Donald Trump cannot understand artificial intelligence because the "A. part" and the "I. part" are too complicated for him to understand

 A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue- Published in The New Yorker

(So, will Artificial Intelligence be able to outsmart its opponents?)

As Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, put it, “People really effing hate data centers.”
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.

That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. 

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic Governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. “It’s time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis,” a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who is the front-runner in this Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, always on high alert for political opportunity, set conditions on new data centers in his state in May. But the surprise in recent weeks has been a reversal on the issue by business conservatives who not long ago were touting A.I. projects as the cornerstone of a new prosperous age. 

Just eight months ago, Governor Greg Abbott, at a news conference with the Google C.E.O., Sundar Pichai, bragged, “Texas will be the centerpiece for A.I. data centers for Google in the entire world.”

Then, last week, Abbott abruptly announced that all such projects would be suspended, pending an “audit” of their costs and potential benefits. Even the brashest, most pro-tech Republicans are sounding defensive. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Presidential candidate and DOGE co-chair, who is now the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, insisted that “despite my opponent’s claims, I’m not ‘pro-data center.’ ”

Part of the issue is simply that the facilities are so huge and tend not to provide many jobs once construction is complete. 

Microsoft’s announcement of a new site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, enumerated “46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping.” The tech journalist Jasmine Sun noted, about a center being built for OpenAI and Oracle in the same state, “Opponents time how long it takes to drive past one at highway speed (1 minute 42 seconds for the Port Washington site).” The resources required for such facilities—electricity for power and water for cooling—have sometimes stressed local systems: after two recent data-center-related electrical surges in northern Virginia, an expert from the Union of Concerned Scientists said that utility companies had fielded “complaints about flickering lights and strange noises coming from refrigerators.” 

Protests spread, and, according to Data Center Watch, at least seventy-five data-center projects, whose costs totaled roughly a hundred and thirty billion dollars, were stopped in the first three months of 2026, alone.

But this summer, some politicians detected a deeper unease, and  began asking more basic questions about whether A.I. infrastructure will benefit ordinary people, or just the billionaires behind the technology, and why it has taken mass protest to force public consideration of these issues. 

As El-Sayed put it during a campaign stop at a data center in Saline, Michigan, “Unless and until we protect local communities from the power of corrupting money and politics, we’re going to continue to see projects like this get pushed onto local communities despite themselves.”

What makes data centers interesting not just as a local issue but as a national one is that they might allow Democrats to highlight the duplicity of Donald Trump’s politics of populism and his embrace of futuristic tech billionaires. Whereas the President’s 2016, run focussed on Rust Belt themes of economic decline, his 2024, campaign featured the presence of Elon Musk, who brought with him a roster of Silicon Valley allies—one of whom, David Sacks, became the President’s A.I. and crypto czar—and the promise of a transformed future. But, as the A.I. boom and the data-center build-out have accumulated momentum, the statements from the tech industry about widespread job displacement have grown increasingly dystopian. In May, Microsoft’s A.I. C.E.O., Mustafa Suleyman, said that the technology would be able to automate most white-collar tasks within twelve to eighteen months. Even if that’s an overstatement, or corporate hype—there’s little evidence of job loss so far, and Suleyman later walked back his remarks—it should have been obvious that the public might need some reassurance that the economy would still require human beings.

But Musk and Sacks have become less visible in Washington, and although A.I. has been the major business and social topic of the past year and a half, the President has barely addressed it. The White House’s most memorable foray into the A.I. debate is still the very weird press conference that Melania Trump held in March where she walked onstage side by side with a white-plated, faintly Stormtrooper-looking robot called Figure 03, which said in a mechanical female voice that it was grateful to play a part in revolutionizing education. For the Trump Administration, the A.I. backlash is at once a source of political trouble and an expression of its second-term rudderlessness, in that the Donald Trump has helped unleash a future that he does not seem to understand.

The moratoriums themselves may not be particularly consequential to the advance of artificial intelligence—many data centers have already been built, and others can be constructed in friendlier jurisdictions, or even overseas. In May, the Anthropic C.E.O., Dario Amodei, waved away the political challenges. He said, “We’re going to find that ideology will not survive the nature of this technology. It won’t survive reality.” The things he was talking about, he added, “are gonna become bipartisan and universal because everyone will recognize the necessity of it.” On the campaign trail, in Michigan and elsewhere, something like the opposite is happening. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 17, 2026, issue, with the headline “Reading the Data.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are supporting maniac threats to destroy an entire Iranian civilization

Echo essay in The New Yorker magazine: In his April 2026 reporting, David Remnick frames the second term of Donald Trump as a profound global threat, characterizing the administration's actions as a "strategic failure and moral calamity". Remnick's analysis focuses on the degradation of democratic norms and international stability.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran

From the first day of his failed administration beginning in 2016 and continuing the second term in 2024, Trump has posed an emergency to both his country and the world. April 10, 2026

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. 

