Sam Forstag and Michael Weiss join Tim Miller.

show notes

• Sam's campaign website

• Michael's Substack

• Watch for Tim's and JVL's live reading of Vance's new book on YouTube or Substack

• Tim's 'Take' with Caolan Robertston in Kyiv re the Russian strike on the Dormition Cathedral

• "The Pulp" interview with Sam

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.

Ad-free editions of The Bulwark Podcast are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Read more

The die is cast

I would never claim to be the first person to compare Donald Trump, with his dominion over the Republican party, to Bane, the primary antagonist of Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. (I also don’t think I’ll be the Last.) But I’ve been struck once more by the analogy in recent days.

In the opening scene of Nolan’s masterpiece, Bane grabs the shoulder of a fanatical deputy and informs him, “They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother.” The line captures something about the administration’s approach to its memorandum of understanding with Iran. It’s clear, here as it is in so many policy areas, that someone will need to sacrifice it all so that the boss can survive.

Enter JD Vance, the vice president whose stock in the party as MAGA heir apparent has plummeted in recent months.

Vance has been handed primary responsibility to sell the MOU, which is a sort of minimally binding agreement between the United States and Iran that is meant to lead to a more permanent agreement. And as details about the preliminary deal finally started to enter the public discourse late Monday morning, it became readily apparent how hard it would be for him to go unscathed.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted some of his concerns about the deal on X, emphasizing both the need for Congress to ratify any arrangement and exactly who he believes is the “architect.”

“I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress,” Graham wrote. “Congratulations to all in getting us to this point. Time will tell.”

Later on Monday, I asked Graham if he was explicitly saying Vance was the architect of the MOU, to which he replied, “I think he is.”

Graham added that he likes the particulars of the MOU that he’s heard about, but he articulated a simple criterion for judging the final product.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as the JCPOA,” he said. “If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal.”

A bit cryptic, for sure. But that’s just one senator, right?

When a reporter asked Senate Majority Leader John Thune if he thinks the full Senate should get a briefing from Vance on the still-under-wraps MOU, he expressed noncommittal support.

“Somebody will need to, whether it’s the vice president—but for sure, our members are going to have a lot of questions about it.”

Other Republican senators offered varying takes on the ownership they believe Vance has of the MOU. Their comments ranged from propping him up as integral to the process to claiming they haven’t yet seen him address it.

“It sounds to me like for two months he’s played a significant role,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said of Vance. But Grassley withheld judgment on the MOU itself, telling me he’s still waiting to take an actual look at it.

“I haven’t seen anything JD’s said yet,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I’ve been on a plane today.”

Part of the job of any vice president is to eat the shit that the president himself doesn’t want to digest. And Trump, who understands how to play the public relations game better than nearly anyone, clearly is not interested in personally absorbing this deal. He’s already begun dropping Vance’s name any time the question comes up as to who is responsible for it. Asked about whether he would be present for a hypothetical signing ceremony—the most public-facing component of any deal—Trump seemed intent on getting his foremost deputy there in his stead.

“It depends. JD is coming in for it, he was originally going to do it. I will probably be gone by then, we are having dinner, in a day and a half, I think staying quite late,” Trump told reporters Monday, sounding a bit like a man explaining why he might have to miss a pickleball meet-up. “So I may be involved, I may not.”

The same day, Vance actively took up his new role as the administration’s chief spokesman for the MOU, appearing on major television networks to tout the accomplishment and bat down skepticism.

“I don’t trust anybody,” Vance told CNN. “The benefits of the bargain only accrue, again, if Iran actually complies.”

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Vance did not rule out the possibility of future uranium enrichment. Instead, he said the deal requires Iran to “eliminate the enriched stockpile.”

Responding directly to Graham’s comments expressing concerns about the differences between Iran’s account of the MOU and the administration’s claims, Vance told ABC News, “I’d caution Lindsey Graham and anybody else not to believe the hard-liner propaganda in Iran but to believe what’s actually in the agreement.”

The fact that Vance appears to be positioning himself as a potential fall guy for the nascent deal is registering with other interested parties, too. Democratic senators, who broadly support an end to the war,1 are taking note of the vice president’s outsized role in the process.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told me, “I heard [Lindsey Graham] say, ‘Vance needs to come up and explain it to us.’”

“So if there’s gonna be a deal, a bill that I helped write, the [Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015], requires any such deal to get submitted to Congress for a review,” Kaine added. “And I heard Graham say that should happen, and we should get VP Vance and others to come describe it. So I don’t know what his role is, but I’m glad that we’re entering into a ceasefire that I hope we can actually get signed [on] Friday.”

This is a fraught moment for the veep. Accepting the frame that you are the main architect of a major initiative means accepting the blame if it fails. That can destroy or at least significantly hinder aspirations for higher office. Just ask Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who spent more than a decade in right-wing political rehab on account of his involvement in the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform agenda, which Trump and others happily used against him in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Or talk to Kamala Harris, whose role as “border czar” for Joe Biden was widely misunderstood (she was tasked with dealing with the roots of migration not the physical entry points into the country) but nevertheless effectively deployed against her in 2024.

Vance, whom some reporters described in March as an original skeptic of the war against Iran, is evidently making yet another career pivot as he steps in to attempt to heroically end it. But he would do well to watch those steps. The position he’s taken might be the worst place to be in the coming weeks.

Share

Making haste slowly

Despite not having seen any details of the Trump administration’s preliminary deal with Iran, lawmakers now have to grapple with the question of whether they should ratify it, or if they should even have to consider it at all.

The Constitution requires Congress to ratify or reject all treaties. Both the executive and legislative branches have gotten around that responsibility by characterizing various deals, which could be interpreted as treaties, instead as “non-binding instruments” or “soft law pacts” like “executive agreements.”

Discussing the prospect with Senate Republicans, I quickly got the impression that this deal—again, merely an MOU—isn’t one they consider to rise to the level of a treaty, and some take this distinction to remove the burden of the ratification requirement. Once again, there’s nothing legislators hate more than actually legislating.

“I think they’ve got an MOU right now versus a treaty,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). “I haven’t seen the text of the agreement, so we’ll wait and see what comes out.”

There is some intraparty disagreement over this. “We’ll have to see exactly what this is, but you would think it’d have to be ratified [by Congress],” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told me.

Despite some waffling, though, quite a few GOP senators did imply they would want to review the nascent MOU in a formal capacity at some point in the process.

“I do think it needs to [be ratified by Congress]—a final resolution, if there is one,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I go into it very skeptical of the government of Iran. I’m not skeptical of the agreement because I can’t assess it. But I congratulate the president and his team for confecting it—whatever it is.”

“Any agreement we make with them has to have guardrails,” Kennedy added. “It has to have a way to judge—through independent inspection—if they’re doing what they say they’re doing.”

The confusion about whether this is a memorandum of understanding, an agreement, or an actual deal apparently didn’t get past Trump, who told reporters Tuesday morning in France that Congress should probably handle the hot turd going forward. He even wondered aloud how he could get Democrats to vote for it.

“What I would like to do is send it to Congress and say, ‘You shouldn’t approve it,’” he said. “And they will approve it.”

As for those Democrats, they no doubt want a say in whether this deal goes ahead. Sen. Kaine told me Democrats are eager to bring the war to a conclusion, even if the MOU is imperfect.

“I think on the Democratic side, we’re almost completely unified—with the exception of Senator Fetterman—that this war is both illegal and deeply foolish,” he said. “And so we want the off-ramp. . . . But we do believe that bringing tension down is the right thing for us and the right thing for the region.”

“We’ll see what the terms are when it comes out. I mean, it’s been a waste, because there was no need for a war, fourteen [American] deaths, billions of billions of dollars, we’re paying more for gas—it was extremely foolish,” Kaine added. “But I’d rather we be moving into a more protracted ceasefire than that.”

Leave a comment

Crying havoc

I want to share a piece from 2019 with you by Tom Holland,2 in which the mega-popular historian and author argued that compounding problems in America, while bad and dramatic, simply do not meaningfully resemble the problems that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. I’d also love your thoughts on it, so please let me know your take on Holland’s essay in the comments.3

Since the garish UFC fight at the White House, I’ve seen a lot of fairly predictable tweets and commentary comparing these late-seeming days of the United States to the decline of ancient Rome. In line with Holland, I consider these comparisons a bit foolish. For starters, gladiatorial fights were a fixture during much of Rome’s expansion and great success, not a symptom of its decline.

Second, arguing for simple parallels between America and Rome will lead you into a maze of factual problems. For starters, as a matter of settled strategic doctrine, the United States does not wage wars for conquest (though let’s wait and see with Greenland); it has no formally recognized nobility; and frankly, our country is a much, much safer place for the average citizen. But stressed-out Americans love to relate our situation to the eternal city, as they have since our country’s founding.

As Holland wrote:

The conviction that Trump is single-handedly tipping the United States into a crisis worthy of the Roman Empire at its most decadent has been a staple of jeremiads ever since his election, but fretting whether it is the fate of the United States in the twenty-first century to ape Rome by subsiding into terminal decay did not begin with his presidency. A year before Trump’s election, the distinguished Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye was already glancing nervously over his shoulder at the vanished empire of the Caesars: “Rome rotted from within when people lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased and the economy failed to grow adequately.” Doom-laden prophecies such as these, of decline and fall, are the somber counterpoint to the optimism of the American Dream.

