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In his 2026 shareholder letter, Fink said that governments can “do more to help channel capital into their own growth.”
Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever
When Politics & Prose hosted a “wake” last month for The Washington Post’s Book World, the rite of mourning was familiar. The closure of the section and the laying off of the paper’s books editors and critics were just the latest in a series of unkind cuts to serious books in this century. They follow the Trump administration’s gutting of the National Endowment for the Humanities (which supports authors), Barnes & Noble’s fire-sale acquisition of the cherished Denver bookshop the Tattered Cover, the demise of local papers that covered books, the shuttering of hundreds of independent bookstores, and the closure of the Borders chain in 2011. The latter two developments were brought about in part by the market dominance of Amazon—which began as an online bookseller and whose founder, in a grim irony, now owns the books-deprived Post.Another recent cut has gotten less attention. In January, Simon & Schuster laid off several prominent editors of nonfiction books. Among them were two renowned editors who had breakthrough books early in their careers: Colin Harrison, of the Scribner imprint, who published Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (an account of a Marine’s service during the Gulf War), and Eamon Dolan, who at Houghton Mifflin published Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (as bold a work of investigative reporting as ever ascended the bestseller lists). Recently at Simon & Schuster, Dolan published Mary L. Trump’s memoir Too Much and Never Enough (where she observed that the election of her uncle Donald turned “this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”); Harrison published Mikhail Zygar’s The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism, about the ways Vladimir Putin has perpetuated the Cold War to his advantage. Nonfiction books are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance. The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. The form is as essential as it is hard to define. Nonfiction books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book review sections, libraries, and universities. They are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance. Fretful narratives about the demise of books and the rise of devices have been in play for half a century or longer. “Our world of books, like most other worlds now, is the arena of an increasingly bitter struggle for space, and for the limited reading time that a busy citizen in this electronic age can afford,” John Updike lamented when accepting the American Book Award in 1982. Narrative nonfiction in particular has faced headwinds in mass culture before. And in many respects, the challenges it faces are built in. Long fact is hard to publish and always has been. Reportage and research take time, resources, attention, and fortitude. A book can require several years to write and another year and a half to be edited, checked, printed, and publicized—only to wind up coming out during a news cycle dominated by a sex scandal, school shooting, pandemic, or war. It was as true half a century ago as it is today that readers expect to pay for fiction but are used to getting nonfiction passively through the media. I know firsthand that even habitual readers often need a mix of factors—reviews, media hits, friends’ recommendations, eye-catching placement on the “new and recommended” table, all on top of long passion for a topic—to induce us to buy a particular nonfiction book.So there’s little point in harking back to a golden age. And yet the decline in serious reading has accelerated in recent years: Forty percent of Americans did not read a single book in 2025. Sure, this is owing in part to the shift in public attention to other media, but the stories told in those other media are ultimately grounded in books, nonfiction in particular. Even as the buying and reading of books declines, then, we as a society depend on long fact to a remarkable degree—so much so that we take it for granted. The journalism we read, the newscasts we watch, the panels of expert commentary, the hard-hitting 60 Minutes reports: All are informed, and shaped, and buttressed from the ground up by long fact—nonfiction developed at length and with a narrative arc that sets it at an angle to the self and the present. So are plenty of movies (Killers of the Flower Moon), streaming series (Say Nothing), and stage productions—notably the breakout Broadway hit Hamilton, based on Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of the Founding Father. At Sunday’s Academy Awards, Hamnet was nominated for best adapted screenplay—adapted from the 2020 novel, whose author, Maggie O’Farrell, cites half a dozen works of narrative nonfiction in the book’s acknowledgments. The challenges of narrative nonfiction are also its advantages. The authors of narrative nonfiction must play a long game, which often means, paradoxically, that they wind up anticipating current events. I saw this from a publisher’s point of view after Islamist terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a quarter-century ago. Eric Darton’s Divided We Stand, a cultural history of the World Trade Center born of his personal curiosity, had been published quietly in 1999; in September 2001, it seemed positively topical. Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan had been turned down by the house I worked for and was published instead as a low-cost, low-risk “paperback original”; all at once journalists, TV news folks, and engaged citizens recognized it as an intrepid update on a place whose story is often told in centuries. That October, V.S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature—for his 20-volume body of work, certainly, but on the particular strength of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, travelogues from 1981 and 1998 that registered the variety and internal fission of societies where surging Islamic fundamentalism was leaving its mark.In the years that followed, there came Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars (a history of the CIA’s dealings in Pakistan and Afghanistan that preceded the attacks), Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (a narrative history of the run-up to the attacks), and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (an account of the ways governments exaggerate social