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Trump’s War With Iran Is a Product of His Deep Stupidity
What can be said about Trump’s war with Iran that isn’t already abundantly obvious? The answer: not much. It is not going well, and it probably won’t end well. But having spent time in the salt mines of Trump punditry, I can tell you that we’re going to endure a difficult round of think pieces purporting to explain How This Happened. So maybe this is the best time to assert the obvious, using my favored rubric of Trump analysis: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: “Yep, that tracks.” As with all of Trump’s presidential exploits, success is always constrained by two factors: The aforementioned sharp limitations of his intellectual capabilities and the fact that he is perpetually surrounded by an inner circle made up of clowns somewhere on the spectrum between “rampantly evil” and “thoroughgoing dipshit.”“Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran?” The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg recently mused. “It depends on what day of the week you ask.” On some days, Trump was acting on (roundly discredited) intel that Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. On others, there is a scent of regime change in the air. Sometimes we are told that we were doing a classic “leading from behind” maneuver, trailing Israel into a conflict it’s long sought. Frankly, I give a lot of credit to the “wag the dog” scenario: With the economy in shambles and Jeffrey Epstein riding high in the headlines, Trump needed a distraction. Also, we mustn’t forget that he’s a warmonger who just thinks it’s fun to blow things up. (For Iran War Stupidity completists, Popular Information’s Judd Legum has rounded up 17 separate and frequently contradictory reasons that the administration has submitted for our approval.)I’ve been reading the comment sections (of the Financial Times, anyway), and Trump is getting his ass roasted: “Let me get all of this straight in my head. They want their allies to join in an ill-thought-out war of choice with unclear aims and an uncertain chance of success for any of the myriad aims stated so far. They want everyone else to just absorb any of the externalities, like influxes of refugees, disruptions to shipping, higher oil and commodity prices, and maybe even some incoming missiles. And then they also want to tariff everyone at 15 percent.” Brother, you seem confused, but you got it absolutely correct.Trump is really going through it with the nations that were once, putatively, our allies before Trump launched a trade war with all of them and threatened to seize Greenland in an act of colonial conquest. In the space of days, Trump has gone from begging for European naval support to free the Strait of Hormuz to having those requests punted back in his face to spiraling out on Truth Social about how he didn’t actually need anyone’s help in the first place. Since then, he’s petulantly suggested that he might wreck the whole shop and leave the nations that rebuffed him to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, countries like France and Italy are simply working on side deals with Iran to be allowed to use the strait.My colleague Heather Souvaine Horn recently expressed to me how maddening it is to see the Trump administration treat Iran’s clampdown of the Strait of Hormuz as if it’s some unfair trick the Iranians pulled and not one of the most singularly obvious strategic choices the regime could make under the circumstances—the other being Iran’s decision to attack other Gulf states, knowing that it would be a pain point for the U.S. both economically and diplomatically. But by Trump’s own admission, the very fact that Iran retaliated in any way has caught him completely flat-footed. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” he told reporters on Monday. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked!” Right now, there are 13-year-old kids about to invade Kamchatka in their first-ever game of Risk that look like Carl von Clausewitz compared to Trump. This week, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote that it will be Iran, not Trump, that dictates when and how this conflict ends. At least one anonymous administration official concurs, telling Politico that Iran’s leaders “hold the cards now.” “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Sounds great. Until then, if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a rake—forever.This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Trump Derangement Syndrome Is a Self-Destructive Distraction
