The New Republic

President Donald Trump has privately expressed his distaste for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan.

Axios reported Monday that the president “didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic” about the plan, which Democrats and Republicans alike have panned as heinous and barbaric. Trump told another aide that it “might not happen.”

This is a 180 for the president, who was all-in on the public execution just last week. “Absolutely, I approved,” he said then.

Now, after a wave of bipartisan backlash, that tune has changed.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Senator Thom Tillis, and Representative Adam Scott were a few of the Republicans who also expressed their opposition to livestreaming Hasan’s execution.

“The concern would be that it would create a video that would be a recruiting tool for future terrorists,” Johnson said in a CBS News interview over the weekend. “I wouldn’t be watching it if it was aired.… [but] that’s outside of my lane of course.”.

“But I need to tell the White House what some of my colleagues think about that, and not everybody’s in favor of the idea.”

“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis said Thursday. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Representative Adam Scott chimed in the next day.

Hasan, a 56-year-old former Army psychiatrist from Virginia, killed 13 soldiers and wounded 32 others when he attacked the Texas military post in 2009. His execution date is set for December 3.

Even Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson disapproves of the Trump administration’s planned live execution of Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan.

Johnson made his position known during a CBS News interview over the weekend.

“The concern would be that it would create a video that would be a recruiting tool for future terrorists,” Johnson said. “I wouldn’t be watching it if it was aired … [but] that’s outside of my lane of course. But I need to tell the White House what some of my colleagues think about that, and not everybody’s in favor of the idea.”

Hasan, a 56-year-old former Army psychiatrist from Virginia, killed 13 soldiers and wounded 32 others when he attacked the Texas military post in 2009. Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the Pentagon’s plans to livestream Hasan’s execution by military firing squad.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said at the time.

Multiple Republicans expressed their distaste for the decision.

“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis said Thursday. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Representative Adam Scott chimed in the next day.

Hasan’s execution date is set for December 3. It is unclear what platform, if any, will agree to livestream it.

President Donald Trump’s midterm campaign rally blitz has him down in the dumps.

During the initial leg of his nationwide tour of half-full high school gyms, the president has been in a “foul mood,” one person with knowledge of his behavior told The Washington Post Monday.

Trump is still speaking in rooms that are packed with supporters—seeing as he’s purposefully touring in deep red areas—but this time around, the venues are smaller, and the vibe is different. Trump’s speaking events don’t feel so much like pep rallies as they do stops on a farewell tour.

Trump is a lot less popular now than he was the last time he hit the campaign trail. The president has even become a liability to some Republican candidates. Ahead of his visit to Syracuse on Friday to support the New York Republican gubernatorial candidate, conservative radio host Bob Lonsberry urged him to cancel, according to the Post. “Stay away, Mr. President,” he wrote on social media. “The last thing Bruce Blakeman needs is a visit from you.”

The Post reported that Trump “combines political strategy with his personal preferences,” jumping between races that need a boost and just stumping for his buddies. His team has also struggled with finding venues of appropriate size and security level, as well as accommodations for the president. “He does not like to stay overnight except at his own properties,” the paper found.

Plus, Trump is 80 years old now, and he’s slowing down. And perhaps it’s beginning to sink in just how close to impeachment he really is, should Democrats regain control of the House and Senate.

Mark Mitchell, an independent pollster and former Trump supporter, told the Post that if the president isn’t impeached following the midterm elections, it’s not looking likely that he’ll hit the campaign trail again.

“It’s the last time he’s really going to be able to do this in full force,” said Mitchell. “A 30-day blitz of the country to do these rallies again when he’s the most unpopular president—it just doesn’t really make sense.”

Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton was asked to explain the constant, controversial leaks coming from a September campaign event. He doesn’t think they matter.

“There have been now five audio leaks from a private fundraiser you attended on September 24 published by various media outlets,” Fox News host Alica Acuna asked Sunday. “Are you concerned that they all came from the same, and are you figuring out who did it? But then also, it raises some flags … over your thoughts, publicly and privately, over the president and Washington.”

“Look, I’m not worried about it at all,” Paxton replied. “You can look at my record, you can look [at] what I’ve done over the last 12 years. I’ve supported President Trump, I love President Trump. We’ve worked together on many many issues, he’s been at work extremely hard to help me get elected. And I really appreciate him.”

“Just because they were able to clip a few things doesn’t mean that’s actually what I meant. So let’s just go back to the record, not this little game that James Talarico has played the whole time, which is ‘let’s not talk about Ken Paxton’s actual record’.… Let’s muddy the water and try to trick people into believing he’s something that he’s not, which is a real Texan.”

Paxton is framing direct quotes that he said to his own supporters in confidence as a “little game.” The reason he has to justify his relationship to Trump is because he himself was critical of the president.

In previous leaks from the event last month, Paxton called Trump a drag on his campaign and said Trump’s war on Iran was raising prices and making it harder for him to campaign. He also claimed that Washington, D.C. was controlling his campaign from afar, and told people depending on federal benefits programs to “suck it up” and prepare for cuts. All of this makes him sound much more like a Never Trump Republican than the loyalist he claims to be.

Talarico—who was born and raised in Texas—is currently virtually tied with Paxton ahead of the November midterm elections.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor of political science at Columbia University. She’s been a regular guest talking to us about her specialty, which is how US policymakers decide and work on foreign policy. So we’ve had her on a few times. Elizabeth, thanks for joining me again.

Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure.

Bacon: So I’m going to go a little bit around the world, not too many places, but I want to hit some various news items that we’ve talked about. When you were on during the Iran war, the US and Israel’s decision—the Iran war we’ve been in, when it started, you talked about, as it started going on, that Trump’s choices were between escalation, meaning really trying to destroy Iran, or capitulation.

My perception is he’s actually chosen, in some ways, a weird third course, which is do not solve the issue, allow gas prices to go up, and kill his political party. That was not an option most presidents think to—most presidents would’ve been constrained by, oil prices are killing my party, I want them to win. He doesn’t seem to care. Even George Bush in ‘06 cared about those basic dynamics.

So do you still see that capitulation, escalation as where things are going, or how do you see how he’s handled Iran now?

Saunders: So I still think his choices are humiliation and escalation. I put everything you just said in the humiliation bucket. And if you believe The New York Times and The Atlantic and other outlets that reported yesterday, he’s had the Pentagon draw up and then rejected a bunch of escalation options that he may or may not use before the midterms, may or may not use after. So escalation is still apparently on the table. We’ve sent another carrier.

And I would just add to that, that the humiliation is a slow accumulation of things, including an underappreciated fact, I think, which is that the United States does not currently have an aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific region, which is pretty shocking if you follow US defense policy.

Now, you might say that aircraft carriers might not be the most useful tool in the Indo-Pacific, but if you believe the idea that we have an interest in the Indo-Pacific, and we’ve had carriers there indefinitely, the fact that we are stretched so thin that we had to pull the last remaining one out is a pretty shocking fact.

I think what is new about the Iran war is that there have always been other actors who could shape the way this goes. But now they’ve acted, and Donald Trump is no longer in charge of the on/off switch of this war, right? Say, by some miracle, we get a deal with Iran tomorrow, which is not going to happen, but for argument’s sake, the Houthis will have something to say about that, right? And they are an Iranian proxy with an awful lot of agency, compared to even other Iranian proxies, and so they’ve been striking airports in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia.

So this has unleashed forces that are no longer—Trump’s access to the off switch, which is full humiliation but stops the escalation maybe, is increasingly tenuous, if it exists at all.

Bacon: But a war we haven’t won and that has killed him politically is humiliation in a certain sense, right?

Saunders: Yes. I would say that’s Vietnam. And the midterms in 2006 with the Iraq War I think is only a partial analogy, for a variety of reasons. But I would say that was humiliation, and then Bush chose a course to escalate, to get to some kind of outcome he could declare a victory. And that may still happen after the midterms, which is what Bush did.

Bacon: But Trump has been hinting at escalation for months now, so my guess is he doesn’t actually want to do that, right?

Saunders: Yeah. His credibility is completely destroyed. I think that was when he backed off of his first civilizational threat.

I do want to just make a quick point about this really troubling and strange story in the UK. The bombers that were pulled very suddenly from RAF Fairford, which is a Royal Air Force base in the UK that had been hosting US bombers, and they were very suddenly taken out because of this apparent plot against the base.

And the details of this story are really odd, and it probably means there’s more that hasn’t actually come out. But the UK and the US have said that Iran is somehow behind this in some way, and we don’t know how directly.

Just imagine for a minute if this had been a plot that had blown up. There’s some thought that maybe they were mimicking the Ukrainian attack on Russian bombers, right? They use drones, they blow up some American bombers, and they kill American airmen who are stationed at the base, of whom there are many.

Unless it was by accident, I really have a hard time imagining that would not have provoked a massive American and British response. I don’t think that the reporting on this has even quite grasped—if that had happened, it would’ve been the biggest story in the UK in decades.

Bacon: Interesting.

Saunders: And would raise all sorts of questions. I don’t think most Americans are aware of just how much damage has been done to our Middle East bases. It’s really shocking. But those are forward bases close to Iran. Psychologically, blowing up a UK air base and killing Americans and British soldiers and destroying bombers, where you’d have lots of media coverage, it’s just a little odd.

And so the reason I say that is because surely Iran, which for all its many evils as a regime, has been very careful about exactly what it has done. And so this would have been crossing a line that is way over the line, right? It’s the equivalent of—the Russians apparently tried to bomb a train carrying Boris Johnson a couple weeks ago. I still wonder if that was a mistake in targeting, because that’s such an escalation.

So if you play the logic through, I’ve never been that worried that Trump would use nuclear weapons, because I just don’t think he would in the end. But there are some things he hasn’t done short of nuclear weapons that he could do.

He would maybe then actually fulfill his civilization-ending threat. So it’s so odd that I do wonder how real it was, or what stage, or who’s really behind it. And so I just find the reporting around it a little strange, given the magnitude of what would have happened.

Bacon: I’m glad you brought it up. I hadn’t really followed it. We talked about Greenland last time I talked to you, and so now we have some kind of security agreement. Was that humiliation as opposed to escalation, what happened with Denmark and Greenland, or something more complicated?

Saunders: I think what it is basically is like asking for your regular allowance from your parents at gunpoint, and then enduring all the costs of having done that, right?

Bacon: Of having used the gunpoint.

Saunders: So I think they got plenty of things out of it that maybe are good, an improvement on the status quo. For example, if Greenland becomes independent, it agrees that all the things in the agreement stay. So there’s no connection between Greenlandic independence and US national security access. That’s a change. From a US national security perspective, one could say that’s a win.

On the other hand, almost everything in the agreement they could have just negotiated without these dreadful verbal attacks, and the fears of real attacks on a US NATO ally. And the cost of that—this is what caused Mark Carney to say we are in the midst of a rupture. The costs of that, the loss of trust, it was way out of proportion. It was unnecessary, and they probably could have gotten it for free.

Bacon: Was Biden pursuing a policy like this? Do we need to have more access to Greenland than we had before, our military and so on? I never understood the rationale entirely.

Saunders: Yeah, it is true that the Arctic is a far more important area than it used to be. I think nobody would disagree with that, because the Russians and the Chinese transit. There are no Russians in Greenland, right, other than undercover. But it is very strategic. It’s the path the missiles would fly, the shortest path.

And so that’s why you got a lot of early warning, and you might want more of that. But this just would’ve been an under the radar issue that was negotiated with Denmark and Greenland. And I wonder if it was because Trump really wanted to be able to say he bought Greenland, right? So he could enlarge. There was never any reason why it had to be part of the United States in order to get any of these things. They’re separate questions, really.

Bacon: One area where he’s been successful in a certain sense would be in South America, the removal of Maduro and the sort of takeover of Venezuela, which appears that Marco Rubio is running the country now. So that policy has actually worked out the way Trump wanted. So I wanted to talk about then the context of Brazil.

In this election, it appears that the Trump allies have finished ahead in the first round. Looks like Bolsonaro’s son is probably going to win the presidency. So in a certain sense, has Trump succeeded in reshaping South America in his way, or is that more where things were going regardless of Trump?

