The reviews are rolling in, and it’s clear that Vice President JD Vance’s new book, Communion, is not the next Hillbilly Elegy—not even close. Ten years after Vance released his bestselling book that was made into a major motion picture, he has released Communion, a reflection on his late-in-life conversion to the Catholic faith that has already earned a meager 1.27 stars on Goodreads. Apparently reading it is painful. “I got a colonoscopy on Friday,” Ginny Hogan wrote for The Cut. “If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading Communion.”“Vance’s hypocrisy alone makes Communion nearly unreadable,” Hogan wrote. “You don’t need me to tell you this, but he is not a good Catholic,” she wrote. “A good Catholic would never support [Donald] Trump’s hateful immigration policies, cruel Medicaid cuts, hatred toward trans children, and unnecessary foreign wars.”Hogan also criticized Vance for how he managed to say so much about second lady Usha Vance, “without saying anything at all.”“Vance came to fame on his writing talent, and all he could muster to describe his wife of 12 years were ‘beauty’ and ‘intelligence.’ JD, ask ChatGPT for some synonyms! Be romantic,” Hogan wrote. The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote that the book suffered from “egregious sloppiness.” Swaim found that Vance oversimplified complex issues and misunderstood research he cited. “Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes,” he wrote. The Atlantic’s Alexandra Petri similarly called out Vance’s frothy phrasing that seemed to lack any understanding of his source material. “Here’s Vance’s gloss on the Book of Job and the problem of suffering: ‘We are like golden retrievers trying to understand how an iPhone functions.’ Well, the Book of Job left me troubled, but that golden-retriever analogy has fixed things!”And Christopher Howse, for The Telegraph, wrote that Communion simply “lacks the raw impact of Hillbilly Elegy.”
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville may not be eligible to run for governor in his home state, according to a lawsuit filed in state court Wednesday.Tuberville, a former college football coach, is being accused of failing to meet the eligibility standard for state residency as outlined in Alabama’s constitution. Candidates have to live in the state for at least seven years in order to be eligible to run. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that Tuberville has “usurp[ed], intrude[d], into or unlawfully holds or exercises a public office.”Tuberville sold all of his property in Alabama as of 2023 but has since claimed that he lives in a 1,500-square-foot property, which originally listed only his son and wife on the deed. Meanwhile, Tuberville’s wife was working as a real estate agent in Florida. He also voted in Florida in 2018.Earlier this month, Tuberville’s gubernatorial campaign released tax documents claiming to prove that he has lived in the state since 2018, but critics such as Ken McFeeters, another Republican candidate, say that they don’t prove anything, claiming they aren’t accurate.“I want his wife to tell me, with a straight face, that she lives in a one-bathroom house with her husband and adults and guests,” McFeeters told AL.com. “A woman like that is not going to share a bathroom.”Those documents were enough for Tuberville to fend off a residency challenge from McFeeters to the Alabama Republican Party. The party’s 21-member steering committee ruled in Tuberville’s favor Sunday, saying he met the state’s residency requirements.“We looked at it with the facts. The contest was unsuccessful. And Coach Tuberville will be our nominee for governor,” said the chair of the state Republican Party, Scott Stadthagen.But this new lawsuit, assuming it goes to trial, will open up Tuberville’s records even further, and could result in new information coming to light in the discovery process. The public will find out if Tuberville is actually a Florida man.
The right is seething over the details of President Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran, seeing the decision as a massive capitulation to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.The full text of the 14-point agreement was released Wednesday, revealing the United States will end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, work with other countries to give Iran access to $300 billion to rebuild its infrastructure, and cease sanctions, among other concessions.“I’ve heard from the president. I have tremendous respect for him. I’d like to hear from Marco Rubio, and I’d really like to hear from John Lee Ratcliffe on the intelligence of whether or not Iran thinks they got the better of us. Because I guarantee, we got the best intelligence community in the world. I’d be really interested in what [Iran’s] reaction to this MOU is. It might be. ‘I can’t believe we got this, because we were losing,’” former Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said on Fox News after the MOU was released. “We had an economic stranglehold on that country. So, when you go back to the status quo ante before the blockade, how are we better off? What did we get?”Gowdy then claimed the pressures of low approval ratings and incoming midterm elections may have gotten to the president.“Don’t we have midterms coming up? Are gas prices high? I mean, I hate to be cynical, but I don’t think it’s a national security document,” he said.Gowdy: How are we better off? What did we get? pic.twitter.com/VEBx6IZE1d— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026“Make no mistake: This MOU is a capitulation to the Iranian terrorist regime, potentially more dangerous than Obama’s JCPOA,” wrote Joel Griffith, a senior fellow at the conservative American Advancing Freedom and co-chair of Young Jewish Conservatives. “This will rejuvenate a terrorist regime with nuclear ambitions committed to global ideological domination through terrorism.”“This is an American surrender,” MAGA commentator Erick Erickson said.“This MOU with Iran does smack of the kind of appeasement that our administration rejected in the Obama-Iran nuclear deal and also when Joe Biden attempted to return to the politics of appeasement during his administration,” Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, posited. “I would urge the President to take a step back, continue the blockade and pursue a negotiated settlement that commits Iran to dismantling their nuclear program, dismantling this missile program, ends support for terrorist proxies and opens the strait. Failing that, we should let our Armed Forces finish the job on our terms.”“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy wrote. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.… Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” “This MOU appears to be … a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual signal goals that were set by the administration at the beginning,” commentator Ben Shapiro said on Fox News. “There are effectively five goals that were set by the administration at the beginning. One was ending the nuclear program: not just nuclear weapons; no nuclear enrichment, zero enrichment, that is not in the deal. Ballistic missiles ended, that is not in the deal.… In my opinion, the vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.”Ben Shapiro: This MOU appears to be a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual goals set by the administration at the beginning. The Vice President, the chief negotiator on this project has not well served the president. pic.twitter.com/pQWgnZOBLe— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026
President Donald Trump refused to mete out consequences for the horrific U.S. missile strike in Iran that killed more than 175 people, most of them children. During a press conference Wednesday at the G7 summit, Trump was asked whether he planned to hold anyone accountable for the attack on a girls primary school in Minab that killed dozens of young girls between the ages of seven and 12.“No, if it was a fault—and as you know that’s under investigation—it’s such a strange question to be asked at this state because we’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said. “Nobody did that on purpose.”A preliminary inquiry found that the strike was the result of using outdated intelligence. Trump seemed to suggest that because the strike had been made in error, there was no reason to punish anyone.Clearly, a deadly mistake warrants a response, and failing to respond in a timely manner is not in itself an excuse for doing nothing. If Trump were a real leader who valued human life, this would be unacceptable. Instead, Trump insisted that one would have to examine how many soldiers Iranians had killed and chalked it all up to the cost of doing business. “No mistakes are made. Yeah, war is nasty. But I know it’s under investigation, I could have a report for you tomorrow,” Trump said, adding that the question would be better directed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. NYT: Now that you're approaching a new phase in this conflict in this Iran, can you now say whether you will hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children?TRUMP: No. It's such a strange question to be asked. It's a… pic.twitter.com/vh0plTlYKZ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026More than 100 days after the strike in Minab, the DOD’s investigation is now complete and awaiting sign-off, military officials told The New York Times Tuesday. The report became delayed as a result of the slow-moving bureaucratic review process, the Pentagon’s efforts to save its own skin, and intelligence and targeting agencies that couldn’t believe their data could possibly be wrong.
President Trump said Wednesday that Iran could have its own nuclear program.“It is a little hard that when you say that somebody wants it, other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. It’s always a little tough. You have to use a little common sense,” Trump said at the G7 summit in France, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.Trump leaves door open to Iran enriching: "It's a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you're not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. You have to use a little common sense." pic.twitter.com/oVfBz4nuI8— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026It seems to be a sharp departure from Trump’s previous claims during the war. After months of insisting that the purpose of the war was to get rid of any nuclear capability, demanding “zero enrichment,” Trump is now saying that the country can use nuclear power for electricity.One wonders what Republicans in Congress—let alone the international community—will think of Trump’s latest concession. If a final peace deal between Iran and the U.S. doesn’t have any restrictions on the country’s nuclear program, it will be effectively worse than the 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran.That agreement was drafted not only between the U.S. and Iran, but the other members of the U.N. Security Council, including China, Russia, the U.K., and the European Union. This deal was negotiated without Congress even being aware of the details. Iran will likely be receiving $300 billion in reconstruction funds, and now they might have a nuclear program too. What did the Trump administration accomplish?
President Trump has given up his efforts to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile, reneging on one of his central aims in “Operation Epic Fury.” “We’ll be working on a parallel effort with the Gulf nations to address nonnuclear issues, such as [Iran’s] conventional ballistic missiles,” Trump said at the G7 summit on Wednesday. “I mean, they have to have some. Because other people have some. You gotta have some. Somebody said ‘You shouldn’t give them more … sir, you shouldn’t let them have any missile.’ … What am I gonna do? I’m gonna let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?“It doesn’t work that way,” Trump continued. “Missiles, they hurt a little location. But they don’t blow up the planet.”Trump says that Iran "has to have" ballistic missiles, adding "what am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles but they can't have them?" pic.twitter.com/32nPskhLpb— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026“One of the goals of Epic Fury, you said going into it, was to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and its capabilities to build more,” a reporter asked Trump moments later. “Why is it acceptable to you now that they keep some of that capability?”“What are they keeping? They have less than other nations now. We knocked out probably 84, 85 percent of their missiles. The rest of them are underground; they can’t even get ’em out,” Trump replied. “They’re gonna have a hard time rebuilding.”Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran secures virtually nothing he sought at the beginning of this war. The Strait of Hormuz was already open, and Iran wasn’t anywhere close to obtaining a nuclear bomb. Now, even as the Strait of Hormuz is set to reopen, it appears that the president is back at square one—all while allowing Iran to retain their missile stock that he claimed to have destroyed.Reporter: One of the goals of Epic Fury was to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles. Why is it acceptable to you now that they keep some of that capability?Trump: What are they keeping? They have less than other nations now. The rest of them are underground. They can't even get… pic.twitter.com/3LVPRJlRtE— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026
Georgia Republicans have decided not to redistrict their state after all.The decision came Wednesday after Governor Brian Kemp called the legislature into a special session to do so ahead of the 2028 election. But Peach State lawmakers flouted Kemp’s demands, arguing that the executive had not given them enough time to shift the state’s voting maps.“When the House learned that it was placed on the call for a special session, we knew it was not the right path forward for our state at this time. We believe that it is important to do things the Georgia way—responsibly, transparently, and with ample opportunity for public input,” said House Speaker Jon Burns during a press conference at the state Capitol.In a letter to Kemp, Georgia House Republicans wrote that they would entertain changes to the state’s voting maps “only when members of the General Assembly and citizens have been given ample opportunity to gather the facts, provide input, and engage in meaningful discussion.”The discussion does not seem to be dead in the water. Instead, state lawmakers are expected to revisit redistricting further down the road, according to Republican state Senate President Pro Tempore Larry Walker III.“Because any changes to our current congressional or legislative districts would not go into effect until 2028, we believe it is prudent to take the appropriate and necessary time to do this important duty the right way and not to rush through it,” said Walker.Kemp pressed the issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s maps on the charge that they were racially gerrymandered.The Georgia legislature’s conclusion is a rejection of a national GOP movement, spearheaded by Donald Trump, to redistrict their locales in an attempt to carve out as many Republican seats in the House of Representatives as possible.Several red states have already caved to the White House’s demands: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee redrew their maps in time to affect the results of the 2026 midterm elections.Yet not everyone has uniformly complied. Republican lawmakers in South Carolina and Indiana balked at the prospect, earning the president’s ire in the process.
The Trump administration’s peace deal following the war in Iran will require America to loom large over the Middle Eastern country for many years to come.The president admitted during a press conference at the G7 summit in France Wednesday that there is nothing enforceable in the drafted agreement, but rather that the constant threat of bombs should be enough to keep Iran committed to its terms.“There’s nothing enforceable in the deal itself, is that correct?” asked a reporter.“Doesn’t have to be,” Trump said wearily. “I let them know. I said, ‘Look, if you don’t adhere to the agreement—I don’t want to do that—but we’re going to bomb the hell out of you.’”“And I don’t think that they’re going to veer from the agreement. What else am I going to do? I’m not going to say, ‘I’m going to take you to court,’” he mused. “‘Let me take you to court, let me sue you.’ No, we’re going to bomb the hell out of them if they violate the agreement.”Q: On Iran, there's nothing enforceable in the deal itself, is that correct?TRUMP: There doesn't have to be. I let them know. I said, 'Look, if you don't adhere to the agreement, we're gonna bomb the hell out of you.' pic.twitter.com/KbXPsLfU42— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026The text of the arrangement has not yet been made public, though both the White House and Tehran reportedly signed the deal on Sunday. U.S. officials read the American draft of the agreement to reporters after Trump’s press conference, but did not release the document. Iran has not released a draft.The latest draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.One component of the plan has become the subject of much debate: a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, which was originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers. Top Trump officials have wavered on the specs of the fund—first claiming that Iran would receive no money, then practically confirming the fund, then backtracking again to claim that the aid package would be bankrolled by Iran’s regional neighbors and managed by the U.S.The murky arrangement does not seem to include details on whether Iran will stop enriching its uranium—a highly anticipated component and one of the White House’s most pressing demands. Failing to obtain commitments regarding Iran’s nuclear program would make the deal far weaker than the Obama administration’s JCPOA.
Hold up—did the United States actually sign a peace deal with Iran? New reporting from Axios Wednesday cast doubt on whether U.S. and Iranian leaders have actually signed Donald Trump’s deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. A senior administration official told reporters that the deal was signed electronically on Saturday by Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Mohammad Bagher, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. However, a diplomatic source from one of the countries who helped mediate talks told Axios that signing had never taken place. A second source familiar with the negotiations claimed the electronic signing had taken place. It wasn’t entirely clear, though, why a second signing was necessary.The diplomatic source’s claim directly contradicts the U.S. administration’s characterization of a done deal, and comes amid widespread confusion about what the memorandum of understanding actually says. The Trump administration has refused to release the final MOU until a formal signing ceremony takes place. The supposedly secondary signing was originally scheduled for Friday, but now the United States and Iran are discussing the possibility of moving that ceremony up. On Monday, Trump said that the deal with Iran was “already signed and the strait is already partially opened,” but speaking at the G7 Summit on Wednesday, he claimed the deal would be signed “shortly, tomorrow, maybe the next day.”“We’re going to most likely sign a deal,” Trump said, but seemed less than sure. Trump’s peace deal with Iran is increasingly reminiscent of one of his fictional trade deals, built on big loose agreements and threats that backfire on Americans. It’s gotten so bad that U.S. negotiators have even begun making efforts to downplay the actual text of the deal, claiming it was political performance more than staunch commitments.It’s not clear whether or not the deal is signed, but that could potentially explain all the secrecy and mixed messaging.
The Trump administration is trying to get rid of the first reparations program in the U.S. for Black Americans. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to end the program in Evanston, Illinois, offering $25,000 to the descendants of the city’s Black residents who experienced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969 due to city policies and ordinances. All residents who experienced housing discrimination in the city after 1969, regardless of race, also qualified for the program, which began in 2021.The DOJ said in its court filing that the program was “racially discriminatory, calling it unconstitutional because it doles out different benefits based on race.“There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer,” said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement.In total, Evanston has allotted $20 million to the program, raised from a tax on legal marijuana, and $7 million has been distributed for use on down payments, home repairs, and paying interest or late penalties on property in the city.But to the Trump administration, any acknowledgment of racial discrimination toward people of color, historical or present, is to be rejected as “wokeness” or “DEI.” If the government’s lawsuit succeeds in ending the program, it could prevent similar reparations programs from starting all over the country—regardless of whether they’re effective or not.
The Trump administration is now arguing that an alleged thwarted drone attack on the White House UFC event on Sunday was an “assassination plot,” even as charging documents indicate otherwise, in an attempt to convince America that the president really does need that ballroom.Just four days before the UFC event, Tycen Proper, 19, of Ohio, reportedly told federal agents that he and four other people planned to bomb the event using drones and then shoot people fleeing. He was hospitalized with homicidal ideations and charged along with other members of his group. They had collected weapons and ammunition, but the status of the drones is unclear.The Department of Justice refers to Proper’s alleged plan as an “assassination plot” in its most recent legal defense for the White House ballroom the president has been insisting on building for weeks now. But Proper was charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S., attempted murder, firearm possession, and receipt or transfer of a firearm used to commit a felony—not assassination, as the DOJ claims.“This latest assassination plot against President Trump and dignitaries at the White House demonstrates the compelling need for the East Wing Project, with a Ballroom designed to defend against just such,” the filing Tuesday reads.This filing came on the same day that Vice President JD Vance described the planned UFC attack as “not that advanced,” placing even more doubt on the legitimacy of the administration’s filing claim.This shameless argument also came on the same day that The Washington Post reported that half the cost of President Trump’s $600 million ballroom will be paid by U.S. taxpayers—even after promising the project would be “taxpayer free,” with no U.S. citizen paying even “10 cents.”
A woman claimed she was approached by two “recruiters” who were scouting young women at Donald Trump’s Manhattan skyscraper to have sex with him—and also tried to lure her to a party at the home of Jeffrey Epstein.Buried in the Department of Justice’s massive trove of files on Epstein, an interview conducted by the FBI on June 19, 2020, included allegations that the president had previously used Trump Tower as a hunting ground for young women, RawStory reported Wednesday. In the early 1990s, the woman worked at a luxury shoe store near Trump Tower, and would study in the building’s public atrium during her lunch breaks. One day, she met a colleague at the atrium who pointed out two men lurking nearby. “[She] described one of the men was dark haired and looked like Antonio Banderas, while the other man was blonde and looked like the surfer type,” the FBI report stated. “Her colleague told her that the men constantly picked up [redacted] women.”The woman was then approached by the dark-haired man, who struck up a conversation with her. “He asked if she knew who Donald Trump was and told her he was meeting people that day,” the report stated. “[She] told the man that she knew who Trump was. The man asked if she wanted to meet Trump and told her that she did not need to work so hard to go to school,” the report stated. “The man winked and said he could do whatever she liked.”“[She] felt that it was clear that sex was on the table, even though the man never mentioned sex,” the report stated. “[She] felt these men were playing the role of recruiters for Trump.”“The man told her that if she did not want to meet Trump right then, she could go to a party. The man told her that she could bring a friend if the friend looked like her, but she could not bring a guy,” the report stated. The invitation for the party had Epstein’s address on it, the woman told the FBI. When she declined the invites, she said she began receiving death threats. “The threats consisted of the men saying that they knew where she worked and could find her. [She] never told the police because she did not think they would believe her,” the report stated. They never approached her again. Over the next six months, the woman saw the two men continue to approach young women in the atrium at Trump Tower. She saw “girls, usually blondes, approximately 15/16 years old with one of the two men and saw them get on an escalator,” the report stated. She never saw anyone meet with Trump. The woman also recalled a story from another woman who worked in Trump Tower, whose daughter had been brought up to meet Trump while she waited for her mother to get off of work. Later, that second woman claimed that “something horrible happened to her daughter that day.”“The daughter had dropped out of school, got into drugs, and committed suicide,” the woman told the FBI. While the interview was taken in June 2020, it was not officially filed until January 2021. This is just the latest allegation against the president to be uncovered from the Department of Justice’s massive cache of documents on Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker. Still, former Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.
