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Jezebel Mar 18, 2026

Lisa Kudrow Worries About the Whole 'Social Unrest' Element of AI Taking Everyone’s Jobs

Pro Publica Mar 18, 2026

Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.

New Republic Mar 18, 2026

Iran, Not Trump, Decides When This War Is Over

A week ago, President Trump effectively declared victory in the Iran war. “We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won,” he said during a speech in Kentucky. “You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won the, in the first hour, it was over. We won.” Of course, this being Trump, he also said that the United States and Israel had to “finish the job.” Days earlier, he had said the war was “very complete … sort of.” And on Friday, when asked by Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade when the war would end, Trump said, “When I feel it, OK? I feel it in my bones.” So the war has been won, but actually it’s not over. It will only be over when Trump decides it is. Got it?As a general rule, if someone gives conflicting answers to the same question, you can assume that they don’t have an actual answer. And if they proclaim that they’re in full control of something, you can assume the opposite. That’s undoubtedly where Trump, in the third week of this war, now finds himself. Things have not gone according to plan—perhaps because his apparent plan was to bomb Iran into submission within days and assume no retaliation of any kind—and now the conflict is spiraling out of his control. Will Trump, to invoke one of liberals’ favored insults, “chicken out”? Or is he already beyond the point of no return?When Trump made those statements above, the war was already shifting gears and beginning to evade his grasp. Within days of being attacked on February 28, Iran announced that it would attack any ships trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Maritime traffic in the key waterway ground to a halt, choking off roughly a fifth of the global oil supply, and accordingly gas prices around the world have skyrocketed. So although the U.S. and Israel have indeed pummeled Iran, its regime does not appear in danger of collapse. In fact, though its retaliatory strikes have dwindled over the past week, the regime has located an effective pressure point that could force Trump’s hand.No need to take my word for it. “We clearly just kicked [Iran’s] ass in the field, but, to a large extent, they hold the cards now,” a “person close to the White House” told Politico for an article published Tuesday. “The terms have changed,” a second person “familiar with the U.S. operation in Iran” told the outlet. “The off-ramps don’t work anymore because Iran is driving the asymmetric action.” Iran’s leaders say they’ll only reopen the strait if the U.S., Israel, and other Gulf States agree on a new security arrangement that aligns with Iran’s interests. And military experts in the U.S. all acknowledge that forcibly reopening and securing the strait would require boots on the ground on the Iranian coast.While this shift in the war’s dynamics begins to dawn on officials in Washington, the financial world appears more sanguine. Here’s Morgan Stanley analyst Michael Wilson: “The bar remains high for the oil spike to threaten the business/earnings cycle.… We maintain our view that this correction is closer to its ending stages in time and price.” Bank of America global economist Antonio Gabriel took a different view, however: “While a quick resolution to the conflict is certainly a possibility, we view the conflict extending into 2Q as an equally likely outcome, and a more protracted war cannot be ruled out.… In our view, the more disruptive scenarios for global growth are underpriced.”Many on Wall Street probably still expect this war to follow the usual script. In the past, Trump has used U.S. military might in bold, often reckless ways. He has embraced large-scale bombing campaigns (dropping the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan during his first year in office in 2017 and bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in the 12-day war last June), assassinated powerful officials (IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020), and kidnapped and extradited others (Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January). Many of these operations resulted in market turbulence, but they all either were limited in scope or Trump quickly pulled back, settling to spin the initial gains as a huge “win” without taking riskier actions that could draw the U.S. into a long-term quagmire. TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out, isn’t a perfect descriptor for this tendency because it downplays the destruction these actions have caused (and do we really want to be goading Trump into doing more harm?). But the acronym’s not exactly wrong, either. Historically, Trump really has backed down before things have gotten too bad, and it’s safe to say that both economic and political leaders acclimated themselves to it. Many of them are undoubtedly expecting, or at least hoping for, a similar conclusion to the Iran war—that the bombing will end, the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, gas prices will fall, and this will all be a distant memory within a matter of months.But the Politico story and other recent reporting suggests something else entirely: that the point of no return in the Iran war has nearly arrived, if it has not already passed. Trump has lost control of the war, and the only apparent way for him to regain control is either to put boots on the ground—the only political red line for Trump that, 10 years into his political career, he’s adhered to—or to draw down the bombing and declare that his objectives have been met.For now, the bombing will persist. On Tuesday alone, Israeli strikes killed Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s Basij Force. But if killing Khamenei wasn’t enough to bring Iran to heel, these latest deaths won’t do anything to bring about a resolution to the war. The problem, of course, is that Trump never stated clear goals for the war, and thus it’s not clear how it can be resolved to his satisfaction. Since the bombing began, he has suggested that he wants to eliminate the country’s nuclear program and foment regime change. The former would likely be impossible to accomplish without occupying the country, and there is zero evidence that the latter is in the offing. So where does that leave Trump? Does he put boots on the ground to “save face,” as that person “close to the White House” told Politico? Or does he chicken out?Let’s hope that TACO holds true. I can only imagine what might happen to this world if Trump stops chickening out.