In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985, until his death in 2006, by cardiac arrest. 

For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his administration, posed an emergency to both our country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024, campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. 

Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. 

Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s 2018, abandonment of that deal. 

For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun 💥🤢 is not yet known. 

Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “Global Threat.”

Question to Donald Trump and maga Republicans? Has Iran surrendered yet? Multiple choice answers are "yes" or "no".

An opinion essay published in the New Yorker magazine, by David Remnick.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, two months into Trump's illegal war of choice, the chief offender of truth is Donald Trump himself.

Donald Trump's war on truth. Who knew? 

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, Dpma;d Trump announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could soon be heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all the President’s men followed his lead: they blamed
the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while the President has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the Donald Trump's cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. Trump loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The most cruel irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦

Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

"Dangerous demagogues once again threatening even some of our oldest democracies," Evil Donald Trump déjà vu

Life in Hitler’s Capital- Berlin Germany

In a new book about everyday existence in wartime Berlin, students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are allowed to speak for themselves. Book review by Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker magazine.

"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews." Martha Gellhorn.

My grandmother’s childhood in Weimar Germany was, at least as she described it, idyllic. She grew up in Grunewald, a leafy section of Berlin, swimming and boating in the district’s many lovely lakes. Her parents, though Jewish, threw elaborate Christmas parties and hosted birthday celebrations at which their three daughters were expected to recite poetry. They sent the girls to summer camp and private school and considered themselves assimilated into the city’s haute bourgeoisie. Even after the Reichstag fire, which occurred when my grandmother was twenty, there was, she insisted, still plenty of fun to be had. She liked to tell the story of a friend, nicknamed Bummel, who, after one particularly debauched New Year’s Eve, took off his tuxedo, carefully folded it up next to him, and fell asleep in the gutter.

Not long before Kristallnacht, in 1938, my grandmother—by this point married, with a daughter of her own—immigrated to New York. After I, the daughter of that daughter, came along, she used to tell me, “We were the lucky ones.” My grandmother had managed to get her immediate family out of Germany thanks to a wealthy uncle in Chicago. This, however, was not what she meant. She and my grandfather had been “lucky” because the only difficult choice that they’d had to make was to flee, and that choice had, in effect, been made for them. History had taken a host of fraught decisions out of their hands.

Over the years, I’ve often been reminded of my grandmother’s words. Recently, while I was reading Ian Buruma’s new book, “Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945” (Penguin Press), they played on repeat. Buruma is a writer who grew up in the Netherlands. In the opening pages of “Stay Alive,” he recounts the story of his father, Leo, whose experience was, in key ways, the mirror image of my grandmother’s. Leo didn’t flee Berlin to escape the Nazis; he arrived there to work for them.

Leo was attending law school in the occupied Netherlands when the Germans demanded that Dutch students sign a loyalty oath. Instead of complying, he went into hiding. For reasons that he was never able to discover, another student, who had also gone underground, advised Leo to return to his home town of Nijmegen. Leo’s father came to meet him at the train station, and both men were immediately surrounded by police. Leo had to make an agonizing call: either he could coöperate with the Nazis or both he and his father would be arrested. He opted for the former and was sent to a labor camp in Lichtenberg, a neighborhood in east Berlin.

Leo was one of those who managed to stay alive, though how, exactly, is unclear. At some point, he met a Frau Lehnhardt, the widow of a Jewish lawyer, who lived on the opposite side of the city. Lehnhardt had an elegant, well-heated home, and Leo seems to have spent a good deal of time there, accompanying the widow on the piano. By the end of the war, he had moved into Lehnhardt’s house. In April, 1945, Russian soldiers knocked on the door. When they found a gun, which belonged to another Lehnhardt hanger-on, the Russians very nearly shot everyone in the place.

Leo’s time in Berlin, Buruma reports, “haunted him” until his death, in 2020. He knew that some of his contemporaries, who had remained in hiding, regarded him as “morally compromised.” Was he? Was this true, as my grandmother’s formulation suggests, of everyone in the capital, including the many Berliners who despised the Nazis and spent the war years just trying to get by? “I wanted to know more about life in the city that marked my father’s life,” Buruma writes.

On September 1, 1939, the day that the Germans invaded Poland, Hitler made a speech in Berlin, at the Kroll Opera House. It was broadcast on the radio and also piped, via loudspeaker, out into the streets. Two days later, France and Britain declared war. Again, the news was blared across the capital. William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for CBS Radio, heard it announced from the speakers in the Wilhelmplatz. Some two hundred and fifty Berliners were standing around him in the sunny square. “They listened attentively to the announcement,” Shirer reported. “When it was finished there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before.”

