Former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently posted an odd picture on social media. A group of people were gathered around a large dining table beneath a massive chandelier of antler, a tableau that evoked some kind of Viking summit. Tucker Carlson sat at the head of the table like a preppy Ragnar Lothbrok, and he was surrounded by fellow Trumpist apostates Greene, former Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Joe Kent — the former MAGA cultist who resigned as Donald Trump’s director of counterterrorism — and their respective spouses. “The movement has begun,” Greene captioned the picture.

Their new political movement began to take shape on Wednesday when he revealed the 10-point manifesto during a livestream. While he was vague about the specific form he expected this movement to take, it was later reported that Greene, Massie and Kent had visited Carlson’s Maine estate to urge him to run for president in 2028. The manifesto would seem to be the first step toward a third-party bid, since all these people are persona non grata with the GOP establishment, and have attempted to seize the MAGA mantle with varying degrees of success. 

Considering the split in the Republican Party these days between the MAGA cultists, the MAGA populists and what is now a rump establishment, the timing does seem ripe for a third-party to form from the right, and Carlson is a likely candidate to lead it. After having debased himself for years by behaving as a Trump toady while trying desperately to maintain something of an original persona, Fox News fired him in ignominious fashion in 2023. Shortly after, he retreated to Maine to reinvent himself as a podcaster and the leader of the populist, isolationist right.

Carlson has had quite a bit of success in that role, which was massively enhanced when Trump went to war with Iran and tightened the already symbiotic relationship with Israel. The opening is here, and Carlson seems ready to seize the opportunity. 

The problem, of course, is that third-party presidential bids in American politics never win, and they often end up being spoilers for one of the two main parties, although they can have quite a lot of influence on the agendas of both. The most successful — those that earned the largest shares of the popular vote — signal a discontent with one or both parties that can serve as a wake-up call that the country is looking for change. 

Four third-party campaigns have resulted in double-digit vote counts, starting with Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912. By then a former president after passing the baton to William Howard Taft, a decision he came to regret, Roosevelt got 27.4% of the vote, showing that progressive ideas around workers’ rights, business regulation, constitutional reform and conservation, among other things, were potent political issues among voters who had been buffeted by an unregulated financial system and exploited by the Gilded Age barons. Roosevelt’s campaign shook the system, earning 88 electoral votes and dooming Taft’s reelection campaign in favor of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Twelve years later, although he received 16.6% of the popular vote, the third-party run of progressive Robert LaFollette was less consequential; he only carried Wisconsin and its 13 electoral votes. In 1968, George Wallace, the Southern populist, racist and former governor of Alabama, received 13.5% of the popular vote and 48 election votes, carrying all five states of the Deep South. 

In 1992, wealthy businessman Ross Perot seized the public imagination with his economic nationalism — “that giant sucking sound of jobs going overseas” — and fiscal conservatism seemed to speak to disaffected members of both parties who felt that the country had abandoned the average worker. Despite his great wealth, Perot had a homespun approach and used the media very effectively. When he ran in 1992, he received 18.9% of the popular vote, support that most pollsters said came equally from both parties, but garnered no electoral votes. Four years later, Perot garnered a respectable 8.4%, and his Reform Party lasted until 2000, when Donald Trump made a brief attempt at a run under its banner. 

Third-party presidential bids have perversely had the greatest impact in moments where the country has been closely divided between the two parties.

The 2000 election comes to mind. The national popular vote was almost equally divided, with Vice President Al Gore receiving 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, but the presidency was decided by a series of events in Florida, where the tally ended up being 537 votes for Bush, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. But without the presence of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, Gore would have won Florida — and the presidency. Nader’s 97,488 votes in the Sunshine State, which would have likely been cast for Gore had he not been in the race, made sure it went for Bush, and consigned the country to years of war and economic distress. 

