Donald Trump’s new White House “pep secretary,” Katie Zacharia, introduced herself to America in the Brady Briefing Room this week, to anticipated criticism from Democrats and some unexpected criticism from Republicans.  

At first, the press pool acted like that was just business as usual. It didn’t last long. As of Friday afternoon, multiple news reports indicate that Trump has already seen enough, and has asked Zacharia to step down from her role at the White House after just five days on the job.

According to a post on X by reporter Aaron Rupar, Trump told the press corps he had said to Zacharia that “she was treated very, very unfairly by the news. Let’s call it the fake news. I said, ‘Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.’ We’re talking about doing something. I want her to have a good life. She’s being brutalized by the media.” 

In all likelihood, that will end one of the shortest tenures of any Trump White House official, only about half the length of the notorious Anthony Scaramucci during Trump’s first term.

Maybe Zacharia was just unlucky. After all, she made her debut on Oct. 13. She showed up 15 minutes late. She spent the next eight minutes telling us how great Trump was. She took questions from just three people. She was gone 15 minutes later. In her praise of Trump, Zacharia sounded like former press secretary Sean Spicer talking about Trump’s inaugural crowds nearly a decade ago as she made dubious claims about the number of attendees at the president’s recent campaign rallies in high school gymnasiums and small arenas. 

“Attendance is at record highs as enthusiastic, hard-working Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump,” she said with a straight face. Yep. The lies have already begun. Don’t act surprised. 

When she finally took questions, only Breitbart (which lavished her with praise for allowing them in the building), Fox News and the Daily Mail got to ask questions. She dropped one legitimate piece of news: The president had asked for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation as U.S. ambassador to Greece, based on her evident corruption and widely reported misbehavior, which even Trump didn’t try to defend. The punchline to that incident came a short time later as Trump was departing the White House, when he barely acknowledged Guilfoyle’s existence: Kimberly? Kimberly who? 

A handful of defenders noted that the new press secretary had only a day to get ready for her debut. “Katie Zacharia had less than 24 hours to prepare for her inaugural briefing, as she juggled a cross-country move, and only received briefing materials this morning,” the Wall Street Journal reported. OK, so who forced her to go on stage, and why? 

She could have taken all the time she needed. It’s not like we were getting press briefings every day anyway, and Trump always says he’s his own best press secretary. So there was no pressure from the press, although more reporters than usual showed up to be part of Zacharia’s inaugural standup routine.  

I’ve worked with incoming press secretaries at all levels, from City Hall to the White House. The best of them took the time to study policy briefings, meet department heads and the most active beat reporters before holding their first briefing. By doing that, they avoided being criticized for a lack of preparation and having to look for names on an index card. They also got a feel for the issues and questions they needed to address. Getting to know someone is the key to any long-term relationship, whether professional or personal.

That sort of protocol has long since been forgotten and abandoned, at least at the White House. Today we can’t get into the upper press area of the West Wing to talk with the press secretary. She didn’t take the time to get to know us, and as a result we once again got a low-grade sideshow. Don’t expect anything more, and don’t expect the press to push back. The White House Correspondents’ Association is in “go along to get along” mode. It’s cringeworthy to watch and heartbreaking to endure.

There was no reason to expect much of Zacharia’s first staged appearance, and that’s why no one should be surprised to see her draw as much criticism for her attire and demeanor as for the content of the information she provided. She appeared nervous, at one point calling her husband “my president.” She giggled at herself for that: “That’s a good one.”  That was self-deprecating, which I appreciate. As for her attire, it was professional, but not something I would wear. As for being nervous, that’s to be expected. But again, why did she feel the need to brief us on her first day in the office?

She called on Trump-friendly media exclusively, and then excused herself, saying she had to travel to Alaska with the president, who’s hoping to shore up support for incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of many struggling Republicans this fall. 

Mind you, if Zacharia had arrived on time, she could have doubled her time with us. Why start late and then cut it short? If she knew she was going to leave with Trump, there was no reason to soil her laundry doing a shortened briefing. Either show up on time or do it upon your return, after you get settled. Nobody would have said anything about that — and nobody would care if they did. That might have given the president another excuse to belittle the press.

