxation without representation. That Trump has levied taxes on a bajillion other things without constitutional authority doesn’t lessen the irony. The fact that he’s also launched a couple wars without congressional authority makes the “No Kings” argument stronger, not weaker.

 

Here’s another data point. The Ruthless podcast promoted its latest episode on social media by lamenting how “Democrats’ normalization of fringe characters, like Hasan Piker, shows you who is driving their party. We review insane clips from No Kings rallies that show the same problem—there’s no such thing as a moderate Democrat.”  

 

Now, in the linked video clip I agree entirely with Josh Holmes that it’s outrageous for the New York Times to be platforming Hasan Piker, a terrorism-supporting left-wing poltroon.

 

But, here’s the thing. The right is suffused with right-wing versions of Piker. They might not be getting softball treatment from the right-wing equivalent of the New York Times, but that’s because there is no right-of-center equivalent of the New York Times (which is why everyone should subscribe to The Dispatch—editors).

 

But you know where there are plenty of ideological freaks? In the Trump administration. One of the most obvious, Joe Kent, just resigned as the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. But there are plenty of inmates running the asylum, from you know, the president of the United States, to the secretary of health and human services. Stephen Miller has his talons in everything.

 

Indeed, the administration is infested with social media propeller beanie white nationalists, spewing “Heritage American” bilge. The vice president, who dismissed “I love Hitler” chat groups by Young Republicans as boys-being-boys hijinks, recently gave an interview to Benny Johnson, “MAGA’s Chief Content Creator.” Johnson is not the New York Times, of course, but that’s the point. The scandalousness here runs the other way. Johnson is an election-denying, ridiculous, plagiarist grifter who insisted that Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl appearance was a pro-Biden “psyop,” suggested that Nicolás Maduro was abducted to prove Venezuela’s role in rigging the 2020 election, and took money from Russia—“unknowingly”—to spread bilious divisive nonsense. He claimed he was the victim of the scheme.

 

Worse gargoyles man every parapet of the broader MAGA infotainment complex, many of whom are granted special access to the White House. I don’t need to call the roll, because it’s such a familiar story now. But if you think Piker being a guest on a New York Times podcast is evidence that the Democrats have caved to the sinister fringe, you might want to take into account the fact that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones et al. host podcasts, some of which often get more downloads than the Times and all of which are respected platforms in the GOP echo-system. The Young Republicans, an arm of the Republican Party, has been infiltrated and in many places, taken over, by groyper acolytes of admitted racist and Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes. At the latest CPAC, a Texan politician said that we need to deport “100 million people.” Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, sees “Zionists” along similar lines to Piker. He also recently explained to Benny Johnson that a “whistleblower” told him the U.S. military is forcibly breeding space aliens with migrants to create hybrid beings for … reasons.

 

My point here is not to say the right is worse than the left, or that Republicans have surrendered more to their fringe than the Democrats to theirs, or that right-wing media is more morally or politically corrupted than left-wing media—or vice versa. Such arguments, however valid, miss a simpler fact: Both sides have little right to get on a high horse about how terrible the other is. They all have splinters in their eyes. They all sit atop horses sunk to their haunches in mud.

 

Pointing all of this out doesn’t make me a centrist or moderate in the way I discussed at the beginning. But it does put me in an uncomfortable place all the same. I get grief from people all the time for making “both sides” arguments and complaints. So be it.

 

When I say I’ve never been more politically homeless but I’ve also never been more ideologically grounded, this is what I mean. Do I think the median Republican politician is more likely to be right on a given policy issue? Sure. Though it obviously depends on the specific question. But do I think Republicans are in any position to righteously lament how crazy the Democrats are in order to insinuate that the GOP is the party of sanity and probity? Hell no. And the fact that apologists for the fringe right—or full-fledged members of it—run Congress and the White House, not to mention so much of the right-wing media infrastructure, makes finger-pointing at the “liberal media” or even Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders et al.—however awful they might be—seem utterly insincere.

 

But I don’t think it’s insincere, at least not in many cases. Fish don’t know they are wet. And people inside partisan bubbles have trouble seeing what is obvious to those outside of them.

 

It’s not just that I’m disgusted with the ideological fringes on both sides, I’m frustrated to the point of being frequently appalled by the inability or unwillingness of the non-fringers in both parties to acknowledge the obvious truth as seen from outside the fishbowl. This puts me in an uncomfortable middle, or muddle.

 

In formal logic, the law of the excluded middle says that a proposition is either true or not true. In law, the jury either finds the defendant guilty or not guilty, but there’s no third option. In science, the object is either alive or dead, the light bulb is either on or off. This is how I often think about policy stuff.

 

But the law of the excluded middle doesn’t apply to politics, despite all of the “binary choice!” dogmatism we’ve been drenched in. If one party sucks, that doesn’t mean the other doesn’t. A stunning number of people really struggle to understand this, which is why all of those cliches about the most dangerous place to be is the “middle of the road”—because that’s where you get run over by cars on your right and left. But I guess I’m with Dwight Eisenhower, who was called a moron by the left and a secret communist by the fringe right. “People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable,” he said. “The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”

Carry On, Patriots

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, March 01, 2026

 

The most interesting political data I’ve seen lately has nothing to do with the economy or immigration or Iran. It has to do with bureaucrats’ job satisfaction, a subject conservatives aren’t naturally disposed to care much about.

