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  • Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Life in Pictures

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    Andrew has always maintained that he has no memory of ever meeting Giuffre, and that he committed no wrongdoing in any of his relations with Epstein, who died in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Nonetheless, in 2011, Andrew stepped down from his decade-long role as a U.K. international-trade envoy. In 2019, after a disastrous television interview in which he admitted that he had “let the side down” by his association with Epstein, Andrew stepped back from royal duties.

    Just over two years later, Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages and military roles; soon afterward, he reached a reportedly multimillion-dollar settlement with Giuffre in a civil sexual-abuse suit, in which he admitted no liability. Last October, with the posthumous publication of Giuffre’s memoir, in which she alleged that she had had sex with Andrew on three occasions, he surrendered the use of his title Duke of York. Then—in what would once have seemed an impossible demotion—he was effectively stripped of his royal status altogether, and reborn as Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. For a man whose identity was constituted around a sense of social superiority—according to Lownie’s book, if Andrew was met with insufficient deference upon entering a room he would loudly announce, “Let’s try that again,” before exiting and reëntering to hastily performed bows and curtsies—the reduction in status was surely a profound humiliation. Even Charles I, who was executed for treason in 1649, went to the scaffold as King.

    Last week, Andrew spent his first birthday as a commoner in circumstances as degraded as earlier celebrations had been grand. At around eight in the morning, he was arrested at a farmhouse on the King’s Sandringham estate—not in relation to any sexual offenses but on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest apparently resulted from documents recently disclosed by the United States Department of Justice suggesting that as trade envoy he had shared privileged information with Epstein. (Mountbatten-Windsor has, as of this writing, not been charged with any crime.) Identified by the police as “a man in his sixties from Norfolk,” Andrew, who is the first senior member of the Royal Family to be arrested since Charles I, spent about eleven hours in custody before being released under investigation. As the car carrying him departed the police station, a photographer captured another indelible image, of the former Prince slumped in the back seat, wide-eyed and slack-jawed—the boy for whom the chimes once pealed looking very much like a man for whom the bell now tolls.

    Andrew is not the only highly placed member of the British establishment whose reputation, at the very least, has been destroyed by an association with Epstein. Peter Mandelson, the former Ambassador to the U.S., is under investigation for passing privileged information along to the financier. (Mandelson has not been arrested or charged, and a report by the BBC noted its understanding that “his position is that he has not acted in any way criminally.”) That scandal has shaken an already unsteady Prime Minister Keir Starmer, despite Starmer’s having never so much as encountered Epstein himself. “Nobody is above the law,” the Prime Minister said during a television interview, broadcast last week just as Andrew was being arrested.

    In Britain, on the current evidence, that appears to be true: investigators have been promised the “wholehearted support” of the King, who issued a statement while his brother was still in custody that “the law must take its course.” It is striking that, by contrast, no authorities in the U.S. seem willing or able to seek comparable accountability from the powerful men who entered Epstein’s orbit. President Trump, when asked whether more former Epstein associates might face arrest, replied, “Well, you know, I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated,” deflecting the question while allowing that events were “very, very sad” for the Royal Family, as if this were a parochial affair among posh Brits, free from implications for an American élite. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s legal fate is still unfolding, but whatever the future holds, the party is over for him. When will it be over for the rest of them? ♦

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    Rebecca Mead

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  • Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?

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    In May, between the two payments, Trump, overruling objections from his national-security advisers about Emirati ties to China, approved a huge sale of cutting-edge A.I. computer chips to the U.A.E. (A spokesman for World Liberty said that the President and Steve Witkoff had not had “any involvement whatsoever” since the election and that the Emirati deal had nothing to do with Trump’s decision about the chips. Trump told reporters that he does not know about the investment and that his sons “are handling that.”)

    It is well documented that Trump and his immediate family have exploited the Presidency for personal profit on an unprecedented scale. Last summer, The New Yorker calculated that over the past decade those profits came to $3.4 billion. Six months later, at the end of his first year back in office, that tally had climbed to more than four billion. But the Emirati payment raises novel questions, beginning with the Constitution’s prohibition against officeholders accepting any “present” or “emolument” from a foreign state without congressional consent. In Trump’s first term, his lawyers contended that renting hotel rooms at Trump properties to foreign states was not the kind of “emolument” that the Founders had in mind. They argued that this was a “fair value” exchange and that, in any case, Trump donated the profits to the U.S. Treasury.

    Trump did abstain from new business deals outside the U.S. in his first term. In his second, he has abandoned such scruples. Yet the Trump Organization maintains that it still avoids deals with foreign governments—a claim the Emirati payment appears to vitiate. Will Trump say that it, too, was a “fair value” exchange and donate the profits?