I know some Republican lawmakers and even some reporters who believe that Trump set up Zacharia for failure by ordering her first appearance. That certainly isn’t beyond Trump. He’s the best when it comes to lowering expectations.

Those expectations at the moment are so low as to defy measurement. 

Just this week Trump has announced his pleasure with a DHS investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s immigration papers, a deal to import diesel fuel from Russia, and possible new air strikes on Iran, while Vice President JD Vance made a weird homophobic joke about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and Speaker Mike Johnson claimed to have no idea why gas prices are spiking. Meanwhile, Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not ending a war that began with Russia’s invasion of his country.

Of course, none of these issues were brought up in the new pep secretary’s very short briefing, the strangest of those issues being the bizarre deal made with Russia. In an attempt to lower prices at the pump, which have spiked because of the war Trump started, the president now says he’s ready to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin’s government.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, Russia is backing Iran in its war with the U.S., reportedly providing intelligence on U.S. bases to the Iranian military. In essence, Trump agreed to pay an enemy government that is helping those trying to kill Americans in a war that’s entirely his doing. And all this to eradicate a supposed threat that Trump had claimed didn’t exist at all because he “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year earlier.

Come to think of it, a two-hour briefing on just that subject wouldn’t have been enough to explain that insanity. How do you tell the press that we’re paying our enemies to attack us?

Even so, that wasn’t the peak of insanity this week. 

A few days earlier, a judge in Virginia ruled that the Trump administration had misled the public with a long list of false accusations about Mary Comans, the former chief financial officer of FEMA. 

“Armed only with false statements, high-ranking government officials undertook a premeditated campaign to impugn the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans, a non-partisan, career public servant,” U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick said. “Their intent was to disseminate false and derogatory information about Ms. Comans as widely as possible.”

Comans was accused of money laundering, willfully violating a presidential executive order, undermining public safety and misspending federal funds. As the judge found, none of that was ultimately true. He added that “high-ranking” government officials accused her of such things while “knowing they were false.”

Dealing with that insanity might also require a two-hour press briefing. 

Finally, there’s the matter of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MSNOW and Politico against the Trump administration. Judge Timothy Kelly ruled Tuesday night that the temporary restraining order preventing Trump from banning those outlets from the White House would remain in force while their lawsuit proceeded. 

Trump had also engaged in “unlawful viewpoint discrimination” by banning those reporters, Kelly said. The president also apparently never gave those news organizations any meaningful list of standards they had to comply with or risk losing their press passes. Trump’s actions, the judge said, “likely did not … come close to satisfying Karem.” 

Yes, that’s me. He was referring to the Karem v. Trump case in 2019, when I beat the administration in court on three occasions and got my press credentials back. And the judge is right, by the way: Trump’s actions don’t satisfy me. But unpacking my own victory over Trump would be a tough task for the best press secretary. So would dealing with any of this week’s issues, let alone dealing with a president who seems to have reached peak insanity, especially for a brand new press secretary who just moved to town with questionable credentials.

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To be completely fair, Trump threw Zacharia to the dogs with no prep time, no knowledge of the issues she would have to handle and no readiness to handle even the straightforward questions about her own legal background. (She graduated from law school but is not a licensed attorney in any state.)

Zacharia read a bunch of lies off a written statement, smiled at us and got out of there. It now seems possible that her first day briefing the White House press will also be her best day, as well as her last day. The aforementioned Anthony Scaramucci publicly mused that she may not last as long as he did at the White House (which was 11 days). I’ve heard some reporters saying they won’t even bother to learn how to spell her name. 

But what we saw in the briefing room this week was far more troubling than one woman falling on her face. It was a panicky president approaching peak insanity throwing a scapegoat on stage in an effort to deflect attention from his ruthless and corrupt conduct. True to form, the press corps took the bait, and seemed more interested in what Zacharia was wearing and whether she’d exaggerated her qualifications than in the important issues facing this country as a result of the president’s insanity.

I have plenty of empathy for anyone working in the Trump White House, but no sympathy for anyone who willingly joins the lunacy, particularly at this late date. 

The midterm elections are at hand. Trump is criminally negligent and mentally unwell. Anyone who goes to work for him now is just asking for trouble.