 

The Office of Personnel Management asks federal workers each year how things are going at their agencies—or at least it used to, until the Trump administration canceled the 2025 survey. Fortunately, a nonprofit picked up the slack by creating its own questionnaire that replicated some of the topics traditionally probed by OPM.

 

What it found, per Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark, was a total collapse in federal employees’ confidence that the leaders of their departments will carry out their duties ethically.

 

Asked whether their superiors behave with high standards of integrity, 62.9 percent of workers across all agencies said yes in 2024. A year later, 11.2 percent said so. Asked whether they’re confident they could report a violation of a law, rule, or regulation without facing retaliation, 71.9 percent surveyed two years ago said they could. That declined to 22.5 percent last year.

 

Some of that can be chalked up to sour grapes over DOGE’s war on the administrative state and some of it to partisan disgruntlement at seeing a Democratic administration replaced in 2025 by a Republican one. But there’s no way around this: In matters ranging from war to policing to criminal justice to petty corruption, Donald Trump’s government has in fact created a culture of impunity unlike any in the history of the United States.

 

It’s an ethical disaster so grotesque that even MAGA influencers occasionally feel obliged to admit it. Federal workers now serve in a system that’s not so much amoral as immoral, where they stand a higher chance of being punished for exposing crimes committed by a presidential ally than that ally does for committing them. America’s bureaucratic culture has never been as comprehensively sick as it is right now. Go figure that federal workers might have noticed.

 

I thought of the survey yesterday while reading about Pete Hegseth’s latest attempt to destroy the U.S. military’s sense of honor.

 

On Saturday two Apache helicopters flew over a “No Kings” protest in Tennessee before swinging by the nearby home of MAGA darling Kid Rock, where the musician saluted the pilots and appeared to receive a salute in return. The aircraft were on a training mission, according to the Washington Post, and had no orders to monitor or disrupt the protest. Despite that, “one of the helicopters flew by demonstrators six times,” at one point descending as low as 625 feet and briefly circling an area where people were gathered.

 

It sounds like the crew thought it’d be fun to scare anti-Trump American citizens by buzzing them, even if that meant deviating from their assigned task. Military officials naturally ordered a disciplinary review and suspended the pilots. And Hegseth just as naturally un-suspended them immediately, no questions asked.

 

“No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots,” he wrote on Twitter, approvingly retweeting a video posted by Kid Rock of his encounter with the Apaches. I doubt any writer anywhere has distilled the corrupt essence of the Trump administration so succinctly. If you’re a presidential ally, i.e. a “patriot,” not only will you not be punished for misconduct, you won’t even be asked to explain yourself. That’s how the Justice Department handled things in Minneapolis too, you may recall.

 

It’s not noteworthy that Hegseth, a longtime apologist for war crimes, would leap to absolve service members for behaving ruthlessly toward the president’s political enemies. Nor is it noteworthy that he would pass on an opportunity to demand accountability for misconduct in a minor incident, if only to keep up appearances that the Pentagon is still enforcing discipline in the ranks. To build a proper culture of impunity, extending that impunity to petty malfeasance is important: It entices the grunts to start small in abusing their power, making them comfortable with the concept.

 

What is noteworthy is the timing. The president’s approval has declined sharply over the last month and will continue to do so as the economic fallout of the Iran war accumulates. If ever there were a moment when you might think toadies like Hegseth would be more circumspect about parading their arrogance and corruption, a spell of intense public discontent is it.

 

They should be chastened by events, wary of antagonizing the public further. In reality, the president and his team are behaving more imperiously than ever.

 

Seems ominous!

 

Unchastened.

 

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday designed to limit voting by mail in America, no matter how our 50 state governments might feel about it. “Trump’s order directs the Homeland Security Department, in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to create an approved list of absentee voters,” Politico explained. “The U.S. Postal Service would be directed to only send mail-in ballots to voters on that list.”

 

There’s an extortion component, too, of course. Any state that refuses to comply will have its federal funding withheld, whether Congress approves of that or not.

 

Take this prediction for what it’s worth, as it’s coming from the worst lawyer on The Dispatch staff, but that order is headed down the judicial toilet. The Constitution grants the legislature, not the executive, the power to big-foot states’ voting protocols, and the Supreme Court demonstrated very recently in a dramatic way how serious it is about not letting the president usurp Congress’ Article I powers.

 

Trump doesn’t expect the order to be upheld, though, unless he’s even more deluded by the information bubble he’s in than I assumed. He signed it to signal that his plot to game the midterms in Republicans’ favor by hook or by crook will continue, undaunted, in increasingly aggressive ways. The fact that his job approval now stands at 35 percent in some polls did not and will not deter him from his dubious mission.

