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Asia boosts defense spending amid concerns over China, US
The Asia-Pacific region was second only to Europe in arms imports between 2021 and 2025, according to new research.
US Vice President Vance criticized for silence on Iran war
The silence of the US vice president — a staunch anti-interventionist voice — has prompted frustration among allies.
Aid groups warn of impending humanitarian disaster in Lebanon
Mass evacuation orders and a bombing campaign have driven nearly 700,000 people, including 200,000 children, from their homes, the UN said.
Iran war risks sparking global food price surge
The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which a third of the world’s fertilizer travels — is driving up the cost of essentials like sulphur.
US destroys Iranian mine-laying vessels in the Strait of Hormuz
Iran had reportedly begun laying mines in the crucial maritime trade route.
How Trump’s War on Iran Is Hastening the Coming MAGA Crack-Up
Congratulations are in order for Donald Trump: His attack on Iran is the most unpopular American war in modern history. The New York Times compared support for Trump’s war with initial support for nine other wars going back to World War II, and found Trump’s adventure at the very bottom. The Times has support for it at 41 percent. Other calculations find support in the high 30s.This is heartening. It suggests the American public is far less reflexively disposed to accept the case for war than in the past, as I’ve argued. But here’s a different reason this matters: It may deliver another blow to the idea that Trump’s 2024 win produced a national realignment.The war, it turns out, is particularly unpopular among some of the voter groups that Trump won over—young and nonwhite working-class voters—the ones who gave rise to that oft-proclaimed “realignment thesis.”The numbers are striking. This week’s Quinnipiac poll finds that only 40 percent of voters support the war on Iran, versus 53 percent who oppose it. I asked Quinnipiac for a demographic breakdown: Among voters aged 18 to 34, only 21 percent support the war with Iran, versus 71 percent who oppose it.Among nonwhite voters without a college degree, only 21 percent support the war, versus 69 percent who oppose it.Meanwhile, young voters say by 58 percent to 21 percent that Trump has made American leadership in the world “weaker” and not “stronger.” Nonwhite noncollege voters say the same by 62–23.Just after Trump’s 2024 victory, a ubiquitous interpretation held that those gains among young and nonwhite working-class voters represented a generationally defining shift in American politics. A new “multiethnic, working-class party” was born. But events have undercut the thesis. Trump has lost enormous ground among those very voters due to the same persistent high prices that drove them to him, suggesting they never underwent any serious ideological transformation.Separately, the spike in positive views of immigration and the massive backlash to ICE—especially among young people—undermine notions of a deep cultural shift against immigrants, another blow to the seismic-realignment theory.Now let’s add Trump’s war to this equation. Here, young voters are particularly pertinent.Trump’s promise of “no more wars” unquestionably helped drive young people to him. JD Vance expressly cast this refrain as a message to the entire “young generation,” vowing relief from the “burden” of elite warmongering folly. No doubt many young people found this meaningful. Yet now Trump’s Iran adventure is resonating very badly with them.It’s a complicated story. John Della Volpe, a pollster who specializes in the youth vote, says that for young people, Trump’s promise had unappreciated resonance. Coming after the financial crisis and global Covid shock exacerbated economic precarity, lack of mobility, and uncertainty about the future, Trump’s vow signified a deeper form of renewal at a time when young people’s faith in American institutions had been badly shaken.Trump’s successes among young voters were “largely built on the promise that he would create more, not less, stability in their lives,” Della Volpe said. Many of them see Trump’s war in Iran in that context, he continued, interpreting it as “clear evidence that institutions cannot be trusted” after all.This especially applies