And so they have always been. At various points in American history, various reasons have been advanced to explain why the United States is bound to join the Roman Empire in oblivion. In 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, The New York Times warned that the Huns and the Vandals were massing again. “The Roman Empire and its civilization were destroyed by barbarian hordes coming from the East—and it is from the east that comes the wind.” Thirty years earlier, visiting the abandoned Roman city at Baalbek in Lebanon, Brooks Adams—the great-grandson of John Adams—had been inspired by the spectacle of shattered greatness to dread that his own country’s gilded age was bound to end in similar ruin. In the decades before the Civil War, opponents of slavery repeatedly cited the fall of Rome as a warning of what might happen to a slave-owning society. In the 1830s, opponents of Andrew Jackson cast him as a dictator and a demagogue whose tyranny would inevitably bring the infant republic to share in the fate of the ancient empire. Present anxieties that Trump’s presidency portends America’s decline and fall are the contemporary expression of a tradition quite as venerable as the United States itself.

In short, our problems are our own. The Romans couldn’t hold a candle to the extraordinary accomplishments of our republic. Also, we wear pants.

Read the whole piece, and if you need some more context, pick up a copy of one of Holland’s many great books on Rome, including Pax, Dynasty, and Rubicon.4

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

Read more

• China is about to launch an international payments system called mBridge.

• mBridge is a direct challenge to the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency.

• In the aftermath of the Iran war, China is pushing ahead with a system that could help replace the petrodollar. WHICH WOULD BE BAD.

• Oh, and Donald Trump is fucking this up, too.

If you don’t want to read the long version, I understand. But my mission is to make you smarter and help you see around corners. Sometimes that means eating your vegetables. To make it go down easier, I’ll share some pictures of my cat, K-Pop, as we go.

But before you click away, do me a solid and hit the “like” button? Thanks. ❤️

And if, God help you, you get to the end and think, “I want more of this spinach,” then come and join Bulwark+. We do this every day. The only way through is together.

Join Bulwark+ today

1. Plumbing

Have you ever wondered how money moves? You run a refinery in the Philippines and you want to buy crude oil from a company in the UAE. How does your money get from Manila to Abu Dhabi?

Once upon a time, the buyer’s bank would send a Telex to the seller’s bank saying,

Read more

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH the quality of the film under review, but it has been striking to, essentially, grow up alongside the Toy Story franchise. I was 12 or so when the original film came out, not too far removed from the age of toys myself; I now have a daughter just a few years older than Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), who spends much of this film wrestling with the weird in-between age of toys and friends and screens and social media.

That the franchise is, generally speaking, a metaphor for parenthood and all its troubles is neither a new nor profound insight: Cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) have spent the franchise fretting about the fates of their kids, Andy and Bonnie. Yes, yes: They also worry about their own obsolescence—this is, naturally, the key theme of Toy Story 5, what with the arrival of the tablet known as Lilypad (Greta Lee)—as well as the general fear of being forgotten by those they raised.

But the worries of the toys are wrapped up in their self-imposed burden to prepare their kids for life outside the home. This is the key insight of Toy Story 5, a lesser version of which would have made technology more purely evil. And while there is a malignancy at the heart of Lilypad, it does not originate in the tablet’s e-guts: She is just as interested in helping Bonnie prepare for teenage existence as Buzz and Woody and the rest of the gang. Rather, it’s what the tablet allows, the doors it opens to human behavior. Man is the most dangerous animal because he is the smartest animal, and no animal is smarter in its cruelty than the tween girl.

Join now

Lilypad, like all technology, is just a tool, one that can be used by humans however they see fit. And when Bonnie feels isolated because none of her peers play with toys like Rex (Wallace Shawn) or Jessie (Joan Cusack), instead preferring to play social games on their Lilypads, her parents give in and get her the screen. (It is perhaps worth noting that every adult is as addicted to their devices as the kids in question: Guilty, your honor.) Efforts to limit access fail as soon as Bonnie makes e-friends with some girls she knows, e-friends who quickly turn the group chat into a torture chamber when it is revealed that Bonnie still plays with dolls. (“Still”! She’s just 8! What is happening to our kids?!)

The broader question the series asks—has been asking; may continue to ask until I’m buying virtual-reality dolls for my grandkids, given how much money these movies keep making—is this: What is the point of play? What is the goal? To develop a fully realized inner life, one driven by imagination? To learn the proper way to socialize with strangers, to make friends? To cultivate empathy for those around us? All of the above? The big question for the tablet generation, then, is this: Does absorption within screens wind up short-circuiting some—perhaps all?—of these efforts?

All that aside: Toy Story 5 is a great deal of fun because it is, like its predecessors, very funny. Buzz and Woody continue to have a nice rapport; there are countless little asides and gags; the visual comedy is all gold. It’s always amusing when the toys are working out their own rules for existence, as when a fleet of drone-like next-gen Buzz Lightyear dolls tries to figure out why they go limp when humans approach.

There are new playthings beyond Lilypad, including several items of outdated toy tech that I cannot imagine actually exist—an electronic aid to help potty-train children and two devices I can only think of as baby’s first camera and baby’s first GPS—but keep the plot moving. (Seriously: Why would a 6-year-old girl need a mini GPS device? What purpose would that serve?) And all of the non-Lilypad tech toys in this movie are borderline magical, but that’s fine. We are, as a society, a long way from the days of Slinky Dog and Mr. Potato Head, I guess.

For what it’s worth, my kids (attending their first press screening) had a blast. The jokes all landed except for the ones meant to go over their heads, and most of those landed just fine with the parents in the crowd. I don’t know that this entry is, strictly speaking, necessary—the franchise has already had two pretty definitive endpoints, after the third and fourth movies—but it’s amusing and entertaining and quietly profound.

Which is to say: It’s a Toy Story movie. And whatever dry spell Pixar’s had over the last few years, they know they can go back to this well just about any time they need to.

Leave a comment

Share

Leave a comment

Read more

“Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings,” WaPo writes. “They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.” Knock us over with a feather. Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew on Substack and YouTube for Morning Shots Live today at 10 a.m. EDT today.

Trump’s Arrested Agenda

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump is, above all, a showman. While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately. More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt.

I’ve written about this slowdown before. But I was forcibly reminded of it yesterday while reading the latest piece of jaw-dropping reporting from the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which pulled back the curtain on a secret internal White House fight from April of last year: Stephen Miller’s campaign to get Trump to suspend the right of habeas corpus for accused illegal immigrants.

The fight came at a time when the White House was charging ahead at max speed with its mass-deportation plans, with Miller and Trump hoping to deport millions in relatively short order. They’d already twisted America’s existing laws into pretzels to set the stage for those deportations, most notably by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. But they were still being slowed by individual migrants’ ability to bring their cases before a judge. Miller proposed: What if we simply took that away? It was “an opportunity for Mr. Trump not only to speed up deportations,” Haberman and Swan write, “but also to assert vastly expanded power over a legal system that was getting in his way.”

Ultimately, miraculously, cooler heads prevailed:1 Trump never pulled the trigger on trying to suspend the right for migrants.

Reading this report was a shocking experience for two reasons. First, obviously, are the merits—it’s insane that any White House would contemplate such measures in peacetime at all.2 But the piece also yanks the reader back to a time last year when pretty much everything was like this.

At this moment, months into his second term, Trump was hurtling forward on everything everywhere all at once. DOGE was ripping through the government, USAID was vanishing in a puff of smoke, “Liberation Day” tariffs were slamming into place, ICE was off the leash, planeloads of migrants were being shipped to an El Salvador torture prison, the National Guard was preparing to march into U.S. cities, suspected deep-staters were being purged from law enforcement and having their security clearances yanked, law firms and colleges were being strong-armed into submission, Trump was threatening to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal, and on and on.

This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year. It has stayed dead since. Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him. Simply reauthorizing funding for ICE and the Border Patrol turned out to be an enormous, sweaty legislative lift. So was maintaining his tariff regime after the Supreme Court ruled huge portions of it unconstitutional. Ditto maintaining his government’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreigners—a typically uneventful legislative renewal Trump managed to capsize with his clownish appointment of hatchet man Bill Pulte to a top intelligence role. His top 2026 legislative priority, the elections grab-bag Save America Act, is a running joke that the Senate will never seriously consider. Other major initiatives, like the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” barely made it past the announcement stage before blowing up in the face of furious public opposition.

Increasingly, the things that have occupied Trump this year are the things that, last year, were just a sideshow to the major policy work. He has become obsessed with the minutiae of his self-aggrandizing monument building, from his Freedom250 birthday bash to the Kennedy Center to the East Wing Ballroom to the reflecting pool to his planned triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery.

And even that isn’t all going to plan: A judge’s order that his name come off the Kennedy Center has provoked a world-historical hissy fit, with Trump declaring the institution dead and installing an apparently permanent cover over the building’s facade rather than allowing it to be seen with his name removed.3

All this could change, of course. We are approaching the end of this chapter for the White House, a period dominated by the Iran war on the one hand and by Trump’s myopic focus on D.C. bric-a-brac ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country on the other. It’s far from impossible that Trump—his war concluded, his ICE re-funded, his White House UFC fights all brought to a satisfying conclusion—could seriously reapply himself to recapturing his god-emperor domestic-policy mojo. It’s safe to say that he intends to do this in at least one seriously chilling way: by monkeying with the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections.