 

This morning, he became the first president in U.S. history (as far as anyone knows) to attend oral arguments before the Supreme Court as the justices at last took up his executive order ending citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born on American soil. That one’s also destined for the constitutional crapper, for much the same reason that his order on mail-in voting is. Even if the court finds that the 14^th Amendment doesn’t guarantee birthright citizenship absolutely, it will assuredly hold that only Congress has the power to make the relevant rules. (It’s right there in Section 5.)

 

Maybe Trump knows that, maybe he doesn’t. Either way, it feels significant that he’d undertake to intimidate Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett into voting his way this time by staring them down in person. (You owe me, you can imagine him thinking, shooting daggers at both.) To be sure, it’s an idiotic tactic: Insofar as the president’s power play has any effect, it should make the justices less willing to rule in his favor to spare themselves lest they be accused that he successfully bullied them into doing so.

 

But I think his appearance has symbolic value. Venturing onto the court’s turf and confronting the justices personally might be his way of signaling that he’s preparing to confront them by infringing on their turf constitutionally if they rule against him. After the bitter disappointment of the tariff decision, Trump might treat an adverse decision in the birthright citizenship case as the moment to cross the Rubicon by ordering ICE to deport the children of illegal immigrants whether the Supreme Court likes it or not.

 

Even popular presidents didn’t dare risk a public backlash by defying court orders or rejecting the authority of Marbury v. Madison. Yet it seems plausible that a guy who’s at 35 percent might try it.

 

We’re not done. As I write this on Wednesday morning, Trump is promising to use his Oval Office address this evening about the Iran war to discuss his “disgust with NATO.” It sounds like the alliance is finally over: When asked yesterday if he’s reconsidering America’s participation in it, he replied, “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”

 

The president might be about to ask the country to support him in exiting a security pact that polls at 60 percent or better because member nations don’t want to participate in a war that, uh, Americans don’t want us participating in either. This too would be lawless, almost needless to say, as the NATO treaty isn’t a mere “suggestion” to the president. It’s a binding commitment that was codified in federal law when it was ratified by the Senate decades ago. Who’s going to give the order to defend Poland from Russia if he refuses, though? Sonia Sotomayor?

 

Then there are the monuments.

 

Never, surely, in American history has a leader been more consumed with glorifying himself than Trump is right now. The Trump ballroom, the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump international airport, Trump’s face on coins, Trump’s signature on the currency, and soon-ish a Trump presidential library-slash-hotel featuring a giant golden statue of the president that distinctly resembles sculptures of Kim Il Sung in North Korea.

 

And that list is not exhaustive.

 

All of it would be deeply, autocratically weird even for a president with massive popular support. For one who’s hemorrhaging approval, teetering on the brink of a full-blown energy crisis and stagflation, “weird” doesn’t begin to capture how disconnected it is from public opinion. From foreign policy to trade, the economy to immigration, Americans hate what he’s doing—yet the attitude of his administration in virtually every respect remains “Carry on, patriots.”

 

It’s Nero-esque, down to the quasi-gladitorial combat for the emperor’s amusement that will take place at his palace a few months from now. And maybe that’s no coincidence.

 

Self-correcting.

 

A president behaving more imperiously as he grows less popular is a confounding development in a democracy.

 

After all, democracy is meant to be self-correcting. A candidate makes promises, gets elected, then undertakes to govern. If his policies are bad, public opinion will sour and incentivize him to change course.

 

Sometimes presidents refuse to change course because they believe devoutly in a particular policy they’ve championed. Barack Obama promised health care reform as a candidate, for instance, and proposed a plan for it after taking office, only to discover that the public hated it. Polling at the time gave him a choice between abandoning the program and recovering or seeing it through and accepting the dire consequences. He chose door No. 2. Voters responded with an historic red wave in House races that fall.

 

What’s unusual about Trump isn’t that he’s sticking with an unpopular policy to which he’s deeply committed, like tariffs. What’s unusual is that he keeps making new and unexpected moves that he has every reason to think will deepen his unpopularity at a moment when he’s already unpopular.

 

The Iran war is the supreme example. Yes, he’s been rhetorically belligerent toward the Iranian regime for many years, but few believed that a guy running as the “peace candidate” in 2024 would start a war that’s now on the verge of involving ground troops and will compound a cost-of-living crisis that already has Americans at wit’s end. A popular president, like George W. Bush post-9/11, could reassure himself that he had political capital to spend in launching a questionable war of choice. Trump didn’t have the same capital—but spent it anyway.

 

Obama was sufficiently chastened by his party’s obliteration in 2010 that he felt obliged to negotiate the following year with the new House Republican majority on a grand bargain on entitlements. Trump will not be as compromise-minded if the House changes hands this fall, I suspect. “Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!,” he declared recently.

 

If we haven’t yet reached a point of democratic breakdown in which the country’s highest-ranking official stops caring about public opinion entirely, we seem to be approaching it. Why?

 

Democratic inefficiencies.