    Then, there’s the secrecy. The sheer brazenness of the Trump family’s operations has been in some ways Trump’s strongest defense against charges of corruption. Because Presidents cannot be expected to jettison all their financial ties, government ethics rules rely mainly on public disclosure to allow voters, and their elected representatives, to judge whether a President puts personal interests ahead of the public’s. And, until now, Trump always seemed unembarrassed to crow about his side hustles. But, if the Emirati payment was kept secret, what else might be? Both World Liberty and Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars from unnamed investors over the past year. Neither the companies nor the President has disclosed the sources of that money.

    In the run-up to the 2020 election, Bob Bauer, who was a lawyer in the Obama White House, and Jack Goldsmith, an Assistant Attorney General under President George W. Bush, published a book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” In it, they offered reforms to curtail the opportunities for the abuse of executive power that Trump’s first term had exposed—opportunities that his second term has taken to extremes. To address potential financial conflicts of interest, one proposal would require Presidents to certify that they have fully removed themselves from any role in any private businesses in which they own stakes, with no access to information about them that is not also available to the public. A second would force any such business to disclose its assets, liabilities, and other stakeholders (precluding a secret investment by a foreign government). A third would give teeth to the emoluments clause: any business connected to a President would be required to publicly report any expected payment or benefit from an arm of a foreign state. If Congress did not consent to it within sixty days, a President would be forced to sell off that interest.

    Such measures are, of course, out of the question as long as Trump has a veto. But most of our current government ethics rules date back to a bipartisan backlash after the Watergate scandal. It is hardly impossible that Trump’s self-enrichment, at four billion dollars and counting, might yet trigger a similar wave. ♦

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    David D. Kirkpatrick

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  • Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis

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    On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

    Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.

    The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

    This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.

    Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

    Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • Donald Trump Was Never an Isolationist

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    There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.”

    The audience hated this. Trump’s fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.

    Trump hadn’t stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”) But by 2004 he truly was opposed. He scoffed at the notion that the war would achieve anything. What was the point of “people coming back with no arms and legs” and “all those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces?” he asked. “All of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.”

    Skepticism came easily to Trump, who had long been hostile to mainstream foreign policy. He made his political début, in 1987, by taking out full-page ads in several papers to complain of Washington’s “monumental spending” on defense for allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia. The foundations of U.S. supremacy since 1945—the aid packages, alliances, trade pacts, and basing arrangements that make up what the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the “symphony of power”—have all seemed to Trump like a colossal waste.

    Critics have called Trump an isolationist. Given the unconcealed delight he takes in dropping bombs on foreign lands (seven countries in 2025 alone), that can’t be right. A better diagnosis is that Trump doesn’t think the United States should seek to superintend global affairs, to take responsibility for the operation of the system. “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” his recently released National Security Strategy explains. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

    At times, Trump has veered oddly close to the left, which has opposed trade deals (“neoliberalism”), military interventions (“warmongering”), the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus (“the Blob”), and the U.S. policing of the planet (“empire”). In his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, he scored points by spotlighting her support of the Iraq War. “In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said last year, “and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

    What distinguishes Trump from the left, of course, are his narrow nationalism and his love of raw force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” he has boasted. He relabelled the Department of Defense the Department of War, and appointed a Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has promised to give “America’s warriors” the freedom to “kill people and break things.” Forget the symphony of power; Trump just wants to crash the cymbals.

    Trump’s second term has been cacophonous with threats—to acquire Greenland, ethnically cleanse Gaza, make a state of Canada, throw the world economy into convulsions. This is a self-conscious flight from principles toward what he calls the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”

    Hence this past weekend’s assault on Venezuela, in which U.S. forces launched air strikes on Caracas and nabbed the head of state, President Nicolás Maduro. (At least a hundred people were killed, local authorities say.) Trump claims that his goal is to punish Maduro for heading a “vast criminal network” that has brought “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” But this is hard to swallow. The drug that is killing people, fentanyl, is almost entirely produced in Mexico, and the drug Venezuela does play a (minor) part in transporting, cocaine, goes mainly from there to Europe. Also, didn’t Trump just pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran President, who had been sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison for conspiring to import four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States?

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    Daniel Immerwahr

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  • What Will New York’s New Map Show Us?

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    On the new map, you can readily see where each train stops, but with less of a sense of where you are on the grid. Central Park, for instance, has been reduced to a small, deformed square. This change is not as helpful to tourists as it is meant to be, but, then, locals secretly think that, if you don’t know where the B train runs, you shouldn’t be on it. (Anyway, locals and tourists alike, seeking some new destination, will ultimately turn to their phones, on which the cooing G.P.S. lady will tell them how to get there.)