But for now, we should allow ourselves to take heart. It’s perfectly natural to remain outraged at Trump’s ongoing parade of obscenities: It’s not fun, exactly, to see him and his people squee and gibber while a bloodsport fighter hoots that “MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN!” from a fight cage erected preposterously on the White House lawn. But these circuses aren’t just intended to trigger the libs and titillate his base—they’re designed to distract both camps from how little the president is actually getting done these days. Compared to where we were last year, it’s a damn good start.

Join now

On the Middle East and Minnesota

by William Kristol

Two brief comments today, first on the Iran deal, and then on one phrase in the New York Times article by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that Andrew discusses above.

On Iran: Donald Trump’s deal is less than a week old, and it already isn’t aging well. Indeed, it’s increasingly obvious that it isn’t a real deal. It doesn’t seem to bind Iran to anything and as things move forward, whatever we were supposed to get out of it seems to be evaporating into thin air.

This New York Times headline is a nice illustration of the deal’s Wizard of Oz–like nature: “Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees.’”

So it turns out that the deal depends, in a Clintonian way, on what the definition of the word “tolls” is.

But to put too much emphasis on criticizing the deal can miss the point. The main problem isn’t that Trump didn’t negotiate effectively—though that’s also true. The problem is that he lost the war. Failed wars end in bad deals.

As one looks back on the last few months, it’s increasingly obvious that Trump was played by pretty much every country in the Middle East—from Israel and Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the war, to the UAE and Qatar and China during it, and at the end by Iran itself. Our second-rate con man encountered first rate-con artists, and, as is often the case, it’s the second rate-con men who turn out to be the biggest suckers.

We’ll stay with the Iran deal as we move through this week toward the planned signing of . . . something short and vague in Geneva on Friday. I actually wonder if even that will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran decided to jerk Trump around some more by finding reasons to postpone the signing. In any case, we’ll be following the depressing denouement of Trump’s failure.

Meanwhile, I want to add a note to Andrew’s excellent item by remarking on one phrase at the beginning of the penultimate paragraph of Haberman and Swan’s article that jumped out at me. Haberman and Swan describe a meeting at the end of January at which Trump basically decided to retreat from the threat of invoking the Insurrection Act. “The vice president and Mr. Miller were still searching for a reason to put federal troops on American streets,” the Times reports. But,

Under immense public pressure, the administration would subsequently take a different course of action. The most vocal immigration hard-liner, Gregory Bovino, the Customs and Border Protection commander-at-large, was removed from his post, and the administration held back on ICE pushes in cities in the weeks after Mr. Pretti’s death.

“Under immense public pressure.”

Public pressure matters. That pressure has come over the last year and a half in many forms and from many places. But the pressure in January came especially from the streets of Minneapolis. Looking back on the long arc of the second Trump administration’s decline, one can tend to assume it all had to happen as it did, and to forget moments of choice, to smooth over particular inflection points. But Minneapolis was key.

All honor to the people of Minneapolis, who, with the Trump administration at the height of its power and presumption, stood up against Trump and his army of goons, and who stood with their neighbors, for our country, and in defense of its principles.

Share

AROUND THE BULWARK

• This Far-Right Thought Leader Is Embarrassingly Vacuous… Auron MacIntyre’s world is one of resentment, decline, and perpetual emergency, writes MATT MCMANUS.

• Trump’s Iran Deal Looks Worse Than Obama’s—And I’m Glad He Made It… Trump promised “total victory” and instead got a sixty-day ceasefire with uncertain nuclear talks ahead. It was still better than the alternatives, argues DANIEL B. SHAPIRO.

• Trump’s Weak, Sad, and Embarrassing Weekend… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss Donald Trump’s embarrassing birthday weekend.

Quick Hits

ANTHROPICGATE AGAIN: We crossed a major AI-development Rubicon over the weekend: For the first time, the U.S. government stepped in to essentially force an AI company to shut down its latest, most powerful model.

Once again, the company in hot water with Uncle Sam was Anthropic, creator of the AI platform Claude, which had already been beefing with the Trump administration over the government’s use of the company’s most advanced models. Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, is purportedly so effective at breaking through cyber defenses that the company feared releasing it to the public; instead, it released a neutered version of Mythos called Fable to the public, while a small number of favored companies got access to Mythos itself. But the administration decided that wasn’t going far enough. On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick ordered Anthropic not to allow any foreign person, including employees of Anthropic itself, to access either Fable or Mythos. With no way of screening people en masse, Anthropic was forced to pull the product altogether.

This is a huge story without obvious right answers: The administration may have been perfectly justified in slamming the brakes on Mythos, or it may have been a matter of overreach against a company they already distrust. Either way, as one person familiar told Axios, one thing is clear: “This is a de-facto licensing regime. Companies will not screw with the White House. That is the ultimate effect.”

DODGING PULTE?: There’s a way for Democrats to keep Bill Pulte out as acting director of national intelligence after all—but they may not like it. Per President Trump, Pulte is slated to take over the job this Friday, June 19. But with Trump having announced his permanent DNI replacement, Jay Clayton, last week, Senate Republicans are now hustling to get him confirmed potentially even sooner than that, with a confirmation hearing Wednesday potentially followed by committee and Senate votes Thursday. Such a timetable, however, would require the unanimous consent of all 100 senators. If any object, Clayton could not be confirmed until next week at the earliest.

Democrats “ought to be happy with Clayton,” Majority Leader John Thune said yesterday. And it’s true that the U.S. attorney and former SEC chair is nowhere near as corrupt and contemptible a figure as Pulte. Still, it’s easy to imagine at least a few Democrats bristling at the dilemma Republicans are forcing them into: Hustle this guy through, or the hack gets the job for a bit.

Share

Cheap Shots

Share

IT’S A CURIOUS TIME to be watching the far right. In days gone by, the far-right milieu produced intellectuals of the caliber of Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger. These intense critics of liberalism argued that the inauthentic nullity brought about by liberal metaphysics could only end in civilizational collapse. By contrast, the best that today’s far-right provocateurs seem to be able to muster is tirelessly repeating how casting black and gay people in Disney remakes can only end in civilizational collapse. Historically, the far right has been described as the ideological playground of the “lesser intelligentsia.” Today’s far right seems determined to prove that their standards can be lower still—or even that their standards can be broken faster than they can be lowered.

One far-right staple is to fantasize that the world runs on mystical cycles. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Oswald Spengler hypothesized that civilizations went through life cycles much as biological organisms do. He fretted that the Western world was entering a winter in which it would be overtaken by a vengeful Global South. A decade later, the Italian reactionary mystic Julius Evola hypothesized that egalitarian modernity was a regression from a deeper aristocratic tradition, and augured a vital return to the latter in the form of a super-fascist SS. This cyclical thinking is celebrated by some of those on the far right who call themselves “traditionalists,” including, supposedly, Steve Bannon.

As I waded through the writings of contemporary far-right muse Auron MacIntyre I found myself reflecting on a somewhat less imaginary cycle: garbage in, garbage out.

Share

Who Is Auron MacIntyre?

The author of a column for the right-wing Blaze media company, which also distributes his eponymous podcast, MacIntyre is a former public school teacher who attributes his move to the far right to animosity toward the COVID lockdowns. (This self-description has been contested by critics.) Angered at state overreach pushed by nebbish liberals, MacIntyre began to search for a better way. He found it in the writings of sages like Curtis “Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from Drinking Lead Soda” Yarvin. For years blogging as a self-described “libertarian” under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin later concluded that only an authoritarian regime led by a corporate monarch could be called a truly free regime. (One suspects a fair bit of the aforementioned lead paint was involved in the evolution of Yarvin’s thought process.) Perhaps seeing Yarvin as something of a model, MacIntyre drank deep of similar waters, imbibing works by white nationalists Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan, as well as other icons of the American far right. Over time, MacIntyre’s posts on social media, and then his writings on Substack and his Blaze output, made him something of a far-right intellectual influencer.

Like most influencers, MacIntyre weighs in on a lot. Topically his show veers pretty widely. He lurches day-to-day from interviews with far-right intellectuals like paleoconservative godfather Paul Gottfried and cyberpunk rightist Nick Land to histrionic broadsides against pop-culture ephemera. On one episode MacIntyre will be recommending Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli. The next, listeners are treated to the requisite Great Replacement fretting as MacIntyre worries about alien invasions and foreign flags being waved at protests. Come to hear MacIntyre whine about a black woman being cast in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey; stay to listen to him chum around with libertarian conspiracy theorists about why we can’t have a truly free society if there are too many Indians living next door.

The tone of MacIntyre’s show replicates the aesthetics of the very online right to a tee. Occasional moments of sneering sarcasm, one-sided erudition, and adulatory fawning break up the usual monotony as MacIntyre relentlessly recounts a grim chronicle of horribles. The driving emotion is resentment over dispossession: MacIntyre will rail against Democrats, democrats, and mainstream conservatives who are functionally liberals; he’ll excoriate “hicklibs,” who live in the country and behave like “cucks” despite being surrounded by better folks; and, perhaps above all else, he’ll blast immigrants—illegal and legal—who have the audacity to try and sell chaat and samosas around his Florida neighborhood. The overarching message is usually absurdly on the nose: The hour is late—maybe too late—and these progressive forces genuinely want everyone on the right dead. Unless radical action is immediately attempted to retake the country, remake the culture, and purge the unworthy, unwanted, and unwelcome, there soon won’t even be a white billionaire class anymore.