In recent weeks, Trumpian excesses have—finally—provoked some visible setbacks: These include his firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; the scaling back of the grandiose “regime-change” goal of his Iran war; and the grudging acquiescence, at least purported, in repeated judicial rejections of unlawful planks of his policy and political agendas. This is all good news, but let’s remember: These retreats are merely tactical. Neither Trump nor his sycophants in the executive branch and Congress have put aside their grander vision of marginalizing entrenched liberal values; dismantling private and public bastions of liberal political power, cultural authority, and societal stature; and hollowing out or outright scrapping the Constitution itself. Liberals must not merely keep their guard up. They must ratchet up their pushback game. Too often, this has been an erratic, flick-of-the-wrist affair, which has enabled their insurrectionist adversaries to push forward with their stated goals. Readers of this journal are already familiar with some of the most essential resets. As Michael Tomasky elaborated in the March 2026 edition of The New Republic, their progressive and centrist factions need to transcend their preoccupation with intra-family spats over messaging and programmatic agendas and mobilize more robustly against the New Right’s genuinely existential war against common, foundational liberal values and goals. As I have repeatedly urged, liberal politicians, pundits, and advocates must wrap themselves in the Constitution—not just as a throwaway talking point, but to spell out how and why the principles and provisions on MAGA’s chopping block serve interests vital to both constitutional democracy and real-life individuals and families. To these ends, attention must be paid to an ingrained miscue that underlies these and other fault lines, but has gained less notice: liberals’ obsession with Trump as an individual scoundrel—what their adversaries snark as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” To be sure, liberals’ reasons for demonizing Trump are hardly off base. On the contrary, close to 100 percent of the time they are 100 percent correct. The problem is that, with notable exceptions, liberals at all levels share Gavin Newsom’s recent reassuring brush-off that MAGA is just a “temporary” hiccup, a “cult of personality,” an “invasive species [that] will not survive Donald Trump.” They think their problem is solely Trump and his putatively ephemeral popular appeal.This is not the case. Behind this erratic but charismatic leader stands an expressly antidemocratic movement with support from substantial and committed constituencies. They may represent a distinct minority of the electorate, but this antidemocratic cabal is driven by deeply rooted economic, cultural, and technological trends, and their message is scripted by a robust cadre of well-versed, savvy, and politically connected savants. Many of the latter view Trump as a useful buffoon, not a visionary leader—very much as the Nazis viewed Germany’s President Paul Von Hindenberg when he appointed Hitler chancellor in 1932. None of these grievants will quit the current battlefield, when and if Trump sulks off. As the New Right movement has taken shape and accumulated power, liberals have remained steadfastly unaware of the radical—indeed, truly counterrevolutionary—depth of their adversaries’ spurn for the Constitution, and of the Enlightenment values that the Constitution codifies: individual liberty, pluralistic tolerance, and representative democratic governance. Liberals tend to harbor derogatory caricatures that devalue the constituencies open to that agenda, shrug off their motivations for shedding pro-liberal and Democratic loyalty, and discount their political weight. Most disabling, the overwhelming majority of liberals are downright ignorant of the academic, religious, and think-tank philosophies that energize and give direction to this movement, to say nothing of the ideas and proposals they elaborate. A major reason that liberals are unaware of these New Right intellectuals is that their ideas and protagonists were, until quite recently, safely beyond the fringe. Their surge to the mainstream—by many measures, dominance—of conservatism and the Republican Party was sparked by a 2018 tract, Why Liberalism Failed, written by Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. Deneen derides liberalism as fatally riven by fundamental contradictions: “A massive state architecture and a globalized economy … combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures [supposed to beget individual] freedom.” Deneen’s message caught the eye of one eminent liberal, Barack Obama. Obama included it in his 2018 reading list, posting on Facebook, “I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.”In 2019, Deneen’s critique was sharpened by an Israeli American publicist, Oram Hazony. “Deneen and Hazony,” Brookings scholar William Galston wrote, “have mounted a frontal attack on the entire individualist, rights-based liberal tradition that they trace back to John Locke.” So far, such warnings have gone almost universally unheeded. By 2022, Deneen, Hazony, and other New Right protagonists had embraced overtly theocratic, authoritarian agendas as means necessary to displace liberal domination of ideology, politics, education, and culture. Hazony wrote that year, “The only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity. This was a Christian nation, historically and according to its laws, and it’s going to be a Christian nation again.”In 2019, Hazony had created the Burke Foundation, which