 

I think there are three reasons. One, of course, is that the president and his movement exist in an exquisitely curated information ecosystem designed to exclude discouraging feedback. Scroll through the replies to this tweet, showing a sharp shift toward Democrats in party ID over the past nine months, for an example of how MAGA true believers cope with data that contradicts their assumptions.

 

Like any market, democracy works best when it efficiently assimilates information, good and bad. Trumpist democracy is not efficient. The president won’t change course now that he’s conditioned himself and his supporters to treat every adverse data point as “fake news.”

 

Another inefficiency with Trumpist democracy is that the leader plainly does not give a rip about the long-term fate of his party and therefore lacks the usual motivation to avoid unpopular actions when he’s not on the ballot. We saw that in Georgia after the 2020 election, when Trump’s selfish paranoia about vote-rigging cost his party not one but two Senate seats. We’re seeing it again in Texas, where the president has held off on endorsing John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary despite the fact that he’d stand a better chance of holding the seat than uber-corrupt Trump crony Ken Paxton would.

 

Again, the Iran war is a prime example. In no sphere of reality does a conflict in the Middle East destined to disrupt oil markets make political sense nine months out from a midterm with affordability the most pressing issue in America. It’s a heavy anchor around Republican lawmakers’ necks. Yet as much as Trump might prefer to have them in control of Congress next year, his own desires will always take precedence over their political welfare. Look no further than the reason he gave to aides who warned him against attacking Iran: “I just want to do it,” the president reportedly said.

 

He just wanted to do it. In the same way that Europeans will have to deal with the economic consequences of the war Trump wanted to fight, Republican members of Congress will have to deal with the electoral consequences. The president doesn’t serve the party. The party serves him.

 

The greatest inefficiency of Trumpist democracy, though, is also the most obvious. Like all authoritarians, the president reveres democracy only to the extent it delivers the power he craves. He sees no special moral legitimacy in being supported by a popular majority, I suspect; if you told him that he could successfully gain or hold power only through anti-democratic means, no civic qualms would stop him.

 

In fact, we’ve seen that movie before, haven’t we?

 

By definition, a president who sees greater virtue in his right to rule than in the American people getting their way will not be chastened by negative feedback to his policies. The opposite, perhaps: If Trump is growing more imperious as his popularity declines, it may be that he’s begun to lean further into determined autocracy to shore up his position as he senses resistance mounting.

 

His new order restricting mail-in ballots and the pressure he’s putting on Senate Republicans to make voting more onerous are signs that he’s getting more aggressive about interfering with the midterms to prevent an impending blue wave. If those orders are struck down, another emergency order asserting presidential power to mandate voter ID and ban voting by mail is probably next. If (or when) that gets flushed, who knows?

 

But it’s a cinch that he’ll get more aggressive, not less.

 

The prospect of Trump conniving to try to suspend or cancel the midterms is realistic enough that a populist as diehard as Marjorie Taylor Greene now allows for the possibility. Last year, when Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House, the president said of Ukraine’s lack of recent elections: “During the war you can't have elections? So let me just see—three and a half years from now, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. That's good.”

 

Maybe he was joking. Or maybe he was doing something else.

 

The point of Pete Hegseth’s exhortation to “carry on, patriots,” and the reason so many federal bureaucrats now fear reporting misconduct, is that traditional norms of civic propriety are defunct. In which case, why would anyone assume that elections are an exception? An America where soldiers can intimidate civilians who hold political views they dislike, where Caesar’s face and name are on everything, and where nearly the entirety of federal policymaking is run out of the West Wing via illegal royal decrees is an America where the people in charge will feel no compunction about trying to retain power by any means necessary.

 

The less popular the president becomes, the more fervently he and his minions must “carry on.” Patriotism requires nothing less.

A Hormuz Handoff?

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

President Trump gave a speech to the nation that, at times, could have been ghostwritten by Curtis LeMay.

 

He talked with passion and relish about the devastating U.S. attacks on Iranian military capabilities and threatened more to come, perhaps targeting the Iranian electricity grid and the country’s oil facilities if there isn’t a deal soon.

 

For all that Trump boasted about U.S. power and threatened to use it in even more fearsome ways, he adopted a posture of relative impotence regarding the Strait of Hormuz. He urged the Europeans to open it or, he said, it would open up naturally when the conflict ends.

 

This is not a trifling matter. Since its earliest years, the U.S. has regarded maintaining the freedom of the seas as a vital national interest.

 

We have also long rejected “excessive” maritime claims (which would include the imposition of transit fees) by coastal states. The U.S. recognizes that the Strait of Hormuz is in Iranian and Omani waters but maintains that, under international law, they must be open to traffic, an uncontroversial argument — outside Tehran and other bandit lairs. We hear a great deal from Europeans about the importance they attach to international law. Now would be a good moment for them to show that they mean it.

