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New Republic • Mar 4, 2026

The Republican Meltdown Over Iran Is Just Beginning

On Monday, two days after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, Megyn Kelly began her SiriusXM show by saying she was praying for American troops, as well as mourning the U.S. service members who already had been killed by retaliatory strikes. But she quickly shifted gears, questioning why soldiers have to “put their lives on the line … for whom, again?” “My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States,” she said. “I think they died for Iran or for Israel.… Our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us.” Kelly is far from alone. Tucker Carlson on Saturday called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil,” and in a lengthy video on Monday said, “It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu did.” (Well, it’s not that hard to say that. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have said something similar, albeit as justification for President Trump’s decision.) In more extreme corners, the white supremacist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes urged his followers not to vote in the midterms over the war—or otherwise vote for Democrats. Steve Bannon, Trump’s svengali during his 2016 campaign and now a top MAGA podcaster, referred to the war as a “betrayal.” It’s tempting to call this a MAGA civil war, though that’s not quite right. Even though a huge majority of the country as a whole opposes the war with Iran, a CNN poll found 77 percent of Republicans support it—and there is little sign yet of Trump losing the support of congressional Republicans, in particular. Still, it is a crack-up and a serious one, especially given the GOP’s dire outlook for the midterm elections. It points to Trump’s diminishing grip on his own movement. “MAGA is Trump,” the president said when asked about Kelly’s and Carlson’s criticism. He’s not wrong, really—he still commands enormous influence over his movement and party. But we are seeing his hold over it truly slip for the first time since his emergence as a political force a decade ago. Kelly, Carlson, and Bannon have all criticized Trump before, and they’ve all gotten back in line later. But less than a week in, this war already threatens to drag on for weeks—if not months, or, as Trump floated on Monday, “forever.” If it does drag on, it will become even less popular, including among Republicans. Facing sustained criticism from the MAGA faithful who rightly see the war as a “betrayal,” Trump could well spiral into unprecedented territory. There are historical reasons for believing that Trump will survive this MAGA split largely unscathed. In 2016, much of the intellectual conservative establishment opposed his candidacy and failed miserably in its attempt to stop him. In January of that year, National Review published an entire issue, featuring essays from dozens of conservative figures, some whose criticism of Trump has grown more pointed (notably William Kristol) and many more who have since warmed up to the president, if not become outright admirers (like Ben Domenech and Erick Erickson). It didn’t work—and National Review slowly shifted from Never Trumpism to anti-anti-Trumpism to generally pro-Trumpism, even as he does many of the things they warned about back in 2016. So yes, Trump has beat back the conservative intelligentsia before. But that’s not really what he’s facing right now. One way Trump was able to defeat the eggheads at National Review was by empowering other figures who embraced him. In many cases, these people backfilled the intellectual void in the MAGA movement. Trump was anti-immigration, anti–free trade, and loosely anti-interventionist; people like Bannon and Carlson took those loose parameters and fleshed them out. Of course, most of the MAGA movement is still whatever Trump says it is. MAGA is Trump—not Carlson or Bannon and certainly not Megyn Kelly or lower-level critics of the Iran war like Matt Walsh, a loudmouth who makes Kelly look like Jürgen Habermas. But Trump’s resilience stems in part from his ability to craft alliances with disparate—and often contradictory—parts of the Republican coalition. His incoherence and stunning lack of command over policy basics made him attractive to both neoconservatives and isolationists. His seeming preference for extremely aggressive but limited military operations abroad—like the assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020 or the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, could ostensibly satisfy people in every camp. These were bold, illegal, dangerous moves. But they weren’t accompanied by calls for regime change or the extended deployment of U.S. troops. Now Trump has planted a flag firmly in the interventionist camp. This has been a long evolution, one that began with the dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan in 2017 and has now peaked with the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the initial strikes on Saturday. We’re now witnessing what may be the beginning of a regional war. Whether U.S. troops will be deployed on the ground is anyone’s guess, but this war will hang over Trump’s presidency regardless. Trump and Netanyahu have made a mess of the entire Middle East in only a few days—Iran is bombing Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and several other Gulf States. The U.S. has instructed hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave the region, even though it has left them to fend for themselves as Iranian bombs fall on airports. It’s still not clear who will emerge to lead Iran in the wake of Khamenei’s death, nor what type of leader or government would be deemed acceptable to Israel or the United States. As I wrote over the weekend, it seems clear that the two countries prefer vastly different outcomes, with American leaders wanting relative stability—perhaps with a full takeover from the Revolutionary Guard Corps—and Israeli leaders seeking to turn Iran into a failed state. And the CIA’s reported decision on Tuesday to begin arming Iranian Kurds seems designed to jump-start a civil war.Trump, it’s worth saying, is doing all of this while he is historically unpopular and his party is facing what may turn out to be the biggest midterm massacre since 2006. But what happens when he is even more unpopular, overseeing a foreign war that’s out of control, and no longer has control of Congress? What happens when the subpoenas and investigations—and yes, impeachments—start? What happens if this becomes a regional war? What happens if U.S. civilians, stranded in a Gulf state, are taken hostage? What happens if U.S. ground forces start aiding one, or several, factions in an Iranian civil war? These are all plausible scenarios, given the state of play in this very moment: Republicans in Congress are holding onto control by a thread, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting to new depths, and this war is already spinning out of control. The administration has no plan for what comes next; hell, it doesn’t even have a plan for evacuating the hundreds of thousands of U.S. civilians who are stuck in the Middle East. But Trump is also unprepared politically—for the exodus of support from Republican voters and lawmakers alike if this war expands and ground troops are deployed. He says, “MAGA is Trump.” Before too long, that may be pretty much all that MAGA is.