to young men. Della Volpe told me he just conducted over 50 interviews with men of ages 19 to 29 for a forthcoming release. They are registering “strong opposition” and dismay with Trump over the war, Della Volpe said, describing their message this way: “He assured them there would be no more wars, and it feels like betrayal.”These days it’s hard to recapture in one’s head the national atmosphere of disillusionment that the “forever wars” unleashed. But many people in their late twenties or early thirties today came of age politically while watching Americans come home in caskets and official pronouncements about the wars utterly disintegrate. In a sense, Trump’s economic failures and Iran invasion constitute a double whammy of broken promises. He gave young people hope for a brighter economic future rooted in populist nationalist renewal and also hope for a future of peace.“Neither of those things has been delivered,” Della Volpe said.There’s another layer of betrayal worth dwelling on here. While Trump’s no-new-wars vow is often cast as a break with the Bush-era neoconservatism of the forever wars, the Times’ Ross Douthat sees a hidden continuity between that doctrine and MAGA ideas today. Just like the right back then, the new Trumpian right is preoccupied with “civilizational decadence” that can be arrested with awesome, revitalizing displays of American techno-military prowess.Both display a similar “hubris,” Douthat writes. Both treat real-world complexities as secondary to the circular ideological goal of letting the world know that American imperial power will not be challenged because—well, because American imperial power must be seen as impervious to challenge. In short, the neocons and MAGA alike both saw a good dose of awe-inspiring Schmittian enemy-killing abroad as just the hangover tonic to cure our civilizational malaise. You cannot watch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth preen and strut about our new “overwhelming and unrelenting precision” and vow of “no hesitation” in “crushing the enemy” without seeing this MAGA intoxication at play.Yet this sort of thing is exactly what many of these temporary Trump voters did not sign up for. They heard promises of economic stability and peace and unglamorously concluded that Trump was actually promising economic stability and peace. One suspects that to these voters, all those MAGA tropes and idioms—the West under existential siege, war as civilizational rebirth followed by rapture—are mostly white noise.This is creating obvious strains inside the Trump coalition. As Matt Gertz documents, the conflict is splitting MAGA influencers into warring camps. Clearly, some of them recognize that war will alienate these new voters who thought “no new wars” meant what it said and aren’t fluent in MAGA’s vocabulary of civilizational Armageddon.You can see a similar dynamic with immigration. MAGA ethnonationalism treats the mass removal of immigrants as essential to saving “Western civilization.” The Department of Homeland Security’s social media feed and propaganda videos quite consciously depict paramilitary raids in cities as achieving nationalist revival and rejuvenation through heroic violence against the enemy within.One of the powerful points in Laura Field’s great book on the MAGA right is that this sort of grandiose playacting reflects a hypermasculine ethic that’s deeply solipsistic and juvenile—so much so that it’s actually “unmanly.” It’s clear that Joe Rogan and other less MAGA-fied types who have turned on ICE agree. Their audiences despise Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the violence and injustice it’s inflicting on living, breathing human beings. Most ordinary people don’t look at ICE raids and see glimpses of the ancient Greeks defeating the Persian fleet at Salamis, or Charles Martel thwarting the invading Islamic armies at Tours in 732, or whatever else is lurking within MAGA’s latest phantasms of Western civilizational emergency.By now, the fracturing of the MAGA coalition is a well-established story. The economy is the main culprit, with ICE raids playing an underappreciated role. It would be particularly fitting if Trump’s war—coming after years of promises to the contrary from Trump and MAGA chief ideologist Vance—ends up playing its own critical role in causing that coalition to come undone.