Saunders: So, stipulating that I’m not a Latin American politics expert and don’t pretend to know the details, I think from what I’ve read from commentators, this was very much a surprise. Which means it was probably closer. This is not like a wave. On the other hand, incumbents are just disliked everywhere right now, whatever flavor they are.

Bacon: Spain. Britain. South America. Hungary. Yes, exactly.

Saunders: And so voting out whoever’s in is the—and I think that you would know better than I, but from what I’ve seen in polling in other places, like Minnesota, that’s true of domestic politics in the US. If there’s a Democratic incumbent, they’re not going to do as well as the average Democrat who isn’t an incumbent. So I think some of that is accounting for what happened.

I don’t even know how much Trump really put effort into this particular election, as opposed to the Javier Milei election in Argentina, in part because there wasn’t an economic crisis that offered him the opportunity to do that. I think the implication, though, which is disheartening, is the narrative around Brazil had been, they had a January 6 and they solved it, in the sense of, they jailed Bolsonaro, and he couldn’t run again.

Bacon: He was jailed and he couldn’t run again, both.

Saunders: Both, right. They handled it the way a lot of people wish we had handled our January 6. And their Supreme Court was a part of that. And so for that to have happened and then to get this—the people still get to decide, and they apparently have decided to bring back a Bolsonaro.

Bacon: But if Donald Trump Jr. was the president in November 2024, that would not have been a reassuring outcome compared to Donald Trump winning. You’re like, “Both were bad.”

Saunders: Exactly, yes. Those are the choices, and the people have spoken. It’s democracy. But there is this idea that a democracy should not actually allow criminals to stand for election, that you are allowed to draw lines about who is eligible. So I don’t know enough about the son to say if he’s—

Bacon: If he’s actually the—exactly.

Saunders: But let’s just assume that he’s innocent of any outright criminality and is just a kind of far-right figure. Oh, you there?

Bacon: I can hear you, yeah.

Saunders: Yeah, sorry, my screen blacked out for a sec. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is still in some way what the people want, right? And there’s only so much you can do. When you have an explicit threat against the Constitution and violence like January 6 and their equivalent, they addressed it, and this still happened. So maybe it’s just anti-incumbency that explains it, but it’s still disheartening.

Bacon: Because your point is that, as far as we know, Trump was not super involved in winning this election. I remember JD Vance flew to Hungary before the election actually happened. We think Trump was, as far as I can tell, less involved in the result in Brazil, obviously less involved than they were in controlling Venezuela. Your point is this election is about Brazil and not really about Trump in any sort of formal way.

Saunders: I think so. That’s my perception, and I may be wrong. But I think the fact that in Hungary you had a far-right incumbent who had been around for a long time, it fits the pattern, right? And although I understand that it’s now considered kind of a done deal that he will win, it’s not as though this was a landslide. But it’s still very disheartening.

Bacon: I’ll finish with Marco Rubio’s speech in Greece. I’m having a hard time summarizing it, so just tell me. I guess this generally fits into, like, the West needs to defend its civilization from the others, from the inferior. He didn’t quite use the word inferior, but it was clearly implied. I guess this is America first abroad, or nationalism abroad, but more formally stated. What did you make of the speech?

Saunders: I turned it off, actually, after I started, and I read some of the coverage after.

Bacon: It was clearly something he wanted to—this was a high-profile speech. It was important to him. Not sure if it was important to Trump, but I think it’s important to him.

Saunders: And I think this is part of him trying to position himself as Trump’s heir, outbidding JD Vance for this kind of civilizational stuff. I think the old Marco Rubio in another life would’ve probably, if he had gone to Greece at all, would’ve made a speech about democratic values. And I think there’s a lot of, but the slickness and the backdrop—

Bacon: It was very presidential. It was all—

Saunders: An announcement. Yeah, it was very, yeah. And I think Dan Drezner had a really good—he’s play acting at oratory, or something like that.

Bacon: I’ve seen oratory as well, so yeah.

Saunders: So I think what’s so odd about it is there’s hardly any diplomacy in it, right? He’s just going there to be able to have these clips and show them. And he is the national security adviser and the secretary of state, the nation’s top diplomat, right?

Every time I post on Bluesky about him, I always say the nation’s top diplomat, because I just do not think we can forget that he does this in the name of the United States. He is supposed to be the top diplomat. And diplomats for sure do things that are performative. That’s part of their job, is the pageantry.

But it’s just not clear who this was aimed at, and what the positive benefit to the United States of going over there and basically saying, “Your civilization is ancient and wonderful,” which they agree with, but they don’t want weaponized in this way, “and you’re letting it be polluted by these people who don’t look like me or you.”

It’s bigoted and it’s many things, but it’s not diplomatic. And there’s why to do that in Greece, right? Be undiplomatic when you go visit an adversary.

Bacon: I guess the idea is Greece is the cradle of—I think that’s what he was getting at. “Today we find ourselves at a crossroads. The next decade will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy, servitude, and decline. We’ll either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.” I guess in some ways I read the speech as being a more articulate version of what Trump says, with better speech writers.

Saunders: Not that much better.

Bacon: Not that much better. Fair enough. He’s trying to give a grand speech. That’s what I’m trying to get at, the idea is to say something grand, but I’m not sure if he’s saying anything particularly interesting. Is he saying anything interesting?

Saunders: No, he’s basically doing the same thing that Vance did at the Munich Security Conference. Vance is doing it the first year, and then Rubio did it at the Munich Security Conference this past year, 2026. It already feels like 10 years, right?

Bacon: This has been a long two years.

Saunders: And Rubio’s speech at Munich got a slightly warmer reception, because it was viewed as a recommitment to Europe in some way. But it was still a weird speech. And this one, it’s just, what was the point of it, right? Other than for him to be able to give a grand speech that features mostly himself.

And servitude to whom, right? It’s one thing to give a speech to say, “We are fighting...” Lots of presidents and secretaries of state have given speeches that are exploiting some historical—think of Reagan at Pointe du Hoc, right? The boys at Pointe du Hoc.

Stirring oratory, and it’s really about a fight between good and evil. But the evil there is the Nazis, and by extension the Soviet Union, which is clearly an adversary of the US. Who is he talking about other than immigrants?

Bacon: I think he’s talking about Muslims coming to Europe. That’s the obvious part. But they’re not really a threat.

Saunders: They are not a regime.

Bacon: They’re not a regime that’s going to take power.

Saunders: That’s what I was going to say, exactly. And so the idea, it’s such an ugly image, and doesn’t resonate with any diplomatic priority of the United States other than the Trump administration’s priority to put this at the beginning of their national security strategy, right? Whatever happened to countering China?

Maybe that’s not your priority, but that has been the priority. Whatever happened to countering Russia, helping Ukraine stay sovereign? It’s just, why this, why now? It’s ugly. And it’s not as though Europe doesn’t realize that it has—you can believe that Europe is not adequately controlling its borders.

Bacon: Which a lot of European leaders on the far left and the center and the far right all think already.

Saunders: Exactly. And you can think that the southern border in the US is a problem that isn’t solved yet without wanting to see ICE shooting people in New York, as they did last night. So it’s just not clear what the point of this is. Europe is well aware of its immigration issue. And so I have to conclude it’s a way of outbidding on ugliness.

Bacon: Interesting. I mostly do domestic politics, and that’s not really your focus, but I’m curious, what’s your sense of—if the midterms go the way we think they are going to, which is the Democrats could win a lot of House seats, maybe win the Senate, and anyway it looks like there’s a rejection of Trump by the electorate. That’s what it looks like we’re headed for.

We can discuss the details of that, but I think the polls suggest we’re going to have a rejection of Trump. How does that affect anything we’ve talked about? Broadly or specifically, are there any foreign policy changes you think result from the electorate? Because Trump doesn’t have to abide by the election, doesn’t have to do anything about it, but do you think it might change anything?

Saunders: First, I think Greenland is going to be very happy that it concluded this deal before the midterms, because the thing that I really worry about is a cornered Trump lashing out, right? Traditionally, late in the second term, lame ducks go for foreign policy. They want a legacy thing.

Trump has swung so many times at that pitch already, that what’s left? He isn’t going to be able to buy Greenland and add it to the US territory. He hasn’t defeated Iran, and isn’t going to. Or at least not on terms that we would accept as legitimate, at a cost that’s acceptable. He apparently wanted to do another grand deal with Kim Jong Un, and Kim Jong Un ghosted him. So I don’t know. And he already has his photo op from that.

So if you look around the world at the big legacy foreign policy projects that he could spend his energy on, and the advantages of the presidency on, which are still massive, it’s hard to tell. And so what’s left is, if he’s under investigation, even with the pardon power and all of that, if he feels like—animals are dangerous when they’re cornered, or humans are dangerous when they’re cornered. So what could he do when cornered? He could do something non-nuclear but heavily escalatory in Iran.

Bacon: That’s not great.

Saunders: Cuba is the other one.

Bacon: Those are the—

Saunders: So I see the midterms as only—Trump is a high variance presidency, right? On any given day, the range of things that may happen is just very wide. But a Democratic Congress after these midterms, under the global conditions right now, widens it even more. Nothing would surprise me. Maybe he will undo the Greenland deal. He undoes deals all the time. Wouldn’t surprise me. It seems less likely to me than some other things.

Bacon: And will the Republican Party take any lessons from this, non-Trump? I guess we’ve already answered the question in some ways, because Rubio giving the same speech JD Vance did, the “fuck the rest of the world” speech, would suggest that we’re not changing there either.

Saunders: Yeah. I think you answered your own question with that one. But I think Bill Clinton tried to solve Middle East peace at Wye River. He apparently wanted to go to Pyongyang himself, and neither of those things came to fruition, but there was a lot of activity at Wye River.

Bacon: The Iran deal happened with Obama in the last couple years.

Saunders: Yeah. And I’m having—maybe ending the Korean War. But he’s had opportunities to do that already, and it’s not clear what leverage he has there. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll just pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Nothing would surprise me, but to me, Iran and Cuba seem the most likely, just because that’s where we have assets in place that would be available, right?

Bacon: I’ll finish on, what are you working on, anything you want to tell people about, or are you writing anything that we should look at?

Saunders: I’m going to write with Dan Drezner a piece basically about what will happen after the midterms, for Foreign Affairs, hopefully. Not sure exactly when that will happen.

But yeah, I’m working on a bunch of things. Working on some stuff about Europe’s reaction and what’s rational about it and what’s not, in terms of defense spending. And starting a new project trying to think through what is the blob, what isn’t the blob.

Bacon: The blob, for people who don’t know, is the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. That word also has a non-meaning, but yeah, similar.

Saunders: Yes, exactly. And it’s bandied about in ways that are just imprecise, and so trying to—

Bacon: Yeah, imprecise is what I’m trying to say.

Saunders: Yeah. So trying to understand—

Bacon: The blob is the Ben Rhodes term, right?

Saunders: That’s what it came from originally. It’s Ben Rhodes’s term. Yes. But lots of people have used it, or some variant. And there’s real backlash against it, and there’s cost. The apparent elite impunity, that’s a real phenomenon.

But I think you also have to understand why we have such a thing as an establishment. What is that? And might it have a place in a democratic society, paradoxically?

Bacon: Wait, the people who do foreign policy at Brookings and then come in and out of government, is that the idea, they’re the blob?

Saunders: It’s more like the revolving door, right? The soft landings, which in the extreme can look like giving a job to somebody who started a war. But there’s lots and lots of people below that who—

Bacon: Who might just be experts in their field, in country X.

Saunders: And once you start a war, you obviously don’t want—there’s people who work on civilian harm, there’s people who work on lots of dimensions of the war that you would like to be handled expertly, right? Even if you opposed it in the first place. So I would call it more like an elite ecosystem.

And we can think about—to me, everything is trade-offs, right? Fine, imagine a world where you get rid of the entire establishment. That has costs too, right? Would you ever get people going back in, investing their expertise, and devoting a career in government if they didn’t have a safe place to land, and they were in fear of prosecution and all that, right? So it’s lowering the stakes of democratic politics for foreign policy officials, to be in a democracy and take risks and handle issues like foreign policy that are pretty tough.