New Republic • Mar 4, 2026

Prediction Markets Are Eroding Our Civic Soul

The odds are 100 percent that the further infiltration of prediction markets into the public square and political decisions is going to make our lives worse. Recently announced partnerships—Polymarket with Substack and X, and Kalshi with CNN and the Associated Press—have created the conditions to incubate the worst existing trends in society: reality mediated by markets, screens, and gamification; the loneliness of late capitalism unaddressed beyond the soothing repetition of virtual lever-pulling. This past weekend, bettors in prediction market contracts involving a U.S. attack on Iran won and lost millions of dollars. Polymarket’s exchange on the exact date of the bombing reached $529 million worth of trades, one of the largest volumes in its history. There are some legal issues. Some of those who bet on the ouster of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at Kalshi may sue the company after it resolved the market as Khamenei being ruler until the moment he died. Because he died in power, their argument goes, he never left power. This left bettors who predicted he’d lose power empty-handed. Kalshi refunded $2.2 million in fees but not losses. Kalshi built a contract around a man’s removal from power, and its response to accusations of assassination bingo is a terms-of-service argument—a distinction understandably lost on the users now suing the firm.But every participant in those markets was betting on death. Even those that lost money in betting on the attacks themselves did so because they bet on the wrong day: Imagine a roulette wheel with a crowd shouting for the marble to fall in their favored slot. Now imagine that marble triggering body parts falling from the air.At least a roulette wheel is equitably governed by chance. These markets are easily gamed by exactly the kind of ethically bankrupt monsters attached to the Trump administration who would have foreknowledge of the strike—or those fortunate to overhear the matter being discussed over drinks. (If you are already OK with civilian casualties, profiting directly on them is just a short hop further away from humanity.) Sure enough, the market-tracking company Bubblemaps announced on Sunday that six crypto wallets established within 24 hours of the strikes had won $1.2 million buying contracts on it. We’re in a boom market for Armageddon arbitrage: Earlier this year, two Israel Defense Forces reservists were arrested for using confidential information to place bets on unspecified Israeli military operations.  But the corrosive nature of prediction markets reaches beyond the merely morbid as news organizations increasingly treat them not just as grim curiosities but as genuine measures of public opinion or, worse, scrying mirrors that can accurately measure anything more than the motivated reasoning of the freaks who place the bets. As disturbing as the reports of insider trading on Iran might be, we should be just as alarmed by the straight-faced coverage of what the “markets” think about the ability of the United States and its allies to force regime change: “Trump Humiliated as Markets Bet Against His Iran War” in The Daily Beast. “Polymarket Bettors Don’t Expect Swift Collapse of Iran Regime” in The Wall Street Journal. These headlines may sound neutral, but they’re not. Any coverage normalizes the practice and, maybe even worse, supports the markets’ own justification for their existence. Polymarket defends its “Middle East Markets” with a disclaimer worth quoting in full: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.The wildest claim of the many astonishing sentences here is that Polymarket has done some kind of focus group with “those directly affected by the attacks.” Did they consult a medium or a ouija board? But the other assertions fall flat under the barest scrutiny, as well: The movement of these markets (especially in early days) is about as relevant to reality as Punxsutawney Phil’s shadow or your horoscope. They are only as meaningful as a straw poll of the Proud Boys or Elon Musk’s solicitation of opinions on X (if those can be said to be different things). Do the hunches of a person who would bet on a war represent the beliefs or desires of a normal human? Is there actually that much wisdom in this crowd, or is this just a cackle of hyenas? A prediction market around deadly world events is, at best/worst, a snapshot of society unraveling. In that sense, I’m not even sure that prediction markets “give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.”When the markets trend toward correct predictions, to the extent they can tell you more than the news, it is because some people know more than others. Insider trading is a feature, not a bug. Without those suspicious wallets coming in to shift prices on bombings, you’re just depending on that site that measures pizza orders from the Pentagon, though these days it might do more to measure deliveries from Total Wine.Compared to what you can