holds annual “National Conservatism Conferences.” To run the foundation and its conferences, Hazony tapped Christopher DeMuth, who after serving for two decades as the CEO of the mainstream conservative American Enterprise Institute, became affiliated with the militantly New Right Claremont Institute. Among other initiatives, Claremont commissioned a “79 Days Report” prior to the 2020 election, which was effectively a playbook for overturning a feared Trump loss to Biden. Written by the subsequently disbarred attorney John Eastman, the report guided the thinking of the postelection Stop the Steal campaign. All four “Natcon” conferences have been heavily attended by activists, academics, think tankers, and politicians, including representatives of European far-right parties and factions. In a 2019 Claremont publication, DeMuth acknowledged that the U.S. New Right’s ethnonationalist “spirit of nationhood” was inspired by the “neo-nationalist parties of Germany and France” and counterparts in other European countries.Last but not least on this (abbreviated) list is Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. Vermeule has been labeled the New Right “movement’s high priest,” by Laura Field, in her encyclopedic and widely acclaimed 2025 volume, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right. With disarming candor, Vermeule “put[s] little stock or hope or faith in law.” He prefers “a Christian Strategy … which view[s] political commitments [a.k.a. ‘laws’] … as tactical tools to be handled in whatever way best serves the cause of Christ.… [The] true identity of liberalism is aligned with Satan.” With University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, Vermeule co-authored a 2011 book titled The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic, which argued that “the legally constrained executive is now a historical curiosity” and the “Madisonian separation of powers is obsolete.”However exotic, these views cannot be dismissed as inconsequential. Quite the contrary. As Field notes, at Natcon 4, in July 2024, six U.S. senators were listed as speakers; Josh Hawley of Missouri and Vice President JD Vance gave keynotes. Within two months of taking office, the second Trump administration had hired over 30 alumni of Claremont Institute fellowship programs. By far the most fervent political disciple of these New Right ideologues is Vance. As New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall recently elaborated, Deneen and Vermeule “heavily influence Vance’s thinking.” That influence is evident in Vance’s self-description as “a voice [of the] postliberal right” with a “corrective” mission that in his view licenses serial deployment of patent falsehoods to displace liberals or Democrats, with whom “there is no unity,” since they are “terrorist sympathizers [who] celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination”—thus knowingly propagating myths to galvanize his followers. Behind Vance and numerous other far-right agents and causes stands the fortune of PayPal and Palantir billionaire Peter Thiel. Infamously, Thiel has written that he does not “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” in part because of the Nineteenth Amendment’s “extension of the franchise to women” over a century ago.Democratic politicians, including former Vice President Al Gore, have been admonished, even within their own ranks, for tossing about assertions that Trump is a “Hitler” or “Nazi” facsimile. But if such critics would dig deeper into the forces behind Trump, they could validate, indeed emblazon, that charge. Today’s New Right savants have admiringly exhumed Hitler’s favorite philosophical guru, Carl Schmitt. Thus, it seems hardly coincidental that key Schmittian concepts structure Trump’s modus operandi: that the leader of the executive branch is the national “sovereign”—not, as the Constitution proclaims, “We the People”; that law is nothing but an illegitimate obstacle to fulfillment of the sovereign leader’s will; that democratic governance is inevitably, and appropriately, grounded in dividing “the People” and their “friends,” from their “enemies,” and flattering and where necessary rewarding the former, while pursuing “retribution” against the latter; and that the leader embodies the Will of the People, regardless of whatever policy or rhetorical flip-flops he or she may find expedient. Recently, two distinguished experts in Nazi-era history, American Timothy Ryback and German Victor Ullrich, have detailed Hitler’s maneuvers in the 1920s and early 1930s, and, most of all, his adversaries’ blinkered indifference and miscalculations, without which his seizure of untrammeled power could have been blocked. Both authors expressly highlight parallels between that history and current challenges facing constitutional democracies in the U.S. and across the West, thereby to warn contemporary democratic, rule of law–embracing readers—and leaders—not to repeat that century-old catastrophic cycle. Yes, Trump might be distinctly deranging. But we must keep the parade of horribles that follow in his wake in view if we are to survive them.
