Hey there. Remember me? Back when I last posted in April, before my book-finishing break, the U.S. was at war in Iran — a war I warned was going to be antisemitism fuel — and the Supreme Court looked poised to overturn Trump’s order gutting birthright citizenship. Today, the U.S. is at war with Iran, the GOP is fracturing between philosemites and antisemites, and the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s birthright citizenship order (albeit far more narrowly than I and many others had hoped). So there you go, we didn’t miss much!

Joking, mostly. We are living in a perversion of the old Marx quote, often misattributed in pithier form to Lenin, about “days into which twenty years are compressed.” In the Trump era, decades routinely pass in a day, except it turns out to be the same day over and over again. Thursday, when the president is expected to make a major speech accusing the Democrats of stealing the 2020 election, likely in hopes of stealing the midterms himself, will be another one — a day which could have happened any time in the last six years and feels at this rate like it will keep happening forever.

Still, it is useful to keep track of events as they happen, which is the point of this newsletter. (And this life, in some respects.) I’d love to be doing more of it, and will soon. But while I have finished a draft, The Legend of Skokie needs a few more weeks of rewrites, fact-checks, and production to be truly finished. All I can ask is … please stay tuned. You are the reason I can make this book good instead of just done. Stay with me — I’ll make the wait worth it. And if you haven’t upgraded yet to support my work, now is a fine time:

Finally, a few of you have actually asked how to help beyond subscribing. So here’s a way. I'm assembling the acknowledgements for The Legend of Skokie right now. Anyone who backs the book before July 31 gets their name in there — a small, permanent stake in something you helped make possible:

Thanks again for your support. I’ll talk to you soon.

Donald Trump made history today by being the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court. He also made history by being the first president to run away from the Supreme Court building as soon as it seemed he was losing. His solicitor general and former personal lawyer, D. John Sauer, tried valiantly to defend his patently lawless executive order stripping the Fourteenth Amendment’s right of birthright citizenship from the children of anyone the government deems an illegal immigrant. But justice after justice — including the three Trump had appointed in his first term — kept blowing holes in his argument.

“That’s not textual, so how do you get there?” Amy Coney Barrett asked at one point. John Roberts called the examples of exceptions to birthright citizenship that Sauer cited “very quirky.” Neil Gorsuch, perhaps the biggest nerd in Supreme Court history when it comes to treaties with Native American tribes, seemed to catch him completely off guard when asked if Native Americans could be birthright citizens under the administration’s argument. (“I think so?” Sauer replied, before changing his mind twice.)

“We’re in a new world now… where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen,” Sauer tried arguing at another moment.

“Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution,” Roberts responded.

Some journalists, ready as always to jump in and clean up Trump’s messes for him, have taken pains to point out that “several of the conservative” justices also asked probing questions of the ACLU lawyer arguing on behalf of the immigrant respondents (and the Constitution), indicating that the outcome is still not “fully clear.” (Thanks for the tip, guys!) I would not put anything past the conservative justices on this court (or even several of the liberals, as evidenced by their ridiculous decision this week in Chiles v. Salazar). Still, if you ask me, it sounded like a 7-2 decision in the making in Trump v. Barbara for striking down the executive order.¹

What is patently untrue, on the other hand, is the assertion by New York Times Supreme Court reporter Abby VanSickle² on the newspaper’s live blog that the case is “legally complicated.” This may, in fact, be the simplest case, legally, ever to come before the Supreme Court.³ The citizenship clause, the framers’ intent, and the subsequent case law around it could not be clearer — not to mention the obvious dangers and social chaos that stripping citizenship from an entire class of children would cause. If there were any doubts about whether the Fourteenth applied to all immigrants — even those whose parents would face deportation, or “temporarily” as the Trump administration, borrowing from Dominican would-be ethnic cleansers, are trying to claim all illegal immigrants are — those were evaporated 128 years ago in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a case Sauer said the administration doesn’t even want to overturn.⁴ 

And when I say easy, I mean easy. I could argue it, and I’m not a lawyer. In fact, I did, over a year ago. I’ll reprint it below.

First though, relatedly, as some of you have no doubt noticed, I’ve been slower on the send button lately. That’s because I’m racing to finish my next book, The Legend of Skokie, which will examine the wild true story behind a failed Nazi march through a heavily Jewish neighborhood in 1977 and its implications for fascism and free speech today. So you may be hearing from me less than you like for a month or two. But I’m still here, working like crazy. And your subscriptions — especially those of you who support The Racket with a paid subscription — make this work possible.

Also, here are two other articles I wrote on birthright citizenship when this foolishness came up in Trump’s first term:

Birth of a Birthright (Politico Magazine, Oct. 31, 2018)

What Happened When a Nation Erased Birthright Citizenship (Atlantic, November, 2018) 

Here’s my piece from January 2025:

Laws are sometimes complicated. This one isn’t. The right to U.S. citizenship by birth on U.S. soil is enshrined in the first line of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That citizenship clause, drafted in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and ratified along with the rest of the amendment in 1868, was primarily intended to overrule the infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford from before the war, which had ruled that members of the “African race” could not be citizens of the United States.

It also came as part of a wave of jus soli — or “right of the soil” birthright citizenship laws — that were being implemented across the Western Hemisphere: in El Salvador in 1841, the Dominican Republic in 1865, in Argentina in 1869, and so on. These laws were based on both emerging liberal ideals — that everyone had equal rights, including an equal opportunity to become citizens — and the needs of settler-colonial states, whose peoples did not necessarily have deep ancestral ties to the land, and depended on arrivals of immigrants to provide wealth and labor.

Those prerogatives often came in conflict with one another: some emphasizing the liberal part, and others trying to keep jus soli for the children of white immigrants while reining it in for others in favor of European-style blood-and-soil racial hierarchy. An example of that contradiction would be the government’s treatment of Native Americans, who even with the provision of the 14th Amendment, and despite coming from tens of thousands of years of native birth would not be granted U.S. citizenship until an act of Congress in 1924 — long after the era of major territorial theft and “Indian removal” was over.

The contradiction was also evident in the debates over the 14th Amendment. That white babies born on U.S. soil were automatically citizens, including children of parents with foreign citizenship, had been considered a fundamental fact since independence. Now Black babies would be birthright citizens too. The only question was whether other colors of babies and babies of non-European foreigners would be citizens, and it seems that both sides of the debate over the amendment agreed on the answer: Yes. Racist opponents thought this was another reason to vote against the amendment. Its liberal proponents simply didn’t have a problem with it.²

Future generations of white supremacists kept looking for a test case to blow a hole in the citizenship clause. They found one in 1895 when Wong Kim Ark, the San Francisco-born 22-year-old son of parents from Guangdong, China, tried to return to California from a trip abroad, only to be arrested by a racist customs chief and held for deportation on grounds that he wasn’t really a citizen. Wong’s case made its way to the Supreme Court. Despite being the same court that had in the meantime given legal sanction to Jim Crow, the justices were capable of reading, and found 6-2 that, yup, the 14th Amendment conferred automatic citizenship on Wong and basically anyone else born in the U.S. (I wrote about the Wong Kim Ark case in more detail during Trump’s first term.)

This is high school-level constitutional law. Even James Ho, the wildly reactionary federal judge who is a front-runner to be one of Trump’s upcoming Supreme Court nominees, had to admit in a 2006 law review article that, “Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.”

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Unable to bar nonwhite naturalization, white supremacists focused on limiting immigration instead, passing racist immigration laws and quotas, many of which were overturned by President Lyndon Johnson and the 1965 Hart–Celler Act. They also tried limiting citizenship in other ways, such as refusing to grant constitutional rights, including citizenship, to the residents of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other islands conquered by the United States starting in 1898 under the so-called “Insular Cases.” Some, like Puerto Ricans, were eventually given citizenship by statute; others, like people in American Samoa, are still not granted automatic citizenship to this day. If Trump succeeds in annexing Greenland or Panama, you should expect to see such citizenship exemptions built into those situations as well.

Just as 19th Century white supremacists didn’t give up after the passage of the 14th Amendment, and the 20th Century kind didn’t surrender after U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 21st Century reactionaries aren’t going to stop trying to turn back the clock by over 150 years. Trump’s lawyers and defenders are trying to exploit the appositive—”subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—by claiming that both “unlawful” and, somehow, “temporary” residents aren’t subject to U.S. laws while they are in the United States.

This is legally ridiculous. In a 1982 case called Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that prohibited undocumented children from attending public schools. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, found that “use of the phrase ‘within its jurisdiction’ confirms the understanding that the Fourteenth Amendment's protection extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State,” and that this applies regardless of whether that “person's initial entry” was legal or not.

Rather, the only jurisdictional exceptions found by the court—also talked about during the ratification debates over the amendment—were for the children of diplomats not subject to U.S. laws, invading armies, and Native Americans, whom as noted above the U.S. government presupposed were subjects of their tribes. The bit about invading armies is another loophole the MAGA right is eager to test: Judge Ho, in an effort to walk back his inconvenient former comments, has tried referring to undocumented immigrants’ babies as “children of invading aliens,” and thus ineligible for citizenship after all. But Chinese immigrants like Wong Kim Ark’s parents were also described as “an unarmed invasion” at the time, which the court didn’t find disqualifying. It’s also a strange argument coming from Ho, himself an immigrant, whose parents brought him as a child from Taiwan, thanks to the overturning of quotas by LBJ.)

But jealously guarding social hierarchy isn’t about reason or law, it’s about power. And that’s why Trump made one of his first acts back in office trying to live out the dream of nativists since the end of the Dred Scott era. In an era of perceived declining resources and climate catastrophe, nations face two options: expand the distribution of resources and support more equitably and widely, or try to reduce it by narrowing the definition of who counts as a citizen, if not a human being altogether.

Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images

If you want to remember why you subscribe to this newsletter (or if you don’t, why you should), hark back to what I wrote in November 2024. That was when then-President-Elect Trump — still being billed elsewhere as the peace candidate — announced his nomination of Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense:

Don’t let anyone tell you this was hard to see coming.

Americans don’t necessarily love overseas wars, but it isn’t hard to convince large majorities to back one, especially once the shooting has begun.¹ So it’s somewhat surprising that so many people in this country watched the first days of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and thought, “not for me.” An average of major polls by G. Elliott Morris showed that far more Americans oppose the bombing of Iran than support it. This opposition includes nearly a third of Republicans — an incredible fact for anyone who remembers the nearly unanimous support Republicans expressed back in 2003 once the Iraq invasion was underway. The opposition grows even larger when you add the prospect of sending ground troops into the mix.

But while this is mildly encouraging news for anyone who opposes this stupid war or the (equally stupid) Trump presidency in general, there’s a dark side to the backlash that bears noting. If you’ve spent any time actually listening to people spell out their opposition to the war, especially on social media, you’ll notice that many keep coming back to a singular villain: Israel.

Some drawing that line are listening to paleoconservative-style isolationists like Tucker Carlson, and, more subtly, Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby — a longtime foe of Israeli hawks who tried distancing the administration from the politically more problematic aspects of the war by calling the assassinations of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior regime leaders ”Israeli operations” in a recent Senate hearing. (In fact, it was openly a joint operation of the Israeli military and the CIA.) Others go for the harder stuff, like Nazi-admiring Nick Fuentes, who recently told his listeners that Trump should walk away from the war, because “Iran is fighting for all the goyim.”

While less strident in their language, the perception that the U.S. is fighting Israel’s war seems to be even more firmly entrenched on the left. A new survey out today from Data For Progress, cosponsored by Zeteo and Drop Site, found approval for the war underwater at 42%-55% — roughly in line with the average. Nearly half of those respondents — 46% — also agreed with the statement that “President Trump is more responsive to the interests of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than the interests of the American people,” compared to just a slightly higher 47% who disagreed. This was especially pronounced among Democrats — 75% of whom agreed with the statement. A smaller majority of Democrats, 59%, also told the pollsters that the Trump administration was pursuing the war “primarily for Israeli interests.” (That is compared with 43% of independents and 22% of Republicans who answered the same.)

There is a logic to this. The U.S. and Israel are the co-belligerents who started the war in the early morning hours of February 28. An early official line settled on by the Trump administration, voiced particularly by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was effectively Israel made us do it. 

But that excuse was too cute by half: Netanyahu has indeed been publicly gunning for a joint war against the Islamic Republic for decades. But the U.S., as the incomparably larger military and economic power, holds the whip hand in the “special relationship” — as evidenced, if nothing else, by the fact that no U.S. president was dumb enough to follow him into one until now. Trump gave the order to launch the attack. And while Washington and Tel Aviv are bombing side by side, perceptive analysts continue to note that their reasons for getting into the war and the strategic goals they want from it are not the same.