    Maps become less perfect, even as they attempt to become more perfect. In Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” we learn of a map, described by an ambitious philosopher, that increases in scale bit by bit until it’s the same size as the terrain it represents. Unable to roll the map out, its creators cheerfully realize that the country itself can serve as its own map. Perhaps the most beloved map in recent decades was Saul Steinberg’s view of New York, initially a cover for this magazine. In the guise of a map, it captured a mentality: New Yorkers see anything beyond Eleventh Avenue as blank, uncharted wilderness. Steinberg’s point was not that his fellow New Yorkers were provincial but that all maps record a state of mind. (Indeed, on the Steinbergian map of today’s New York state of mind, many Brooklyn neighborhoods would loom as large as his West Side avenues did.)

    Even the current redistricting battle reveals the constant paradox: we draw firm lines around a fluctuating reality. The intention in Texas, recently green-lighted by the Supreme Court, was to redraw the congressional map to make it easier for Republicans to win more districts, however absurd the boundaries. But the shifting allegiances of the people within those boundaries may thwart the designers’ aim. The Latinos grouped together who were expected to vote Republican may, after the mass mobilization of ICE and the implementation of other anti-immigrant policies, no longer do so. The map itself can’t capture the changing views of the people who populate it.

    “The map is not the territory” is by now a truism, but the more important truth is that the territory is inarticulate without a map to know it by. Maps are the ideal metaphor for our models of what the world might be. A new political map of New York City awaits us—“slight left turn ahead,” as the G.P.S. lady would say, unless she pauses and issues an unsettling “recalculating” alert.

    And so for the map of the country. We live in a time when the chart of the nation, its recognizable edges and worn paths, has been largely erased and replaced with one that calls to mind medieval maps, with misshapen horizons, weirdly distorted territories, and dragons lurking beyond the borders. The primary feeling that many of us currently experience is not merely distress but profound disorientation. We not only don’t like where we are; we don’t know where we are. Once reliable routes to reality have been cut off.

    It helps to know where we’re going before we get there. If there is a consoling reflection in this season, it is that all good maps, like the digitized city map, turn out to be shared work, made by many hands over a long period of time. Drawing a plan of our plans is the necessary task of the approaching year, as an act of collective imagination and common hope. ♦

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    Adam Gopnik

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  • What Zohran Mamdani Is Up Against

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    According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundred-and-thirty-third, based on the department’s best estimates. “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other missing Mayors.”

    New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, a.k.a. the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, a.k.a. Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), hard-charging mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little to no prior experience in elected office (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported the Democratic Socialists of America. (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or a bad mayor, he will also not be alone in either respect. He will, however, be the city’s first Muslim mayor, and the first with family roots in Asia. He is as avowedly of the left as any mayor in city history. And the velocity of his rise to power is the fastest that anyone in town can recall.

    Since his general-election trouncing of the former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of governing—appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. Trying to preserve the movement energy he tapped during the campaign, he has also made an effort to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to broad public attention. Just last Sunday, for instance, he sat in a room in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s giving up to move into Gracie Mansion), for twelve hours, meeting with New Yorkers for three minutes at a time. It was a gesture to show that he could look his constituents in the eye, and that he could listen to them.

    Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign, and he has run a disciplined transition. He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him. Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office—and they startled everyone by having an outwardly productive meeting. (Trump happily told Mamdani that it was O.K. to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young D.S.A. city-council member, Chi Ossé, from staging a primary challenge next year to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries—a magnanimous move, considering Jeffries’s ongoing chilliness toward Mamdani. In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and in others filled with donors, he has tried to win over skeptics among New York’s élite. (“They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when he asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, whom Adams appointed, to stay in the job. Last week, when a top appointee’s old antisemitic tweets surfaced, Mamdani accepted her resignation within hours.

    Having rocketed, in a matter of months, from one per cent in the polls to mayor, Mamdani seems comfortable facing his doubters. But what he’s up against cannot be overstated. It’s been an open question for centuries as to whether New York is “governable” in a top-to-bottom, municipal, positive sense. For a long time, city government here was considered little more than a trough for Tammany Hall. In the past century, the city proved that it could (more or less) pick up its own garbage, get a handle on crime, and operate large school and hospital systems, even if sometimes just barely. It can do more than that, of course, but can it durably make life in New York better, and not just more tolerable, for the bulk of its residents? In his effort to answer affirmatively, Mamdani will have to navigate problems of management, budget, and bureaucracy inside City Hall, and also Trump (does anyone think their chumminess will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires, public impatience with slips or inconsistencies, and twists of fate and nature. The billionaire exodus that was forecast during his campaign has shown no signs of materializing, but one bad blizzard in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months.