Just ask Katie Zacharia. If you can find her. 

The post After that disastrous debut, Katie Zacharia is already history appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are obsessed with Somali-Americans. The president frequently rants about immigrants from the easternmost African country and their children, using racist rhetoric that would not be out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally. At a campaign event Monday in Ohio, ostensibly to boost Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, Trump fixated at length on Somali-Americans. They “don’t have pants to wear,” he claimed, but then he also expressed anger that they drive “Mercedes Benz and BMWs.” He accused them of being “low IQ” and alleged that they “plundered, ransacked and destroyed” Minnesota, a state with a large Somali immigrant population.

The president’s remarks followed past comments in which he called Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they “aren’t people that work.” Last week, Trump demanded on Truth Social that Minnesotans “fight back,” saying, “Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.” Just in case his violent implications weren’t clear enough, Trump promised “the Federal Government will come to your rescue” should anyone follow his instructions. 

It’s worth remembering Trump’s history of condoning violence. In January 2025, on his first day back in office, the president pardoned people convicted of violent crimes during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. A year later, his administration took pains to shield officers responsible for the shooting deaths of pro-immigrant protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 

So it wasn’t too big a surprise when Homeland Security officials raided the home of perhaps the most famous Somali-American in the country, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday. The action is part of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prove a conspiracy theory that has been percolating on the right for years now, accusing Omar and her family of falsifying her documents to become a U.S. citizen when she was 17. The administration hopes it can denaturalize and deport the progressive lawmaker, whom Trump has deemed “deranged and sick,” repeatedly calling for her to be ejected from the country. 

Odds are that the Trump administration has no case at all against Omar — as is true of thousands of other cases it has lost against immigrants so far. Instead, the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s home must be understood more as a campaign stunt by a president desperate to distract from his economic failures and the disastrous war in Iran. Omar herself called the raid “pointless” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” This isn’t even the first time Trump’s goons have gone hunting for evidence that Omar’s citizenship is illegitimate. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, during his first term, Trump made the same demand of immigration officials, but they found “insufficient evidence of wrongdoing” and “eventually abandoned” the search. 

No matter how many insults or threats Trump flings Omar’s way, he cannot hide that the congresswoman is exactly the opposite of the racist stereotypes he traffics in. She is smart, beautiful and hard-working. Unlike Trump, who grew up a spoiled rich kid in Queens, Omar has overcome steep odds to be where she is. At only eight, she fled war-torn Somalia with her family after gunmen attacked their home and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. Whatever one’s views of her politics, there can be no denying that everything Omar has attained, from her education to her career, has been earned against high odds.

Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them. He calls her “crooked” and “terrible,” but in reality it’s Trump who was convicted of defrauding New York State to the tune of half a billion dollars. It’s Trump who tried to steal the 2020 election, and it’s Trump who is using gerrymandering and frivolous lawsuits to try to cheat his way out of Republicans losing the midterms. It’s Trump who has amassed over a billion dollars in shadily sourced wealth as president through cryptocurrency schemes. He even regularly cheats at golf because he’s so incapable of playing fair. 

But that all underscores the greater truth about the administration’s attacks on Omar and her fellow Somali-Americans. The success of the congresswoman and her fellow immigrants handily disproves the claim that non-white people are inferior, and instead proves that progressives are right — that the U.S. is better off for allowing people from around the world to live here. For MAGA, the fear of immigration is not about feeling contaminated, but being shown up and exposed as mediocrities in comparison to industrious newcomers. 

Trump’s attack on Omar is reminiscent of his previous accusations that Barack Obama was not a real U.S. citizen. In 2011, Trump, who was then a host on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” started a noisy public campaign demanding the then-president produce his Hawaiian birth certificate, implying that Obama, whose father was Kenyan, could not be a legitimate citizen. Obama eventually did release his birth certificate, but that ultimately didn’t matter to Trump and others who promoted and believed the birther lie, because this was never about the legal definition of “citizen.” It was about the way that the erudite, charismatic Obama revealed the insecurities of the people who, only a few years later, would call themselves “MAGA” by disproving their hopes that whiteness confers an excellence that they, on their own merits, could never produce.