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In the lead-up to 2028, you can already see the influence of Carlson’s faction of the right putting pressure on the GOP. His manifesto is an eccentric amalgam of populist right-wing nationalism, woo-woo Make America Healthy Again anti-science beliefs, isolationism, anti-elitism, natalism, degrading education and xenophobia, and ideas of “beautifying” the country and rebuilding manufacturing and farming. Carlson side-stepped the issues of abortion, religion, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which is surprising since he’s been in the middle of those culture war issues for years.

At the same time, Vice President JD Vance has been laying the groundwork for his own run by releasing “Communion,” a book focused on his religious faith and conversion to Catholicism. He has also been trying to thread the needle between the anti-elite message, which is at the center of the present populist movement, and his devotion to Trump, the most corrupt president in American history. Vance seems to be trying out a strategy in which he will portray himself as the great crusader against fraud in day care centers and hospice care, for which he blames the so-called scourge of immigrant labor. 

The vice president is coming to the defense of those who are economically disadvantaged in this economy, which he has said shows that “40 years of bipartisan economic policy has failed.” (The Trump years, which the president insists have been the greatest economy the world has ever known, evidently don’t count.) Vance has even taken to social media to position himself against a Trump-supporting elite. Responding to right-wing columnist Marc Theissen’s rude “cry me a river” response to a college kid lamenting that “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20,” Vance responded with a Trumpian insult, saying, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.” I guess this is supposed to endear him to the MAGA folks while subtly acknowledging that the affordability crisis is real.

Vance seems to know that such a magic trick will be difficult, if not impossible, to pull off in 2028. He will have to defend Trump’s economy, which will be necessary to attract the hard-core cultists who still love the president despite the nation’s sluggish economy. 

Carlson, meanwhile, sitting outside the administration, has a much better chance of snagging this populist right-wing movement that’s evolved from Trump’s original “America First” movement, which could serve as a way for many disillusioned Trump voters to maintain the fiction that they really only cared about policy all along. 

This fissure has every chance of splitting the GOP and helping Democrats take back the White House. Go, Tucker, go.

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Most of Donald Trump’s success in politics has stemmed from his reputation as a savvy dealmaker. But in his 11 years on the national political scene, that has been exposed as a fiction — a persona invented by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for the president’s bestselling book “The Art of The Deal,” who followed him around for 18 months and realized in the process that no one would want to read a book about the real Trump. 

After Trump announced his run for president in 2015, Schwartz told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer he felt deep remorse for creating this erroneous image of Trump, saying if he wrote the book today, he would call it “The Sociopath.” He said, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

His words were startling, to say the least, but Schwartz’s description of the president’s true personality was revelatory. The man who touted himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker was a pathologically dishonest hype artist with the attention span of a four-year-old, described by Schwartz as having “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” who seemed “driven entirely by a need for public attention.” His alleged negotiation prowess was actually nonexistent, as the multiple failures of his businesses should have made clear. 

In Trump’s first administration, it became obvious that his idea of dealmaking consisted of willingly succumbing to flattery by malevolent actors and ineffectually bellowing at allies. Professional diplomatic and national security advisers managed to steer him away from most disasters, although he commonly embarrassed the nation on the world stage by displaying his ignorance and fondness for sucking up to adversaries. 

Trump’s second term is a whole other story. 

The president has confused his “Art of the Deal” with the art of diplomacy, and they are most definitely not the same thing. Even if he were actually talented at the former, which he is not, it would have no bearing on the latter, and the consequences of that are turning out to be substantial and damaging. By this point, it’s a cliché that Trump is “transactional,” which many (if not most) people understand to mean he is negotiating on behalf of the American people, bringing riches and security to the nation. In reality, Trump’s often self-serving deals are gravely harming the national interest. 

Diplomacy isn’t just signing a particular agreement between two countries. That may be the culmination of negotiations or just the beginning, but it isn’t actually the goal, especially for a superpower. The aim is to manage relations between countries over the long term to maintain stability and predictability; it’s not a “winner take all” proposition. Credibility is everything for a country like the United States, and now, without it, we are unleashing powerful forces that will be very hard to control.