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    Eric Lach

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  • The Justice Department Hits a New Low with the Epstein Files

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    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. ♦

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    Ruth Marcus

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  • The Meaning of Trump’s Presidential Pardons

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    “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. ♦

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • Voting Rights and Immigration Under Attack

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    Sixty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that are, to a remarkable degree, animating forces in the most volatile aspects of the current political moment. In August, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil-rights movement which paved the way for the election of thousands of African Americans to political office in states where, previously, they were not even allowed to vote. Two months later, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, overturning the Immigration Act of 1924, which, by way of eugenics, had sought to curate an immigrant stock of white Europeans. Taken together, the laws democratized the idea of who could be an American, and also which Americans could freely exercise their rights at the ballot box. The Trump Administration and its Republican allies are now engaged in a concerted effort to return the United States to the landscape that preceded them.

    The G.O.P. under Donald Trump, like many reactionary nationalist movements, is disproportionately concerned with demographics. Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade has reached a point where masked federal troops are snatching people from their homes—including an instantly infamous ice raid on Chicago’s South Side that involved a Black Hawk helicopter—their cars, their workplaces, courthouses, and public streets. Further demonstrating the nature of the President’s exclusionary vision, on Thursday the Administration announced that it will slash the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. next year to seventy-five hundred, with priority given to white Afrikaners. In addition, the Administration is insisting that universities accept fewer international students, recognizing that admission to such institutions is often the first step toward citizenship.

    The President’s goals were made plain on the first day of his second term, when he issued an executive order defying the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship clause. The clause was written after the Civil War to affirm that emancipated native-born Black people were citizens, as was virtually anyone born in this country. But it has been targeted as a means of insuring that children born here without a parent who is either a citizen or a permanent resident are not automatically granted citizenship themselves. Courts blocked the executive order, so, in September, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to take up the question of its legality. The attorneys general of twenty-four Republican-led states have urged the Court to act in Trump’s favor.

    At the same time, the President’s desire to control which Americans’ votes will count has been manifested in the battle over congressional maps. The maps are typically revised every ten years, after the census. But three states—Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina—have redrawn their maps at Trump’s behest, creating potentially six more G.O.P.-held seats, and several others, including Louisiana, have taken steps to do the same. This is a transparent attempt to move the goalposts ahead of the 2026 midterms, when a three-seat shift would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives.

    In response, at least five states with Democratic majorities are considering redrawing their maps. To counter Texas’s move, California put redistricting on its November ballot, which could give the Democrats five more seats, and voters appear set to approve the measure. In a perverse mirroring of a provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is dispatching federal election monitors to some California districts.

    But the potential impact of state efforts would likely pale in comparison with the one presented last month at the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais. In January, 2024, following court orders, Louisiana—which is allotted six seats in the House of Representatives, and where African Americans make up a third of the population—passed a map that created a second majority-Black district. In March, after a legal challenge, the state attorney general defended the map before the Supreme Court, asserting that it was consistent with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing districts in a way that minimizes minority voters’ ability to elect their candidates of choice. (Strategically drawn districts were key in preventing African Americans from gaining political power prior to the civil-rights movement.) But a group identifying itself as “non-African American voters” has claimed that the protections enshrined in Section 2 are themselves discriminatory, in that they offer Black voters an entitlement not offered to non-Black voters. And Louisiana has effectively switched sides, arguing that the map it defended just last year should now be struck down.

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    Jelani Cobb

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  • Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing

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    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.

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    Adam Gopnik

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  • A “New Middle East” Is Easier to Declare Than to Achieve

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    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.

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    David Remnick

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  • The Real Problem Is How Trump Can Legally Use the Military

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    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. ♦

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    Jeannie Suk Gersen

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  • Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the “War from Within”

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    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. ♦

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • Grace and Disgrace

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    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. ♦

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    David Remnick

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  • Seeing Enemies Everywhere

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    Following the tragic death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the line between eulogy and blame wore swiftly and predictably thin. By Monday afternoon, five days after Kirk’s murder, it was threadbare. If the encouragement of political dissent is a part of Kirk’s legacy, as his supporters have insisted, the actual practice of it isn’t tolerated much at the moment. His podcast continued, on schedule, with a series of guest hosts. One was Vice-President J. D. Vance, who declared that national unity wasn’t possible while people were “celebrating” Kirk’s death. The available evidence suggests that Kirk’s alleged killer, a twenty-two-year-old man from Utah without any clear political affiliation, acted alone. But Vance already had a unified theory of the case, and he brought on Stephen Miller, the White House’s most fervent ideologue, to help him lay it out. The killing, in their telling, was the direct result of a coördinated and well-financed network of leftist organizations that “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” Vance and Miller spoke as if this were a truism. It is now apparently up to members of the Trump Administration to decide who, in criticizing Kirk’s lifework, might somehow be condoning his death.