Congress is finally demanding answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Iran.Senators are threatening to cut off Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides more details about the deadly U.S. strike that hit a school full of children on February 28, Politico reported Wednesday.At the time, Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base. It was not. The DOD initially did not take responsibility for the strike.The vast majority of the 175 people killed in the strikes were children, according to Iranian officials.Senators have also asked Hegseth to turn over all the video footage of his department’s bombing campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, for which the death toll recently surpassed 205 people. The U.S. has been attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela since September 2, in what it claims is a broad effort to stamp out drug smuggling into the U.S. By December, Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio confessed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said at the time.The details of Hegseth’s punishment were folded into a Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill, specifying that Congress would withhold 75 percent of his travel budget until lawmakers received adequate documentation for the aforementioned atrocities.It’s the second such time that lawmakers have tried this gambit. Late last year, lawmakers passed defense legislation that cut a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget under similar demands. The raised stakes, however, suggest that lawmakers did not get what they asked for.Even Trump’s MAGA allies in the upper chamber seem disgruntled with the Pentagon’s lack of transparency. They’ve complained that Defense officials have kept them in the dark about major national security decisions—a frustration only further intensified by the administration’s cloaked proceedings around the Iran peace deal.
The Department of Defense revealed it used Elon Musk’s Grok AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran.In a sworn statement in federal court, the DOD’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, defended the chatbot’s existence as a “a matter of paramount national security,” saying that it was used to fire “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours” in the Iran war.Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is being sued by the NAACP in Mississippi for allegedly running at least 57 gas-burning turbines to power its Colossus 2 data center without the necessary permits or pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act. Stanley issued his statement as part of the federal government’s effort to get the lawsuit tossed out on national security grounds.It’s the first time that the Trump administration has admitted to using Musk’s AI in the Iran war, following reports that the military may have used AI targeting in its bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 175 people. Last year, the DOD awarded xAI a $200 million federal contract to install “Grok for Government” into its systems, ignoring a laundry list of issues with the platform.Grok has often gone on antisemitic rants; it has pushed debunked claims of white genocide in South Africa, insulted X CEO Linda Yaccarino with sexual comments, and been used to generate explicit photos of women and children. Other government agencies even see the tool as a security risk. Why, then, is the DOD defending its existence and continued use for the military?
The Trump administration spent nearly $15 million to rid the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of algae. They were not successful.Within days of the pool’s refilling, the green algae hasn’t just returned but is having a “field day” thanks to high phosphate levels in the water, according to an algae researcher at the Smithsonian who spoke with CNN Tuesday.CNN sampled and tested some of the pool’s water with the help of a swimming pool store. They found that the water contained phosphate levels “far higher than what is recommended to keep algae at bay,” based on estimates for a pool that holds 6.5 million gallons of water.The Department of the Interior has so far blamed the algae’s resurgence, in part, on residual algae that had accumulated in the pool’s pipes—which it apparently neglected to clean as part of the multimillion-dollar restoration.Washington’s hot and humid weather has also contributed to the bloom, as the Trump administration filled the Reflecting Pool with fresh water and, consequently, more oxygen. By the weekend, the green, plantlike form had coated the bottom of the pool in several areas and floated to the surface.Now park workers are throwing darts at the wall trying to clean up the monument in time for America’s semiquincentennial. On Tuesday, hi-vis park workers were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds.Photojournalists also snapped shots of buckets of Induclor around the memorial, a chlorine compound used to control bacteria, algae, slime, and fungi in water, reported The Washington Post.Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923, because what makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain. The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs at its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious, structural leaks, which requires the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algal blooms that turn the water green.
President Trump appears to be completely smitten with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, professing his love for the authoritarian leader at the G7 summit in France on Wednesday.“I met him early in the campaign when Crooked Hillary and I were running against each other, right, and I was told that the president of Egypt is here. That was a big deal. It’s still a big deal for me to be with the great president of Egypt, but not as big as it used to be before I ran. So he was in a hotel and I met him, and we fell in love. Deeply in love,” Trump said, while seated next to the Egyptian leader. “And he didn’t even want to see Hillary. He said, ‘You’re going to win, I don’t want to meet her. You’re going to win.’ He didn’t want to see her, remember that? So we had a good relationship right from there.… We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed.”Sisi has long supported Trump, from the infamous picture of him, the president, Melania Trump, and King Salman of Saudi Arabia touching a glowing orb in 2017 to his current role promoting the Trump administration’s plans in the Middle East. He has been accused of employing torture and forced disappearances, as well as discrimination against the LGBTQ community, by multiple human rights groups.Trump on Egyptian President el-Sisi: "He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love ... we didn't know each other before that. We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to." pic.twitter.com/jSJyt8eIik— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026
Donald Trump lashed out at former President Barack Obama as everyone turned on Trump’s peace deal with Iran. Speaking at the G7 summit Wednesday, Trump desperately tried to make his peace deal seem better than Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “He tried to bribe his way out, I didn’t do that,” the president said. “Nobody mentions that. $1.7 billion and hundreds of millions of dollars, they tried to bribe their way out of it. And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.”Trump: "You know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said he's a stupid son of a bitch." pic.twitter.com/2l712bUV2d— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026Projecting much? Obama’s previous nuclear deal with Iran unfroze a now meager-looking $1.7 billion. Now Trump wants to write Tehran a bigger check. A leaked draft of the 14-point memorandum of understanding detailed the billions the U.S. would provide in financial relief for Iran—including a $300 billion investment fund for reconstruction in Tehran. Vice President JD Vance confirmed Monday that a $300 billion investment fund was included in the deal, but he walked back the claim just hours later, while Trump and the White House outright denied it.Here’s why the investment fund matters: If such a fund does exist, that means that Trump will have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and killed thousands of civilians (including children) to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon that it wasn’t even building in the first place. All of this would be cleared up if the White House would just release the text of the MOU. It’s hard not to imagine that if the deal was any good for the U.S., it would’ve released it right away.
The president just scrambled the last week of negotiations in Congress to abet his dead voter ID bill.Donald Trump cancelled the Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton via a Truth Social post Wednesday, just hours before it was set to take place. Trump had tapped Clayton earlier this month to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in place of acting Director Bill Pulte. Democrats had argued that even temporarily appointing Pulte, a housing regulator, was illegal, since he had no national security experience to bring to the job. (For the record, neither does Clayton.)As a result, Democrats completely stalled negotiations over FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil foreigners on U.S. soil without warrants. But even without Pulte’s name in the mix, negotiations had stalled over the FISA section as both chambers failed to pass an extension.And Trump has undoubtedly only made matters worse by involving himself in the process. In a lengthy rant Wednesday, Trump baselessly lamented that Republicans had advanced Clayton’s nomination without any concrete assurances from Democrats. He then hitched the FISA section’s renewal onto his Save America Act, which Republicans have warned him dozens of times has no chance of passing the Senate. That legislation hinges on Trump’s conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting (against him) in U.S. elections.“Now, the Dumocrats are saying they will vote against FISA—So, the Republicans wound up having fulfilled their commitment, but Dumocrats broke the Deal,” Trump wrote. “Therefore, to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it. Not complicated, actually, the Republicans fell into a trap.” The Save America Act sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.The Save America Act suggests numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure would also add a federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports, and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”Trump noted that the pause on Clayton’s Senate confirmation would also interrupt the rest of the pipeline: in the meantime, Pulte would remain as the acting DNI, while Jamie McDonald—a litigation partner at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell—would wait to replace Clayton as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the chamber’s intelligence committee, ignored the president’s bluster. He noted on his X account that the president’s influence did not extend to the Senate confirmation hearing process.“Jay Clayton is a pending nominee before the Intelligence Committee,” Cotton wrote. “We will proceed with his hearing as scheduled unless the president directs him not to appear or withdraws his nomination.”But by Wednesday afternoon, Cotton had postponed Clayton’s hearing, writing that the decision was “regrettable” and “unfortunate” and that the proceedings would continue in the near future. Amidst the chaotic back and forth, committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner snarked to Punchbowl News: “I am not sure whether Jay Clayton has been simply postponed or withdrawn. I’m not sure Jay Clayton knows.”This story has been updated.
White House officials are trying to claim that a leaked draft of the peace agreement between Iran and the U.S. isn’t real.CNN reported Wednesday that the deal consists of a 14-point memorandum of understanding, which it obtained from a U.S. official. The points include the terms of the ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and details about billions in financial relief for Iran.However, White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung denied the CNN report’s accuracy, posting on X that “The supposed text of the MOU that was obtained by CNN does not reflect the language of the actual MOU.” President Trump also issued his own denial Wednesday when reporters asked about the inclusion of a plan for the U.S. and Gulf allies to “ensure financing of at least $300 billion” in reconstruction funds.“It’s false. People, you can invest if you want. What am I gonna do, say nobody’s ever allowed to invest? We’re not invest[ing]—we’re not putting up 10 cents. People can decide to do that, but that’s up to them,” Trump said at the G7 summit in France, seated alongside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. “We are not investing in it, and we do not have a fund.”Trump also denied that Gulf countries were investing in the fund, and added that the CNN report was a “false story that got picked up incorrectly from a statement that was pretty well made, I think.”Q: It's been reported the MOU includes a $300 billion reconstruction fund funded by Gulf allies.TRUMP: It's false. You can invest if you want. We're not putting up 10 cents.Q: Are you asking Gulf countries to--TRUMP: No I'm not. If they do it, that's fine. Don't forget --… pic.twitter.com/2TmhtR8eW6— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026Bloomberg also obtained a copy of the draft memorandum, which U.S. officials are not attacking, although an unnamed Iranian official told the country’s Tasnim news agency that parts of it were inaccurate. It contains similar language regarding $300 billion in reconstruction funds for Iran. Both versions also promise that the U.S. will release additional billions in frozen Iranian assets.Until the official terms are released to the public, we won’t know for sure if any funds will be transferred, or what assurances are being made to ensure that the war doesn’t resume. Trump could easily clear this all up by releasing the signed agreement in full, but for now, he’s content to attack the media and leave everyone guessing.
President Trump is threatening to drop “bombs on their head” if Iran doesn’t abide by the guidelines established in their memorandum of understanding, which has still not been publicly released.The president made the hawkish comments while touting the agreement at the G7 summit in France on Wednesday morning.“Is the text of the agreement final?” a reporter asked.“No, it’s not final. It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at ’em—dropping bombs on their head. If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head,” Trump replied. “Because they’ve misbehaved for 47 years, alright?”Q: Is the text of the agreement final?TRUMP: No, it's not final. It's a memorandum of understand, and if I don't like it, we'll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head pic.twitter.com/F7JHHNfGDC— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026Then he began to gloat about how great the deal was, just seconds after threatening to inflict more violence on Iran.“Nobody could’ve made this deal. The JCPOA done by Obama … he gave ’em $1.7 billion in cash—green cash, from banks—into a Boeing 757 and flew it into Iran,” he continued. “He tried to bribe his way out. I didn’t do that.… And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.”Leaked versions of Trump’s memorandum of understanding suggest the U.S. has promised Iran access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds and billions more in currently frozen Iranian assets.In return, Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and commit to no nuclear weapons development—two points that already existed before Trump went to war in February. And what does it say about Trump’s belief in an eventual deal if he’s already threatening to drop bombs if the whole thing falls through?
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.JD Vance is having a moment. He’s selling his new book and he just appeared on The View, where the hosts worked him over pretty hard. In a telling exchange, Vance found himself defending Trump in the context of the Iran war in a way that will come back to bite him later. Indeed, there are several other signs that Trumpworld is setting up Vance to take the eventual fall on Iran in a number of different ways. New leaks from inside the administration are making Trump’s Iran deal look even worse, and they’re also shedding light on what this shivving of Vance really entails.We’re talking about it all with one of the best observers out there of the intersection between politics and culture, New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia, always nice to have you on.Virginia Heffernan: Hey, Greg, same here. I like being on the show.Sargent: Well, we like that. So let’s start with JD Vance’s appearance on The View. He took a hammering on a number of fronts. I want to highlight one exchange, though. They’re talking about inflation. JD says, We’re doing all we can. Then one of the hosts points out that Trump recently said, I love the inflation. Listen to this.JD Vance (voiceover): We’re doing a lot to make it better. It’s going to take a little bit of time. There’s a lot more work to do. But the president knows that a lot of Americans are struggling. In fact, he ran on that, he talked about it, and we’ve done some things and made some good progress on that point.Ana Navarro (voiceover): He just said he loves the inflation.Vance (voiceover): What he said, Ana, what he said is that he loves the fact that the inflation is going to come down when this war is over. That’s what he said.Joy Behar (voiceover): Are you his—wait, are you his interpreter or are you his vice president?Vance (voiceover): Well, look—what the president said—people were asking about the inflation, they were asking about the affordability problem, which, again, is very real. And what he said is, I love the inflation because it’s going to come down when the war is over.Sargent: Joy Behar got a good dig in there saying that Vance is just functioning basically as Trump’s propagandist and not leveling with people, although she said it in a way that kind of kept it light. Virginia, what did you make of the exchange?Heffernan: I don’t know, do people still say “mogged?” I do think that JD Vance got mogged by the women of The View. They were all on top of him. He had said on Fox News the day before, or maybe earlier this morning, that he was trying to prepare for a civil conversation, but he knew he was going into the lion’s den.The inflation question is going to be really interesting to View viewers. JD Vance has this book come out about his Christian faith, about his Catholic faith, and he really wants everyone to focus on his religious journey because he believes that he can bond with the suburban women who sometimes lean Republican, especially on issues like crime, and he might get to them by The View.So he wasn’t going into the lion’s den for no reason. He was going into it to promote a book. And they gave the QR code so you could buy the book at the end. They did their part. And they gave him a onesie for his forthcoming newborn that says The View on it. But—Sargent: I have to ask—do you think that JD Vance and Usha are going to put that onesie on their baby?Heffernan: I was wondering about that. Maybe that was just another mog moment; we’ll brand you with The View, brand your baby. We don’t want to get too symbolic about it, but there was a lot going on and it’s a lot to watch.And Whoopi and some of the other hosts of color were especially incensed and didn’t give any ground. And there was something satisfying about seeing that, because we’ve seen Trump attack so many women over and over again in interviews, walk out of interviews, call women “nasty,” call them “piggy,” call them whatever. And so just saying, We’re not really going to entertain the idea that there’s a kumbaya here with you, and making it very clear with their expressions that they weren’t going to entertain it.Sargent: JD was really on his best behavior, though. We should point that out. What do you think of the inflation exchange? Because I want to clarify for people that the inflation exchange is really about inflation from the war. That’s what Trump was talking about when he said, I love the inflation. It maneuvered Vance into a position where he was essentially forced to defend what Trump said there. What did you make of the exchange?Heffernan: So what Vance says is he didn’t mean he loves the inflation, he meant, I love that the inflation is going to go down after the war. For some reason, everything these days is reminding me of this moment in The Simpsons. I can’t remember what season it is, but Krusty the Clown or someone who’s trying to kill Bart has “Die Bart Die” tattooed on his chest. And when it’s revealed—“Die Bart Die”—he says, No, this is just German. “Die Bart Die.”And I love that because no, he didn’t say I love the inflation. He said I love that the inflation is going down. “Die Bart Die.” There’s no way that that’s what he was saying. Everybody knows that’s not what he was saying. For JD Vance to introduce doublespeak, to introduce propaganda, really shows how he’s on his back foot.Sargent: I want to add something about that exchange as well. As you say, it’s a stretch, as Vance said, that Trump was claiming that he loves the fact that inflation will come down after the war. I think Trump was more saying, I don’t give a shit about the inflation because the problem’s going to magically go away because I say it is, and that’s it, and you should make it go away in your head. That’s what he actually meant.But seriously, there’s another vulnerability here, which is that Vance is tying himself to the idea that costs will come down significantly after the war. In other words, he’s endorsing that idea and aligning himself with it. That’s going to take a while. Whatever actually happens with costs, I’m not sure the public’s going to feel good about costs anytime soon. So Vance has been maneuvered into a position where he’s tied to defending that big, big, big thing about the Trump term, which is a very, very tough thing to defend.Heffernan: It’s asking people to pay more for groceries in exchange for some foreign policy goal that keeps shifting, that we don’t understand. And that, frankly, the administration did nothing to gin up support for. We don’t even have a narrative about why we’re in Iran. They weren’t building nukes—or were they? Nobody is following this enriched uranium conversation or whatever JD Vance is saying this new Iran deal is, which sounds like the last, or good, Iran deal, except worse.Nobody understands what we’re doing there, just as they didn’t understand Venezuela and they didn’t understand the first attack on Iran. This has not been sold to the American people, and yet we’re asked to make a sacrifice for it. We’re asked to pay more for groceries while he keeps telling us affordability is a hoax and that he loves inflation. This is the signature piece of foreign policy, clearly.It reads to the American people as, We’ve gone to war for Israel and we don’t know why. Nobody has a stake in figuring out this nuclearized Iran because we keep not understanding it. The only thing we understand is we’re paying more, something about the Strait of Hormuz, and this is all Trump’s fault. We have then no faith in him. There’s not even a strong base that’s trying to spin up support for it. What they just say back is, It’s a hoax, or, You’re nasty for asking questions about it.Sargent: A hundred percent. There are clear signs that Vance is getting set up now to take the fall for the Iran deal if it goes south. Axios reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Trump and other top officials that the intel agencies seriously doubt that Iran will ultimately make the concessions that Trump will demand in terms of constraints on its nuclear enrichment program.This is a really key thing. I want to read it: “In internal discussions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding announced Sunday, while Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.”Virginia, that’s strongly suggestive. People around Trump who expect—rightly—that he’s going to have serious trouble pinning Iran down when the talks on nukes get going, want it very clear that Vance internally rooted for this deal. We’re talking here about people who are sympathetic to Hegseth and Rubio. What do you make of that?Heffernan: As you said before, I think he’s being shivved. The person who is least confident in Trump’s decisions around foreign policy—as we’ve seen from his past disputes with Trump and Hegseth, and pretty aggressive, meaningful isolationism—is having to defend those things and then babble about how bad Obama was, about whatever comes into his head, because the details of the deal have never been fully exposed. We don’t know what they are.But we don’t even know what our objective is. The objective of the first deal was to prevent supposedly breakout capacity from Iran so that they couldn’t turn what they had into nukes. That was a deal that the UN was invested in with its nonproliferation treaty. It was a deal that Iran was ultimately invested in because it got a lot of goodies, and that it complied with.But now, are we trying to prevent breakout capacity? What’s the time horizon? What are the things that an ordinary diplomat would ask about with this deal? No, it’s just Trump trying to humiliate people or be humiliated himself. Iran has gone to psychologists to say, what is it like to deal with—remember with Nixon, he was exercising the madman option? Well, Trump’s madman-ness is nonoptional. He is a madman. He’s not choosing, Am I going to act like a madman? He just is.This isn’t a question of Democrats saying, He’s crazy. This is a question of, if you are negotiating with this person, how do you talk to an actually insane person? How do you flatter his ego, do XYZ? Iran is very likely to get away with some pretty hideous things with JD Vance scrambling to defend him, being shivved by the president, and the president himself insane. And Hegseth pretty insane.Sargent: To pick up on this idea of JD Vance getting shivved and this idea that you mentioned of Vance being somewhat of a skeptic of this stuff—he’s getting screwed in two ways. Not only was he initially skeptical of this thing, but now he’s got to be the one to defend the deal in a more frontal way than anyone else. Everybody knows that vice presidents are on the hook for that as a general matter. They’re supposed to go out and take a lot of shit for the president. That’s just part of the role. Everyone knows that. And now he’s got to go out there and defend this deal when everyone knows it’s a complete joke and nobody else has to be as frontal as him.Heffernan: It really would be Marco Rubio who should be talking about it. But Trump is way more threatened by JD Vance’s future career than he is by Little Marco’s. And so he wants Vance out there and he wants Vance to have to do the doublespeak that he’s getting him to do. Also speak for something that he doesn’t know about, because nobody has seen this deal. This deal is like Pam Bondi’s, I have the list of Epstein’s people on my desk. There may be a piece of yellow paper with some Sharpie scribbles on it, but we don’t know what this piece of supposed diplomacy is.He’s just going to end up making no sense. It’s like hang Mike Pence. The version of hang Mike Pence for now is hang JD Vance out to dry.Sargent: Very well put. There are more signs of Vance getting set up here. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark highlighted a number of statements from Trump-friendly people. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a staunch Trump ally, described Vance as “the architect of the deal.” Very, very clear. This is Vance’s deal, says Senator Lindsey Graham, who probably hates the deal and thinks it’s going to fall apart later. That’s a key point. Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a real Iran hawk—I hate that phrase, but whatever—he’s an Iran hawk who expects this deal to not produce any real results later. And he’s saying that JD Vance is the architect of this deal which will fall apart later. That really screws him.Trump himself recently said that JD Vance will probably be at the signing ceremony instead of him. We’ll see how that pans out, but it’s really obvious where all the arrows are pointing.Heffernan: I don’t think Lindsey Graham cares about getting out of Iran. He probably would be happy with forever war. It seems to be his sweet spot, and certainly Pete Hegseth’s. But Trump does have trouble on his hands if this—every day this war continues, it’s expensive. It’s very, very, very unpopular. He wants a way to back out of it, but he doesn’t want to make something called “the Iran deal,” because an Iran deal is supposedly what made Obama seem effete, seem like a globalist, seem like he didn’t understand hard power. So here he is making an Iran deal in order to back out of the optional war of choice that he started for no reason to get attention.Sargent: Trump wants it to be Iran’s surrender. That’s what he wants.Heffernan: He wants an Iran surrender and they are not—there is no white flag from Iran. The other thing is: We haven’t had this open collision with Iran ever. We’re starting to see their cards. And they have played the propaganda war very well. The Lego videos have mostly been taken down, but those were really influential. And “Your Government Is Run by Pedophiles,” their hit song of the summer—you can still find that. It was on Spotify and rising up the ranks.Americans have paradoxically acquired at least some understanding, if not sympathy, for Iran. For Iran being a closed rogue state, defined as the most hated nation on earth for all this time, and suddenly people have started to think, There’s schoolgirls there. There’s schoolgirls that were killed by a bomb. The consequences of this for geopolitics are going to be felt forever. And it’s just on somebody’s whim. What a nightmare.Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there. There’s the global economy as well, which is going to continue to be in a really ailing state because of all this.Let’s spool this forward and see what it looks like. So down the line, maybe Trump reaches this stupendous deal with Iran in two to three months before the midterms. I don’t think that’s likely. I think it’s more likely to drag out and the Iranians have every incentive to drag it right up to the midterms to hurt Trump as much as possible.We start to get into next year, and then that’s when the presidential race starts. At that point, Trump is really checked out. He’s passing from the scene. And so next year you’ve got JD Vance as the frontman to defend all of the legacy of the Iran war. We’re talking about the global economy. We’re talking about potential trouble that they run into with getting Iran to constrain its nuke program. We’re talking about the money that’s going to start flowing to Iran—which, when Obama did that, was this huge betrayal of America according to Trump. How does Vance manage all this in, I don’t know, March or April of next year?Heffernan: As you point out, there are Republicans who hate the Iran deal and want to see it fail, like Lindsey Graham, because they’re hawks, because they are really invested in this idea of Iran as a rogue state in opposition to Israel as a democracy and an ally in the region—which has also shifted in popular imagination, yet that’s something that a Lindsey Graham is going to hold on to. So you have old-school Republican hawks who are going to hate that there’s a deal at all.Then you have people for whom the deal is bound to fail. At very least, even when you talk about this perfect deal idea—the first Iran deal was close, it was a B-plus as a deal at least—it takes a while to bear fruit. You can call it a failure at any given time because you could say, Well, they’ll have this breakout capacity in 10 years, 15 years, we should have gotten it in perpetuity. They can always be flexing. We can suddenly be like, The uranium is enriched to 68 percent, so it’s a failure.There’s absolutely no way that an Iran deal of any kind is going to play as a success with the American people. The only way that this could come to a soft landing for them is if prices go steeply down, if affordability goes up, if the strait is completely open and free, and if we have a complete surrender by Iran. And none of that is possible either.So they’re not going to get there. Jamelle Bouie says that they reiterate the logic of domination in these wars. What they want to see is Iran crying in pain. That seems like a fool’s errand. It’s not a very Iranian position. They have shown that they’re refusing to do that.This is an impossible position. JD Vance is so in a corner. It’s impossible for him to make a friend. Tucker Carlson is just going to hold him responsible. Tucker Carlson, who hates this war, who broke with Trump over this war, who begged Trump not to go to war, and now opposes Trump and is sort of the leader of this particular—maybe running for office himself, right? We shouldn’t rule that out. If JD Vance had been able to stay with Tucker Carlson and have that group of people on his side, he might have had a chance in 2028. But you know what it is? He’s tarred with the brush of the war and he’s tarred with the brush of the deal. That’s as bad as it gets. Both things are going to cling to him and both things are huge failures.Sargent: Just to really boil this down, basically every major element of the MAGA coalition will dislike whatever emerges here, so they’ll dislike Vance for it. And all the constituencies that Republicans, especially Trumpy Republicans like JD Vance, need to win majorities—young people, working-class nonwhites—they’ll also hate it. So that’s where Vance is.Heffernan: That’s where Vance is. I’m not going to say I feel sorry for him, but just strategically, he is in a very, very bad spot. I don’t see a way out of it for him. I don’t see where his reputation is at the end of this.Sargent: I don’t either. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.Heffernan: Thank you.
Why have kids, anyway? It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I get ready for yet another bout of fertility treatment. I’ve managed to log an impressive if doomed record of “trying”: two artificial inseminations, three rounds of IVF, 11 embryos, one pregnancy, one miscarriage, zero children. It’s strange that after all that, I still find myself gearing up for another round. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what is making me act in such an irrational way—squandering my energy and resources and seeking out physical and emotional risks for something that will likely never happen. But lately a couple books have helped me think about the pursuit of parenthood in new ways. It’s probably not an accident that they are written by queer or gay men whose path to parenthood has been similarly mediated by reproductive technology and defined by deferral. Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood is an utterly unique contribution to the often predictable genre of infertility and parenting lit. Written by Joseph Osmundson, a professor of microbiology, it begins with an immersive account of reproduction from the perspective of a female salmon. A salmon mother swims thousands of miles against the current to spawn, and then guards her nest until she dies. After her death, she nourishes her children with her decomposing body. Of her thousands of fertilized eggs, perhaps one or two, perhaps none, will survive to become adult fish capable of spawning the next generation. The whole system is bizarre enough to make IVF injections and egg donor ads seem normal. In Osmundson’s telling, it’s also beautiful—a fluid vision of “translucent tails and pink yolk sacs,” and a moving metaphor for maternal endurance and sustenance against the odds. “A mother doesn’t let her children go hungry,” he writes. “This is one way I’d like to be a mother.” Salmon reproduction provides a structure for Osmundson’s own “experiment in queer parenthood,” from his lifelong yearnings for pregnancy to his life-changing journey through sperm donation, embryo creation, and family reimagining with two lesbian friends. His story is told in four parts—“Fry,” “Salt Water,” “Humpy,” and “Hatch”—that map his life onto stages of a salmon life cycle. (A fry is a young salmon that has just emerged from its nest—hence the phrase small fry. Humpy is a nickname for a male pink salmon; they develop a small hump during their spawning migration.)This whole-life-cycle framing allows Osmundson to take a capacious perspective on the conception and care of progeny, seeing it not simply as an adult rite of passage but as a life-defining desire that begins in childhood and continues far beyond the limits of legal or literal parenthood. The awe-inspiring reproductive drive of the salmon also allows him to express an unapologetic urgency about procreation that cuts through common clichés and ambivalences about when, whether, or how to have kids. “We are human animals,” he writes. “The purpose of an animal is to mate and make more animals. If biology has desire, this is its root.… We human animals render things so complicated; we hide desires even from ourselves.”This is not to say that the desire to be a parent is universal—it clearly is not—or that the human complications aren’t real. Osmundson writes about them with palpable poignancy. In addition to dealing with the particular challenges facing queer people who want to procreate, Osmundson faces some systemic struggles common to millions of potential parents, regardless of their sexuality. His list of difficulties includes “money, my lack of a uterus, the ethics of surrogacy, the adoption-industrial complex.… I don’t own a home … my car is a two-door … climate change and American politics have only gotten worse; did you know adoptions can cost $100,000 out of pocket?” Osmundson and his friends make a plan in which he will provide sperm, one woman will provide an egg, her partner will carry the baby, and they will all share the parenting. It’s not a simple scenario, and they face the further complexities of figuring out the role of genes and culture in an interracial family (Osmundson is white, while one of his potential co-parents is Indonesian), as well as the uncertainties of building a family in which two parents are romantic partners and one is not. The stakes of working it all out are high. Osmundson feels like it might be his only chance at parenthood; he can’t afford to have a child on his own. Spawning Season is, among other things, a deeply personal exploration of “situational infertility,” the voluntary or involuntary lack of children due to external factors. Whatever the various causes of our plummeting birth rate, the crushing costs of parenthood are clearly not helping. Neither is the bleakness of the political landscape, as the U.S. government makes reproductive health care more dangerous and queer families more precarious, defunds education and childcare at home, and bombs children abroad. In some ways, the situationally infertile are not so different from endangered salmon whose reproductive efforts are thwarted by dammed rivers or warming oceans. Osmundson takes a wild narrative risk that allows him to express lyrical tenderness, protectiveness, laughter, hope, and loss—a full range of parental feeling.It’s rare to read a well-researched nonfiction narrative that blends fascinating specialized knowledge with sharp political critique and a moving, gripping personal story. It’s even more rare to read one that is unafraid to move beyond nonfiction into the realm of fantasy. “Critical fabulation” is a technique used by scholars like Saidiya Hartman to flesh out historical narratives where the surviving records fail us, imagining the experience or interiority of people whose lives have been lost to time. Osmundson experiments instead with a kind of “uncritical fabulation,” giving himself permission to conjure up an imaginary fish-child friend called Fry—a dream child hovering somewhere between potential and real, salmon and human, who expands the narrative into what-might-have-been or what-might-be, alongside what is and was.Fry first appears a few pages into the book and recurs throughout, a daughter figure whom Osmundson longs for, cares for, talks with, carries in a Ziploc bag full of water, introduces to some of his trusted friends, and goes to the beach with. Sharing Fry with us is a wild narrative risk that pays off, allowing him to express lyrical tenderness, protectiveness, laughter, hope, and loss—a full range of parental feeling—even and especially when suspense is submerged in heartbreak and it looks like his real-world child will never actually come to be. If Spawning Season dramatizes the near-impossibility of parenthood in a world of material limitations, the biographer Brad Gooch’s Good Morning Moon conjures an enchanted world seemingly free of constraints. It is a memoir of gay fatherhood infused with children’s literature that sometimes reads like a “happily ever after” fairy tale, with any shadow of suspense dispelled at the beginning. Unlike Osmundson’s book, which keeps us wondering where his journey toward parenthood will end, Gooch informs us at the outset that he and his husband have two sons and are happy. The book is thus less a quest narrative than an ode to joy: “I’ve never believed all happy families were alike. I’ve been wanting … to voice our happiness.” The apt first epigraph, self-deprecating yet proud, is courtesy of Frank O’Hara: “Happiness, the least and best of human attainments.”Gooch and his husband, Paul, had children late, in their fifties and sixties. (I’m obviously delighted for them, but as a woman who is approaching my fertility clinic’s age cutoff, I couldn’t help remembering the time I saw a headline about a septuagenarian celebrity father and wailed to a friend, “I just want to have my first child before Mick Jagger has his ninth!”) Gooch was an only child from the midcentury suburbs, emotionally distant from his parents. For him, as for many in his generation, being gay meant leaving traditional family decisively behind to live a nontraditional life in the city. Marriage and children were not legally options for most of his adult life, and would not have been appealing to him even if they were. Paul, 12 years younger and a Baptist minister, was close to his large and lively family of origin and interested in building a family of his own.Eventually, after over a decade together, the couple decided to have children via a Stanford-educated egg donor and two decidedly non-Stanford-educated surrogates. Osmundson wrestles with the ethical complexities involved in assisted reproductive technology, and surrogacy can be especially fraught, as relatively wealthy parents pay poorer women to provide an immense, intimate, and dangerous service. But Gooch and his husband were able to move beyond what Gooch calls the “moral awkwardness” of surrogacy by focusing on the undeniable rightness of the children who result from it, encouraged by the experience of friends who had already been through the process: “Paul excised those doubts decisively on the afternoon we left the playground where my friend’s son was playing. ‘If you look at him, you could never think that this was anything but right,’ he said, truly articulating the nub.”In a way, the entire book is devoted to articulating the doubt-defying truth of the rightness of children, especially his own. Gooch’s sons, Walter and Glenn, are lovingly evoked, a study in contrasts as siblings inevitably are, Walter suffused with the meditative spirituality of Rumi (about whom Brad was writing when he arrived) and Glenn with the lively spirit of Keith Haring (Gooch dedicated his biography of Haring to him). Gooch revels in the gentle gifts of being the quieter, older, “indoor” parent—the father mostly likely to read with his sons or console them in the wake of bad dreams. Meanwhile Paul is the comparatively youthfully exuberant “outdoor” parent, swinging his sons up on his shoulders or challenging them to a game of paddle tennis. Both fathers are doting and devoted. When Walter asks Gooch, “What is the biggest thing that happened to you in your life?” the answer is obvious: “Having you kids.”Osmundson brings soup to a friend who has just given birth, and reflects, “Everyone belonged to everyone.… There are many ways to have a child together.” At times, some of the privileged parenting problems in the book are hard to empathize with—for example when Gooch writes about the stresses that come with having two full-time nannies—and I wish that the women who carried and helped to raise the boys were depicted more fully. But overall I was enthralled by the literary snapshot of “Papa Paul, Walter, Glenn, Dad Brad.” Gooch’s ode to his family is irresistibly bright.Happiness is satisfying but can be narratively flat. Good Morning Moon avoids this problem with an unexpected swerve: Like countless twenty-first-century Americans, Gooch takes a DNA test and discovers that his family of origin is not what he thought it was. His discovery has implications beyond the personal, reminding us that even the most hyper-conventional, heteronormative families are far from straightforward. As Stephanie Coontz argued in The Way We Never Were, the much-revered and reviled 1950s-style “traditional family” barely if ever existed. Perhaps every family is nontraditional in its own way.At the end of Spawning Season, Osmundson calls us to think about having children beyond the narrow bounds of the nuclear family. He brings soup to a friend who has just given birth, then sits with her and her partner and their baby and reflects, “Everyone belonged to everyone.… There are many ways to have a child together.” His vision reminded me of the ubiquitous James Baldwin quote that “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” Baldwin, the eldest child of nine, who carried his baby siblings on his hip, wrote a book for his nephew, and advocated for millions of children he never met, lived out this principle. I’m not sure what my future holds, but especially in this celebratory season of Father’s Day and Pride, this is the version of family I’m holding close.
For years, the conservative partisan playbook to win working-class votes was to ignore economic inequality and demagogue the culture war. The journalist Thomas Frank published a bestselling book about this in 2004. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas.“Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.”It may be aging now. Public approval of labor unions, which bottomed out during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 at 48 percent, has been rising ever since, according to Gallup, and lately it’s around 70 percent, which is higher than at any time since the salad days of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Although support stands highest (90 percent) among registered Democrats, in 2022 a 56 percent majority of Republicans also approved of unions. That’s fallen since to 41 percent, but it’s still a significant minority for a party that for nearly four decades included right-to-work boilerplate in every quadrennial platform. It took a few years, but a significant minority of congressional Republicans is now beginning to catch up to GOP voters. The 2024 Republican Party platform was the first since 1980 not to include a right-to-work plank, and, as I noted last week (“How to Get a Labor Rights Bill Through a GOP House”), two labor rights bills successfully bypassed Republican Speaker Mike Johnson in recent months via discharge petition and passed with support from 20 Republicans. Meanwhile, Democrats are fielding, to challenge red-state Republicans, candidates who appeal to the working-class voters they long neglected. Even the problematic oyster farmer Graham Platner has a good shot at unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine.Given that the culture war no longer serves to distract voters reliably from labor rights, the new conservative strategy is to redefine labor rights as culture war. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial (“A GOP Gift to the Cultural Left”) that’s a sort of trial balloon.The editorial addressed House passage of the second labor rights bill to sneak past Speaker Johnson, the Faster Labor Contracts Act (text; summary), which time-limits management dithering after a union election. I fully expected the Journal edit page’s usual tirade about greedy union bosses extinguishing capitalism’s animal spirits. That was the gist of the Journal’s previous editorial about the bill in May, when the discharge petition acquired the necessary 218 signatures. But the thrust of the new editorial was quite different. Unions, it said, only seem like they’re about improving your working conditions; really, they’re just a front for sex-changers and baby-killers. “We wonder if Republicans know what they’ve voted for,” opined the Journal. “Unions, allied with Democrats, have long supported a progressive agenda that includes collective bargaining for abortion coverage and transgender healthcare.” Those 20 Republicans who voted for the Fair Labor Contracts Act, the Journal said, are “selling out their constituents to the progressive left.” The Journal’s Exhibit A was an “Abortion Model Collective Bargaining Agreement Language” recommended by the AFL-CIO. This document does indeed propose “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services, including contraceptives, abortion services (procedural and pharmaceutical) and gender-affirming care.” But the AFL-CIO is not a labor union—it’s a federation of labor unions that plays no role in negotiating union contracts. That’s typically the work of a union local. “Unions are democratic institutions,” Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO explained to me, with officials at all levels elected by members and conventions. “They take positions accordingly, based on where the members are.” If a contract includes health coverage for gender-affirming care or mifepristone, that’s because members want these things. Any member of Congress who actively opposes such language is interfering with the terms of a private contract, which is something conservatives are supposed to hate.The Journal editorial didn’t identify any union members who object to their health plan covering abortion and gender reassignment. (My guess is such people are hard to find.) Instead, the Journal complained that “many businesses have objected to those provisions on religious grounds.” Oh, please. If I may be permitted a conservative complaint: I never even imagined I’d hear such an argument before 2014, when the Supreme Court decided, outrageously, that businesses enjoy the same First Amendment right to religious freedom as individuals. Bring back the good old days when they didn’t! Fourteen years after that high court ruling, I’ve still never seen a corporation take communion or read from the Torah.The culture-war argument is being test-driven not only by the Journal editorial page but also, according to Gabrielle M. Etzel of the Washington Examiner, by Thomas Beck of the union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson. “It’s going to be easy for the arbitrator to say, OK, employer, I’m not going to make you pay the high wages that the union is demanding,” Beck told Etzel, “but what I am going to make you do is … make you give generous health benefits and give very generous access to abortion on demand and give very, very generous access to so-called gender-affirming care.” But in truth, that will be easy for the arbitrator to say only if the union local, which is accountable to rank-and-file workers, truly does care more about abortion and gender-affirming coverage than about a wage hike. The arbitrator has no reason to prefer one over the other. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who introduced the Senate version of the Faster Labor Contracts Act, was confronted by the Examiner with Beck’s and the Journal’s moronic argument. Rather than present any of the logical arguments I make here, Hawley, who is a social conservative, accepted a culture-war framing but performed a sort of jujitsu, identifying the woke enemy to be not unions but corporations. Or rather, his spokesman did. “Giant corporations are desperate to kill legislation that would help American workers,” the spokesman said, “while they invest billions in DEI insanity.… Senator Hawley is fighting for the American worker, rather than the same Big Business who stands with the radical left to push woke, transgender ideology.” But Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and therefore will decide the fate of Hawley’s bill, sides with Beck and the Journal. In reality, I’d guess Cassidy opposes the bill not because it gives aid and comfort to the trans and abortion lobbies but, more straightforwardly, because Cassidy is anti-labor, with a lifetime AFL-CIO score of 13 percent. (Hawley’s, it should be noted, is only two percentage points higher, so don’t call him a working-class hero just yet.) But rather than tell the Examiner, “Look, I don’t want to give organized labor more power,” Cassidy said piously: “I’m all for finding solutions to strengthen workers’ rights and make collective bargaining more efficient, but a policy forcing Louisiana workers and small businesses to potentially fund abortions and sex-change operations is not the answer.”So that’s one Republican legislator willing to embrace the new dogma. Then again, Cassidy, an actual physician, allowed himself to be conned by Robert Kennedy Jr., when the health and human services secretary promised at his confirmation hearing to leave vaccines alone. And anyway, Cassidy will be gone from the place in six months. It remains to be seen whether anybody else will recite this new catechism.