Trump is a pathological liar. Schwartz discovered that from the very beginning. He was attached to Trump at the hip for many months, listening in on every phone call, observing his conversations and racking his brain to figure out how to present the man as a lovable rogue rather than the damaged personality he really is. The whole world has seen this up close for the past decade. 

At first, allies depended upon the professional diplomatic and national security apparatus to continue to run things in spite of Trump’s erratic behavior and belligerence. They understood early on he loved pomp and circumstance, and that he was easily flattered by obsequious compliments, so they played along, giving him the pageantry of over-the-top state visits and paying homage to him at his properties and the White House. But for the most part, they were just trying to wait out the term, expecting that the American people would realize the error of their ways and revert to being a serious nation. 

This time around is different. A recent report in the Washington Post by Steve Hendrix and Anthony Faiola revealed that the world is no longer taking the U.S. seriously, leaving the government with no credibility. As a result, international relations are unstable and dangerous. 

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When Trump regained office the second time, the world quaked at his swagger, backed up by a bizarre tariff regime that seemed to be put together by Mad Libs. The markets dropped, recriminations flowed, and it looked as if Trump had finally been completely unleashed. To some extent, he had been. He and his close circle had decided to do whatever they wanted and see what they could get away with. But it soon became evident there wasn’t really any strategy or even any particular goals, despite the apparent participation of people like Elon Musk and the authors of Project 2025. In the end, it was all about Trump’s whims, which changed from minute to minute. 

The short attention span Schwartz described is now even more pronounced. The president’s obsession with building monuments to himself notwithstanding, he flits from subject to subject, bellowing threats to all who oppose him and rewarding his cronies with ever more obvious modes of corruption. 

The world has decided to stop paying attention. “[M]ost consequently,” Hendrix and Faiola wrote, “Iran refuses to bend under American bombs and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Russian President Vladimir Putin persists in his war in Ukraine. Europe met Trump’s recently renewed demands for Greenland with a collective sigh, and trading partners have shrugged off the latest tariffs.” 

Over the years, world leaders have had varying reactions to American presidents of both parties. But the country’s leaders have never been disregarded. 

Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Post he was surprised at how long Trump’s bluffs and bellicosity had worked, crediting it to the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

The president’s threats are now seen as empty, and his so-called deals aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. This was most recently on display in mid-July when he made a big, splashy announcement of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Within a day, Trump added a poison-pill requirement by way of a Truth Social post that left the Saudis reeling. His threats to annihilate Iran are now falling on deaf ears because he’s all over the place, usually lying about the progress of diplomatic talks, showing that he’s full of bluster and bombast but lacks a strategy to win and ideas about how to get out. 

America’s political dynamics have us all just trying to hold on until he’s out of office so we can try to rebuild from the rubble. But the loss of credibility, the exposure of the nation’s weaknesses and the people’s willingness to put such a man in charge will not be easily repaired. The long-term damage to our international reputation, coupled with the weakness we are demonstrating in any number of areas, will leave us vulnerable for a long time to come.

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On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.” 

Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident. 

“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.

As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face. 

Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.

The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy. 

These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail. 

We are witnessing a fascist crusade taking place on the streets of America every single day that has seen federal immigration officers shoot and kill at least eight people since January. Over the weekend, a Salvadoran immigrant being held at the notorious Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey died after experiencing a medical emergency, the second death the facility has seen since December.

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The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.

Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black. 

This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.

Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.

The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.

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Six years ago, Match.com released an ad in which the devil met his true love: 2020. The couple spent their courtship sharing fun Covid-era activities, like stealing toilet paper, enjoying empty cinemas and stadiums, and taking selfies in front of dumpster fires, all to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” In a memorable tagline, Satan said, “I just don’t want this year to end.” Released in December, only weeks after the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, it reflected the national mood perfectly: horror at what we’d all been through, and vast relief that it was almost over.

Sadly, it seems we are destined to live in that damned year until the end of our days. 