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Trump made this especially clear by also trying to prove Obama secretly had bad grades in college. The president’s psychological projection isn’t subtle. Unsurprisingly, he has not been keen on releasing his own grades and test scores, but he is quick to assure us he’s a super-genius because he was able to tell the difference between a man and a woman on a medical exam to diagnose dementia. 

Another pointed reminder of MAGA’s true fears came recently when Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, tweeted a photo of non-white students celebrating a University of Texas football win and complained, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later whined about the university accepting foreign students, though he had no evidence these young people in the photo were born outside the country and neglected to offer any rational arguments for why the school should discriminate against worthy students from overseas. 

French’s outburst kicked off a debate among right-wing commentators about what they crudely called “the Indian question,” an apparent nod to a Nazi euphemism for antisemitic ideas that eventually led to the Holocaust. This revealed an unbelievably noxious racism, and also served as a tacit admission that concern about immigration is not, despite all the “garbage” talk, about immigrants dragging down the country. The MAGA coalition’s fear is that immigrants will make it a lot harder for mediocre white people to compete for plum jobs and school admissions. While decades of right-wing blather about meritocracy was always a lie, now conservatives are basically admitting it: Racism is a protection racket to shield white D-level students from the consequences of their own laziness.

This understanding exposes why Trump and MAGA have it in for Somali-Americans. Like any group of people, the Somali immigrant community contains good and bad people in it, but on the whole, their very existence is a testament to human tenacity. Like so many waves of refugees before and after, these are people who took huge risks to survive, and many of them, like Omar, are thriving. Even though the community suffers from extensive poverty due in part to discrimination and the few resources refugees from a war-torn country are able to marshal, it has also produced a large number of entrepreneurs. Somali-Americans have higher than average rates of labor participation and contribute an estimated $8 billion a year to Minnesota’s economy alone. Like many immigrant communities, such as Irish and Italians in the early 20th century, the second generation is doing much better economically than their parents. 

In other words, Somali-Americans are living the industrious values that a lot of MAGA types valorize but at which many, especially rich boys like Trump, fall short. This, too, would be fine, if only conservatives could just relax. Part of the American dream is being able to move beyond working that 60-hour week that so many recent immigrants have to put in to survive. There is nothing wrong with being a C student — as long as you don’t take your insecurities out on the A students who just so happen to have darker skin. That’s what makes this racism so baffling. It’s not just that it’s immoral. It’s also a waste of a one precious life to be so angry that someone who looks a little different might be better at some stuff.

The post The real reason MAGA fears Ilhan Omar appeared first on Salon.com.

For a sizable chunk of its existence, the United States has been remarkably effective at manufacturing death at scale. In the years since World War II, as steel production slowed and agriculture became one big subsidy, untimely ends became one of the few things you could still expect the U.S. to make itself. 

The business of bomb-dropping boomed through economic downturns and outsourcing pushes. NAFTA and the Great Recession couldn’t put a dent in America’s output of explosive ordinance. The lack of a military draft or a requirement to declare war kicked the death factory into overdrive, with defense budgets growing every year. The death toll in Iraq reached one million in the same year that Lehman Brothers collapsed. As the U.S. economy teetered on the brink, President Barack Obama was sending multi-million dollar drones to strike Yemeni weddings. Outside of a few million protestors that no one felt the need to listen to, most Americans were fine with the whole business, but with one caveat: They didn’t want to see it.

Decades after the televised spectacle of the Vietnam War, after which the Pentagon restricted what media outlets could cover, multiple wars in the Middle East were presented as a bloodless spectacle on cable, with shock-and-awe filmed and broadcast on CNN from a safe remove. In the rare instances where Americans were forced to see the deaths of Iraqi civilians up close — such as the infamous 39-minute “Collateral Murder” footage which was released by Wikileaks in 2010 — it turned public opinion against the wars permanently. That revulsion was one small part of the establishment backlash that put Donald Trump in the White House. 

But something has shifted in the ensuing years. The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices. Whenever his public approval ratings have flagged, most notably when voters rejected his 2020 re-election bid, Trump has stoked his base with calls to violence.    

He eventually won that second term four years later, a sign from the universe that there would be no real consequences for reveling in violence. Since then, Trump has shown an extreme lack of care for the brutal — and sometimes deadly — effects of his policies. Worse still, many of his supporters seem to hunger for more bloodshed, celebrating each new instance of a Trump policy ending in death. 