Four years on from the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, we are still making sense of that loss. Amy Littlefield, the abortion rights correspondent at The Nation, has for more than a decade reported on the people and players responsible. In her new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, Littlefield traces how they did it and who their accomplices were along the way. “Studying their playbook showed me they hadn’t done anything special,” she writes of anti-abortion movement figures. As it turns out, there was no unique genius behind the long campaign to end abortion rights but rather a strange, shifting constellation of power players and little-known true believers. What distinguishes Roe’s killers is their willingness to go all in on ideas far outside even their own side’s mainstream, as Littlefield argues, and their skill in exploiting their foes’ vulnerabilities.Littlefield and I spoke in May about how Roe became so vulnerable in the first place, what we can learn from its demise, and the cost of people accepting, as Littlefield told me, “that there’s one set of rights for folks who are low income, for people of color, for folks who are on the margins, and then there’s another set of laws and policies for the rest of us.”Melissa Gira Grant: There are still people who think that it’s completely shocking that we lost Roe. What do you think led people to feel as if Dobbs came out of nowhere, when in fact we had been losing Roe for decades?Amy Littlefield: What most stood in the way of people’s ability to recognize the incremental death of abortion rights—and the fact that Roe v. Wade itself was going to fall—is a lack of awareness within mainstream media, and also mainstream progressive and pro-choice organizations, of just how profoundly race and class and geography shaped people’s lives, including their ability to access an abortion.The Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, and in a way, a huge part of the fight was over right then, because this meant that low-income people for the most part were going to have to fundraise hundreds if not thousands of dollars out of pocket for an abortion. The fact that an estimated more than one million people have been unable to do so and have given birth as a result should be at the center of our abortion politics. Roe v. Wade was extremely meaningful for people who had access to wealth and privilege, more than it was for people who were poor, or who were Black, or who lived many hundreds of miles from the nearest abortion clinic and couldn’t get there.Melissa: It also seems like very quickly after Roe there was a desire to claim that victory, and to not push further. You mention the incoming NARAL executive director in 1975 being told “the job would be a cinch,” that “it didn’t seem like it would have too much left to do.”Amy: What could possibly happen next? (laughs)NARAL started out as an effort to repeal anti-abortion laws in the states. There was this initial sense that the job should be a cinch now because we have Roe v. Wade and that the fight was over. I think that sense faded very quickly because of the Hyde Amendment. I do think that there was immediately this sort of complacency. But I think pretty quickly after that it became clear, “Oh, Roe v. Wade is under attack, and the opposition is better organized.”Melissa: You also write that at that time, some people regarded issues of abortion funding as obscure or complicated, compared to whether abortion was legal. It looked like they were then choosing to shift focus toward threats they assumed more people would care about, like a national ban. Do you think some people benefited from that simpler story? Amy: One of the most fascinating interviews I did for the book was with a man named Roger Craver—I call him the father of the nonprofit industrial complex. He’s the guy who helped nonprofits figure out how to raise money from small donors. His equivalent on the right, who he managed to have a friendly relationship with, was Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail mastermind of the conservative movement. The two of them were doing same thing. Fifty-odd years ago—that was like the hot new controversial technology. What I really took away from Craver is that you do need a pretty simple, straightforward, but compelling story that has a very clear enemy. And when the devil is winning—in his terms—and you can point to something like the threat of a nationwide constitutional ban on abortion that’s looming, then you generate a sense of urgency that will lead people to sit down at their kitchen table after a long day of work and write a check. Another thing that I learned from him is that people’s attention spans are pretty limited. We think of this as being a function of our era, but it was maybe always the case: that the story needed to be changing. You couldn’t just be like, “Poor people lost their right to access an abortion when the Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, and now, they still don’t have it.” You had to constantly convince people that there was this urgency. I hadn’t really understood the degree to which the story that is written by nonprofits when they are trying to raise money determines the way that their donors—who are their most supportive base, the people who are writing checks to NARAL and Planned Parenthood—those folks learn the story of what’s important in part through these mailings, through the stories told to them by the folks who are trying to get them to donate. So there is this simplification of the story, and this way in which incremental, more subtle changes, and the changes that affect low-income people, Black people, people who are not the donor class, get obscured as part of that process. Melissa: Do you think that that dynamic is still with us—the competing demands, the fact that you need to reach people with a simple story? And are we repeating a story that didn’t work? Amy: My fear around storytelling, and one of the themes of the book, is: Why aren’t stories enough? Why aren’t the stories of women like Rosie Jimenez and Becky Bell and Portia Ngumezi, who have died from abortion bans in their respective eras, from the ’70s to the ’80s to today, why are their deaths not enough? Why is it not enough when we know that a 4-year-old girl in McAllen, Texas, lost her mom, Rosie Jimenez, to the Hyde Amendment? Why is it not enough that we know that Porsha Ngumezi’s son chases after women who look like her on the street, shouting out to Mommy, because she died when she didn’t get care in time for a miscarriage in Texas? Why, why are those stories not enough to change the outcome of our elections? Part of what I’ve been grappling with in our current moment is that I don’t think stories are enough if you haven’t built the organizing infrastructure that it takes to change the political landscape, to repeal these policies, to mobilize the very real outrage and sadness that many people feel when they hear those stories into a channel that will actually create political change. That requires massive amounts of grassroots organizing and mobilization. It doesn’t just require a text message being sent to your phone with someone’s story and then you make a donation and then it’s over. One of the enduring legacies of the Hyde Amendment that I really wanted to highlight in the book is that it directed a lot of the energy of the most radical, intersectionally minded activists in the abortion rights space into mutual aid work. Because it took an enormous amount of energy to raise the tens of millions of dollars, in recent years, that it takes to actually pay for people’s abortions, and to pay for the practical support they need in order to get that care. Meanwhile, I think the organizations that were more geared toward political organizing—chiefly, Planned Parenthood was very focused on providing health care. It’s a health care safety net provider. But I think we can see in retrospect that having an organization that is reliant on federal funding to provide those non-abortion health care services that are lifesaving to millions, and so they couldn’t risk losing them, having that organization steer the political direction of the movement was a mistake. There was a reliance on the courts to protect a right that had been given through the courts. The larger white-led groups within the abortion rights space had trusted, for almost 50 years, that the Supreme Court was going to protect the legal right it had bestowed in 1973. And I think there was an inability to absorb the possibility that that backstop was finally going to fail. Melissa: It makes me think of something you mentioned early on in the book, the millions of dollars that are fundraised for people’s abortions—what if the folks doing that work had been able to do something different, and what if those resources had been able to be marshaled in a different way? Amy: Exactly. What if they’d been running for city council? Or whatever! There’s such a tremendous amount of energy that went into getting people the abortions they needed—from the people who worked in clinics, from people who worked in fundraising, people whose work is basically invisible. And when they succeed, what happens is the crisis is ameliorated somewhat. There are fewer people being forced to carry pregnancies to term, even now in the post-Dobbs moment, precisely because we have these brave clinicians operating under shield laws and mailing medication abortion to states like Texas, because we have abortion funds that are still raising millions of dollars to help people who still need to travel. I think it also makes it harder to do what Roger Craver and his contemporaries were trying to do, which is to tell people, “There’s an emergency, the devil’s winning, we have to get out there,” because the number of abortions is up, because a lot of the energy of the movement has been directed into providing the abortions and paying for the abortions. Melissa: There are so many characters in the book—like Craver, like Viguerie—that aren’t the bold-faced names that people have heard of. What drew you to these particular players?Amy: I loved finding these people, precisely because I had never heard of them even though I’ve been reporting on abortion for many years. I want to believe in a version of history where crucial events are driven by folks who are not famous, who are behind the scenes. Their motives were really different from the motives that were on the minds of the presidents and the political figures. These were folks who were the keepers of the flame, right? They truly believed that they were doing God’s work. Some of them believed God was speaking to them directly. They believed that they were going to earn their place in heaven for the work that they were doing chipping away at abortion access. That taught me a lot about the relationship between the true believers that power social movements and that come up with long-shot ideas, and how they drive our politics in ways that are less visible. It’s only through dogged organizing that long-shot ideas become thinkable, right? And we can see that on the right and the left. That’s why one of my favorite stories is the story of All* Above All, the initially long-shot campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment and how it changed the way that we talk about that policy today, and made this unthinkable idea that we would ever try to repeal this policy that by then was so taken for granted, even by Democrats. They forced a lot of Democrats to change the way that they talked about that policy. They didn’t repeal it, because those changes don’t happen overnight. But they did have some incremental wins at the state and local level. I hope people take away from this an understanding of how the smaller players, the true believers, the behind-the-scenes figures played a role in the death of Roe v. Wade; that it wasn’t just Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society working with the Alliance Defending Freedom to bring the perfect case to the perfect Supreme Court justices; that it was much more incremental than that, that a lot of the fight was in state legislatures and city councils and at the local level. And I think a big part of how the anti-abortion movement won was by building power in the states that progressives did not have.
What if you had the chance to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby—would you take it? For The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, the famous thought experiment offered the starting point for his debut novel, Killing Baby Hitler, an eccentric journey through history, counter-histories, and a dark future that bears an unsettling resemblance to our present. In the world of the book, the climate has dramatically worsened; humans rely on (and sometimes have sex with) robot companions called filos; and in place of the countries we know today are spheres ruled by billionaires (Trump One, for instance, or Thiel Two). A pair of scientists time-travel to 1889 Austria to find the baby who would grow up to perpetrate the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century. Their mission sets in motion an alternate past whose various likenesses and unlikenesses to what really happened underpin an abundance of jokes, allusions, and unnerving comparisons. In this conversation with Tomasky, three colleagues—Emily Cooke, Kirsten Denker, and Alex Shephard—explore his research process, his influences, and his reaction to some of the book’s most prescient elements.Alex Shephard: I’ve always wanted to say that our guest needs no introduction, but I have never been able to do so, because it has never been true. But now it is. Our guest is Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Michael has written a funny, biting new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, that is more or less about just that, although it is a little more complicated. Set in a dystopian 2141, the world in the future looks a lot like ours, just worse; divided into spheres of political influence and ravaged by climate change. A group of scientists discover time travel, and they go back to late nineteenth-century Austria to try to set their worlds right by killing baby Hitler. What follows is a sharp and sometimes scathing satire, and a novel that hopscotches between genres— speculative sci-fi, thriller. It’s also just a fun and funny novel. I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Cooke and Kirsten Denker, and also Michael Tomasky. Welcome.Michael Tomasky: Hey, that was great, thanks.Alex: I was wondering if we can start just by talking about the genesis for the novel itself. When did you get this idea, and when did you start to work through it? Michael: I seem to remember that I got the idea in late 2022 and I don’t remember exactly how. It just popped into my head one morning, I think, while I was exercising. The question obviously isn’t original to me. I did go and immediately Google to see if anybody had written a book about it. I didn’t turn up who anyone had, although I have subsequently been told that none other than Stephen Fry wrote a novel that was built around this idea back in 1996. I looked it up: It’s true, Michiko Kakutani absolutely savaged it in The New York Times. I haven’t even bothered to read it, because I’m just going to live with the idea that mine might actually be funnier than Stephen Fry’s. So anyway, I had the idea late 2022; it was my New Year’s resolution to sit down on New Year’s Day and just start writing and see what came out and see what happened. I was immediately confronted by the reality, which I hadn’t thought of, I admit, that if I’m going to write a novel about time travel, it probably needs to be set in the future when time travel might theoretically be plausible. So I just kind of picked 2141 randomly out of the air, and that’s when it’s set.Then I realized I have to build this world of 2141. You referenced how dystopian it is, although the idea, for example, that men like Peter Thiel or his heirs literally own countries, which is the case in my novel—that seemed a lot more far-fetched in early 2023, when I was writing that bit, than it seems now. So anyway, I created this world of 2141, and then the characters travel back to 1889 Austria, or at least two of them do, so I had to create that world. I actually did a lot of reading and research about that world. It’s a novel, so I make a lot of stuff up, but a lot of it is grounded in reality, too. Then of course there’s the question of whether they succeed and so on, but we’re not going to give that away.Emily Cooke: I’m curious—it’s essentially a comic novel. I found it really funny, but of course it describes all these very disturbing developments, not least the division of the world into these horrifying spheres owned by the mega-rich. Of course, it’s fiction, and also tonally it’s quite different from the sort of thing that you’re doing every day as the editor of this magazine and as a writer. I was wondering, was that difference part of the motivation to write it? Did you want a relief from the work that you normally do, or was there some way that engaging with this different form that performed that function for you? Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. In some ways it was a release from what I do, and from thinking about Donald Trump for 14 hours a day, and it was fun. I wrote it in this chair where I’m sitting, and I would come down here on Saturday morning at 7 o’clock before other people in my house were awake and start pounding it out, and I had a lot of fun writing it and letting my imagination run in that way. At the same time, it wasn’t that different from the work I and we do at TNR. It’s still a pretty political novel, as we’ve already established, and it deals in a lot of the stuff that we all have to think about, the way the world is turning very dark on us very fast. I wrote an exaggerated version of that, and it was fun to write, but it’s also sort of frightening to think about the fact that the world that I conjure up in 2141 (and there’s another section that’s in the 2060s) is also really bad. My own daughter will still be alive then, presumably, so it was kind of unsettling in some ways too. Kirsten Denker: You were saying how between your writing it and it being published, some things are actually seemingly a little bit less absurd than they were when you wrote them. I copyedited this book, but I also gave it another little read to sort of refresh my mind on the details before this session, and the thing that jumped out at me was this moment where you wrote about the Republicans’ decision to raze the Lincoln Memorial and build the Nathan Bedford Forrest mixed martial arts arena, and I think when I copyedited it just in October, that was a funny joke. Now it’s not so funny, actually. It’s a little like, Gosh, we’re living this now. Were you expecting that when you wrote it? Michael: Not in the least, Kirsten, and that’s pretty on the nose, all right. I’m kind of proud of having come up with that. Based on where it is in the book, I must have written that in the first half of 2023. This is describing an American Republican Party in the late 2040s. Nathan Bedford Forrest, of course, was a Confederate general, so they tear down the Lincoln Memorial, they decide to build something that they name after a Confederate general, and it’s a mixed martial arts arena. Of course at that point I had no idea that Donald Trump was going to be president again, let alone have the kind of celebration that he had the weekend of his birthday and building an MMA octagon on the White House grounds. So yeah, I nailed that one. Alex: I gotta say, he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t want to shift gears too much away from the politics, but there are a lot of funny cultural references. One of the things that stood out to me is you have a riff about the Beatles not existing in the post-world. I was wondering how you came across those. Were there just things that your own personal cultural interests would make you say, Would Paul McCartney exist in this alternate version of the 1960s? How did you come up with them? Michael: That was one of the most fun things about the book. I’ll give this much away. The people who go back to kill the infant Hitler botch the job and don’t succeed. However, he does not become the Adolf Hitler we all came to know and hate in history. His life takes a very different course, and he indeed becomes somebody else, so there being no Hitler, history changes a lot, and so I have some sections toward the end of the novel that talk about those changes, and that was probably the most fun part of it to write. I don’t want to give away too much of what happens and doesn’t happen, but there is no World War II, there is no Holocaust. Interestingly, in Stephen Fry’s novel, the Nazi Party found somebody who was even more diabolical and powerful and intoxicating than Hitler, so it became worse. In my version, the Hitler-less Nazi party is nothing, and Joseph Goebbels is a history professor and a writer of novels—he did, in fact, write novels in his life—and Goering ran a flying circus—he was still a World War I hero, as he was in real life, he’s still a World War I hero in the non-Hitler reality—but never became a Nazi. The Nazi Party existed but was a minor thing. So I had a lot of fun with stuff like that, and then, to get the Beatles in this reality, John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t meet on the fateful day, they met in July of 1957, they both separately formed bands. They met later as competing leaders of two local Liverpool bands, and they hated each other because they sensed prodigious talent in each other. So the Beatles never happened, and that had reverberations for Bob Dylan and for the rest of the culture, and it was just a ton of fun to write that stuff.Kirsten: I especially like the bit about—was it Paul McCartney’s brother being in the loo too long?Michael: Yeah, those kinds of details were just really fun to write. I’ll just add that there was a President Roosevelt in this non-Hitler reality, but he was a two-term president. Another American political figure becomes the dominant figure of the mid-twentieth century, and he was, in real life, in our reality, a senator, but somebody that very few people today have even heard of. I had fun with that too. Kirsten: I feel as though you had fun throwing in a lot of cultural references that are just your favorite things, like there’s a Casablanca moment.Michael: It’s just sort of unapologetically stuff that I like and I’m interested in and things like that, but there are also a number of jokes in there for people who know their history. You don’t even have to know that much history, you just have to know the basics of twentieth-century European history to get these jokes. There’s a point when my two time travelers encounter a police officer in 1889 Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they finish their conversation, and one of my two protagonists stops and turns around and says, I want you to remember a name, and the officer says yes, and he goes, The name is Princip, Gavrilo Princip, and if you’re still wearing that badge in 1914 you want to find an excuse to arrest him. I thought that was really funny, and I drop all kinds of things like that in there. Emily: In the profusion of references like these, but also for a lot of other things—the sprawling cast, the the madcap jaunts through history—I thought of Thomas Pynchon; Alex mentioned H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut. Would you think of the book as being in conversation with particular writers? Who are your influences? Michael: Those are apt, and I’m obviously quite flattered by them. H.G. Wells, for obvious reasons, is a point of comparison. I had a friend who said it’s very Pynchonesque in the way that it brings in all these different things. Alex: The name Darius Shrike is also very Pynchonesque.Michael: Yeah, I guess it is. Well, that’s cool. I’m glad to hear that. But yeah, the thing I’ve heard most often is Vonnegut. Kurt Andersen gave me a nice blurb, and he compared it to Vonnegut, and I have a friend who says he’s a big Vonnegut fan and told me that Killing Baby Hitler is as good as any Vonnegut, which I’ll take from him. That’s obviously really flattering. I read Vonnegut in high school and college, but it’s literally been that long, which is decades. I should go back and read Breakfast of Champions or something and see. I read three or four of his novels in those days, loved them. Was I conscious of Vonnegut while I was writing this? Not very. I thought it was kind of Vonnegutesque, but it’s been so long since I’ve read him that I really didn’t know. Alex: You mentioned reading Vonnegut in high school, and it also made me think that one of the things that jumped out to the book as well is that there are various