    As an example, Vance called out an essay in The Nation that assails Kirk’s views on women, homosexuality, and affirmative action. “It made it through the editors, and, of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack,” Vance said. By “attack,” was he referring to the murder, or to the writer’s withering appraisal of Kirk’s positions? It scarcely mattered. The Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, bêtes noires of the political right, were to blame. Miller, meanwhile, vowed that “we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.” Evidently, he hadn’t read a 2024 study from the Department of Justice which found that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism”; in recent days, it was taken down from the department’s website.

    The first nine months of Donald Trump’s second term have been a breakneck exercise in rebranding those disfavored by the White House as enemies of the state. Such enemies can have many faces, and the government has gained increasing latitude in picking them out to serve its agenda. The week of Kirk’s death, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed federal immigration agents conducting “roving” patrols in Los Angeles to arrest residents on the basis of their race or ethnicity, or just if they’re speaking Spanish in a Home Depot parking lot. At the same time, the Justice Department is devising its own means to target anyone who opposes the President’s immigration policies. In August, it moved to fine Joshua Schroeder, a lawyer in California who unsuccessfully fought a client’s deportation in court, for making what the government claimed were “myriad meritless contentions” and “knowing or reckless misrepresentations.” He appears to be the first attorney sanctioned under a memo, signed by the President in March, to penalize lawyers or firms that pursued what the government deemed “unreasonable” cases against it.

    Last week, the Justice Department advanced its prosecution of LaMonica McIver, a Democratic congresswoman from Newark, whom the Administration has accused of “assaulting” a federal agent outside an immigration jail in May—a charge she denies. She was arrested along with Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark. (The charges against him, for trespassing, were dropped.) According to footage from an agent’s body camera, the officer who arrested Baraka said that the order had come from Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and now the No. 2 at the Justice Department.

    In a CNN interview after Kirk’s death, Blanche also argued that a group of women who had recently protested against Trump when he was dining out in Washington could be prosecuted under the RICO Act, a law typically used against gangs and organized-crime groups. Blanche’s boss, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said that she would “absolutely target” people who engaged in “hate speech.” On Tuesday, Jonathan Karl, a correspondent for ABC, asked Trump what Bondi had meant. “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,” Trump said. “You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC. Well, ABC paid me sixteen million dollars recently for a form of hate speech.” The government’s working definition of “hate speech” now seems to include anything that offends the President personally. Last week, he sued the Times for fifteen billion dollars for publishing articles that, among other things, credited the producer Mark Burnett, rather than Trump himself, for the success of “The Apprentice”; on Friday, a federal judge dismissed the suit.

    The legal underpinnings of Trump’s threats have always been dubious, but his bullying, as a tactic of intimidation, is succeeding spectacularly. Trump hates being laughed at, and comedians who once enjoyed the armor of celebrity are finding that their corporate employers would rather sacrifice the First Amendment than risk retaliation. The late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had offered his condolences to Kirk’s family and called the shooting “horrible and monstrous.” But, on Wednesday, ABC suspended him indefinitely for a segment in which he likened Trump’s conspicuously detached response to the murder to how a “four-year-old mourns a goldfish.” Aboard Air Force One the next day, Trump told reporters that TV networks on which he is criticized are “an arm of the Democrat Party” and could have their broadcasting licenses revoked.

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    Jonathan Blitzer

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  • R.F.K., Jr., Brings More Chaos to COVID Policy and the C.D.C.

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    Last month, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, demanded that Susan Monarez, the newly confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fire senior officials at her agency and accept wholesale the recommendations of a handpicked panel of vaccine advisers whom he had installed. Monarez refused, and Kennedy asked for her resignation, just weeks after saying that he had “full confidence” in her “unimpeachable scientific credentials.” She appealed to G.O.P. lawmakers, including Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee and who had cast a crucial vote in favor of Kennedy’s confirmation after receiving what one can only imagine were extremely believable assurances that he wouldn’t do what he is now doing. The White House resolved the standoff by showing Monarez the door. (A headline in “Intelligencer” captured Cassidy’s posture: “Key Republican Almost Annoyed Enough at RFK Jr. to Act.”)

    Then the C.D.C., which has bled thousands of employees since Kennedy took office, was further roiled by the resignations of several high-ranking officials. Nine former C.D.C. directors and acting directors published an essay in the Times arguing that Kennedy’s actions “should alarm every American,” and more than a thousand current and former Health and Human Services employees called for Kennedy’s resignation. On Thursday, at a contentious hearing before the Senate finance committee, Kennedy accused Monarez of lying, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, about why she was fired. She wrote that his agenda “isn’t reform. It is sabotage.”