problems in order to apply excessive solutions). Right now, much of the reporting and commentary about the U.S. and Israel’s fresh war against Iran is rooted in the vast nonfiction narrative literature about the Middle East—books reported, researched, written, and published in the years after 9/11. In the past two weeks, amid war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, PBS, CNBC, the Financial Times, The Hill, Barron’s, Fortune, and a number of YouTube shows and podcasts have featured fresh interviews with Daniel Yergin, whose 912-page narrative work The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, about the emergence of the global oil market, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1999—and is still an essential work on the subject nearly three decades later.Many of today’s popular new media forms—podcasts, Substacks, and social media feeds—rely for their techniques and their content on the old medium of long fact. The popular podcast Freakonomics Radio was derived from the host’s 2005 book. The pioneering Serial podcast used the techniques of narrative nonfiction writing in audio form—and emerged out of public radio’s This American Life, whose founder, Ira Glass, edited the 2007 anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction, which linked audio storytelling with literary storytelling of prior eras. Reams of streaming documentaries and fictional dramas that strive for verisimilitude (such as Succession and The Diplomat) are made by showrunners and screenwriters versed in narrative nonfiction. Shows from Morning Joe to Rachel Maddow present authors as experts alongside policymakers and elected officials, and Maddow is herself the author of four narrative nonfiction books. Opening the broadcast, she often relates an episode drawn from the history books—literally—and then pointedly joins it to the present. Those figures generally present books that are recognizably “on topic.” That’s good and necessary. But through my own work as an author and teacher, I’ve been struck by the pertinence of nonfiction books that don’t deal directly with current affairs. These books develop narratives that at first glance are well outside the news cycle, but as you read them, you find they speak powerfully to the moment precisely because they don’t succumb to the presentism, partisanship, and winners-and-losers schemas too often regarded as inviolable norms of media today.Truly, current events make more sense when narrative nonfiction books are there to offer a backstory. Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party? See Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, about William F. Buckley, the paragon of American conservatism—who staked out proto-Trumpian positions on Israel, the United Nations, and the U.S. as a Christian nation, and whose program Firing Line took the culture wars to television. Similarly, Brooke Nevil’s Unspeakable Things is not about the Epstein files, but it goes deep into the networks through which powerful men commit sexual assault and make it seem normal, and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. (its title notwithstanding) is a bracing portrait of a power elite who consort with one another in a world unto itself of mansions, yachts, and private islands, styling themselves as beyond politics, law, and morality.The rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani fits into the story told in Ross Perlin’s Language City, which reveals present-day New York (and Queens, especially) as a boomtown of linguistic diversity, stirred by immigration, where 40 percent of citizens are foreign-born and 700 languages are spoken. ICE’s crackdown on illegal immigrants in Chicago and Minneapolis has a forerunner in Chinese exclusion, which Michael Luo traces in Strangers in the Land, a chronicle of the federal government’s persecution of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century.America’s and Israel’s wars in the Middle East? Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza, a short book long in the writing, presents regional wars as the inevitable outcome of half a century of policies that invoked an “existential threat” to Israel as a justification for a military buildup that now poses an existential threat to global peace. Artificial intelligence? Michael Pollan’s just-published A World Appears addresses the question at the core of the present tech revolution—what does it mean to propose that machines are “intelligent”?—by burrowing deep into current research into our everyday experience of intelligence, known as consciousness.In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore—with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current—is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated.Now, I’m not saying each of us personally must read each of those books in order to understand those developments. But our broader cultural understanding depends on the context and insight they provide. This is why the thinning out of the nonfiction book culture is so distressing. Book reviews don’t just apprise customers of products they might want to buy; like the books themselves, they’re ways for us to encounter narratives and ideas we might not encounter otherwise. In a review of John Updike’s Hugging the Shore—a collection of over 800 pages of book-review essays—the novelist David Lodge pointed out that “most people’s knowledge of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, arguably the three most important thinkers of the modern era, is second- or third-hand. Hence the importance of the generalist reviewer, to monitor and disseminate information about the endless production of new ideas and artefacts, on behalf of the rest of us, who will never have the time, opportunity or will to encounter them all directly.”In societies where freedom is under threat, an informed citizen is countercultural and deep reading is an act of resistance. Just as protest and vigilance are essential, so is the ability to read and think. In a would-be autocracy, the autocrat aims to subsume our society’s particular narratives into his master narrative—in which his name fills the headlines, his voice and image dominate the broadcasts, and his airbrushed visage appears on the facades of government. To read a book, however, is to enter a narrative that stands outside the politics-and-media maelstrom. In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore—with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current—is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated.