The Frankensteined Feminism of The Bride!
Even before Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes a black-bile-spewing revenant, you wouldn’t call her a proper lady. At a shady gin joint in Chicago, 1936, she’s vacant-eyed, slurring, and lurching in her seat when she launches into a tirade against the local Mafia. The gangsters tolerate her until she rises up and vomits all over their king (Zlatko Buric), a toad-faced godfather who promptly orders his minions to give her the whack. And so they do, in this opening scene of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a jangly reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with a post–#Me Too spin. In this vision, loud, leaky, nasty women are ideal monsters to navigate issues of power, consent, and narrative control.At the end of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s monster yearned for companionship, begging his master to create him not just a friend but a “bride,” whose similarly abominable construction will allow her to empathize with him and tolerate his presence. In Gyllenhaal’s movie, Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) grants the monster, “Frank” (Christian Bale), this wish when she zaps Ida to life. The resurrected Ida has a new look: a puff of platinum blonde hair etched with finger waves and a splash of black ink across the side of her mouth. She doesn’t remember her name, who she is, or where she came from, but otherwise Ida is the same cackling debauchee we saw in the bar. Frank is delighted. Chivalrous, prudish, and naïve, he at the very least has the wits to tell Ida that they were a couple before her “accident” and to profess to admire her intellect. “You have an amazing vocabulary,” he observes, adoringly.In this vision, loud, leaky, nasty women are ideal monsters to navigate issues of power, consent, and narrative control.Nevertheless, Frank gets feisty after a few drinks and brutally kills two thugs who tried forcing themselves on Ida. These actions make the headlines, turning The Bride! into an outlaw drama that spins out in frenzied, genre-spanning directions: A pair of wry detectives, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna (Penelope Cruz), are hot on the monsters’ heels; so is one of the mobster kingpin’s cronies (John Magaro), who’s been tasked with getting rid of Ida once and for all; Ida is occasionally plunged into the depths of her unconscious, where she consults with Mary Shelley herself (Buckley, again, in a gothy getup).This encounter between Ida and Shelley reminds us that Frankenstein’s monster—for all its iterations throughout the last century of pop culture—derives from a woman’s mind. And so it’s curious that there are so few female versions of the Creature across the dozens of films and shows in which it appears, including, most recently, Guillermo Del Toro’s (relatively faithful yet sleepy adaptation) Frankenstein (2025). Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) stages a man-made woman’s moral and intellectual awakening, and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein (2024) follows a teenager who reanimates a corpse and tries to “fix” him into the man of her dreams. Yet Gyllenhaal’s feminist Frankenstein seems to want to rewrite the myth itself—or at least reimagine the Hollywood version of it.Frank claims to have been born in 1819, the year after Frankenstein’s publication, so it’s telling that he meets Ida over one hundred years later—right around the time when the iconography of Frankenstein had begun to appear on the silver screen. At the end of the 1935 film, Frankenstein’s bride rejects the monster’s hand, preferring death, it would seem, to a lifetime of subordination. Gyllenhaal has her bride signal her independence in a very different way: Ida not only shirks convention as a club-going, hard-drinking, sex-having vigilante, she is also presented with the capacity to love and to be loved by Frank on her own terms, though their romance—its authenticity and fraudulence—also explores the limits of heterosexual coupling in a patriarchal world. When a woman dares to upend gendered dynamics, she is a monster, is the film’s spirited proposition—even if, in Gyllenhaal’s hands, it lands with a thud.Among the film’s more clever traits is its metacinematic approach to Hollywood history. Ida quickly finds out that Frank is a raging fanboy for the fictional song-and-dance star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose movies he rewatches obsessively. A dark theater, any moody cinephile will tell you, is an extraordinary comfort for the downbeat and lonesome, so it makes sense that poor Frank would find solace on the screen. Ida and Frank plot out their travels based