    There won’t be a day when Americans awake to news that vaccines are prohibited, or that the National Institutes of Health has been shuttered. No agent will come knocking on your door to make sure that you’re drinking raw milk and cooking with beef tallow. But Kennedy has already propagated an insidious revolution within the agencies under his control, using a playbook familiar to illiberal leaders—culling expertise, silencing critics, and weaponizing administrative procedure to grant a veneer of legitimacy to his actions.

    When maga met maha, Donald Trump vowed that Kennedy would “go wild on health.” Promises made, promises kept. Kennedy has gutted the C.D.C.’s independent vaccine-advisory panel and appointed a noted vaccine skeptic to study the causes of autism. The N.I.H. has distributed billions less in funding and awarded thousands fewer grants than in a typical year; although a Senate committee recently voted to increase the agency’s budget for the next fiscal year—in defiance of a forty-per-cent cut requested by Trump—officials are concerned that they will be blocked from getting the money to researchers. Government scientists have reported that their work has been undermined, and Kennedy has suggested that he may bar employees from publishing in “corrupt” medical journals, in favor of “in-house” publications. Claiming that he had “listened to the experts,” Kennedy cancelled half a billion dollars in funding for mRNA technology—a genuine triumph of Trump’s first term that not only is our best defense against future pandemic pathogens but also shows potential as a treatment for autoimmune conditions and deadly cancers.

    The effects of Kennedy’s maneuvering could be most acute when it comes to covid. During the past year, the virus has sickened millions of Americans and led to tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. The C.D.C. estimates that infections are now increasing in dozens of states; in New York City, there are reports of patients flooding medical practices with inquiries about their symptoms, and about whether they’re eligible to get immunized, in the wake of new restrictions announced by the Food and Drug Administration. (Vaccine eligibility is usually determined by the C.D.C., but, in another departure from precedent, the F.D.A. usurped that role.) At the end of August, the F.D.A. approved updated covid shots targeting an Omicron descendant known as LP.8.1., but authorized them only for people aged sixty-five and older and for younger individuals with certain high-risk conditions. Earlier this year, before disbanding the C.D.C.’s vaccine panel, Kennedy unilaterally announced that the agency would no longer recommend covid vaccination for healthy children or pregnant women. (Kennedy’s newly appointed panel is scheduled to meet this month to discuss immunization protocols for covid and other diseases.)

    The federal government’s vaccination recommendations are more than just a biomedical bully pulpit—they have implications for who can access a vaccine and what it will cost them. Health insurers generally aren’t required to cover vaccines that the C.D.C. hasn’t recommended, and uncertain reimbursement can affect whether pharmacies and doctors’ offices carry a product. Some doctors may also be wary of the liability associated with administering vaccines to people for whom they were not officially approved; although doctors have traditionally been protected from legal exposure related to harms resulting from vaccination, Kennedy has warned that those who “diverge from the CDC’s official list are not shielded from liability.” Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether pharmacists, who administer most vaccines to adults in the U.S., are protected. “These pharmacists at CVS and Walgreens who were giving the vaccine are in a conundrum,” Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said recently. “And that’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s goal—to make things confusing.”

    Kennedy’s reign might end tomorrow if not for the President’s unwavering support. Trump, who has sometimes seemed conflicted about the anti-vax sentiment in his coalition that prevents him from claiming more credit for Operation Warp Speed, has thoroughly capitulated to the political reality that Kennedy is a useful ally. The two men share a talent for misrepresenting facts and an animosity toward institutions. But the nation’s institutions—political, academic, scientific—are the reason that it has long been the world’s unrivalled biomedical leader.

    The question now is how much more hollowing out Americans will tolerate, and whether the nation’s self-correcting mechanisms are still operational. In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville warned of a path by which institutions in a country like the U.S. might degrade—not by violent seizure but by the consolidation of control through “a network of small, complicated rules” that marginalizes innovators and experts. What kept this from happening here—what made America great—were “habits of the heart”: the everyday engagement of citizens that sustains institutions by holding leaders to account. Habits fade, but they can also be revived. ♦

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    Dhruv Khullar

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  • The Trump Administration’s Efforts to Reshape America’s Past

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    In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald J. Trump, thirty, leonine, and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured around Manhattan by an armed laid-off city cop in a silver Cadillac with “DJT” plates, while talking on his hot-shot car phone and making deals. “He could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos,” an architect told the Times. That architect was drawing up plans for a convention center that Trump hoped to build in midtown. Trump called it the “Miracle on 34th Street,” promising a cultural showpiece, with fountains, pools, a giant movie theatre, half a million square feet of exhibition space, and rooftop solar panels.