 

As so often with President Trump, his handling of our European allies over the Iran war has included home truths, gratuitous insults, and profoundly dangerous ideas. The surge in the price of oil and certain other commodities caused by this war has been a windfall for the Kremlin. Denigrating NATO, as Trump has done — let alone threatening to leave it — adds further to Putin’s strategic haul. That is not in this country’s interest, and neither is suggesting that the U.S. might leave the Europeans to sort out the Strait of Hormuz for themselves.

 

The president has, quite rightly, been “encouraging” Europeans to pay more for their own defense, with results far exceeding those achieved by many of his predecessors. But Europe’s defense buildup is still a work in progress. For now, despite Trump’s exhortations, there is only so much that — either acting alone or assisted by Japan and other interested parties — it can do to restore and preserve the flow through the strait. If they tried and were unsuccessful, the result would be a deep economic crisis across a large swath of the globe, with economic and geopolitical effects from which we would not be immune.

 

The American economy’s direct reliance on products — aluminum comes to mind — transported through the strait is greater than often understood. For the U.S. to really leave it to others to sort the strait out would be an invitation to chaos and an act of profound self-harm. Even floating the idea, as the president has repeatedly now, sends the wrong signal.

 

Any outcome to war short of the strait’s again being free for navigation would be inconclusive at best and a strategic setback at worst. Trump should be clear-eyed about this.

 

The ideal solution to the crisis would be the fall of the Iranian regime, but that is outside our direct control. The result of Tehran’s savage crackdown earlier this year — and the years of horror that preceded it — is that many of those who might have led a revolution against the mullahs are dead, incapacitated, exiled, or imprisoned. The attacks on Iran’s machinery of repression may have created some space for an uprising, but that seems unlikely in the near term.

 

If the regime hangs on, it will continue to be toxic domestically, regionally, and globally. As demonstrated by the recent launch of two ballistic missiles with a range that Tehran had said was beyond its capabilities, any pledges it gives with regard to its arsenal, nuclear or otherwise, are worthless. Destroying Iran’s weaponry and weakening its short-term capacity to replace it have been worthwhile efforts, as Trump emphasized in his speech. But absent dramatic changes within Iran, they will probably have to be repeated. Containment is a long and not always peaceful process.

 

In the meantime, unless the United States takes the lead on the strait, the Iranians will remain in control. The strait is out-of-area for NATO, so the force to keep it open will have to be a coalition of the willing, comprising countries inside and outside NATO, including some from a region that has been painfully reminded just how bad a neighbor the Islamic Republic can be.

 

Of course, some potential members of the coalition of the willing have proved strikingly short of willingness to date. But an emphasis on the preservation of international law in the Strait of Hormuz ought to — along with a sense of self-interest sharpened by today’s shortages and price squeezes — persuade some to enlist, even if the most intense phase of combat has to end first.

 

If Trump wants the war to be the national and personal triumph he envisions, and to enhance the country’s deterrent the way he hopes, the strait can’t be left unaddressed.

Against Misery: Moonshot Edition

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

As a child, I was obsessed with the American space program, which, along with the country’s unparalleled collection of rollercoasters, was one of the many things that initially attracted me to the United States and convinced me that it was better than everywhere else. I can remember reading about the Apollo missions in awe, but also being shocked to learn that, by the time of the later excursions — Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17, in particular — the general public was no longer interested. This, frankly, astonished and annoyed me. Naturally, nothing was going to beat Apollo 11 in the popular imagination, and, for obvious reasons, Apollo 13 had its own grim televisual appeal. But these were manned missions to the moon! How could the whole world not have been transfixed during every single one?

 

The best case I could come up with was that, in 1971 and 1972, Apoll0 11 had been recent. Amazing, yes. But amazing a couple of years ago. Humans are impatient, complacent, and easily bored, and the moon landing was so 1960s. Oh look, Dick Cavett’s on!

 

But what, pray, is the excuse for indifference now? Today, from Cape Canaveral here in Florida, NASA is sending humans back to the moon. This time, they’ll “only” orbit it. A few missions hence, they’ll land on it. Such things are no longer recent. This will be the first time since the Nixon administration that a person has left low earth orbit. That’s more than half a century ago!

 

Does anyone care? I am fully aware that I cannot tell people what they should be interested in. But I find it remarkable that this is not the sole topic of discussion in America. The press is quiet on the matter. Not a single one of my casual acquaintances has mentioned it. Heck, my son’s baseball coach has scheduled a practice during the launch. It’s just not a big thing — at least not relative to other apparently crucial subjects for conversation, such as whether NBA players should be allowed to be Christians and whether a pretty standard midterm-year correction in the stock markets signals the end of the world. Are we crazy?

 

In the most recent issue of the magazine, I made a plea against misery:

 

It is, of course, virtuous for a free people to attempt to improve the country they inherited. But it is a grave mistake to believe that anything short of the establishment of heaven on earth represents failure. What we have in the United States right now — it’s not a matter of if or when or after or before, but right now — is a miracle. This country — as it is. This economy — as it is. This culture — as it is. This constitutional order — as it is.