personal moments, or not-quite-autobiographical ones. Like the sections in Morgantown, West Virginia, where you grew up, are very lovingly written. I was wondering if that was something that was conscious, were you just looking for settings that you were familiar with, or are there other bits of Tomasky autobiography sprinkled throughout for those who know? Michael: I think that’s the only bit that’s autobiographical. They say write what you know, and 90 percent of this novel is not that—I’m not German, I’ve never been to Munich, I wasn’t alive in 1889. I think I do a pretty serviceable job of evoking the smells and sounds of the nineteenth century, which are a lot grosser than you think, but obviously I wasn’t there, so I decided to, for those few pages, write what I know and put in something about a place that I know. Another protagonist is from Pittsburgh, which is just up the road from where I’m from. I’ve been to Pittsburgh a lot and I know Pittsburgh pretty well, but the rest of it is imagination. There are a lot of great novels where people write what they know, but I’m always a little bit more impressed as a reader when people write what they don’t know. It feels more adventurous to me. Alex: You mentioned the research. I was wondering what that was like, actually. I understood a lot of the World War II references, but then I was like, Oh, you’re not writing World War II. You’re writing nineteenth-century Austria, a place about which I know nothing. So what did you go through to flesh that out? Michael: Some Hitler biographies that talked about his youth and his upbringing, some books about the Habsburg Empire, and little specific things. There’s one thing in there involving a female character, Ulrike, who turns out to be an extremely important character in the book. When she’s introduced to readers, she’s sitting in a tavern reading a short tract by Nietzsche about Wagner. The casual reader of that paragraph could think I just made that all up, but I actually researched that. I was thrilled to find out that this pamphlet or short book that Nietzsche wrote was indeed published, I think, two years before the action in my novel is set. It’s entirely probable that this intellectual, bohemian, lefty young woman would be reading this book, in which Nietzsche denounces and announces his break from Wagner. It was indeed written just a year before Nietzsche went mad, so all that stuff’s true. I researched that, and I even read this book, which was really passionate and fascinating. I didn’t need to just to write this paragraph, but it was great. Kirsten: You’ve created a world that’s dystopian, that is extremely dark at times, and I was struck by your tone as a writer. You have a fluid tone, and you’re able to say things in a very casual way that are actually horrific. A lot of this world you describe, it’s described in a very offhand way. I particularly noticed that when you’re weaving climate change into this dystopia you’ve imagined, it really figures in a large way, in terms of shaping how society works, and in its effects on characters. At one point you make a joke in the Jaipur section about a well-loved cricketer who’s struck down by heat stroke and dies in the middle of a speech or something. It’s a funny line, but it’s also dark, and it reflects the reality we’re all staring down the barrel of: the way we’ve had to accept discussing these things in a very quotidian way. This is now the reality we have to tell our kids about. That’s all normal. How would you say that your awareness of climate change and maybe even the coverage we do at The New Republic has fed into this? Michael: I think we—led by Kate Aronoff, but a whole lot of other people too—do a really first-rate job on that topic, and I read our stuff, and I think about it, and it just struck me. I said, Well, if I’m creating a future world, I can’t ignore this, and it’s probably likely to be pretty bad, so let’s not sugarcoat it. But you’re right, I do try to present heavy things in a jokey way, just for the sake of the tone that I’m going for. I also try to do it not in terms of big pronouncements, but just little examples that make a reader go oh Christ. There’s one point where I say that alligators have migrated as far north as southern Illinois and grown to 30 feet. That’s like, Whoa, and another way of saying climate change has really had a massive impact on the world.Emily: There are so many ways that the book is so prescient, but one of them is in these robot companions that many of the characters have. Again, when you were writing this, people were not keeping AI girlfriends and boyfriends, as far as I know, but what do you make of how well you envisioned what was about to soon happen? Michael: I don’t know. I guess by the time 2141 actually rolls around—if it rolls around—things will be a lot freakier than I managed to portray in this novel, because it sounds like it’s all coming faster. One thing I ducked is this question of AI and how many people would be out of work. I did have one passage in there that said only about 30 percent—I forget the number, but only about 30 percent of the people had jobs anymore. But yeah, the robot assistants that people have—I don’t know, I was just trying to think of something science fiction-y, and I was thinking also in cinematic terms, and I could picture a person’s personal assistant—the word I came up with is filo. I don’t even remember why, but there’s some Greek root there that I forget, and you could picture people’s filos materializing and dematerializing and answering their questions, and being at their beck and call, and even in the case of at least one having intercourse with them. Alex: There’s another similar element as well, with one of the things is very prescient in the book: its conception of a far right that is globalized, which was a trend when you were starting to work on it; but especially as we’re talking this week, it’s like, Elon Musk encourages what are essentially pogroms in Belfast and in parts of the U.K. It’s one of the parts of the book that scared me the most. As I say this, also, it’s 99 degrees in New York, so climate change would be one of those things as well, but that was something that I was wondering—if this was a means for you to think through some of the ways that you’re thinking about politics right now. Michael: There’s a section—it’s not that long, maybe 12 pages or so—that discusses the breakup of the United States over the course of the mid-twenty-first century, and that’s something I’ve kind of thought a lot about. It seems to me like there’s decent odds that that’s going to happen. I’ve thought about how it might happen, and on what timetable, and what compromises people might have to make. To make a long story short, it doesn’t happen the way it happened in the 1860s, by these states going here and those states going there. It’s not geographically that simple in 2060 as it was in 1860. I’d like people to read it to see the details. The things that I describe the Republican Party of that period coming up with are pretty extreme, but also pretty plausible, and I’d also point out—in case any conservatives are actually watching this—that I don’t hold the left entirely blameless in what happens. There’s some, there’s some liberal shortsightedness in this story as well. Emily: Well, we have a final question for you, a very important final question: Michael, would you kill baby Hitler? Michael: I might do what my character did and chicken out, but I would certainly find a way to get him out of Braunau am Inn, which was his little hometown in Austria, right along the German border, and lead him to a to a different and better life. I just—I’m not sure I could. I thought about this a lot while I was writing it, and I might ask the three of you. I’m not sure I could kill an infant, even if I knew it was that infant.Alex: I would do it.Kirsten: You have a joke at one point about babies, which did make me laugh, where I think Harry’s trying to decide whether he wants to be involved in bringing up baby Hitler, and he says, I don’t think I want to. Not because it’s Hitler, but just because it’s a baby. Anyone who’s brought up babies can understand that. Alex: Well, thanks very much. Michael: Yeah. I’m really grateful to all of you. Not just for this—everyone should know that I asked a handful of friends and colleagues to read this in advance to see if there was anything that struck them as weird and that I needed to be careful about, and I’m grateful to all three for doing this, and Kirsten copyedited it into the bargain, and knows German, which really came in handy here. So thank you all a whole lot.
If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.”These developments graphically illustrate the future that Musk truly envisions. They also demonstrate that Musk will use his stratospheric wealth and influence to incite untold levels of global fascist violence going forward. Which leads to an unavoidable conclusion: At some point, friends of liberal democracy throughout the advanced democracies—including future liberal governments—will simply have to come together in a concerted and deliberate way to constrain Musk and all he’s unleashing. Whenever Democrats take back power in the United States, this must be squarely on the agenda.In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war. Last fall, he compared nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. to orcs—the dangerous, inhuman monsters from Lord of the Rings—and enthusiastically endorsed a tweet claiming: “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered.” As Musk has watched the anti-immigrant far right grow in the U.K., he has gravitated toward extreme versions of “great replacement theory,” ones that posit a far-reaching plot to violently eliminate whites or breed them out of existence entirely.A coming-out moment for Musk came last September, when he spoke via video link to a “Unite the Kingdom” rally—a gathering of far-right and anti-immigrant groups organized by Tommy Robinson, a British white nationalist with a long history of thuggery. Musk promoted the event on X. He addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 people, warning of the dangers of multiculturalism and “uncontrolled migration.”“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,” Musk warned. “You either fight back, or you die.”In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.Musk zealously adapted this to the U.K. context. In one case he suggested that “the gentlefolk of the English shires”—that is, the descendants of the imagined, unsullied Anglo-Saxon island existence mythologized by white nationalists everywhere—will be “brutally murdered” if the “tide of illegal immigration is not turned.”With the Belfast stabbing, Musk hit paydirt. After a Sudanese man who’d legally sought asylum brutally mauled a white man, video of the attack rapidly circulated online, amplified by Musk. The perpetrator was swiftly arrested and charged, but that didn’t stop loud demands for “justice,” which actually meant collective retribution against all nonwhite and foreign-born residents. Rioters clashed with police and threw bricks. Hooded masked men roamed in large gangs, setting up roadblocks to check cars for immigrants. The Police Federation of Northern Ireland, hardly an overly woke institution, explicitly described the rioters as “fascist.”Even as his trillion-dollar payday came together, Musk promoted a pamphlet calling for action against this supposed “invader attack on our people.” He amplified far-right politicians demanding retribution against “third world savages.” He posted a reminder of his September exhortation that “you either fight back, or you die.”These were violent, fascist ethnic purges—or pogroms. As an Indian man who’s lived in the U.K. for 25 years told the BBC: “It was horrible. It was like a war zone. Everything was burning.” The man added: “I pay my taxes. I am British.” Yet he’s preparing to leave: Across Belfast, others are finding themselves forced to make similar decisions.It’s instructive that amid the violence, Musk endorsed a call for “Reconquista,” an allusion to Christian military campaigns to retake the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. (Modern-day keyboard fascists have long rather pathetically imagined themselves to be akin to Charles Martel, who turned back the Muslims at Tours in 732.) And Musk boosted a call for the removal of millions from the U.K.The turmoil has now subsided, and soon after, thousands demonstrated in Belfast against the pogroms. But nonetheless, Musk’s influence on events there must be reckoned with. While what transpired is not all about Musk—political violence in the region has deep roots, and many homegrown demagogues in the U.K. have demonized immigrants there—the riots demonstrated a real-world manifestation of the racial apocalypse Musk wants and may increasingly be in a position to summon into being.By endorsing Reconquista, Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right and, increasingly, the American right, as well: “remigration.” This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!”In other words, nonwhite immigrants are by definition invaders who threaten “Western civilization” wherever they infiltrate, from New Zealand to Belfast to Minneapolis, where Musk called for a military crackdown on pro-immigrant protesters. True, Musk employs high-skilled immigrant tech workers and has defended the need for them. But this does not constitute a general tolerance of immigration or a desire to see immigrants integrate at scale within the embattled outposts of Western civilization. Indeed, in some respects, Musk’s vision is a classically fascist one: He appears to believe that race and culture are inseparable. Fascism is a set of interconnected values and yearnings that center the state, the nation, violence, masculinity, and the rebirth of a mythic, heroic past. It’s an ideology of palingenetic ultranationalism: Though the nation is a broadly contested concept, to the fascist, the nation is defined, in an almost transcendent spiritual sense, by culture and race. These are inexorably linked: Only certain races are capable of producing certain cultures.Thus it is that Musk is also obsessed with white fertility—he has done his part to save civilization by siring over a dozen children by multiple women. There is no doubt that this is deeply entangled with his belief that nonwhite immigration threatens the West. One of the greatest challenges in combating fascism, both in the early-to-mid-twentieth century and today, is getting comfortable, middle-class, politically moderate people to understand that its adherents actually mean what they are saying. Musk’s favorite politician in Britain—Rupert Lowe of the far-right Restore Britain Party—has called for the deportation of almost every immigrant in the U.K., which Musk too has endorsed.*Such large-scale mass expulsions of legal residents are rare. The closest modern analogue is Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population. The famously insane tyrant forced out 80,000 legal residents in the 1970s. Britain has a foreign-born population of around 13 million. So if we take Musk’s calls for remigration at his word, he’s envisaging an act of ethnic cleansing over 100 times as large. He apparently hopes to see this in all majority-white countries with large immigrant populations. There is nothing in the modern era that compares.In their great book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff take an exhaustive look at just about everything Musk has said on these and other topics. As they observe, we know Musk’s preoccupation with declining birth rates is linked to his embrace of remigration because he’s far more preoccupied with declining birth rates in some parts of the world than others. As Slobodian and Tarnoff conclude: “Musk’s demographic panic is bound up with his concern for the survival of white civilization.”Here’s the idea, put simply: Nonwhite immigration and reproduction threaten “white civilization.” By definition, that threatens the survival of Western civilization (remember, to the fascist, race and culture are inseparable). The only hope for humanity’s future is the West, which can only be preserved by halting and reversing declining white birth rates and migration to majority-white nations. In short, saving whitness—via remigration and white reproduction—is essential to saving humanity.What does Musk envision for those who are not privileged inheritors of Western civilization? On the one hand, he sometimes gives voice to the hope—albeit vaguely—that his companies’ breakneck development of AI and robotics will unlock a future of widespread, drudgery-free abundance. He has flirted with progressive ideas like universal basic income to spread the fruits of technological advancement.But it’s difficult to take all that seriously in light of Musk’s emergent fascist politics. Musk—whose contributions to combating global warming are unquestioned—knows what the models show: Under plausible climate scenarios, large additional swaths of the earth will be rendered uninhabitable. That could mean much more human misery and/or dramatically scaled-up mass migrations in the future.Here’s where Musk’s well-known fondness for terms like empathy gene and suicidal empathy enters the chat. As Slobodian and Tarnoff document, Musk’s pronouncements amount to suggesting that “civilization” is committing “suicide” when Western countries allow migration while showing too much “empathy.” Musk insists this constitutes allowing “the Rape of Europe” by nonwhite immigrants. He has absurdly claimed that hordes of thousands are invading “lovely towns” of 500 people throughout the U.K. and “raping the kids.” The idea of nonwhite predation on Aryan women is, of course, a core historical fascist narrative.But the real intent behind Musk’s indictment of “suicidal empathy” appears to be future-focused too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Musk’s imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. “You reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,” Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to “restrict immigration.” In this context, we believe it’s not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated “civilizational suicidal empathy” while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Musk’s robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human “civilization” will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that third-world civilizational dead weight.“Musk’s vision of the world is extremely anti-humanitarian,” Tarnoff tells us. “Empathy enables human beings to relate to one another across differences. And that is very threatening to Musk’s vision.” In Musk’s future, Tarnoff continues, “the vast majority of humanity is expelled from the productive process.” In a sense, Tarnoff says, Musk’s logic is ultimately “eliminationist.”Musk often speaks about his goal to save the “light” of human “consciousness.” It’s a tellingly cold formulation. It doesn’t entail a concern for actual human beings. It just requires preserving the select and their descendants—perhaps through mind merges with digitally superintelligent machines, or behind the walls of vast Muskian compounds guarded by humanoid robots, or on faraway planets.“Whatever happens, we have got the spaceships, and they do not,” Musk posted recently. As chronicled in Muskism, that alludes to a quote from a nineteenth-century colonialist celebrating the machine gun’s power to put down colonial subjects. If the global race war doesn’t accomplish Musk’s objectives, there’s always interplanetary escape—or perhaps the extermination of the brutes left behind on land with the spaceships’ lasers. Those who call themselves inheritors of “Western civilization,” then, are making a coded declaration of privilege: We get to be on the spaceships. The savages do not.Understood this way, it all looks like some supercharged Muskian version of the “reactionary modernism” that John Ganz frequently discusses. Technology will be used to fortify and harden global hierarchies and protect those chosen to carry humanity forward from the disposable hordes. Hypermilitarized borders and violent pogroms will grow even more necessary as human labor is replaced and climate-fueled global suffering produces more desperate migrations. Perhaps the robots—who have no empathy gene—will carry it all out.We don’t mean to oversell Musk’s influence. He’s not unstoppable. He often fails, is thwarted, or just doesn’t follow through. He’s also clearly not the only, or even primary, reason for the global reemergence of fascism. But he wields immense power. Political theorist Stephen Lukes famously divided power into three dimensions: decision-making power (should we do A or B?), agenda-setting power (is it a choice between A and B, or B and C?), and ideological power (how do people perceive and understand A, B, and C?).People who question Musk’s influence note that his decision-making power is limited, as his DOGE fiasco revealed. But Musk has tremendous agenda-setting power. His white-nationalized Twitter—now X—is somewhat diminished by backlash but still helps shape how many journalists in developed countries interpret the world while enabling him to launder fascism for the mainstream. His deep embeddedness within the machinery of Western governments through immensely lucrative contracts in everything from space travel to national security means he has incredible power to derail the projects of modern states.What about ideological power? It is bad, very bad, that a fascist controls an information conduit that still shapes a fair amount of how many politicians and the press understand global events. Ideology is not just how we label ourselves, or what policies we endorse. It’s also how we see the world. Because of Musk, more and more people have in their heads a fascist conception of the nation—that of an inexorable fusion of race and culture, under unrelenting racial siege.Ultimately, Musk is playing a crucial role in the global fascist resurgence. He represents at once one of its loudest megaphones, the organizing space for its paramilitary wings, a fifth column of sorts inside the apparatus of many states, and the movement’s bank.It’s hard to know what dealing with this should look like. Obviously it includes moving to break the power of the oligarchs in a broader sense. This must start with higher taxes on billionaires—and trillionaires. It requires stringent limits on the ability of people like Musk to singlehandedly spend immense sums on our elections, such as the extraordinary $290 million he plowed into the 2024 contest. It should go without saying that breaking the power of the tech oligarchy—Democratic proposals along these lines would rupture tech monopolies, curb market dominance, and empower labor—is also essential, as is far-reaching AI regulation.Another big question is whether liberal democratic governments should remain on Musk’s disinformation platform. “X is now the mechanism through which white nationalist groups have organized violent riots three years in a row,” Ian Dunt, a prominent U.K. commentator, tells us. “There’s no good reason for the British government to remain on X. Its continued presence keeps journalists on the site, allowing Musk to mainstream far-right rhetoric.” A future Democratic administration will have to weigh similar dangers.Then there’s what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a “national security threat,” even as Space X itself is in many ways a “national security asset.” We need to know a lot more about what Musk’s contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government. “Congress has to do rigorous oversight of Musk’s government contracts as well as his entire financial empire,” Finkelstein tells us.Other ideas abound. Brian Beutler has urged the next Democratic administration to closely scrutinize the murky circumstances of Musk’s own immigration to the United States. Beyond such things, we’ll need a coordinated effort across liberal democracies. Appropriately, the targeting of apartheid in Musk’s native South Africa provides a model. We need an international consensus that recognizes the threat Musk poses and works against it with boycotts, with the withdrawal of support and funding, and with whatever creative tools are available. Politicians and publics alike need to think internationally. The world’s richest man is participating in a transnational terror campaign. Ultimately, what’s really needed in response is a new mindset: We are now fighting a global battle against resurgent fascism. The fight is across nations and at every level of society. The response must be international, as well. Any path to a free international order, unthreatened by fascism, must run in part through breaking Musk’s power.* This article originally misidentified Lowe’s party affiliation.