How “Buy Now, Pay Later” Reveals the Weakness of the Trump Economy
During last month’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump had a message for beleaguered Americans facing rising costs: They should just “hold on a little while” longer on lower prices. “We’re getting that down. And soon you will see numbers that few people would think were possible to achieve just a short time ago,” he said.In the meantime, “buy now, pay later” companies are taking advantage of the affordability crisis. Americans’ personal savings rate is the lowest it has been since 2022. Food inflation in January was high by historical standards, rent costs are still straining household finances, and health care coverage will be more expensive for many Americans. Buy now, pay later firms have seen the financial weaknesses of the average household, as well as skyrocketing credit card interest rates, and they’re here to sell their customer base financial products that are far less accountable than those offered by banks, under the illusion they will be less costly. Under the Biden administration, those products—used for purchasing everything from new clothing to groceries—were beginning to receive more regulatory oversight. The Biden administration rule proposed to hold these products to credit regulations by implementing the Truth in Lending Act. But the Trump administration put the kibosh on Biden’s efforts to rein in the budding industry when it withdrew a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule—claiming that it did so in the interest of “focusing resources on supporting hard-working American taxpayers, servicemen, veterans, and small businesses.”The latest development in the rapid expansion of buy now, pay later is the use of the product for the payment of rent, sending people into cycles of debt as they try to pay for housing.Emily DiVito, senior adviser for economic policy at Groundwork Collaborative, said, “The steady rise in the use of buy now, pay later loans to cover the basics, like groceries and rent, is a warning sign that working families are under real financial strain. Prices for essentials are climbing as a result of the president’s reckless economic policies, wages aren’t keeping pace, and hardworking Americans are being pushed into cycles of debt just to make ends meet.”A growing number of buy now, pay later companies are either currently offering or planning to offer an option to pay rent, including Flex and Affirm. Flex partnered with the software company RealPage, the same company that reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice last year after the Biden-era DOJ filed an antitrust complaint against the company relating to the impact of its rent algorithms on the rental market, which many consumer advocates said reduced competition.There are many downsides to the use of these products. Consumer experts and advocates told The New Republic that these include hidden high costs for consumers, poor customer service, the prospect that they might damage customers’ credit ratings, the encouragement of consumers to get involved in other fintech loan products, and the direct access to bank accounts that many companies require or encourage.Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting and data advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, a consumer advocacy group, said buy now, pay later companies take advantage of the fact that credit card companies have raised interest rates to very high levels and that every time there is an increase, rates don’t seem to come back down.“I do think there is plenty of room to reduce those interest rates. It is an expensive way to borrow and [buy now, pay later] took advantage of that by saying they’re interest-free,” she said.But buy now, pay later firms usually charge membership fees or monthly fees. They don’t get included in what is known as the annual percentage rate, which is a measure of the interest rate and the additional fees charged with the loan, which is what consumers use to comparison shop in credit. “If you were to include [those fees] and calculate it a different way, you’d see they’re not cheap,” Wu said.The direct access to bank accounts, which makes it difficult for consumers to control their payments, also forces many consumers to incur insufficient fund fees and overdraft fees, according to a February report from Protect Borrowers, a nonprofit advocating against predatory lenders, and Towards Justice, a law firm that represents workers in litigation. Some consumer advocates say that the use of these products for rent payments indicates something is deeply broken in the rental market. Mike Pierce, executive director of Protect Borrowers, told The New Republic, “We come down pretty strongly that this is a bad sign for the economy, a bad sign for families, and something that shouldn’t exist. If landlords mis-priced the rent and the rent is too high for the market to bear, then they need to lower the rent and shouldn’t be pushing their tenants into debt to paper over the fact that there is a market failure going on here.”Buy now, pay later lays bare not just an affordability crisis but an income crisis as well. As more Americans work multiple jobs, sometimes taking on gig work or retail jobs with unreliable scheduling, they often struggle to pay rent because they have less consistent paychecks. These companies can swoop in to take advantage of that financial volatility and leave Americans mired in additional debt, all while these firms continue to profit without any regulatory consequences.Lorelei Salas, former supervision director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said she sees unreliable income as related to the spread of these products and said greater protections for gig workers would make a difference. “To me, what is making this problem worse is that so many people can’t count on a big salary, and a lot of people rely on part-time employment and gig work, so if you are living with that kind of unpredictability, obviously it’s going to be harder to make ends meet,” she said. “We should be thinking about legislation that addresses this problem. If you are employed in this economy, you should have access sooner to the money you earned.”The good news is that the number of workers represented by a union rose last year by 463,000 workers from 2024, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and workers covered by union contracts have higher wages on average than workers in nonunionized workplaces. “There are two sides to the affordability equation. It’s both how much things cost and ‘Are you earning enough to cover the cost of what you need?’” said Heidi Shierholz, the president of EPI. “It’s prices and wages.… We know that people are feeling the squeeze. That translates into understanding that unions raise wages, and I have to believe that that is playing a role in this.”Consumer advocates say that federal and state regulations are needed to rein in these products. But the current political environment makes it challenging to pass any kind of consumer protections through Congress, much less have them signed into law by the president. Pierce said his organization and Towards Justice recommend banning corporate landlords from owning, operating, marketing, and embedding buy now, pay later products on rent platforms. Given the Trump administration’s clear choice to abandon the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mission, this work will likely fall to the states. For that reason, Pierce also urges state attorneys general and state financial regulators to take action to enforce consumer protection laws under the CFPB’s scope as well as enforce relevant state protections, among other legal paths to oversight and accountability.“The history of credit is one in which someone comes along every few decades and says, ‘I have a great new product. It’s not a loan,’” Wu said. “It’s so new and shiny you don’t know how to regulate it. And you look at it and it’s a loan. You’re just trying to disguise the cost of it as a loan.”
