Tag: comment

On a Friday evening in October, 2021, the Justice Department launched into damage-control mode. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, and other senior officials gathered on an emergency conference call to decide how to deal with what they considered out-of-line remarks from President Joe Biden.

Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, had defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating January 6th. Committee members were weighing whether to refer Bannon to the Justice Department for prosecution. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, had ducked commenting on a matter of such delicacy. “That would be up to the Department of Justice, and it would be their purview to determine,” she told reporters. “They’re independent.” But Biden, asked by the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins whether he thought those who ignored subpoenas should face contempt charges, didn’t mince words. “I do, yes,” he said.

As Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis report in their new book, “Injustice,” those three words so alarmed Garland and his team that they felt compelled to issue a statement effectively rebuking their boss. Just fifty-one minutes after Biden’s comments, the department’s chief spokesman, Anthony Coley, released this deliberately tart comment: “The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop.”

Compare this with the reaction of another Department of Justice, on another fall Friday, four years later, to a Presidential directive that was far more pointed. “Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “All arrows,” he wrote, are “pointing to the Democrats.”

This time, the answer from the Attorney General was not full stop; it was full speed ahead. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Bondi replied on X, as if grateful for the assignment. Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, would “take the lead,” she assured Trump. William Barr, Bondi’s predecessor during Trump’s first term, was driven to complain publicly that the President’s frequent tweets about pending cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Bondi takes instant obedience to Trump’s social-media edicts as her job description.

A challenge of covering Trump’s Washington is to guard against being worn down by the unceasing flow of aberrant behavior, one politically motivated and factually deficient investigation after another. But, until the announcement of Clayton’s probe, Trump’s Justice Department at least engaged in the flimsy pretense that it was investigating crimes—that there was some basis (“predication,” in the language of the D.O.J.) for F.B.I. agents and prosecutors to be rooting around in the actions of the President’s political enemies. Trump’s prosecution by social media, and Bondi’s eager compliance, cross yet another line once thought inviolable.

Not only is this behavior not normal; it is also, as is becoming increasingly clear, self-defeating. Experienced, ethical prosecutors want to have nothing to do with political prosecutions. That leaves such cases in the inexperienced hands of attorneys like Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer named by Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, after his initial pick for that job, Erik Siebert, balked at bringing mortgage-fraud charges against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. So it was that Halligan found herself appearing for the first time before a grand jury, racing against a statute-of-limitations deadline to file false-statements charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comey. Last Monday, a federal magistrate judge, citing a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” granted the “extraordinary remedy” of giving Comey access to grand-jury materials. These are ordinarily secret, but the judge said that Halligan had made “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.”

The judge’s order is partially redacted, but Halligan appears to have misled the grand jurors about Comey’s constitutional right not to testify. The judge also found that, as grand jurors wrestled with whether there was adequate evidence against Comey, Halligan “clearly suggested” that “they did not have to rely only on the record before them to determine probable cause but could be assured the government had more evidence—perhaps better evidence—that would be presented at trial.” This is not how prosecutions work. Grand juries aren’t instructed to issue indictments in the hope that the government produces more proof down the road. Halligan filed an emergency appeal, but her seeming incompetence could doom the case against Comey. On Wednesday, the district judge hearing the case, Michael Nachmanoff, questioned Halligan about whether the indictment was valid if all the grand jurors had not approved the final version—something that she acknowledged, but then later denied.

In the end, it took just two days for Trump to shift from decrying the “Epstein Hoax” to backing a House move to order the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. No matter that he had just gone to extreme lengths to pressure lawmakers to vote against the measure. No matter that he didn’t need to wait for congressional action; he could order the release on his own. This was a humiliating about-face of the sort we’re not used to seeing from the President, but it reflected Trump’s bowing to the inexorable political arithmetic: a single Republican House member, Clay Higgins, of Louisiana, voted against the bill, and the Senate passed it with unanimous consent and sent it to Trump, who signed it. Despite that lopsided vote, the documents may not be so quickly forthcoming; the Justice Department could seek to invoke the investigation that Trump ordered up to avoid releasing the files. The Republican-controlled Congress may be showing stirrings of independence, however belated. But the President can take solace in the knowledge that he still has the subservient Attorney General of his dreams. ♦

“No maga left behind,” Martin tweeted. He seems to mean it: Trump granted two hundred and thirty-eight pardons and commutations in his first term; less than a year into his second, he has issued nearly two thousand. In most cases, of course, the person being pardoned had been found guilty of a crime. The pardon economy presents the possibility that, if you’re nice enough to the President, a jury’s judgment might be set aside. But you have to stay nice: on Newsmax, Trump mused about a potential pardon for Diddy, on his conviction for prostitution-related charges. “I got along with him great,” the President said, “but when I ran for office he was very hostile.” He added, “I’m being honest—it makes it more difficult to do.”