Berlin was, at that point, continental Europe’s largest city, with a population of nearly four and a half million. What its typical—or, for that matter, atypical—resident was thinking at the start of the Second World War would have been impossible to ascertain. Since the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933, Germany had been a one-party state, and only Nazis were free to speak their minds.

Following the war, it would have been almost as difficult to get an honest account of Berliners’ experiences. The city’s population had shrunk by a million and a half, and Allied bombing had reduced many neighborhoods to rubble. Few people wanted to dwell on what they’d seen, or to reckon with their role in the catastrophe. The German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger described the collective response as a “form of moral insanity.” 

American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who travelled to the Rhineland shortly before V-E Day, wrote a famous dispatch that read, in part:

"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews."

Eighty years later, the task that Buruma has set himself—learning what life was like in wartime Berlin—has, in obvious ways, become even tougher. The vast majority of people who actually experienced the period have, like Leo, taken their memories to the grave. In some ways, though, the job has grown easier. As the so-called Tätergeneration, the perpetrator generation, has died off, Germany as a nation has become more open about its past. This is especially true in Berlin, where it’s hard to walk more than a few blocks without encountering a sign or plaque or monument devoted to some horror that occurred there. In the last few decades, the diaries of a number of Berliners who lived through the war have been published, along with a variety of memoirs and collections of letters.

Buruma relies heavily on works like “Das Blaue Buch” (“The Blue Book”), a wartime diary kept by the author Erich Kästner, which was not published in its entirety until 2006. (Kästner, who’s best known for his children’s story “Emil and the Detectives,” hid the volume among the thousands of others that he owned, and, as an additional precaution, he wrote in it in shorthand.) Kästner appears and reappears in “Stay Alive” like a restless ghost.

So does a half-Jewish guitarist named Coco Schumann, who wrote a memoir that appeared in German in 1997. (An English translation came out in 2016.) Schumann was part of a group of jazz-loving teens who liked to greet one another with an insouciant “Swing Heil!” He and his friends spent the night after the invasion of Poland listening to music at a bar on the Kurfürstendamm. Three years later, Schumann was still performing at jazz clubs, even though jazz was verboten, and flouting the Nazi regulation that all Jews wear a yellow star. One evening, he had just completed a set when an S.S. man approached.

“You should arrest me,” Schumann says he called out. “I’m a minor, and a Jew to boot.” The S.S. man at first looked puzzled, then started to laugh. Clearly, Schumann must be joking.

“Stay Alive” is itself organized like a diary, with a section devoted to each year of the war. This structure lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints; in addition to diaries, memoirs, and letters, he draws on advertisements, fashion magazines, propaganda leaflets, and interviews with aged Berliners. Students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are all allowed to speak for themselves—to judge their own behavior, or not to.

According to Buruma’s sources, life in 1939, proceeded much as before for most Berliners, albeit with less illumination (the street lights were turned off) and less food (beer, milk, and meat were rationed). Attendance at the city’s cinemas went up. Goethe’s play “Iphigenia in Tauris” was performed at the Volksbühne, and “Tosca” played at the Volksoper. Buruma quotes a woman named Hilde Korseck, who was studying medicine in Berlin when the war began. “We had a lot of fun,” Korseck told a television interviewer. “It was a wonderful time, especially at night when we danced with small groups of friends.” Buruma himself interviews a Berliner named Jörg Sonnabend, who was in elementary school when the war broke out. “As a boy I must confess I loved uniforms,” Sonnabend tells him. “But otherwise, things were entirely normal.”

That some Berliners would be having a normal, even wonderful, time of it as others “were being tortured in the Gestapo cellars on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and murdered or worked to death at Sachsenhausen, is disturbing but should not surprise anyone,” Buruma writes. “Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to hear or see.”

Soon, it became more difficult for Berliners to remain quite so oblivious. In August, 1940, the British started bombing the city; practically every night, the air-raid sirens screamed. The Nazis, who seem not to have anticipated that the war they had unleashed would come to their own capital, belatedly ordered the construction of massive bunkers. (After the war, one of these, designed under the direction of Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, was transformed into a Soviet prison, then a fruit storehouse, then a rave space. It now houses a collection of contemporary art.)

Most of the eighty thousand or so Jews who had stayed in Berlin or become stranded there were, initially, herded into Judenhäuser (Jewish houses). Among them was a relative of Buruma’s, on his mother’s side, Hedwig Ems. In 1941, when the deportation of the city’s Jews began in earnest, Ems was in her early seventies. “Whenever you met an acquaintance, the first question was bound to be: ‘Are you going to commit suicide, or will you let them deport you,’ ” Ems wrote in an unpublished memoir. Trains bound for the concentration camps left from Platform 17 at the Grunewald station, today the site of another grim memorial. In her memoir, Ems lists twelve of her family members who killed themselves and one who was revived from an attempt, only to die later in Theresienstadt. Ems herself managed to survive Theresienstadt, an outcome she attributed to her decision to wear fourteen layers of clothes when she was rounded up.