The Supreme Court Has Another Tribal Sovereignty Test on Its Hands
Six years ago, the Supreme Court held that nearly half of the state of Oklahoma was still legally considered Indian country. State officials have gone to great lengths to refuse to apply the court’s landmark decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Now the Supreme Court faces another crucial test of whether it will uphold tribal sovereignty that had been unjustly denied for more than a century.The petition in Stroble v. Oklahoma comes from Alicia Stroble, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who works for the tribal government on tribal land. In 2019, she filed tax returns with the state that argued she was exempt from state income taxes because of her tribal membership and employment. Auditors from the state Tax Commission denied her protest, prompting her to appeal through the commission’s internal processes.Generally speaking, states cannot tax tribal governments or members who live in Indian Country—the formal legal term for tribal reservations in all their various forms—without permission from Congress. (Please do not email me about all of the non-relevant exceptions.) The Supreme Court held in a 1993 decision, for example, that Oklahoma’s Tax Commission could not levy income taxes or motor vehicle registration taxes against members of the Sac and Fox Nation who lived on its reservation without Congress’s “explicit authorization.”At first, a state administrative law judge agreed with Stroble’s argument. Then the Oklahoma Tax Commission exercised its final administrative review of the matter. It conceded that Stroble was indeed an enrolled member, that she worked for the tribal government, and that she did so on Creek reservation land. Nonetheless, they rejected her claim.How can this be? After all, it was six years ago that the Supreme Court held in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation had never been disestablished by Congress and still legally existed, even though Oklahoma had acted otherwise for roughly a century. (Oklahoma courts later applied the same reasoning to other major tribal reservations in the state, covering roughly 43 percent of the state.)Oklahoma’s tax code is also fairly clear on the matter. An enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe is exempt from Oklahoma’s personal income tax, the law says, when the member is “living within ‘Indian Country’ under the jurisdiction of the tribe to which the member belongs” and “the income is earned from sources within ‘Indian Country’ under the jurisdiction of the tribe to which the member belongs.”To get around this, the commission did two things. First, it concluded that Stroble’s residence wasn’t part of the reservation because it didn’t meet the commission’s regulatory definition of Indian Country. The commission described it as “unrestricted, non-trust, private fee land,” which is a complicated way of saying it isn’t owned by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation itself or by the federal government on the tribe’s behalf. (Stroble argued, citing McGirt and federal law, that this status isn’t relevant.)Second, and perhaps more importantly, the commission went out of its way to refuse to apply McGirt to state taxation laws. The administrative law judge who initially reviewed Stroble’s case had concluded that “the importance of the McGirt decision to the instant matter is the Court’s analysis of whether Congress disestablished or diminished the Creek reservation.”The commission’s response was to claim that the judge had “completely disregarded the Court’s express limitation of McGirt to the Major Crimes Act,” which was the law at issue in the case. “To date, the U.S. Supreme Court has not expanded the scope of McGirt to state taxation, nor has Congress or the State Legislature made any changes to Oklahoma tax laws that would exempt the McGirt defined historical reservation boundaries from state taxation,” the commission argued.This claim is hard to square with McGirt itself. In that case, the defendant was an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma who had committed multiple felonies against other tribal citizens on the Creek reservation. States typically prosecute felony offenses within their borders. In the nineteenth century, however, Congress enacted the Major Crimes Act to give federal prosecutors the power to prosecute certain felonies committed between tribal members in Indian Country.During his appeals process, McGirt argued that his state convictions were invalid because the federal government, not Oklahoma, had jurisdiction over his crimes. The state of Oklahoma countered that the Creek reservation on which McGirt had