The Reason Trump Isn’t as Perturbed by Rising Oil Prices as You Are
Many of us who remember the 1970s energy crisis are experiencing right now a strong sense of déjà vu. I acquired my California driver’s license in January 1974, three months after the Arab petrostates imposed an oil embargo against the United States for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. At its peak, the price of gas at the pump rose about 40 percent to today’s after-inflation equivalent of $3.51 per gallon. At the moment, that looks like a bargain, with the national average a whisker under $4 per gallon.The oil embargo’s effect on me was that I accepted steep gas prices and long queues at the gas station as a normal fact of life. Its effect on the United States was more severe. The embargo brought an abrupt end to the unmatched prosperity of the post–World War II era, accelerated the decline of labor unions, reversed a three-decade trend toward fairer income distribution, and initiated dismantlement of the New Deal consensus. When historians try to pinpoint when the confident assumptions behind Henry Luce’s American Century began to falter, they tend to gravitate toward my high school days behind the wheel of my parents’ dark green Mustang.The current run-up in gas prices won’t likely stop at $4 per gallon, raising the question of whether we’re about to experience societal transformation comparable to that of the mid-1970s. The general consensus is that we won’t, a significant reason being that the United States is now itself a petrostate. But with congressional Republicans reduced to saying things like “What we’re paying at the gas pump is a small price to pay,” gas prices ought to help Democrats win back the House, and maybe even the Senate.When the 1970s oil embargo hit, the U.S. was importing more than one-third of its oil. Today, the U.S. is a net oil exporter. We still import plenty of oil, but more of it is from Canada and less from the Persian Gulf. This ought to make oil a less urgent consideration in the formulation of foreign policy. But President Donald Trump thinks about oil all the time. Partly that’s because his brain never left the 1970s (“Y.M.C.A.,” Trump’s signature rally song, was released in 1978), but mostly it’s because Trump wants to control the global oil market in general, and Middle East oil in particular. When Trump looks at the oil industry, he doesn’t see an energy source. He just sees a pile of money. In 2011, as the United States was preparing to remove troops from Iraq, Trump told Kelly Evans of The Wall Street Journal that he’d rather stay and “take the oil” as compensation for removing Saddam Hussein. Trump was likely unaware (and may be still) that the U.S. already had sort of “taken the oil” in Iraq, in the sense that Iraq’s oil revenue was and remains collected and controlled by the New York Fed as a check on corruption and other potential mischief by our client state. Around the same time Trump was mouthing off to The Wall Street Journal, he also advocated seizing Libya’s oil from Muammar Qaddafi. He kept saying this stuff during his 2016 presidential campaign, and during his first presidency, when he sent troops into Syria, he said, “We’re keeping the oil.” (We didn’t.)Trump’s January invasion of Venezuela, in which the United States arrested President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the U.S. for trial, left Maduro’s corrupt Marxist regime in place, raising the question of why we’d bothered. We’d bothered, it turned out, because Trump fantasized that he could bring American companies back to Venezuela, whose oil, he claimed, had been “stolen” from the Americans who pumped it out of the ground. (That wasn’t true, but never mind.) Trump was furious when Exxon’s chief executive told him at a televised White House meeting that the country was “uninvestable”; only Chevron is operating there now, and it was there before. Meanwhile, Trump is using oil as a weapon to topple Cuba’s antique Communist regime.Trump’s ever-shifting explanations for why he went to war with Iran mostly reveal an old man’s confused mind, but somewhere in that maelstrom is the idea that he can gain control of Iran’s oil. And now, whaddya know, he’s talking obliquely about sending in the Marines to seize Kharg Island, where Iran stores its oil prior to exporting it. The idea is to deprive Iran of oil revenue to pressure it into reopening the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, though, Trump is expanding Iran’s oil revenue by removing sanctions from 140 barrels of Iranian crude oil that’s already loaded onto tankers, in hopes that that will lower oil prices at home. If there’s a larger purpose, it’s to control Iran’s oil—never mind whether to enrich the enemy, starve it, or do both simultaneously.Trump’s environmental policy consists almost entirely in boosting oil revenues. In January, he repealed the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing the agency’s jurisdiction over greenhouse gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act. Previously, he eliminated the Biden administration’s $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, clawed back grants to promote wind and solar energy, reopened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, eliminated from regulatory cost-benefit analyses considerations of public health, canceled grants to research climate change—you get the idea. Trump’s top environmental priority is to extend as long as possible the primacy of petroleum as an energy source, ceding renewables (that is to say, our energy future) to China. Don’t ask what the strategy is. The strategy is, he can’t help himself.At an April 2024 Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump bluntly told a group of oil executives, including representatives from Exxon, Chevron, and Occidental, that if they raised $1 billion for his presidential campaign he’d reverse Biden’s environmental policies. “You’ve been waiting on a permit to drill” in the Arctic for five years, Trump said. “You’ll get it on Day One.” Energy companies ended up spending about a quarter of one billion dollars in that election cycle, virtually all of it on Republicans, more than doubling their spending four years earlier on soft money and outside groups. Sure enough, on his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.I’m not the first to observe that Trump’s style of governing apes that of authoritarian leaders in