Many of Trump’s pardons have helped him secure political loyalties. He has pardoned more than a thousand people convicted on charges related to the events of January 6th, as well as dozens of fake electors and lawyers who supported those events. But some of the most egregious acts contain a financial element. Last month, Trump pardoned the Chinese Canadian billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who founded the crypto exchange Binance. In 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to report the use of the platform by terrorist entities and individuals sanctioned by the U.S. government. This spring, according to the Journal, Binance took steps that boosted the value of a stablecoin developed by World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family has a large stake, including the receipt of a two-billion-dollar investment. (Representatives for both World Liberty Financial and Binance denied that there was any impropriety.) When asked on “60 Minutes” about Zhao’s pardon, Trump said, “O.K., are you ready? I don’t know who he is.”

The ingenuity of Trump’s initiative is that it is explicitly permitted by the Constitution, which states that the President “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” But the power can still be politically entangling. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has generally argued that Trump’s pardons are correcting overzealous prosecutions by the Biden Administration of political enemies and financial upstarts—in effect, claiming that the social consensus has shifted to the right. But Trump’s popularity has declined—it’s forty-one per cent in the Times’ polling average—and this month’s elections went badly for the G.O.P., so the correcting-Biden justification may have less traction.

That could prove particularly true with Trump’s stickiest problem, which he’s lately been calling the “Epstein hoax.” Over the summer, after Justice Department officials had promised to review investigative files on the activities of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse minors. She told Blanche that Trump had always been “a gentleman” and that she’d never seen him in Epstein’s house or “in any type of massage setting.” She was then moved to a minimum-security prison, where she is reportedly preparing an application for commutation, but last week House Democrats released thousands of documents obtained from Epstein’s estate, including some e-mails that appeared to contradict her.

Last week, the White House said that Trump is not considering a pardon for Maxwell, and no wonder. If he were to issue one, it would highlight, in a very public way, the system that he and his subordinates have built: a separate tier of justice for his allies and investors—a legal gray zone for people the President finds useful. ♦

The surprise and shock that so many people have registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself, in a way, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged.

And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation.

The same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure. As Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the President is merely a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed term. That was the beauty of it.

The East Wing has never been a place of grandeur. The structure as we knew it was built in the anxious years of the Second World War. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not incidentally, to carve out a secure refuge beneath them. But it quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The wing’s very plainness came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not spectacle; for the sustaining rituals of civic life, not the exhibition of personal glory.

All of that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.

Trump apologists say that earlier Presidents altered the White House, too. Didn’t Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn’t George H. W. Bush build a horseshoe pit? Didn’t Barack Obama put in a basketball court? What’s the fuss? And, anyway, who but élitists would object to a big ballroom that looks like the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what’s decorous and what’s vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with a caution that has become typical of this dark time, confines itself to stating that it has been allowed to make a digital record of what’s being destroyed—as though that were a defense, rather than an epitaph.

This, of course, is the standard line of Trump apologetics: some obvious outrage is identified, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, vaguely similar act by a President who actually respected the Constitution. It’s a form of mismatched matching. If Trump blows up boats with unknown men aboard—well, didn’t Obama use drones against alleged terrorists? (Yes, but within a process designed, however imperfectly, to preserve a chain of command and a vestige of due process.) If Trump posts a video featuring himself as the combat pilot he never was, dropping excrement on peaceful protesters—well, didn’t Lyndon Johnson swear at his aides from his seat on the john? What’s the fuss? The jabs and insults of earlier Presidents, though, however rough, stayed within the bounds of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side also gets to make its case. Even Richard Nixon sought out student protesters one early morning—at the Lincoln Memorial—and tried to understand what drove them.