    The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue
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    On the Fourth of July of that red-white-and-blue year, the Tall Ships—a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels from more than a dozen countries—sailed into New York Harbor. Three days later, Trump was in Washington, D.C., presenting to the city’s redevelopment board his plan to build another gargantuan convention center, this one near the U.S. Capitol. Encountering stiff resistance, according to the Evening Star, a visibly “miffed” Trump left the meeting “in a huff.”

    The paper did not report whether, before leaving D.C., Trump stopped by the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology to tour its thirty-five-thousand-square-foot bicentennial exhibition, “A Nation of Nations.” Five years in the making, it told the twinned stories of American union and disunion with five thousand objects, from a Ute flute and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves to a Klan robe and a sign that read “Japs Keep Out You Rats.” The show aimed to demonstrate how people “came to America, from prehistoric times to the present,” and “how experiences in the new land changed them.”

    It is also unknown whether Trump, huffy and miffed, walked along the National Mall to see the Smithsonian’s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife, the product of years of field work conducted on a scale not seen since the nineteen-thirties. One field worker, for instance, found a Cajun crawfish peeler in Louisiana, and recommended giving her a booth: “She can peel very fast.” The festival featured what organizers described as a “cultural sea” of cooks, dancers, and artisans; musicians, from fife-and-drum bands to Ghanaian gonje players; and a truckers’ “roadeo.” Margaret Mead called it “a people-to-people celebration” that revealed how Americans “have links—through people—to the whole world.”

    Neither of Trump’s lavish bicentennial projects came to pass. In September, 1976, a little more than a year after the Trump family business settled a lawsuit alleging that it had refused to rent to Black and Puerto Rican tenants in housing complexes in Brooklyn and Queens, marking their rental applications “C” for “colored” (the company settled without admitting wrongdoing), Trump’s father was arrested in Maryland and briefly jailed, having been charged with housing-code violations in apartments he rented to primarily Black tenants. (The elder Trump pleaded no contest and paid a fine.) And D.J.T., having sought tax abatements and municipal subsidies, lost out in his bids to build convention centers in New York and D.C. The Tall Ships sailed away. The moment passed.

    This summer, in advance of next year’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump White House sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announcing its intention to conduct an extensive review of all semiquincentennial plans. The review will require the museums to provide the President with information including “internal guidelines used in exhibition development”; “exhibition text, wall didactics, websites, educational materials, and digital and social media content”; and “proposed artwork, descriptive placards, exhibition catalogs, event themes, and lists of invited speakers and events.” The Administration, deploying the same strategy that it has used in menacing and extorting universities, did not specify in the letter how it intends to review these materials, or what standards it will apply. It did say that the purpose is to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” with “historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage” and especially of “Americanism—the people, principles, and progress that define our nation.” That the President of the United States doesn’t get to decide what is true and what is not is apparently no longer among those principles.

    Even before the White House announced the review, the Presidential purge of American cultural institutions had begun. Trump sacked the national archivist, the Librarian of Congress, and the board of the Kennedy Center, and said, on social media, that he had fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery. (He lacks the authority to do so, but she subsequently resigned.) His Administration killed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, hobbled the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and cut federal funding to thousands of state and local programs that support arts and music education for children.

    The Smithsonian letter followed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” one of whose directives is “Saving Our Smithsonian,” by “seeking to remove improper ideology” from its museums. The Smithsonian’s twenty-one institutions, whose role in the culture of the nation is invaluable and unparalleled, have had their share of lame exhibits and programs over the years, including a few that have been torridly inflamed by ideological ardor, as is true of any museum or cultural organization. That is the nature of culture. But it’s not in the nature of democracy for the government to intimidate and censor curators who have spent years preparing to do the always difficult and critical work of telling the nation’s story.

    “Perhaps our most significant achievement as a nation is the very fact that we are one people,” the Smithsonian proclaimed in a press release in the spring of 1976, at the opening of “A Nation of Nations.” “So many ancient and modern states composed of conflicting tribes, languages, and religious factions have failed to unite and remain whole.” How has this country lasted so long? the Smithsonian asked. “How is it that people representing cultures and traditions of literally every part of the world could come to think of themselves as one nation of Americans?” Those questions wouldn’t pass muster with this White House. They’re still excellent questions, though. How has this lasted so long? ♦

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    Jill Lepore

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  • Trump Sends in the National Guard

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    Tourists who came to Washington, D.C., last week—tromping from one Smithsonian collection to another, eating ice cream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—witnessed a bit of history that they surely had not anticipated: the beginning of President Trump’s takeover of the District. At a press conference that Monday, Trump had vowed to bring order to a place that he said was beset by “total lawlessness,” and by “bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.” Within days, D.C.’s police force had been federalized, the National Guard had been mobilized, and hundreds of troops had shown up, many in drab-colored Humvees.