the Gulf and Russian petrostates. His personnel policy is unapologetically nepotistic, and he prioritizes the collection of bribes. Four days before his inauguration, the president of the United States accepted as his business partner the United Arab Emirates, which (unlike Trump) had to pay for its 49 percent stake in the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. Eric Trump, who signed the document, had previously said of the UAE that it was “the developers’ greatest dream, because they never say ‘no’ to anything.” Last May, the UAE purchased $2 billion in WLF stablecoin; two weeks later, Trump lifted national security restrictions on UAE’s importation of high-end AI chips. That was, as I’ve noted more than once, the worst political bribery scandal in America since Teapot Dome, the main differences being that this time out a sitting president was himself implicated and that the sums were, after inflation, much vaster. More recently, Trump bypassed Congress to sell $23 billion in weapons to UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan.Not to be outdone, UAE rival Saudi Arabia’s Dar Global, a firm with close ties to the monarchy, has initiated four Trump Organization projects in that country since Trump’s inauguration, including a billion-dollar “Trump Plaza” in Jeddah. And last week we learned that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, even as he acts as Trump’s Middle East envoy, has been soliciting investment from the Saudis for a private-equity fund that made Kushner a billionaire after his previous stint as Trump’s Mideast negotiator. Nobody shoves money into Trump’s pockets like the oil-producing Arab nations.A May 2025 essay published in The National Interest by Tatiana Mitrova and Anne-Sophie Corbeau of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy suggested we may see the emergence of a new oil cartel consisting of the three largest petrostates—Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States—because their combined oil production now exceeds that of all OPEC nations. One potential obstacle is that international cartels are illegal in the United States (though American judges and Congress have always been too chicken to apply that reasoning to OPEC). Another obstacle is that the oil business doesn’t have a great future. Global demand is high now, promising windfall profits to foreign sheikdoms and American oil executives. But it’s projected to decline in the next decade with the spread of conservation and renewables in other nations, and, after Trump leaves office, in the U.S. as well. Still, at the present moment, the price of oil remains sufficiently relevant to voters’ well-being that Trump’s driving them higher with his war of choice in Iran is the height of madness. Less than a month ago, Trump boasted in his State of the Union address that gasoline had dropped to $2.30 per gallon. Now it’s $3.94 per gallon and Trump is boasting on Truth Social that “the United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” You have to wonder whether by “we,” Trump means the Trump Organization and that the price of a presidential bribe is rising accordingly. For Trump, oil prices are a game of heads I win, tails you lose.
The Scariest Thing About This War? He’s Sitting in the Oval Office.
Iran, according to reports, has around 500 power plants. The vast majority run on natural gas, though a fairly impressive number are solar. Only one is nuclear. The country’s largest plant, called Damavand, is gas powered and sits about 30 miles southeast of Tehran. If Donald Trump decides to start bombing civilian power plants, as he threatened to do over the weekend if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it would seem likely that Damavand, which produces an output of around 2,900 megawatts (point of comparison: The largest gas-fired plant in the United States, the West County plant in Florida, has an output capacity of 3,750 MW), would be among the top targets.Bombing it to the point of taking it offline would be a pretty large undertaking (go check it out on Google Maps—nothing is obscured, hidden, or pixelated). It would leave millions of Iranian people without power. It might also be a war crime.Wait a minute, a real war crime? Well, as the United States Law of War Manual defines it, probably not. But under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Law of Armed Conflict therein, probably yes. Article 147 prohibits acts by a military—and the U.S., of course, is a signatory to those conventions, as is Iran—that cause “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”International law experts debated the question robustly in the earlier stages of Russia’s war on Ukraine, when the Red Army was trying to knock out Ukraine’s electrical grid. So, before we go any further, let’s just stop and dwell on that fact: What Trump wants to do to Iran was most recently done on a large scale by Vladimir Putin. Comforting, eh?The broad point here is whether military necessity justifies such attacks on civilian targets. Thresholds in international law are higher than in the aforementioned Defense Department Law of War Manual, whose less stringent standard states: “Electric power stations are generally recognized to be of sufficient importance to a State’s capacity to meet its wartime needs of communication, transport, and industry so as usually to qualify as military objectives during armed conflicts.”I wouldn’t suggest we get too hung up on the matter of whether such bombings constitute a war crime. It’s an interesting question to think about, but it’s murky. What isn’t murky is that it’s a significant escalation. And as we enter this war’s fourth week—and wasn’t it supposed to be winding down by now?—we need to start thinking about the ways in which this could escalate further and why it’s potentially dangerous with an impetuous man-child sitting in the Oval Office and a secretary of “war” who has already shown us that he lusts to inflict violence on noncombatants (the people on those boats in the Caribbean) and to thumb his nose at both international law and our own military’s rules of engagement while doing so.This is how conflicts become, well, real wars. It always starts small. But history and current reality remind us of two truisms of war. The first is that unpredictable things always happen. I believe that we didn’t intend to bomb that girls’ school. But bomb it we did, and those 150 dead children are not something Iranians will soon forget.The second is that wars escalate. The United States and Israel started this war. Iran ordered reciprocal strikes on Israel and some Gulf states. The United States and Israel stepped up their attacks. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which led Trump to say what he said over the weekend about bombing civilian power plants. Iran countered that move by announcing that if Trump does that, it will launch strikes on the energy and water systems of Israel and some Gulf states. What exactly is Iran’s capacity for doing this? We don’t know. But we did learn last week that Iran has missiles that can reach far beyond the previously known range of around 1,200 miles. A tit-for-tat battle of strikes on civilian infrastructure would at the very least rattle the markets and add to the growing economic uncertainty the war is causing.And remember—Trump has not merely promised some strikes against Iran’s civilian power infrastructure. He said the U.S. would “obliterate” it. Yes, that’s how he always talks, so he probably doesn’t mean it. If he remains true to form, we’ll take out 5 or 10 percent, which will provide enough boom-boom video footage to make them happy at Fox and Newsmax, and he’ll say it was 90 percent destroyed, and the people who want to believe him will believe him.But this brings us to what’s really dangerous about this situation. It’s the complete unpredictability of Donald Trump. It’s very easy to imagine him growing bored with this war, seeing a few more negative polls, declaring victory, and ending it this week. His friend Mr. Netanyahu will have a few things to say about that, we can be sure, but it does seem like Trump has thrown in the towel on regime change, which he expected to have happened by now. It’s also easy to imagine him going in completely the opposite direction: Iran does something that surprises and irks him—that emasculates him personally—and he escalates with a ground invasion. Or even a “small” nuclear weapon. It was utterly unthinkable that any other American president in the nuclear age would use a tactical nuclear weapon against a nonnuclear nation. But with Trump? Nothing is impossible.I’d still bet more on the former than the latter. Trump wants everything to be fast and easy because everything in his life has been fast and easy for him. That’s how life tends to go when you have a father who drops into your struggling casino and buys $3.5 million worth of chips.What’s terrifying about this situation is that we have to reckon psychically with the fact that the worst-case scenario can never be ruled out. A draft dodger and scam artist who can gloat about the death of a war hero (Robert Mueller took a bullet in the leg in Vietnam) and career public servant before his body is even cold has no moral compass and is capable of anything. The mullahs are evil tyrants, and that man in Tel Aviv is a thug. But in terms of ability to inflict pain on the world? The scariest one of the bunch is sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump’s Civil Service Cuts Are Now Putting Americans in Danger
As the United States continues to pursue war with Iran, the infrastructure that would have helped respond to threats has been hollowed out by the Trump administration’s efforts to dramatically shrink the federal government. The overall loss in institutional knowledge wrought by massive personnel cuts and other efforts to decimate the civil service might not just affect the future of this war, it risks the government’s ability to manage an array of future conflicts.President Donald Trump has expressed shock at Iran’s targeting of its Gulf state neighbors, saying that “nobody could have predicted” the attacks on countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But that assertion comes as the agencies that oversee diplomacy and conflict operations have seen a significant loss in expertise. This brain drain could have long-lasting consequences beyond just the ability to predict conflict dynamics.“You need good career, nonpartisan expertise for your policy to work and for your operations to be the most effective, and when you’re gutting that career federal workforce, you are really constraining your ability to get to good outcomes,” said Jeff Greene, who worked in the Biden administration as head of the cybersecurity division at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, and served as the chief for cyber response and policy on the National Security Council.Over the past year, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and politically appointed agency leaders have worked hard to gut the federal bureaucracy. The Trump administration has made dramatic cuts to CISA, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security that works to protect cyber and physical infrastructure from attacks. Moreover, CISA currently lacks a permanent leader, and is chiefed by an acting director.The FBI has also purged several high-ranking officials due to their participation in investigations against Trump while he was out of office. In the days before the U.S. began its operation in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired dozens of staff from a counterintelligence unit that monitored threats from Iran because they were involved with investigating Trump’s alleged holding of classified documents.The State Department decimated its Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and worked hard to shrink the number of foreign service officials. The agency also reportedly fired a number of its oil and gas experts, leaving the government without resources to address the ongoing crisis of rising oil prices in the wake of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the Pentagon decimated the offices that would have investigated the lethal strike on an Iranian school that killed 165 people.Since Trump took office last January, more than 380,000 people have left the federal workforce; although some of these “separations” occurred due to retirements or contract completions, tens of thousands were the result of layoffs, hiring freezes, and the “Deferred Resignation Program,” which provided employees with payouts to leave federal service. According to data from the Office of Personnel Management, more than 130,000 federal employees took the DRP, also known as the “Fork in the Road.”