Bacon: I know you’ve written about elites, but your work is not necessarily in defense of elites. Your work is almost to understand elites more, in a more sophisticated—we’re in this anti-elite culture, and that’s bipartisan across the world, in the US, racially. And I think your work, my perception is, is not necessarily to say elites are great, but to say maybe we should understand the elites and their own thinking more precisely.

Saunders: Yeah, and also career incentives, right? You have to be able to make a living. There’s nothing wrong with a career incentive, or even partisan. Take members of Congress. Everybody’s always talking about members of Congress playing politics with national security, right, for their own political gain. Isn’t that what we want them to do?

Part of the problem we have right now, and I have written about this in a Foreign Affairs piece, we need more politics in our foreign policy. The problem we have right now is there’s no incentive to have expertise that pays politically, right? It has to pay politically for you to be seen as an authoritative voice on foreign policy who has a foreign policy position that isn’t necessarily reflexively with your party. It used to be that you could be a Sam Nunn, right?

Bacon: Oh, I see what you’re saying. I get it.

Saunders: Anything nuclear had to go through Sam Nunn in the late part of the Cold War. And it meant that sometimes he was with the Democratic president, sometimes he wasn’t, and Jimmy Carter and the SALT II Treaty is an example.

The real thing I’m working on is trying to think about what comes after, right? How do we think about elites and expertise, which we all on some level reflexively dislike, but I think of it as, we can’t live with them and we can’t live without them, right?

Bacon: Those words are so different, because I blanked when you said it, because I was like, I don’t necessarily like elites, but I like expertise. But those things are obviously tied together.

Saunders: They’re related. And it’s uncomfortable to think about, but we do have a different kind of elite running the Pentagon right now, but it’s not an experienced elite with expertise that you need to run the Pentagon. And we’re witnessing in real time the costs of that, right?

So you can say that the blob, or make arguments about how they got us here—I would definitely say in my work that elite politics has costs, right? In my book, elites do sometimes make it easier to go to war, but they also are a source of accountability. And if you take them away, or take away their ability to hold each other and the president accountable, you’ve really lost something.

And I think that’s the big difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. Jim Mattis, John Kelly, trying to think who else. The sort of, quote unquote, “adults in the room” from Trump 1. In some tellings they’re part of the blob, and so they deserve some of the blame for the things that happened that brought us Trump. On the other hand, they showed what elite constraint really can be.

They stopped Trump from doing a lot of his most extreme impulses. And so now we see a completely unconstrained Trump, because there’s no blob—I don’t like the term blob, because I think it’s imprecise, but just as a shortcut. There are no establishment figures. None. Bessent is maybe the closest, and he even has seemed to—The Wall Street Journal had all this reporting this week.

So I think a lot about, it’s trade-offs, right? Nothing is all good or all bad, right? Except the Nazis. But in a democracy, you have trade-offs. If you want to delegate something that’s specialized, requires expertise, diverse expertise, different countries, different issues.

It’s not just one kind of expertise, right? Like bond market expertise. You need a group of people who feels like they can earn a living and respect the alternation of power, and go in and out, and feel that is a viable path within the democratic system.

Bacon: So that might be a—I should talk to Ben Rhodes. I’m guessing on the career path of foreign policy, this might be a place of disagreement. I agree with you that I’m in a career, I think careers matter, I get that. But I do think the critique has become that the revolving door is bad, and that term itself has become fraught, because to me, working at Brookings and then working for the government is different than working for a defense contractor.

But I can see where you gain expertise from the defense contractor too. It’s not necessarily inherently immoral, and the contractor might pay more. People have to pay their bills, and so on.

But I do think it’d be more precise—because Ben Rhodes himself is working at some kind of foreign policy organization to earn income, or maybe he does the podcast. I don’t know. But inevitably, I think the point is, you do have to have a job where you’re not in government, and the question is probably, are you in government to therefore get a job outside of government?

Saunders: It’s a longer conversation. He has pointed out, I think rightfully, and this is the part where I don’t defend—elites make all kinds of mistakes, and they introduce all kinds of—my book’s conclusion is that basically we have a hawkish bias in our foreign policy because of elites, which is more or less what he’s saying, right?

But it’s trade-offs, right? The issue is, OK, so what do you want to do about it? You could just get rid of all the elites, and we’re witnessing that. Doesn’t seem that great right now.

Bacon: How do we rebuild the—

Saunders: Yeah, what is an ecosystem where—political science is basically about what costs are you willing to tolerate. Tolerating some mistakes, which may have been genuine, like they tried really hard and they just got it wrong. Robert Jervis, who’s the most famous scholar of decision-making ever, had a lot of sympathy for policymakers, because they’re dealing with difficult things under fog of information and war and so forth, right?

They may just make a bad call. They may not be biased. They just may make a bad call and get unlucky. How do you set up a system of accountability that can hold people accountable for really egregious failures that they should have seen coming, versus giving people the space to make decisions under highly uncertain conditions?

Bacon: But the context here is 2024, right? Joe Biden ran a foreign policy on Gaza a lot of people don’t think was effective and ended up not working quite well. And so what do you do with the implementers of that policy? I’m not saying you feel that way, but some people feel that. I think that’s the conversation we need to have right here.

Saunders: Yeah. I think it’s also just thinking about the complete hollowing out of foreign policy expertise in the government right now.

Bacon: In the government right now. In Trump.

Saunders: Yeah. And how do we think about rebuilding it in a way that doesn’t demonize expertise? Because demonizing expertise is part of what’s gotten us here. In addition to the failures of elites, demonizing expertise is a big problem, right?

Bacon: Although is the blob critique slightly different? I don’t think Ben Rhodes debates—he wants USAID to come back in some form.

Saunders: Yes, of course. But they’re related in a way that is often not acknowledged by blob critics. They’re only highlighting one piece of it. So I’m trying to put the whole thing into trade-offs.

Bacon: Oh, I see. Anytime we’re talking about the blob, in some ways—that’s why we use the establishment as sort of blanche, because I don’t know that word can become—like, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is surely a part of the civil rights establishment. There’s no way—they’ve been established for a long time. But I would never criticize them, because they, to me, are defending poor African Americans in the South’s ability to vote. I’m trying to take the issue aside here.

Saunders: Or even think of the political parties’ infrastructure, like the RNC and the DNC, which at the moment are just totally hollowed out entities. Julia Azari has said strong partisanship and weak parties, and nobody likes the RNC. You want the opposite. But the absence of a strong RNC is what got Trump the nomination in 2016, because there was no coordination.

Bacon: And it means that Elon Musk has more power in political parties than the actual parties do.

Saunders: Yes. So elites stepping in and having a strong role, that has upsides and downsides. And I think we have had a sclerotic establishment in foreign policy. I think some of the critiques about just defending the status quo reflexively are right, and that’s a function of the system having gotten out of whack. But that’s very different from saying we shouldn’t have an ecosystem at all. No blob-like ecosystem at all.

Bacon: So what the blob should look like is probably not what you should headline with either.

Saunders: Or what’s the system? And it’s also not only a function of what the people inside the blob believe. A lot of the debate is about the substance, which is important.

Bacon: Yes, of course.

Saunders: Liberal internationalism, is that the thing that got us where we are? Or is it a militaristic mindset? And then there’s debate about that, right? But on some level, I just want to abstract away from all of that, because it’s not clear to me that just injecting some different ideas is going to work without some structural thinking about the benefits of the system. What counts as going too far in establishment reform and accountability, right?

And we think about this in tons of other contexts in our democracy, right? Just the justice system, like how much, what the line for prosecuting people is. Which of course tolerates a certain amount of tax evasion, or whatever the issue is. So it’s not as though we can’t do this as a society.

We just don’t think of—this is the first thinking about foreign policy in this democratic society kind of way. If you think that it contributed to how we got here, then we should think very seriously about the costs and benefits of that system and how to reform it, and not just say we need some new thinking, right? New thinking is a dime a dozen.

Bacon: Yeah. The challenge is, and this is why I respect you for doing this, there’s not a lot of people who are in a place to suggest anything other than, elites, the blob, the establishment are bad. Because if you’re running for office, or even you on a TV show, or you on a podcast, if you want to become famous, defending any elite even a little bit is not in your incentive structure right now.

Saunders: And I’m not defending elites.

Bacon: I’m not saying you are. You’re creating more nuance.

Saunders: This is pretty abstract institutional reform kind of stuff, but that’s the business we’re in, political scientists. That’s why it’s helpful to be able to take a step back and think about, what are the things about this that could be destabilizing if you went too far, right? And I think we actually have the answer to that.

We are witnessing a massive global shock. Things we don’t talk about: the Iran war has completely upended British politics, right? Because they don’t have any fiscal space anymore to solve their extremely difficult—they just got a new prime minister, because the previous one didn’t have a vision. This one has a vision. He can’t do anything because of the Iran war.

So we are witnessing the cost of just wholesale getting rid of expertise and experience as an input into decision-making. That’s clearly too far. Where is the optimal—

Bacon: There’s a lot of people I talk to about this, because to me the presidential campaign is a time for people to bring out ideas. So I want one of the 90 southern candidates we have who are Democrats to run on, “I’m going to rebuild the government.” But my worry is they’ve all been told cost of living, affordability. You’ll sound elite if you mention the word democracy. All you can say is gas prices and grocery prices, and I think that’s not the—

Next year should be, like, I’m hoping people like you have influence.

Saunders: No, I don’t have any influence, even within my own house.

Bacon: I hope they’re reading things other than—the government making the country more affordable broadly is actually very challenging. It is not necessarily the only thing the government should be doing, and rebuilding our foreign policy and our government capacity is a really big thing, and I’m hoping some candidates talk about that.

But I think their consultants are going to be telling them voters only care about jobs and gas, and I think that’s dismissive of voters, who I think do care about more than just that.

Saunders: Yeah. The only thing I would say is, as terrible as some of this destruction has been, it’s one thing to talk about it at a point like 2016 when all those institutions were still intact, right? It’s really hard to reform an institution except under conditions of crisis, or when it’s been destroyed.

Bacon: And now we have both.

Saunders: And now we have both, or one or the other depending on the issue. Like, USAID has been burned to the ground. And so if you believe we need to have new foreign aid, this is the time to think about the trade-offs of how you rebuild it. But I have no influence. All I can do is the incremental, “All right, your idea for how to reform this, here’s where it sits on the trade-offs. Are you willing to tolerate this cost or that?”

It’s about choosing which cost. There’s never a perfect solution to these problems, right? Giving countries foreign aid will always have some perverse effects on its economy and incentives of its politicians. So do you just not want to give foreign aid? You design a system that has features, and they’re imperfect, and this is politics, right?

Bacon: All right. Good to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Saunders: Take care. Thank you so much.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.

Donald Trump’s choices in Iran remain “humiliation or escalation,” says Elizabeth Saunders, a Columbia University professor who studies U.S. foreign policy. In the latest edition of Right Now, Saunders argues that little has changed strategically since the start of the U.S.’s conflict with Iran. It’s still not clear how the U.S. can force a regime change or any other major shift by Iran, unless Trump launches a super-aggressive attack, which he does not seem inclined to do. Saunders also discusses the new security agreement between the U.S, Denmark and Greenland, the first round of the presidential elections in Brazil, and the major foreign policy address Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered last week in Greece.

The Trump administration won’t be reimbursing Americans for its $20 million, taxpayer-funded, pro–Donald Trump propaganda ads.

The issue was raised to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.

“Money that was allocated by Congress to Customs and Border Patrol was used to purchase roughly $20 million in ads that have run on networks.... It’s touting President Trump’s accomplishments and also him personally,” host Margaret Brennan said. “The president has since said his political action committee will pay for future ads.… What about the past spending? Will U.S. taxpayers be reimbursed for the money that was spent on this?”

“Any time we can do a public service announcement and brag about America, I’m all about it,” Mullin replied. “You have so much negative media that’s out there … constantly controversy … I think 99 percent of the coverage of President Trump is negative—”

“So no reimbursement of the $20 million?”

Mullin ignored the question and continued on.