on Ronnie Reed screenings happening around the East Coast, and Frank routinely projects himself and Ida onto the films within the film: In a Busby Berkeley–style dance number, he appears as one of the tuxedoed chorus boys, and in a shipboard romance, Frank’s and Ida’s faces replace those of the leading couple. Perverting these cinematic templates, while also calling attention to the delusions and desires motivating Frank’s displacement, makes for a productively ambivalent tribute to that era. The film’s spectacular period settings, especially when the action shifts to Manhattan with its scintillating marquees and packed houses, may demonstrate a certain nostalgia for a time when movie culture was capable of meaningfully organizing public life; yet Frank’s parasocial relationship to Reed is a reminder that the movies don’t love back, and that they historically have held very little space for people like Frank and Ida—literal monsters, here, being a convenient catchall for all manner of the oppressed.Gyllenhaal, in part, seeks to rework this history, giving the Bride her spotlight, yes, but also casting women in professions that the movies themselves have reinforced as masculine domains. Myrna reveals herself to be a far more talented sleuth than Jake, though she continuously is faced with skepticism from her male colleagues; and even Frank is surprised to learn that Dr. Euphronious is, in fact, a woman.But if Frank’s fantasies of assimilation prove pathetic, firebrand Ida embraces her outsider status to spark social unrest. Halfway through the film, Ida and Frank crash a glitzy downtown affair, posing as waiters while feasting on shrimp cocktail, outlaw life having left them penniless and hungry. This charade devolves into a choreographed dance sequence with intentionally weird, jagged moves at odds with the ballroom’s propriety. Here, Jake and Myrna catch up with them, along with dozens of cops ready to lock ’em up, only for Ida to grab a gun and start menacing the crowd, even threatening to kill Ronnie to leverage her and Frank’s escape. The scene is total nonsense, a jumble of provocations that have no stakes or dramatic effect. Ida takes this opportunity to monologue about corruption and abuse of the marginalized before the crowd of partygoers and policemen, though she lacks the power and gravitas she is aiming to convey. When the press throws Ida on the front page, she ignites a feminist revolution, in which other women adopt her style and pursue their own forms of vigilante justice, a romanticized rebellion that shrivels into cringe content.As a number of films from the past decade or so show (Birds of Prey, 2020; Cruella, 2021; Joker: Folie à deux, 2024), there’s something plastic about backstories and redemption plots issued as correctives to past minimizations and/or simplifications of female characters, especially when whatever good intentions might motivate such “inclusive” storytelling almost always appear secondary to capitalizing on preexisting intellectual property. To Gyllenhaal’s credit, the film’s empowerment messaging feels sincere; it’s just also obvious and goofy, no thanks to Buckley’s ham-fisted performance, a caricature of female madness that strains to be believed. (She delivers a similar gloopy maximalism in Hamnet, for which she won an Oscar.)Following Ida’s antiauthoritarian theatrics, Ida and Frank come to realize the full extent of their repulsiveness to society, and resolve victoriously to throw caution entirely to the wind and truly “live.” Their sex life improves, or, rather, begins, as a result; and the film winds desultorily toward their eventual capture. Liberation transforms the couple into pleasure-seeking lovers on the lam. In this sense, the film’s second, looser act gestures at the freewheeling future of filmmaking and the dismantling of the studio system’s moral framework by the arrival of the New Hollywood and films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Too bad this dimension remains largely theoretical, as with the film’s emotional upheavals. When Jake, for instance, is revealed to be one of Ida’s lovers in her past life, during a nocturnal showdown in Niagara Falls, the moment, for all the screaming and gunfire, unfolds listlessly. Likewise in the film’s most intentionally disturbing scene: When a dirty cop pulls them over and assaults Ida while patting her down, her eventual grisly retaliation—which ends in her biting his tongue out of his mouth—is a contrived means of signaling her burgeoning monstrosity and unapologetic lack of remorse. The Bride! is baggy, baffling, and erratically conceived, yet even as I bemoaned its inadequacies, I was also fascinated by them.This awkward, indifferent tone