“There is an approach by this president and the leaders around him not to value expertise, and that has implications above and beyond the reduction in talent that has existed and the morale that has been damaged,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that studies the federal workforce. “The sum total means that we are less safe as Americans under the leadership of this administration.”Even if the White House changes hands in four years, there may be far-reaching consequences of the hollowing out of the federal workforce, including young people avoiding entering government service due to job insecurity. Federal employees are often mission-driven, and are willing to take lower pay to fulfill what they see as a calling. Future would-be employees will choose the safety of the private sector over the uncertainty of a federal job. Meanwhile, those employees who are remaining are working with fewer resources and support.“Morale has been really hit by the constant rounds of layoffs, the punitive actions against some members in leadership, trying to transfer people as punishment. It shatters the ‘We’re all in this together’ type of mentality that you need when you’re working long hours on important things,” Greene said.According to a recently released survey by the Partnership for Public Service, government employees are feeling less satisfied and engaged with their work in 2025 as compared to 2024. When asked how they would describe their work unit’s performance as compared to the previous year, 36 percent of respondents said they were worse at meeting deadlines, 36.5 percent said they were worse at delivering quality service, and 39.6 percent said they were worse at fulfilling stakeholder needs.Losses in diplomatic infrastructure may also, in the long term, make it more difficult to receive support from allies. One former State Department official noted that, under normal circumstances, agency leaders would be “trying to coordinate with the foreign partners on what our strategy is, what our messaging is, what we need from them.” Although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were internationally controversial, President George W. Bush and his administration did lay the groundwork to collaborate with other countries. “We got a lot of countries to sign on and join in, not just diplomatically,” the former official said. “You need a bureaucracy to not only help shape that and coordinate with our allies … but keep everyone rolling in the same direction.”Even seemingly unconnected cuts may have a major impact on the war in Iran and the future of conflict management. The Trump administration has decimated Voice of America, the government-funded outlet that has been crucial to broadcasting in foreign countries, particularly those with closed societies, including airing Persian-language broadcasts in Iran. (A federal judge this week ordered the administration to reinstate more than a thousand VOA employees on administrative leave.)“They shut down and sidelined basically that entire agency, without any recognition of the consequences for something like a war that is being fought in Iran or an effort to influence what is going on in Venezuela or Cuba,” said Stier. “The larger web of impact is quite important to understand.”Still, Greene cautioned against the belief that there were no remaining experts in the federal government. There may be fewer career officials, working with fewer resources, but Greene argued that their work is still critical for ensuring American security.“The people who are there are still busting their ass to keep us as safe as they can,” he said.
What the James Talarico Vegan Story Reveals About U.S. Politics
Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” advocating republican form of government in the 13 colonies, turned him into a national hero. Few people today realize that he in fact died poverty-stricken and alone—his opposition to religious dogma in his last major work, The Age of Reason, having proven significantly less popular in early American society than his writings against monarchy.Today, the United States appears on paper the sort of representative democracy with formal separation of church and state that Paine championed. But in practice, the sort of dogma Paine warned about is ubiquitous, including in electoral campaigns. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the run-up to the Texas race for the U.S. Senate, where Democratic primary-winner James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, has made his faith central to his campaigning, counterposing his vision of godliness to the Christian nationalism he sees as ascendant in the Republican Party. But now Talarico himself is being accused of apostasy: not against god but against barbecue. It is a telling moment, where debating the finer details of religious dogma is being actively encouraged while even the slightest challenge to secular dogma (in this case, meat eating) is treated as unacceptable. Ever since the charismatic young member of the Texas House of Representatives from Austin won the Democratic primary and began polling ahead of both Republican hopefuls—long-serving incumbent Senator John Cornyn and his challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton—the GOP has been scraping the internet for oppo research. Last week they found it, improbably, in a speech Talarico gave during a statehouse race in 2022 to a small animal rights group called the Texas Humane Legislation Network. In it, Talarico told his audience that reducing meat consumption for animal welfare and climate reasons was “the right thing to do” and explained that his campaign was a “non-meat campaign … only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.” It’s a perfectly commonsense claim—and just the right amount of pandering to a special interest group—for a young Democrat running in a local election in Austin. But it’s red meat for the Republican Party culture warriors trying to win a statewide race. Ted Cruz took to Twitter to claim, baselessly, that “this freak wants to BAN BBQ. That’s not Texas.” Cornyn chimed in: “Vote Republican this November. The steaks couldn’t be higher.” Newsmax, Fox, and The Hill immediately ran stories on Talarico blaspheming against both Texas’s culture and its agriculture. How could he represent Texas if he shunned meat in the state that produces more beef than any other in the country and where barbecue might as well be a religion? Talarico’s campaign fired back—at veganism. His campaign released