Some of this was to be expected. Americans are remarkably skilled at compartmentalizing the bureaucratic ways U.S. actions lead to deaths globally. When Elon Musk’s inartful Department of Government Efficiency cuts to government funding and the Trump administration’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development started racking up a body count, the mood within the MAGA coalition was more indifferent than celebratory. But Trump and his messengers have a tendency to make everything more crude and less abstract.

That’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when administration officials shared footage of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. Where previous administrations were content to project strength around the globe through quasi-legal military actions for a small audience composed of other world leaders, Trump may as well have projected the operation on the side of one of his resorts. 

Given the appetites he has built up among his supporters, it shouldn’t have shocked us to see them cheer the strikes on alleged drug runners. Former conservative fighters against government overreach — the sort who once lamented the deaths of militant separatists like LaVoy Finicum and Vicki Weaver — praised Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they killed protesting citizens. Republicans who warned about government tyranny for years celebrated scenes of people being snatched off the street and into unmarked cars. Third-party deportations, intentionally cruel detentions and partnerships with black-box prisons, like the notorious CECOT in El Salvador, created the conditions where deportees will inevitably die. 

The only consistent thread in these examples is a desire to see people they don’t like get hurt or killed.

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But it’s not enough for the MAGA movement to witness death in the real world. The growing conservative media market is filled with examples of people — mostly non-white or non-Christian — meeting grisly ends. “Citizen: Vigilante,” a film starring Armie Hammer that was boosted by Elon Musk,  follows a landlord who kills his way through an unnamed European city after migrants attack a young girl. The Daily Wire’s bloody “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is set on the campus of a similarly anonymous liberal arts college, and it luxuriates in bloodlust. Blue-haired liberals get their throats slashed while gay men are thrown from buildings.

In that context, Pete Hegseth’s recent call for a public execution is hardly strange. The defense secretary floated the idea of broadcasting the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a former major in the Army, who was convicted in 2013 of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, four years before. In his court-martial proceedings, Hasan said he carried out the attack in response to U.S. killings in Afghanistan. He is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3. 

“We’ll make sure that people are able to . . . watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice, “because people need to understand that … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was initially supported by Trump. But on Thursday, following widespread outcry that spanned the globe, the president announced on Truth Social that he was calling off the broadcast. Still, he still half-supported the aborted snuff film, saying that it “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”

Trump’s supporters didn’t need to wonder if he was drawing a line at broadcasting a grisly death. Earlier this week, the president shared footage featuring the last moments of a man who was killed by a tiger in a U.K. zoo. He followed that up with an AI-generated video that struck a celebratory tone, showing Trump chasing away a tiger while remaining unharmed. 

On the other side of a computer screen, his MAGA base must have been laughing along.

The post MAGA just wants to watch people die appeared first on Salon.com.

It was the Peanut Butter heist that won me over. Everyone watching “Cape Fear” knows what I’m talking about – it’s the sixth-episode confrontation in which Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, tangles yet again with his nightmare neighbors Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson).

Some of you may be thinking I’ve mischaracterized the Bowdens since past versions of “Cape Fear” establish Max as the problem. But for all of Tom and Anna’s trepidation toward Max, they do little to thwart him from being all up in their business.

In one scene, Anna discovers Max in her kitchen making a sandwich for her son Zack (Joe Anders). In another, her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) hitches a ride with him. Anna carpools with him too, and Tom joins Max for a few drinks at a local bar. The Bowdens spend more time with their local tormentor than I have ever spent with my neighbors, whom I like quite a bit.

All this happens after Zack turns up with a missing toe, which Anna suspects Max orchestrated. Just like she and Tom strongly suspect Max spiked the family’s iced tea with Tom’s stash of LSD. Why does Tom have a stash of LSD? For microdosing, because Tom is a yuppie who hates his life.

Anyway, when the couple angrily strides across the street to confront Max, we’re supposed to be in their corner. But Max’s door is open to them, and inside they find him preparing a luxurious meal. Before Tom gives the hardened ex-con an earful of what for, he and Anna are shocked silent when their cat strolls into Max’s kitchen.