For anyone who’s ever slogged through Yarvin’s oeuvre, or the tirades of the similar formerly pseudonymous writer Bronze Age Pervert, it’s all pretty same-old, same-old by now. The most interesting moments of MacIntyre’s podcast come when the show threatens to become genuinely self-reflective. In February, while dialoguing with Dave Greene, a fellow far-right influencer and a fanatical Potterhead known as “The Distributist,” the dynamic duo mechanically jaunted through the New Right’s complaints with Bad Bunny’s record-shattering Super Bowl performance. In doing so, they very grudgingly admitted that the Turning Point USA alternative, headlined by a lip-syncing Kid Rock, probably won’t go down in history as an aesthetic peak. MacIntyre and Greene wonder why the right—despite obviously being smarter, better read (at least at its higher levels), and more eschatologically sensitive than liberals—can’t seem to manage better than Lady Ballers. As they ponder any number of solutions, they ironically muse that a smidge of liberal toleration for eccentricity and bohemian indulgence might be necessary for cultivating a right-wing counter to the progressive monoculture. Pluralism for we, but not for thee.

The Aesthetic Reactionary Ouroboros

One set of possibilities they don’t consider—something that never factors into these formulations—is that the personalities attracted to the far right may simply lack the requisite talent. Or that the kind of authoritarian culture produced by the hard right might further preclude achieving aesthetic greatness.

We don’t have to speculate on these points. MacIntyre and his ilk love to defend authoritarian conservatives like Franco while ignoring that creative figures like Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso balked at his repression (often fleeing or refusing to return to Spain if they could) and by and large greeted liberalization and democratization with relief.

Things were even more aesthetically humiliating in the fascist states of Italy and Germany—an irony given one of the self-stated aims of both Mussolini and Hitler was to inaugurate the “New Fascist Man” who’d break the stifling cultural shackles of bourgeois and Judeo-Bolshevik materialism and humanism. In his magisterial The Third Reich in Power, Richard J. Evans chronicles how the artistic productions of the Nazi Germany—in some respects once technically daring— rapidly diminished in quality. To put it plainly, state repression in the name of combating decadence and anti-nationalism created a stifling conformity. The Nazis produced a combination of bombastic propaganda chastened by consciously middle-of-the-road productions aimed at keeping the population entertained and docile. This climate contrasted sharply with the prior dynamic art scene in Weimar Berlin—against which the Nazis drummed up so much fear about transgressive cultural degeneracy. (Indeed, Schmitt and Heidegger, the most sophisticated thinkers in the Nazi firmament, both experienced career stultification and political frustration during Hitler’s reign.) The “order” that the right promises inherently comes at the expense of the freedom needed for genuine creativity. It rewards those willing to pander to power.

Share

Of course, there are deep ideological reasons for MacIntyre’s inability to understand the culturally stultifying nature of the authority to which he is so clearly attracted. MacIntyre fanboys over the Savoyard arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre, who died in 1821. In The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1814), Maistre insisted that too much individual reason was dangerous, because it inspired people to develop a critical attitude toward tradition and its authorities. Rather than Enlightenment, what society needed was dogmatic conformity: The “nascent reason” of individuals, Maistre droned, “should be curbed under a double yoke; it should be frustrated, and it should lose itself in the national mind, so that it changes its individual existence for another communal existence.” Such self-conscious and moralizing insistence on demonstrating irrational fidelity to authority is totally antithetical to genuine creative spirits—from the Socratic critics to Romantic artists. To the extent the reactionary mind can endorse a creative sensibility, it is only in the venomous—but sometimes perceptive—reaction to a world not yet ordered the way it “ought” to be. But once in power, the ideology of the far right necessarily consumes the very stimulations that once fed its rise. Reaction can only work as antithesis. Bile is its natural muse.

The source of the problem that MacIntyre and Greene grope toward lies in the fact that, far from being countercultural warriors, they’re now defenders of a tottering regime presided over by an octogenarian president whose sense of beauty never evolved beyond the bikini wax.

Join now

A Chud Manifesto

When listening to MacIntyre’s podcast, it can be hard to make sense of his ideological bearings—in no small part because his intellectual impulses so frequently contradict one another. In a very bad way, one is reminded of the tension in the conservative writer Russell Kirk’s classic The Conservative Mind. In his effort to chronicle but also theorize conservatism, Kirk proudly described the conservative as an anti-ideologue defined more by an attitude than a belief system. Immediately after, he lists six “canons” (later expanded to ten principles) that conservatives believe in.

MacIntyre has read but not synthesized his influences. Sometimes he invokes Machiavellian and international realism, describing America as an empire that conquered its neighbors (which he defends as part of the inevitable life cycle of strong states). In this mindset, if imperialism is “bad,” it’s only because an empire is doing it badly. Sometimes MacIntyre thinks it would be wisest for the United States to ignore the rest of the world while adopting an unashamedly extractive attitude toward the Western hemisphere by no longer even pretending to care about the needs of subject peoples. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” and all that.

But at other points our pseudo-Thucydides goes silk-pajama soft, describing himself as a true Christian believer in natural law, eternal verities, and dividing the world into the virtuous and the evil. In these moments, MacIntyre expresses his dislike for materialism and historicism of all sorts and stresses the need for transcendent spiritual and cultural dimensions of life.

That is until and unless someone has the audacity to suggest the United States is a “propositional nation,” with values that anyone could in principle internalize and embrace. When that happens, things like race and heritage naturally become important, even healthy, for MacIntyre to consider.

Perhaps most glaring of all is MacIntyre’s thoughts about elites. He’ll podcast himself breathless condemning the progressive liberal state and its elites for their hypocritical authoritarian and even totalitarian impulses, while at the same time routinely musing that the only solution could be the elevation of a new elite who will embrace unabashed authoritarianism à la Franco and other tin-pot dictators. This latter isn’t so much a theoretical contradiction as a contradiction in practical reason; MacIntyre wants freedom for those like him who deserve it, and either doesn’t much care or is actively hostile toward anyone else enjoying it.

Join now

At some level MacIntyre seems to recognize these tensions. In 2024 he inflicted a book, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, on the world. Despite being widely lauded by the far right, the book is not especially original. Condensing major tropes that had circulated on the online right for years, it is less a working through of the far right’s ideological tensions than taking an “everything, everywhere all at once” approach to affirming their precious instincts.

Following Samuel Francis and his posthumous 2021 opus Leviathan and Its Enemies, MacIntyre posits that the liberal democracy we live under is already, or at least is very nearly, a totalitarian state. The total state is ruled by a managerial elite that has concentrated power in their hands by appealing to the need to satisfy the will of the demos. Over time, as ever more interest groups demanded entry into the democratic arena via women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, the state and its managerial elite expanded its power to gratify these needs while eroding traditional and local sites of authority. Following Yarvin very closely, MacIntyre posits that this undesirable state of affairs is upheld by a “cathedral” of cultural discourse, produced by elites in academia, the media, Hollywood, journalism, and so on. While nominally committed to Brat Summers and DEI, the cathedral in fact propagates a concealed but nonetheless tyrannical homogenization of morality and culture. A monoculture that ends not with a bang, but with New Yorkers embracing a Muslim mayor and with Elliot Page being cast in The Odyssey.

In my initial review of MacIntyre’s book two years ago, I described its overall argumentative quality as unusually poor, even factoring in my very limited expectations. The book went semi-viral recently when liberal commentators chuckled over the fact that its entire bibliography took up less than a page and included a YouTube video. Sometimes the fabulism is very obvious, like when MacIntyre described the January 6th riots that resulted in several deaths as a “protest at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 [that] ended with participants entering and taking pictures.” By that logic, I suppose Jeffrey Dahmer was just walking about looking for a bite to eat.

The book is full of theoretical banalizations that are deeply insulting to the richness of the Western canon. MacIntyre will cite the seminal communitarian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (no relation) to the effect that tradition is needed to combat relativism. But in doing so, he ignores the philosopher’s insistence in After Virtue that Burkean traditionalism was an ideology (in the full Marxist sense) unworthy of serious defense, or his barb that being asked to die for the nation-state and its imperial projects was like being asked to die for the telephone company. The biggest dreams of the far right are small indeed. . .

Sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today

But ultimately the quality of argumentation isn’t really what sells a book like The Total State to far-right audiences. Despite hilariously posing as a kind of middle finger to the system, the book is nothing more than another opiate for the mass of alt/new/reactionary/dissident or whatever other flavor of right they now want to identify as. The only level at which the book works minimally hard is in affirming the far right’s every instinct, prejudice, and grievance, one after another, while generating a kind of pseudo-unity through agonism.

In the far-right mind, all social problems can be reduced to a fairy story of decline and fall brought about by the wicked. The Total State neither challenges nor induces critical thinking. Its effect is precisely the opposite, negating the need to ever again think at all. No wonder it has been so welcomed by a grateful far-right audience.