plagues the film’s most pivotal scenes, making The Bride! feel more like a collection of strange, sometimes amusing scenarios than a cohesive narrative with real dramatic weight. Buckley and Bale’s chemistry has the appeal of a wet blanket, and explains what, in my mind, is the film’s greatest missed opportunity: to build out and complicate the parallels between creating an artificial being and engineering your own partner in a world of gendered expectations. Despite Ida’s assertions of autonomy, she was born of Frank’s yearning, her past replaced by Frank’s invented stories of their shared history. He is essentially gaslighting her throughout the entire film. This feels more conspicuous precisely because we never really buy their love story—it’s drowned out, diminished, by the film’s many moving parts.The Bride! is baggy, baffling, and erratically conceived, yet even as I bemoaned its inadequacies, I was also fascinated by them and by Gyllenhaal’s steadfast commitment to the concept, her choices clearly born of the desire to experiment. With its niche references and bizarre, if also intriguingly discordant, genre shifts, it’s a unicorn among other expensive studio offerings (it reportedly had a budget of $90 million). Ambition, funnily enough, can be perceived as a monstrous trait for women in particular; though being difficult to love, the film contends, may very well be a virtue.
What’s Behind MAGA’s Strange New Crush on Solar Energy?
Is MAGA changing its tune on solar energy? Since the start of the year, a dizzying array of social media posts and news reports have pointed to the possibility, even as the administration continues to double down on its anti-wind policies and rhetoric. Why solar? And why now—especially given that President Trump continues to fulminate against its renewable energy cousin, wind power? Let’s recap, because sorting through this is not easy.On January 24, Trump shared a video on Truth Social that seemed to endorse rooftop solar for households as a way to free up energy for the industrial parts of the grid and help the United States compete with China. Four days later, The Daily Caller published an op-ed from Newt Gingrich declaring that “American energy must not pick winners and losers,” that the energy market could use “more of everything,” and that “solar and wind power are popular, with 80 percent and 74 percent respectively backing local construction.” On February 4, Axios reported that a new poll from a Trump-aligned polling firm, commissioned by First Solar, found that a majority of Trump voters support solar. Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife and former press secretary to Mike Pence, promptly retweeted it on X, saying, “Solar energy is the energy of the future.… We must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” A little over a week later, Miller posted a chart on X, noting, “Solar is now the dominant source of new U.S. power capacity and is on track to surpass coal in total installed capacity before the end of 2026.”A week after that, on February 19, Semafor reported a poll from Kellyanne Conway’s firm showing that Trump voters support solar. And the following week, Politico’s Greenwire reported “three agency career officials” confirming that the Interior Department was now “reviewing at least 20 commercial-scale projects that have languished in the permitting pipeline since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.” Specifically: solar projects. Greenwire noted that this coincides with “the artificial intelligence boom—and the electricity demands helping hike consumer power bills,” and that “some congressional Republicans” have objected to Trump’s complete rejection of renewables.The next day, February 27, Politico finally shed some light on what might be driving this: The outlet obtained access to a “confidential memo” from early February from renewable energy group the American Clean Power Association, outlining a new strategy to “engage Conway and conservative influencers like Miller” on behalf of solar energy. “As part of the campaign, ACP is working with a series of conservative influencers to secure opinion media placements authored by conservative columnists, former Republican lawmakers, and other credible Republican voices in conservative outlets,” the memo stated. Politico also noted that Conway’s poll had been commissioned by American Energy First, an advocacy group founded by ACP. (Not mentioned in the Politico piece, but notable: AEF first created accounts on X, Instagram, and Truth Social in January. This campaign has ramped up very quickly.) Miller denied to Politico that she was being paid for her solar advocacy. But four days later, The Washington Post