President Donald Trump arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on Monday morning, October 13th, just as Hamas was releasing the last surviving Israeli hostages after two years of cruel captivity and Israel had halted its devastating bombardment of Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, two thousand Israelis and sixty-seven thousand Palestinians had been killed. The Strip had been reduced to a landscape of destitution and ruin. A ceasefire that could, and should, have come long ago was finally, fitfully, taking hold.

In Jerusalem, Trump was greeted on billboards and in the Knesset as a modern Cyrus the Great—the Persian ruler who, in 538 B.C., allowed the Jews to return to the Holy Land from their Babylonian exile and rebuild the Temple. During Trump’s speech to the Knesset, two left-wing lawmakers, Ofer Cassif, a Jewish Israeli, and Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli, raised small placards reading “Recognize Palestine.” Guards swiftly hauled them from the chamber. The President praised the speed with which this modest protest was suppressed. “That was very efficient,” he said brightly. In his self-admiring rambling, Trump took time out to thank his lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff (a “Kissinger who doesn’t leak”), and one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson (“She’s got sixty billion in the bank!”), then turned to trash Joe Biden—the “worst President in the history of our country by far, and Barack Obama was not far behind.”

It is impossible not to feel immense relief that this long, terrible war may at last be ending; it is also hard to ignore that the President’s decision to apply his sense of leverage and cunning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu owed little to consistent strategy, empathy, or conviction. Indeed, his reckless musings earlier this year about making Gaza a “Riviera of the Middle East” stoked the Israeli right’s fantasies of resettling the Strip and annexing the West Bank. They also deepened much of the world’s anger. The pivotal moment came on September 9th, when Netanyahu ordered an air strike on a residential building in Doha, hoping to kill four Hamas leaders who were then engaged in ceasefire negotiations. The strike missed its targets but clearly rattled Trump.

Like so many Presidents before him, he had indulged Netanyahu’s propensity to take American military and political support for granted. But the strike on Doha touched something more sensitive than principle: the bottom line. The Trump family’s business ventures are increasingly entwined with Qatari and Gulf capital. Trump compelled Netanyahu to deliver a scripted apology to the Qataris— a humbling that restored their confidence and amour propre, reassured Turkey and Egypt, and led these regimes to press Hamas into accepting the pending ceasefire agreement. The most consequential Israeli air strike of the war, in the end, was one that failed.

The President now hails “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” When, during the hopeful years of the Oslo Accords, Shimon Peres used that phrase, he was mocked for his naïveté. Trump’s version owes less to diplomacy than to real-estate patter, the it’s-so-if-you-believe-it’s-so spirit he called on when insisting that Trump Tower had sixty-eight floors, though it actually had fifty-eight. As much as the President prizes “deal guys” over starchy diplomats, however, attaining peace in the Middle East is not so simple as unloading a defunct casino. The Administration cannot just declare an end to what the President calls “three thousand years” of conflict and move on to its domestic project of undermining the rule of law. History resists the shortcut.

The idyll of a “new Middle East” in Netanyahu’s triumphalist view is one in which, owing to his Churchillian leadership, the threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen, and Iran are all diminished or defeated. Behold the dawn. As for Netanyahu’s failure to safeguard the country on October 7th? All is forgotten. This willfully blinkered vision, or, more precisely, reëlection platform, ignores the cost in global opinion along with the moral and political fractures within Israel itself. It also overlooks the rage bred into the bones of young Palestinians, who have lost family members and friends but not their insistence on dignity and a home. Real progress in the region, real justice and stability, will require healing, constancy, imagination, and endurance—day after day, year after year, long past any one Administration.

The militarization of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, has brought home a perverse irony. Throughout the history of the United States, immigrants have come here to escape authoritarian governments. But, in the twenty-first century, it is Donald Trump’s crackdowns on immigration, and on the protests against them, that are giving him momentum in the direction of ersatz dictatorship. The President has also threatened to deploy troops in more cities, such as San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York, against the will of the states’ governors.