It isn’t hard for a student of history to see what’s happening here. Given a panoply of reasons to oppose the war — the enormous cost in both taxpayer money and human lives, the economic chaos, Trump’s utter lack of a coherent goal or exit strategy, the tremendous risk of blowback and uncontrollable escalation — people keep circling back to the one that shifts blame to an Other. And not just any Other, but one who billions of people have been raised to believe a priori has the unassailable power to bend even the world’s most powerful empire to their bidding.

If the war drags on, and opposition to it grows (as opposition to wars tends to do), I’d expect to see more Republicans who voted for this administration turning to their far-right ideologues and reaching for the same excuses.

Contrary to popular belief, goldfish do retain long-term memories. The same can’t be said of Peter Baker:

As I wrote during the 2024 campaign, you just had to look at Trump’s first term to know how he’d use his war powers in a second. Worse, in fact, since in the interim, he purged anyone who might suggest the barest modicum of restraint. (To wit: In today’s darkest moment of comedy so far, some of the strongest words of warning against Trump’s impulsive and unstrategic attack on Iran are coming from John fucking Bolton, the ex-Trump and Bush adviser who has arguably done more to push us into a war with Iran than anyone since Kermit Roosevelt.)

He then replaced them with unhinged, inexperienced toadies like the Fox News weekend host (now Defense Secretary). Also see the Florida attorney general he once openly bribed, who then became a highly paid lobbyist for Qatar—an Arabian/Persian Gulf state that is home to a major U.S. base and is now getting pulled into the war, possibly as a belligerent, as it spreads across the Middle East.

Baker isn’t alone, of course. People from all over the spectrum did yeoman’s work to sell the lie that Trump-Vance was the “pro-peace ticket.” I’m thinking of a whole rogue’s gallery of names, from Tucker Carlson to PayPal mafioso-turned-influencer David Sacks to ex-Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., both of whom were rewarded with cabinet posts. If you’d forgotten, then-Senator J.D. Vance catapulted to the top of the post-Pence Veepstakes with a Wall Street Journal op-ed subtitled, “[Trump] has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note the Pulitzer Prize-sharing buffoon Glenn Greenwald, who spent the last decade screeching that the “energy behind opposing American interventionism — American wars — is much more on the populist right than the populist left,” promoting the above-mentioned charlatans, and asking: “George Bush and Dick Cheney started new Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama started new Wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did Donald Trump start? What new wars did Trump start [in his first term]!?”¹

The answer was none, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Remember: in his first term, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal (which, as nuclear researcher Cheryl Rofer again notes this week, had been working) — the key step that set up one of the pretexts for his attack. In January 2020, he ordered the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, which could have easily triggered the Iran War then and there. He notoriously staged disastrous raids in Yemen and Niger, played nuclear chicken with Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and escalated all four of the wars he inherited: Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the two-continent war against the so-called Islamic State.²

This war is extremely unpopular, with just 27% of respondents to a snap Reuters/Ipsos poll — including just 55% of Republicans! — saying they approved of the attack. And of course it is: Trump and his cronies, whose corruption is matched only by their indolence, didn’t even try to manufacture consent for it. When George W. Bush, rest his soul³ , lied our way back into Iraq, he at least had the decency to make one of his most notorious lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent nuclear program a key element of his 2003 State of the Union address, so we could all at least know what it was, debate, and then ultimately debunk it. Trump had the exact same stage, at almost the exact same time on the war-of-choice calendar, last week. And all he could manage by way of a lie was to say: “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.” Then he went back to slasher porn and baiting Democrats.

He did not bother to try to wrangle a congressional authorization for the use of military force — the latter-day substitute for the Article I “Declare War” clause. And forget about taking a dog-and-pony show to the U.N. Security Council to obtain authorization for the strikes, as required by the fundamental charter to which the U.S. remains a signatory. Again, Bush did that — sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to humiliate himself in the most notorious moment of his career — and then just ignored them when they refused to go along. This time, the Republicans just cut out the middleman.

Trump’s dwindling population of defenders is left spinning the Excuse Wheel: “it isn’t really a war” (OK: define “war”), “it won’t last long” (wanna bet), “it’s self-defense” (even the Pentagon isn’t bothering with that one), “he had no choice” (it’s definitionally a war of choice.) His characteristic refusal to settle on a rationale means that supplicants must simultaneously assert that Mr. Trump is telling the truth when he insists he heroically destroyed the Iranian nuclear program last year and also that the mullahs were (or still are?) a week away from making a nuke. They have to believe that Mr. Trump is heroically standing up for benighted protesters there, while jailing, killing, and deporting dissidents here.⁴ They have to celebrate a war of regime change that, as in Venezuela, to date has failed to change, or even offered a roadmap toward changing, the regime.

They have to argue that “America First” — a slogan that for 170 years, since it was debuted by the xenophobic American or Know-Nothing Party, has stood for isolation from foreign wars, foreign immigration, and foreign trade — actually means the opposite of what it says: that following the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia into an unnecessary foreign entanglement, if not quagmire, is “America First” if the president says so.⁵

I don’t take much solace from the fact that it isn’t going to work — politically, if not militarily. (Though likely both.) This is, as a friend of The Racket Spencer Ackerman argues, and my 2022 book’s subtitle presaged, “dying empire behavior.” And empires, like certain aforementioned Substackers, do not learn from or atone for their mistakes. Instead, they tend to double down after their failures and shift blame — to immigrants, the opposition, or, that old crowd favorite, the Jews.

People view damage to shops and residences in the aftermath of an airstrike on March 2, 2026, in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

(Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images)

“In his first State of the Union address of his second term, President Trump offered a rosy portrait of a United States that has lost confidence in his leadership,” the New York Times wrote today.¹ And I suppose that is technically accurate. Rosy is one way to describe the color of a torrent of blood.

It is difficult to convey the sheer luridity of what the president unleashed last night. But I’ll try. Trump described no fewer than 17 separate instances of severe injury, violent death, or graphic bodily harm in his joint address, often in vivid detail. At least ten stories involved people whose loved ones were seated in the chamber. In several of those cases, the grievously wounded themselves were present. Conservatively, I’d estimate a quarter of Trump’s record-smashing 1 hour and 47 minute harangue, not including pauses for camera close-ups and extended applause, was devoted to staging scenes of death and dismemberment. Because much of this material was concentrated in the speech’s latter half, the cumulative psychological effect on those who watched to the end was likely more pronounced.

This might feel like a curiosity — another strange tic of a deeply weird politician who has, for the last decade and change, dominated American public life (and/or a tic of his speechwriters).² But it is much more than that. The constant invocations of people “lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely,” “viciously slash[ed] … through her neck and body,” of “blood all over,” of legs shredded “into numerous pieces,” of “gushing blood … flowing back down the aisle,” all direct quotations from different passages of the speech, are part of a specific kind of politics. They were meant to do very specific political work: organizing power through the spectacle of injury and the promise and celebration of state-sanctioned violence.

There is a name for this. The political theorist Achille Mbembe called it necropolitics. His argument, laid out first in a 2003 article and more recently in a 2019 book, is that state power ultimately reveals itself not in how it fosters life but in how it organizes death — that, as the Cameroonian scholar writes, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.” Who is protected and who is abandoned? Who can be confined, deported, or exposed to violence? Those political decisions are made easier when the public is trained to see the world as a battlefield of butchered innocents and lurking monsters.

Mbembe wrote years ago of the endpoint of that argument in the early 21st century, speaking in the guise of a government:

Mbembe was thinking about Europe. But as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a rapt Munich Security Conference last week, the “old world and the new” — by which he meant those who long for a return to unapologetic white Christian imperialism in the U.S. and Europe — “are part of one civilization.” So it wasn’t hard for Mbembe’s words to presage Trump’s second-term immigration policy almost exactly.

Nearly all of Trump’s victim Lenny Skutniks last night fit a pattern: they were either U.S. citizens injured or killed by immigrants, white people injured or killed by nonwhite people, members of the armed forces harmed by foreign militants, or Erika Kirk. In other words, members of the in-group, at least for the purposes of a televised speech, harmed by Others. Trump performed the same discomfiting ritual for each: they stood, the cameras zoomed in on their reddened, often sobbing faces, as the president described in gory detail the worst moments of their or their loved one’s lives.

These moments were interwoven with invocations of enemies abroad: Iran, Hamas, Venezuela. And of course, the “foreigners” at home, as Trump demonized Somali-Americans in Minnesota — calling a population that is predominantly U.S. citizens, many of whom were born in America, "Somali pirates." He went further, claiming absurdly that Somali-Americans and others in similar communities had stolen enough national wealth that its reclamation would result in a “balanced budget overnight.” This is all to sell the overarching mythos: We are Great, yet we are Under Siege, and only Trump can save us.

It is equally notable who did not get moments like those. Renee Nicole Good and Alexi Pretti were not praised as martyrs killed in the exercise of their constitutional rights, as Charlie Kirk was. The relatives of Ruben Ray Martinez, the 23-year-old U.S. citizen whose killing by federal immigration agents was covered up for months by Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, were not honored with tearful close-ups; nor were there standing ovations for the families of the at least 39 people who have died in immigration detention during the second term — the most in over 20 years. And that’s to say nothing of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, and several powerful people in that room, whose presence went unremarked upon by the man on the dais.

Trump underscored his visceral anecdotes with a bigger lie. He repeated his claim that the Biden administration had allowed “millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions” into the country. “There were murderers, 11,888 murders,” he claimed, apparently making a hash of the even more overtly neo-Nazi dogwhistle he debuted in October.³ The one partially accurate murder statistic he referenced, with no apparent awareness of the irony, was the fact that, rather than becoming more dangerous, America’s murder rates are going down — a trend that preceded Trump’s return to office by two years, though one he gleefully took credit for.

Perhaps the most disturbing moment of the night was Trump's interaction with Anya Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee whose daughter, Iryna, was killed by a fellow passenger on the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail system last year. Surveillance footage of the grisly murder went viral on the right. The Trump team made sure to position her right next to Erika Kirk, who amped up the pathos. As Zarutska openly wept, Trump dug in the rhetorical knife:

Did you catch it? In the middle of a John Carpenter-esque scene-setting, Trump dropped an out-and-out lie. The man arrested for Zarutska’s murder, Decarlos Brown, did not come “in through open borders” — or any borders at all. He was born in Charlotte to what, by all appearances, is an African-American family with deep roots in the South. The immigrant in the case is the victim, Iryna, who fled Ukraine amid the invasion ordered by Trump's ally, Vladimir Putin. But the victim is white, and the American-born accused killer is Black — an internal Other. That’s all necropolitics needs to work.

As Mbembe had written, borders in the modern era are “no longer merely a line of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities” but “the name used to describe the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general.” "In fact, everything leads back to borders,” he writes. “These dead spaces of nonconnection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet … that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition.”

Trump’s other register — really his only other register besides victimhood, ever — was triumphal. Each of the victim-Skutnik moments ended with a promise of restoration: a law to be passed, a border sealed, a criminal punished, a budget balanced. A nation purified.

Yesterday, while Trump’s golfing buddy and fellow Epstein confederate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was hauled off to the clink, and his South Korean admirer, ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol, was being sent away for life for his version of January 6, our unincarcerated president was throwing a party for himself. The party was billed as the first meeting of the “Board of Peace” — his ersatz pay-for-play version of the United Nations.

Instead of a general assembly, whose members are admitted by a two-thirds vote of all the other countries of the world, the 22 members of the BOP so far—most of which are dictatorships or countries with abysmal human-rights records, including Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, Uzbekistan, and Israel—bought permanent membership at $1 billion each, with the destination of the money unknown. Instead of a secretary-general elected by a Security Council, it is headed by Trump, who is eligible under the charter he wrote to serve as chairman-for-life. Fittingly, the inaugural meeting was held at the “Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace,” a building his goons seized at gunpoint during the heady days of DOGE, then renamed for himself, as he is doing to institutions all over the capital, in the style of dictators from Saparmurat Niyazov to Rafael Trujillo.

He also banged the meeting to a close with a gold-painted gavel. I hate it here.

The meeting itself was a macabre joke, focused mainly on the plan by Trump, Steve Witkoff, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to raze what is left of Gaza and turn it into Atlantic City with concentration camps. (Not to be confused with the administration’s $45 billion plan to build warehouse concentration camps here at home.) “The coastline alone [is worth] $50 billion on a conservative basis!” Marc Rowan, the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management, enthused.