I want to return to the striking juxtaposition between MacIntyre’s appeals to ruthless realism and his sentimental need to bifurcate the world into the pure and impure, the good and evil, the Heritage Americans and unworthy browns. There is a sense in which these two valences require one another: There is nothing more self-flattering than the fabulist pretension of imagining oneself to be an aristocrat of blood and soul, intended to belong to a purer world. Anyone who brings this fantasy to politics is destined to be disappointed when confronted with the reality of diverse human complications. The denizens of the far right haven’t reconciled themselves to this, and it feeds into the anger that something was taken from them and destroyed by decadent unworthiness. The far right’s attraction has always lain in its coupling of aristocratic haughtiness with the resentment of dispossession. Adherents enjoy the appeal of superiority and the moral baptism of victimization. The feeling of urgency these affects engender, and the need to gratify them, always lead the far right to conclude that all means are justified to smite their foes and bring about their Valhalla.

This drive means, in the end, that the far right will always promise a phoenix-like fiery rise, right before realizing they can only ever deliver ashes.

Share

Matt McManus teaches at Spelman College and is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, among other books.

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

Read more

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

Read more

THE TEXT OF THE U.S.–IRAN Memorandum of Understanding was digitally signed on Monday. But it still has not been released.

Until that happens—and, frankly, even after it does—both sides will be spinning wildly. U.S. officials will claim Iran has made specific concessions on its nuclear program. Iranian media outlets have and will allude to massive sanctions relief.

But the overall framework of the MOU is clear on certain points: The ceasefire will be extended by sixty days; the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened in both directions; Iran will receive some sanctions relief; and negotiations will begin on restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.

As someone who had a front-row seat to previous negotiations with Iran, having served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel, I can unequivocally say that, from the U.S. perspective, this is a very weak deal. But it is also a necessary deal, and, more importantly, it was the least bad available alternative.

This war was a mistake from day one, and it needed to end. President Trump, high on his own supply after extracting President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in one night, thought that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly. But it did not. In fact, the regime has been strategically strengthened by its survival against a heavy U.S.–Israeli assault and through its ability to carry out some effective counterstrikes. The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, and many other countries in the region are now courting Iran and looking to de-escalate and rebuild ties. That’s a clear sign of which way the wind is blowing. And it’s not blowing toward the “total and complete victory” that Trump promised.

But by the time the MOU was being negotiated, the president clearly had different objectives in mind. For the United States, getting the Strait of Hormuz open was the most important outcome. Already oil prices are responding with a modest decline, providing hope that Americans will experience relief from the economic pressure and high gas prices the war brought on over the past hundred days. Of course, the strait was open before the war. Now we are paying to reopen it with sanctions relief. And Iran will attempt to derive additional revenue by imposing transit fees. Worse, Iran has taken a theoretical point of leverage and turned it into a very real and powerful one, imposing costs across the global economy that it now knows will rattle President Trump.

As tough as those concessions are, they may be easier than what comes next. Because on the nuclear issues, there really is no agreement. The only thing we know is that the United States and Iran will enter sixty days of negotiations over the disposition of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile and a possible moratorium on further enrichment. Iran knows how to drag out those negotiations, and will try to pocket concessions along the way. Don’t mark your calendar for a signing ceremony in two months. It’s entirely possible that no deal will ever be reached, and very likely that if one is reached, it will be worse than what we could have achieved through diplomacy before the war.

U.S. leverage in these negotiations will be very poor. Iran knows that this has been a deeply unpopular war that Americans felt in their own pocketbooks. The Iranian leadership is not likely to take seriously that Trump would return to fighting, certainly before the midterms. So that means we will be conducting diplomacy without one of the most important tools to ensure success: a credible threat of force.

Join now

THE MIDTERMS AREN’T THE ONLY motivating factor for Trump here, though. He seems mainly focused on comparing his deal favorably to the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal reached by President Obama.

We are a long way from being able to make any comparison. But in some ways, Trump’s deal (if one is struck) and the JCPOA are bound to be similar. If anything, Trump could end up for the worse. Negotiations will likely do little to contain Iran’s ballistic missile program, or its support for terrorist proxies. Trump has already abandoned the idea of regime change and offers nothing but lip service to helping the Iranian people. His MOU reportedly includes plenty of sanctions relief—variously described as released frozen assets, oil sanctions waivers, and reconstruction investments; some up front, some as the agreement is implemented—that will strengthen the regime, producing revenue that will be poured into its missile program and proxy networks.

Personally, I have little interest in relitigating a decade of bitter debates over the JCPOA. I’m not a kneejerk opponent of Trump’s Iran policy either. Last summer, I supported Trump’s decision to join Israel’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, based on real progress that had brought Iran too close for comfort to a nuclear weapon. I considered whatever positions one held in 2015, when the JCPOA was signed, or in 2018, when Trump withdrew from it, to be irrelevant to the situation we faced in 2025. That said, honest critics of the JCPOA should not twist themselves into pretzels to defend Trump’s deal. They should acknowledge that we are nearing the same end results, albeit from a much worse place: the loss of thirteen American service members, the death of thousands of Iranians, the depletion of our munitions and strain on our navy’s readiness, and the fraying of our alliances throughout the Middle East, including with Israel.

Israelis are deeply disappointed in this outcome, but they should not be surprised. After some initial overlap of Trump’s and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s interests, there has now been a strong divergence. The United States needed this war to end to restore global economic stability. Netanyahu wanted it to continue to further weaken the Iranian regime.

Trump’s claim that Lebanon is included in the ceasefire and his profane shutting down of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah is also a win for Iran. But clashes in Lebanon still have the potential to derail the nuclear diplomacy ahead. Iran will have to restrain Hezbollah from strikes against communities in northern Israel. No Israeli leader could fail to respond to such attacks, but Trump will lean on Netanyahu to do so. And this is where the deal may fall apart, as Netanyahu is being assailed by both supporters and the opposition for allowing Trump to tie his hands.1

Let’s hope that war doesn’t erupt again. And let’s hope we see the removal of Iran’s enriched uranium and a long-term suspension of enrichment, with full verification. If such an agreement is reached, I will readily acknowledge its merits. But to achieve those goals, Trump’s team will need to engage in far more sophisticated diplomacy, backed by qualified experts, than they have to date. No two-page MOU will suffice. And no spin, however crafty the spinsters, will cover it up.

Share

• Monday's "Morning Shots"

• Hertling on the use and abuse of the military at the UFC fight

• Brendan's interview with Rep. Joyce Beatty, who sued to get Trump's name off the Kennedy Center

• The Bulwark's live coverage from the Kennedy Center Friday eve

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.

Ad-free editions of The Bulwark Podcast are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Read more

1. Always Right

On Friday I explained to my best friend, and later to Catherine Rampell, that I believed we would get a “deal” with Iran this weekend. I said that it was likely to be announced shortly before the White House cage fight, with a signing to take place later this week. In Switzerland.

There’s a reason we sell the shirts stickers.1

I’m going to explain my thought process. And then, we’re going to talk about what this “deal” is, what it isn’t, and what it means for the future.

This is my value proposition. If you want to see around corners, join Bulwark+.

Now let’s get to Trump’s surrender.

Read more

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

Read more

Hey, man, glad you’re having fun. Happy Monday.

Join Sam Stein and Will Sommer live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT today for MAGA Mondays.

Bread and Capitulation

by William Kristol

It would have been nice to write this morning about the remarkable and inspiring Knicks and the joyful scenes of celebration in New York City that followed their championship. I would have relished a word about the happy removal of our current president’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in D.C.

But the stern siren of duty calls. There is an Iran deal to discuss, and discuss it I shall, even if writing about a defeat for our country is genuinely painful.

Fortunately our friend Tom Nichols of the Atlantic is made of sterner stuff. He stepped up last night to perform the distressing task of analyzing the deal that will apparently bring to an end Donald Trump’s misbegotten war against Iran:

The United States has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary. . . . It is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible. . . .

The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks; Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks; the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror; and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran. In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.

Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war. . . .

The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker.

I’m sad to say that Tom has it right. And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.

So Iran comes out a winner. But Iran’s victory isn’t the most important outcome of Trump’s foolish war. The most important outcome is our defeat. Trump’s failure in Iran has confirmed and accelerated the broader retreat during his second term from our standing as the linchpin and guardian of an American-friendly international order. We were a great power—the greatest world power—from 1941 to 2025. Now we appear to be one power among many, even one bully among many, perhaps the preeminent one, but one without much credibility among either allies or enemies.

Our allies at the G7 meeting in France over the next couple days will have no interest in highlighting the fact of our decline, as they want to buy time to make their adjustments. But everyone with eyes to see understands what Trump has wrought. This failed war will leave us both less feared and less respected than before, and will leave the world more dangerous and its future less hopeful than before.

The coincidence yesterday of the announcement of an agreement on a deal and the cage match at the White House has led to much discussion of imperial decadence, and of our entering an age of bread and circuses. The phrase comes from the Roman poet Juvenal, writing around 100 A.D.: The people “shed their sense of responsibility long ago . . . the mob . . . reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.”

But the Roman Empire remained great for quite a while after Juvenal’s lament. In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon identified the subsequent eighty years or so as the peak of the Empire in size and power, the height of the Pax Romana, and also as a golden age of peace, prosperity, and human happiness. So a taste for bread and circuses didn’t mean imminent Roman collapse.