In the summer of 1941, Germany justified its invasion of the Soviet Union as a preëmptive strike against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” 

The following spring, with the Wehrmacht bogged down outside Moscow, the Nazis staged a carnival next to the Berlin Cathedral, sarcastically titled “The Soviet Paradise.” Inside a series of tents, visitors could gawk at photographs that purportedly showed Soviet slave-labor camps and tour what was supposed to be a replica of a Russian village—one where people lived in holes in the ground. The macabre spectacle was a big hit: in just six weeks, more than a million Berliners flocked to see it. The propaganda photos, Buruma reports, were fakes; many of the laborers pictured were actually prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of the city, where at least thirty thousand people were killed.

The Battle of Stalingrad, often described as the turning point of the war, drew to its bloody close in February, 1943. German casualties ran to something like a million. (Soviet losses were even greater.) “The mood in Germany has become very grave,” Erich Kästner recorded in his diary. Toward the end of the month, the authorities moved to round up Berlin’s remaining Jews, most of whom were performing forced labor in munitions factories. Some went underground. So-called Taucher, or “divers,” kept themselves alive by staying on the move, sleeping wherever they thought they could avoid detection, including in the Berlin Zoo.

Meanwhile, the British renewed their bombing of the city, after a lull during which they had focussed on destroying Germany’s ports.

When Leo Buruma arrived in the capital, in May, he was assigned to work for Knorr Brakes, a concern that, in addition to brakes, manufactured light machine guns. The guns were so shoddy that the S.S. handed them off to allies in places like Latvia. Perhaps because he spoke German, Leo was soon relieved of manual labor and sent to work in Knorr’s accounts department. He can’t have been paid very much; nevertheless, Buruma writes, he “was able to attend classical concerts at the Berlin Philharmonic, watch soccer matches, take walks around the many lakes on the outskirts of Berlin, and go to the movies.” He ate his first Chinese meal, at a restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm; attended a dance party at another labor camp; and struck up a romance, or perhaps just a flirtation, with a Ukrainian worker named Nadja. She “is a married woman and chaste,” Leo wrote in a letter to his parents.

The Dutch workers at Knorr were housed together in drafty barracks. Nearby were more heavily guarded quarters for Russian workers. In November, bombs destroyed the Russian camp. “Things did get a little scary last night,” Leo wrote home. “But don’t worry too much about me.”

Buruma likes jokes, and offers several that made the rounds in Berlin as the bombs rained down. One went like this:
Man in an air-raid shelter: “Where would we be without our Führer?”
A calm voice behind him: “In bed.”

And, another went: The Nazi regime has ended. Judgment has been passed. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels are suspended from the gallows. Goering, always the know-it-all, turns to Goebbels one last time and moans, “As I’ve always told you: the whole thing will be decided in the air.”

Buruma’s title comes from another joke of sorts, the humor of which is difficult to convey in English. “The new greeting in Berlin now is: Bleiben Sie übrig,” Kästner noted. The phrase übrig bleiben, which Buruma renders as “stay alive,” usually refers to something left over: a last piece of cake, for example, or some odd change.

By 1944, much of Berlin was a ruined hulk. A member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth, confided to her diary, “I’m a disgusting traitor. . . . I wish for peace, precisely for the sake of the soldiers. Is this the proper attitude for a Prussian, a German woman? No, and no again.”

The more that signs pointed to defeat, the more furiously the Nazis tried to stamp out “defeatism.” They formed a special task force to spy on people sitting in cafés (and even air-raid shelters) and report back negative comments. One Berliner who was overheard mocking the Führer was a cartoonist named Erich Ohser. In the Weimar years, Ohser had worked for a leftist newspaper; as a consequence, he’d been banned by the Nazis from practicing his trade. Under a pseudonym, he had gone on to publish a popular comic strip and then, amazingly enough, to work for Goebbels’s propaganda sheet, Das Reich, drawing caricatures of Allied leaders. Ohser was arrested for expressing anti-Nazi opinions. He hanged himself in his cell the day before his trial was set to begin. A journalist friend who was arrested with him was beheaded.

In early 1945, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, prisoners of war were forced to dig tank traps in the city’s rubble-strewn streets. These were referred to—privately, at least— as Lachsperren, or “comic traps,” because it seemed that the only use they would serve was to give the Soviets a laugh. The hunt for defeatists continued, ever more gruesomely. S.S. men and military police went around searching for deserters and “cowards.” When they found someone they thought fit the bill, they hanged him from a lamppost.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a German journalist who was part of a resistance group called Uncle Emil, wrote in her diary about encountering one such corpse. Passersby tried not to look at the body, which was swaying in the wind. “There are so many lampposts in Berlin, thousands of them,” Andreas-Friedrich noted.