bet on now, the small-beer trading on presidential futures at one of the earliest “world event” platforms, the Iowa Electronic Market, seems quaint or even harmless. Kalshi partner CNN has some restrictions around the goriest markets; both CNN and Kalshi’s newest partner, the AP, have positioned their use of the markets mainly to forecast election results. (Though, again, even their utility in that regard is suspect.) So it’s unlikely CNN’s excitable pollster Harry Enten will be trumpeting the odds around Polymarket’s more obviously upsetting contracts: children catching a once-eradicated illness or ICE deportations anytime (or more war in the Middle East, for that matter). But anyone betting on the U.S. elections on Kalshi is betting on those things happening too.Polymarket’s partnerships with X and Substack hit differently: These are already corrupted platforms, each of them willing to monetize the alt-right and awash in AI content. When they encourage users to take Polymarket seriously, it’s of a piece with their current business plans. The Wall Street Journal’s embrace is a little more jarring, but only if you forget they cover the biggest casino of them all. The ingenious Midwestern economics professors that debuted the Iowa market were still asking people to think of politics as something outside themselves. That their small experiment only attracted the wonkiest among us is the only reason no one recognized it as an early indicator of this asocial insanity. They were pursuing accuracy for accuracy’s sake, and that’s a form of blindness. As soon as the journalism industry began rewarding those who were savvy about who will win office more handsomely than those who could point out what voters would lose, an embrace of prediction markets was inevitable.Predictions markets are in some ways just more honest about the sociopathy embedded in the stock market and the depersonalization that capitalism demands of all of us. If you’re invested in Wall Street, you’re betting on the value of shares before people. (I’m guessing most of us have a health insurance company or two in our 401(k)s and yet still want the Dow to rise.) That existing alienation creates a feedback loop. Prediction markets reintroduce the illusion of connection in a world where the media environment flattens events into digestible memes and distances us from outcomes. Already, social media perverts our natural desire for dopamine into an endless scroll, thriving on the possibility of pleasure coming after the next flick of the wrist. Gambling hijacks that same nervous system response: Gambling is not addictive because you win; gambling is addictive because you might keep winning. The sense of involvement that comes from wagering might feel immediate and quantifiable, but it is a distraction from, well, the stakes. Profiting off an outcome means you are always incentivized to care more about what happens than who it happens to. That is why it is as corrosive to bet on zero more measles cases as it is to bet on a thousand more. That’s why I’m as worried about people betting on the weather as I am about them betting on which party takes congressional control. It feels like “skin in the game,” but you always lose a bit of yourself; profiting off of the outcome of an event places investment in being right or wrong over what serves you or your community. Contracts resolving into “right” and “wrong” predictions—“yes” or “no”—might be another subtle attractor to these markets for those of us adrift in the toxic, infinitely malleable present. How wonderful to just know something. But I keep thinking of the “U.S. civil war before 2027?” contracts on Polymarket, currently trading at $.08 (or 8 percent chance) with a relatively low volume of $118k. The market will resolve, according to Polymarket, with “a wide consensus of credible reporting confirming the U.S. is in a civil war.” Polymarket clarifies further, “Use of the phrase ‘civil war’ metaphorically will not count. Only a wide consensus of reporting that the U.S. has entered a literal civil war will qualify.”All the problems I’ve identified above exist with this wager. It is immediately reprehensible from a moral standpoint. But processing the logistics of that resolution is where my brain breaks down. Multiple blue cities could be rubble, but waiting for “a consensus of credible reporting” would keep us out of a civil war forever given the rate at which journalism is evaporating now. A civil war might be an occasion when the markets themselves “give us the answers we need in ways TV news and 𝕏 cannot.”Perhaps Polymarket partner The Wall Street Journal will be left. And maybe their White House correspondent places a side bet, holding off posting to X the piece that will finally seal the consensus until one minute after midnight the morning of January 1. At that point, insider trading is the least of our worries; I’ll just be happy that someone is left to collect.

New Republic • Mar 4, 2026

Somali Immigrants Fled Climate Change. Now They’re Facing ICE.