Sources tell Axios that U.S. intelligence agencies seriously doubt Iran will make the concessions on its nuclear program that Donald Trump expects it to once talks on it progress in earnest. The leaks are damning: They badly discredit Trump’s ceasefire with Iran. They also seriously undermine his claims that he prevailed on Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions. Tellingly, the sources also leaked word that JD Vance was a vocal proponent of the deal during internal discussions. This strongly suggests Vance is getting shivved: He’s getting set up to bear the blame if the deal goes south. There’s lots of other evidence of this too: Senator Lindsey Graham is vocally describing Vance as the deal’s “architect.” Graham, an Iran hawk, expects Iran to not comply on nukes and clearly wants Vance to get blamed for it. We talked to New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, a sharp observer of MAGA turmoil. We discuss why Vance is so vulnerable to being shivved on Iran, why this is likely to tarnish his presidential ambitions, and how MAGA will reckon with all this as Trump’s influence wanes. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
The Senate is moving to officially green-light Donald Trump’s expensive rebrand for the Department of Defense.Buried deep in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s annual defense authorization Tuesday was a measure to redesignate the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The measure would also change the titles and acronyms for the secretary of war, assistant secretary, and under secretary, as well as the names of other programs and offices that use the word “defense.” Another clause would ensure that all laws, documents, and records referring to the department or secretary of defense would be understood to apply to the secretary of war. Of course, the Trump administration has already been using its own made-up name for months. So Pete Hegseth is sure to have his new desk placard already.The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that a statutory name change implemented throughout the department could cost up to $125 million in taxpayer dollars. Trump has made it clear he’s willing to spend millions to make the United States look tough—but in reality, the president appears to be caving to our country’s purported enemies. As The New Republic’s Indigo Olivier pointed out: Trump’s rebrand may be stupid and expensive, but at least it’s honest.
Details of the Iran peace deal are still under wraps, even for America’s strongest ally in the Middle East.i24NEWS correspondent Guy Azriel reported Tuesday that Israel was denied access to the informal agreement, which he called a “remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance.”The White House and Tehran signed a peace deal on Sunday, though the exact specifications of the agreement are not yet public and are still being hashed out.The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.One component of the plan has become the subject of much debate: a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, which was originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers. Vice President JD Vance has wavered several times on that particular issue. He first claimed on Saturday that Iran would receive no money at all. He seemingly reversed course on Monday, when he all but confirmed the reconstruction fund to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe. Within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance seemed to change his tune again, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Iran would not receive a “single dime of American money.” Instead, Vance claimed that the U.S. would allow Iran to receive foreign aid from its Gulf State neighbors so long as the “Iranians behave.” Vance has not yet elaborated on how the administration plans to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.The murky arrangement does not seem to include details on whether Iran will stop enriching its uranium—a highly anticipated component and one of the White House’s most pressing demands.Vance told Hannity that the particulars of the enriched uranium depletion would be figured out over the next two months, “but the basic structure is they can get a lot if they comply with the United States’s demands.”Donald Trump has pledged since the beginning of the war that any peace deal he signs would end Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But now that the deal is actually being negotiated, Trump seems to have lost his bluster, even disengaging from the idea of collecting Iran’s nuclear dust.“You could make the case, ‘Why even bother?’ Because it’s not really valuable, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth,” Trump said Tuesday while at the G7 summit in France. “It’s not very valuable stuff. But I think, psychologically, we want to get it.”Failing to obtain commitments regarding Iran’s nuclear program would make the deal far weaker than the Obama administration’s JCPOA. Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered his deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country. By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
One of President Trump’s personal lawyers now has a federal judgeship for life, and it’s thanks to multiple Senate Democrats being absent.Justin Smith, 41, was confirmed by the Senate Tuesday in a 48–43 vote, with every Democrat voting against his nomination, while all but one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, voted for him. Nine senators missed the vote: Michael Bennet, Kevin Cramer, John Curtis, Angus King, Ben Ray Luján, Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Sanders, Raphael Warnock, and Mitch McConnell.Bennet, King, Luján, Sanders, and Warnock all caucus with the Democratic Party, and if they had been present to cast a “no” vote, Smith’s vote would have been blocked in a 48–48 tie. Smith will now sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, overseeing federal district court appeals in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.Smith represented Trump in his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court and worked on his case to have the Supreme Court overturn the sexual assault and defamation charge against the president brought by E. Jean Carroll. Despite being nominated to the federal bench in March, Smith continued representing Trump in Carroll’s case.In his confirmation hearings in April, Smith refused to say who won the 2020 presidential election, and refused to answer questions about whether he would recuse himself from any cases involving Trump, sparring with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.Smith is now the third of Trump’s personal lawyers to be appointed as a federal judge, and the second to be confirmed. He’ll join Emil Bove, who, while working for the Justice Department in Trump’s first term, told his fellow federal prosecutors to disobey court orders and say “fuck you” to judges who ruled against them.Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Smith’s conflicts of interest raised “serious questions.”“These are lifetime appointments to federal judgeships—lifetime appointments which have to be given to people who have been carefully scrutinized. We have not done that when it comes to Mr. Smith,” Durbin said.
President Trump has taken further steps to dismantle the Department of Education, moving offices for special education and civil rights to other departments. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services will be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, while the Department of Justice will take over civil rights issues, the Trump administration announced Tuesday.The moves are worrying, especially considering Trump’s campaign to dismantle the Department of Education as well as who he has appointed to HHS and the DOJ. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made worrying comments about autism, making outlandish claims and changing policies on vaccines to fit his medically inaccurate views.Kennedy’s views have also been criticized as incorporating eugenics, which should not be anywhere near special education in America. It raises fears that students with special needs could be marginalized or worse.When it comes to civil rights, the DOJ has been ground zero for the Trump administration’s attacks on “wokeness,” undermining its own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and targeting one of America’s leading civil rights organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center. The person in charge of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, Harmeet Dhillon, is a loyal foot soldier to Trump.Now the Department of Education will be weakened further, and students will lose valuable resources as these offices are moved into departments without education experts. Combating discrimination and increasing special education resources used to be a priority in the United States, but no longer.
The Justice Department is indicting 15 Minnesotans on charges of conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, using vague Facebook posts and anti-ICE actions as grounds to deem them “antifa.”All 15 people are involved with Direct Action Minnesota, which the administration accuses of “aggressive use of shields against law enforcement, surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization against law enforcement actions.” The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, alleged that the group “advocates, promotes, and utilizes militant tactics and violence.”These are people who are using non-electoral tactics—many of which are legal, like observing—after watching federal agents kidnap immigrants and shoot their neighbors dead in the street. The administration even pointed to a Facebook post in which defendant Cameron Kennedy stated that they needed to become “ungovernable” as a flimsy example of antifa activity. And even with all that, it’s worth mentioning for the umpteenth time that antifa is not a cohesive, established group that exists. There is no leader, no headquarters, no yearly conference. The Trump administration is cracking down on people who took action against what they saw as a violent occupation of their city by following and impeding ICE officers and making mean posts on Facebook. This crusade against antifa is a cover for a wide net of First Amendment suppression against any kind of left-leaning individual or group–from Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil to these 15 Minnesotans.
The Trump sons’ crypto scam is about to make their family even more money. World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform co-founded by Eric and Donald Jr., will almost certainly be approved for a national bank trust charter, according to two former staffers at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency who spoke with NOTUS Tuesday. It was “inconceivable” that World Liberty Financial wouldn’t be approved, one of the staffers told NOTUS. Jonathan Gould, the current Trump-nominated comptroller of the currency, is due to deliver his decision on World Liberty Financial’s application soon. He has previously eased restrictions and allowed for more crypto companies to receive bank charters.Receiving a national bank trust charter would allow World Liberty Financial to independently issue its USD1 stablecoin directly to American consumers, sidestep liquidity requirements, and settle financial transactions like platforms such as Venmo or Paypal—for which the Trump family could potentially receive a cut. David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, insisted to NOTUS that “none of its leadership or employees work for the U.S. government, and there are no conflicts of interest.” Eric and Donald Jr. are the company’s co-founders, while Barron serves as a “Web3 Ambassador,” and Donald Trump reigns as “chief crypto advocate.” The company has previously claimed that the president has not been involved in its business since he was reelected to the White House. But his family took even greater control over the company after his inauguration, asserting a claim to more than 75 percent of net revenue from token sales, and 60 percent from the firm’s operations. Trump owns 70 percent of an LLC that owns 38 percent of the shares in a holding company behind World Liberty Financial, according to the president’s most recent financial disclosures. The rest is managed by family members. In June 2025, Trump reported having earned $57 million from World Liberty Financial in 2024.
Kash Patel’s big mouth might have just gummed up another investigation.The FBI director frustrated Secret Service officials by prematurely announcing the details of an investigation into a violent attack planned for the White House UFC event, according to multiple sources that spoke with MS NOW Tuesday.Patel revealed components of the investigation via a social media post earlier in the day, sharing that “multiple individuals” were in custody.“On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C. involving individuals outside of the National Capital Region,” Patel wrote.Nearly two dozen people participated in Signal group chats discussing an alleged plot to strike the UFC’s America 250 event with explosive-laden drones so as to rush the evacuating crowd into the crosshairs of a pre-staged sniper team, reported Fox News. Five people are reportedly in custody in connection with the scheme.“While the result represented the best of investigative work, it was also nothing out of the ordinary for this law enforcement team—we are built to detect, respond to, and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens—particularly during large gatherings like the historic UFC 250 fight,” Patel continued in his X post. “That’s exactly what we did here. I want to thank our great agents and partners, this work remains ongoing and we will continue to update the public as permitted.”A White House spokesman claimed that the incident was exactly why the White House needed the proposed $400 million ballroom—though the 90,000-square-foot space still would not have been capable of housing the UFC event, nor was the fight ever planned to be indoors.It’s not the first time that Patel has flubbed a federal investigation. In September, Patel’s reliance on the bureau’s planes waylaid the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assassination by at least a day, preventing a critical analysis team from accessing a flight to the crime scene. His personal flights interfered with another FBI investigation on December 13, when the FBI’s shooting reconstruction team was unable to immediately respond to a shooting at Brown University due to a lack of available bureau planes at an airport in Richmond, Virginia, according to Senator Dick Durbin.
If JD Vance was hoping for a light interview to highlight the release of his new book, he had another think coming: The hosts of The View did not pull any punches Tuesday while interrogating the vice president about his administration’s policy positions. “What did Black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?” asked host Whoopi Goldberg, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to remove Black history from American monuments and museums. “What exactly are you talking about, Whoopi?” Vance pressed, prompting loud groans from the audience. “It seems that it has been very easy for this administration to remove that, and to denigrate Black folks who have worked their behinds off to get this American dream,” Goldberg said. “So, that was actually a very helpful intervention because, I think the story you’re talking about is where you know, allegedly the administration is holding back the appointments of people based on skin color,” Vance said. “Well no. I’m talking about a host of things,” Sunny Hostin interjected. “I’m talking about Black history getting erased from public spaces, Black voter districts are being dismantled, Black leaders are being sidelined from our ranks. Where do Americans of color fit in this vision? Because it doesn’t seem like we fit.”Host Ana Navarro added that the Trump administration had allowed only 6,668 refugees into the country since October, and all but three were white South Africans. Vance denied Navarro’s number, claiming “everybody is welcome in our political coalition.” “So, you say we’re anti-minority or anti-Black—” Vance said.“No I didn’t say that. I asked, see?” Goldberg said. “Don’t start any stuff with me, man. Don’t get me in trouble!” The audience burst into cheers as Vance conceded. WHOOPI GOLDBERG: What did Black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?JD VANCE: What exactly are you talking about?AUDIENCE: *groans* pic.twitter.com/xFozfFCohk— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026The hosts of The View also pressed Vance over the economy. Host Joy Behar criticized the president for calling affordability a “hoax,” while spending millions of taxpayer dollars on his ballroom, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, an arch for himself, and a UFC-themed birthday party.Vance denied that Trump had called affordability a “hoax,” though he has many times, and argued that Trump had made “good progress” bringing prices down. “He just said he loves the inflation,” Navarro said, referring to Trump’s recent remark responding to surging inflation rates. “What he said, Ana, what he said is he loves the fact that the inflation is gonna come down when this war is over,” Vance said. “That’s what he said.”“That’s not what he said,” Goldberg interjected. “Are you his interpreter, or are you his vice president? Come on,” Joy Behar chided. The hosts laughed at the flailing vice president, who chuckled uncomfortably along with them. NAVARRO: Trump said he loves the inflationJD VANCE: What he said, Ana, is he loves the fact the inflation is going to come downWHOOPI: That's not what he saidBEHAR: Are you his interpreter, or his vice president? Come on pic.twitter.com/VNXTzb9NOv— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026At one point, Vance was brutally fact-checked after he brought up the claim that Trump had called all Mexicans rapists, saying that was a misconception. Instead, Vance argued that South American countries were off-loading criminals into our borders. “There have been many, many journalists, including CNN, where you used to work and be my colleague, that have tried to find evidence of that,” Navarro replied. “There is no evidence that [Nicolás] Maduro was releasing people from insane asylums or jails, like Fidel Castro did do. This was made up. And we just can’t, you know, accept it without pushing back.”Vance’s attempt to peddle his book on The View was a disaster—but honestly, it was entertaining.
Donald Trump was caught completely checked out on the world stage Tuesday, staring into space as every other leader in the G7 posed for a group photograph.The strange moment was caught on C-SPAN: Trump slouched in his chair with a vacant expression as French President Emmanuel Macron encouraged everyone at the table to turn and face a photographer. But while every other leader smiled and complied, Trump didn’t budge.Trump, 80, seems unaware that everyone else is posing for a photo pic.twitter.com/XGEK4p8kpS— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 16, 2026There could be several reasons why Trump would be so obstinate in front of the summit. The G7 consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—but Trump has railed against the alliance for years, departing from prior administrations by taking issue with the G7’s trade negotiations, climate change efforts, foreign policy, and international cooperation.So far through his second term in office, Trump has threatened G7 allies (namely Canada), resisted the alliance’s joint statements on issues such as Ukraine, and advocated for Russia’s inclusion in the informal forum.Another reason for Trump’s detachment could very well be his health. He is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief, and his increasingly erratic behavior has sparked global concern in recent weeks about his stability and judgment.The 80-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions over the last nine months, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, seemed lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions. He has also derailed press conferences to throw cheap and petty insults at members of the press, taken jabs at the pope, and become so obsessed with his Washington renovation projects that he has a difficult time focusing on anything else. That last detail has been flagged by leading clinical psychologists as a tell-tale symptom of dementia.
President Trump seems to think that Iran and Qatar share a land border. Trump made his geographical error Tuesday while speaking to reporters alongside the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, at the G7 summit in France.“They are the closest to Iran physically, so, with other countries, I noticed that they had to travel about 45 minutes to get there. With you, you could walk right across the border, so you are in a more dangerous position,” Trump said.Trump: "Qatar is the closest to Iran, physically. With other countries, I noticed they had to travel about 45 minutes to get there. With you, you could walk right across the border."There's no land border between Iran and Qatar. They're separated by the Persian Gulf. pic.twitter.com/Li2RBmeFK9— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) June 16, 2026Qatar and Iran are actually separated by the Persian Gulf, a body of water, at a distance of about 119 miles. Trump had the audacity to claim otherwise even next to the country’s ruler, and it’s not even the first time. In October, Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “They’re literally, you walk over from Iran to Qatar. You can walk it in one second. You go ‘boom boom,’ and now you’re in Qatar, that’s tough territory”—to much ridicule online.Has no one bothered to correct the president? It’s possible that advisers have tried, only for Trump to ignore them. Iranian state media decided to offer their help in a post on X Tuesday, including a map with video of Trump’s comments.Donald Trump says Iran and Qatar share a land border and you can cross on foot.Here's the map to check that claim. pic.twitter.com/zVgWc8wSax— IRNA News Agency ☫ (@IrnaEnglish) June 16, 2026
FBI Director Kash Patel may be using the FBI as a “personal slush fund” to give “tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars” to his cronies, according to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin.“We have been receiving troubling reports that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful ‘bonus’ payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Patel. He went on to allege that Patel made “nearly $8,000 payments” to multiple different people who had already eclipsed their maximum salary. “We can confirm that numerous loyalist employees have received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods, amounting to nearly $40,000 per agent. We can also confirm you have depleted this reserve at such a frenzied rate that some of the payments have bounced back from exhausted accounts,” Raskin continued. “It is not clear whether these bonus payments have simply been a corrupt attempt to slide cash to friends or whether they are also meant to ensure the silence of the agents who witness your inebriation and accompanying professional negligence and misconduct.” The FBI has yet to respond to Raskin’s letter. This is the latest in a string of troubling allegations against the FBI director regarding his use of federal resources for personal gain or convenience.
The White House’s latest effort to kill off algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool involves a whole lot of bleach.Park workers outfitted in hi-vis vests were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool Tuesday morning. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds.Records indicate that the Trump administration spent at least $14.8 million renovating the Reflecting Pool—a project that was, apparently, all for naught. (As well as a far cry from the president’s original promise of a $1.8 million price tag.)The project wrapped earlier this month to praise from Donald Trump, who celebrated its “beautiful, clean water” following the overhaul. The job involved painting the bottom of the memorial a color that Trump has described as “American-flag blue” ahead of the country’s semiquincentennial anniversary.But within days, the relentless algal bloom was back—almost in full force—thanks to Washington’s hot and humid weather. By the weekend, the green, plant-like form had coated the bottom of the pool in several areas and floated to the surface.Photojournalists also snapped shots of buckets of Induclor around the memorial, a chlorine compound used to control bacteria, algae, slime, and fungi in water, reported The Washington Post.Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923. What makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain. The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs as its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious structural leaks, which requires the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algae blooms that turn the water green.