But things seem to move faster these days. Our decline shows every likelihood of being far quicker and more thorough than Rome’s.

Or not? Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?

After all, the Knicks pulled off a remarkable comeback. Who’s to say America can’t, too?

Join now

The Real Real America

by Andrew Egger

Although last night’s UFC extravaganza on the White House lawn seemed in danger early on of losing the biggest, most important fight on the card—the fight against the weather—the good Lord in his mysterious judgment apparently decided we wouldn’t get off so easy. The thunderstorms that had menaced the melee turned aside, delaying the start of the event but ultimately robbing me of what would have been the most interesting viewing of the evening: watching them try to figure out the logistical challenge of how to pack the fight’s audience into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in a downpour. (See, folks: We need that BALLROOM!)

Instead, the saturnalia of bad taste went ahead as planned. Maybe some of you enjoyed the spectacle of grizzled men, having spent the weigh-in the day before pushing and shit-talking each other and pretending (?) to vomit on themselves, beat each other silly on the White House lawn in a cage spangled with ads for prediction markets and Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump’s crypto businesses. Not for me, personally! Two moments seemed to sum up the whole thing: UFC promoter Daniel Cormier tweeting and then deleting apparent DMs from Eric Trump asking him whether any of the fights were rigged,1 and fighter Josh Hokit capping his win by hollering into a microphone: “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”

It was the whole Trump moment in miniature. Some of the worst people alive, the biggest fetishists for pointless brute violence and the dumbest conspiracy theories the internet has to offer, luxuriating in the illusion MAGA has built for them: that their proximity to power has given them the opportunity to tell themselves and each other that they speak for the country. This is real America, and if you don’t like it, you’re the unpatriotic one.

Amusingly, some of the loudest proponents for this idea were some of the longtime Beltway elites who have lately taken to wearing MAGA credentials as if they’re a talisman that will ward off any Real Americans who might otherwise want to stuff them in a locker. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who has spent his entire life on the Acela corridor but apparently went to a monster truck rally in Maine once, was emblematic: “Most of those bemoaning what Trump is doing to the ‘people’s house’ are elites who have utter contempt for the ‘people’ (who love motocross and UFC),” he scolded on X. “If you’re going to sniff your nose at the proletariat don’t invoke the sanctity of the ‘people’s house’—you look ridiculous.”

Well, I don’t know. I grew up in Missouri and Iowa and I hope my “real America” credentials are good enough to say that the proletariat likes some dumb shit, too. (If you want actual data on the matter, a Reuters poll last week found that just 16 percent of Americans, including a third of Republicans, approved of the MMA-on-the-lawn plan.) But this too is the Trump moment in miniature: A bunch of conservative-media types sternly telling you that this or that objectively terrible thing is real America, and that you’re the out-of-touch one for thinking it’s bad.

Here’s something I think is actually beautiful, however: At exactly the same moment all this has been playing out, we’ve been getting a wonderful reminder that this silly spectacle isn’t “real America”—or not, at least, the whole thing. If you’ve been following the stories around the World Cup, which is playing out across Canada, Mexico, and the United States right now, you’ve been treated to a number of incredible storylines that bring a whole different “real America” into focus. There’s the silly, fun spectacle of the international tourists coming to the states for the first time and going repeatedly viral as they’re blown away by some of the biggest and best of what our country has to offer—the majesty of our college sports stadiums and our Buc-ees. And there’s the host of oddly touching human stories that have bubbled up, too, like the way the locals of Lawrence, Kansas have thrown themselves into enthusiastic support for the Algerian national squad, which has pitched their World Cup base camp there.

“I want to say thank you to Team Algeria for choosing our home town, Lawrence, Kansas, to come here,” one local told an Algerian broadcaster in a now-viral clip. “I came mainly because I was so happy that they chose our town for their base camp. And we just know Algeria is on the Mediterranean Sea, and then the south part is on the Sahara Desert. And we know that you gained independence from France kind of around the time I was born. We don’t know too much, but we want to welcome you here.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not saying all the chest-thumping and bloodlust and crypto trading and gambling-scamming isn’t American to its core. But all the good stuff from the World Cup is in our DNA too: the willingness to throw our door open and welcome people in, the pride in seeing others wowed by the stuff that surrounds us that we take for granted, the pleasures of meeting new people—even outsiders!—and approaching them with simple generosity of spirit. You didn’t see that stuff at the UFC fight last night; it isn’t in Trump’s stage-managed picture of “real America.” Out there in the sticks, you still see it plenty.

Share

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Sentinels at the Bacchanal… Military participation in the spectacle in D.C. is a reminder that trust in our armed forces depends on them standing apart, writes MARK HERTLING.

• The Iranian Regime Isn’t Going Anywhere….With Eric on vacation, ELIOT COHEN welcomes KENNETH POLLACK, vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute, to discuss Iran’s future.

• After Trump: Proposals for a Post-Authoritarian America… How Democrats can lead the charge for a new Reconstruction—if they can avoid becoming what they defeat, write SHIKHA DALMIA and ANDY CRAIG.

• John Avlon’s Final Warning… As How to Fix It wraps up its run here, JOHN AVLON is joined by RYE BARCOTT to discuss why political courage has become so rare in Washington.

Quick Hits

THE PETTIEST MAN ALIVE: If you thought Donald Trump would comply with the court-ordered removal of his name from the Kennedy Center with a little dignity, think again. The White House had been given a deadline of noon Friday to take the president’s name off the building facade, but pushed that timing later with an eleventh-hour flurry of legal appeals and protestations.2 The courts having failed to rule against them, the White House presumably went ahead with removing Trump’s name—but even that remains unclear, as workers raised tarps to block the view before beginning work, and the tarps have yet to come down.

Even more obscene is a poison pill apparently created by the Kennedy Center’s board of Trump toadies. The emergency motion Trump filed last week made reference to an astonishing and apparently new Kennedy Center bylaw: All new private donations, it suggested, have been conditioned “upon the name of the Center remaining unchanged as the ‘Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’” If the name were ever changed, the bylaw apparently states, the Center would be obliged to return all such donations.

The suit’s justification for this bylaw is “that people and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the building.” And if you believe that is why the Center’s board baked a bomb into its own bylaws, we’ve got a bridge across the Potomac to sell you. What’s actually happening is that the board—at Trump’s behest—is throwing a remarkable tantrum: If Trump’s name can’t be on the Center, there won’t be a Center at all.

This is how Trump sees things, too: “So now,” he wrote after a judge ruled his name had to come down last month, “the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially.” No skin off his back—he’s more of a UFC guy, after all.

FISA AROUND AND FIND OUT: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expired Friday, meaning that for the first time since 2008, the government is unable to pull information on foreigners abroad from domestic service providers without a warrant. While civil-liberties focused lawmakers have long opposed the program, arguing it can sweep too broadly through Americans’ communications, this was the first time Democrats have opposed reauthorization en masse, in protest over Bill Pulte’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence.

Trump, however, isn’t in much of a hurry to get FISA reauthorized. “I’m against FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday, “if it doesn’t come with the Save America Act (Full version!) firmly attached to it. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” Whether Trump actually intends to oppose FISA when Congress agrees to reauthorize it, or whether this is just his latest blunderous attempt to browbeat Congress into passing his DOA voting bill, remains to be seen.

Share

Cheap Shots

Share

A YEAR INTO HIS SECOND TERM, Donald Trump has proved transformative: He has transformed America’s proud liberal democracy into virtual one-man rule, tearing down checks and balances constructed over more than two centuries to block exactly this.

Trump will not be president forever. And when he goes, Democrats will face a defining choice: exploit the executive machinery he has exposed, or dismantle it. The temptation to exploit it will be enormous—and yielding to that temptation would be a historic mistake. If post-Trump America is to be a post-authoritarian one, it will have to embark on a Second Reconstruction, and Democrats will need to lead it.

In the first Reconstruction, the Union faced the challenge of reintegrating the South under a rule of law guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens. Republicans led the task then, with some support from loyal Democrats. They undertook not minor technocratic tinkering but major structural interventions—constitutional amendments and new institutions—that remade our governing framework and ensured democratic inclusion. Something similar is needed now.

And enacting such a Second Reconstruction will require not only sustained commitment from Democrats at a moment when they will face powerful incentives to look away, but also the support of principled, non-MAGA Republicans who still care about constitutional governance.

Perennial Presidential Overreach

America has weathered upheavals before. But never, since the Civil War, has its political operating system faced such a fundamental assault. This system consists of three interlocking elements: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s structural framework, and the amendments that protect individual rights.

Many presidents have taken liberties with the system. Woodrow Wilson restored segregation in the federal government and used wartime powers for an aggressive federal crackdown on speech—criminalizing criticism of the war and the draft. Franklin Roosevelt, confronted with a Depression and another world war, browbeat Congress to pass the sweeping National Industrial Recovery Act, effectively legislating by proxy. But Wilson acted largely with congressional support, and when the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA and other New Deal measures, Democrats themselves rose to thwart FDR’s court-packing scheme.

Neither attempted to quash every check, blow past every limit, like the current White House occupant. The closest analogue in presidential history was Richard Nixon, who authorized secret wars, withheld appropriated funds, ordered warrantless surveillance of political opponents, and directed White House staff to burgle the Democratic National Committee headquarters before obstructing the investigation.