The year ended on a high note. Biden was elected president, the new Covid-19 vaccines were about to become available and we felt we could look forward to a day in the not-so-distant future when going to the grocery store didn’t come with a potential death sentence. Many people were back at work in one way or another, and the government had managed to get the American people through the crisis without suffering economic ruin. But it soon became clear Trump was unable to admit he had lost his reelection bid, and by January he and his army of surrogates and influencers had worked his MAGA followers into such a frenzy that they stormed the Capitol to stop certification of the election results. 

At the same time, the MAGA faithful at home, which had, with the president’s help, pushed snake oil cures and conspiracy theories about the virus for months, were unwilling to move on from their various obsessions. They were set to turn the anti-vaccine movement into a juggernaut that would be ready to take on the entire American public health system and challenge medical science in general. The “do-your-own-research” crowd had felt their power, and they liked it. 

Still, most of the country eventually moved on. Things had changed in some ways. Working from home is now a regular feature of the work world, Zoom calls are an everyday thing, and digital learning and telehealth have become mainstream. 

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Imagine my surprise, then, to awaken on Wednesday to a Senate hearing featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci in which he was being asked about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. I had to check to make sure I wasn’t accidentally watching a documentary about the pandemic. But no: Rand Paul, Kentucky’s GOP senator had decided to scrape off the scab yet again by calling Fauci to face a grilling by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Fauci looked the same. Paul looked the same. The daft conspiracy theories sounded the same. It was as if the last six years never happened. Déjà vu all over again. 

Before leaving office, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci — and for good reason. The doctor had become the whipping boy of the MAGA right, commonly accused of personally creating Covid-19 (in cahoots with Chinese communists, naturally) and then making a vaccine that they insist killed more people than the virus. It’s all nonsense, of course. There are still debates about the origins of the virus, but the idea that Fauci created or enabled it in some way is ridiculous. The hearing, ostensibly called to get to the bottom of all this, is actually just the latest step in Rand Paul’s petty vendetta against Fauci that began when they sparred in a series of confrontations during the crisis. 

Despite being a doctor, Paul has always had, shall we say, an eccentric view of medical science, and he could never get the better of Fauci in their meetings. But the senator wanted the last word, and he got it. Ignoring Biden’s pardon, Paul threatened Fauci with perjury if he “lied” during this latest hearing, a charge he claimed would not be covered by the pardon. In fact, the whole hearing was obviously a perjury trap. 

Paul had released Fauci’s 1,000-page private pandemic diaries — helpfully provided to him by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — which had been stored on government servers. The senator knew there would likely be inconsistencies between Fauci’s memory and what he wrote at the time. Fauci’s attorney wisely told him to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, which he did. Paul threw that attorney out of the hearing for attempting to explain why. 

The senator’s Republican colleagues piled on in their questioning of Fauci. Ohio’s Bernie Moreno was especially grotesque, bellowing “Who the f**k do you think you were?” at the 85-year-old scientist. Even Trump was less harsh in his commentary about the hearing, merely saying that he stopped listening to Fauci after a while. 

But the hearing wasn’t the only recent time warp. Trump has spent the last six years attempting to rewrite the 2020 election, and apparently it’s not enough that he made one of the greatest political comebacks in history. He needs to erase the fact that he ever lost in the first place, so he has deployed the intelligence community to find proof that he didn’t. and decided to give a primetime presidential address on July 16 to reveal the findings. 

To no one’s surprise, it was a dud. The information he presented was mostly old news, and he failed to provide any proof that domestic or foreign actors had any impact on the election that year — because they didn’t. Even his MAGA media ecosystem was left unimpressed.

But Trump remains undaunted. He’s been willing to completely blow up the legislative session going into November’s midterms unless he gets his way with the SAVE America Act, legislation designed to suppress the vote, which Senate Republicans have so far refused to pass. (It will suppress their own voters too.) 

For Trump and Republicans, the worst year in living memory will never end, and it’s easy to see why. Like the devil in that famous ad, it’s their idea of a good time.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a busy man. When he isn’t working out with fellow Cabinet members and denying promotions to Black and female officers, he’s making videos ordering the troops to take testosterone tests to prove they are manly enough to serve their country. He’s fighting the culture war morning, noon and night. When he can find the extra time, he’s also running the Pentagon as it wages war in Iran, commits murder on the high seas in the Caribbean and prepares to invade Cuba — and possibly Mali and Greenland. Hegseth has a lot on his plate. 