“We have the most secure border in our nation’s history. Fentanyl deaths are dropping. Drug apprehension is gaining speed every single day. And we should be bragging about what’s happening inside America,” he said. “I commend the opportunity of President Trump to give us the opportunity to brag about America.”

“OK. So no reimbursement. Secretary Mullin, thank you,” Brennan concluded.

That is your money. The president has funded two different hype videos for himself, running them multiple times on multiple channels as a contentious midterm election draws nearer. There’s the strange “Love Me” ad, which debuted late September on Fox News during Jesse Watters Primetime, and the “Final Battle” one in which a voiceover of the president promises to “demolish the deep state,” “expel the warmongers,” “drive out the globalists,” and “cast out the Communists.” The commercials have drawn criticism from even Republican senators for their use of DHS funds.

The ads aren’t even convincing the people who paid for them, as 86 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s use of taxpayer funds on the commercials.

A federal judge has once again blocked President Donald Trump’s takeover of a public golf course in Washington, D.C.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ordered the National Park Service Monday to halt all tree removal on the East Potomac Golf Links, after the agency cut down dozens of trees over the weekend.

In a court filing Friday, the Department of the Interior declared its intention to cut down more than 500 trees “that do not contribute to the historic landscape.” Its plans included shearing 169 trees from one “heavily overgrown” area on Saturday alone.

Reyes blocked that plan Monday until 7:00 a.m. the following day or until she issues another order. She will also hear an emergency request Monday from a group of preservationists for a 14-day restraining order on tree removal at the course.

The tree clearing is part of a plan to transform the public golf course into an exclusive, high-end one. The venture is just one of the many expensive renovation projects the president has set on in the capital region—without receiving any congressional or legal approval.

In May, Reyes pumped the brakes on the renovation plans after the D.C. Preservation League intervened to stop tree removal. The group has good reason not to trust the Trump administration after the president demolished the White House’s East Wing and made clear his intentions to destroy the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts because he wasn’t allowed to plaster his name onto it.

Homeland Security Investigations officers raided Representative Ilhan Omar’s home Monday morning.

The raid was part of a criminal investigation into the Minnesota Democrat’s immigration paperwork, according to Fox News Digital, which was filled out by her late father when she was a child.

The first Somali-American lawmaker and one of the first Muslim women in Congress has been a regular target of Donald Trump’s. The president has repeatedly accused her of financial fraud without providing any evidence for those claims. Now, his smear campaigns have developed into full-out weaponization.

This is a developing story.

What can the history of American socialism tell us about the present and future of democratic politics? The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in socialism, from Bernie Sanders’s runs for president to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recently the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor. Each of these figures has had to face the long-standing assumption in American politics that socialists just can’t find traction in the United States. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement. Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism.

From the beginning of the transformation of the United States into an industrial power, the tycoons, politicians, and judges formed the best-funded union in American history, a cartel that used its bottomless collective pocket to divide and conquer workers—all while promoting the myth of rugged individual success. The collusion of corporate and government interests to suppress worker power has been a constant down the decades, from Jay Gould cutting wages and firing union workers in the 1880s; to the Colorado state militia setting ablaze an encampment of strikers’ families in Ludlow in 1914, killing 11 children; and through thousands of more or less bloodily suppressed labor protests in between. Any history of socialist actions—union drives, strikes, demonstrations, political runs—is incomplete without the story of this ferocious, unequal reaction. And it’s vital for an understanding of Debs himself, of how and why a man would hurl himself time and again into the teeth of this enemy.

An elusive, often frustrating hero, Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, to immigrants from Alsace in northeastern France who ran a grocery store catering to their local French community (in other words, they stocked wine). Gene, his four sisters, and baby brother were raised to be skeptical of organized religion and to question American society’s entrenched inequalities. In the overwhelmingly white Midwest of Debs’s childhood, these were primarily economic. The Civil War was a distant roar, but the downturn that followed affected the family finances enough that 14-year-old Gene quit school to work for the railroad—then barreling across the open plains, transforming remote, windswept way stations into smoke-choked cities, home to a brand-new working class.

He began by scraping the grease off the side of trains, then painting the stripes on the engines. At 16, he became a “fireman,” shoveling coal alongside the engineer driving the locomotive—sweaty, strenuous, dangerous work. He lost his job when the railroad boom of the early 1870s crashed and plunged the country into depression, but Debs still identified as a railway man. In early 1875, he became a charter member of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—a secretive, exclusive fraternity priding itself on “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” These proto-unions supported their “brothers” and families after accidents, although many workers no doubt felt like the man who said, “I would prefer my limb instead.”

As the economy continued to bubble and burst through the late nineteenth century, the vast expansion of the railroads across the country drew in huge numbers of workers, who knew their importance to America’s industrializing project. As an alternative to exclusive craft unions and fraternities, the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, preached a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” that would welcome everyone, Black and white, male and female, whether they worked in fields or factories, kitchens or coal mines. The Knights emphasized community as much as battle, with picnics, dances, newspapers, and study groups. Their vision of the labor struggle as a shared, joyous culture would, in time, resonate with American socialists, but few leaders grasped how vital that joy really was.

Eugene Debs’s union activism was, by contrast, conservative and cautious. He distanced himself from the strikes that were becoming more frequent, widespread, and violent, and in 1885, at 29, he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives as a Democrat. There, he fought to introduce a bill to make railroad companies liable for worker injuries, only to see it quashed by the business-friendly state Senate. Tired of the compromises, he served out his two-year term quietly, and did not seek reelection. Debs did not really want to govern; he wanted to run, and run, and run.

As his political star rose, Debs began courting Kate Metzel, a friend of his sister’s, who came from a community of politically radical German immigrants. The two married in June 1885. Their relationship rested on shared ideals, but her personality remains shadowy. Few private letters or diaries survive, although Gude suggests, fairly, that their life together did not unfold as either of them expected. They could not have children, and Kate spent much of her mature life at home in Terre Haute caring for her elderly mother and her motherless nephew. She was a rock for her husband as he roamed, but the cost to her own soul is lost to history. For Debs, home and family were “the sustaining element,” as he wrote his sister, giving him the strength to continue his work of lecturing, writing, and travel. But this rosy view ignored the widening rift between his two closest allies, Kate and his devoted younger brother, Theo, each of whom was growing increasingly jealous of the other’s influence over Debs.

His vision was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.”

Gude describes Debs’s conversion to socialism as a “transformation of the soul,” which he declared publicly on New Year’s Day 1897. He had shed the doubts and compromises of his previous organizing, given up the slow work of bargaining for scraps and winning by inches. His vision now was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.” And it was a particularly American vision. As Gude describes it, Debs’s rhetoric fused nationalist and Christian mythology with Marxism, evoking the spirit of Christ and the fire of the abolitionists. It was a brew that appealed to crowds wherever he spoke. The era of political oratory made stars of the unlikeliest speakers, whose photographs or transcripts can barely convey what felt to audiences like an electrical current. Eugene Debs would spend the rest of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, and critics and followers alike would frequently compare him to Jesus Christ.

The socialist movement Debs joined contained many factions, and plenty of leaders more pragmatic than Debs, like the more intellectual Victor Berger, who built a solid socialist base in Milwaukee, and was unafraid of compromise for the sake of gaining political power. Nobody in the Socialist Party, however, could challenge Debs’s star power. His first of five runs for president came soon after his conversion, in 1900. On a tiny budget, the candidate had to do the work single-handed, riding the rails for months at a time to lecture to audiences large and small, curious, hostile, and indifferent. In 1908, he traveled from Chicago to the West Coast in a train dubbed the “Red Special,” decked out with flags and snowing the stops with leaflets. The itinerary was relentless. A typical September morning saw him leave Des Moines, Iowa, at 6 a.m. with a schedule of four stops, and four speeches (and at least six more impromptu stops), before the train chugged into Kansas City, Missouri, in the middle of the afternoon, ahead of a speech that evening. Debs was generally blunt about his purpose: to spread the socialist gospel, not to actually make it to the White House.

In those early years of the new century, the makeup of the country’s workforce changed dramatically, and horrors of industrial labor and living conditions—especially the employment of children—became a widespread concern. Middle-class Americans began to press for regulation and government intervention, for reform within the system. To Debs’s disgust, the bombastic Teddy Roosevelt attracted their attention and votes as a Progressive, despite his coziness with big business. His popularity showed that capitalism had left behind its most rampant phase and was now having to engage in public relations.

Yet the promise of reform did little to cool labor energies in the new century. Strikes became bigger and bolder, from the mines of Minnesota to the garment factories of New York City, and the militant rhetoric of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, founded in 1905, spooked the plutocrats into fierce reprisals. For a brief moment there was an alliance, under the banner of socialism, between well-heeled, reform-minded Americans and fiery rebel workers—potently symbolized by the marriage of WASP millionaire J.G. Phelps Stokes to activist Rose Pastor, a Jewish immigrant cigar worker who became famous as the Lower East Side’s answer to Cinderella. It all pushed Debs and the socialists to the crest of a wave in 1912, the year they garnered almost a million votes for the presidency.

Debs was proud that “the Socialist Party was the first party to make the political discovery woman is a human being,” and he was a staunch supporter of women’s autonomy, from their right to vote to their freedom to access birth control. Yet he did not fully grasp the connection between capitalism and patriarchy drawn by activists like Rose Pastor Stokes, the IWW’s teenage star Elizabeth Gurley ­Flynn, and flame-haired Kansas speaker Kate Richards O’Hare, who appear here in brief cameos. It was one thing to fight for higher wages, and quite another for those wages to depend on granting a factory foreman access to your body. (According to Gude, among the abuses that sparked a 1909 walkout at the Pressed Steel car plant in Pennsylvania was a system in which workers had to offer up their wives and daughters as bribes to keep their jobs.) Socialist feminists went further, however, in showing how sexual coercion on the job reflected patriarchal dominance in society at large. Was Debs, with his habit of visiting brothels during his long stretches living away from home, and his emotional dependence on women who were not his wife, really capable of understanding what socialism meant to women? How far was he willing to share power with them—or anyone?

Early in his career, Debs moved cautiously on what was known as the “race question,” seeing it, as many Northerners did, as a Southern problem, and one that class solidarity would in time solve naturally. But the brutalities of Jim Crow disillusioned him, and by the time The Birth of a Nation was enthralling white audiences across the country in 1915, he was spitting blood. In a letter protesting the film’s racist distortions of history, he went so far as to call out the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women, writing that, if truly told, Black history “would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning” than those in the film. His outrage was so rare that it was reprinted in a number of Black newspapers, and put him in contact with the rising new generation of “New Negro” activists in Harlem. Gude argues persuasively that this is where the energy and the optimism of socialism migrated after Debs’s death, smack in the middle of the rip-roaring capitalist ’20s—to Harlem, and then into the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Debs understood capitalism as a scourge that reached beyond America’s borders. He railed against U.S. empire-building and warmongering abroad, whether in Cuba in 1898 or in Mexico in 1914, when President Wilson sent troops, as Debs put it, to die “fighting for Rockefeller and his class.” That was April. By late summer, what was then called the European War had engulfed the foreign policy agenda. Debs joined the chorus protesting “preparedness,” the military buildup that was the pet cause of his old adversary Teddy Roosevelt. But when Wilson, reelected as the peace candidate in 1916, swept the United States into the war the following spring, the repercussions for protesters and leftists were immediate, and crushing. The Espionage Act criminalized dissent, while vigilantes calling themselves the American Protective League hauled off suspected draft dodgers in unmarked vans. The battered IWW was broken, and the thriving socialist press abruptly silenced.

In June 1918, Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, in defense of socialism. He denounced war in general as a tool of the oppressors, and urged the crowd to remember that they were human beings, with minds and souls to develop, not wage slaves or cannon fodder. Two weeks later, the 62-year-old was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1920, two years after the end of the war, he mounted his fifth and final presidential run from his Atlanta prison cell. After President Harding commuted his sentence the day before Christmas in 1921, Debs used his experience of incarceration to write about the horrors of the prison system, especially the way it robbed poor Black boys of their future. But his health was shot, and less than five years after his release, America’s leading socialist died at the age of 70.