In Somali culture, there is a famous adage: “Calaf waa labo cagood.” It translates to “Happiness is two feet,” and denotes deep-rooted traditions of movement and migration. Somalis have been caught in civil war and unrest for decades, and many have migrated to Kenya, Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States.For months, Trump has denigrated Somalis, and Somalia. In December, he went on a racist tirade, calling Somalia “the worst country in the world,” where people “run around killing each other,” and calling Somali-born Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar “garbage.” The Trump administration then began targeting the Somali American community in Minnesota and Maine with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The Department of Homeland Security has reopened thousands of refugee claims in Minnesota, and is about to end the decade-long Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, giving those living in the U.S. only a few months to leave or face deportation. But what Trump—and the political discourse focused on conflict-driven migration out of Somalia—misses is the pervasive role of climate change in people’s decisions to move both in and out of Somalia. Persistent drought—made a hundred times more likely due to warming caused by fossil fuel emissions—is affecting Somali people’s decisions to either relocate internally or migrate across international borders.Somalia’s contribution to climate change is almost nonexistent—estimates say it accounts for about 0.08 percent of global emissions. But the country faces devastating consequences of climate change, with average temperatures rising by 1.7 degrees Celsius (over three degrees Fahrenheit) since 1970. From 2020 to 2023, the East Africa region had five failed rainy seasons, an unprecedented drought and climatic episode not seen in 40 years, which led to 70 percent crop loss, three million livestock deaths, and the displacement of about 2.9 million people in Somalia, according to some estimates. Even today, Somalia is in the midst of a drought emergency; there has been no rain since last year, and hundreds of families have moved to find food and water in the Bari region of northern Somalia.  Climate scientists analyzed survey data from the U.N.’s refugee agency across Somalia’s 18 administrative regions from 2016 to 2019, and found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall can have measurable effects on displacement. A one-to-two-degree Celsius rise in the local monthly temperature leads to a tenfold increase in displacement, while a nearly four-inch reduction in monthly rainfall leads to a fourfold increase in the number displaced. People impacted by drought represented the largest number of displaced people within the country. “We don’t see displacement from drought right away,” said Lisa Thalheimer, climate scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and lead author of the study. “When there are drought events, people tend to collaborate,” she told me. “They try to help each other out. It takes people a couple of months to leave one part of Somalia to go to another.”Traditionally, Somali pastoralists had resilient ways to deal with changes in rainfall and drought patterns, where families migrated and moved on a regular basis, even crossing borders in the process. But the nature of climatic changes—and conflict—overwhelmed their traditional capacities, leading to more rural-urban migration within the country and in East Africa. In 2024, Amnesty International interviewed people from central and southern Somalia in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, to study the effects of the four-year-long drought from 2020 to 2023. They found that rivers drying up between the Jubba and Shabelle areas led both agricultural and pastoralist communities to flee to overcrowded camps within Somalia, and then across the border to the Dadaab camp. People initially relied on their community for food and water and only decided to migrate when their social system was overstretched, prompting entire families or clans to abandon villages and move internally or across the border. People who fled due to drought and floods were new arrivals in the Dadaab refugee camp, David Ngira, a researcher for Amnesty International who led the study, told me. Those who had fled conflict had been in the camp longer. While people displaced by conflict are protected by international law, those who move due to climate-driven drought are not considered refugees.But narratives that characterize Somali migration as drought- or conflict-driven miss how interconnected and multifaceted the decision to move can be, migration scholars argue. Surveys can capture immediate triggers but cannot explain the structural context of people’s mobility. It’s well established that what makes drought a disaster or how it leads to famine is inherently political. “Drought does not necessarily lead to famine and does not always lead to migration,” said Abdi Samatar, a Somali scholar and geographer at the University of Minnesota. Samatar—who is also a member of the Pan-African Parliament—argues Somalia’s current “political catastrophe” is driven partly by historical Cold War dynamics that produced civil war and state collapse. Somalis were unable to “put Humpty Dumpty back together in their country,” and in the absence of government support, “people have to do what they can for themselves,” Samatar added.Journalists have documented perilous journeys young Somalis can take to travel by road through Ethiopia, Sudan, Libya—and then by boat across the Mediterranean to Europe. This migration is commonly known as going on tahriib, a journey into an unknown terrain. Tahriib used to describe people fleeing the civil war in the 1990s, but today it refers to young Somali men—and to a lesser extent women—migrating to Europe, facilitated by smugglers. Social scientists say that diasporic ties lead people to migrate from East Africa to Europe or the U.S., where people construct social networks across borders. Somalis in refugee camps in Kenya often aspire to live in Minnesota in the U.S. Many moved to Minnesota after civil war erupted in the country in 1988. Fifty-eight percent of Somalis in Minnesota were born in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and of the foreign-born in Minnesota, almost 87 percent are naturalized citizens. But the way politicians talk about Somali Americans ignores the role the U.S. played in creating this immigrant and refugee community—whether through exacerbating climate change or playing a role in the civil war. The U.S. is the top historical emitter of greenhouse gases. It was no bystander to the civil war in Somalia, and has had a long history of military engagements in the country until today. None of this history seems to inform the current administration’s approach. Refugee admissions are the lowest they’ve ever been, with a special carve-out for white South Africans to claim refugee status. In late February, after reopening thousands of refugee claims in Minnesota, the White House said ICE agents would be empowered to detain legal refugees in the U.S. indefinitely for “aggressive rescreening.” After leaving a home destabilized in part by U.S. actions, many Somalis are now confronting fresh challenges in the country that was supposed to be offering them safe haven.