committed the offenses was not Indian Country because Congress had implicitly disestablished the Creek reservation around the time that Oklahoma became a state in the early twentieth century.McGirt responded that, under Supreme Court precedent, Congress must explicitly disestablish a reservation for it to be dissolved. In an earlier case known as Royal v. Murphy, a death-row appellate lawyer had made a similar argument—that the Creek reservation still legally existed—to argue that her client couldn’t be put to death by Oklahoma on jurisdictional grounds.After the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in that case that the Creek reservation still existed in 2017, Oklahoma asked the Supreme Court to step in. The justices held oral arguments in Murphy, then deferred the decision to the 2019–2020 term and heard the McGirt case instead. The Supreme Court does not explain itself when it performs these kinds of maneuvers. One likely explanation is that the court was initially deadlocked in a 4–4 decision because Justice Neil Gorsuch, a former Tenth Circuit judge who hadn’t directly participated in the case, had recused himself from Murphy. McGirt’s state court case posed no such problems.In McGirt, Gorsuch led a 5–4 majority to affirm that the Creek reservation still existed despite decades of Oklahoma’s infringement upon it. Though Gorsuch’s opinion was rooted in history and precedent, it was fundamentally about right and wrong. “Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law,” he wrote, joined by the court’s four liberal members at the time. “To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.”The decision had profound implications for Oklahoma. Since Congress had not explicitly disestablished the reservations of the rest of the Five Civilized Tribes in the state, either, the Supreme Court had effectively recognized half of the state’s territory as Indian Country, with all the governance changes that come with it. Gorsuch had indicated in the McGirt opinion that the court had only decided the Major Crimes Act question, but the implications obviously went far beyond criminal convictions.The state of Oklahoma, Gorsuch wrote in 2020, “worries that our decision will have significant consequences for civil and regulatory law. The only question before us, however, concerns the statutory definition of ‘Indian country’ as it applies in federal criminal law under the [Major Crimes Act], and often nothing requires other civil statutes or regulations to rely on definitions found in the criminal law.”This paragraph can be read a few ways. For one thing, it was not part of the decision’s reasoning and is therefore not binding on lower courts. The Supreme Court also typically only decides specific questions in specific cases. Since the parties had only briefed the justices on the MCA and its application, it would have been inappropriate and unnecessary to describe how any other federal law should operate now.At the same time, the answers to many of those other questions should have been obvious. The Supreme Court reached its conclusion in McGirt by holding that Congress had never formally disestablished the Creek reservation and that it still legally existed, even though Oklahoma had acted otherwise for the past century. From there, the court then concluded that the Creek reservation still counted as “Indian country” for MCA purposes. To pretend that the court was merely deciding some narrow MCA-related technicality is to fundamentally misread the decision.That brings us back to Stroble’s case. After losing before the state Tax Commission, Stroble appealed its decision to Oklahoma’s state Supreme Court. The nine-justice court took its time on the matter: It agreed to hear her appeal in November 2022, then did not schedule oral arguments until January 2024. In its ruling last July, the state Supreme Court also adopted an exceedingly narrow reading of McGirt. A six-justice majority concluded, for various different reasons, that it would refuse to apply McGirt beyond the MCA context to the facts at hand.“The United States Supreme Court’s declaration—113 years after statehood—that nearly half of Oklahoma is a reservation is unprecedented,” the Oklahoma Supreme Court wrote in a nine-page unsigned opinion. “To date, the United States Supreme Court has not extended its ruling in McGirt to the State’s civil or taxing jurisdiction. And it is not this Court’s place to do so.” In a concurring opinion, Justice James Winchester spelled out the stakes more plainly.