Vice President JD Vance admitted that Iran has not actually agreed to stop enriching uranium—one of President Donald Trump’s biggest demands.During an interview Monday night on Fox News’s Hannity, Vance was asked whether Iran had agreed to end its uranium enrichment program. “They’re agreeing right now to eliminate the enriched stockpile,” Vance said. “And, if they don’t get to a point where they agree to stop enriching, then they don’t get any other benefits of the bargain.“A lot of the technical details we’re gonna figure out over the next month, over the next two months, but the basic structure is they can get a lot if they comply with the United States’s demands.”Hannity: They’re agreeing never to enrich?Vance: They are agreeing right now to eliminate the enriched stockpile…a lot of the technical details we will figure out over the next month, over the next two months pic.twitter.com/NEKtI7rVCA— Acyn (@Acyn) June 16, 2026Since the beginning of the war, Trump has repeatedly promised that his deal with Iran would end the country’s uranium enrichment program. However, it seems that’s a commitment Iran has yet to make. Rather, Trump’s deal seems primarily interested in collecting Iran’s nuclear “dust.” But now the president doesn’t seem committed to doing that, either. “You could make the case, ‘Why even bother?’ Because it’s not really valuable, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth,” Trump said Tuesday while at the G7 summit in France. “It’s not very valuable stuff. But I think, psychologically, we want to get it.”Trump is backing away from getting Iran's enriched material: "You could make the case, why even bother? It's not very valuable stuff." pic.twitter.com/CgNgnZCaMQ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026So rather than stop Iran from enriching uranium, Trump made a deal to collect Iran’s nuclear dust—which he says probably isn’t worth it, except that it will make the United States feel better. Crucially, it’s not clear that Iran was actually enriching uranium in the first place. At the beginning of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that Iran was not currently enriching uranium. Later, multiple U.S. intelligence officials suggested that Iran did not present an imminent threat. Still, upending Iran’s uranium enrichment program was a central demand for the Trump administration, though now it appears that it’s been punted to further negotiations.
Iran’s national soccer team is dealing with unnecessary hardship during the World Cup thanks to the Trump administration, with acquiescence from FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.The team was forced to leave the U.S. immediately after its World Cup match with New Zealand Monday night in Los Angeles, which ended in a hard-fought 2–2 draw, and head back to their Tijuana, Mexico, base camp.“After the game today they said to us, ‘You have to leave immediately,’” coach Amir Ghalenoi told the press after the match. “Whereas today it’s very important for us to have recovery.“We’ve been asked to get on a plane and return to our camp in Tijuana, and we are really troubled by that. They are forcing us to go back early. They are making the situation more and more difficult, more hurdles, but we’re not going to let that stop us from doing our best.”Iran wasn’t even supposed to have its tournament base camp in Mexico. They were forced to abandon their original plans for a base camp in Tucson, Arizona, thanks to the Trump administration, which isn’t letting them stay overnight in the U.S. despite their group stage games taking place in Los Angeles and Seattle. Their fan base is also being punished: Iran’s entire ticket allocation was taken away last week, although it’s not clear if that was a U.S. or FIFA decision.Before their match, the team had to go through five hours of travel and security checks on Sunday, despite the distance between Tijuana and Los Angeles only being 140 miles. “We don’t know why they’re returning us, to be honest. I think it’s very strange. It seems like others are doing the planning for us.… We were supposed to arrive two nights before the game, but they didn’t permit [it],” Ghalenoi said. “We were supposed to stay here tonight to recover and return tomorrow lunchtime.“I think our team is the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup. Our federation isn’t here, our media isn’t here, our management isn’t here.”The U.S. government initially denied visas to 15 of the Iranian team’s support staff, later reducing that number to 11 after some visas were approved. Those excluded from the U.S. include both of the team’s media officers, analysts, and Iranian Football Federation President Mehdi Taj. Inexplicably, winger Mehdi Torabi’s visa has also expired, as he was only granted a single entry visa to the U.S., Iranian state media reported. The Iranian federation is scrambling to get Torabi a new one that lets him take part in the remaining matches.“I think it’s not good for the football,” team captain Mehdi Taremi said of the team’s situation. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.” 🚨🇮🇷 BREAKING — World Cup “Disaster”Mohammad Mohebi and Mehri Taremi Say:“Not to Make Excuses but This Is Not a Fair Competition.”Iranian Players argued they should arrive 2 days before matches instead of traveling, training, and playing while exhausted by 5 hours in… pic.twitter.com/Z0ViTFEoRO— Pamphlets (@PamphletsY) June 16, 2026
Republican senators are being kept in the dark about the exact terms of Donald Trump’s deal with Iran—and they’re not happy. The Trump administration has yet to release the text of the memorandum of understanding officials signed with Iran, leaving senior GOP members frustrated at everything they don’t know, Politico reported Monday. Senator Lindsey Graham, a defense and Iran hawk, voiced concern about discrepancies between different parties’ descriptions of the deal. “The MOU being described by us sounds really very good; the MOU being described by Iran sounds awful,” he told Politico. The South Carolina Republican fretted that the deal would resemble former President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which defense hawks despised.“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA. If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal,” he continued, and added in a separate conversation that he was “skeptical that Iran will ever go there.” It seems that the similarities between Trump’s deal and the JCPOA are already coming into sharp relief: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth crumbled on live television when trying to explain the difference. Some Republican senators are wary of the deal, believing they will have to review and vote on it. “If you want a deal to last, it can’t be an executive agreement,” said Oklahoma Senator James Lankford. “We’ve got to have a vote of Congress to be able to solidify [it] long term.”But others suspect that, like the JCPOA, the deal will be a political agreement. “They’ll try to write it around the treaty requirements, so I don’t expect we’ll vote on it,” said Texas Senator John Cornyn.GOP lawmakers aren’t the only ones wary of Trump’s deal with Iran: Even his own Cabinet members seem to hate it. Trump has claimed he will release the text of the deal on Friday, after the formal signing ceremony.
Half the cost of President Trump’s $600 million ballroom will be placed on the shoulders of U.S. taxpayers like you. This development, based on financial records obtained by The Washington Post, comes just two months after Trump promised the project would be “taxpayer free,” with no U.S. citizen paying even “10 cents.” The ballroom has already eclipsed the $400 million Trump originally said it would cost. And while Trump has defended the necessity of the ballroom profusely, it’s become abundantly clear that this is simply another vanity project for him to feel like he’s actually done something successful, even as there’s no real need or demand for the ballroom—especially not if Americans are paying for $300 million of its price. And the wealthy individuals who are actually paying for it are getting government contract kickbacks for doing so. “I guess ‘privately funded’ meant Trump was keeping it private that he’s stealing hundreds of millions of the public’s money for his ballroom. All this while gutting health care and raising costs,” Democratic Representative Gabe Amo wrote on X. “Shame. We have to stop this grift.”
The Trump administration’s plan to approve $300 billion in aid for reconstructing Iran has only become more confusing.Vice President JD Vance all but confirmed to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Monday morning that the $300 billion was a real proposal in the Iran peace deal. Yet within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance seemed to change his tune, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Iran would not receive a “single dime” of U.S. money.“The agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that’s just not what this is,” Vance said Monday night. “What the agreement does say, Sean, is again, if the Iranians behave, and if there are sanctions relief, and if the Iranians are integrated into the world economy, we would invite other countries—not us—but other countries to invest in their country.“That’s fine, but only if they comply with the terms of the agreement,” Vance added.Hannity: There’s a report that the Qataris are giving them $300 billion with the approval of the US. Did the U.S. Ever sign off on the Qatari paying them that money?Vance: No, the agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that is just not what this… pic.twitter.com/qk024IvfLS— Acyn (@Acyn) June 16, 2026Vance did not elaborate on how the administration planned to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.The White House and Tehran have already signed a peace deal, though the exact specifications of the agreement have not yet been revealed (and are still being hashed out). The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.The most contentious point of the plan, however, is a reported $300 billion reconstruction fund, as well as billions more in unfrozen Iranian assets and forfeited sanctions—which were originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers.Donald Trump similarly tried to cast doubt on the proposal Monday evening, claiming on Truth Social that “the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!”But not everyone in the administration is on the same page. Earlier that day, a U.S. official told reporters that the White House had “discussed the possibility of releasing frozen funds, sanctions relief, you know, a big $300 billion fund to rebuild their country, and all of these things are going to be tied to performance.”
President Trump is defending America’s tentative deal with Iran, claiming that the U.S. is not “investing any money.”Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in France Tuesday morning that unlike with 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran, the U.S. was not transferring cash to Iran, ignoring the fact that reports of the still-unpublished deal include Iranian access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds and releasing $25 billion in Iranian assets.“We’re not investing any money. We have the right to if we want, but we’re not investing any money. We didn’t pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars, he paid $1.7 billion from an airplane, all green cash. I watched that, I couldn’t believe it,” Trump said. “But the one that’s happening that’s of note, frankly the only thing that matters to me is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”Trump: "I want to mention Iran. We appreciate the relationship we've had over a short period of time with Iran. We're not investing any money. I have the right to if we want, but we're not investing any money. We didn't pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars." pic.twitter.com/zBqNl2cGe9— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026The JCPOA also included a commitment from Iran that it would not pursue a nuclear weapon. Plus, it included the U.S. lifting sanctions and sending Iran $1.7 billion to settle decades-old failed contracts between the two countries. In Trump’s new deal, the funding sources for the $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran are unclear, although Vice President JD Vance said Monday that they would come from the “Gulf coast coalition.”Is that some combination of Persian Gulf countries and the U.S., or did Vance actually mean to refer to the Gulf Cooperation Council? If some of that money does come from American taxpayers, that’s not going to go over well with most of Congress, except a few of Trump’s most sycophantic supporters.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and others within the Trump administration don’t think Iran is being serious about its promise not to develop or attain nuclear weapons, according to anonymous sources from Axios. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Ratcliffe each voiced their doubts regarding Iran’s commitment to the memorandum of understanding announced on Sunday, as each detailed “intel” that led them to doubt Iran’s side of the MOU agreement. “The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” one source told Axios.While the full text of the deal has yet to be released, it is understood that the MOU requires that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days and refuse to develop nuclear weapons, while the U.S. must end its blockade of Iranian ships in the strait and Israel must withdraw from Lebanon. It’s important to note that the strait was already open before the war, and this commitment to no nukes from Iran was already in the original deal from 2015—a deal that Trump canceled in 2018. It’s also not clear just how seriously Trump will take this “intel” from Rubio, Ratcliffe, and Hegseth, as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff are supportive of the MOU.
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. The widespread opposition to the construction of data centers is a huge opportunity for liberals and Democrats, says author and organizer Astra Taylor. In the latest episode of Right Now, Taylor argues that Americans are frustrated about data centers in part because they are being built in communities without residents’ knowledge and consent. Rural residents and Republicans also oppose data centers, making them fertile ground for politicians. Taylor also discussed her upcoming book on “end times fascism” and the importance of Democrats defending higher education and debt-cancellation programs.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 16 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here. Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump has signed a deal with Iran to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We still haven’t seen the document, but all of the reporting suggests a very simple story: Trump lost. He got nothing of any significance. Trump himself plainly has no idea what happened, as he revealed in a strange ramble to reporters. But JD Vance does know what happened, even though he’s trying very hard to sugarcoat it in a pretty revealing way.We’re really lucky to be talking about all of this with Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who has a good piece arguing that Trump capitulated to Iran. Tom, great to have you on, man.Tom Nichols: Good to see you, Greg.Sargent: So let’s just sum up where we are. We haven’t seen the document, but all the reporting suggests that while the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, all that does is return us to where we were before Trump’s war. Meanwhile, they’ve punted the discussion over Iran’s nuclear program until later. And the Iranian regime has survived. So basically, Trump’s tens of billions of dollars in bombing didn’t compel Iran to do what he said he’d make them do. Tom, is that basically the size of things?Nichols: I think it’s worse than that. The bigger problem is that he counted on regime change. This was what the war was really about. So when that wasn’t going to happen, when it became clear a week or so in that this regime wasn’t going to collapse, this outcome, I think, was more or less inevitable.And the people that are now waiting and saying, Well, we need to see the details of this MOU. That’s fine. But even without knowing the details of the MOU, the Americans have been defeated here. And that pains me to say as an American. Because the regime is still intact, their nuclear material is still in their country. They’re actually politically more powerful now that they’ve flexed muscle and done some serious harm to the other Gulf states as a warning not to cooperate with the United States. There’s going to be some money going back into Iran, whether it comes through third parties or not.If you had said any of this to Donald Trump on the first night of the war, he would have said, That’s impossible, we’re going to get unconditional surrender. Well, we didn’t. And all of these things are going to happen. Without even knowing what’s in the MOU, you can know at least this much.Sargent: Right. Trump absolutely did expect unconditional surrender, even though he was told by lots and lots of different people within his administration, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that that wouldn’t happen. He was told that the strait would be closed by Iran and that that would exercise leverage over the global economy and over us. Trump couldn’t fathom that possibility because he’s strong. It’s just that simple, right? He’s strong, he wins, he’s a winner, so there’s no way that things won’t go exactly the way he says they will.Nichols: It’s bitten him before and caused him problems before, but there’s this weird quirk in Trump’s personality where he really believes that saying things makes them real. That, like a child, he can sort of wish-cast things into existence. And you can play that game with domestic politics and tariffs and taxes and do some fancy dancing around where the money is in terms of things like revenue. You can bully other Republicans to agree with you. What you can’t do is do that with a war where the enemy gets a vote.Every day that Trump said they’re eager to make a deal, there’s going to be a deal, a deal is imminent—the Iranians are not Republican House members. They are a foreign country and an enemy of the United States. And there’s nothing to stop them from saying, No, there is no deal. And now that we have one, it’s not great. It’s basically an acknowledgment that the United States failed to gain any of its strategic objectives.Sargent: That seems beyond clear. So Trump talked to the media about his deal today. He blasted Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which unfroze tens of billions of dollars that Iran could then access in foreign accounts. Listen to Trump.Donald Trump (voiceover): It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars was given to Iran. It was a deal where $1.7 billion in cash was put on a Boeing 7—well, not a 757, I guess, right? But on a big, beautiful Boeing 757. They needed a Boeing 747, to be honest with you, because it was a lot of cash. $1.7 billion was taken out of the banks and given to Iran. And on top of that, tens of billions of dollars was spent. So they tried to bribe them to make a deal and that didn’t work. It never works.Tom, as far as we know now, Iran will also be able to access a huge tranche of funds under Trump’s deal too. Can you explain that? How do you respond to what Trump said there?Nichols: Well, I was a critic of the JCPOA because I didn’t like how much of it was front-loaded. But I also have to be honest and say that in the years that followed, the deal seemed more or less to work. Now Trump has wandered into a crappier version of the JCPOA, starting all over again, with the argument that they’ll get access to this money if they clear certain gates and engage in certain things. And the Iranians are just better at this than he is. I think that money is going to start coming to them again through third parties.That’s why you keep hearing Trump and Vance both being careful to say, Well, we’re not just going to give them cash. No, you’re going to open up the ability to have cash get to them with your OK. And I suspect that once people are tired of this whole process, which will be very soon, and once Trump is no longer paying any attention to it, the Iranians are going to get what they want. How soon, how much—that’s just a matter of working out the details.Remember, in the end, this was supposed to be giving the Iranian government back to its people, who would then dismantle the nuclear program, end support for terrorism, restrain their proxies, blah, blah, blah. None of that’s going to happen. They’re going to get the money one way or another.Sargent: What’s the basic difference between what Obama did with the money and what Trump is doing with the money? Do we know?Nichols: Well, without seeing the MOU, hard to say. But I would say that Obama did it without completely disrupting the international economy, blowing billions of dollars’ worth of expensive American weapons, getting some Americans killed, getting many hundreds more wounded, and then weakening the United States by forcing us to basically admit that, yes, the Iranians own the Strait of Hormuz.Sargent: Right. The bottom line here is that Trump is in some sense using the mechanism Obama used, which is a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Obama did this through negotiation. Trump did it through spending tens of billions of dollars committing massive war crimes, bombing an Iranian school filled with children, et cetera, to practically melting down the global economy. That’s the difference. They’re using more or less the same mechanism.Nichols: Trump blew up a lot of things, expended a lot of weapons, messed up the global economy, and now is doing it exactly the way Obama did it. And we’ll probably not get as good a deal, because now the Iranians have made sure to do things like booby-trap the uranium. Even if international inspectors get in there—and whatever Pete Hegseth says, you’re not going to have Marines in there digging this stuff out—getting inspectors in there is going to be a lot trickier than it was 10 years ago. It was just stupid and pointless.Sargent: I think there’s actually another reason for that that I want to get to in a second. But first, let’s listen to JD Vance for a second. There’s a bit of confusion about how Iran will get access to this money. It’s being described as $300 billion. JD Vance was asked about this. Listen to this.Reporter (voiceover): The Iranians are saying that they’re going to have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?JD Vance (voiceover): Well, that’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you’re going to see, Ed, and people have to be skeptical of this, is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits. So we absolutely are open to the Gulf Coast countries investing in the reconstruction of Iran, but only if Iran ends their nuclear program, ends their enriched stockpile of material, and is really open to an inspections and enforcement regime that gives the American people confidence they’re never going to have a nuclear weapon.Sargent: So if I understand this correctly, the U.S. will allow Iran to get access to this money if and only if Iran agrees to some kind of binding long-term constraint on its nuclear program. What you’re saying is that once the nuts and bolts really hit, when they really start to talk about this, probably Iran will be able to get access to that money fairly quickly, or at least before any final commitment is made. And when JD Vance says this money will come from other Gulf Coast countries investing, what’s he referring to there? And what’s your overall reaction to what you heard from JD?Nichols: Well, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get it. This is where I will be cautious and say that until we see this MOU—which for some reason the administration really doesn’t want to release to the public, which should tell you something right there—I don’t know how quickly it’ll get here. But basically, we’re committing to supporting the reconstruction of the country we just blew to smithereens after getting nothing.It really is staggering to have the administration claiming, We finally got a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. Look, I was never in favor of attacking Iran, but I was a real hawk on the issue of, if they ever get close to a nuclear weapon, that could actually be the trigger for war. But there was no evidence of this, and there’s been no evidence of it for 10 years, since the JCPOA.So again, we’re back to this problem that they’re going to get a lot of money, they’re going to get reconstruction support from the Gulf states that they have pounded and inflicted punishment on for cooperating with us. How does this not leave Iran—even though Iran is temporarily militarily weakened—in a strategically more powerful stance?That’s why, when you listen to that part we just listened to, Greg—where you ask JD Vance these questions and he does the Jackie Gleason thing, where he’s trying to explain his way out of it—the reality is Trump wants out. And he’s willing to buy his way out if he couldn’t bomb his way out.Sargent: Right. Obama actually ended up getting more because he had an actual deal that laid out what oversight of the Iranian nuclear program would look like. Trump doesn’t have that. He’s just now doing what Obama did, which is using money to try to get it. Nichols: And doing it without the support of the international community. Sargent: And after spending tens and tens of billions of dollars committing war crimes, destroying the global economy—Nichols: I’m not there yet on war crimes. I think that waits for an investigation. But he started a preventive war. He started a war of choice, which itself is horrific, because this didn’t even have the rationale of the Iraq War behind it. I said at the beginning of this, the Iraq War looks like it was competently lawyered up compared to this. Bush went to the United Nations, he had allies on board with at least some of it. He made a case, he put a clock on it about the inspectors. This was Trump just getting up one morning and saying, you know what, it’s time to take out Iran.Which itself is a problem when you’re talking about war crimes and crimes against humanity. But in the end, I will also say that had he toppled this regime, Greg, I would have been one of the people shrugging and saying, Well, you have to congratulate him if he managed to get rid of one of the worst, most dangerous regimes on this planet. I may not have liked the way he went into it, but I would have had to certainly congratulate him on coming out of it. Now he’s gotten the worst of all worlds. He’s taken America on a discretionary war, didn’t get what he wants. He’s going to have to pay off the bad guys so that he can get out of this. And basically he’s going to paper over his own mistake here with dollars. That’s what he’s going to do.Sargent: I think that’s basically the size of it. I just want to say one more thing about JD Vance’s strange ramble there. He’s basically admitting that Trump is using the same mechanism that Obama used—a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Doesn’t JD just end up making Trump look like a complete moron, given that it comes right after Trump compared his deal favorably to Obama’s unfreezing of funds to Iran?Nichols: No part of this administration communicates within itself. And what we’re seeing here—given the concerns about Trump’s health, his state of mind—JD Vance’s answer was sort of stumbling and bumbling, but within the normal range of political dissembling, if that makes any sense.Trump, I think, just doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. That’s the bigger worry—that Rubio and Witkoff and Kushner are saying, OK, we’ve got it, but I don’t get the sense that Trump himself really understands anything that’s going on here. The idea that Trump and Vance aren’t on the same page isn’t surprising at all. I really wonder how much Trump understands any of this at this point.Sargent: So Tom, I just want to close on a point you make in your piece, which is really interesting. Trump is threatening to restart hostilities against Iran if it doesn’t agree to surrender its nuclear program. You point out that Iran just won’t believe that, because Trump has shown that he wanted an exit from all this. I want to add to your point and get you to talk about this. As we get closer to the midterms, it becomes next to impossible for Trump to restart military action of any kind, let alone using any kind of ground invasion. Republicans will just not allow that to happen because it’ll utterly crush them in the midterms.So I think, Tom, what Trump has really done here is lock in a time frame that actually weakens his leverage over Iran over time. It weakens his leverage over Iran’s nuclear program over time. And Iran knows that. Am I right?Nichols: I think so. And he’s also alluded to using a nuclear weapon at one point. He said, We still have the ultimate, you know. But I just find it hard to believe—although with this administration and this president you never know—that right after Labor Day, as everybody’s going into the midterms and he’s still trying to wait for good news on the economy … remember, what he really cares about is international markets. He’s going to say we’re starting up the war again? On what pretext? And by that time, he really will have to go to Congress or do something.He surprised the country and the American people and the world by doing this when he did it. I don’t think you can go to that well twice. And I could be wrong—I just don’t believe him when he says, Well, if this doesn’t work out and they don’t behave, I’ll just start up the war again. That means he’s willing to tie down huge numbers of U.S. forces halfway around the world on a maybe while negotiators negotiate. At some point, ships have to come home. Soldiers and sailors need to be cycled through so they can do the things they need to do. They can’t just sit on ships for three or four months. I just don’t buy it.Sargent: So just to boil this down, we’re now entering the really hard part, which is the part where we negotiate over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and the nuts and bolts of that have to be worked out. And Trump has weakened his leverage going into that. And Trump has also strengthened Iranian leverage because Iran knows it can hold the global economy hostage now. Is that the size of it?Nichols: Right. And the Iranians get to appear like the aggrieved party now that they’re the ones that have lost thousands of people and been attacked. And even with a competent team that understood the issues and knows what it’s doing, trying to negotiate a nuclear program after you’ve bombed it and put it under a lot of rubble takes a long time. It’s going to take even longer here.So the idea that somehow in 60 days, sometime again around Labor Day or something, Trump’s going to say, That’s it, everything’s fixed, we’ve got it—none of that’s going to happen. This is going to be a long cold war with the Iranians, just like the one we’ve been in with them for 47 years. And Trump made it worse. So I don’t see any way out of this in a way that enhances American security anytime soon.Sargent: Utter catastrophe all around. Tom Nichols, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.