Member states pledged $6.5 billion for the effort, an impressive amount on paper, though a) those are merely pledges, b) where or to whom the money would go remains totally unclear, and c) is a drop in the bucket of the $70 billion the actual U.N. says is needed to rebuild after two years of Israeli destruction. Trump also promised an additional $10 billion from the U.S., but Congress has not approved that money, and seemingly no one reached by the press for further details had any idea what he was talking about.²

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is struggling to hold together his coalition between factions who think there’s been enough genocide already and those who are champing at the bit to reopen the floodgates—chose not to attend, sending Foreign Minister Gideon Saar in his place. (He used the occasion to say nothing of interest.) This is key: It is not clear the extent to which the Israeli government has bought into the plan. Without that buy-in—not to mention that of a significant portion of the Palestinian people in Gaza, who are not involved in the real-estate negotiations at all—the plan would be impossible to carry out. In which case, any money actually delivered from the conference would be effectively a pump-and-dump scheme.

Meantime the Chairman-for-Life of Peace is openly threatening another war of choice against Iran. Sean Hannity says it’s to stop Iran’s nuclear program — you know, the one Trump previously claimed he’d obliterated in his last preemptive war. (Racket readers know better.) Or maybe it’s to support the protests that ended weeks ago after the Iranian regime already brutally crushed them. Or — who knows! The point is that the USS Gerald R. Ford—the same nuclear aircraft carrier group we used to kidnap Venezuela’s president in January—needs something to do.

For the Super Bowl X halftime show, back in 1976, members of a cult took the field in color-block turtlenecks and danced around a giant wheeled birthday cake. The group was Up With People; the theme of both the cake and the aggressively clean-cut rock medley was the bicentennial of American independence. Fewer know, but might not be surprised to learn, that UWP was a superficially multicultural offshoot of a right-wing Christian faction called Moral Re-Armament, founded in the 1930s by a Nazi sympathizer. It had been spun off in the Sixties by an MRA leader who thought pop music and some nonwhite faces might more effectively create “a positive alternative to the anti-war, anti-adult, anti-establishment mood.”

Last night, the NFL marked the United States’ 250th birthday with a far better vibe. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the 31-year-old Puerto Rican phenom better known as Bad Bunny, led a subtly all-star tribute to his island’s music, culture, and diaspora that became one of the most powerful statements of unity, defiance, and, frankly, Americanism that pop culture has ever seen.

Obviously, not everyone felt that way. About six million conservatives performatively tuned out, opting for the moral successor to an MRA halftime show: a thirty-minute livestreamed tribute to guns, monolingualism, and Charlie Kirk led by 55-year-old Robert “I like ’em underage” Ritchie, a.k.a. Kid Rock. The president seems to have skipped that one, opting instead to join the record 135 million viewers who tuned in to see Bad Bunny. In Trump’s case, it was, of course, a hate-watch. The president rushed to Truth Social and Newsmax to call it “one of the worst, EVER!” and the Grammy-winning multi-platinum star someone “I’d never heard of” (as opposed to, say, Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett, and Lee Brice.¹ )

“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” Trump further whined, referring to the fact that most of the performance was in Spanish, the second-most widely spoken language in the United States and the source of the names of ten states and territories, including Martínez Ocasio’s Puerto Rico and the site of Super Bowl LX itself: Santa Clara, California. The president finally complained about the suggestive dancing and the NFL’s new kickoff rule, both reminders that, three weeks before America turns 250, Donald Trump turns 80.

As many of you know, I spent half my twenties and parts of my thirties living in the Caribbean, including a fair amount of time in Puerto Rico. I have also done in-depth reporting from the island, including in the massive, deadly blackout that followed 2017’s Hurricane María—a defining catastrophe referenced in the halftime show. I also happen to have been a Bad Bunny fan since before it was cool. So as a service to our dear leader, and everyone else, here is a breakdown of some of the most “INoLVIDABLE”² moments from last night.

The show opened heavy: a shot of workers in a sugar cane field, the source of much of Puerto Rico’s historical wealth and a major driver of the brutal European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery that created the modern Caribbean and its peoples. (At least some of the stalks were, somewhat poignantly, people in costumes. The New York Times’ social media desk hilariously identified the background as “green grass.”)

With a cry of “¡Qué rico es ser latino! ¡Hoy se bebe!” (How wonderful it is to be Latin, today we drink), we get a bachata riff—a style of Dominican country music that spread to Puerto Rico, New York, and the rest of the world—which is the opening notes of Bunny’s hit “Tití Me Preguntó.” Rapping, he passes the cane cutters into scenes of village life: peddlers selling fresh coconut, old men playing dominoes, a woman getting her nails done, some extremely attractive women building a house with cinderblocks, a piragua stand—Puerto Rican snow-cones. At that moment, Martínez’s lyrics start talking about the various nationalities of women he has dated, and the background accordingly turns more international: there’s a cameo from Victor Villas, owner of a beloved Los Angeles taco joint, then the Mexican boxer Emiliano Vargas, sparring with the Puerto-Rican born Floridian Xander Zayas. Bunny gets a gold ring from a pawn shop, which he gives to a man to propose to a woman, in a bit of minor foreshadowing.

The action then turns to a typical Caribbean concrete house—a cinderblock style of construction that is good in hurricanes but can be fatal in earthquakes, as we saw in Haiti in 2010, and to a lesser extent in the cluster of earthquakes that struck PR in 2020. This casita was reportedly modeled on a real house in Humacao, on the east coast of Puerto Rico, that Martínez featured in a short film accompanying his latest album. The next song is “Yo perreo sola” — effectively “I dance to reggaeton by myself.” (Perreo is the grinding partner dance typical of the genre. It literally means doggy-style. Sorry, Don!) A host of celebrities make blink-or-you’ll-miss-them cameos at the block party including Pedro Pascal, Jessica Alba, and Cardi B.

Bad Bunny falls through the roof. (A reference to the earthquakes? Maybe that’s my brain talking.) There’s a sample of Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina, the first major international reggaeton hit from 2004. Everyone dances, including two men grinding with each other. “You’re listening to the music of Puerto Rico,” Martínez explains, before doing a snippet of one of his dirtier tracks, the trap/reggaeton/hip-hop/dancehall fantasia “Safaera,” whose lyrics seem to have scandalized the reactionaries who bothered to look them up, but not for nothing is one of Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs of All Time.

As he performs this, a cartoon toad cheers on from a screen atop Levi’s Stadium:

NFL, via YouTube

This is Sapo Concho, an animated version of the endangered Puerto Rican crested toad that has become a symbol of Bad Bunny fandom. El Sapo has also become a political symbol, used—with the artist’s blessing—in anti-ICE posters and costumed protests. All music is political in one way or another, but things will get more political from here.

“Buenas tardes, California!” Martínez says, prompting a cheer from the crowd—which, that’s right, Mr. President, the crowd understood. This was a freighted moment: Bad Bunny famously canceled all his U.S. mainland tour dates this year for the reasonable fear that ICE agents would use the concerts to hunt and harass his fans. (Some Trump supporters and frankly others assumed that Martínez—who like all Puerto Ricans since 1917 was born a U.S. citizen—was himself afraid of being deported, which just bolstered the point.) Announcing he was singing in the metropole was itself an act of defiance. He then says, looking straight into the camera in close-up:

Which means, after stating his full name: “And if I am here at Super Bowl LX it is because I never, never stopped believing in myself, and you too should believe in yourself. You’re worth more than you think. Believe me.” This Hallmark-ready statement, benign in its formulation, was transformed into something far more powerful by its language, its context, framing, and intended audience: an immigrant population that is currently fearing for its life, safety, and future in the face of a relentless ethnic-cleansing campaign. Bunny carries a football, its laces hidden.

The camera pans to a wedding in progress. The wedding was real.

A reveal: Lady Gaga. “Here is what you wanted!” Martínez has purred, and indeed it is: a song in English, “Die With a Smile," albeit to a salsa beat. This transitions to the aforementioned "BAILE INoLVIDABLE." “Dance! Dance without fear! Always without fear!” he intones in Spanish.

Now we are in New York — “NUEVAYoL,” the title, a joking nod to the Puerto Rican/Dominican/sometimes Cuban habit of making filial Rs into Ls. The song, sampling a salsa hit from 1975, is a paean to immigration, community, and the struggles of maintaining identity in diaspora. One of the last ungentrified Puerto Rican bars in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Toñita’s, gets a shoutout in the song. And there, at the Super Bowl, was Toñita herself, doling a shot out to the cantante.

The next shot was one of the most talked about of the night: a clip of Martínez’s recent Grammy win, followed by him handing out the Grammy to a young boy. There were unfounded rumors that the boy was Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old legal Ecuadorian immigrant rounded up with his father from Minneapolis and trucked off to a concentration camp in Texas, only to be liberated (for now) by a federal judge so enraged he quoted the Bible and the Declaration of Independence in his opinion. Lo siento a tod@s, but the lad was not Liam, nor any of the countless other children terrorized by the ICE/CBP raids, though the viewer was free to make that inference.

The camera pans up to Ricky Martin, in a white suit and framed by plantain trees, as if to say: Yes, perhaps you forgot, but I was Puerto Rican this whole time. He sings the chorus of “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” Martínez’s anti-colonial protest song lamenting the damage to Hawai’i’s native culture at the hands of Anglo-American settler-colonialism and tourism and declaring that the same will not happen to his island. (The U.S. annexed Puerto Rico and Hawai’i in the same year, 1898, under the cover of war with Spain, as readers of Gangsters of Capitalism will remember.)

Suddenly, an explosion. Three electrical transformers, reminiscent of the crosses on Golgotha, have sparked, sending their linemen tumbling, Cirque du Soleil-style. Bad Bunny appears, singing “El Apagón” — the Blackout — another protest song, this one about Puerto Rico’s antiquated electric infrastructure. It was fatally damaged in the 2017 disaster that plunged the entire U.S. colony into darkness for months, with some areas remaining without power for a year.

That disaster occurred during and in large part due to the colonial apathy of the first Trump administration, which, along with the island’s right-leaning government, tried to shrug it off at the time — and judging from media coverage of the halftime show, most Americans have completely forgotten. From an initial death toll of the storms of 64 (coincidentally, or perhaps not, the jersey number Bad Bunny wore last night), the death toll from the blackout soared to somewhere between 2,650 and 3,290. As I wrote in 2020:

Another company, Cobra Acquisitions LLC, illicitly secured at least $1.8 billion in federally reimbursable contracts to rebuild the electrical grid. Cobra’s former president, Donald Keith Ellison, and Ahsha Tribble, FEMA’s former deputy administrator for Puerto Rico, who led the energy infrastructure recovery under Trump, pleaded guilty to one count of bribery each in 2022.

Rage over the disaster and its associated corruption sparked major street protests, at some of which Bad Bunny performed. That movement led to Gov. Ricardo Rosselló's resignation in 2019. (Some, including myself, wondered why Americans wouldn’t take the lead of our colonized fellow citizens and demand the same of Trump.)

At this point in the Super Bowl show, Martínez appears carrying a Puerto Rican flag, but a very specific one. The version he carried — the older version with a sky-blue pennant, rather than the newer and more Washington-friendly version with a shade of blue that matches the field in the U.S. flag — is a symbol of Puerto Rico’s independence movement, carried by those who want total decolonization rather than statehood. The symbolism was surely lost on most, but would have been screamingly clear in San Juan.

Finally, the beat drops on “CAFé CON RON,” and a crowd carrying flags of countries in the Americas rushes forward.³ Standing in front of the Stars and Stripes, Martínez utters his only English words of the performance: “God Bless America.” What he means becomes clear momentarily as he begins rattling off the names of nearly all the countries in the hemisphere⁴ . Then he says, mixing English and Spanish: “United States, Canada, and my motherland, mi patria, Puerto Rico.” Having reached the end zone, he turns the football to reveal the words on the laces side: “TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA.” “Seguimos aquí,” he says. We are still here. Then he spikes it.

Donald Trump was in trouble. Millions of Americans watched the torture and murder of Alex Pretti, and they didn’t like what they saw: Instead of the promised campaign against the “worst of the worst,” Trump’s federal goons had been caught on camera unloading their clips into a defenseless U.S. citizen observer whom they had already disarmed. Support for abolishing ICE grew while the president’s already-dismal approval ratings sank.