That includes demanding a $454 billion increase in the 2027 Pentagon budget, which brings the total request to nearly $1.5 trillion — a 44% increase from the previous year. Hegseth has called this a “generational investment” that comes out roughly to all of U.S. military spending in World War II. You might think that it’s because of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and all the munitions the military is going through, but you would be wrong because, like most wars, it is paid for separately from the Pentagon budget through emergency supplemental requests.

During a combative appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth asked for another $67 billion in supplemental funding for the rest of the budget year. But the shock of that request paled in comparison to another number. Hegseth estimated that the Iran war has cost $37.5 billion so far, far higher than the $30 billion figure the Pentagon only recently gave to lawmakers. 

That number is astounding on its own, but according to most sources and experts, it significantly lowballs the war’s true cost, which continues to mount. NBC News reported that, according to internal estimates by the Defense Department peg the amount at $80 billion to $100 billion. 

It’s not unusual for administrations of both parties to bulk up the Pentagon budget, although the Republicans have always been the most passionate about it. But this is beyond the wildest dreams of Pentagons past. With all the cuts the Trump administration has made to everything else in the government, you’d think they would be a little less greedy. But that’s not how they roll. In Trump’s first term, military spending was profligate, and this time it’s a free-for-all.

Hegseth is basically asking for an unlimited supply of money to finance an extremely unpopular war and such “generational investments” like the “Trump-class battleships,” otherwise known as the Golden Fleet. We needn’t worry that they are being irresponsible, though. They are committed to rooting out “woke” wherever they find it, and that will surely save a few bucks somewhere down the road.

When the senators asked him why the Pentagon needed all this extra money, Hegseth fell back on the Trump administration’s catch-all explanation: “Joe Biden did it.” In this the secretary was correct. Biden requested military funding for Ukraine through emergency supplemental requests. But the Trump administration has created an unprecedented innovation. In partnership with MAGA allies on Capitol Hill, they are trying to get it passed through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered but is subject to ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, who can strip the provision if it is determined to be non-budgetary.

The U.S. is running through its supplies of expensive precision-guided munitions and air-defense interceptors at record pace in the Iran war, and there are concerns that reduced inventories are going to affect readiness in case the country is drawn into a war it didn’t choose. Hegseth, though, would not cop to that, insisting instead that all was well — and that the Pentagon just needed more cash to fix up the depleted military Biden left them.

House Republicans have proven more pliant. On Wednesday, by a margin of 216 to 212, they passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill to cover some of what the White House is requesting, adding some juicy extras for artificial intelligence and other tech-bro projects led by the private-equity types who are running much of the Pentagon these days. According to Guardian, one of them, former Uber executive Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering who is an aggressive promoter of AI, made a profit of up to $24 million by selling a private investment he held in xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, earlier this year. (In March 2025, Michael declared the value of his stake at between $500,000 and $1 million.) Since the company isn’t public, no one is quite sure how he came to own the shares or who he sold them to, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the defense department entered into two separate contracts with xAI before Michael sold his shares. 

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He’s not the only one who appears to be milking the military-industrial complex. The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s eldest sons, have a portfolio of tech companies that are raking in billions from the Pentagon. These are not businesses with which the Trumps have any experience, and the partnerships and investments have all been initiated since their father became president the second time. Don Jr. has said publicly that he works with Hegseth to steer more contracts to drone manufacturers, of which he is a beneficiary. Both brothers are heavily involved with firms that have contracts all over the Pentagon. They insist, though, there’s no conflict of interest and no one in the department has even considered favoritism.

As usual, Hegseth behaved like a teenage bully during the Senate hearing. He argued with senators, blamed Biden and insisted that America has won the war in Iran while simultaneously requesting many more billions to win it. Since the GOP is attempting to push this supplemental package through using reconciliation, they won’t need Democrats to pass it, so one can probably expect that he’ll get what he wants. The firehose of money flowing to the Pentagon and all the insiders who are making massive bank from it isn’t going to dry up any time soon. 