 

After all, though “Americans have become convinced that, outside of their own enclaves, the United States is a hellscape,”

 

in the year of our Lord 2026, the United States is no such thing. In fact, it is the best place in the world by far. It has a durable constitutional order that, more than two centuries since it was ratified, continues to protect individual rights to an extent that remains unique in the West. It has the largest and most dynamic economy and the highest standard of living of any large nation. It has the most impressive higher-education sector; the best scientists, engineers, and doctors; and the lion’s share of the global technology industry. It boasts massive natural resources, including enough oil to remain energy-independent, vast tracts of arable land, and abundant fresh water. It has the most fearsome military, the world’s reserve currency, and the most important financial markets on earth.

 

And we’re going to the freaking moon!

 

 

Is This Really Orbán’s Last Stand?

By John Gustavsson

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

Recently, a bombshell report by the Washington Post alleged, among other things, that Hungary had leaked confidential information to Moscow. With Hungarian voters heading to the polls to elect their next government in less than two weeks, the timing of the report’s release could not be much worse for the current government. It may seem that this could be the final nail in the coffin of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was already trailing badly in the polls against opposition party leader Péter Magyar. However, the seemingly concerted effort to remove Orbán could yet backfire.

 

WaPo’s revelations have shook not just Hungary, but the EU as a whole — including neighboring countries typically sympathetic to Hungary. According to the report, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has, for years, routinely called his Russian equivalent Sergey Lavrov during breaks during closed-door Council of the European Union meetings, offering Moscow real-time information on what EU leaders were discussing and providing recommendations on how Russia should act in response.

 

Szijjártó has partially confessed, admitting that he had discussions with Moscow before and after meetings, though he argues that this was “completely normal” and that he also spoke with other countries.

 

Furthermore, WaPo uncovered a plot by Russia’s foreign intelligence service to stage a faked assassination attempt on Viktor Orbán — an attempt that would presumably be pinned on Ukraine in an attempt to rally support behind Orbán. Within the European Union, Hungary remains the staunchest critic of aiding Ukraine, and Orbán is currently holding up a €90 billion loan package, using his country’s veto in the European Council. His opponent, Péter Magyar, is more supportive of Ukraine.

 

Parallel to the WaPo revelations, independent Hungarian media outlet Telex uncovered a Watergate-style operation against Magyar’s party Tisza, which involved state intelligence services placing moles inside the party to gain access to its IT system. Even prior to these revelations, the EU had for the first time activated the rapid response mechanism of the controversial Digital Services Act to force social media platforms to flag and remove disinformation (including deepfakes of Magyar) related to the upcoming election. Péter Magyar has embraced the help and reporting, promising to investigate both political leaders and high-ranking government employees involved in these plots, even going as far as to threaten Foreign Minister Szijjártó with life in prison for treason.

 

As justified as this may be, it is a dangerous strategy. In the end, the EU may be what preserves Orbán’s grip on power. Hungary’s history has rendered it adverse to any semblance of foreign interference: Hungarian voters are always on guard against would-be leaders whom they suspect could turn out to be puppets of a foreign power, much like the despised Hungarian Socialist Workers Party who were Moscow’s patsies during the Cold War and aided the subjugation of Hungary to communist rule. A flawed champion of self-determination will therefore always be preferred to a marionette.

 

And this brings us to how many Hungarians view Viktor Orbán. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Orbán started as an anti-Soviet activist, at one point being arrested by communist authorities for his fight for Hungarian sovereignty. He was the architect behind the country’s EU and NATO accession, and he also played a great role in the country’s recovery from communism. For this, many Hungarians who do not support his policies still very much respect him. The fact that Magyar has repeatedly promised that he, if elected, will govern as an “Orbán of 1998” plays to this: Hungarians respect the leader Orbán was, but not so much the one he is today.

 

It may seem strange that somebody who fought the Soviet Union would later cozy up to Russia. This, however, is to misunderstand what Orbán is doing: Thinking of Hungary as a “buffer zone” between Europe and Russia, Orbán is arguably trying to safeguard his country’s independence by playing both sides (Russia and the West) against one another, keeping one foot in each door.

 

To Orbán, the EU represents at least as great of a threat to Hungarian sovereignty as Russia does, with intrusive regulations encroaching on matters previously reserved for national governments. This feeling of resentment toward the EU is shared by most other Eastern European member states.

 

Yet this in no way excuses his actions, especially with regards to Ukraine. Given his pro-national sovereignty beliefs, Orbán ought to have been Ukraine’s most fervent supporter in its fight to fend off the Russian invasion. That he is instead using Ukraine as a bargaining chip against the EU is petty to the point of being villainous. Last Wednesday, Orbán upped the stakes even further by announcing he would gradually cease natural gas deliveries to Ukraine, until Ukraine restores a Russian pipeline carrying oil through the country to Hungary and Slovakia that was damaged two months ago (ironically in a Russian attack).

 

Since the beginning, Orbán and his party Fidesz have attempted to portray Péter Magyar as a stooge of the EU who would sell out Hungary’s independence and even bring the country to war with Russia. Magyar’s discipline and triangulation have so far rendered these attacks ineffective.