“If Congress did not disestablish the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s historical reservation, do tribal members living in eastern Oklahoma have to pay state sales taxes?” he wrote. “Has the McGirt decision impacted the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s ability to regulate oil and gas?” He also suggested that “questions remain as to whether McGirt impacts the maintenance of state highways, environmental regulations, and operations of oil and gas production owners in the region.”Justice Doug Combs, writing for himself and two other dissenting justices, criticized his colleagues for refusing to apply McGirt forthrightly to the case at hand. In one key portion, for example, he explained that there was no significant daylight between the term “Indian country” as defined in the MCA and how the Supreme Court understood the term in the 1993 Sac & Fox Nation ruling. “Based on my reading of both definitions, it is apparent the two definitions are different ways of saying the same thing,” he explained, complete with tables of the two texts. “For each category of land in the Major Crimes Act, there is a corresponding corollary in the Sac & Fox Nation definition.”Why would state officials and courts refuse so strenuously to abide by a Supreme Court ruling? Because it might work. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt and other top officials had opposed the McGirt ruling and largely resisted its application over the next few years. Some of their anxiety is understandable: McGirt fundamentally changed how a significant portion of the state would be governed. But much of it appears to be driven by a point-blank refusal to accept the ruling on its own terms.Two years later, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, the state’s recalcitrance paid off. Under the Major Crimes Act, Congress had also allowed the federal government to prosecute certain crimes committed by non-Indians against tribal members in Indian Country. Oklahoma, attempting to circumvent McGirt, argued that it had concurrent jurisdiction and could prosecute those crimes as well. Two centuries of Supreme Court precedent said otherwise. The McGirt dissenters, now joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, nonetheless sided with the state as a five-justice majority and substantially narrowed tribal sovereignty along the way.Gorsuch, writing in dissent this time, sharply denounced his conservative colleagues for their blatant misreading of law and precedent. “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts,” he wrote, referring to a famous 1832 case where Chief Justice John Marshall had ruled against Georgia officials who tried to seize criminal jurisdiction over tribal lands. “Where our predecessors refused to participate in one state’s unlawful power grab at the expense of the Cherokee, today’s court accedes to another’s.”Four years later, Oklahoma officials can still do basic arithmetic. Their obstinance towards McGirt is likely driven by the calculation that the Supreme Court will ultimately support them—a calculation that informs much of American political behavior these days. Former Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who represents Stroble, nonetheless urged the justices to take up the case for defying the high court’s authority.“The glaring inconsistency between the decision below and decades of this Court’s precedents would call for certiorari even in the absence of a conflict,” she told the justices, quoting from precedent. “And indeed, in the ‘complex’ area of tribal sovereignty, the Court has recently granted certiorari in cases where the petitioners asserted no conflict in the lower courts.”The commission, unsurprisingly, told the justices there was nothing to review here and that the state Supreme Court got it right. If the court takes up the case, the state argued, it should be to reverse its own ruling. “Although it is not necessary for the Court to do so in order to affirm the decision below,” the commission argued in its brief, “the Court may wish to revisit McGirt itself, both because it was incorrectly decided and because the predicted problems with the decision have been borne out in practice.”Most of the time, the court’s decision to hear or not hear a case does not signal any view on the merits. This time, however, the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear this petition would effectively sanction Oklahoma’s campaign to read McGirt—and the long-awaited restoration of tribal sovereignty over a large portion of the state—out of existence. Narrowing McGirt into insignificance would not be the greatest crime committed against Oklahoma’s tribal nations by uncaring federal officials in the nation’s capital, of course. But it would spring from the same spirit as past mistakes—and be just as reprehensible as them.
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