Almost immediately, arguments over his legacy began. His ability to inspire listeners in every corner of the country, to connect and convince them that he cared about them and had a balm for their pain, was powerful, but fundamentally at odds with the movement’s democratic ethos. Debs himself worried that socialism could not grow by following a powerful leader, but at the same time he wasn’t willing to give up the spotlight. There was always another audience.

Gude grapples throughout his book with this contradiction in Debs, the grandiose visionary and the man who craved constant affirmation, and whose heavy drinking at times meant that he needed a junior party member to get him to the stage on time. After a failed run for Congress in 1916, he plunged into an emotional affair with a married woman several years his junior, with whom he exchanged passionate letters up until the end of his life. In his final years, he embraced alternative health therapies and wrote enthusiastically to his brother from one sanitarium of the powers of such wellness cures as cold plunges, touching grass, and avoiding processed foods. These human peculiarities of Debs resist a clear narrative, and apparently did nothing to undermine his followers’ faith. He didn’t connect with people by confessing his own failings, but clearly his flaws helped him toward his spirit of nonjudgmental humanism, which allowed him to meet his fellow human beings where and how they were.

For all his wide knowledge across the vast range of American working lives, Eugene Debs was a Midwesterner at heart, and his politics belonged to Terre Haute, a small town under a big sky, rather than socialism’s urban hotbeds, Chicago or New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York isn’t explained by Debs, although he quoted him in his inauguration speech (“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity”). There’s perhaps a more pertinent line of inheritance from the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee, who proudly got their name by installing a sewer system in the sanitation-deprived town, to Mamdani’s equally unglamorous, useful project of filling potholes across the city. Action, not oratory.

The international socialists who inspired Debs at the start of his conversion were wildly excited at the prospects for American labor. How far might a nation go that had no kings to depose, no entrenched hierarchies to uproot, a country so young and iconoclastic and resource-rich? It was a disillusion as brutal as the mines and the mills, to see how powerful the pushback would be. The promise of American socialism is still unfulfilled, but this is a country in which almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Even politics. Even capitalism. Perhaps the story of Eugene Debs, told as meticulously as this, shows us that reinvention will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people.

On October 25, Brazilians will vote in the second round of their presidential elections. The matter might not be all that suspenseful. The far right-wing candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, is widely favored to defeat the incumbent, President Lula da Silva, especially after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round, which found both him and the members of his far-right movement broadly in the ascendance. His victory will be a catastrophe for many reasons, but there’s one looming disaster that will extend far beyond Brazil’s borders: The fate of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest, hangs in the balance. Its stepped-up destruction will likely dramatically accelerate global warming.

What’s more, Donald Trump has personal ties to one of the Brazilian oligarchs who is most directly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon, and Trump actually hosted him in the White House on August 20.

And yet the mainstream U.S. media is ignoring the rising danger to the Amazon. Ominously, climate scientists have warned that increased destruction will push the vast rainforest toward a “tipping point,” after which recovery will be difficult, if not impossible. 

Here, briefly, is the science behind the warnings. The Amazon rainforest is our planet’s biggest carbon sink. Its 2.3 million square miles of thick vegetation pull dangerous carbon dioxide from the global atmosphere, and safely store it in the forest’s thick vegetation. Burn the forest, and carbon dioxide, the worst of the greenhouse gases, remains in the atmosphere, damaging the climate everywhere on the planet. 

In recent years, climate scientists point out that some 17 percent of the Amazon has already been burned or otherwise destroyed. Estimates are that 20 to 25 percent would be the tipping point, after which the end result will be treeless savannah and scrubland. Naturally, these predictions are not facts, but as Thomas Lovejoy, the great American scientist and environmentalist who devoted his life to the Amazon, used to say, “Multiply the risk of a catastrophe by its disastrous consequences, and you will see that inaction is impossible.”

Once you witness the aftermath of the rainforest destruction, you will never forget it. Take, for instance, the construction of BR-317, the two-lane highway that runs southwest from the city of Rio Branco in Brazil’s western state of Acre to the Bolivian border. Once, triple-canopy forest reached right to the highway’s edge on both sides. Now, green pasture stretches into the far distance, with occasional dead tree trunks and blackened stumps a reminder of what happened. Once, you would have struggled to peer more than 50 feet into the forest. Now, you can see for miles. 

These days, huge herds of dewlapped, humped, white Brahma cattle roam across the huge fazendas, or ranches. Patches of sickly orange-brown soil are the giveaway; the topsoil is actually shallow and not fertile. In the rainforest, falling vegetation from the thick forest cover is regularly recycled into new forest growth. Destroy the original dense tree cover, and the rainforest dies. 

Of course, along highway BR-317, the rainforest’s rich and interdependent insect, bird, and animal life has also retreated into the far horizons. From time to time, you might see a couple of parrots; they sometimes fly in matrimonial pairs. On a rare occasion, you might catch sight of a dazzlingly blue morpho butterfly dancing along the highway. But the life form you are most likely to notice is gray-headed vultures. 

Xapuri, a small town along the highway, was once the home to Chico Mendes, the legendary environmentalist and rubber-tapper leader who was murdered back in 1988. The local ranchers who later burned the forest killed him first, to get him out of the way. Several books have been written about his life; he is also the subject of an excellent feature film.  

Destroying the trees to create pasture for beef cattle is one of the main reasons the rainforest is dying, and powerful cattle ranchers are one of the major supporters of the far right in Brazil. Flávio Bolsonaro, the current candidate, is a stand-in for his father, Jair, who was president from 2018 to 2022 (and is presently in prison for plotting to overthrow the incumbent president, Lula da Silva, who defeated him in the 2022 election). Under the elder Bolsonaro, rainforest destruction had accelerated dramatically, as the fazendeiros, or large-scale ranchers, had demanded. After Lula won, the burning dropped 34 percent in his first six months in office.

Another contributor to rainforest destruction is JBS, the gigantic global foods company that originally started in Brazil but which has now expanded, including into the United States. JBS is the world’s largest meat-processing company. Environmentalists and others have credibly accused it of exporting meat from Brazilian pastures that replaced stretches of burned-out rainforest. JBS denies the allegations, but Senator Ron Wyden held a series of hearings from 2021 to 2023, and he concluded that JBS “was turning a blind eye as parts of its supply chain burn down the Amazon, push the world toward climate catastrophe, and undercut American ranchers who play by the rules on international trade.” Human Rights Watch also reported in 2025 that JBS “may have exported beef ... sourced from illegal ranches.” 

It was one of the principal owners of JBS, Joesley Batista, who met Donald Trump face to face in the White House on August 20. Batista apparently successfully lobbied Trump to lower U.S. tariffs on imported Brazilian beef, in an effort to reduce consumer prices in the United States. But you can bet that Trump never raised the fate of the Amazon—nor will he, if Flávio Bolsonaro wins on October 25. 

Defending the Amazon rainforest is a dangerous business, and the killing didn’t stop with Chico Mendes. A 2022 report by Global Witness found that more than 1,700 environmental activists had been murdered in the previous decade across the global south. Brazil was in first place, with 342 killings. Indigenous people are among the victims. A remarkable 2022 film, The Territory, actually documented one such murder.

Cattle ranches are not the only threat to the Amazon. High global gold prices have stimulated feverish efforts to invade the forest, as Amazon Watch, the influential U.S.-based environmentalist organization, warned last May. Large mining corporations, and the individual artisanal miners called garimpeiros, are both to blame. Amazon Watch indicted “a predatory logic that turns rivers into sludge, strengthens illegal networks, and deepens violence.”

There is unfortunately yet another threat. Rising global demand for soybeans is also triggering rainforest destruction.

Under President Lula, a Brazilian government agency called IBAMA fought hard to protect the forest. IBAMA agents are authorized to carry weapons, and they do often get into gunfights with forest destroyers. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins, he and his allies in the Brazilian Congress, which will be dominated by the far right, will surely neuter the agency. What’s more, for now the Brazilian Constitution bans industrial mining in Indigenous territories. But the fear is that the incoming far-right majority will change the law. 

Amazon Watch’s program director is Christian Poirier. His organization, like the others in the global environmental movement, regards the news from Brazil as a true climate emergency: “The Trump administration is openly sympathetic to the Bolsonaros, and has been working to subvert and interfere in Brazil’s election. We need to vote in a Democratic Congress in November, and then push it to put the brakes on Trump’s pro-Bolsonaro, anti-rainforest moves.”

Andrew Miller is Amazon Watch’s advocacy director, in Washington, D.C. He recognizes that certain progressive members of Congress, like Representatives Delia Ramirez and Mark Pocan, are already taking a direct interest in the Brazil environmental crisis. But he warns that Congress is also afflicted by what is called “climate hushing.” 

“It’s crazy,” he says. “Studies show a measurable decline in the number of press releases and public statements about the environment coming out of Congress. The number of congressional interventions on the climate is decreasing—at a time when the actual global crisis is greater than ever, and growing.” 

After briefly fading into the background following the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX under the weight of its own accounting fraud, effective altruism, or E.A., is back in the news in a big way. This time, the philosophy’s adherents have found themselves in a sudden-onset blood feud with the Trump White House. Given the administration’s unceasing hostility to both effectiveness and altruism, the spat has a certain intuitiveness to it, but this conflict is not driven by Trump’s hatred of the global poor. Instead, it was the Department of Defense posting, seemingly unprompted, a pronouncement of “Americanism, not Effective Altruism” that ignited the conflict. Since then, there has been a major struggle over “AI safety” policy between E.A. adherents and the techno-fascist right—two groups that do, confusingly, overlap as well.

It’s hard to remember as the world burns around us, but there was a moment when E.A. (and its sister philosophies rationalism and longtermism) was ascendent. It was quickly amassing capital, adherents, and political power. In just a few short years, it went from a few quirky thinkers and writers trying to logic their way to solving morality to a coalition with substantial financial, media, and lobbying capacity. 

While Bankman-Fried may have become effective altruism’s most notorious adherent, he was far from alone. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn remain firmly in the E.A. camp, and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have both publicly embraced and funded parts of the movement (although their overall giving doesn’t graft as cleanly onto the philosophy). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has also described his approach to philanthropy similarly to E.A.  

That ascendence was, in no small part, fueled by Silicon Valley titans’ patronage and proselytization. And a key reason for that is that the central premise of (especially longtermist) E.A. is just a hop, skip, and a jump from a moral permission structure that nakedly celebrates wealth and excuses opulence as steps on the path to a more just future. Bankman-Fried himself admitted as much in a candid exchange with a journalist after his business empire imploded; the altruism he championed was all about cloaking the scramble for wealth and power as something noble. 

This is in no way true of everyone who takes interest in or subscribes to E.A., and it’s important to remember that those who are able to season their effective altruism with a dose of epistemic humility do often fund worthy projects. But the totalizing moral structure that shields the machinations of the powerful is a crucial dynamic to make sense of how we got to our current political moment, with tech oligarchs running amok, major financial realignment, and all-encompassing AI storylines. Because while the impulse to do altruism, and make it effective, can help galvanize works rooted in good intentions, our would-be overlords took that to start paving the proverbial road to hell.

At its core, effective altruism posits that, given scarce resources, the most ethical course of action is the one that maximizes the “returns” that can be generated from those scarce resources. Usually, the “returns” in question are measured in things like lives saved, disease incidences avoided, people educated, or other noble goals. But the returns can also be monetary, which is part of why E.A. is extremely useful to the ultrarich seeking to amass power. 

The obvious assumption here is that there is an objective way of accounting for those returns and an objective way to “weight” doing good that benefits different people. One of the more common instincts among effective altruists is to consider all human lives equal. On its face, that sounds obviously correct! But it can quickly lead to counterintuitive conclusions. 

Take for instance a charity that runs a program integrating ex-cons into communities’ workforces at an expense of $10,000 per week. An E.A.-style analysis could take this program and compare it to a famously cost-effective intervention like bed nets to fight malaria and mosquito-borne disease—which costs around $2 to $5 per net and can save a child’s life for every 600 nets distributed—and conclude that this facially worthy cause is actually bleeding resources away from more effective forms of altruistic intervention. And in that framework, career development to integrate people back into their communities is not only suboptimally moral but could even be immoral because that work takes on the opportunity cost of children’s lives. In the hypothetical above, that $10,000 a week could instead be spent on malaria nets and save as many as eight lives a week.