The NRA turned on Trump. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham came out for abolishing the entire Department of Homeland Security. A leading Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota—who just days earlier had been legally advising the ICE agent who murdered Renee Good—dropped out of the race, and seemingly Trump’s party. Most damagingly for the president, crucial votes for a stopgap funding bill, needed to avoid yet another politically disastrous (for him) government shutdown, evaporated thanks to moderate opposition to funding DHS.

So Trump called the only person who could help him: Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

We know about that call because Schumer bragged about it to the New York Times:

Moments like this haven’t come along often in the Trump years: a doddering, embattled Don, reaching out to the leader of the minority party, hat in hand, all but begging him to get him off the hook. Indeed, moments like this are rare in history—a clear-cut authoritarian in the critical stage of consolidating his regime signaling to a weaker rival that, in fact, some cards remained in his hands.

So what did Schumer do with this unearned leverage? What was the move of this 75-year-old Senate veteran, this alleged master of procedure, the de facto leader of the party in opposition? He caved. The Democrats would override even Republican defections to push through a $1.2 trillion package that would fund nearly the entire federal government—including $839 billion for a U.S. military that has repeatedly violated international law, lied to Congress, recently kidnapped a foreign president, and is being used to threaten allies. In “exchange,” Schumer and his House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries, would also secure the votes needed to provide two weeks of extra funding for DHS.

“Two weeks of extra funding!” doesn’t quite have the base-rallying power of “Abolish ICE!” But Schumer and Jeffries told us not to worry: they would use those two weeks to insist on “commonsense reform”:

Democrats want commonsense reform for ICE:

End the roving patrols and racial profiling.

Take accountability and abide by the same rules as local police.

Masks need to come off, body cameras need to stay on—no secret police in the United States of America.

— Chuck Schumer (@schumer.senate.gov)
9:19 PM • Feb 3, 2026

Because that’s what you do when you see roving gangs of masked secret police terrorizing your nation’s cities, specifically and loudly gunning for your party’s constituents. You ask for some minor reforms.¹

When I brought up the scale of the leader’s failure on Bluesky, I was accused of exhibiting “Schumer Derangement Syndrome" — of “theatrically overreacting to a deal that was good, actually,” and harboring a child’s wish list for unattainable progressive goals. I was assured that Schumer was thinking several moves ahead; he was engaged in “harm reduction”; that getting rid of masks and insisting they follow some rules was the best option available.

But, surprise, surprise, even this was too much to hope for. Yesterday, Schumer and Jeffries backed off their demand for a totally unmasked secret police, saying that sometimes masks can be fine, you know, if the secret police promise that they really need them:

So what exactly did Schumer’s “deal” achieve? He bought Trump and the Republicans two weeks to spin news cycles and outlast the storm of outrage. He took the pressure off the Republicans while ensuring DHS remains fully funded as it contemplates its next potential pogrom—likely against Haitians and Haitian-Americans in Springfield, Ohio. And all for what? To insist on some toothless reforms, many of which are already laws that ICE and CBP agents are ignoring? Reforms that the Democrats are all already talking themselves out of?

It is absolutely true that Democrats and liberals in general don’t have much power in Washington at the moment. The areas they do hold power—to oversee federal elections in Democratic-controlled states and cities, for instance—are under threat. They have essentially one card left: the power to freeze spending and grind the government to a halt. They could play it for the people of Minneapolis, who have braved bullets, tear gas, and freezing temperatures to stand up against tyranny. They could play it, in the tradition of Senate Leaders past (thinking of you, Lyndon Johnson)² , for themselves. They just decided not to use it at all.

I don’t really care why Schumer or Jeffries are the way they are—whether it’s because they personally approve of slightly gentler crimes against humanity, which mass deportation definitionally is, or because they think that demoralizing their base and responding to every single insult to democracy with irritating text demands for campaign donations will somehow ensure a Democratic majority in the 120th Congress. With these losers in charge, I don’t even know what the point of such a majority would be.

We have people in the street, putting their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors. We have journalists who, despite the predations of immoral billionaires like Jeff Bezos (solidarity with the hundreds laid off from the late, great Washington Post this week), are sounding the alarms and reporting the facts. We need them all. But without a way to translate those energies into political power, the game is lost.

Fire Schumer. Primary Jeffries. Get rid of the rot. Replace it with a party that will fight.

The public execution of Alex Pretti by federal agents on a Minneapolis street is a watershed moment.

I don't say that because it is unprecedented in either recent or American history—Pretti is at least the seventh person killed by federal agents since Trump returned to power one year ago.¹ But this killing is different. The victim was, by all accounts, a beloved veterans’ intensive-care nurse. The shooting itself, captured on video, was unprovoked—it came while Pretti was lying prone and unarmed, and continued after he had been mortally wounded. Those factors, and the characteristic shamelessness with which Trump officials are lying about it, have shaken something loose in a sclerotic national debate.

Republican senators and the National Rifle Association are breaking with the administration to call for a full investigation into the killing. Terminally accommodationist Democrats are refusing to fund not only ICE but the entire Department of Homeland Security, even if it means another government shutdown. Even right-wing pro-gun influencers aren’t buying the Trump line. This is being driven from below: Regular people, from NFL meme accounts to fitness posters to duck painting enthusiasts, are speaking out against the shooting in particular and the oppressive federal crackdown in general. It is finally dawning on people who never asked before that ICE and CBP’s primary mission is no longer immigration enforcement but rather stifling dissent.

We need to abolish ICE and, frankly, the entire Department of Homeland Security — a bad idea from the start whose legitimate functions would be better served by assigning its mishmash of sub-agencies (why do disaster response, airport security, the Coast Guard, bioweapons defense, and immigration services need to be in a single aggressively postured department?) to their original homes.

But that isn’t going nearly far enough. Restructuring federal agencies isn’t sufficient when the heads of all the other departments are weaponizing themselves against the people as well. There are plenty of agencies that can step in as militarized oppression if ICE is gone. (To wit, initial reports are that Pretti was shot to death not by ICE but by agents of Customs and Border Protection). If you get rid of DHS, you’re still left with a Department of Defense whose war-crimes-enthusiast secretary responded to Pretti’s murder by spiking the football. Impeach Kristi Noem, yes. But Hegseth would have no qualms about finishing the exploding network of detention centers — centers that Andrea Pitzer rightly notes meet the historical definition of concentration camps.

No, if you want to prevent more killings like those of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and Silverio Villegas González, if you want to stop the unraveling of our society and prevent the descent into full authoritarian takeover and/or civil war, there’s only one option. Donald Trump must be forced to resign.

I know it sounds far-fetched, but that’s just because enough people aren’t talking about it yet. Think about it: Twice in a month, the president of the United States has lied profligately about the killing of U.S. citizens by his own federal agents. Trump claimed, falsely, that Good “viciously ran … over” ICE agent Jonathan Ross, that it was “hard to believe he is alive,” and that he was “recovering in the hospital,” none of which was true. Immediately after the murder of Pretti, Trump went to Truth Social again, calling the victim “the gunman” and saying “that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do!”

If the people of Minnesota were not so diligent about filming every interaction with ICE and CBP they come across, those lies may have been allowed to stand. So what about the things he claims that we do not have independent video or journalistic evidence for? If he’ll lie about the murder of American citizens on American soil, he’ll lie about anything. You can shrug it off as the ramblings of a nearly 80-year-old man feeding on a poisoned media diet, but that isn’t a safe situation for a country to be in either. Everyone in power should be asked about this. Not just procedural questions about investigations or where they stand on the president’s lies. But the core question: When will he resign?

Mr. Secretary, the president flew to Europe to threaten our NATO allies, then seemed to confuse Denmark with Norway and kept calling Greenland “Iceland.” When will he resign?

Mr. Majority Leader, the president invaded Venezuela after lying to Congress about his plans and is now hiding Venezuelan oil money in an opaque bank account in Qatar. When will he resign?

Mr. Speaker, the president is profiting from massive crypto scams in the Oval Office to the tune of over $800 million. He is likely enriching himself by demolishing part of the White House to build an imperial ballroom (a ballroom he could not stop talking about even while Pretti’s body lay cold in the street). He is pardoning fraudsters while dismantling the FBI’s anti-corruption unit, then turning around to justify a murderous authoritarian crackdown on the streets of Minnesota on the pretext of rooting out fraud cases that had already been successfully prosecuted by the Biden administration. And he is doing that because much (but not all!) of the fraud in the latter case involved members of a nonwhite, non-Christian immigrant group whose country of origin he keeps bombing to smithereens, whereas many of the fraudsters he is pardoning have been donors to his campaigns.

He keeps “joking” about canceling elections.

Sir, ma’am, everyone … when will he resign?

You might think that Republicans will never give up the presidency, even if J.D. Vance keeps it in their hands, at least until the next election. But they might if they see disaster on the horizon — if the alternative is a wipeout, especially one that would involve real accountability. It’s happened before: Richard Nixon was a would-be tyrant who weaponized intelligence agencies against his perceived enemies, headed a network of corruption, and arguably committed treason against the United States. When the country turned on him, senior Republicans told him it was time to go.

We live in a different world now — a world filled with media and attitudes created by Republicans specifically to prevent being held accountable for another Watergate. But Trump’s crimes are already leagues worse, and the damage he could do to the country and the world with another three or more years in the White House is hard to fathom. Yes, the machinery of repression is clicking into place. Yes, it may already be too late. But millions are standing up. We won’t know if we don’t try, and we can’t try if we don’t start talking about it, loudly and regularly. So say it with me: When will he resign?

Things somehow keep getting stupider. Donald Trump went to Davos this week, where he nursed his wound from his Great Paperclip Scare and told an audience in Switzerland that if it wasn’t for the United States, they would be speaking German.

The trip started with everyone gearing up for a U.S.-European trade war over his threats to annex Greenland—a wildly unpopular idea, even in the States, from which he promptly backed down in exchange for more or less the same deal we’ve had since 1951. It ended with the signing of the charter for Trump’s “Board of Peace,” an ersatz pay-for-play United Nations created under false pretenses over which Trump will apparently preside as chairman-for-life.

The closest thing to a clever take I have about all of this—and it’s certainly not mine alone—is that Trump is haphazardly remaking geopolitics back into the patchwork of competing empires that collapsed into two world wars a century ago. Garrett Graf calls this “watching a superpower die by suicide.” (Or, as someone else once put it: “ …the breaking of America’s Empire.”) Far from auguring a new wave of decolonization, however, Trump and his neocolonialist minions are imagining a reconsolidated world run by a handful of continental hegemons — namely Russia, China, and the U.S. — with a few subordinate regional players — Israel, possibly Argentina or Hungary — allowed to run their neighborhoods.¹ (With the “Board of Peace” thing, Trump would maybe be some kind of reality-show god-emperor, an Apprentice-coded primus inter pares handing down bullae from Mar-a-Lago.)

“We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as Stephen Miller put it. He called these, as would befit a Nazi occultist, “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”² If that isn’t a gold-embossed invitation to Russia to seize as much of the former Russian Empire as it can swallow and China to annex Taiwan and the South China Sea, I don’t know what is.

Under this scheme, the U.S. gets the Western Hemisphere. What exactly counts as the Western Hemisphere is an eternal debate: Continental North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean, surely; but if Greenland, why not Iceland; if Hawai’i, why not the rest of Polynesia and parts of New Zealand? (No one except the most pedantic geographer thinks Europe and Africa west of Greenwich count.) This week, on the anniversary of his return to office, Trump shared an AI-edited photo of himself with a map indicating what he at least thinks is good for trolling purposes: the current U.S. territorial holdings, plus Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, and (it’s hard to make out³ ) possibly Cuba.

The justification that keeps getting trotted out for this imperial fantasy is the “Monroe Doctrine.” I have a piece coming in Foreign Policy, hopefully today or tomorrow, about the rationales for the invasion of Venezuela (spoiler alert: there’s a lot, and they’re all bs). Not sure what the editors did with it, but in the last draft I sent I called it “the so-called Monroe Doctrine.”

I did that because, while you will find no end of references to it online, and even a page with a properly ceremonial-looking antiquated document at the National Archives webpage, the “Monroe Doctrine” was never a thing, in the way that, say, the Constitution or the Emancipation Proclamation were things. It wasn’t a law, an amendment, or even a formal policy. Nor did the statements retrospectively cobbled into a doctrine have anything to do with an envisioned U.S. dominance of Latin America or any other part of the hemisphere.

Trump, however, did not come up with the idea of pretending otherwise.