Every so often, “Stay Alive” provides a glimpse of Berliners facing the kinds of hard choices that my grandmother felt lucky to have avoided. Marie Jalowicz was one of about fifteen hundred Berlin Jews who survived the war as “divers.” In 1942, she was hiding out with a distant relative when she found the relative’s husband standing by her bed. “He indistinctly muttered a few revolting obscenities,” Jalowicz would later recall. “You can guess the rest of it. I could neither kick up a fuss nor send him back, so I just let him have his way.” In 1945, Jalowicz was raped by Soviet soldiers. She allowed one of her rapists to become her “fiancé,” thus securing his protection.

More common are the evasions. “We never encountered any Jews,” Dorrit Sonnabend, the wife of the man who as a child loved uniforms, tells Buruma—a line that could easily have been dreamed up by Martha Gellhorn. A Lutheran pastor named Kurt Rasenberger writes encouragingly to his son, “Even if you are not a Nazi . . . you must be true to the Germans. God will reward loyalty. Even with tears in our eyes, we should remain loyal to our blood.”

Leo Buruma, too, seems to be seeking exoneration. He may have been haunted by his experience, but in his letters home, which his parents saved, he comes across as a young man intent on sparing his family and also himself pain. “Even in these times I have doubts whether we should demand of every Dutch person that they put themselves in serious danger,” he tells his sister in 1943. “I used to take a different view, but I’m no longer so zealous.” In July, 1944, with much of the city in ashes, Leo reports that he has gone to see a highly entertaining operetta called “The Golden Cage.” The jokes, he writes, “were very daring.”

Is Leo’s self-protectiveness justified? How about that of the many, many other Berliners who made ugly accommodations to stay alive? I confess that I’m not sure, and I don’t know that Buruma is, either. At the end of the book, Buruma characterizes his project as “partly a love letter to Berlin.” This, he acknowledges, may sound perverse; the book is, explicitly and unrelentingly, about the Berlin of the war years, when, in his words, “unspeakable crimes were planned and perpetrated there.” Buruma explains that his affection is for the city of the present and “the way the scars of its worst crimes are openly on display.” Elsewhere in the book’s final pages, Buruma offers a different account of his purpose, more along the lines of a warning. “Dangerous demagogues are once again threatening even some of our oldest democracies,” he writes. This is, or should be, the book’s claim to relevance, in which case not love but shame and terror would seem the pertinent emotions.

(Maine Writer- Excellent question here....)
What historians of the future will do with all of our diaries and blog posts and TikToks is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime, as they used to say in Berlin, Bleiben Sie übrig❗ (Stay Behind!). In other words, "hold that thought", ensure this idea is not forgotten .)

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have not yet explained why the American military must be put in harm's way in Iraq

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder have become reliable prophets in predicting how Donald Trump continues to pursue the dismantling of American democracy.  Cox Richardson compared Donald Trump's demonic intentions to the actions of Adolf Hitler, as she published in November 2024 in the Milwaukee Independent:  "Adolf Hitler’s, on January 30, 1933, took an oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and in three months he dismantled that constitution. By March, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it."

This echo opinion published in The New Yorker describes the evil result of that and other dire predictions about Donald Trump.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

(Donald Trump has no idea what the five letter  one syllable word means.)

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation and then threatens freedom of the press back home. By David Remnick editor of The New Yorker magazine.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were soon over heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” 

(Hmmm, turns out the Rumsfeld decisions cost Americans 2,400 military lives in his failed Afghanistan war and another 4,400 were killed in the Iraq disaster. Donald Rumsfeld died on June 29, 2021 in Taos, New Mexico.) With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces. But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. 

Donald Trump's need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shit-posting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained? 

Donald Trump's cult advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, (aka "Whiskey Pete") who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too. Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” 

Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.” 

Carr’s saber rattling threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975, book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.” 

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all Donald Trump's cult of men followed his lead: they just blamed the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. 

Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦








Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must call for the impeachment of Donald Trump. Senator Susan Collins, where are you?

Where Is the Iran War Headed❓ 

Senator Susan Collins, where are you❓

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are over their heads in illegal wars.

Donald Trump has both called for Iranians to rise up and oust the ruthless theocracy and said that he’s fully prepared to deal with a new religious leader.  Echo article published in The New Yorker Magazine by Robin Wright. 