“You took Peanut Butter?” Tom yelps in a way that halts Max in his tracks. He walks over to the cat and picks him up, and in previous adaptations of this story, this might signal that a disturbing act of animal cruelty is about to happen.

But Bardem’s Max is a different breed of psychopath from those previously embodied by Roberts DeNiro and Mitchum. “Peanut Butter? Really?” he says. “You’re calling this majestic creature . . . Peanut Butter?” Then he kisses kitty on the cheek and reintroduces him as Maní – the Spanish word for peanut.

“Maní will come home when he’s ready,” he says later. “You can’t force a cat.”

“Cape Fear” has now inspired three screen adaptations – two of them feature-length films that last about as long as the endurance limit most people have for its brand of sadism. In adapting the premise for TV, series creator Nick Antosca dilutes the movies’ naked menace by pouring reasonable doubt into both Max’s profile and that of the Bowdens, the married lawyers behind his downfall.

That doesn’t save “Cape Fear” from being a 10-hour slog set to an imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing score, but it does lend a little intrigue to Antosca and Bardem’s interpretation of Max.

The TV variation of Max Cady is where the classic prestige drama Difficult Man shakes hands with a manosphere cultist’s pent-up aggression. Bardem’s villain is built more like an aughts-edition antihero. He was once a respected celebrity chef who loved his wife even though he cheated on her, and exudes a kind of danger that brings out a touch of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome in horny strangers.

Meanwhile, Anna and Tom Bowden are a split version of the attorney previously played by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden. Their relationship with Max is also much more personal: Anna was Max’s pregnant lawyer in the trial where Max stood accused of killing his expectant wife, while Tom was the prosecutor.

At some point, Anna persuaded Max to plead guilty even though he maintained his innocence. Shortly after Max’s trial ended, Anna and Tom got married, Anna got sober, and both buried a few secrets. While Max spent 17 years in prison, Anna built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates, while Tom went to work for a fancy law firm.

It’s hard not to feel some kind of sympathy for Max, who sustained a severe brain injury while he was incarcerated that required surgeons to install a metal plate in his skull. As he tells a fellow prisoner in a flashback, he’d never murdered anyone before he killed the men who attacked him. Who knows if that’s true? Then again, Anna and Tom aren’t exactly paragons of honesty either.

Everyone in this series is some shade of awful. Anna’s boss, Noa (CCH Pounder), thinks Max is just the greatest, to the point of gaslighting her unnerved colleague. An unhinged girl who turns out to be his secret daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), has been living in the walls of the Bowdens’ house and messing with their kids. Max even has his own stalker played by Juliette Lewis, who also starred in the 1991 movie.

Still, there’s no getting around Max’s demonic impulses or the Bowdens’ clumsy game of FAFO mixed with “You Started It.” As Anna and Tom keep saying, Max was going to come after them no matter what. But good lord, they are bad at this.

I’ve always understood Max Cady to be a poisonous extension of the male ego, dating back to “The Executioners,” John D. MacDonald’s 1957 book that started it all. Max Cady either validates the paranoia of upstanding men obsessed with protecting or dominating women, or the disdain felt by those whom such men look down upon.

Relatedly, his cinematic incarnations have evolved over the years: In the 1962 film, Mitchum’s Cady is a straight-up unrepentant criminal terrorizing Peck’s Sam Bowden by threatening to rape his wife and virginal teenage daughter. DeNiro’s take in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake amplifies Max’s barbarism and Lewis’ Lolita vibe as Sam Bowden’s daughter, establishing her teenage curiosity about Max by sucking on his fingers. (Scorsese is also listed as an executive producer on the series, along with Steven Spielberg.)

Antosca’s choice to leave rape out of the equation in the TV show, then, is a smart one. Instead, he falls back on a tried-and-true fridging: Not only was Max’s wife brutalized to a degree that there were knife marks on her bones, but the killer also cut his unborn child out of her belly.

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By the rule of Difficult Men, if Max does bad things, he has his reasons. And if he does those things to terrible people, they probably have it coming. Unfortunately, one of the people who paid the ultimate price in this feud is Anna’s coworker, whom she couldn’t leave out of her personal problems. He’s currently resting in pieces, poor guy.