What we now call the “doctrine” was a few scattered paragraphs in James Monroe’s seventh annual message to Congress in 1823 — the forerunner of today’s State of the Union addresses, delivered as a written letter. They were not written by the Fifth President either; historians are in wide agreement that the ideas in question were conceived by Monroe’s secretary of state (and soon-to-be successor), John Quincy Adams. In short, the Monroe administration was trying to answer the question of what it thought of the newly-won independence of four former Spanish colonies — Chile, Colombia⁴ , Argentina, and Mexico⁵ .

Its answer was: Good for them! They were republics now, like us. Spain shouldn’t try to take them back, nor should any other European power — most likely Britain, but also maybe France — try to recolonize them instead. All the rest of the surviving European colonies in the Americas, including Canada, Cuba, and the rest of the Caribbean, were also fine. No one thought about the Danish ice colony. Monroe and Adams also had nothing to say about the second-oldest republic in the Americas, Haiti. In fact, two years later, when France sailed gunships into Port-au-Prince harbor to extort a 150 million gold-franc indemnity for having won its independence in 1804, Adams said it was proof that the Black Republic had never really been independent in the first place.

Conspicuously absent from this somewhat mealy-mouthed set of observations was any sort of enforcement mechanism, or even much of a statement of intent of any kind. Nowhere was the notion that the U.S. should supplant Spain as the imperial power. “Observers have long had a hard time determining what, exactly, the Monroe Doctrine meant,” Greg Grandin has written. (“It might be a good thing,” he quotes Democrat Samuel Tilden, who won the popular vote in the 1876 presidential election, “if one could only find out what it was.”)

Happy Imperial Boomerang Friday. As Trump’s goons terrorize Minneapolis and St. Paul, the president spins his wheel of overseas aggression to decide who’s next: Iran? Cuba? An 800,000-square-mile sheet of ice? The ICE agent who straight-up murdered Renee Good learned to kill in Iraq. (Frantz Fanon remains undefeated.) The would-be puppet president of Venezuela is transparently trying to bribe him as you would a baby, by dangling something shiny that he desperately wants but can’t have. I’m already sick of 2026. It’s January 16.¹

Earlier this week, I published an essay about war, trauma, and prestige journalism in Flaming Hydra, a media cooperative that I’m part of. It’s both personal and on point for the news this week, so I’m sharing it here with you. Afterward, I’ll include some parting thoughts and extras for premium subscribers. Thanks as always for reading, sharing, and subscribing.

There’s a moment early in The Stringer, a new Netflix documentary, where photographer Gary Knight visits the village of Trảng Bàng in what was once South Vietnam. The town is famous as the setting of the 1972 photograph The Terror of War. The image is better known as “Napalm Girl” for its subject: nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running burned, naked, and terrified down a highway after a napalm attack by U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces. Knight stops at a tin-roofed bar in the village today; inside, faded copies of the photo hang on the walls.

The documentary aims to challenge the authorship of a photo that rocketed around the world, catalyzing the anti-Vietnam War movement and becoming an enduring symbol of the human toll of war. The shot also elevated the journalist credited with taking it—Associated Press staff photographer “Nick” Huỳnh Công Út, then only 21—to international fame, earning him the George Polk Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, the World Press Photo of the Year, and a Pulitzer Prize. Út went on to have a five-decade career with AP, mainly based in Los Angeles, capturing wildfires and celebrities. He retired in 2017, his place in photojournalism’s pantheon seemingly secure.

The film’s stunning claim is that Út’s career was built on a lie. It argues that he could not have taken the photo because he was too far down the highway when Kim Phúc and her cousins reached the spot immortalized in the photo. Knight and his team contend that a stringer, or freelance journalist and photographer, named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ took the shot and sold it to the AP in Saigon for $20, where photo editor Horst Faas deliberately miscredited it to Út, his staffer. (There are other circumstantial pieces of evidence as well, such as visual evidence suggesting that the camera that captured the image was most likely a Pentax, rather than the Leica M2 that Út has always claimed he used to take the shot.)

World Press Photo, the preeminent gatekeeper of prestige in photojournalism, took the incredible step of removing Út’s name from its 1973 prize, declaring he was “unlikely to be the photographer,” though they say the identity of the true photographer remains contested. The AP’s own investigations found “inconsistencies” in both Út and Nguyễn’s accounts, but said it could not find evidence definitive enough to withdraw Út’s credit.

The photo was taken eight years before I was born, in a country I’ve only visited on vacation, decades after the war, but the documentary described a world I know all too well. I spent years working for the Associated Press, in some of the hottest flashpoints of my generation. I have firsthand experience of the neocolonial fault lines between English-speaking journalists backed by major international agencies and our local subjects, and between staffers and stringers. I also know some of the main characters in the film, if not intimately, including Knight. 

Most of all, I fully inhabited the world shown in the film, whose totems—authorship, credit, and above all, the quest for recognition—were so central to our identities that they were worth risking our lives for, again and again. Sometimes I was in Út’s position, being feted at award banquets and at AP headquarters in New York. Other times, I was in a position closer to Nguyễn’s. Though that world is steadily dying, as the media institutions it fed and depended on morph and mutate into new forms, it still exists. Whether or not I am still in it depends on my mood each day.

I first worked for AP in 2003 as a graduate student intern in Jerusalem during the Second Palestinian Intifada. I knew right away that this was where I was meant to be: in the shit, witnessing history unfold—and, if I was truly committed and fortunate, perhaps even helping to shape it. I looked up to my older colleagues with awe and admiration, soaking up their stories of adventure and planning how I might follow in their footsteps.

When I returned to the United States, I hungrily applied for any AP gig I could find, regardless of how menial or brief. In 2005, I got a break: a reporter in the Washington bureau was going on maternity leave. Midway through that temporary job, I broke the story that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist had sold all his stock in his family’s mega-corporation just before a disappointing financial report caused share prices to plummet. My story triggered multiple federal investigations and ended Frist’s presidential aspirations. AP submitted my work for the Pulitzer. I didn’t win, but for the first time, I believed I could. I was 25.

I could have stayed in Washington, but my dream was to return abroad. I spent two years in the Dominican Republic, then two more across the island in Port-au-Prince—both times as a “local hire,” the same disposable bureaucratic status as Carl Robinson, the ex-AP photo editor and main whistleblower in The Stringer. By late 2009, I was making plans for a “bigger story”: Afghanistan.

Then, on January 12, 2010, I found myself sitting atop the biggest story in the world, quite literally. A 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed most of Haiti’s capital, including the AP house I was in, which galloped and buckled around me. With the help of my friend and Haitian fixer Evens Sanon—like Nguyễn, one of the global army of stringers and local hires who have both supported and conducted international newsgathering for generations—I survived and immediately went to work.

It is perverse to think about now, but what kept me going in Haiti, especially amid the horror of those first weeks, was the thought of joining the elect company of journalism’s greats. I vividly remember standing in the flattened core of Carrefour, beside a building where uncounted bodies were trapped, listening to my boss’s boss tell me to keep extra careful notes, because they were surely submitting my work for “prizes.”

I knew what prizes he meant. The Polk. The Overseas Press Club. And the one that goes in front of your name in your obituary: the Pulitzer. In that world, the world of The Stringer, those prizes open doors. They grant and signal worth. They are the difference between being just another schmuck who lives and dies, and having a chance—not the guarantee, but the chance—of being someone whose work is remembered. Of becoming Nick Út.

That promise, and the terror of losing my chance at it, kept me going for a year, through 12-to-18-hour days, usually seven days a week. I was the first international reporter to reach the town closest to the epicenter. When scientists recalculated and found another city even closer, and more horrifically damaged, I went there too. So wracked was I with what would later be diagnosed as PTSD that for three months I refused to sleep inside a building, lying on bare bricks beside a cracked hotel pool until someone brought me a tent. But I was going to cover this story better than anyone. I was going to change things. I was going to win.

Once that summer, the New York Times beat me on a big story. The United Nations had given one of my main rivals a scoop about guards killing prisoners in a quake-damaged prison in southern Haiti. I dutifully called my sources to match it. Then I went outside and vomited in the bushes.

A few months later, I got mine. A major cholera epidemic broke out. Rumors circulated that the disease had been introduced by U.N. peacekeepers stationed in rural Haiti. I went to the suspected base and, with Evens’s help, produced the first story showing that the allegations were plausible. Then I kept investigating until the case was made. When I put out my big article laying out the case in detail—along with an exclusive admission from a peacekeeping chief that the United Nations was, after weeks of denial, taking the allegations seriously—my boss called to say, “Congrats on your Pulitzer.”

But I didn’t get a Pulitzer. I got some nice hardware and, after another year of struggle, a modest deal for my first book. A judge for one of the major awards later told me, cryptically, that the jury he was on had been on the verge of giving me the nod—but decided that a rival’s work and mine had “canceled each other out,” and gave it to neither of us. For that chapter of my life, the grand tier had passed me by.

The Stringer highlights the stark differences between Út and Nguyễn’s lives —differences, it implies, caused by a single credit and recognition from journalism’s gatekeepers. Both men ended up in California. But Nguyễn was a refugee fleeing the fall of Saigon to the metropole of the empire that failed him. Út arrived an international celebrity. A series of images flickers across the screen: Young Nick Út surrounded by fashionable, mostly white men and women, toasting him with champagne. An older Nick Út soaking in applause at a democracy forum. Út with Queen Elizabeth. Út and Kim Phúc presenting a copy of the photo to Pope Francis. Út at the White House with Donald Trump. In the background, an audio montage of news presenters calling out his name plays. “How do you reconcile something so tragic, yet something that has brought fame?” a questioner asks at the democracy forum. The moderator chuckles knowingly, as if to say: A nice problem to have.

Út had not had an easy life. Born in French-occupied Vietnam, he started working for AP at 15, after his older brother was killed taking photos for AP in the Mekong Delta. If the allegations of Carl Robinson and the documentary are true, then Horst Faast, the also legendary—and apparently dictatorial—AP photo editor in Vietnam switched the credit as an homage to Út’s family, a kind of atonement for having sent his older brother on a fatal assignment. No one disputes that Út was at the scene in Trảng Bàng that day in 1972, or that he, at the very least, saw—and likely took some photos of—the badly burned Kim Phúc. He breathed in the same napalm smoke as everyone else on that road that day. He lived the same trauma.

What ranks people like these in the eyes of the industry, what sends torrents of money, gifts, and adulation—decades of full bellies and mind-shaping dopamine—to this one instead of that, is expressed as a matter of perceived and exceptional talent. “He is a natural in his ability to get himself in position to take that shot,” the voice of an unidentified but confident man explains in a clip from a more laudatory recent documentary about Út, From Hell to Hollywood. 

Nguyễn’s lack of credit and awards, meanwhile, is cited as evidence of a lack of talent—of less worth—that, tautologically, makes his claim to have taken the immortal photo inherently suspect. “Nguyen’s story would require several leaps of faith, including believing that the only time he ever sold a photo to a Western news agency it turned out to be one of the most famous images of the century,” the AP intoned. (Út took other well-regarded photographs, but none that achieved anywhere near the acclaim of the picture from Trảng Bàng.) 

I am neither man. I was born privileged in the heart of the empire. I had to fight for professional opportunities, but not for basic survival. I chose the hard situations I found myself in. I turned that modest book deal into a well-received book. I added to my list of awards, including one from the Overseas Press Club of America, which I accepted in a rented tux. I wrote another book after, for a far healthier advance, and am now working on a third. I’m living a great life with a wonderful wife and two miraculous little girls who would not exist but for the exact turns that life took in creating them. 

I can’t help but wonder how that sliding-door moment might have changed my life; what opportunities Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz is basking in on Earth 2 that never came my way. But there were darker and equally probable outcomes as well, including the ones in which I never made it out of that house in the hills above Port-au-Prince fifteen years ago.

Which brings me back to The Stringer. In the Trảng Bàng bar, the camera pans down the wall from a faded copy of The Terror of War to the bar floor, where Gary Knight examines a different framed print. He pauses to snap a picture of it: a film camera recording a still camera recording a photograph of an event that took place fifty years ago. But there is something that goes unmentioned in the film:  There is no indication of any credits anywhere in the bar. The closest thing to a caption is on the print hanging from the rafters on the roof, a single English word for unknown reasons: “Hollywood.”