Hegseth ended the week with a gratuitous gesture to his commander in chief, who spent a good part of his time explaining that the 18 deaths in the Iran war are nothing compared to all the deaths in previous wars. To make Trump feel better, Hegseth removed from the tally four troops who were killed in renewed fighting, bringing the official death toll back down to 14. Military officials told the New York Times that “one reason behind the change was . . . because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Nonetheless, Trump attended the dignified transfer of the four fallen soldiers’ remains and concocted a story to burnish his war lust. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”

Sure they did.

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According to a Pew Research Center survey released in October 2025, large majorities of Americans are unhappy with both political parties. Three-quarters were frustrated with the Democrats, and almost as many felt the same about the GOP. Half said they are downright angry with both parties. Partisanship is responsible for some of it, of course. But despite all the talk from Donald Trump about the “golden age” of America being upon us — symbolized by the gaudy, gilded gew-gaws all over the White House and Washington — just over a third of Republicans said their party makes them feel hopeful, and far fewer noted it makes them feel proud. Democratic voters were even less hopeful and proud than their rivals. This is not a healthy political system. 

The loathing for the parties doesn’t just come from the high-profile national campaigns. Republicans and Democrats alike have been taken over in recent years by a populist uprising coming from within. From the Tea Party on the right to Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders-led democratic socialist movement on the left, there has been a large shift away from the traditional politics of party leaders and ideological conformity to a more grassroots-oriented politics. 

Both sides have at least one thing in common: They loathe the political and media elites who, they believe, have lost touch with ordinary people and run the country for their own interests. This should not surprise anyone who has observed politics for the past 30 years or so. Those elites have shown their tone deafness toward the concerns of the average American for decades, and the rise of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle, conservative talk radio television, the internet and social media have successively given people a front-row view of their pretentious arrogance. 

One person in Washington perfectly illustrates this phenomenon: Sally Quinn, the longtime columnist and doyenne of what remains of the Georgetown set. Married to the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee until his death in 2014, Quinn has functioned, at least since the 1980s, as the self-appointed spokeswoman of the nation’s permanent political establishment. 

In 1998 she wrote the seminal essay on official Washington’s state of mind during Ken Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton. The day of that year’s midterm elections, the Post published “Not in their back yard: in Washington, that letdown feeling,” which quoted numerous political and media denizens expressing their shock and horror at Clinton’s inappropriate behavior with Monica Lewinsky. Those interviewed insisted their disgust wasn’t about the unseemly power differential between the president and the former White House intern, and they insisted it wasn’t about the sex. Rather, they were apparently upset that Clinton had lied to them about the affair, as if they thought that it all would have been fine if he had just shared it with them privately at a glittering, intimate dinner party. 

The quotes were unbelievable. “There is a small-town quality to the grief that is being felt,” said journalist Andrea Mitchell, “an overwhelming sadness at the waste of the nation’s time and attention, at the opportunities lost.” Muffie Cabot, Nancy Reagan’s former White House social secretary, mourned, “This is a demoralized little village . . . the emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.” 

But the piece de resistance came from the then-dean of the Washington press corps, Post columnist David Broder, who lamented, “He came in here and he trashed the place — and it’s not his place,” as if the nation’s capital belonged to him and Quinn and their kind, rather than the American people. 

Quinn vapidly observed in passing, “For reasons they cannot understand, Washington insiders come across to the public as judgmental puritans, shocked and horrified by the president’s sexual misconduct,” which was completely off the mark because contemporary polling showed that people saw the non-stop, six-year crusade against Clinton by the GOP and media establishment as over-the-top and hypocritical, not that it excused Clinton’s conduct. 

As the election results trickled in later that night, it emerged that Republicans had unexpectedly lost seats. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign his seat, and just a few months later, on the very day he was impeached by the House, Clinton’s approval rating reached 73%. The number was not an endorsement of the president’s behavior; it was a reaction against the hypocrisy of the GOP and the elitism of the same establishment elites Quinn portrayed as the nation’s moral conscience.