So, to a stickler E.A. analysis, community service missions can be actively harmful because it would be more moral to spend the money elsewhere. This sort of thinking is not universal among the movement’s adherents; it is entirely possible to recognize the limits of this economics-style optimization problem as a philosophy. But when that possibility is pushed out of mind, or actively attacked, such analysis can rapidly lead to some very unsavory moral positions.

Take, for instance, Sam Bankman-Fried, who subscribed to the E.A. movement’s more radical offshoot, longtermism. In SBF’s mind, spending a dollar to help save a life today would be a waste when that dollar could instead be invested in the development of new technologies that could theoretically save thousands or millions of lives in the distant future. With enough navel-gazing, SBF appears to have convinced himself that a utilitarian course of action could include purchasing the island-nation of Nauru and setting it up as a doomsday bunker from which a select few effective altruists could repopulate the planet after an apocalyptic scenario. Deranged, eugenic, and laughable, you might say, but if you give an insular group of E.A.s enough time and space to stew in their own juices, just about anything can seem rational. 

Think back to the fundamental idea that we can objectively decide how much to “weight” the good done to different individuals. Any attempt to refine such an analysis runs into the problem that the “solution” to your optimization problem will be different depending on how weights are assigned. And you can get better results if you prioritize certain subpopulations. For example, if you have limited funding for cancer research, you will get wildly different resource allocations depending on if you weight each life the same versus if you prioritize maximizing years lived post-treatment. If everyone counts the same, there will be comparatively more funding flowing toward cancers that impact older adults. If we weight by years of life post-treatment, the focus will be much more on pediatric cancer. 

Naturally, either of those is colorably better than the current market-based approach to research and development that sees more investment in erectile dysfunction treatment than, say, endometriosis. But if it feels a little gross to be pitting different communities of cancer patients against each other, that’s because it is. It is also necessitated by any system that purports to “solve” moral quandaries. And it feeds into the more unsavory tendencies among E.A.s. 

There are broadly three buckets of destructive ways of thinking that effective altruists are predisposed toward, all downstream of this necessity to determine the relative moral worth of helping different populations with a fixed pool of resources: deference to notions of a chosen elite, justification of the centralization of power and wealth, and wanton disregard for human well-being and agency. 

It’s here that I have to introduce you to Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI theorist, Peter Thiel associate, Harry Potter fanfic writer, and movement figurehead. Yudkowsky, often referred to simply as “Yud” by those in the know of AI research and E.A. thought, views himself in a messianic light, to the point that when one supporter (Scott Alexander, an E.A./rationalist thought leader in his own right) tweeted a comparison of him to Jesus Christ, he responded with a hypothetical conversation where he condescends to the Lamb of God. If you have developed and propagated a moral framework that is objectively more correct than the Son of God, though, it follows that you have the moral high ground, elevated well above that puny peak at Mount Sinai where Moses received his ethical framework. 

Yudkowsky’s epic screed, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, is a common entry point to the world of rationalist and E.A. thought, and has been deployed as a recruiting tool to bring new people into the movement. At more than 600,000 words across 122 chapters, the alternate Harry Potter story, doled out in pieces over five years, follows the titular character as he uses rationalist thinking to engineer new types of magic, wielding his upbringing by an Oxford philosopher to demonstrate the power of rational thought. Arthur C. Clarke famously posited that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; Yudkowsky’s take is basically that sufficiently rational thought will enable the creation of technology that functionally is magic. 

This messianic sense of self is not confined to Yudkowsky. One of the most long-standing critiques of the broader E.A. space is that it insists on totalizing and moralizing across every part of life to insist that there is an objectively correct way to live. And that people who don’t follow that path are hence wrong. 

Australian philosopher Peter Singer, one of the ethical pioneers of E.A. thought, gave a TED Talk in which he argued that a blind American should not be given a guide dog through philanthropy, because it uses funds that could have a much greater impact in treating blindness in developing countries. Similarly, philosopher Eric Friedman wrote that he would be “angry” at people donating to St. Jude, the pediatric cancer treatment hospital, when the same money could go further if it were diverted to a different pediatric cancer center (again in the developing world). 

And while St. Jude does have its own issues with arguably bloated overhead and advertising costs, this mode of analysis would say that you shouldn’t fund any pediatric cancer wards in rich countries as long as there is a more cost-effective alternative elsewhere in the world. Remember earlier, when pitting cancer patients against each other felt like a reach? Some people actually do that. The end point of all of this is that unless you are the objectively most worthy of help, any assistance given to you is not just suboptimal but deeply immoral.

To a certain cadre of extremist, egomaniacal E.A.s, their vaunted ability to be the only ones capable of clearly seeing these trade-offs is reason enough for them to be a chosen elite. They need to lead because most people don’t have the stomach to come out and say that children in rich countries don’t deserve help with their cancer. Instead, only this group has the right combination of intelligence and objectivity to usher society into the future. And here is the juncture where some E.A.s go down the road of eugenics, believing that the intentional breeding of humans for desirable traits gets a bad rap. Incidentally, people who follow the tenets of effective altruism and rationalism just happen to have the traits for which they want to select. For some, their superiority is not just intellectual but biological. Which leads to dabbling in long-discredited race science and writing off entire populations.

This innate superiority feeds directly into the second set of dangerous thinking endemic to certain corners of E.A.: the justification of massive concentration of wealth and power. If some people are just better leaders because they are smarter and more objective, then it is preferable for those people to control resources and direct decision-making. This is, as University of Chicago philosopher Brian Leiter noted to the New York Post, part of why tech titans love E.A.; “There’s no talk about higher taxes, redistribution to a more progressive income tax, anti-trust investigations or more regulation of their businesses.” In fact, tax-based redistribution could actually be worse for society if it takes money away from the altruists who could steer it toward worthy causes more efficiently. 

This exact problem is compounded by “longtermism.” Recall that the central premise of E.A. charitable calculus is that we can do the most good by being agnostic about how near or distant a person is; the entire idea is to weight only by who is most deserving and would make greatest use of the help. Longtermism extends this line of thinking into a fourth dimension: time. 

If good deeds done in an indeterminate future time frame could be just—or more—ethical than anything done now, then there is a point at which amassing wealth now to spend later can be presented as more useful than just doing good things now. This is the justification of the “earn to give” mentality modeled by Sam Bankman-Fried. He had to get filthy rich, you see, because then he can take all that money and better the world on the back end. 

Vanilla E.A. already teaches that we should set aside our own personal relationships and care about people regardless of where they are. Longtermism says that we also have to care equally about when people are. And there is practically no level of disempowerment or disinvestment that cannot be justified when you are weighting eight-odd billion lives against a theoretically infinite number of people who might exist in the future. 

Here’s where the wanton negligence toward humanity can kick in. Once you break down the social bonds built by relationship and community first and foremost to the people closest to us, it’s much easier to reduce human life to an abstract agglomeration of discrete beings that exist outside of the world as we know it. Suddenly, the inclination to be willing to burn the Earth to fuel space colonization makes a lot more sense. You might doom most of the population in the near future, but there is infinitely more net utility once the entire galaxy’s resources are able to be tapped to fuel future lives. This is basically an argument Elon Musk, noted fan of E.A. gospel What We Owe the Future, has been making for years. 

Moreover, once you divorce ethics and altruism from the social and communal relationships that they’re traditionally grounded in, you move away from a focus on channeling resources toward helping living breathing people. Instead, you can justify takes that, actually, insects are more important to help because they have some form of consciousness and vastly outnumber us. The least extreme iteration of this is animal welfare and veganism activism that comes out of E.A. spaces, pushing for greater acceptance of animals as beings worthy of altruistic treatment as well. The most extreme is intertwined with frontier AI development’s quest to create new artificial beings. That version is the crucial evolution of Elon Musk’s older take about space colonization. Our species is just a biological “bootloader” for a one-day interstellar artificial superintelligence. 

It is easy to see how noble intent can pave the way to these outlandish ethical positions. We probably should care more about the way we treat animals. But that doesn’t mean that choosing to fund a program to help children orphaned by natural disasters is unethical because the money would be more effectively spent preserving ant colonies. The reason why we intuitively help the people closest to us is not just an ethical lapse, it’s because we have different moral responsibilities depending on how we relate to people. 

Maybe AI will become conscious and colonize distant stars. But it is the height of ego and folly to predict that it necessarily will happen and that, therefore, we need to prioritize our potential robotic progeny over the people around us in the here and now.

Not all, or even most, people who dabble in E.A. thought fall into these moral traps, but it’s common enough that there are observable patterns of behavior. More importantly, the people who do fall into these tendencies seem determined to engineer the end of the world as we know it. 

Effective altruism prides itself on being nonconformist and willing to break with public opinion. Many of its adherents seemingly relish being outside the mainstream. It legitimates their view that they are apart from “normies” who are shepherded towards rote philosophical positions. 

That’s how you wind up with Yudkowsky being spoken of in the same breath as someone in a “sex cult” and an important thought leader in AI alignment. 

Some expat critics of E.A. who left the movement have a different acronym: TESCREAL, or transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. Basically, the argument is that Silicon Valley has been taken in by a compulsion to strive for biologically evolving beyond the current nature of the human race (transhumanism plus extropianism), achieving a technological  innovation that renders previous human ways of life obsolete and results in integrating humanity with machines (the singularity), the achievement of immortality through consciousness transfers (cosmism), improving human decision-making by centering objectivity (rationalism), and that we have an ethical responsibility to deploy resources in the way most likely to do the most good (E.A.), not just for the people who exist but for those who could exist in the future, as well (longtermism).

The TESCREAL argument lays out the case that much of the tech world has become dedicated to obsessive focus on the potential of human extinction and the necessity of achieving a science fiction–esque future. 

The business plan here will look familiar to anyone who has tracked the promises figures like Sam Altman have continually made. Promise that technology is being developed that will fundamentally change life for the better, cure cancer, and usher in a post-scarcity society. In the meantime, build up huge reserves of money and political power. And then justify the costs being borne in the deployment of technology as a necessary evil to usher in a brighter future.  

The entire E.A. worldview has been a microcosm of Silicon Valley’s political framework, which is why it was so expedient for figures like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz to promote it. Bundled into a single philosophy, you have the groundwork to validate elites’ self-importance, justify the amassing of power and wealth, and excuse nearly any antisocial behavior through commitments to the future. 

To the powerful people who invested in spreading the gospel of effective altruist thought, these quirks are features, not bugs. A philosophy that confirms that those wielding power and resources are actually heroes fighting a cosmic battle for the future allows for oligarchs to justify the undermining of democratic institutions, the hoarding of wealth, and callous treatment of humanity. 

One last time, it’s worth bearing in mind that this mentality is not universalizable across everyone who finds E.A. to be valuable. Initiatives like Giving What We Can are a way for people to genuinely put their money where their mouths are. For plenty of people, the weird, deeply anti-human takes are a bridge farther than they’ll ever take the philosophy. But for Silicon Valley titans, these predilections are a crucial element of why they find this worldview to be useful—to their own ends, at least. 

Once you have a framework that validates your role as the builders of a new, better world, it justifies serving as pallbearers of what we currently know as human civilization. And once you accept that your movement is an elite that must be nurtured into stewards of the future and that this destiny is more important than anything else in the present, it becomes totally reasonable to do things like buy castles for your thinkers’ enrichment. 

Now we’re at a juncture where the people who helped effective altruism make it big, people like Musk, are in conflict with the elements of the movement who have kept out of the worst rabbit holes. Some see the singularity as inevitable, and creating artificial consciousness as an ethical imperative. Some see real people as being worth helping. When your philosophy lionizes elites and excuses their greed, of course they’ll help fund it. But now the chickens are coming home to roost, and it’s becoming more apparent that the indulgence of power is the reason those people were on board in the first place. Their altruism is devoted purely to laying claim to a future that merely aligns with their own desires.