All that is there in that memorial are the photograph and the people in it: Kim Phúc, her brothers Phan Thanh Tam and Phan Thanh Phouc, cousins Ho Van Bon and Ho Thi Ting, the South Vietnamese soldiers behind them, and a United Press International photographer reloading his camera. Van Bon and Thi Ting are interviewed in the documentary as eyewitnesses whose testimony can help establish the photo's authorship. But the photo belongs to the person who took it only partly. It also, in more meaningful ways, belongs to them. It is their lives and traumas that were captured, packaged, and sold.

The power of a photograph lies in its ability to compress reality into a single moment—to capture the scattered attention of billions of viewers and concentrate it onto a single point, a laser beam cutting through time. This power doesn't belong to anyone, but the demands of the world we live in mean it has value. The purpose of credit is to channel that value to an individual. The purpose of prizes is to formalize it, while ensuring that nearly all of the monetary value stays with institutions. 

“It makes no difference to us if we changed the credit,” Derl McCrudden, an AP vice president who heads global news production, told his underlings. And that’s right, it doesn’t. The AP cares about Nick Út, about any of their employees or contributors, in fact, in much the same way that the U.S. government cared about any of the Vietnamese people; useful, until they are not.

You can trace concentric circles of power from the focal point—chosen by the photographer, whoever it was—on the naked Kim Phúc. Then come the other children (Thanh Tam, far less famous than his sister, screaming from an injury that will cause him to lose an eye), then the soldiers in their American-style uniforms, then the UPI photographer, cropped out of many versions, immortalized missing the moment. Then, beyond the frame: the other victims of the accidental strike on Trảng Bàng; the millions of other Vietnamese civilians maimed or killed in the war; the millions more who died that decade in wars less remembered because they are farther from American consciousness. And so on until you expand the frame to include all of creation.

The war ended, the earthquake is behind us, and soon enough, all of us who captured, framed, and sold moments from them will be gone, too. It is up to those of us who lived those moments to do what we want with our memories in the time we have. We can celebrate, quarrel, imagine what might have been. Or we can do as Ho Thi Hien says in the film, after reflecting on the most famous artifact of her life: “The past is the past. Just let it go.”

The brazen invasion and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last week prompted a flurry of renewed attention in the United States’ history as the longstanding imperial power in Latin America. This meant an uptick in attention for my last book and a flurry of interview and writing requests, which I was grateful for. You can read an excerpt from my piece in the New Republic below; more interviews and pieces will likely drop next week.

One podcast host asked me if I thought the Venezuela incursion and accelerating talk of annexing Greenland, etc, were distractions from something else — Trump’s growing exposure in the Epstein files, perhaps, or signs of trouble in the U.S. economy. I responded with a point I’ve been making for the last decade: In the interminable Trump Era, everything is the crisis and everything is the distraction.

To illustrate: Turning people’s attention to Venezuela is a way of both distracting from and justifying the abuses being visited by Trump’s secret police, ICE, against people across the United States. But those abuses, and fearmongering about immigrants in general, is a classic way for governments to distract from literally anything, and manufacture consent for foreign interventions. Both are bad on their own, and in the way they overwhelm and exhaust public attention to clear the ground for other crimes. This is what Steve Bannon was talking about when he told Michael Lewis that the administration’s chief media strategy was to “flood the zone with shit.”

As if to underscore my point, hours after we’d finished recording, the episode got bumped.¹ News had broken in Minneapolis that an ICE agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen, soon after identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. And while, again, a violent anti-immigrant campaign and the invasion of the homeland of a substantial number of those recent immigrants are part of the same larger story, in the mind of an assignment editor, they require a whole different framing, and thus an entirely new interview. (Which in turn must have been exhausting for the podcast team, which had to quickly research, record, and edit their second episode that day.)

Good’s murder at the hands of an ICE agent, identified by various media outlets as Jonathan Ross, is yet another case in point. From the point of view of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and potentially the world, this is yet another stimulus — a thing to think, worry, fear, cheer, protest, obsess over, or argue incessantly about online. Poring over (or avoiding) the mounting angles of cell phone videos, comments, comments about the comments, saps time and energy that could otherwise be spent addressing other crises (climate change, elite corruption, war and hunger in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, Venezuela, and on and on, not to mention the torture, imprisonment and death of all the other victims of Trump’s anti-immigration machine), not to mention what is needed simply to live and feed oneself and perhaps one’s family.

The artifice at the heart of it — a set piece whose conditions, if not directly orchestrated, were purposefully created by Stephen Miller — is accentuated by the fact that we now know the killer was literally recording his own crime as he committed it. Then he, or his superiors, leaked it to a right-wing news site on the belief that a video an ICE agent made of himself killing someone and then calling her a “fucking bitch” made him look good — a new and depraved level of doing it for the ‘Gram.²

But to Good, and those who loved her, and to an extent the larger Minneapolis community, it is of course the story, her last story, and will be for many of the survivors and witnesses the defining story of their lives. It can not be a distraction, but rather the thing that will, inevitably, be distracted from, when the next unimaginable event arises.

If you have the stomach for it and want a deeper, frame-by-frame look at Wednesday’s events on Portland Avenue³ , the New York Times did yeoman’s work. As of last time I checked, Ross’ camera footage was not yet included, though that may have changed:

Video: Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

An analysis of footage from three camera angles show that the vehicle appears to be turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire.

www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis-ice-shooting-video.html?smid=url-share

I was wondering how early in 2026 — as I’d been warning — I was going to be writing about an invasion of Venezuela. Turns out it’s right out of the gate. In a lightning invasion, on the third night of the year, the U.S. military bombed and raided the South American country, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, Cilia Flores. At 11:23 a.m. EST this morning, Trump staffers posted a picture of the deposed president — blindfolded, ear-muffed, and handcuffed like a Guantánamo detainee — in custody on the USS Iwo Jima¹:

Trump then announced that the United States will be running Venezuela indefinitely — “until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” He acknowledged this could take years.

I spent most of the last decade decoding and contextualizing the history of U.S. coups and colonial occupations all over the world, and particularly in Latin America. (Sorry/not sorry for the plug, but if there was ever a time to read on Gangsters of Capitalism, it’s now.) This time I don’t have to. As is often his wont, Trump openly bragged about his motivations for embarking on a war of regime change in today’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago.²  

That speech mostly took place in the realm of total fiction. Trump repeated his lies that Venezuela in general and Maduro in particular are among the world’s principal drug traffickers (not even close), that each alleged drug boat whose occupants Trump’s lieutenants have illegally murdered at sea saved “25,000 American lives,” and that Maduro had effectively staged an invasion of the U.S. with inhabitants of his prisons and “insane asylums,” in the form of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. (Trump’s own intelligence agencies dispute his assertion that Maduro runs the gang.) He and his aides claimed to be reasserting allegedly dormant (when?) American power — with an eye toward China, Iran, and perhaps Russia — joyfully repeating the moniker “Don-roe Doctrine.”³ He also flung his own imperial boomerang, rhetorically tying in his ongoing domestic campaign of secret police violence and slow-motion ethnic cleansing against the nonwhite residents of American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — a campaign his lawyers have tried to justify using his war powers, which may now get a boost.⁴

But the one concrete thing he kept coming back to was oil. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves, larger even than Saudi Arabia’s. Trump claimed Venezuela “stole our oil” — an incoherent claim that nonetheless points to a real bone of contention between Washington and Caracas. (Venezuela nationalized its oil in the 1970s, but U.S. corporations profited nonetheless. After Hugo Chávez took power in 1998—and survived a U.S.-backed coup in 2002—he ordered multinationals to accept 60% state control. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused and left; their assets were seized. Chevron accepted and remains.)

So whereas it was once high social treason to make such claims about the Gulf or Iraq wars, Trump emphatically made it plain: this is in large part a war for oil. “We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country,” he said. “And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”

This is keeping in part and breaking in part with Trump’s rhetoric over the years. Though his supporters and centrist newspaper columnists long refused to hear it, Trump has never been shy about his fetish for military conquest. He supported the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003; his main complaint about that war, as repeated on the campaign trail in 2016, was that we “didn’t take the oil.” But he did maintain, and profit politically from, an opposition to “nation-building,” riding on the resentment caused principally by the collapse and blowback from the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.⁵

Trump insisted that, actually!, a foreign war and occupation will actually uphold the principles of “America First.” “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors. We want to surround ourselves with stability. We want to surround ourselves with good energy,” he said. It’s an inversion of the “no more foreign wars” principle that only makes sense if you’ve been cooking your brain in right-wing conspiracy circles that posit that the last century and a quarter of America’s foreign wars were for foreigners’ benefit, and not principally those of American elites.

When a reporter asked about the “mixed results” of U.S. intervention and coups in Latin America, Trump responded: “Not with me.” (We’ll see, sir!) No one thought to follow up about war games conducted during Trump’s first term, which showed, unsurprisingly, that toppling the Maduro regime would result in “chaos for a sustained period of time with no possibility of ending it,” likely requiring the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

Asked what a sustained U.S. occupation of Venezuela would cost, Trump replied, fancifully, nothing. "It won’t cost us anything,” he said, “because of the money coming out of the ground.” (We now get to see what Trump’s “keep the oil” strategy for Iraq would have looked like.) He further claimed that increased oil production thanks to U.S. investment will somehow help Venezuelans, and U.S. businesses, as well as the U.S., as “reimbursement for the damage caused to our country.” This is contradictory, and ignores the actual history—indeed, falling oil prices and U.S. sanctions, not new state controls, are most responsible for Venezuela's economic crisis and the international migration that followed. This argument can only work as a permission structure for Trump supporters squeamish about abandoning their former principles and rooting for the occupation of another country.

What does this mean for international politics? Trump and his acolytes, who lined up to lather him in autocrat style, claim they are putting the world on notice that America is “back.“ Trump tied the Venezuela strikes in with last year’s airstrikes on Iran, repeating his illusory claim that he has “nearly” achieved “peace in the Middle East.” (Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians during the “ceasefire” in Gaza; Trump is elsewhere threatening new strikes on Iran since — surprise! — the June war didn’t really end their nuclear program.)

Marco Rubio seized the moment to issue veiled threats to the country he really wants above all to bomb and invade, his parents’ native Cuba, saying “If I lived in Havana, I would be concerned, at least a little bit.” Trump, feeling emboldened, also talked about extending the regime change war to Colombia, claiming, without evidence, that President Gustavo Petro is “making cocaine … [and] sending it into the United States, so he does have to watch his ass.”

For weeks now, Donald Trump has been playing a game of will he/won’t he with a regime change war against Nicolás Maduro. He’s blown up civilian boats, alleging they are carrying drugs; moved in the U.S. Navy’s largest aircraft carrier and its strike group; and announced the closure of Venezuelan airspace. He’s also deploying surrogates across U.S. media to drum up consent for a war in an almost shot-for-shot replay of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, with one crucial difference: this time, the Republicans are being open about this indeed being a prospective war for oil.

Yesterday, that got even more real. The NYT reports:

I’m already hearing the stirrings of whataboutism in reference to a 2023 incident in which the Biden administration seized 800,000 barrels worth of Iranian oil that they alleged was being smuggled, likely to China, in defiance of U.S. sanctions.¹ That was a messy case that triggered Iranian reprisals. But in that one, the Greece-based, Marshall Islands-flagged charter company that owned the ship, the Suez Rajan, agreed to cooperate and voluntarily sail it to Galveston, Texas, so that the contraband could be offloaded.

In yesterday’s case … well, just watch this video:

Military helicopters (they look like U.S. Navy SH-60B Seahawks or a repainted Coast Guard variant), commandos rappelling onto the ship’s deck, seizing the bridge at gunpoint — these are visuals straight out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. (Which is, undoubtedly, the point.) The question is which one: Capt. Frank Ramsey or Cap’n Jack Sparrow?

Trump is, as I’ve written, likely of two or three minds about a war with Venezuela. Inflation, the cost of living, and unemployment are all rising. His approval rating is in the toilet. The most politically damaging scandal of his presidency so far is likely to get worse whether the promised Epstein files are released this month or not. War is sometimes a panacea for all of that. War with Venezuela, however, is deeply unpopular — even 42% of Republicans oppose it, according to a recent CBS poll. (Though they are delighted with the murder campaign against suspected drug boats.)