New Republic Mar 18, 2026

The White Working Class Is Quiet-Quitting Trump

Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the white working class (conventionally defined as “white non-college voters,” i.e., white voters who lack a college degree). In 1992, Clinton won 55 percent of this cohort, and in 1996 he won 53 percent. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the white working class since, even though it was once a core Democratic constituency. A lot of people say the reason is that Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Act into law and normalized trade relations with China, thereby beggaring American factory workers.One of these people appears to be Robert Reich, who by his own admission didn’t achieve all that much for working people as Clinton’s labor secretary from 1993 to 1997. “The Democratic Party … abandoned the working class,” Reich told the journalist Kara Swisher last summer. “To some extent, I allowed it to happen. I didn’t fight as hard as I should’ve fought. Deregulating finance and allowing global trade to dominate the way it did, and taking our eyes off monopolization, and not really encouraging unionization as much as we should have. I mean, all of these ways contributed to disempowering millions of people in this country and ultimately helped lead to Donald Trump.”To say the Democrats lost the white working class after 1996 is not to say the Democrats lost the entire working class. A lot of people conflate these two groups, but the working class, which was overwhelmingly white when its political influence stood at its peak in the mid-twentieth century, is a lot less white now. And although the working class stopped voting reliably Democratic after the 1960s, no Democrat in the last century ever got himself elected president without winning the working-class vote—with one exception. The exception was Joe Biden in 2020. It’s a great irony, since Biden was the most pro-labor president since Harry Truman and had a strong affinity for working-class people. Even so, Biden won the 2020 election while losing the working class—which is to say, the overall multiethnic working class—to Trump, 47 percent to 51 percent. My boss, TNR editor Michael Tomasky, has concluded from this that Democrats can win in 2028 with less than a working-class plurality. In Tomasky’s view, “all a future Democrat needs to do” is match Biden or gain a point or two more. But I think Biden’s 2020 victory without a working-class plurality was a fluke and that Democrats must keep chasing working-class majorities. Working-class voters were, after all, 57 percent of the electorate in 2024 (when Kamala Harris lost them to Trump, 43–56). To win the most votes, you tend to need the biggest constituencies.Winning back Latinos and Blacks who drifted to Trump in 2024 shouldn’t be that hard. In October, Axios reported Blacks (84 percent) and Latinos (70 percent) to be the two groups most dissatisfied with the country’s direction under Trump, and in January the BBC reported that Latino support for Trump had dropped from 49 percent at the start of his presidency to 38 percent. And that was before the Iran war sent oil prices through the roof. A survey this month by Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics and Joan C. Williams, emeritus law professor at University of California San Francisco, found that among those who voted for Trump in 2024, 45 percent of Black working-class voters and 28 percent of Latino working-class voters said they won’t vote Republican in 2028. “Wavering rates are highest,” they wrote in Jacobin, “where race and class intersect: Low-income, noncollege black and Latino voters—the very people whose shift toward Trump was most celebrated by Republicans—are the most likely to leave.” In last year’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, nonwhite working-class voters drove Democratic victories. The conventional wisdom going into election night was that Mikie Sherrill was struggling to close the deal with New Jersey voters; she ended up winning handily, and Latino voters were a big reason why.Winning back working-class white voters is, of course, a much taller order. But Trump is making that easier too, with every passing day. According to G. Eliott Morris, a former data analytics guy at The Economist and Five Thirty-Eight, low-income white voters favored Trump by 22 points in 2024. Now Trump’s four points underwater with them—a 26-point swing. Middle-income white voters have swung 14 points away from Trump; they favored him by 16 points in 2024 but today favor him only by two points.A Marist poll last month told the same story. Fully 49 percent of white working-class respondents said they disapproved of the job Trump’s doing (46 percent approved). Out of the 49 percent who disapproved, 42 percent said they “strongly” disapproved.It’s not hard to see why this is happening. As the Center for American Progress noted Tuesday, during the 10 months since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs (subsequently ruled illegal by the Supreme Court), the United States lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs—after gaining 775,000 under President Joe Biden. Granted, Biden’s gain was skewed by the Covid crisis, from which the U.S. was recovering—but that crisis was worsened by Trump’s gross mismanagement of it, a factor on which voters for some reason chose not to dwell in 2024. Manufacturing investment is in free fall because of Trump’s infantile cancellation of tax credits and grants under Biden’s CHIPS Act and his Inflation Reduction Act. And the tariffs themselves amounted to roughly a $1,000 tax hike in 2025, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation. A report issued last week by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee said they’ll amount to a $2,500 tax next year.Whether Democrats can seize the advantage remains an open question. A September report by the Center for Working Class Politics by Abbott, Les Leopold, and Todd Vachon found that in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, “the Democratic label carries a clear electoral penalty.” Democratic candidates delivering an economic populist message performed worse (by about 8 percentage points) than independent candidates who deliver the same message. The only group among whom the gap disappeared was union members—but even there, Democrats performed no better than independents. Among the complaints the study noted was that Democrats lacked sufficient courage to stand up to Republicans. Dissatisfaction with “wokeness” registered among “a significant minority,” but economic grievances weighed more heavily. “The dominant narrative is structural,” the report said. “The party doesn’t deliver.” Ouch.It’s starting to dawn on the working class—and even the white working class—that Trump sold them a bill of goods. “No talking, no faces, no nothing,” a fictional middle-American mom played by Ashley Padilla urged her wised-up children in a Saturday Night Live skit widely shared last month on social media. “I may have changed my mind about Trump,” she continued haltingly. “I feel now … like he might be … bad for our country.” But that doesn’t automatically mean people like the SNL mom will pull the lever for Democrats in the 2026 midterms or in the 2028 presidential election. There’s still a lot of ground to regain. I laid out some suggestions before the 2024 election (here and here). Nobody listened, least of all Kamala Harris. More recently, Tomasky proposed some excellent ideas to win back the working class. The good news is Trump is losing. The bad news is that doesn’t automatically translate into Democratic victories.