But even this seems like petty crime compared to Trump, whose abuses have fundamentally inverted the president’s relationship with American citizens, executive agencies, the other branches of government, and the states. He swore to defend the Constitution, but he is in fact its enemy.

All-Out Assault on the Constitutional Order

The Declaration of Independence lays out America’s design philosophy: The people are free and equal, and government derives its legitimacy from protecting their rights and rests on their consent. The Constitution is the operating system’s core architecture, structuring relations among the branches to prevent anyone—especially the executive—from monopolizing power. The Bill of Rights and later amendments hardwire limits on state power over individuals.

Trump has attacked every layer of this system.

The Declaration’s premise—that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed—was breached by his efforts to steal the 2020 election and his ongoing attempts to corrupt free and fair elections. His retaliation against critics, media organizations, and political opponents undermines the basic principle that legitimate government exists to secure rights, not punish dissent. His rhetoric casting certain groups—not just social outgroups but also political opponents—as less authentically “the people” collides with the Declaration’s universal claim that all are created equal.

At the constitutional level, Trump has converted a presidential system into a personalist and patrimonial one—pardoning those who attacked Congress at his behest and handing them settlements for being investigated in the first place, before floating an obscene $1.8 billion slush fund to shovel taxpayer dollars to insurrectionists. He has presided over his and his family’s enrichment by over $3 billion in just the first year in office.

Inside the executive branch, he has treated agencies not as neutral administrators of law but as extensions of personal will. He removed at least seventeen inspectors general—congressionally created watchdogs against public corruption—and replaced many with loyalists. Through more than two hundred executive orders, he has stripped career officials of tenure protections, centralized enforcement in the White House, bypassed Senate confirmation, and sidelined senior military officials including judge advocates general who advise on the legality of operations.

He has also usurped Congress’s powers. He empowered Elon Musk to head a “Department of Government Efficiency”—never authorized by Congress and led by an unconfirmed private citizen—enabling cancelation of contracts and redirection of appropriated funds in violation of Congress’s power of the purse, the bedrock of the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. By invoking emergency statutes to justify sweeping tariffs and harsh interior enforcement, he stretched broad statutory delegations into instruments of unilateral rule.

Finally, the judiciary—the system’s error-correction mechanism—has faced escalating defiance. A Washington Post analysis found the administration frequently resisted or narrowly complied with adverse rulings, while a Minnesota judge documented nearly a hundred court orders that ICE had ignored.

This is not merely aggressive governance. It is a rejection of the operating system itself—the premise that executive power is bound by law. When, back in his first term, Trump declared, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he articulated a theory incompatible with constitutional architecture and has governed accordingly. The last rupture of comparable magnitude came when Southern states attempted to dissolve the Union itself.

A Constrained and Accountable Presidency

The Declaration not only affirms the right of a self-governing people to “alter or abolish” an abusive government; it affirms their duty to “institute new Government.” And our constitutional system established mechanisms by which Americans could restructure our government when necessary. After FDR broke the two-term norm, the Twenty-second Amendment imposed presidential term limits. Following Nixon’s abuses, Congress enacted a suite of guardrails—the National Emergencies Act, the War Powers Resolution, the Impoundment Control Act—to constrain an overweening presidency.

Trump knocked down each of these, and they will need to be not just rebuilt, but strengthened. Internal guardrails such as inspectors general, expert commissions, and the nonpartisan civil service must be insulated from at-will removal by the president. But Trump has created a blueprint for future authoritarians, so restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t be enough. Two deeper structural reforms are essential.

First, strip the executive of the massive powers that have accumulated over the last century. Congress must claw back discretion over war, economic policy, and emergency powers it has ceded to the president. Many statutes will have to be completely rewritten. Most urgently, Congress should enact an automatic thirty-day sunset on presidential emergency powers unless it approves an extension—reversing the current perverse arrangement wherein Congress must pass a veto-proof resolution to stop powers already invoked. Had such a rule restricting the exploitation of emergency powers been in place, Trump could not have used them to impose his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Second, make the powers retained by the executive subject to greater oversight with real consequences for abuse. No president should fill the cabinet with loyalists and rogues whose chief qualification is personal allegiance, or fire experienced officials for refusing to do his illegal bidding. Congress should sharply limit acting appointments and ensure major executive roles cannot be filled indefinitely without Senate approval. White House staff, advisory by design, should be statutorily barred from issuing directives to Senate-confirmed agency heads—as Stephen Miller has done, creating a shadow chain of command beyond constitutional accountability.

Congress must also adopt “for cause” standards for oversight officials, require written findings before removals take effect, and—most crucially—tie department funding to compliance with these safeguards. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have thought twice before stonewalling the Senate Finance Committee this month on whether Trump and his family retain IRS audit immunity if he feared having Treasury’s funding halted.

Join now

Constitutional Fixes

The pardon power cries out for accountability. Trump has used it as a tool of patronage and self-protection. Congress can check abuses through transparency: requiring disclosure by those who seek to influence clemency, and strengthening FOIA for clemency-related communications. The most direct fix—narrowing the pardon power itself to bar presidents from pardoning themselves, relatives, and members of their own administration—would require a constitutional amendment.

But if we’re amending the Constitution, the more important target is impeachment, the ultimate backstop for executive accountability. The two-thirds threshold for conviction has proved more prohibitive than the Framers anticipated—the two-party system makes it nearly impossible for a president to lack one-third of Senate support. Lowering it to 60 percent would still demand substantial bipartisan agreement while restoring real accountability.

Easier still, but deeply meaningful: allow a secret ballot in the Senate for impeachment votes, a change the body can adopt by rule. South Korea’s use of a secret ballot in its recent presidential impeachment illustrates how institutional design can reduce partisan intimidation. Had this option been available, Trump almost certainly would have been convicted after January 6th.

Electoral Reforms

Beyond punishing rogue presidents, we should take steps to prevent them from reaching office in the first place. America’s rigid two-party, winner-take-all structure creates incentives for polarization and minority rule. Congress and states could move toward multi-member districts with proportional representation—no constitutional amendment required. More voters would have a representative they actually voted for, and genuine multiparty competition would replace a system where the only real choice is Republican versus Democrat. Restoring fusion voting—still used in New York—would allow third parties to influence elections constructively rather than act as spoilers.

Our political system, like our constitutional system, has become dangerously presidentialized. A more pluralistic party system would lower the stakes of any single presidential election, reduce the appeal of strongman politics, and redirect political energy toward the legislature—where democratic bargaining, not personal dominance, is supposed to occur.

Democrats’ Democratic Duty

The first Reconstruction collapsed not only because President Andrew Johnson undermined it, but because a war-weary country lacked the will to see it through. Democrats cannot let exhaustion produce the same failure this time.

The temptations will be real and powerful. A future Democratic president—especially with unified control of Congress—will face enormous pressure to wield the executive tools Trump has expanded rather than dismantle them. The logic will be seductive: If Republicans used these powers destructively, why not use them constructively? But that path leads nowhere good. Institutional erosion normalized is institutional erosion institutionalized. A Democratic president who governs through executive orders and agency directives, who stretches emergency statutes to advance progressive priorities, would ratify Trump’s constitutional theory even while repudiating his politics. The operating system would remain broken—just running different programs.

Democrats will also face the temptation to counter MAGA’s cultural populism solely with kitchen-table issues, betting voters care more about economic bread-and-butter than restoring constitutional order. That bet is wrong twice over. Polities that lack stable rule of law rarely deliver long-term equitable prosperity—corruption, retribution, and oligarchic patronage ultimately shortchange ordinary voters. And Democrats have a powerful contrast available: a Republican party that capitulated to the systematic decimation of our governing institutions. That contrast is only credible if Democrats arrive with a genuine mandate to rebuild, not to exploit the rubble.

Any politician willing to put the long-term governing health of the country ahead of personal and partisan gain—making the curbing of their own future powers a central plank—will go a long way toward overcoming public cynicism. Americans have shown themselves capable of comprehending the urgency of structural reform when the messenger is credible. Think of the post-Watergate wave of 1974, which swept in a reform Congress that passed the very guardrails Trump later dismantled.

Building that mandate is the urgent work. It means running explicitly on a Reconstruction agenda: making the case, in language accessible beyond law school seminars, that what Trump has done is not aggressive-but-normal politics but a fundamental break with the constitutional order. It means developing a concrete reform agenda—and finding the right message for it: “Rebuilding a government of laws, not one man.” Or how about: Make Uncle Sam Accountable Again? It means building coalitions now, within the Democratic party and with the principled Republicans and independents who know what has been lost.

Republicans led the way in the first Reconstruction. It’s now on the Democrats.

Share

Shikha Dalmia is the president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and the editor in chief of The UnPopulist.

Andy Craig is senior editor at The UnPopulist and heads its Reconstruction Agenda project, dedicated to developing a comprehensive and concrete list of reforms.

OVER THE WEEKEND, military service members participated in the public spectacle in Washington that blended politics, entertainment, celebrity, and national symbolism. This was not just a matter of military musicians (in this case, the Marine Band and Army Band), a flyover (in this case, both the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels), and a joint color guard representing each service branch presenting the flag. There were also officers serving as aides to VIPs, standing in formation and escorting civilians. There were members of the National Guard providing site security alongside various federal civilian police. And there were invited service members participating in the main event on the South Lawn of the White House.