On the more goal-oriented front, Trump is openly salivating over Venezuela’s oil, and keeping it out of Iranian, Chinese, and possibly even Russian hands. He’s eager for progress in the revived War on Drugs (which blowing up Venezuela won’t accomplish, but it’s unclear if he knows that). He and his embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth both love to (briefly) play war. His attorney general, Pam Bondi, may be eager for an Actual War to justify the implementation of putatively wartime measures such as the Alien and/or Insurrection Acts, or whatever she has planned against anyone she deems “antifa.” His more ideological Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, wants to embark on a hemispheric Global War on Terror 2.0 in which, according to a dusted off version of Domino Theory, the insertion of a María Machado or Edmundo González regime in Caracas would inevitably be followed by similar regime changes in Nicaragua and, por la gracia de vuestro Dios y Señor Trump, Cuba. A U.S.-ruled Venezuela could also be a nice companion piece to a partially Russian-ruled Ukraine, for when the homies get together to compare Spheres of Influence.

The hard part would be getting to that point without a costly military campaign, a dangerous Venezuelan insurgency, or the final bottoming out of his poll numbers. So, for the moment, it seems he’s doing the Trump Thing: posturing, threatening, making scary videos set to music, all while quietly negotiating and hoping his problem decides to resolve itself, or everyone else decides to start paying attention to something else.

This is how I read the seizure of the oil tanker, The Skipper. It is a bullying move. (“When people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard,” Trump’s ghostwriter wrote in The Art of the Deal). It’s a psyop (“My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe” — in this case, Venezuela’s impression that Trump is a belligerent madman and the U.S. a remorseless imperial power.) It looks impressive to the base. (“A little hyperbole never hurts.”) It’s theft — or perhaps leverage for the next phone call.

The problem is that, at some point, he’s got to produce a result — either Maduro leaves power, he strikes a deal he can hype, or the war begins. As he said in that 1987 book: “You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

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Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. While millions of Americans were sitting down to festive meals yesterday, the President of These United States went on a racist tear. “What’s new?” you might ask. But, reader, this was unprecedented even for him. David Duke may be sitting at home right now, or perhaps on a Substack podcast, saying, brother, take it down a notch.

The impetus for the meltdown was the Thanksgiving Eve shooting of two National Guardsmen in downtown Washington, D.C. (One of the two, Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, has died; Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe remains in critical condition.) The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is a 29-year-old Afghan national who is widely reported to have served in a “Zero Unit” — one of the CIA-trained death squads that fought alongside American commandos and murdered hundreds of civilians during our 20-year war and occupation. He is said to have moved to the United States with his family during the U.S. withdrawal and was granted asylum in April, three months after Trump returned to office.

Trump’s spiral — first in a press conference, then in an unhinged series of late-night posts on Truth Social — immediately went way beyond Lakanwal, or even Afghan nationals in general. Triggered in part by a question on his own administration’s potential responsibility for having granted the suspected shooter asylum, Trump launched into a wild attack against all immigrants, his political enemies, and ultimately against the idea of America as a pluralistic nation of settlers as conceived by its founding generation two and a half centuries ago.

In the space of 511 words, Trump accused Americans of having “allow[ed] our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at” by immigrants — “most of which,” he said, are “on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”; accused Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) of both illegally immigrating and committing incest; called Minnesota governor and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz “retarded”; announced a “permanent pause” on immigration from “all Third World Countries”; announced the cessation of “all Federal benefits” to “noncitizens of our Country”; said he planned to strip the citizenship of any immigrant who “undermine[s] domestic tranquility”; and to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

The president ended his rant (part I here, part II here) screaming: “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation” — a white nationalist concept that spread from an Austrian far-right party founded by a former Nazi SS officer to white supremacist movements in Europe and North America over the last few years.

I don’t know, and I don't care, whether Trump wrote all or even most of the rant himself. (The screeching about “Western Civilization” and the use of X-brained buzzwords and the Omar conspiracy theories suggest the hand of a relatively younger chud like Stephen Miller, though Trump has invoked the latter before.) The salient fact here is that the president put his name to a screed in which he announced plans to “denaturalize” — that is, take away the citizenship of — potentially tens of millions of Americans; blatantly violate the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment protections of millions more (the Constitution gives rights to “persons,” not citizens); and used language straight off of a Nazi imageboard. All in the name of responding to an Imperial Boomerang-coded attack¹ on National Guardsmen who shouldn’t have been in D.C. to begin with.

But the main thing that drove me to write this on a holiday weekend is to say that I don’t think it’s going to work. It’s annoying that legacy media are intent, as ever, to sanewash Trump’s racist rambling. It is sad that the American political sphere and its media apparatus swings into reflexive consent-manufacturing mode as soon as a shot rings out near a troop or a center of power, yet relegates the mounting numbers of masked ICE and CBP agents shooting wildly at, and sometimes killing, immigrants and U.S. citizens alike to local coverage that focuses on adjudicating the victims’ innocence or lack thereof.

It just doesn’t seem to be working. For the moment at least, judging from polls and growing resistance from corners not traditionally known for radicalism like childcare workers and suburban moms, Trump’s mass deportation scheme is wildly unpopular. Starving and immiserating noncitizens by taking away their legal SNAP, Medicaid, or CHIP benefits may play with the MAGA base. But to normal people, even those who could perhaps be persuaded to reduce refugee admissions, it’s just cruel. Start stripping the citizenship of friends, coworkers, fellow church, mosque, and synagogue-goers for using their legal federal benefits or doing whatever Stephen Miller thinks is “non-compatible with Western Civilization?” Trump could have a popular revolt on his hands. And that’s all before you get to the ways that the MAGA coalition itself seems to be fracturing over the Epstein Files, Venezuela adventurism, and the increasingly open levels of Nazi influence on the right.

That is not to say it couldn’t work. Given a big enough event — a 9/11, Maine, a Pearl Harbor — you can get Americans to sign on to a lot of cruelty in the name of promises of public safety. But Trump is lazy, impatient, and losing steam. His circle’s attempts to make the Charlie Kirk assassination into a Reichstag Fire moment claimed some victims but ultimately failed. And this isn’t even that. As horrible a tragedy as it is, it seems to me that too many of us are sadly too inured to mass shootings at this point for this one to crack apart increasingly baked-in perceptions of the issues that the administration is trying to center. And Trump — old, tired, and looking, for all his TRUMP 2028 posturing, like the lame duck he is constitutionally supposed to be — simply isn’t the salesman he once was.

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Trump listens to a reporter's question at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, on November 27, 2025. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)

I don’t usually read David Brooks or spend any time thinking about his columns, but a headline today caught my eye: “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.” Brooks writes that “America’s political class [has] decided to obsess” over “a guy who has been dead for six years and who last was in touch with Donald Trump 21 years ago…”¹  

He continues:

Brooks goes on to say that “the Epstein case is precious to the QAnon types because here, in fact, was a part of the American elite that really was running a sex abuse ring,” but that this is foolhardy because Epstein was not “a typical member of the American establishment” but rather “an outlier.” He compares their mentality to that of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, which, “not content to claim Alger Hiss was a Communist spy, which he was,” also “had to insist that President Dwight Eisenhower was a paid Soviet agent.”

There are some fundamental problems with this analysis. A big one is that, in fact, Epstein is not particularly “precious to the QAnon types.” Quite the contrary: For all their obsessive imagining of Eyes Wide Shut-style elite sex cabals around every corner, QAnons and PizzaGaters spent an inordinate amount of time ignoring Epstein and making excuses for Trump’s longstanding associations with him. In their book Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko write: “The irony of Trump’s documented association with Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted trafficker and sexual abuser — as well as a number of lawsuits filed against Trump by women and girls — accusing him of harassment, misconduct, or rape — is lost on the QAnon followers. QAnons dismiss all criticism of Trump.”²

This is, in fact, one of the big reasons why Epstein and his well-known links to Trump and his administrations have been so politically salient: They expose the hypocrisy of a right-wing populist movement, supposedly fixated on protecting children and exposing corrupt elites, being constructed around a rapacious and (allegedly) predatory billionaire who was close friends and bragged about sharing “wonderful secret(s)” with the most notorious pedophile of the early 21st Century.

I’m sympathetic to those worried about an obsession with Epstein fueling the worst paranoid and conspiratorial tendencies in American life, if not the Western world. It isn’t hard to foresee how a shadowy real-life conspiracy of elite sex abusers, headed by a Jewish financier with reported links to Israeli intelligence, will encourage far more destructive and patently false beliefs. (One of the livest wires there was Epstein’s apparent late dealings with the Swiss Edmond de Rothschild Group — a relatively young private bank, totally separate from the larger and better known Rothschild & Co., both of whose surnames are basically synonymous with “batshit antisemitic conspiracy theories.” Very helpful, Jeff!)

But there are good reasons not to follow Brooks’ lead and dismiss the story entirely. For one thing, as Brooks himself notes, the Epstein story is something millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people are currently fascinated by and engaged with. It is wrong to say, as he does, that Epstein’s fuzzy connections and interlocking networks are “easy to understand” — very much the opposite, when you actually try. But as a notion, it is pretty simple: it’s a story of rich people using their wealth, prestige, and connections to hurt the vulnerable, then turning around and using the same to avoid consequences for their harm.

That is a fact of life that it is tough to get Americans, the lot of temporarily embarrassed capitalists we are, to pay attention to, much less in a wildly rare bipartisan fashion. And it isn’t something you can just swap out with another tale of avarice or corruption, however plentiful those might be. There are plenty to choose from: Olivia Nuzzi’s obscene remuneration for corrupt fraternization with (apparently multiple?) presidential candidates while publicly covering them, the Trump family’s endless grifts with foreign potentates, or any number of other options. But to get something with equal power, you’d need one that involves ex- and (crucially!) current U.S. presidents, a senior member of the British royal family, a president of Harvard, and movie stars. And you’d need to convince millions of people that this other story is more worth pursuing than the story with which they’re already familiar.

The late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once described conspiracy as “the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” When people can’t access or even learn about the actual mechanisms by which elites control our lives and fortunes, they resort to stories. Those stories are often wrong — they can, in fact, be dangerous — but they come from a genuine and rational impulse to make sense of a world in which power really does operate through networks of personal relationships and constantly evades democratic accountability.

The Epstein case is fascinating precisely because it collapses those distinctions. It was an actual elite network, operating through personal relationships and mutual protection, flying on private jets and meeting on an exclusive tropical island — more or less what the paranoid style typically imagines. And — and this is really key — it involves, in ways we are getting glimpses of but do not yet fully understand, the sitting president of the United States, whose former chief political adviser, former labor secretary, current attorney general, and others were all tied in.

It is absolutely the case, as I’ve said before, that the Epstein case does not and cannot explain everything — the closer one gets to declaring that the Epstein circle was or is the shadowy cabal controlling the whole world, the more we should all collectively and slowly back away. But running in the other direction — dismissing public interest in the Epstein case as heedless conspiracy-mongering — ignores the fact that, sometimes, lurid popular narratives, however crudely expressed, point toward truths that institutional discourse avoids.

David Brooks certainly knows more about elites than your average American — he is, despite his protestations, one of them. His defense of his friends (“say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites, but they are not mass rapists”) may often be true. Still, as the #MeToo era exposed, it isn’t always as true as we’d prefer to believe. Brooks finally tips his hand at what he is really defending as he sets up his closing plea: “No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.” Being worried about the knock-on effects of the Epstein story on one’s billionaire and party-elite friends may be the worst argument for ignoring it of all.

If you’re interested in more on this, as well as more thoughts on the Olivia Nuzzi journalism scandal, check out my conversation with Maria Bustillos at Flaming Hydra:

Yakkin’ About the Bad Writers

Katz and Bustillos spoke over the phone on Tuesday. Here's a lightly edited version of their conversation. Maria Bustillos: I think the chickens of “American exceptionalism” have finally come home to roost now. We’re seeing all these human beings in what was supposed to be a superior form of

flaminghydra.com/yakkin-about-the-bad-writers

And re-upping my deep dive into the material reality of his island, the much-ignored role that Virgin Islanders play in the story, and how it all fits into the much bigger saga of American and European empires from this summer:

Epstein and Empire

There's an angle to the Trump-Epstein affair that most people are missing: In the Virgin Islands, silence and impunity have long been the price of paradise.

theracket.news/p/epstein-and-empire

While Americans have spent the last 24 hours justifiably focused on Trump's exposure in the Epstein files, the president has been increasingly engaged in another dangerous flirtation: with yet another war.

The supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group are nearing Venezuela, capping off the most significant U.S. military escalation in Latin America since the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has mobilized an estimated 200,000 troops in hopes of staving off regime change. Trump, meanwhile, keeps treating the Caribbean as his personal shooting gallery, with the death toll from missile strikes on civilian boats he accuses (without offering evidence) of drug smuggling now reaching eighty.