At the nation’s founding, James Madison warned that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” because of the temptation to turn soldiers into “instruments of tyranny at home.” The Constitution divides power over the military between the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief, and Congress, which funds and regulates the military, declares war, and provides “for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” In the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Congress spelled out that it is generally forbidden to use the military for civilian law enforcement. But, in a statute from 1956, Congress gave the President the authority to federalize any state’s National Guard in the event of an “invasion by a foreign nation” or a “rebellion” against the federal government, or in cases when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

In June, President Trump first mobilized thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of marines to L.A. to protect ICE officers and other federal employees, functions, and property at sites where people were protesting against the Administration. Those deployments provoked more protests, which, in turn, fuelled the Administration’s claims that troops are needed to quell them. The sight of armed soldiers outfitted for war on city streets strikes many Americans as a frightening escalation from a President seemingly bent on punishing those who oppose him. The problem, though, is not what’s illegal but what isn’t. The lawfulness of Trump’s actions hinges on circumstances specified by Congress, and the courts have not been uniform in evaluating them.

A federal district court in California temporarily blocked the deployment of troops to L.A. in June. But the Ninth Circuit lifted the block, recognizing that courts are “highly deferential” to a President’s assessments. It found that Trump likely had a “colorable basis” for claiming to be “unable with the regular forces to execute” federal immigration law, given the evidence that some protesters had violently interfered with law enforcement by throwing things at ICE vehicles and federal officials, utilizing “dumpsters as a battering ram” at a federal building, lobbing Molotov cocktails, and vandalizing property. The California district court later ruled that the Administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using soldiers to execute federal law, and an appeal is pending.

Last week, an Oregon federal district judge, Karin Immergut, who had been appointed by Trump, found that the President probably lacked the authority to federalize the National Guard to deploy in Portland in September. That conclusion rested largely on the contrast between Portland and L.A. in the weeks leading up to the President’s orders regarding each city. That is, unlike when Trump sent troops to L.A., “it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland.” The Justice Department’s claims of disruptive protests in September included “setting up a makeshift guillotine,” posting a photo of an ICE vehicle online, and shining flashlights in drivers’ eyes—all of which, Judge Immergut said, could be successfully handled by law enforcement.

The President didn’t help his case by spreading outlandish falsehoods. He posted on Truth Social about “War ravaged Portland,” “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” and “Chaos, Death, and Destruction.” Even affording “a great level of deference” to the President, Judge Immergut concluded that the claim that Trump had been unable to execute federal law was “simply untethered to the facts.” But this commonsense point about Trump’s credibility may be controversial, too, because of the difficulty in determining when judicial second-guessing of the President’s assessments amounts to usurping the power that Congress has delegated to him. The Ninth Circuit may well ignore Trump’s posts and find that even low-level disruptions in recent weeks, or violent incidents from months earlier, are sufficient for him to send troops to protect federal officials’ ability to do their jobs. Meanwhile, a district court temporarily enjoined the deployment of troops in Illinois, noting that the Administration’s perception of events is “simply unreliable,” which was a polite way of rejecting the warping of reality entailed in viewing the protests in Chicago as a “rebellion.”

What is perhaps most concerning is that wide judicial deference to a truth-indifferent President may mean that there is effectively little to no constraint on what he can do, which would quickly erase the separation of powers, not to mention the federalism, that the Constitution is supposed to insure. The statute on federalizing the National Guard is only one of many laws that allow the President to decide whether certain circumstances exist—an invasion, a rebellion, an emergency, an “unusual and extraordinary threat”—and so exercise an extraordinary power. Last week, Trump said that, if necessary, he would invoke another statute, the Insurrection Act, which creates an exception to the prohibition on using the military for law enforcement: “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.” The Insurrection Act, which Trump has frequently mentioned in the past, gives the President staggeringly broader power. For instance, it permits him to use military force inside the U.S. “as he considers necessary to suppress” any “conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution” of federal law. Judges and state officials must surely understand that, if they stymie Trump, he is poised to unleash a more dangerous and harder-to-check power that Congress has already handed him.