published a piece in which she declined to comment on the payment question. (She did double down on her advocacy, saying that solar “solved” Australia’s “rolling blackout issues” and that solar “should be a driver of the solution” to rising energy costs.)The Post story pointed to other signs that MAGA may be pivoting. “Among the loudest” of the MAGA solar advocates, it noted, “may be on-again, off-again Trump adviser Elon Musk, whom Miller worked for as he designed and executed the president’s initiative to slash the federal workforce. Musk is now throwing his influence behind a moonshot effort to wrest solar manufacturing away from China.” There are signs of broader adoption too. “In Virginia, a coalition of conservatives pushing for more solar power is printing ‘Make Solar Great Again’ hats.” And a “Richmond-based group funded by industry and philanthropists called Energy Right,” led by an alum from the first-term Trump Interior Department, “has been working with conservatives there to push solar forward in the statehouse and local communities.” Interestingly, the Post reports, Energy Right recently founded the “America First Energy Project” in Louisiana—seemingly unaffiliated with ACP’s American Energy First, but a striking linguistic echo.Throughout this multi-month saga, the president has been on a more or less constant tirade, interrupted only by breath, sleep, and distraction, against offshore wind—his January speech in Davos being a prime example. This week, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration remains so committed to sinking wind power that, after having its attempts to halt multiple offshore wind projects rejected by the courts, the administration is now contemplating buying off the companies in question: paying one energy company $1 billion not to build the wind farms and to instead invest in natural gas in Texas.What in the Sam Hill is going on here? Successful lobbying is nothing new, but the speed with which this solar campaign seems to have succeeded is a little unusual, particularly given Trump’s doubling down on wind power as some kind of satanic scam. Nor is conservative voters’ support for solar new—it’s been showing up in other polls for years, long before Conway’s. What’s new is the leaders now embracing the cause. Is it really possible, you may wonder, that the only thing keeping prominent Trumpers from endorsing solar before was that no one had considered paying them for said endorsement?I don’t have the answers here, but there are a few points worth considering as context. First, while Trump has demonized renewable energy in general, and financial incentives for rooftop solar got scrapped in the 2025 GOP budget bill, both Trump and others have demonized solar conspicuously less than wind, which appears to be a particular bugbear.The MAGA figures pivoting to solar are stressing this distinction. Kellyanne Conway’s memo to American Energy First, detailing the results of the poll it commissioned, concludes by saying that “solar, unlike wind, is not viewed through a partisan lens; it is seen as a means to an end.” Since the survey summary doesn’t document any questions about wind at all, it’s hard to know where that conclusion is coming from. Independent polling finds only a slightly larger spread between Democrats and Republicans for wind than for solar: In 2024, Pew found a 27-point gap on solar versus a 32-point gap for wind, and Yale/George Mason, looking at parties’ extremes, found a 51-point gap between liberal Dems and conservative Republicans on solar, versus a 57-point gap on wind. The U.S. solar industry, however, is about twice the size of the U.S. wind industry in installed capacity, and also larger in terms of market value. New solar installations are typically less financially and logistically fraught than new wind installations, and a lot are planned for the next few years. The solar industry may have both more money for lobbying and better stats to deploy in its favor. There’s also another thing that might be driving the speed of this political pivot. Conway’s poll, though headlined as showing “Trump voters’” thoughts on solar energy, wasn’t interviewing all Trump voters. Instead, it was interviewing Trump voters in five specific states: Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Florida, and Texas. The latter three are among the top five states for currently installed solar capacity, with Texas the “fastest-growing solar economy,” according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Arizona is the third-fastest-growing solar economy, Indiana is fourth, Florida is seventh, and Ohio is eighth. SEIA also reports that Texas stands to lose 51 percent (162 projects) of new solar capacity