    Few tourists, and fewer locals, would recognize the nightmarish place in Trump’s depiction. D.C., like virtually every American city, has crime and homelessness; in 2023, it experienced a notable spike in carjackings. But its problems are long-simmering, not acute. According to Metropolitan Police Department statistics, violent crime is down twenty-six per cent since the same time last year.

    In any case, Trump’s display of federal muscle was concentrated not in the neighborhoods where crime is most prevalent but in the iconic, touristic spots near the White House. Perhaps he envisioned a sort of sequel to the military parade that he staged in June, with made-for-Fox-News visuals: National Guardsmen clustered around the Washington Monument, D.E.A. agents standing outside an upscale bakery in Georgetown. On Fourteenth Street, a lively night-life corridor with a diverse population, men wearing ICE and Homeland Security vests operated a checkpoint at which agents, several with faces covered, pulled over drivers and questioned them. (According to the Washington Post, at least two were detained.) People walking their dogs or heading out on dates stopped to heckle. “Oh, I feel so much safer,” a young woman scoffed. “Fascists, go home!” a guy on a bike shouted.

    Trump’s show of force is an imposition on a citizenry already aware that its democratic self-governance is tenuous. As advocates for D.C. statehood like to point out, the District has some seven hundred thousand residents—more than Wyoming or Vermont—but no right to elect a representative who can vote on legislation in Congress. Until the Home Rule Act of 1973 gave the city limited autonomy, it had no mayor or city council of its own. Even now, laws that the council approves after deliberation and public comment can be tossed out by Congress. This has happened many times over the years, usually with the aim of nullifying progressive legislation. In the eighties and nineties, Congress rejected a law to decriminalize gay sex and blocked the use of public funds for abortion services. This June, the House voted to repeal laws that allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections and that barred the police union from negotiating on disciplinary measures against officers. Two Republican congressmen recently introduced a bill that would revoke home rule altogether, in the interest of having Congress “manage the nation’s capital.”

    An effective plan to improve the lives of D.C. citizens would require detailed policy and a prolonged investment of time and funds—the sorts of things that Trump has zero interest in. What he wants is a redecoration reveal for D.C., as in his paving of the Rose Garden: a makeover heavy on ball gowns and bulletproof vests, light on poor people. “I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.” Advocates for the homeless say that it’s unclear where people will be sent; the city does not have enough beds in local shelters.

    As the week went on, Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to usurp the authority of the police chief, Pamela Smith, by appointing the head of the D.E.A. as “emergency police commissioner.” The District pushed back, suing the Administration and arguing that its actions were “unnecessary and unlawful.” Americans have long been wary of using the military in local law enforcement, and for good reason. Soldiers generally don’t live in the places they’re dropped into; they don’t know the communities and are less answerable to them. They’re also usually not trained in law enforcement or empowered to make arrests, so using them to fight crime means relying heavily on the power of intimidation. Militarized patrols in city streets are uniquely chilling to the exercise of assembly and free speech.

    An 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally restrains the use of the military for such purposes. (Trump’s recent deployment of the National Guard during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles has been challenged in court.) But the District’s peculiar status makes it easy to use it as a laboratory. In D.C., the President is allowed to send in the National Guard without officially federalizing it. And the Home Rule Act authorizes him to take over the Metropolitan Police in case of “emergency.” Though these Presidential powers do not apply elsewhere, Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, worries that Trump’s recent use of the National Guard will be “desensitizing.”

    At the press conference where Trump announced his plans for D.C., he suggested that other cities could be next. “You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is,” he said. “New York has a problem.” (Baltimore and Oakland he dismissed as too “far gone.”) Days later, James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, dutifully said that Trump’s “experiment” in D.C. ought to be replicated in “a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America.” There are ways around the Posse Comitatus Act, and Trump seems likely to test them. At a rally in L.A. where Governor Gavin Newsom was speaking last week, a force of Border Patrol agents, some armed with rifles, showed up uninvited. The Washington Post reported that the Administration was considering the creation of a “Domestic Civil Service Quick Disturbance Reaction Force”—hundreds of National Guard troops that could be deployed to cities to quell protests.

    At the checkpoint on Fourteenth Street last week, D.C. police officers at least felt compelled to answer residents when they asked what was going on. (“Traffic-safety check,” one said, unconvincingly.) The federal agents just turned their backs. Trump had said at the press conference that his law-and-order enforcers could do “whatever the hell they want.” That’s not true—but it’s truer than it used to be. ♦

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    Margaret Talbot

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