Congress wrote such statutes with the apparent assumption that whoever held the office of the Presidency would use the powers they granted in good faith. Courts, for their part, developed legal doctrines that require them to presume the President’s good faith in deferring to him. The law may therefore be on the President’s side, which is troubling for what it suggests about its capacity to protect against tyranny. Judge Immergut insisted that “this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.” We must hope that they do not turn out to be one and the same. ♦

For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”

So it felt fairly ominous when hundreds of serving generals and admirals were summoned from their postings around the world for a televised meeting on Tuesday with Trump and Hegseth, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. “Central casting,” the President said, beaming at the officers in the audience, who sat listening impassively, as is their tradition. He praised his own peace efforts, particularly in the Middle East, and mused about bringing back the battleship (“Nice six-inch sides, solid steel, not aluminum,” which “melts if it looks at a missile coming at it”), then issued what sounded like a directive. He proposed using American cities as “training grounds” for the military, envisioning a “quick-reaction force” that would be sent out at his discretion. “This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Trump said, like a theatre teacher trying to gin up interest in the spring musical. “That’s a war, too. It’s the war from within.”

Peace abroad and war at home? It was an unusual note to strike in an electoral democracy, even if recent reports had indicated that a draft National Defense Strategy would shift the military’s focus from Russia and China to domestic and regional threats. But though Trump keeps talking about his domestic military missions in a dramatic future tense, not much has been demanded of the ones deployed so far. In Washington, D.C., where troops were sent this summer as part of a supposed war on crime, they were seen picking up trash, painting fences, and finding lost children, while the arrests they initiated often led to trumped-up charges that grand juries rejected, in what the Times described as a “citizens’ revolt.”

When that offensive petered out, Trump turned his attention to immigration enforcement in the Windy City. (“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” he warned on social media.) Yet there has been an asymmetry between the Sturm und Drang of that operation—a midnight raid featured agents rappelling from helicopters onto a South Side apartment building—and its effect. Alderperson Andre Vasquez, who chairs the city council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said that his office had not seen enforcement “to the level of what is being promoted by the President,” and reporters struggled to square government claims about the number of detainees with court records. Even so, the Border Patrol announced that a marine unit would be relocated to Chicago. “Lakes and rivers are borders,” an official said. With what, Michigan?

Cities do have problems, but no matter how much Trump wants to literalize the culture war they are not war zones. Memphis and Portland are next on the President’s list. But the generals and the admirals assembled at Quantico might have reasonably noticed a paradox: although Trump seems to want no restraints on what he can do with the military, he hasn’t yet articulated anything specific for it to do, other than make a show of reducing crime in places where the rate is generally already falling.

The call to Quantico initially came from Hegseth, lately seen staging a pushup contest with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At the Pentagon, Hegseth, who has few typical qualifications for his position, has largely focussed on a de-wokeification program, restoring the names of Confederate generals to military bases and, last week, rejecting efforts to revoke the Medals of Honor for soldiers involved in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. At Quantico, he declared that to instill a “warrior ethos,” a new promotions policy would be based on “merit only.” But it sounded like a pretty superficial idea of merit. “It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth said. He mentioned beards and fat (he’s against them) more than he did drones or missiles. “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” he added. “It’s a bad look.” But does Hegseth want the best generals, or just the best skinny ones?

It’s interesting that the long tail of the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should wind its way here, to a militaristic right-wing President who loudly denounced those foreign conflicts but means to treat American cities as war zones, and to a Defense Secretary who wants to do away with rules of engagement. Among the defense community, the reaction to the Quantico speeches was an extended eye roll. “Could have been an email,” an anonymous senior official told Politico. On Tuesday, the White House announced that troops would be sent to Portland to “crush violent radical left terrorism.” That sounded much more frightening than the policy details reported by Oregon Public Radio: two hundred National Guard troops would be sent to provide additional security at federal facilities. For now, there is a heavy element of make-believe in the President’s domestic military ambitions, which, as was the case with the now greatly diminished doge project, allows him to pretend that he wants a major substantive change when what he really seems to want is more power.

On Wednesday, in Memphis, the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told a group of deputized federal officers, “You are unleashed.” That same day, the President’s lawyers asserted in a letter to Congress that the country is now formally in an “armed conflict” with the drug trade broadly, a determination through which Trump can claim extraordinary wartime powers. (There have been three more lethal attacks on boats in the southern Caribbean since early September, the most recent on Friday.) Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one. ♦

On a humid Charleston evening ten years ago, a ninth-grade dropout with a bowl haircut named Dylann Roof walked into a Bible-study class at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, home to the oldest historically Black congregation in South Carolina. Roof, twenty-one, carried a .45-calibre Glock semi-automatic and eight magazines of hollow-point bullets. He settled into a seat near Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator, who was leading a discussion of a parable from the Gospel of Mark. Around them sat a dozen parishioners, all Black, mostly women decades older than Roof.