One might have thought Quinn and her fellow Washingtonians would have taken a beat to question whether they were actually qualified to be the voice of American democracy when they were so clearly out of touch with the people. But that didn’t happen. 

Now, nearly 30 years later, Quinn is at it again, this time railing against Donald Trump in the same tone she deployed against Clinton. 

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No longer writing for the Post after it acquiesced to Trump and MAGA after the president’s return to office, Quinn instead contributed an op-ed to the New York Times called “Watergate-Era Washington Was Less Toxic Than This” that described how vulgar and frightening D.C. has become under the second Trump administration. She claimed that everyone is terrified, even Republicans, and waxed nostalgic for the days when she and the “charming, funny, bright, thoughtful” Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator from South Carolina, could talk about throwing bipartisan dinner parties together. Sadly, those days are over, and the barbarians have trashed the gates — again. The crude Trumpers are having too much fun with their vulgar galas and economic excess. 

Evoking the Watergate crisis, Quinn seemed to have no recollection of eagerly joining that earlier GOP crusade against Clinton, despite the widespread understanding of its cynical partisan nature — and how that marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s descent into the ruthless partisan warfare that resulted in Trump’s election and non-consecutive reelection. 

On Sunday, Quinn wrote another essay for the Times announcing “It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington.” Apparently, the inhabitants of the village have noticed that the GOP, under strain from the relentless failure of Trump’s policies, isn’t feeling its oats so much these days. She describes a “popular annual cocktail buffet at the Hay Adams Hotel on the rooftop overlooking the White House” on the night of Trump’s UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. The party’s attendees laughed and scoffed at the “garish,” “grotesque” and “bizarre” scene below, much relieved they were suddenly feeling the return of “bipartisan” revulsion at the spectacle of a usurper “trashing the place.”

I confess that I, too, was appalled at the grotesque display that night. And I, too, have nothing but revulsion for everything Trump stands for. But when I read those words coming from the likes of Quinn and her elitist comrades, I actually felt some sympathy for Trump’s MAGA followers. Quinn’s description of this soi disant aristocracy literally looking down on the plebes who refuse to know their place was almost enough to make me don a red cap and burst into a rousing rendition of “YMCA.” 

Nothing provides a boost to Trump’s MAGA agenda like the brand of Washington snobbery Quinn’s writing chronicles, and it’s this kind of thing that’s driving both parties to populism. If Republicans and Democrats could come out of their corners and recognize their common foe, we might actually get a little of that vaunted bipartisanship for which Quinn and her fellow travelers are so nostalgic. 

Unfortunately, it might not work out so well for them if that happens.

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For a man who considers himself the greatest builder the world has ever known — move over, Pharaoh Khufu! — Donald Trump has managed vanishingly little of it in either of his presidential terms. What his administrations have done is show an impressive talent for tearing things down. 

From the East Wing of the White House to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and public health, Trump has demonstrated a clear aptitude for demolition. Among his most successful accomplishments has been his assault on the international institutions that were created in response to the worst catastrophes of the 20th century. 

During his first campaign and administration, Trump constantly attacked NATO, the military and political alliance formed in 1949 in response to Soviet aggression that operates on the principle of collective security. He also withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and ripped up the Iran nuclear agreement, cornerstones of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. But Trump didn’t stop there. He withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Since he returned to office in January 2025, he has continued to attacks on NATO and signed an executive order withdrawing from 66 additional international organizations. 

To be fair, Republicans have never really trusted international institutions. This tendency stretches back at least a century to the League of Nations. While the GOP has tended to back alliances like NATO, which they felt they could control, the party has been deeply suspicious of organizations like the United Nations, which they believe threaten national sovereignty — and impede America’s ability to act with impunity anywhere in the world. Since 1998, this has especially included the International Criminal Court, which is now coming under assault by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on behalf of the Trump administration.