New Republic Mar 18, 2026

Finally, Democrats—of All Stripes—Are Coming After the Wealthy’s Money

The state of Washington is on the verge of enacting a 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million. Rhode Island’s governor has proposed a 3 percent tax on income above that same level. Lawmakers in New York state are advancing a 0.5 percent tax on income over $5 million. Liberal groups in California and Michigan are pushing for ballot initiatives that would raise taxes on the superrich in their states. In Washington, D.C., Senators Cory Booker, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen have all recently rolled out proposals to drastically increase taxes on the rich across the country. It’s soak the rich time. Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden all raised taxes on the rich, so this isn’t new for Democrats. But there are three important shifts happening. First of all, Democrats at the state level are aggressively pushing tax hikes, ignoring perennial threats from the wealthy that they will move to other states if their taxes go up. Secondly, Democrats are no longer framing their tax increases on the wealthy solely as measures to fund programs for average Americans. They are leaning into populist rhetoric, arguing that America’s superwealthy simply have too much money and taking some of that away is a public good on its own. Third, the federal proposals are bigger and more comprehensive than before, attempting to tax all the myriad ways the superrich earn and save money. This is a great and long overdue direction for the Democratic Party to go in. “Billionaires are hoarding their wealth to corrupt our politics and entrench their own power,” Indivisible co-executive director Ezra Levin said in a statement endorsing Van Hollen’s proposal. “Those very same billionaires are bankrolling the wannabe king, making a bet that selling out our democracy will be rewarded with personal financial favors.” Blue states have generally had higher taxes than red ones. But Democratic politicians in those states, particularly governors, have often been wary of raising taxes on the rich. What’s changed? Four things. First, it worked in Massachusetts. In 2022, the Bay State passed a ballot measure that created a 4 percent tax on income over $1 million. Despite their threats before the vote, the wealthy and businesses didn’t leave the state en masse. And the state has used money from the tax on very useful policies, such as making breakfast and lunch free for all students. The Massachusetts success has emboldened Democrats in other states. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has cited the Bay State while pushing the state legislature in New York to raise taxes on the rich. Second, it helps that numerous blue states are advancing these provisions at the same time. This way, no individual blue state can be cast as uniquely anti-rich or anti-business. It also complicates things for the superwealthy, many of whom are socially liberal and therefore prefer living in blue states. Moving from California to Washington or vice versa to avoid taxes can’t be done if both states have taxes on the superrich. “Red and Blue States Are Growing Further Apart on Income Tax” was the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article that chronicled Democratic states’ collective move to increase taxes on the wealthy even as red states keep dropping their rates. Third, while federal income taxes are generally progressive (the rich pay higher rates), that’s often not the case at the state level. Washington, for example, currently has no state income tax. So in many ways, blue states are simply catching up to their federal Democratic counterparts in hiking taxes for the rich. Fourth, fury with billionaires either acquiescing to President Trump or outright supporting him is driving Democrats at the state level and nationally to support higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. Sanders has been complaining about the superwealthy for decades. He, Elizabeth Warren, and the party’s left wing have spent the last several years warning of an oligarchy. But the pro-Trump behavior of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other ultrarich people is driving even more moderate Democratic voters and politicians to a much greater antipathy to the billionaires. That makes it easier to propose major tax increases on them. To be sure, not all Democrats are embracing this anti-rich ethos. Governors Gavin Newsom (California) and Kathy Hochul (New York) are opposed to the provisions in their states, making the usual argument that too many rich people will leave. They’re not just fearmongering. Starbucks founder and longtime Seattle resident Howard Schultz has announced that he is moving to Miami; Google’s founders are leaving California. But overall, research suggests that states come out ahead financially when they raise taxes on the wealthy. And even with the tax increases on the rich, the U.S. economy did better under Clinton, Obama, and Biden than the GOP presidents who preceded and succeeded them. “Income tax levels have little impact on where the wealthiest taxpayers choose to live. This makes sense because the rich don’t need to consider cost of living and they typically have business and family ties that keep them in a certain area,” wrote Miles Trinidad and Matthew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in a recent paper. Some states may not end up passing new taxes on the rich. Some provisions may be invalidated by judges. But we are moving toward a country in which all Democratic state legislators, governors, and presidential candidates will be expected to have plans to drastically raise taxes on the wealthy. That’s the right economic policy. But more importantly, it’s the right democracy policy. Real democracy cannot be sustained if a few people have enormous wealth that they turn into excessive political power. Too many billionaires have chosen to align with Trump. They have already lost respect and acclaim—and hopefully that decision will eventually cost them money too.