There is a nonzero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital, Tirana, to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”In addition to halting the developments on Zvërnec and on Sazan Island, protests are demanding the resignation of Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama, who’s been in power since 2013. Demonstrators have also targeted opposition leader and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha. A member of the Democratic Party, Berisha was until last November under house arrest as a result of corruption charges. “It’s called the Socialist Party of Albania,” Hasa clarified of Rama’s party, “but has nothing to do with socialism.” Both he and Berisha have been supportive of the developments in question as they look to cozy up to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as a means of endearing themselves to the U.S. president. Last week, the Trump administration lifted restrictions against Berisha imposed by the Biden administration.Rama has played a more active role. He had a chance dinner meeting with Ivanka Trump and Kushner in southern Albania. Months later, the president’s son-in-law approached him in Davos about investing in his country’s coastline. Rama has championed the project ever since. Just before Trump’s inauguration, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners—a firm linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners—the status of a “strategic investor.” The Narta Lagoon resort is slated to be officially developed by the Netherlands-registered Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, an offshore trust that reports have linked to Kushner, Qatari billionaires, and a string of questionable characters. The Sazan Island project is being led by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. A P.R. agency for that development told Al Jazeera that any investors involved in it were acting “in a personal capacity.” The strategic investor designation entitles Atlantic Incubation Partners to expedited approvals, and the Zvërnec project was officially approved to begin construction in January 2025. Demonstrations began locally at the end of May. On May 30, footage showed private guards for Albanian oligarch Shefqet Kastrati—who’s reportedly been working closely with Kushner—beating up activists protesting around the fence protecting the site of the slated development. The images only further inflamed Albanians, and protests spread rapidly.Since then, the protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s Communist government in 1991. Protesters’ demands reflect their long-running frustrations. Besides seeking Rama’s resignation, the Flamingo Revolution is demanding the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers. It’s further demanding the withdrawal of a recent initiative to offer generous tax breaks and special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas. Protesters are also trying to reverse recent amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage, which they argue have streamlined investors’ ability to build on and near important environmental and cultural sites. “This project broke the camel’s back,” Hasa said. Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends.”Understanding why Kushner’s seaside ambitions have kicked off an uprising in Albania requires a look back at the country’s tumultuous last century. Albania was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism. The country’s increasing isolation—from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China—led to mounting economic difficulties in the lead-up to Hoxha’s death and the ensuing collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Like many other formerly socialist countries in the 1990s, Albania underwent a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism marked by graft, speculation, and—in Albania’s case—disastrous pyramid schemes. Among the most enduring legacies of that period is a controversial 1991 land-reform law meant to redistribute property that had been collectivized under Hoxha. The result has been decades of ownership disputes, including in coastal areas that stand to become more valuable as the country continues to court foreign tourists to its sandy beaches and lush pine forests. Residents claiming land—and without the resources to fight for those claims in lengthy court processes—have been forced to give up their parcels and move away. Conversely, enterprising developers with more cash, including foreign investors and organized crime syndicates enriched by transition-era graft, can falsify documents and contest locals’ ownership claims. These legal gray areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers; as Rama once bragged to prospective Italian investors, “Fortunately, here we have no trade unions.” Last week, the Democratic Party expressed support for the protests as means of confronting government corruption, and introduced legislation aligning with several of the protesters’ demands. Demonstrators, however, have continued to call for Berisha to be thrown in jail, and to express frustration with the two parties that have dominated Albanian politics and economic development since the 1990s. In recent years, smaller parties have sprouted up in an attempt to pose alternatives. Redi Muçi was elected to Parliament last year, as a member of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë—the Together Movement, in English. The party formed out of student protests that were violently repressed by Berisha’s government in 2011, and another wave of demonstrations against educational reforms in 2018 and 2019. As Muçi points out, popular frustrations with both Rama and Berishi have been fueled by rampant corruption and the rising cost of living in one of Europe’s poorest countries. “Practically the whole Albanian economy has been directed toward the construction industry and tourism,” he told me. “The fuel that pushes this through is money laundering from drug traffickers. What has been happening along the Albanian coastline, but also in the capital city and elsewhere, is money coming from investors that hide behind shell companies that pour huge sums of money into the country through the construction, and which has made the city of Tirana an unlivable place” as public spaces are turned into enormous private developments backed by shady investors who drive up property prices through speculation. In rural areas, especially, he added, there are “investors who come from God knows where to build these huge resorts, destroying nature and ecosystems and habitats, as well as taking away property rights for local communities.”A bipartisan push to turn Albania into a prime destination for real estate investment has seen rents skyrocket as foreign investors snap up properties for short-term rentals and glorified safety-deposit boxes, making housing prices “utterly unaffordable” for ordinary renters, Muçi said. A report from the nongovernmental organization Transform Europe found that the average price per square meter of housing in Tirana reached approximately $1,700. The average salary was less than $800; housing prices that year grew more than twice as much as wages. The combination of rising costs and low purchasing power has made Albania’s capital more expensive than Rome and Barcelona. A significant part of that, the report adds, is likely the result of money laundering: 32 percent of homes sold in 2021 were acquired by nonresidents. As of 2023, 33 percent of Albanian residencies—and more than 17 percent in Tirana—remained unoccupied.While rising tourism has been a boon to the country’s economy in aggregate, the jobs created in the tourist sector tend to be poorly paid and vulnerable to exploitation. Migrant workers making just 700 euros (around $812) a month for grueling 12-hour days in restaurants and hotels have had their passports confiscated by employers as soon as they land in Albania. Lëvizja Bashkë is pushing for the state to direct investment toward more productive sectors that can create year-round, broader-based economic opportunities and prevent the rapid emigration of young Albanians seeking better-paid job prospects abroad. Protests may already be bearing fruit. Politico noted still unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multibillion-dollar resort project. That may not stop the demonstrators. Rama seems worried. The European Commission warned his government to “act without delay” to stop any prospective violations of the bloc’s environmental rules—or endanger Albania’s bid for EU membership. Under mounting pressure, Rama has accused protests of being the product of foreign meddling by “enemies of Israel and Albania,” and complained that marches were causing tourists to cancel their reservations to visit the country. The image of nefarious foreign actors sowing chaos bears little resemblance to the images being broadcast from the streets of Tirana and elsewhere, of peaceful parades with areas for kids to sit and draw. “You have grassroots left-wing movements, LGBTQ+ activists, environmental movements, representatives of all four major religious communities, and conservatives,” Hasa said. “You even have individuals who are right-wing, or a little bit far right.” Muçi agreed. “In such big numbers, you have people there from all walks of life, beliefs, and ideologies,” he told me. What unites them, he said, “is this call for a new Albania—for a different kind of politics that is not the one represented by Rama and Berisha.” It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note.
The alt-comedy-to-auteur-pipeline keeps pumping away: Jordan
Peele, Zach Cregger, Bo Burnham, and now John Early. The 38-year-old stand-up
and sketch-scene staple is familiar to millions for his handpicked cameo in
Taylor Swift’s music video for “Antihero,” and is deeply beloved by fans of the
pitch-black, premium-cable cult series Search Party, in which he played
a callow, sociopathic influencer who faked lymphoma for clicks, among other
things. “Oh my God, I would never lie about abuse,” says his character, Elliott
Goss. “And I lied about cancer.” The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of
dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret,
an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes
its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production
starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating
disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime
time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the
actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s
eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed
kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight
into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of
imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal
bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or
cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network
executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel
away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital
in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights
of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for
self-destruction.Early speaks a kind of humane truth about how
certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture.
The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about
it. On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a
comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy
dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the
essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are
really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the
studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far
from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing
everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the
situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how
certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture.
The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about
it. The first time we see Maddie—played by Early wearing a
blonde wig and prosthetic breasts—she’s bouncing her way through sunny Los
Feliz to what sounds like a synth-thetic cover of Hot Fudge’s “You Keep Me
Hanging On.” The risks here are real, and they’re spectacular; like much else
in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s performance—all fluttering eyelids, wan
smiles, deep-chested breaths and a mild vocal fry seemingly derived from the
Aaron Spelling Televisual Universe—is suspended between deadpan rigor and
earnest expressivity. To paraphrase Sontag on camp, Maddie is very much “a
woman” in quotes, but she’s also an intrepid, endearing, and desirable heroine
whose talent is emphasized alongside her decency, and whose pain is never
played for laughs. Early’s decision to cast himself—inspired by the legendary
drag queen Harris Glenn Milstead—feels like an unveiling of aspirations and
influences from the bad-taste extravaganzas of John Waters to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls
to the postmodern brinkmanship of Todd Haynes, whose shadow falls over Maddie’s
Secret and then some. Todd Haynes’s controversial 16 mm short Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story (1987) used a series of strategically carved Barbie
dolls to dramatize the singer’s battles with anorexia. The film’s miniaturized melodrama style
invited pearl clutching while winning critical plaudits. Haynes was inveighing against the kind of
prime-time docudrama dreck that sought to reduce artists and celebrities to
their afflictions. Maddie’s Secret isn’t as stark or as confrontational as Superstar,
but it’s obviously a spiritual descendant of sorts, adopting a
hyper-specific form for the express purpose of demolishing it. Early’s mash-up
of allusions and straight-up see-what-sticks goofiness is novel, like a bold
combination of Haynes (whose critically acclaimed movies are often very funny)
and the deadpan alt-comedy pastiche master David Wain, venerated by
creators of Early’s generation for
superbly skewering glossy, popular genres like summer-camp sex farces or
big-city rom-coms. (A corny
portmanteau for those in the know: Wet Hot
May December.) But Early
isn’t simply cracking in-jokes; instead, he’s inviting fellow campers and
normies alike to revel on his particular, slippery wavelength. “I swear to God, Maddie, it’s like you’re out of some
modern-day fairy tale,” says Deena (Kate Berlant) to her work bestie as they
clock in for dishwashing shifts at the premium cooking brand GourMaybe. The
avidity of the line reading is amusing in and of itself while establishing the
very real—and inherently perilous—happily-ever-after stakes of the narrative to
come. Like most princesses, Maddie is a bit oblivious: She can’t tell, for
instance, that Deena regards her as her own personal thirst trap, an infatuation
that manifests in increasingly aggro-platonic postures. The more that butch
lesbian Deena brags about her other sexual conquests, the clearer it is she
wants to stick her tongue down her hetero pal’s throat—a shameless genre cliché that Early and Berlant take giddy pleasure in pushing to the breaking point.
The pair have been working together for more than a decade now in shorts and
sketches, and their chemistry is positively pharmaceutical; Berlant, who’s got
a touch of wild genius, weaponizes her lanky limbs and angular jawline every
time she walks into frame, as if Deena were trying to puncture the invisible
bubble of the friend zone with her body.Deena is transparently jealous of Maddie’s sweetly and
sweatily ursine husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), the main beneficiary of his love’s
off-the-clock cooking talents. “Did you throw away the mango pickle from the
Indian we ordered?” Maggie asks after sashaying home, one of many delectable
lines that turn the low-hanging fruit of TV-movie dialogue into gourmet fare.
Another one, after Jake gently suggests uploading footage of Maddie’s culinary
skills to the cloud: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m
in postproduction.”Maddie won’t cook or eat meat, because of a childhood trauma
around food and body image. “The camera adds ten pounds,” chides Maddie’s
mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), when her daughter calls her to talk about the
possibility of her becoming a brand ambassador for her company—a “Gourmaybe
Girl.” Early’s stricken reaction shot on
the other end of the phone—blue-hued in the moonlight, and held for an extra
beat beneath a tinkling piano score—perches firmly at the precipice of winking
excess without tipping over. Every aspect of the film exhibits this level of
discipline, from the writing and directing and acting to the mise-en-scène;
the wonderfully stylized cinematography is by Max Lakner, who keeps floridly
color-coding the characters’ psychological states. We get blood reds and deeper
purples; enveloping shadows and ring-light halos; ghostly window reflections
and heart-to-hearts. The food that Maddie prepares looks variously appetizing
and ersatz depending on whether we’re in her home kitchen or at the fluorescent
Gourmaybe offices. There are plenty of less stridently artificial movies that
could benefit from a small fraction of such expressivity.As the plot develops, Early includes all kinds of
superfluous shtick, like interludes in a queer-dance group that are basically
an excuse for cast frolicking on the clock. Still, he keeps an admirably tight
handle on the various character dynamics, including Jake’s yearning to become a
father, a plan held in check by Maddie’s mommy issues. Crucially, Early refuses
to trivialize Maddie’s recovery in the hospital scenes, even as he populates
the ward with killer supporting performers like Vanessa Bayer and Leah
Hennessey. Sad moments are played straight, despite the absurdist flourishes
around them, as when another patient, Connie (Hennessey), eulogizes a fellow
patient who didn’t make it: “Your existence was inconvenient to me because you
were the living embodiment of the parts of myself I’ve tried to obliterate.”
Simple tear-jerking is easy, but the articulation of genuine angst—especially
in this context—takes real sensitivity and nerve. For anyone who might still be
disoriented by the way Maddie’s Secret plays with tone, the eulogy
sequence wipes the smirk off the movie’s face—or their own—once and for
all. The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending underlines Early’s desire to create
something stranger and more bracing than expected.Early’s softheartedness is winning, but he’s hardly
edgeless. Besides working through his nostalgic ambivalence for the shock
tactics of Kate’s Secret and its ilk, he’s taking aim at the
lifestyle-brand fakery of GourMaybe and its craven head honcho, Zach (Connor
O’Malley), who addresses his staff megalomaniacally, like a true believer. “Play
nice, we’ve got content to make,” he bellows, with O’Malley torquing his
delivery as if he knows the line is destined for future screencap-meme status.
It’s telling that a comedian like Early, who developed his skills and following
in an extremely online setting, would cast the internet in such ambivalent
terms; crucially, Maddie’s catharsis bypasses the zone of public performance
altogether. The question of whether Maddie will get another chance to be
famous for her cooking is one of several loose ends that Early leaves
conspicuously dangling; others include the fate of her marriage to Jake (Rahill
is given plenty of directorial leeway in a part with more bruised dignity than
expected) and Deena’s mental health (Berlant is intrepid enough to survive
being the only member of the cast treated in the end like a cartoon character;
the movie loses a bit of spark when she’s sidelined in the home stretch).The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending is in sync
with its TV-movie inspirations, but it also underlines Early’s desire to create
something stranger and more bracing than expected; to swap out a benign,
crowd-pleasing sort of cognitive dissonance for a sometimes disorienting
ambiguity. Maddie doesn’t hold onto all of her secrets—she can’t—but she’s
still finally a woman of mystery. The highest compliment that Early can be paid
is that even when the movie ends, Maddie seems to exist beyond the final (freeze)
frame.