Since its creation, the I.C.C. has been the bête noire of the American right. At first glance, one might have thought such an organization would have been championed by the U.S. After all, the country pioneered the idea of such a tribunal after World War II when it ran the Nuremberg trials to hold Nazi leaders accountable for crimes against humanity, while also pointedly declaring that waging a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime,” containing within itself “the accumulated evil of the whole.” The idea of holding individuals responsible for such violations was forged in that process and became the basis of international criminal law. 

In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted and established four crimes over which it could take jurisdiction if the party state refused use its own legal system: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The statute was immediately decried by Republicans (and some conservative Democrats) as a threat to U.S. sovereignty on the basis that Americans could be subject to political prosecutions. But that wasn’t all of the story. It’s clear they also wanted to maintain the impunity conferred by America’s superpower status. 

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One hundred twenty-five countries are parties to the agreement. The U.S., under Bill Clinton, was a signatory to the treaty, but it was never ratified, and in 2002 it was officially withdrawn by George W. Bush. Israel, Sudan, Burundi, the Philippines and Russia have also withdrawn. 29 countries have signed but not ratified the agreement, while 41 others, including China and India, have neither signed nor acceded to it. 

Since then, the I.C.C. has tried war criminals and has a number of active cases, although few leaders have faced charges while in office. In November 2024, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became an exception for his conduct in Israel’s war against Gaza following the attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, joining the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. 

Even after Bush withdrew from the treaty, it was assumed the I.C.C. could grow its legitimacy among the holdouts — including the U.S., which has used the body itself when it was advantageous. But that is not to be. 

Project 2025, the plan for a MAGA overhaul of the entire federal government produced by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, explicitly demanded that the U.S. to “must end blind support for international organizations,” only using them to the extent that they help the country achieve its own goals regardless of the effect on other nations.

Now, in his quest to be the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, Rubio has launched a full-blown assault on the I.C.C. with the support of Trump. The move is part of a variety of crusades the secretary is leading to establish his MAGA bona fides, and comes in addition to his international “far left terrorist crusade,” which I recently chronicled. Not content just to refuse to participate in the process and pledge to rely on our own justice system, as Republicans have done in the past, Rubio wants the I.C.C. destroyed completely. 

The administration has already sanctioned eight of the court’s judges, including its chief prosecutor, banning their travel to the U.S. On July 13, Rubio took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare that the I.C.C. “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system.” Using the usual sophomoric language of the MAGA movement, such as referring to “smug globalists,” he declared that the U.S. will now lead a “diplomatic campaign” against the Court, which will include penalties on countries that continue to cooperate with it, including by withdrawing foreign assistance. This is a tried and true Trump tactic that the president has even deployed on the home front against blue states that disagree with him. Now, it looks like the GOP establishment, of which Rubio has long been a representative, has signed on to the president’s mob-like coercion tactics against all rivals foreign and domestic.

According to Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the administration’s goal is to destroy multilateralism altogether using what he called “four basic behaviors: defection, rebellion, substitution, and conditional cooperation.” Trump has quit some institutions, attempted to sabotage others and even tried to establish his own, such as the “Board of Peace” and the “Shield of the Americas,” both of which the administration believes it can dominate — and no doubt profit from. It has reengaged with others, such as the World Bank and the G20, but on a conditional basis: They are expected to do as they are told. But, as Patrick observed, “the administration’s campaign to dismantle the ICC is a campaign of pure destruction, a coercive attempt to impose the United States’s will on the rest of the world.”

The world has reacted in horror to Rubio’s moves, as we might expect. Patrick wrote, “Given the voluble reaction from America’s closest allies, the full-bore attempt by the administration to destroy the ICC would seem to be both imprudent and futile, an effort in symbolic politics that will further cement the reputation of the United States as an unhinged, domineering hegemon, rather than a benevolent and farsighted global leader.”

I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

This policy is Marco Rubio’s baby. He owns it. The secretary has established himself as the would-be statesman who took Donald Trump’s wrecking ball and made it his own. In doing so, his remake of himself in the Dear Leader’s image is complete.

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