New Republic Mar 18, 2026

Trump Accidentally Reveals What He Really Thinks of MAGA Voters

It’s become a stock social media joke to point out that MAGA stands for whatever Donald Trump says it does at any given moment, but now Trump himself has essentially confirmed the point. Faced with a battle among MAGA influencers over his attack on Iran, Trump unleashed a harsh broadside against some of the dissenters.“THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM,” Trump raged on Truth Social, adding that MAGA entails “not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon.”In short, anyone who dissents from Trump’s war of choice—anyone who points out that the invasion contradicts his longtime promise of “no new wars”—faces potential excommunication from the MAGA movement. The contempt this shows for the aspirations and fears of ordinary voters who happened to pick Trump in 2024—and might have legitimate worries about the Iran war—is basically boundless.The immediate target of Trump’s fury was podcaster Megyn Kelly, who opposes the war and is feuding with pro-war Fox News host Mark Levin. Kelly and others, like Tucker Carlson and the non-MAGA Andrew Sullivan, oppose the war as doing Israel’s bidding. The battle has gotten vicious, with Kelly deriding Levin as “Micropenis Mark” and pro-war voices like Ben Shapiro slamming Kelly as an “unbelievable coward.” MAGA debates unfold at a lofty level.This conflict among influencers primarily involves MAGA voices turning against the America-Israel alliance. It seems less focused on the general suspicion of foreign entanglements—and anger at elites who brought us the Forever Wars in the Mideast—that supposedly drive MAGA.To be sure, those anti-interventionist leanings have long been overhyped. Yet some swaths of MAGA do at times appear to harbor such views. In a bombshell, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, just resigned his post over the war. Kent, an extremist with vile views, did cite Israel’s influence as a key reason, but he also declared that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” adding: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people.”It’s noteworthy that a MAGA diehard like Kent directly contradicted Trump’s claims about the Iran threat and the benefits of attacking Iran—while warning of exactly the sort of quagmire that Trump supposedly opposes. The way Kent blamed Israel in his letter was certainly ugly; a big motivator of some of these critiques is antisemitism. But we can distinguish between the likes of Kent and Carlson and their followers. Clearly some segments of their audiences genuinely oppose wars of choice. Trump and his advisers have responded to this by simply writing the “no new wars” pledge out of the MAGA story. In suggesting that critics of the war on Iran “ARE NOT MAGA,” Trump also declared that “MAGA is about stopping them cold” before they get a nuke to “blow up” the United States and “the world.”Note that this simply erases any debate over whether Iran’s nuclear ambitions actually constituted a dire enough threat to America—and the world—to justify our attack. Trump’s own intelligence officials have privately said they did not, and this now includes Joe Kent saying so publicly, whatever his twisted motivations. But in Trump’s formulation, anyone who harbors doubts about the threat Iran posed is commanded to accept it as a settled question. Because Trump said so.