a photo of him wearing a Texas flag shirt, chowing down on barbecue. And the day after the video resurfaced, at an event in Dallas hosted by The Bulwark, Talarico told the audience: “I deny all accusations of veganism … our campaign basically runs on barbecue these days.”All electoral politics is to some extent identity politics, in that it entails a population choosing a representative who will speak for them—and therefore, typically, whom they also see as being like them in one way or another. This may be why Talarico, an outspoken Christian, is such a viable candidate, even as a Democrat, in a state where 67 percent of the population is Christian. But it’s also why being vegan or even being branded—pun intended—a vegan is such a hard sell for a politicians. Meat eating is the one true cultural unifier in the United States, crossing party, geography, class, and creed lines. The vast majority of Americans eat meat, and the average American eats about 225 pounds of it per year.This has been exacerbated by meat eating being pulled into the culture wars, primarily as a marker of masculine and conservative identity. This is in part why Republicans accuse any opponents who dare mention environmental issues of trying to ban meat. In 2018, when Ted Cruz was locked in a Senate battle with Democrat Beto O’Rourke, he claimed that “if Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.” In 2019, when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was championing the Green New Deal, conservatives claimed the New York congresswoman wanted to ban hamburgers. In 2020, Cory Booker’s presidential campaign was beset with attacks on his veganism. And Joe Biden’s climate initiatives were attacked for allegedly requiring the rationing of meat. In this sense, meat eating works as both a cudgel in attack ads and as something of a secular dogma, an ideology placed by its proponents beyond rational critique. Ideals of a democratic public sphere in an age of reason, as championed by Paine, rested on the idea that dogma of any kind, and especially dogma that undergirds power and oppression, should wilt under the light of rational scrutiny and critique. Sacred cows should be slain.Talarico and his campaign have decided that to be seen as a legitimate Texan and to focus on ostensibly more important issues, he has to pretend he never gave that 2022 speech. But here’s the problem: That speech was right. There is a broad consensus among environmental scientists that to keep global food production within planetary boundaries, and to reduce the food system’s contribution to climate change, we need to produce and eat far less meat. The ethical case for reducing harms to animals is no less salient today than it was four years ago when Talarico gave that speech. And research shows that the politicians who are most effective at championing both personal and policy changes to address climate and environmental problems are the ones who lead by example. In other words, to move toward a more sustainable food system, we need more politicians willing to talk about meat reduction and maybe even veganism. And that’s particularly true in Texas, where the volume of cattle production makes the state one of the country’s biggest agricultural greenhouse gas emitters. The state’s massive cattle feedlots also choke local ecosystems and communities in particulate matter, including fecal dust. Politicians being able to freely speak about these documented harms, and linking them to meat consumption, should be the first step to being able to address them. But modern electoral politics make this sort of speech extremely risky or even disqualifying. It forces what Paine called “infidelity,” or the professing of beliefs people don’t actually believe. This isn’t Talarico’s fault. He’s making a rational decision about electoral strategy. But we should be very worried about what that decision represents: right-wing culture warriors’ successful poisoning of the public sphere, to the point that rational discussion about science and ethics is seen as politically disqualifying. Two hundred and fifty years after Paine wrote “Common Sense,” we find ourselves with a public sphere where neo-scholastic claims about whose vision of politics better aligns with religious texts are fair game, but discussions of the environmental impact of food production and animal ethics are off the table, all enforced by an elite-owned media amplifying bad-faith attacks. Thomas Paine imagined the opposite: a United States where the public sphere would be a robust democratic space for the rational exchange of important ideas about how to build a better society, free from the suasion of elites and organized religion. When even ostensible progressives abandon science and embrace dogmas—both religious and secular—we have never been further from that ideal. These are the times that try men’s souls, as it were.
Epstein’s New Mexico Horror House Will Finally Be Investigated
Since November 2024, dozens of states have moved to protect their internal sovereignty against President Trump’s campaign to consolidate an autocratic central government. The flamboyant resisters have mostly been loudmouths like Illinois, New York, and California. But now New Mexico, a quieter player, has entered the fray. The New Mexico state legislature is bringing rigor, tactical acumen, and moral imagination to the cause.Last month, the New Mexico statehouse launched a Truth Commission, chaired by state Representatives Andrea Romero and Marianna Anaya.Their plan, which won bipartisan support in the majority-female state legislature, is Hague-like in scope: to investigate human rights violations and atrocities carried out in New Mexico by the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein and his many enablers.A four-person panel is now holding public hearings and conducting private interviews about crimes and cover-ups, using subpoena power and a $2 million budget. A request for proposals from the House of Representatives to law firms that may want a piece of this action went out on March 13.The physical investigation of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County started March 9, and it turned sinister in short order. New Mexico Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard proposed that cadaver dogs pore over the state land around Zorro to search for the bodies of girls alleged to be buried there. “The state land was used almost as a