Since 1979, Iran’s revolutionary regime has been the nemesis of eight American Presidents. None could tame its political furies; its covert operations, which killed more than a thousand Americans in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan; or its expansion, through the creation of like-minded extremist movements, across the Middle East. The Islamic Republic considered its mini-realm a defensive buffer against U.S. and Israeli intervention. The U.S. and Israel viewed Iran as the most persistent threat in the world’s most volatile region. Donald Trump and Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu have now set out to destroy the regime, militarily and politically, in a reckless war of choice with no visible or thoughtful endgame—and, in Trump’s case, no advance approval by Congress or warning to American taxpayers.💢❗

For Operation Epic Fury, the Trump Administration has so far deployed nearly half the United States’ air power and roughly a third of its naval assets. The cost is nearly nine hundred million dollars a day, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated. Much like the initial “shock and awe” campaign during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in 2003, the first week of the war was militarily stunning. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of senior officials were killed. Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles was seriously depleted and its strategic installations left in rubble. Its navy was devastated; a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, the first such strike since the Second World War. Pete Hegseth (Whiskey Pete), the Secretary of Defense, boasted, “More and larger waves are coming. We are just getting started.” Iran’s capabilities, he added, are “evaporating.”

Trump, with his usual inconsistency, has called for Iranians to rise up against the ruthless theocracy—last week, he demanded its “unconditional surrender”—but also said that he’s prepared to deal with a new religious leader. Since 2017, millions of Iranians have participated in protests; tens of thousands have been killed. For now, though, an uprising seems unlikely. Iranians will first need to pick up the political and physical pieces of their lives, and although public fury at the government has not diminished, foreign military intervention has ignited a sense of millennia-old nationalism. The prospect of many members of the Iranian security forces—there are more than a million, counting reservists—joining a popular rebellion seems improbable, too.

The Iran war rattled the international order, troubled as it already was. After two disastrous U.S. wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an ominous sense of how messy and costly and deadly this one will  get, however confident Trump sounds. 

Iran is larger, in size and in population, than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It is arguably the most important geostrategic country in the three regions it borders—the Arab world; the formerly Soviet “stans” of Central Asia; and Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, in South Asia. It has vast oil and gas reserves, along with the largest military in the Middle East, and it has had powerful sway in parts of the Muslim world, particularly among Shiites.

Trump said that the biggest surprise to him is the scope of Tehran’s response. Iran was clearly prepared, especially after the Twelve-Day War, last June, when Donald Trump ordered B-2 stealth warplanes to drop bunker-busting bombs on nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. This time, it countered with missile and drone strikes on seven oil-rich neighbors allied with the United States, from Iraq to Saudi Arabia and Oman. It targeted international airports, hotels, businesses, ports, and energy facilities. Despite American defensive superiority, Iran hit the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh; the consulate in Dubai; the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, at Al Udeid, in Qatar; and the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, which coördinates U.S. naval operations across the Middle East. Netanyahu said that he has been dreaming for forty years about overthrowing the theocracy, but Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. Air sirens repeatedly alerted the residents of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to seek shelter. Dozens of buildings, including a military airbase, were hit. Hezbollah, Iran’s longtime partner, opened a second front with Israel from Lebanon.

In fact, the scale of Iran’s retaliation has led U.S. allies, who had balked at joining a U.S.-led offensive, to reluctantly agree to play a role. France, Germany, and Britain pledged to “take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region,” with Britain deploying warplanes in Qatar. Greece, following a drone strike on Cyprus, sent four fighter jets to the island. Italy promised defense systems to Gulf nations. By the end of the first week of war, seventeen countries were involved. After cutting direct military aid to Ukraine last year, Washington even reached out to Kyiv for its expertise in countering Iranian drones, which Russia uses to attack it.

Beyond the physical damage, Epic Fury has spooked the global economy. Stocks plunged, and the price of oil spiked by fifteen per cent, as Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes. Saudi Arabia temporarily shut its Ras Tanura oil refinery, one of the world’s largest, after a drone strike. Qatar suspended the production and export of liquefied natural gas.

Iran, then, still has some leverage. Hadi Semati, a former professor of political science at the University of Tehran, who is now in Washington, said, “If Iran comes out of this crisis alive, it has essentially won, albeit with degraded military capability.” And the theocracy may survive. Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution, cautioned, “We’re going to be left with some kind of bloodied, battered rump version of the Islamic Republic, led by officials who are now even more determined to try to cling to power, and who are going to be more confident of the fact that they’re able to stay, because they have withstood this terrible crisis.”

Last week, as Iran’s Assembly of Experts met to elect a new Supreme Leader, Trump insisted that he should have the right of approval. He told Axios, “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.” He rejected Khamenei’s hawkish son Mojtaba as “unacceptable.” (Trump, Maloney said, “seems to think that this is an episode of ‘The Apprentice.’ ”) But the Assembly may select a revolutionary hard-liner to signal continuity. 

Meanwhile, Iran’s ninety-two million people are trapped between a bloody war and the bloody regime. ♦

#HasIranSurrenderedYet ❓

Published in the print edition of the March 16, 2026, issue, with the headline “War-Torn.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans use Americn tax money to fund evil ICE operations to punish American citizens

Why the Department of Homeland Security Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable.