Seeing these images, I was reminded of a speech that, even though it was delivered nearly forty years ago, captured the essence of the scene and what was troubling about watching this event and seeing the military’s participation in it.

The speaker was the late Tom Wolfe, the novelist and cultural critic famed for picking up on trends long before others did. He spoke at West Point on “The Meaning of Freedom,” addressing an audience of several thousand cadets on October 8, 1987. Wolfe was funny, provocative, and perceptive in equal measure. Unlike many guest speakers who delivered carefully rehearsed remarks designed to leave audiences comfortable, Wolfe seemed to delight in making people laugh one moment and think deeply the next. His lecture, later published in the Army’s War College magazine Parameters, centered on Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and what those freedoms meant for America’s future. But as was often the case with Wolfe, the most memorable parts of the evening were not the historical references but the observations about where the country was headed.

I attended that lecture. From 1984 to 1987, I served as a captain at West Point, assigned to the Department of Physical Education. Like many officers on three-year academy tours, I tried to take advantage of every opportunity the institution offered, including the steady stream of distinguished visiting speakers. On countless evenings, cadets and officers would gather in auditoriums and lecture halls to hear scholars, authors, journalists, diplomats, and public officials discuss ideas that stretched far beyond the matters of structured classes, military tactics, and physical training that occupied the cadets. Most of those lectures have faded into the background of memory, but Wolfe’s has remained with me for almost four decades. What struck me as his most memorable and clever phrase that night now reads almost like a warning delivered well ahead of its time.

Wolfe’s core argument was that America was gradually becoming a society in which fewer citizens had direct experience with military service. The all-volunteer force was still relatively young, and Wolfe believed its long-term effects might not yet be fully understood. As fewer Americans served, he predicted, the military might increasingly become a profession apart, populated by people who willingly embraced concepts such as duty, sacrifice, discipline, and service to something larger than themselves. Meanwhile, he continued, the broader culture would continue moving toward greater individual freedom, personal fulfillment, and self-aggrandizement. Neither development was necessarily bad, he mused, as one existed to protect the other. But Wolfe believed the separation between the two worlds would become increasingly noticeable.

Then came the line that has stayed with me all these years.

Those in the military, Wolfe said, would likely become “sentinels at the bacchanal” and “armed monks at the orgy.”

The audience laughed. It was vintage Wolfe: colorful, humorous, and impossible to forget. Yet beneath the laughter was a serious point. A bacchanal, in ancient Rome, was a festival of indulgence and excess; monks, of course, represented discipline, restraint, and devotion to a higher calling. Wolfe was describing a future in which military professionals would increasingly find themselves standing apart from the culture they were sworn to defend. Their mission would not be to condemn it, reform it, or participate in it. Their mission would be to protect it. And that might become increasingly a challenge for the cadets in the audience, some of whom would be generals and military leaders in thirty years.

Honest news.
Smart analysis.
No-BS commentary.

Support our independent journalism and join our growing pro-democracy community.

Sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today.

LOOKING BACK NOW, what strikes me is that Wolfe didn’t suggest the “monks” would voluntarily abandon their vows. His concern was that the surrounding culture would increasingly pull them toward the celebration, the “feast.” The military’s professionalism, discipline, and public credibility would make it attractive to those seeking legitimacy. The danger was that the revelers would repeatedly ask them to step away from their posts and become part of the festivities.

Over the course of my military career, I watched many of the trends Wolfe described unfold. The military became smaller relative to the population. Fewer Americans now have direct ties to service members. The percentage of citizens who understand military life through personal experience has declined steadily. At the same time, because of transformational efforts over the last few decades, the military became increasingly professional, more educated, and more focused on standards of conduct and accountability. During my time in service, my fellow service members were increasingly taught and trained that the oath remained the defining feature of the profession.

What Wolfe understood, and what many Americans still struggle to understand, is that the military’s role in a constitutional republic is fundamentally different from that of any other institution. The military exists to defend the nation, but it does so by standing apart from the nation’s political and cultural struggles. Its purpose is not to determine the outcome of those struggles, its purpose is to ensure they can occur freely.

That is why the image of the sentinel is more important than the image of the monk.

A sentinel stands watch over the feast. He does not organize it nor judge its worth. He does not determine the menu. He does not decide who attends. He does not settle arguments among the guests. He does not determine what values should guide the gathering. Those responsibilities belong to the participants themselves. In a free society, citizens decide what kind of nation they wish to have. They debate questions of morality, culture, public policy, civic responsibility, and national priorities. In a healthy society, they persuade one another, vote, organize, advocate, and engage in the difficult work of self-government and working for the greater good of all.

The military’s responsibility is different. Its responsibility is to guard the constitutional framework that allows those debates to occur. It protects the feast. But it must never become a part of the festivities.

That distinction may sound subtle, but it is one of the most important principles of the American republic. If citizens believe society is losing its moral bearings, it is their responsibility to address that through democratic means. If they believe civic responsibility has declined, they must work to strengthen it through persuasion, education, leadership, and example. If they believe political leaders are taking the country in the wrong direction, they have every right—and indeed every obligation—to make the case. But the military is not, and must not be, the instrument through which those arguments are resolved. The military exists so that arguments can continue to occur peacefully and freely.

In many respects, this is what makes military service unique. The officer corps, the noncommissioned officer corps, and the enlisted ranks are sworn to defend rights they cannot fully exercise while in uniform. Military professionals deliberately surrender a degree of personal freedom to protect the freedom of others. They accept restrictions on political activity. They refrain from publicly engaging in many of the debates that shape the nation they serve. The active military must not participate in the bacchanalian feast.

Americans trust their military not because they agree with every war or every policy. They trust it because they believe the institution belongs to the nation rather than to a faction within the nation. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, urban and rural Americans could all look at the military and see it as their military. Any segment of the nation that attempts to usurp that trust imperils the nation.

Institutions rarely drift from their purpose through conscious decisions by those within them. More often, the drift begins when external actors value associating with the institution’s reputation. When politicians seek the military’s credibility. When public movements seek its symbolism. When commercial enterprises seek its prestige. When cultural figures seek the aura of service and sacrifice that the military represents. None of this is necessarily done with ill intent; many of those issuing the invitation sincerely admire the military and want to associate with it.

And that is precisely what makes the process so dangerous. The invitation feels harmless. The association feels ceremonial. The symbolism appears positive. But over time, the cumulative effect can pull the institution away from the careful distance that has long protected both it and the republic it serves.

The irony is that the military’s value must come from its neutrality. The military is trusted because it stands outside the contest and it is respected because it is seen as belonging to everyone. The moment it becomes associated with one side, one movement, one personality, one cultural trend, or even one event, the source of that credibility begins to erode. The prestige being borrowed is gradually diminished by the borrowing itself.

Share

THAT IS WHAT CAME TO MIND as I watched those images from Washington this weekend. And let me be clear: Those pictures reflected much of what I’ve seen lately. My concern here isn’t that single event, or any single administration, or any single political movement. My concern is the broader trend that Wolfe identified. The profession’s value lies precisely in its refusal to become just another participant in America’s cultural and political contests. In an age of social media, celebrity culture, and relentless political polarization, maintaining that discipline is becoming increasingly difficult.

The military’s role was never to lead the feast, regulate the feast, or become part of the feast. Its role is to guard the gates while a free people argued, debated, stumbled, corrected themselves, and ultimately decided what kind of society they truly aspired to be. That responsibility belongs to citizens. It belongs to elected leaders. It belongs to institutions of government, faith, education, and civil society. Those decisions are the responsibility of we the people.

The temptation to surround political causes, cultural movements, or public spectacles with military symbolism may provide short-term advantage, but it comes at a long-term cost. Tom Wolfe’s warning to those cadets a long time ago was not that the sentinels would abandon their posts. He implied the danger was that the guests at the feast would become so accustomed to seeing and admiring the sentinels nearby that they would eventually invite them to join the celebration. And that’s where the danger truly begins.

If the citizens become comfortable with the sentinels becoming guests at the feast, or if those sentinels willingly participate, many in the republic may begin to lose confidence that anyone is still guarding the gates.

Leave a comment

WHEN JAMES TALARICO FIRST STARTED to take off last summer, moderate-minded Democratic officials were anxious. They’d seen videos of him in the state House talking about how “God is nonbinary” and were convinced that he was too liberal to win statewide. They thought he’d bungle the party’s admittedly slim chance at flipping the Texas Senate seat.

Some moderate operatives were so worried about the prospect of Talarico winning the nomination that they tried to boost retired NASA astronaut Terry Virts as an alternative candidate. Virts even put out an attack ad warning that Talarico’s past woke comments would lead to Republicans holding the seat. But Virts never caught traction. He dropped out four months before the primary.

Three months have now passed since Talarico won the party nomination and some of the once-panicking moderate Democratic operatives are starting to feel slightly reassured. As they see it, Talarico isn’t running the same playbook from Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign that came close, but ultimately squandered a similar opportunity to flip a GOP seat.

He’s adapted himself to Texas’s political landscape.

In the past few months, Talarico has

Read more

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

Read more

Leave a comment

As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

Read more