buffer, a shield to hide what activity was occurring on the ranch,” she said last month.From a drone’s-eye view, the ranch looks cadaverous itself. It’s a pale-flesh-colored colonial monstrosity of 28,636 square feet that sits goonishly amid the sagebrush in the high desert, sucking it dry.Though Epstein bought the land in 1993 from Bruce King, who was then New Mexico’s Democratic governor, his Temu Xanadu, with its helipad, giant pool, firehouse, and private airship, always irritated locals for putting “inordinate burdens on the scenic and water resources of our region,” as a local journalist wrote in 1999. Nationally, the face of the Truth Commission’s investigation is New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury, who as a member of Congress has had a look at the unredacted files. “I spent a fair amount of my time this morning looking at the files on Zorro Ranch,” she told reporters last month. “There aren’t words to describe what are in those files.” Stansbury has repeatedly emphasized to the press that “both girls and boys” were abused at the ranch.On Thursday, after sitting through Attorney General Pam Bondi’s evasions in a closed-door “fake hearing,” Stansbury reported on social media: “If anyone wondered whether there is a coverup, there is a coverup happening in the Department of Justice and in the White House.”Stansbury has 1.2 million followers on TikTok alone. (For comparison, Connecticut Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who is also outspoken on the Epstein affair, has 125,000.) Comments on Stansbury’s videos are effusive. “Ma’am, thank you,” read a recent one. “I’m from Florida and follow you for the truth.”New Mexico’s Truth Commission is clearly ambitious. But what does conducting an investigation of a local crime scene have to do with defying federal overreach?That is the real motivation for these New Mexico lawmakers. Back in 2019, when Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking of minors, the state geared up for a probe into his activities in the region. Girls and women, after all, had alleged for decades that Epstein groomed, abused, or raped them, many as teenagers, at Zorro Ranch. New evidence surfaces all the time that New Mexico was the site of some of Epstein’s gravest misdeeds, not to mention his obscene plan to seed a master race with his own DNA. What’s more, the FBI at the time was investigating all of Epstein’s global houses of horror: properties in France, the Virgin Islands, New York, and Florida.But before the New Mexico investigation could even take its first step, the feds stopped it in its tracks. The then New Mexico attorney general said in 2019 that federal prosecutors in New York told him they were running a complex, multi-jurisdictional investigation, and New Mexico should just back off.And thus seven years have passed without Epstein’s ranch being so much as dusted for fingerprints. Zorro has also changed hands. Whatever evidence was there at the time of Epstein’s 2019 death in prison has likely been Lysoled away and hauled off in GOT-JUNK trucks.How could criminals manage to get officials to let their radioactive crime scene devolve into tumbleweeds? Through the usual trick of the Trump-Epstein class: Butter everyone up. In this case, Epstein sucked up to the most powerful men in the state with his trademark mix of money and “massages.”Epstein was especially close to Bill Richardson, a Cabinet secretary under President Clinton and governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. Richardson regularly visited Zorro Ranch for sex, according to Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre. Or, rather, as she clarified in a 2016 deposition, Richardson came for “massages,” which, she said, “means sex.”Like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Richardson, who died at 75 in 2023, just after evidence emerged that connected him closely to Epstein, denied ever meeting Giuffre. He also denied being friends with Epstein, though documents have since revealed otherwise. (Richardson, the author of How to Sweet-Talk a Shark, was known for canny diplomacy.)In 1993, King, who served three nonconsecutive terms as New Mexico governor between 1971 and 1995, sold Epstein the tract of land in Stanley on which he built his ranch. Epstein had the mansion built later in the 1990s, and the King family still owns the land around it.King died in 2009, but his son Gary, who served as New Mexico attorney general from 2006 to 2014, was even closer to Epstein. When Gary King was running for governor in 2014, he took money from the child rapist via a rat’s nest of secret shell companies.During the failed 2014 campaign, King and his running mate, Deb Haaland (later secretary of the interior), also took one of Epstein’s jets to fundraising events in Washington, D.C. King long maintained that he didn’t know the source of the plane, but an email sent to Epstein on August 21, 2014, says that Gary King “wanted to speak to you about possibly using your plane to get him from Sante Fe evening of Sept 8th (around 8pm) so he could make a breakfast in DC on Sept 9th.”Several members of the powerful King family show up in Epstein’s so-called little black book.Whatever the Truth Commission turns up, the formation of such a boldly conceived investigation right now, while Donald Trump is back in the White House and obfuscating about Epstein, comes not a moment too soon.Though always imperfect, truth and reconciliation commissions on human rights abuses—notably, the ones launched in South Africa on apartheid in 1996, and in Canada on Indian residential schools in 2008—change the record. Such commissions foreclose historical denialism and are the minimal act of compensation that a government must provide witnesses, victims, and survivors of state-abetted violations of human rights.The investigation in New Mexico says what no one else has: that the American people deserve a candid audit of the catastrophic injustices of the age of Trump. It’s early days, but read the brief. The Truth Commission asks New Mexicans, and all of us, to raise our expectations and imagine the possibility, post-Trump, of contrition, justice, and even reparations.
Why Donald Trump Just Can’t Stop Going to War
When Imperial America Offers Help, It Just Might Get You Killed Patrick Strickland for Tom Dispatch After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes […]
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