Very early on the morning of August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea woke up for the last time. He was a young Black man—Wikipedia pegs his age at the time at 27, while another more authoritative-seeming source I read said he was 22—who had lost his mother and father while young and drifted into a life of itinerant labor and, eventually, crime. Earlier that summer, he broke into the home of 70-year-old Lishia Edwards, who was white. He raped her and killed her and stole some of her jewelry. Or at least it seems like he did—he confessed more than once, but never in the presence of counsel, and at one point he told police he was drunk at the time of his first confession. But a ring was found at the scene that did belong to him.

His execution, by hanging, was set for sunrise that mid-August day. A crowd of 20,000 gathered; vendors sold candy, popcorn, Coca-Cola, and watermelon; some men climbed utility poles, and parents held their small children aloft, for a better view. The Louisville Courier-Journal enthused: “Kentucky is already famous for her hospitality. Her Derby parties are known all over the country. Her hanging parties should have an even wider fame. Most people are interested in horse-racing, but all people are interested in death.”

Coverage was national and intense. The Northern papers were horrified by this macabre spectacle (here’s a photo of the scene). The people of Owensboro resented the way they were portrayed. But the state legislature and the governor had enough of a conscience that not long after, they passed a law outlawing public executions. And the hanging of Rainey Bethea was, by most accounts, the last public execution in the United States (the Death Penalty Information Center’s website says that one more took place, in Missouri in 1937).

In either case, it’s been nine decades, nearly a century, since the United States of America or any of its states decided that turning the killing of a human being into a public entertainment was a good idea. France banned the practice soon thereafter, in 1939. In the UK, public execution was outlawed back in 1868. In 2025, according to Amnesty International, just two countries carried out public executions. The theocrats in Iran held 11, and the Taliban in Afghanistan hosted six. And that’s the company in which Pete Hegseth—the testosterone-obsessed, man-boy “war” secretary—wishes to place the United States of America.

Donald Trump has done a lot of repulsive things as president and taken this country down moral sinkholes most of us never thought we’d encounter. But if he approves the livestreaming of the execution of Nidal Hasan—and Hegseth’s announcement last week was just a recommendation; Trump said over the weekend that he will decide—it will easily be the most depraved thing he’s done.

Hasan’s crimes are sickening. He killed 13 people, including a pregnant woman, and injured 32 more when he opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. I’m an opponent of the death penalty, mainly because there’s just way too much evidence that our justice system wrongly convicts people. Since 1972, 203 people sentenced to death in this country have been later exonerated. I’ll admit, though, that in cases of premeditated mass murder like this one, where the crime was unspeakable and the guilt is clear, I don’t lose much sleep when I learn that the perp will be put to death.

But televising it is barbaric. Turning the killing of a human being, any human being, into a spectator sport is about as sick as it gets. The United States of the mid-1930s was not exactly a progressive Eden, to say nothing of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. A Black man was lynched in the state just two years before Bethea was put to death. But even in that place and at that time, people in positions of power knew that killing a person for public amusement was one moral bridge too far and moved to outlaw it.

It’s not too far for Hegseth. The man who has overseen a disastrous war that has cost you and me $45 billion and 81 aircraft worth more than $3 billion thinks it’s a grand idea. He laid it out last week to some right-wing “news” outfit called Real America’s Voice. A “no-brainer,” he said. “It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kinda like the mentality we had in World War II. Which was win.”

Where does one even begin? As if turning murder into a piece of theater is on par with the global fight to stop fascism. As if taking a human life on TV is a “win” comparable to the defeat of Hitler. What kind of monster talks like this?

At another point in the interview, Hegseth gave away what really makes people like him seethe. Of Hasan’s act, he said: “Remember what Obama called it? ‘Workplace violence’? I mean, that’s what we’re up against.” Wow. Did Obama really say that? “Workplace violence” is Andy Bernard punching a wall, not a religious extremist executing 13 innocent people and perpetrating a bloodbath.

But Obama never personally uttered the phrase. In the shootings’ immediate aftermath, he called them a “horrific outburst of violence.” Instead, the Pentagon categorized Hasan’s act as an incident of workplace violence until it much later decided to call it what it obviously was, an act of terrorism (Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire). So that’s what’s eating at Hegseth here—that a Pentagon full of beardos and weirdos, no doubt acting at the behest of a commander-in-chief who would never meet Hegseth’s perverse definition of manhood, was engaged in a bunch of low-testosterone wokery until he came along.

One can agree with Hegseth on that score that if one wishes. But it doesn’t excuse, nothing excuses, livestreaming the event. It still may not happen. JD Vance threw a little cold water on the idea over the weekend, announcing that it wasn’t a done deal and in any case he wouldn’t be watching. Trump, in his remarks, left the door open for an about face.

If it does happen, though: Can there be any doubt there will be watch parties—mini-Owensboros, so to speak—all over the country, or at least certain parts of it? And remember: This will take place on December 3, during the first week of Advent, in between the Sundays dedicated to Hope and Peace.

I wonder what Hegseth—who fancies himself a devout Christian and sports a tattoo saying “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), which was a rallying cry among the Christian crusaders massacring Muslims—makes of that little piece of irony. Or the irony that adheres in the fact that he wants to punish an Islamic religious extremist by doing something that will link the United States of America arm-in-arm with what are almost surely the two most extremist theocratic Islamic regimes in the world. One doubts that irony has occurred to him. And of course it will elude Trump. Our hope is that one of those plastic-faced denizens of Mar-a-Lago might point it out to him in time. And if not, December 3 will take its place as one of the darkest days in modern American history.    

Canada’s last breakup, with Great Britain, took roughly 100 years of painstaking and piecemeal constitutional reform to accomplish. This time, things are moving a little faster. Since President Donald Trump launched his trade war against his closest neighbor shortly after taking office a second time—leveling tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of goods—relations have been icy, and keep getting icier. “Canadian-American relations go back and forth, and they sometimes get fairly bad,” Norman Hillmer, Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University and a leading historian on the subject, told me. This time, however, it feels as though the love is really gone. “They’ve never been like this,” he said. “This is right off the charts.”

While the White House has been issuing a torrent of threats—including promises to use “economic force” to annex Canada, and hints at other more direct methods, like forced annexation—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been quietly hunting for new suitors. For over a year, The Wall Street Journal reports, he has been exchanging sweet nothings on long-distance phone calls with the leaders of the Old Continent. Canada, he teases foreign leaders, is open for business. Its huge tracts of land are just waiting to be exploited—its amber grain, pink potash, and hot natural gas overflowing in abundance. And with generous new tax incentives to rival even American corporate giveaways, it’ll even pick up the check. We’re just like America, he hints—only sweeter.

It would seem Europe got the message. In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament in September, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, if anything, came on too strong. Tearing the corset of EU precedent, she proposed a wholly invented new category of “associate member” for Canada. “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world,” she fawned. “And we will now build our shared future as well.”

What, exactly, “associate member” would mean is anyone’s guess; officials on both sides soon played it down with mild embarrassment. In his response, Carney referred only to “an alliance for the future.” Some members of the European Parliament responded with the bitterness of a rejected suitor. “It was an absurd and unrealistic knee-jerk reaction,” Siegbert Frank Droese, a far-right German MEP, lamented. Europe simply wanted “the closest possible” relationship, President of the European Council Antonio Costa clarified. “I don’t think we should get too bogged down with words and labeling,” Mark Camilleri of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association told me, channeling the consummate bachelor.

In Carney’s Don Draper–esque world of jet-setting luncheons and grenadine ties, this was a play well-executed. Just look, he seemed to say. They’re throwing themselves at us. His oblique references to America’s boorishness on the world stage—“economic integration is now being weaponised, and tariffs are being used as a means of pressure”—likewise hit their mark. “Laughable,” Trump huffed, before striking the paternalistic note of the bitter ex. “If it’s a good intention, that’s fine,” he said. “If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe.”

For most Canadians, this is all a fantasy worthy of fan fiction. Many Canadians, especially of Carney’s urbane class, have long nurtured the aspirational notion that they are closer in character to Europeans than to their neighbors to the south. They tend to look fondly on a welfare state. Their genteel gradualism, born of their lengthy breakup with Britain, makes them natural partners for slow, set-in-their-ways European institutions; their common-law conventions make them reluctant rebels, studious observers of norms and traditions.

This makes Canada a particularly appealing ally: reliable and rich, not to mention well-resourced. Canada has long vowed that its friendship comes with access to the critical minerals, uranium, and gas Europe sorely needs. Carney has even forsworn his nation’s traditional “ick” regarding militarization as he pours money into defense to spur economic growth. In mid-September, he promised “to produce millions of drones within the next two years,” signing a 100-year pact to arm Ukraine against Russia—offering a deeper commitment to that conflict than anyone in Europe has been able to muster.

A well-armed, well-funded Canada offers Europe more than just resources: It is also strategically positioned to see the continent through the next century of war and warming. As long as it maintains sovereignty over the Northwest Passage (a fact the United States has long denied), it controls the only Arab- and Russian-free route from Europe to Asia, offering secure shipping no matter the EU’s stance on Israel, Ukraine, Iran, or America’s next war.

All to say, it is no surprise Europe leaped so quickly to the idea of Canadian “associate membership.” After all, a diplomatic coup with Canada would also help cover a growing rot at the heart of the European Union: its own ambivalence toward expansion. With a lengthy line of corrupt economies and shaky democracies waiting at its door, the EU’s regulatory bouncers can’t even relax the rules enough to woo the likes of Iceland, which voted down nonbinding negotiations in August in a high-profile rebuke to Eurocrats. For Europe, too, Canada represents something fresh—a new, deeper, more harmonious relationship, free from the baggage of past disappointments.

But what, you might ask, would Canada gain from flirting with a club its own members want to leave? In some conservative corners, news of Carney’s surprise European romance prompted alarm from those fattened on a drip-feed of Brexit-style panic. Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s nonentity of an opposition leader, issued dire warnings of becoming Europe’s “twenty-eighth state” and falling victim to “reckless European-style immigration.”

Those fears are deliberately naïve—any labor mobility agreement would require painstaking negotiations with each of Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories. But it did not stop Canada’s more affluent and liberal-minded communities from fantasizing about a future of visa-free work and travel, or other supposed fruits of Carney’s flirtation: lower tuition at Europe’s universities, fancier cheese, better wine. The potential dowry was hard to deny—hundreds of billions in European funds and investments, unlocked; a chance, finally, to sell Canada’s family jewels to the right sort of buyer.

Canada had long since signed on to the more feasible aspects of this exchange. It still struggles to fill its quota for some tariff-free European food products under a free-trade agreement signed in 2016 (and still unratified by 10 EU states). Italian wine is already cheaper than Canadian on many liquor store shelves. Canada long ago signed onto Europe’s $106 billion research fund, Horizon Europe, and its defense procurement agreement, SAFE. It remains to be seen what more could actually be done in terms of formal ties with the continent, besides slightly cheaper exchanges to the Sorbonne for the children of Canada’s wealthiest families.

In reality, what Europe offers Canada is something far less tangible: an implication. Europe’s interest in Canada shows there is a new deep-pocketed benefactor willing to slot into the role being vacated by a self-destructing United States. “What happened in Strasbourg this week very much also has to be seen as a sign signaled to an American audience,” Achim Hurrelmann, director of Carleton University’s Centre for European Studies, told me in September. There is a growing realization on both sides of the Atlantic, in no small part prompted by Carney’s repeated calls for a new global order, that the United States will not fully recover after Trump; that this new phase of American bellicosity and dysfunction may be a generational phenomenon. As Carney made clear in his lauded speech at Davos, he sees the solution as an alliance of “middle powers,” a global nonaligned movement of capable, middle-class democracies—a normal kids club, rich and stable enough to stand up to the world’s bullies.

It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list.

It’s perhaps a little damning that the European Union, once thought a possible global hegemon in its own right, was among the first on Carney’s invite list. Carney has been explicit: His goal is not to seriously challenge U.S. power by crafting a new “great power rival … with better manners.” Rather, it’s to insulate his country—and, if you take him at his word, the civilized world—from the more insane impulses of America’s increasingly unhinged government—like the sudden defunding of USAID.