 

After the stream of revelations, and the DSA measures taken by the EU, the Orbán camp is now hard at work claiming that this is a coordinated foreign effort to derail the prime minister’s reelection campaign and usurp the government. Péter Magyar embracing the scoops and promising repercussions could prove to be a bad move, tarnishing his moderate image.

 

While current polls break decisively in Magyar’s favor, it is worth keeping in mind that polls in the last election underestimated support for Fidesz by ten points. The Hungarian opposition would do well to steer clear of foreign help during the closing two weeks of the campaign.

 

Magyar’s election, in any case, would likely prove anticlimactic to many in Brussels who for years have been wishing for Orbán’s replacement. Magyar has promised to not block any non-military aid by the EU, but maintains that he will never contribute Hungarian arms, and much less so troops, and he (correctly) opposes accelerating Ukraine’s accession to the EU. On migration, he and Orbán are virtually identical, with Magyar pledging to keep the border security policies that have so enraged Brussels (he also rejects the EU’s migration pact). Like Orbán, Magyar views increasing fertility rates as a top priority, pledging to dedicate even more funding toward pro-natalist policies. He and his party have mostly been silent on “culture war” issues, though frequently voting with Fidesz against the EU in the European Parliament, not least on social issues.

 

Anybody in Brussels expecting a continental-style mainstream liberal will be greatly disappointed. That is not who Magyar is, and however much they may wish otherwise, that simply is not Hungary.

 

Should Viktor Orbán beat the odds and prevail, the consequences for Hungary would almost certainly be dire. First, such an outcome would immediately raise suspicions of cheating, suspicions that would appear more credible given the revelations by WaPo and others. Social unrest cannot be ruled out. Second, the EU would almost certainly seek to activate the “nuclear option” Article 7, which allows the EU to suspend Hungary’s voting rights in the European Council and Council of the European Union. This move would effectively prevent Hungary from using its veto to stop aid to Ukraine, or on any other issue.

 

While there is no mechanism to formally expel a member, this — combined with new, draconian sanctions ending remaining EU funding critical to Hungary — would be the closest. Hungary would go from unofficial to official pariah state, and the likelihood that Ukraine would repair the pipeline delivering oil to Hungary from Russia would be almost zero. All in all, this would almost certainly cause a recession or stagflation.

 

Orbán may hope that other, increasingly Ukraine-skeptic member states (such as Slovakia) would block Article 7, which requires unanimity, but it appears increasingly unlikely that any European leader would sacrifice political capital to save Hungary. Especially considering that, without funding for Hungary, there’s more left for everyone else.

 

For now, however, political leaders who secretly or openly wish for the end of Orban’s government would do well not to overplay their hand, as the EU is arguably doing with its heavy-handed use of the DSA. It would be a supreme irony if the very institutions and outlets most eager to topple Orbán instead ended up saving him by turning the election into a proxy battle between Brussels on one side, and Budapest on the other. If the opposition cannot resist the temptation of seeking outside help and validation in these final weeks, they may learn a hard truth: Hungarians would rather tolerate a flawed guardian of sovereignty than install a successor who appears a bit too comfortable subordinating it.

Why Rubio’s Stock Is Rising With MAGA

By David M. Drucker

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

Any sensible discussion about Marco Rubio and the race for the 2028  Republican nomination begins by addressing an essential question: Would a GOP base dominated by populists who view President Donald Trump as their north star embrace the secretary of state as the nominee and enthusiastically back his candidacy?

 

Accounting for some possible caveats, the answer is—most likely—“yes,” key Trump allies connected to the president’s Make America Great Again movement told The Dispatch this month, as Rubio’s White House stock continued to soar in Republican circles. This crowd’s affection for Rubio is a significant development. Although nearly a decade has passed since the onetime free-market Reaganite converted to conservative populism (“common good capitalism”), the MAGA wing of the GOP was sufficiently distrustful of Rubio in 2024 that its most prominent voices pushed Trump to make Vice President J.D. Vance his running mate.

 

That was due partly to the secretary’s lingering hawkishness. Rubio never abandoned his preference for projecting American power abroad, fueling suspicions that he remained a so-called “neocon warmonger”—the derisive label Trump and many of his supporters attach to Republicans who take their cues from Ronald Reagan and who dominated the GOP coalition prior to the president’s 2016 nomination. Ironically, it’s Rubio’s close working relationship with Trump on military matters like the Iran War that has contributed to the populist right warming to him as the party’s possible 2028 standard bearer.

 

“He’s done such an impressive job, and he’s done it with such good humor—which I think really helps. He’s just come through again and again,” a conservative populist media figure and loyal Trump supporter told The Dispatch, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. “If J.D. doesn’t go for it, I think he’s the obvious choice. I think he’s the obvious veep if J.D. does go for it.”

 

So why is the answer “most likely” instead of definitely likely? A longtime Republican insider who has supported Trump since his first campaign explained: “Rubio is at his apex. He’s at the point where he’s making the most Republicans happy. The question is: If he moves out of this secretary of state role, where he’s simply implementing the Trump policies, what happens when he has to start speaking about all of this other stuff? Do the ghosts of the past come out?”