due to new federal policies, Arizona 53 percent (15 projects), Ohio 40 percent (14 projects), and Indiana 35 percent (10 projects). Several of these states are also home to embattled Republican congresspeople. In Texas, as Republican Senator John Cornyn and MAGA challenger Ken Paxton duke it out in a primary runoff, current polling suggests that Democratic nominee James Talarico has a decent shot at beating either of them in the November midterms. (Notably, one of the first polls showing Talarico leading the Trump-aligned Paxton came out in late November last year, just before the MAGA tide seemed to turn on solar.) In Ohio, Republican Senator Jon Husted is in a dead heat with former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. Either of those races could flip control of the Senate. In Florida, noted Trump acolyte Cory Mills, who seems to be even more stunningly scandal-prone than Paxton, is looking vulnerable.Of course, several of these states are also home to significant wind power—particularly Texas, which leads the country in wind power. And you’d think that would complicate the narrative here. Then again, the Trump administration’s attacks on wind have mostly been on offshore installations—in addition to making it a bit harder to install wind power on federal lands. Texas’s wind farms aren’t offshore, and they’re mostly on private lands. So the contradiction between the position on solar and on wind, as it pertains to Texas, perhaps isn’t as significant as it might first appear. Is Republican fear of the midterms making solar lobbying more successful than it might otherwise be? Hard to say. Pending new, more extensive reporting on the solar lobbying network, the idea can’t be dismissed.Stat of the Week“Earliest 100-degree temperature on record”That’s what the National Weather Service is predicting for parts of the country this week and next, as a massive heat wave envelops the American West and Southwest.What I’m ReadingThe Latest Front in the Battle Over Climate Lawsuits: Bills Wiping Out LiabilityAn important update on state efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change, and make them shoulder some of the costs of adapting and recovery after climate-fueled disasters:Republican lawmakers in multiple states and Congress are advancing proposals to shield polluters from climate accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms—even as these harms and their associated costs continue to mount. It’s the latest in a counter-offensive that has unfolded on multiple fronts, from the halls of Congress and the White House to courts and state attorneys general offices across the country. Dozens of local communities, states and individuals are suing major oil and gas companies and their trade associations over rising climate costs and for allegedly lying to consumers about climate change risks and solutions. At the same time, some states are enacting or considering laws modeled after the federal Superfund program that would impose retroactive liability on large fossil fuel producers and levy a one-time charge on them to help fund climate adaptation and resiliency measures. But many of these cases and climate superfund laws could be stopped in their tracks, either by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court or by the Republican-controlled Congress.Read Dana Drugmand’s full report at Inside Climate News.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley Into America’s Nuclear Power Regulator
The post DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley Into America’s Nuclear Power Regulator appeared first on ProPublica.
Searching for Solace in a Nuclearized World
The Nightmare of Fukushima 15 Years Later By Joshua Frank Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we […]
Will Trump Break the Nuclear Taboo?
In addition to the widening of the war on Iran to the whole Middle East and beyond, this conflict risks deliberate use of nuclear weapons, write Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes. By Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes Common Dreams President Donald Trump has been on quite a roll. Since just the beginning of the year, he […]
‘Not Another Penny for Another Endless War,’ Ilhan Omar Says as Trump Seeks $200 Billion
Jessica Corbett Common Dreams As US President Donald Trump on Thursday confirmed reporting that he’s seeking $200 billion more from Congress to continue waging his unpopular war of choice on Iran, Rep. Ilhan Omar was among those forcefully pushing back. “We’re told there’s no money for universal healthcare or to end hunger in this country. But somehow $200 billion more for war will likely move […]
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