Donald Trump has created his own personal Gestapo*❗

For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies.

By Jonathan Blitzer published in The New Yorker.

When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, one lawmaker bragged that the United States was finally “meeting the enemy’s agility with our agility.” 

At the time, the issue of who the enemy was didn’t cause much political disagreement in Washington; it was generally understood to be Al Qaeda, or groups like it. Early skeptics questioned the wisdom of giving a single federal department a monumental budget as well as broad policing and surveillance powers, but caution was largely cast aside. Agencies within the department, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), which includes Border Patrol, received lavish bipartisan support. Twenty-four years later, their mission and their conduct have exceeded the worst imaginings of even their sharpest critics. With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path.

The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable. For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Ms. Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground. Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was 🤥“an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

These lies 🤥were the basis of the government’s legal response, prompting half a dozen federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office to resign. State and local authorities, blocked from conducting their own inquiries, were accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to oppose Trump. Shortly after Mr. Pretti’s killing (murder❗😢), Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, offering three “common sense solutions” to end the federal siege. One of them was to turn over the state’s voter rolls. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” a district-court judge asked Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers.

In the face of mounting national outrage, the Administration came as close as it could to admitting fault without actually doing so. The President demoted Greg Bovino, the commanding agent in charge of the roving patrols that have besieged Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. The night before, according to the Times, Noem had to defend herself in a two-hour meeting at the White House. Miller wasn’t there—“he knows just how and when to disappear,” a former colleague once said. But he has since acknowledged that the two agents involved in the Mr. Pretti shooting “may not have been following” protocol.

The idea that this response would be enough to temper the political fallout from 🤢Operation Metro Surge💢 is a sign of the unbridled impunity that reigns in the White House. 

Three thousand federal agents remain in Minnesota. A parallel operation, run by Citizenship and Immigration Services—the D.H.S. agency responsible for administering the legal-immigration system—has targeted fifty-six hundred refugees in the state for potential “fraud.” The federal government had previously granted these people legal status. But, more than a hundred of them, according to a lawsuit by the International Refugee Assistance Project, were arrested by ICE and sent to jails in Texas, where they were re-interviewed, as though the legal process they’d already gone through meant nothing.

No other aspect of Trump’s crackdown has shown any sign of changing, either. D.H.S. agents in masks and unmarked vehicles have been abducting immigrants with legal status and detaining and harassing citizens who look or sound as though they might not be U.S.-born. A recent ICE memo, obtained by the Associated Press, stated that agents can now enter people’s homes to make arrests without a warrant from a judge. The agency has always relied on administrative warrants, signed by its own officials, to carry out deportation orders. But, this authorization marks a radical departure from legal precedent, and a clear affront to the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches.

On Wednesday, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the refugee arrests in Minnesota, but whether D.H.S. will comply is anyone’s guess. According to a recent ruling from the chief federal district-court judge in the state, ICE violated nearly a hundred court orders in January alone—and that was just orders relating to Operation Metro Surge. The Administration has ignored other federal injunctions, going back to March of last year, and it has serially lied about aspects of its operations in court, bringing rebukes from judges across the country. “After nearly thirty-five years of experience with federal law enforcement,” one of them, a Trump appointee on Long Island, wrote, “I have never encountered anything like this.”

Tom Homan, the Administration’s “border czar,” has been dispatched to Minneapolis to oversee the situation. His current title is itself revealing. The White House is bringing the border to the rest of the country. Politically, in light of the institutional history of D.H.S., this gives the Administration broader license to claim that it’s facing down foreign threats; practically, agents on the ground are engaging in exceptionally aggressive forms of policing.

Last year, at the Administration’s behest, Congress tripled ICE’s budget, making it the most heavily funded law-enforcement body in the country. After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct, such as forcing them to remove their masks and raising the legal bar for the use of warrants. These are rearguard actions that are long overdue. 

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats reached a deal with Donald Trump to forestall a government shutdown while they negotiate the details. The inevitable retrenchment came hours later: Bondi issued orders to arrest four people for disrupting a church service in Minneapolis. Two of them were anti-ice activists; the others were journalists reporting the story. ♦

Published in the print edition with the headline “Out of Control.”

*Gestapo:  

The secret police of Nazi Germany, formed in 1933, and operating until 1945, that enforced government rule through terror and repression, with the authority to arrest individuals and organizations suspected of opposing the Nazi regime without judicial oversight. The organization's primary function was to identify and suppress threats to the state, a mission that included significant involvement in the Holocaust.

Donald Trump lies and Karoline Leavitt amplifies it!

 The Cruelty and Theatre of the Trump Press Conference

"We're all mad here," said the Cheshire Cat to Alice. 