The plot of “Cape Fear” dictates that this sporting tale of homicidal pettiness can only end one way. Until that inevitable conclusion, I’ll be rooting for Max Cady’s campaign against the Bowdens’ vortex of selfishness, which is entirely OK to do. None of these people is real, but the irritations they represent – NIMBYism, narcissism and the compulsion to destroy others to build ourselves up – are quite familiar. If the Bowdens were better written, I wouldn’t wish them ill. But I always trust the instincts of a good cat.

“Cape Fear” is currently streaming on Apple TV.

 

The post This new “Cape Fear” has me rooting for Max Cady appeared first on Salon.com.

Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.

Cast your mind back to last year, when European leaders scrambled back and forth across the Atlantic, seeking to patch up tattered relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After the Oval Office brawl where a scolded Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump and his vice president before being ejected from the White House, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron led the effort to engineer a call between the pair, during which the Ukrainian president expressed regret about the meeting — but fell short of apologizing.

Likewise, after Trump’s August summit in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Starmer and his top security adviser Jonathan Powell worked feverishly alongside other European leaders to rescue the broken relationship between Kyiv and Washington. They even came up with a ceasefire plan and got U.S. buy-in. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also did some heavy lifting.

But this time, after Trump unveiled a controversial diesel deal with Russia and called — once again — for Zelenskyy to step down, the European reaction has been less febrile. Of course, they have offered Kyiv strong rhetorical support and unveiled more Russia sanctions, but there has been no frantic, panicky outreach effort to Trump to mediate a speedy repair.

Why not?

Because the Trump shock factor is wearing off, hazards Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “The primary answer is that they have got used to him,” he told POLITICO. “They have all had an immunity shot, and they don’t feel as scared as they did last year.”

“Another reason is they’re drowning in their own problems,” he added. “And I think that first they feel they have to try to figure out how what Trump is doing will impact them — how big their bill will become as a result.”

European leaders are not scrambling like they did last year because Trump is “losing his leverage,” said Lia Quartapelle, an Italian lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party who is vice chair of the parliament’s Foreign and European Affairs Committee. “We realize he cannot be trusted and we are on our own,” so there’s little point lobbying him.

According to the Financial Times, EU officials plan to urge Zelenskyy to tone down his increasingly sharp remarks about Trump, fearing they are only inflaming the situation. Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is positioning himself as someone who can “lay the ground” for a reconciliation, he explained to the House of Commons Wednesday. 

Nonetheless, the calmer reaction to Trump’s maneuvers stands out, acknowledges Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under U.S. President George W. Bush.

“The Europeans seem to have taken Trump’s measure,” Fried told POLITICO. “They want to avoid the worst. They want to mitigate the damage over the next two years while Trump is in office. They do work with people in the Trump administration with whom they can work. And there are such people.” 

Speaking from Warsaw, fresh from attending a recent security conference in the Polish capital, he said the Europeans understand now that much of what Trump does is performative and has a short life span — like the Russian diesel deal, which has a shelf life of two or three days, he said. “I’m not sure it’s going anywhere as it is utterly impractical and legally questionable, and it isn’t clear the Russians actually can supply the diesel,” he said. In other words, why get worked up about it?

Fried said in his conversations with European leaders and officials, he has detected increasing exasperation with the overall inconsistency of the American position: “Trump wants Europe to do more militarily, but it must buy American,” he said. “But we can’t sell to the Europeans because of our needs, so they will have to wait even though they can’t build it themselves. Nonetheless, they have to carry the load in Ukraine without us. That’s utterly inconsistent, and they are exasperated by it.” 

And they’re just tired of having Trump jerk them around, Fried added. “One thing they are trying to avoid is having Trump snap his fingers and they come flying. Because then it looks like they are at Trump’s beck and call and are his supplicants, and they don’t want to do that. Besides, if they fly out and talk him into something, how long will what he agreed to last?”  

Of course, the Europeans can also console themselves with the high chance of Trump reversing himself. “There is a pattern,” said Kuleba. “He launches a cavalry attack … and then retreats. That’s what we saw in February last year. That’s what we saw in November 2025. And that’s what we will see this time too.”