“President Trump is the leader of MAGA,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly insisted recently. “And there is nothing more ‘America first’ than taking out terrorists.” This again treats it as unassailably true that the war actually does constitute doing what’s urgently needed to combat terrorism. It suggests the only people the war is killing are terrorists, whereas it has likely killed over a thousand Iranian civilians.But the “leader of MAGA” has decreed that the war is only killing “terrorists.” Being “MAGA” requires robotically accepting this as truth.That’s just not sustainable. To see why, just look at the gyrations of JD Vance. Asked this week to reconcile his support for Trump’s war with his long-stated suspicions of previous foreign entanglements, Vance said: “One big difference is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents.” Trump, said Vance, will avoid the “mistakes of the past.” Vance has also said: “Now we have a president who knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives” and won’t get sucked into “some long, drawn-out thing.”Vance’s argument, then, is that the “smart” Trump has defined a precise objective—the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, as Vance puts it—and is now using overwhelming force to accomplish this immaculately. Trump will get out before falling victim to the sort of quagmire that befell “dumb presidents.” But this is not faithful to Vance’s previous positions, no matter how hard he tries to make it so. You cannot overstate how central suspicions of foreign entanglements have been to Vance’s political identity as a champion of working-class heartlanders abandoned by “elites.” Central to this has been the idea that these wars were not worth their cost in lives and treasure, and thus were sold with “lies.”Vance, for instance, marked the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion with a solemn declaration. “The war killed many innocent Iraqis and Americans,” he said, noting that “it cost over $1 trillion” and thus was an “unforced disaster.”Now contrast that with Vance’s current stance. He only purports to evaluate Trump’s war based on whether it’s accomplishing a precise aim—disabling Iran’s nuke ambitions. But Trump’s official rationales have lurched in all directions, and what’s missing now is any wrestling with whether the supposed benefits we’re gaining are worth what we’re sacrificing.They plainly are not. Our own intelligence officials didn’t see Iran’s nuclear program as anything like the threat Trump proclaims. The war cost over $11 billion in its first week. It has killed over a dozen Americans and apparently over a thousand Iranian civilians, many of them children. Vance expressed concern about the Iraqi dead in evaluating that catastrophe. What does he say about Iranian civilians now? What about the financial burdens? What about the global consequences of the choked-off Strait of Hormuz, let alone whatever will be required to reopen it? Vance—who used to talk about the costs of foreign wars in posing as a kind of Avenger of the Abandoned Heartland—should be pressed to account for all of it.Then there’s the official lying. As Damon Linker notes, the Iran war echoes many of the broader foreign policy establishment’s previous world-historical errors. The lies, hubris, and folly of the old elites were central to Vance’s case against them. But this war, too, was sold on lies about the Iran threat—and in its catastrophic planning failures, it too has been marked by hubris and folly. What does Vance have to say about all that?Trumpworld’s redefinition of MAGA is a farce. Not just in the hands of Trump and Leavitt, but also in the hands of Vance, who is recasting it almost as crudely. It’s hard to know what’s more galling—the brazen shamelessness of this effort, or the naked contempt it shows for the voters who are obviously expected to simply roll over and unthinkingly accept it.