In this sense, Carney’s priority areas for collaboration are revealing: AI policy, financial services, and defense are all still overly dependent on rules and systems designed in America. The companies that dominate those fields are, of course, also based in America. As its rules on data protection and its standardization of charging ports show, one thing the European Union can still do is use the weight of its sizable consumer market to dictate the rules of the capitalist game, as it is currently trying to do in several areas, most notably tech regulation. Part of Carney’s calculus is the bet that this can also work in state procurement.

There are reasons to be skeptical. Carney’s bid for closer ties with Europe comes at a time when the continent’s governments—and the EU itself—are struggling to resist a tidal wave of right-wing populism. Any substantial agreement may see Carney shaking hands with Germany’s first far-right chancellor since the last one shot himself in a bunker. While Trump is addled and ineffectual, the far-right in Europe is operating with a genuine democratic mandate—at least, as long as there is any democracy left.

But it’s quite possible that Carney simply doesn’t care. Like a true banker, he has already demonstrated a remarkable agnosticism regarding the origins of the dollars he hopes will build his nation by buying its assets. Attendees at a high-profile investment summit in Toronto just before his trip to Strasbourg included prominent Trump donors, alongside state-backed wealth funds from China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. In the pitch book was the usual offer of mines and pipelines, but also key strategic assets like airports, rocket launchpads, and fiber-optic lines. Carney drew the ire of Canadian progressives for his willingness to sell out the country’s few remaining public assets. But he appears to be a true believer in trickle-down economics: Enriching a class of highly mobile, global investors, he seems to reason, will make Canadians wealthier so long as they are enriched on Canadian soil.

That should offer some consolation to Americans worried about their place in the world, or their special relationship with their neighbors to the north. Get yourself a few billion dollars in assets, and even the debonair likes of Carney will still fling open the doors, lay out the family china, and attempt to woo you from your wallet. It’s also a sad indication that, like many partners in abusive relationships, Canada may not be able to resist crawling back to the United States if it puts on a serious show of being reformed. “That’s a question that I’ve heard Europeans ask,” Hurrelmann told me. “What happens when the trade war is over? Will Canada still be interested in these types of things?”

The answer to that question is hard to discern while Trump continues blustering from the White House. Like many genteel Canadians, Carney likely may have an inclination to lean away from America anyway—from its increasingly crass politics, debased culture, and unrestrained greed. Canadians may be more American than they like to admit, but they are not as American as America is now. Another few years of accelerating decay may simply be too much to come back from. For now, at least, Canada is exploring its options—and it doesn’t seem inclined to wait around. Jilted lovers seldom do.

With the midterm elections less than a month away, it would seem to be an absurd time to suffer a thought for the next election cycle and the challenges that any would-be Democratic presidential victor would have to tend to on day one. Unfortunately, sometimes current events intercede with a potent reminder of just how rough the road to recovery and post-Trump renewal will be. One such story broke this week in the pages of The New York Times, which detailed some of the Trumpian luminaries who have recently ascended to important positions at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, run by Trump acolyte Harmeet Dhillon.

The piece wastes no time: In short order, we’re introduced to “a former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents,” a “onetime gambling executive” with a sideline in promulgating “conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017,” and a “Florida activist” whose “activism” included being jailed for several weeks for “hacking a local election system.” The long and the short of it is that the agency, once stocked with skilled professionals, is now chock-full of people who ordinarily wouldn’t pass the smell test for public service. Somewhere, a pool is missing its cess, and they might want to check whether it ended up at the DOJ.

Much has been made of the way the Trump administration, returning to power with Project 2025 as its guiding manifesto and Elon Musk as its chainsaw-wielder, went to war with the civil service in the hopes that it could be ground down by purging the dedicated civil servants who’d previously staffed whatever posts were relevant in keeping us free of cyclospora. This Times story is covering the other side of the equation: The full Trumpian takeover isn’t just about firing people en masse. Frankly, it’s not merely about placing people loyal to the cause in top positions. It’s about stationing borderline lycanthropes in powerful positions.

Daniel Flickinger, who began working on the division’s education cases earlier this year, was forced out of his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 after suggesting—to the disgust of his bosses—that George Floyd was fortunate to have died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

Peter Feaman, a veteran lawyer from Florida hired in early 2025 as a senior counsel, has a history of far-right political statements. In a May 2021 post on social media, he accused the “diabolical” Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, of forcing citizens into getting the “mark of the beast” (a coronavirus shot).

This isn’t going to be a temporary problem by any means. The idea that the Trumpers who’ve come to Washington might take their leave if and when the federal government comes under Democratic control is a hopeful notion, but I worry that some of the true believers aren’t just here visiting; they intend to stay. That’s certainly the sense that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who’s gone to great lengths to stuff the agency under his control with all manner of cranks and quacks—strove to convey at last week’s MAHA Summit in Washington, D.C. As Mother Jones reported, Kennedy “proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen.” “Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he bragged, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

When it comes to government agencies that have suffered the most from this Trumpian takeover, none are as complete or as concerning as the Department of Homeland Security. On its best days, DHS is a walled garden of cops all hotboxing themselves with reactionary politics. Under Trump, it’s essentially become a hive of outlandish herrenvolk propaganda, pumping neo-Nazi memes into the social media bloodstream—the better to recruit the sort of person who might want to inflict terror on the streets of American cities.

As The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant documented, DHS’s tainted origin as a post-9/11 agency with a monomaniacal focus on Muslim extremism—and with a storied history of downplaying the threats of white nationalism—has only grown even more corrupted by the second coming of Trump. “We are doubling back around the same circular path,” Grant observed, “where agencies such as DHS downplay white nationalist violence, both potential and actual, while they draw recruits from those same ranks.”

For a future Democratic president, the challenge of righting the ship of state will not simply be a matter of reviving the federal workforce and bringing competent professionals back to the perches they once occupied. It will be a matter of fumigation, as well—or, to use a better term, lustration, which Yale Law professor Dina Francesca Haynes, writing immediately after the first Trump administration, defined as “the process of vetting and removing from public service those who engage in or support extremism or seek to undermine democracy.”

Lustration, Haynes explained, “has been carried out or proposed in many countries attempting to pull themselves from the wreckage of fascism, genocide, and nationalism.” As Haynes described, the idea is that for a country to successfully “move forward” from its authoritarian past, “it must rid itself of corrupt public servants by vetting them, and potentially dismissing from employment and cancelling pensions of those who harbor such deep bias that it would be impossible for them to fairly and impartially exercise the discretion they have been granted by virtue of their position in public service.”

This is something that those of us at The New Republic have already begun considering as a necessary bridge back to a functioning democracy. In fact, as The New Republic’s Matt Ford pointed out as he gamed out what a future president could do to gut ICE, Trump himself has already provided the working blueprint for a quick and effective purge of any Trumpian fifth column that might remain gummed in the gears of government after the president leaves office. A future president can claim the same “vast powers to decide the fate of federal agencies,” including terminating employees, cutting funding, and transferring staff and programs to other agencies.

Elsewhere, Ford also suggested that a future Democratic president make use of the power Trump claimed for himself to “reduce headcounts through a reduction in force, perhaps by firing every agent hired since 2024.” As Ford opined at the time, the administration’s “decision to drastically reduce hiring standards for incoming ICE agents would more than justify such a sweeping action.” That the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is studded with people who shouldn’t be managing a Pizza Hut, let alone prosecuting civil rights offenders, suggests there is ample room to expand these principles of lustration throughout a Trump-tainted civil service.

As I’ve said before, the right way to think about the Trump administration and its wholesale operations across the federal government is to accept the fact that it is essentially a criminal syndicate, dedicated to self-enrichment and political corruption. The next Democratic administration should have accountability on its mind, and a commitment to rooting out the Trumpian rot that’s infected the civic architecture of this great nation. It might be that the most useful thing the Trump administration has accomplished in its odious lifetime is to provide the playbook to right its wrongs and dismantle Trumpism permanently.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Vice President JD Vance just asked Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton out for drinks.

Vance’s strange invitation came during a Friday rally in his home state of Ohio for embattled Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“[Vivek] Ramaswamy is running against a crazy person,” Vance said. “Amy Acton, I have to be honest with you, I don’t know that much about her, other than she was the woman who wanted to mask all of our two-year-olds and keep them from going to school.” Acton served as the head of the Ohio state Health Department from 2019-2020.

“Now I did promise Amy that I would meet her at a bar later,” Vance continued. “I understand that she’s into that sort of thing. So I’m gonna try to get to know her a little bit better.”

This is yet another shot in a cheap GOP smear campaign to convince Ohio voters that Acton is some raging alcoholic and drug addict. The Ohio Republican Party has run ads calling Acton “unstable” and violent based on a 911 call from 2019 in which her daughter said she was “drinking and throwing things” while on medication, arguing with her stepfather in their home. Police arrived, made a report, and nothing came of it. Seven years later, and it’s the Ohio GOP’s primary dirt on Acton, with Vance even sampling the low-hanging fruit.

Acton denies that she has ever had a drug or alcohol problem. She and Ramaswamy, the hedge-fund billionaire and failed pharmaceutical startup founder, are locked in a fairly close midterm race for the governorship.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the U.S. would lift sanctions on the sale of Russian diesel—a move that will help Russian President Vladimir Putin far more than it’ll help Americans.

The Treasury Department announced that the U.S. would waive sanctions on Russian diesel sold to the global market until April 2027. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Russia would “immediately” supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace. Russia agreed to supply another 500,000 tons in November and then “1,000,000 tons thereafter,” Trump added.

Javier Blas, the energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg, observed that these commitments to the United States were too small to make a “meaningful impact” on the nationwide surge of diesel prices.

In reality, 300,000 tons is equivalent to only 2.2 million barrels, Blas wrote in a post on X. To give you an idea of just how little that really is, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 3.6 million barrels of refined petroleum products traveled through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Now only 677,000 barrels of refined products are moved through the essential trade passageway every day.

Meanwhile, Russia will get the right to sell its oil globally. Congress last month passed a sweeping sanctions bill, which Trump signed, punishing countries that purchase Russian oil. Now it seems the United States is one of them.

If Trump thinks his latest move cozying up to Putin will potentially help in the upcoming midterm elections, he has another think coming.

Turning Point USA’s AmeriFest returns this December, and the speaker lineup is once again a proper who’s who of the MAGAverse.

The event, which takes place in Phoenix, Arizona from December 17-20, will again be headlined by Vice President JD Vance. Former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, former White House advisor and far-right activist Steve Bannon, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, former presidential candidate Ben Carson, right-wing provocateur Nick Shirley, former Representative Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr., Erika Kirk, and a host of other prominent voices on the right will also be speaking.

Notably absent from the list of esteemed speakers is Tucker Carlson, as he was a large part of the reason last year’s AmeriFest—the first since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination—was largely unsuccessful. Carlson got into a back and forth with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in 2025 after Shapiro called him and Candace Owens “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Carlson responded by attacking Shapiro’s fealty to Israel, and the entire event became a stark representation of the serious rifts within the conservative movement. This year will follow what will likely be an unsuccessful midterm election performance by the Republican Party, which may in turn impact the nature of the event.

The United States issued sanctions on the International Criminal Court Friday, just hours after President Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize to one of the institution’s former judges. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions cutting the court off from any U.S.-based financial services, technology companies, and U.S. currency. The Trump administration set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies to wind down their business with the war crimes tribunal. 

“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video statement on social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”

Rubio has previously argued the court has become “radical and extreme,” though Trump has outright admitted Rubio’s campaign against the ICC is meant to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  

U.S. officials maintained that these sanctions had been in the works for months, and the timing so close to the Nobel Prize award ceremony was merely coincidental, according to the Associated Press. But these sanctions are exactly the kind of petty behavior we’ve come to expect from a president who’s spent years begging for the prestigious award.

Instead, the award went to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer with a decades-long career. Last year, Pillar led a United Nations commission that found the Israeli government had committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Nobel committee said Thursday that Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

Pillay took an immediate shot at Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday. “Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said, causing the room to erupt into laughter. 

Trump attacked the ICC after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The White House has chosen its new press secretary: MAGA communications adviser Katie Zacharia.

The 42-year-old was previously the senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social. The news of Zacharia’s ascension to the White House inner ring was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by CBS News.

Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who exited the role in August to join Fox News as an on-air contributor.

This is a developing story.