During the Donald Trump second term, he and his staff have made the media briefing his signature rhetorical form.
Echo essay by Vinson Cunningham published in The New Yorker Magazine

Texas oil fields for crude before successfully running for President—as much to establish strong images as to earn a family fortune. These are the ultimate capitalists, pecking ruggedly at the earth’s skin and turning its lifeblood into piles of cash. The men surrounding Trump were the kinds of guys he always seems to want to impress.

Now Trump, having asserted control over Venezuela’s resources as well as its immediate political fate—an arrogation he has taken to calling the “Donroe Doctrine”—had something to offer them. He started to deliver his remarks without having turned on the microphone in front of him; his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, leaned over unstealthily and pressed a button that activated the audio and made a green light on the microphone glow. Trump didn’t skip a beat. Now amplified, he was already midsentence, rushing off urgently, like a burbling river. Leaders of all the “biggest” countries had called to congratulate him about nabbing Maduro. “They’re all impressed,” he said, implying that the oil guys should be, too.

Playacting for journalists standing in an unruly huddle just off camera, Trump asked questions of the oilmen, wondering how soon they could suck the ground under Venezuela dry. “And you’re very much set up for the heavy oil, right?” he asked at one point. There was an implicit cruelty behind the exercise. He wanted the cameras to see him place Venezuela on the table like a celebratory goose and start slicing.

The White House press-briefing room, a small theatre for an increasingly sick show, sits atop what used to be a swimming pool. The pool was installed during the Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who swam to maintain his strength after his paralysis. Today, the room is the central site of the Trump Administration’s ritual humiliation of the American media. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, presides over the space, transmitting the spleen and the constantly shifting imperatives of the President.

She’s good at telling lies on the job. Some press secretaries show hints of strain, managing the dual tasks of carrying the boss’s message and playing it straight with the press. Leavitt—who ran for Congress, in 2022, and lost—betrays no such struggle. She has a placid, open face and often, when she’s in a jovial mood, jokes around behind the lectern. When a wonky issue like health care comes up, she tends to read deftly and quickly from a sheet of talking points. When one of Donald Trump's favored hot-button issues arises, she speaks fluently off the cuff, as she did recently when describing undocumented people being hunted by ICE as “criminal illegal-alien killers, rapists, and pedophiles.”

Even when Leavitt is acting enraged, she does so with a small smile. Case in point: a fracas with Niall Stanage, a columnist from The Hill, who wanted to know how the Administration could possibly believe that ICE’s activity was going “correctly,” as the Donald Trump had enthused, when, for instance, one of its officers had been filmed shooting and killing  of the innocent American citizen named Ms. Renee Nicole Good, on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis.

Leavitt took on the strict tone of a scolding teacher: “Why was, uh, Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?”

“You’re asking me my opinion?” Stanage asked.

“Yeah!”

“Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.”

Leavitt pounced. “Oh, O.K., so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” She said “left-wing opinion”—referring to an opinion she’d solicited just a second ago—with a slight, taunting singsong in her voice. She continued, “Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack, you’re not a reporter, you’re posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question. And you and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist—you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat.”

This short diatribe, delivered with a raised voice (but, still, that Cheshire Cat slimy smile) was a characteristic sample of the Administration’s verbal style. Its members apply names and labels—illegal, criminal, alien, left-wing, agitator—in order to dehumanize the people to whom those words are supposed to refer. If you fit into this ever-growing lexicon of categories, you shouldn’t have your job, or sit in your seat, or try to protect your neighbors, or even, in Good’s “unfortunately and tragically” illustrative case, be left alive.

A few days earlier, Vance gave a press conference to shame the media about its reporting on Good and her killer, Jonathan Ross, and to slant the story in a more Trump-friendly direction. Vance showed off a way with words quite similar to Leavitt’s, and to Trump’s. He made sure to note that Minnesota was under siege by fraud, perpetrated mostly by “Somali immigrants.” Without the benefit of a thorough investigation, he nonetheless asserted that Good had been trying to ram Ross with her car, called her a “deranged leftist,” and, admitting that her death was a tragedy, deemed it “a tragedy of the far left.” So many names for nonpersons, emitted with such ease!

And yet Trump doesn’t always sound so pleased with the promotional efforts of his team. On January 20th, to mark a year since he retook office, the President made a guest appearance at Leavitt’s briefing. She’d teased the spot on her X account with QVC-ish good cheer: “A very special guest will be joining me at the podium today. . . . TUNE IN! 👀🇺🇸.”

Trump showed up with a thick sheaf of papers, listing the “accomplishments” of the year. He’d turned the United States into the “hottest country anywhere in the world” and wanted to get some credit. “We’ve had the best stock market in history,” he said. “I mean, I’m not getting—maybe I have bad public-relations people, but we’re not getting it across.” ♦

Published in the print edition with the headline “Meet the Press.”