 

Rubio, 54, and Trump, 79, have traveled far since the 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination.

 

On the trail, Trump belittled Rubio as “Little Marco” while Rubio warned that Trump was stoking anger and violence that threatened to unravel American society. But Trump’s victory caused Rubio, then a senator from Florida, to rethink his approach to domestic policy. And during the president’s first term, Rubio’s staunch defense of Trump amid the federal investigation into allegations he colluded with Russia in his race against Hillary Clinton helped paper over their persistent disagreements over America’s role in the world.

 

“Marco did something really good,” Trump told me in May 2021. “He went up, in my estimation, so much.” Fast forward past the 2024 campaign, during which Trump came close to choosing Rubio over Vance for the Republican ticket, and their personal and working relationship appears genuinely collegial and synergistic. That’s apparent, at least, from watching the secretary effusively heap praise on the president in televised Cabinet meetings as the commander in chief goes around the room soliciting progress reports from his department heads.

 

From August 26: “You were elected as the president of working Americans, and that’s why this Labor Day is so meaningful.” Also, referring to himself and White House diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff: “We both work for the peacemaker in chief. Think about it. How fortunate we are to have a president who’s made peace a priority?” December 2: “It’s also an honor to be involved in, and be a witness to, what I believe is the most transformational year in American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War—at least.”

 

And from just last Thursday: “The most important job any president has is to keep the American people safe. And every president says it, but we have a president that means it and does something about it.”

 

Rubio’s loyalty is paying dividends with Republican voters, many of whom often place fidelity to Trump above any particular policy agenda. Indeed, the secretary finished a healthy second to Vance in this past weekend’s straw poll of grassroots conservatives who attended the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

 

Traditional polling also shows Rubio on the rise.

 

In a previously unreported survey conducted in March by the GOP polling firm Deep Root Analytics and shared with The Dispatch, the secretary narrowly trailed the vice president in a 2028 sweepstakes that, granted, seems unlikely to unfold. Rubio has vowed not to challenge Vance should he run. But the secretary’s performance in this poll, which gauges whom Republican voters would consider for the nomination in a hypothetical primary, was impressive. He far outpaced many prominent Republicans mentioned as possible contenders—though not all. Among the survey’s findings:

 

·         Sixty-nine percent of all primary voters said they would consider backing Rubio in a primary, just ahead of Donald Trump Jr.’s 66 percent (82 percent said they would consider Vance).

 

·         Among voters who identify as “MAGA GOP” or “Nationalist Conservative,” roughly one-third of the primary electorate in this poll, Rubio would be considered by 80 percent of them, although he trailed Trump Jr.’s 85 percent (Vance was at 93 percent).

 

·         In a simulated ballot test across all categories of GOP voters, Rubio garnered 18 percent (he was tied with Trump Jr.), and Vance received 27 percent.

 

But Rubio did hold one trump card.

 

According to this survey, the secretary has the highest ceiling of potential support among all candidates, Vance included. This metric is an “efficiency score,” or the percent of respondents who say they would consider voting for a candidate versus the percent who say they would “never” do so. Rubio’s score was 16.6; Vance’s was 11.6.

 

This is how veteran GOP strategist Brad Todd characterized the growing appreciation for Rubio inside a Republican Party remodeled and dominated by Trump: “The uniting thread to the group Trump brought to the party is populism, but its animation is strength. Marco is demonstrating he understands how to translate strength into action in a way that has appeal inside Trump’s hardcore base, and beyond it.”

 

Populist operatives and media personalities in Trump’s orbit interviewed for this story did not raise the bygone issue of Rubio having once supported the legalization of illegal immigrants as part of a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill he helped negotiate as a senator. (The 2013 legislation cleared the Senate but died in the House.) And these political insiders agreed that the secretary’s image is strong enough with grassroots Republicans to withstand public revelations that wealthy GOP donors prefer Rubio over overtly populist alternatives—reporting already making the rounds.

 

That’s significant and another example of how the secretary is being viewed with fresh and adoring eyes by the GOP base as currently constituted. But no politician’s trajectory is without potential obstacles.

 

For Rubio, that could be the Iran War, not to mention the president’s other foreign policy endeavors that, as secretary of state, he is closely associated with. That includes a successful American military operation to change the leadership of the government in Venezuela—and the as-yet undetermined outcome of the squeeze Trump is putting on the communist regime in Cuba. There’s zero indication at this point that these conflicts are politically problematic for Rubio.

 

But there’s no guarantee the Iran War or the president’s other overseas initiatives won’t turn into problems.

 

“Up until this war, he’s done a pretty good job,” Steve Bannon, host of War Room, a podcast popular in right-wing populist circles, told The Dispatch. “But this war could overshadow everything else.” Bannon added: “A lot of people figured his strong neocon attitude and direction had really kind of pulled back. He understood this is a populist, nationalist movement. But apparently not.”