Our cosplaying “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth took another step this afternoon, officially designating the build-up Operation Southern Spear. His announcement — on X, of course — hit all the imperial chestnuts the U.S. has historically used to justify its actions in Latin America: describing targets as “narco-terrorists” and the entire Western Hemisphere as “America’s neighborhood.”

“Narcoterrorism” — a word you will see everywhere if the war begins — was a piece of agitprop first used at scale by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. It was a way of rhetorically linking the socialist governments of Cuba and Nicaragua to the moral panic over cocaine and crack to boost support for his interventions in Central America’s civil wars. This was especially ironic given that the region’s governments and factions most directly involved in the drug trade were right-wing U.S. allies, including the Nicaraguan Contras and Panamanian dictator/CIA asset Manuel Noriega.¹ When the Cold War ended and Noriega ceased to be useful, his former boss at the CIA, George H.W. Bush reversed course and declared that the Panamanian dictator had been a narcoterrorist after all, as the pretext for the 1989 invasion that overthrew him.²

War with Venezuela will make even less sense, at least under the terms the Trump apparatus is trying to justify it. Trump has justified his lawless assassinations of smugglers and fishermen by raising the specter of fentanyl — the early 21st-century replacement for 1980s’ crack in the American imagination. At an Oct. 15 press conference, he claimed: “The boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean … It’s like floating in bags. It’s all over the place.” He claimed that every strike against a boat thus saved “25,000 American lives” — itself an unhinged claim, given that the last total reported one-year number of overdose deaths by the CDC was less than 74,000, and that was for all drugs combined.

Look, as an author, you always want your work to feel timely — especially when it’s a globetrotting deep dive into century-old history. But this is ridiculous.

We’ve got the Trump administration reinstating gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean (see chapters on Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13) in preparation for a possible invasion of Venezuela. This invasion would be on the pretext of stopping “narcoterrorism” (see e.g., Ch 9 The Canal Zone, p. 174-75) and dismantling an alleged drug “cartel” (see Ch 10 Veracruz, p. 190). But in reality, as The Atlantic recently explained, it is actually based on Trump’s directive “to ensure future U.S. access to the extractive riches of Venezuela,” especially oil (Ch 10, 178-184, 201).

This possible war is springing from an intra-administration dispute between two factions. One, led by former public relations consultant and presidential bagman Richard Grenell (see journalist-turned-operative Roger Farnham in Panama, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and throughout book), thought he had secured access to Venezuela’s resources through coercive diplomacy (“dollar diplomacy” Ch 8 Nicaragua, 141-144).

But a hardline faction led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (see Sec. Philander Knox, Ch 8, 134-35) sees far more opportunity in violently toppling the government of President Nicholas Maduro (too many examples of U.S.-sponsored Latin American coups to count), which Trump insiders reportedly believe could be simply the first step in launching a hemisphere-wide effort to “beat back Chinese encroachment in the U.S.’s sphere of influence” in the spirit of the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (Ch 8, 133).

(The New York Times reports that China, meanwhile, is driven by a desire to wipe away the stain of “national humiliation” visited upon it by European empires — and, the paper fails to note, directly and repeatedly by the United States — from the end of the First Opium War in 1842 to the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. See Ch 4 Northern China and Ch 16 Shanghai, esp. 66, 71-72)

In this light, the Trump administration's murderous illegal strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean — for which they've provided no evidence, and at least some of which appear to be regular fishing boats — look like the Rubio faction hitting back against the Grenell faction through mafioso tactics against civilians (see title of my book).¹

The Republican-controlled Congress has responded by abdicating its role in warmaking or holding the president even mildly accountable (see eg, McKinley re China, Ch 4, p. 65). Investors believe they will profit either way (see all pages 1-339). 

Meanwhile, all this belligerence abroad, now and in our history, is coming back home to bite us. You have people, especially recent immigrants, being terrorized by law enforcement like ICE and CBP, using tactics and attitudes developed through our imperial wars abroad (see Ch 15 Philadelphia, 269, 272-274). You have the president threatening to unleash the full force of the active military against so-called radicals and revolutionists, on promises to stop an alleged Communist insurrection (see Bonus March, Ch 17, 312-316).

This is all a textbook case of the imperial boomerang (Prologue, p. 8-10). Trained to look at enemies abroad as being subhuman and unworthy of life, an entire political party, caught in a death spiral of insane capital accumulation and unchecked racism and nativist populism, has become hellbent on similarly destroying its rivals and perceived enemies at home, through similar means — military repression, starvation, drones. In a clumsy but on-the-nose effort to make sure the military is at least partially exempt from the chaos of his government shutdown, Trump is emulating Hitler and Mussolini’s strategy of keeping “soldiers on their payrolls in various ways” (Prologue on The Business Plot, p 3)² , paid for by the grandson of former Hoover Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon³ (Ch 17, 313).

The right is accordingly engaged in ideological struggle over exactly how much they should emulate (or anoint as a champion) the Holocaust denying, Hitler-defending, open antisemite Nick Fuentes. Fuentes — a modern-day Father Charles Coughlin (Ch 17, 317) or pro-Nazi “America Firster” Charles Lindbergh (Ch 17, 332) — was embraced as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show last week.

But you also have liberals and democratic socialists like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani⁴ grappling with the same situation. Emulating Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers of the 1930s (Ch 17, 318-319), they are trying to show people that liberal democracy and government can still work for the people while pointing to the dangers posed by authoritarianism and gangsterism. Maybe there’s a Smedley Butler, or millions of Smedley Butlers, out there, ready and eager to fight back.

Hey reader, a few weeks ago I asked you to ask me questions. In the meantime, I’ve done some globetrotting, both physical and intellectual: mentoring a workshop in northern Greece (shoutout to the terrific folks at Rosemary’s House) and keeping tabs on the wildly oversold ceasefire in Gaza (which Israel has predictably violated now at least 80 times).

Now it’s time to dive into the mailbag. But first, I want to address a question that came up after I asked for submissions — a question I wish more political media were asking.

A Bluesky user asks:

This question is about Virginia’s attorney general race — a pivotal contest with the potential to shape the governor’s race and influence national politics. (Because of Virginia’s large and politically divided population, its off-year elections are widely regarded as bellwethers.)

As early voting opened, the National Review published opposition research targeting Democrat Jay Jones. They highlighted a text Jones sent a few years ago to a Republican colleague about then-GOP House Speaker Todd Gilbert: “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot (sic). Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.”

The story was a lay-up for national media: Jones — a young Black Democrat — had seemingly been caught threatening a GOP politician and equating him with infamous dictators. This fed into the ongoing (orchestrated) national freakout about Donald Trump’s (empirically false) claims that the left is mounting a wave of political violence, a (fictitious) wave that can only be stopped by a neo-McCarthyite/War on Terror-style crackdown from Trump and his federal goons. And, indeed, polls show the “text scandal” is doing real damage to both Jones and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger’s campaigns.

Yet one major detail seems to have gone unmentioned: “Two bullets, two dictators, and a guy I don’t like” isn’t just an obvious absurdist joke¹ — it’s an exceptionally well-known one. This line has been used for decades in sitcoms, documentaries, and major newspapers. Never once, to my knowledge, has it appeared in any context where it was meant to be taken even remotely seriously as a statement of political intent.

Here was an extended treatment of the joke on The Office back in 2010:

The real joke there is that everyone knows this joke. And you can find endless riffs on it online: versions making fun of lawyers, a Pakistani cricketer (trolled by his own fans), and a Russian soccer referee. One nerd put Hitler and Bin Laden in a room with the equally long-dead philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Rousseau gets the bullets.) There’s even a subset of meta-jokes in which the teller turns the metaphorical gun on themself. The specifics change, but it’s always the same format: Hitler (always Hitler), another dictator/political villain, and the obviously-less-evil-but-still-shitty-guy-we-don’t-like, who inevitably gets shot twice.

The ur-version seems to be one from the 1950s involving Hitler, the recently deceased Joseph Stalin, and the butt of the joke: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner who infamously moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. (Brooklyn hates O’Malley more than the two greatest geopolitical enemies in recent American history! Get it????) Here it is featured in the documentary Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, told matter-of-factly by Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger:

It's a very old one, too. Brooklyn Dodger fans would recite a version of it after Walter O'Malley moved the team to Los Angeles.

— Matt Ortega (@mattortega.com)
6:19 PM • Oct 23, 2025

Possibly the biggest fan of this form of the joke is New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman (that’s right, Maggie’s dad), who likes it so much he repeated it on Twitter/X no fewer than ten times over the last decade:

“You shoot O’Malley twice.”

Calling on Jones to drop out of the race for this is like arresting someone for conspiracy to kidnap because someone heard them say, “Take my wife, please.”

I tried writing political journalists to point this out. Those who responded, called out for missing such an obvious reference, pivoted: “Yeah, but he also joked about killing Gilbert’s kids!” (No, he didn’t.) “He also said he’d piss on his opponent’s graves!” (If you think that’s inflammatory, wait until you hear how American politicians have been talking about each other for the last two hundred and fifty years.)

Look, it was extremely dumb for Jones to put a joke like that in writing, much less in a text to a Republican colleague. Not the kind of judgment one might want from the potential head of a state justice department. But then again, compare him to the other options: We’ve got Jones’ opponent — sitting Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares — who, the Washington Post editorialized in 2022: “… sent a message to police last week: Don’t hesitate to shoot a civilian if you are exasperated, angry or feeling disrespected in the course of any encounter.” (Miyares had, in real life, just thrown out a grand jury’s charges against two U.S. Park Police officers who had shot and killed an unarmed driver in Northern Virginia. A bit more consequential than an off-color private joke.)

And then there’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears — the ultimate beneficiary of the smear campaign — who said to pro-choice advocates that same year: “Murder is murder, and one day it's gonna be your turn.”

So, yeah. That’s the context.

1996. If Dole had won, we would have mostly gotten Clintonism in its purer, more Republican form. Butterfly effect and all that, but the main legacy of that election was some good Simpsons jokes and convincing Gen Xers and elder Millennials that elections don't matter — an idea I hope they've since abandoned.

Today, Israeli soldiers shot and killed at least seven Palestinians atop the massive rubble field they have made of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government is threatening the fragile ceasefire by throttling humanitarian aid shipments meant to alleviate the genocidal famine they created. Defense Minister Israel Katz¹ instructed the military to resume its destruction of Hamas’ underground infrastructure in Gaza as soon as the hostages are out. And Hamas is taking advantage of the pause to execute Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel, thumbing its nose at Israel’s stated war aim to disarm them.

If any of that sounds like peace to you, we have very different definitions of the word. Yet if you turn to most American sources today, you’d think not just this war but maybe all wars in the region are over. They are saying that for one reason above all: because it’s what Donald Trump wants to believe, and most everyone else feels obligated to play along.

There are some genuinely good developments here: Israel released 1,700 Palestinian hostages and 250 prisoners in exchange for the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages. The massive bombing has stopped. Many Israelis and Palestinians believe this ceasefire might actually hold, unlike the last two that Israel broke.

But it is a far cry from the narrative of “PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST” that Trump and his acolytes are feverishly trying to sell. This is underscored in the details: Israel is forcing 154 of the Palestinians it is releasing into exile. The bombing only stopped after Israeli forces went on a post-ceasefire announcement arson spree. The most bitter irony is that, after two years of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet’s insistence that only slaughter and unconditional surrender could free the remaining Israeli hostages, it was once again negotiations and diplomacy that saved them — good, but too late for the dozens who died in Hamas captivity in the meantime.

As I’ve written, the hostages were, for many Israelis and their supporters, the justification for war, the unimpeachable reason for its continuation, and the primary war aim, all rolled into one. But for Netanyahu and the ultranationalist faction of his coalition they were at best a useful tool and at worst a distraction from their real aims: the “total destruction” of Hamas and the ethnic cleansing and annexation, in whole or in part, of the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu, you’ll recall, rejected offer after offer to negotiate the release of hostages in the months after October 7. It was only after Trump convinced himself he might have an inside track at his dream bauble of the Nobel Peace Prize² — and, crucially, after Netanyahu severely pissed him off by trying to assassinate the negotiators at Trump’s own negotiations in Doha — that Netanyahu agreed to take the best option left to him: accept the remaining hostages and declare victory. Pretending it is a victory is a key part of that show. It will be to Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan’s eternal shame that they could not do the same, tens of thousands of lives and one definitive presidential election ago.