Roof had set down his creed on a website he called “The Last Rhodesian”: a lonely, seething hatred of Black people, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics. He posted photographs of himself holding a Confederate flag and standing at Sullivan’s Island, where hundreds of thousands of Africans had once been sold into bondage. “We have no skinheads, no real K.K.K., no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” he wrote. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

In the Bible-study class, Roof sat quietly for forty-five minutes. When the assembled bowed their heads in prayer, he stood, drew the Glock, and began to fire—pausing only to reload, then firing again. He loosed some seventy-five rounds. Tywanza Sanders, a young barber who had come with his mother, collapsed to the floor. As he lay dying, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country,” Roof replied.

He spotted a woman praying under a table. “Shut up. Did I shoot you yet?”

“No,” she said.

“I’m going to let you live,” he told her, “so you can tell the story of what happened.”

What lingers in memory from Charleston, beyond the horror of the massacre, are the funerals that followed—above all, Barack Obama at the service for Clementa Pinckney, closing his eulogy by singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” That unscripted hymn may have been the most moving moment of his Presidency. Yet another moment was still more poignant, and, for many, beyond comprehension. Two days after the murders, at Roof’s bond hearing, the families of the dead spoke through their grief. They did not renounce him. They forgave him.

Felicia Sanders, Tywanza’s mother, addressed Roof directly: “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms. You have killed some of the most beautiful people that I know. Every fibre in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. But, as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. May God have mercy on you.” The daughter of Ethel Lance, who died at the age of seventy, told him, “You took something very precious away from me . . . but I forgive you.” Obama later said that the “decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families.”

It was impossible not to recall those words of mercy while watching the memorial service, last Sunday, for Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist assassinated this month as he spoke at Utah Valley University. Tens of thousands of people filled a stadium in Glendale, Arizona, to honor him. Kirk was thirty-one, with a wife and two small children. The service lasted more than five hours, but the moment that stilled the crowd came when his widow, Erika, spoke of her husband’s killer in the language of absolution. “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” she said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love—love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

President Donald Trump, who spoke next, embraced Erika Kirk, but at the microphone he all but rebuked the spirit of her forgiveness. Charlie Kirk, he said, in the course of a self-regarding and vengeful ramble, “did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.” Other Administration speakers, including J. D. Vance and Stephen Miller, echoed Trump, not Erika Kirk. Retribution, division, grievance—this is the official language of the regime.

At the start of Trump 1.0, the journalist Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic that the press took him literally but not seriously; his supporters took him seriously but not literally. The line was meant to suggest how out of touch the press was. Trump himself told Zito that his true aim was, in her words, to “bring the country together—no small task.”

Of course, this was never the case, and each week brings fresh evidence of the darkness we are being led into: the attack on the rule of law, the weaponization of the state against the President’s enemies, the erosion of civil liberties, the colossal Trump-family grift. The assault is relentless. In the days after the memorial, Trump managed to “unite” the country by renewing his threats against Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian guilty of nothing more than making fun of him; by pushing through a last-minute indictment of James Comey; by convening a press conference where he pronounced on the science of autism—“based on what I feel”—in a manner so reckless that it was guaranteed to sow confusion and anguish among parents desperate for clarity; and by informing the United Nations that America is “the hottest country anywhere,” that he deserves Nobel Prizes for ending “seven unendable wars,” that the U.N. is a useless organization, and that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” We look forward to next week.

It is not easy to reconcile the act of forgiveness with some of the positions Charlie Kirk once took. They were in moral opposition to the civil-rights-era spirit that infused the parishioners of Mother Emanuel. But his instinct to argue, to engage, left open the possibility of evolution. Trump is long past that horizon. His appetites and his animosities only deepen. Hope lies not in expecting a late-in-life conversion experience in the Oval Office but in carrying out the ordinary work of civic life—in persuading neighbors, friends, even family who have supported Trump to reconsider their decision, one hard conversation at a time. Grace is not weakness but resolve, the Charleston families believed, and politics, too, depends on a willingness to coax one another toward better ground. In that work of persuasion, of politics—slow, imperfect, yet necessary—we attempt to close the distance between what we are and what we might still become. ♦