Trump’s widening war of choice against Iran promises to make this even worse by disrupting the global economy and raising the price of oil, gas and other essential products. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman noted, the war’s cost looks much worse when measured in human terms: Replacing the three F-15E jets that were shot down over Kuwait will cost the equivalent of food for 125,000 Americans or health care for 100,000 children over the course of a year.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to brag about the economy, saying there is so much “winning” that people are begging him to stop and the affordability crisis is a “hoax” conjured by Democrats to undermine his MAGA Golden Age. Trump’s solipsistic alternate reality, though, does not change the facts. His approval ratings are at record lows, and a majority of Americans correctly blame him for the worsening economy.

But this is where the story gets more complex, and much more dangerous. The conventional wisdom holds that presidents and the incumbent party will be punished at the polls because of the economy, particularly in midterm elections. On the surface, the GOP’s wave of losses in 2025’s off-year elections would seem to fit that pattern and logic. In reality, matters are much more complicated.

Voters don’t experience the economy in a vacuum. They compare their lives and experiences with their neighbors and peers, the larger community and their sense of the country as a whole. Moreover, the economy is an abstract concept for many Americans, often making their judgments about its overall health wrong, as humans are not purely rational in their political decision-making. A wide range of factors influence voting and other political behavior, such as partisanship, political knowledge, identity, concerns about cultural and social change, media consumption, signaling from elites and personal affinity for a given candidate.

The argument that voters punish politicians for a bad economy also leans heavily on two assumptions that no longer fully hold: that America’s democracy is relatively healthy, and that leaders feel accountable enough to the public to change course — and will leave office when they are voted out. In the Age of Trump and amid rising authoritarianism, neither are guaranteed.

To the contrary, economic insecurity may actually make authoritarians like Trump more compelling to voters. This counterintuitive conclusion, based on new research from Northwestern University’s Center for Communication & Public Policy, has serious implications for how Democrats, the media and the mainstream political class think about elections, and politics more broadly.

The challenge, as explained to Northwestern Now by the center’s founder and professor Erik Nisbet, is that standard measures of democratic commitment are unreliable.

“Traditional surveys typically ask people whether they support democracy or value free expression,” he said. “Decades of research show that Americans overwhelmingly say ‘yes,’ but these self-reported attitudes often do not predict actual political behavior.” 

Some of the study’s key findings, which were published in the journal Perspectives on Politics, are revealing — and timely. Commitments to liberal democratic norms are conditional, not fixed. When people feel financially secure, support for democratic principles increases. When they feel economically disadvantaged, voters are more open to authoritarianism and autocracy, with characteristics including a biased press, weakened checks on executive power and attacks on the rule of law. Perhaps most striking is that for both liberals and conservatives, political ideology mattered less than economic stress and hardship.

Trump and the Republicans may well be punished at the polls in the near term. That’s the good news. The bad news, which Nisbet’s research makes uncomfortably clear, is that a sustained economic downturn doesn’t weaken anti-democratic movements — it fuels them.  

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America’s extreme — and steadily increasing — wealth and income gap has been politely described as a “K-shaped economy,” a sterile, technocratic term that obscures more than it reveals. What a K-shaped economy really means is an America where the rich and the plutocrats live in their own worlds, walled off, while everyone else is left to struggle. Moreover, in a K-shaped economy, the wealthy as a class have little if any sense of obligation to the common good. They instead use politics and the law to extract more wealth and resources from the American people while making themselves increasingly immune to democratic accountability.

In 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats made the democracy crisis and Trump’s authoritarian agenda the center of their campaign. That messaging did not move voters in sufficient numbers to elevate Harris to the presidency.

Nisbet was direct about what this means for Democrats. “The research suggests that messaging focused solely on abstract democratic ideals is unlikely to resonate with voters unless it is tied to their economic concerns,” he said. “Broader electorates require democracy narratives grounded in pocketbook realities.”

Looking to the midterms and beyond, the challenge for Democrats and the anti-Trump resistance is to connect economic pain to the threat authoritarianism poses to regular people’s wallets and day-to-day lives, something Harris and the party failed to do in 2024. The most effective argument is not an abstract one — it’s about corruption. Authoritarians and autocrats like Trump hate democracy because it places limits on their ability to rig the system for personal gain.

The president is a malign actor, a walking-talking moral hazard who is driven by gross self-interest and cares little, if at all, about the harm his actions cause. Like other autocrats and authoritarians, his political project is one of destruction rather than creation. If Trump becomes convinced that he’s politically doomed, he may choose to wreck the economy — and the country as a whole — so that his opponents inherit ruins. 

He has consistently advanced policies that cause measurable harm to the country, and his personality and character show a fascination with destruction and violence. To further sabotage and destroy America’s economy would be Trump’s way of punishing a country and people he views as not deserving of his greatness.  

From those ruins another authoritarian may emerge, one far more dangerous than Trump, with tens of millions of desperate Americans primed and ready to embrace anyone who promises them jobs, healthcare and a better way forward. Desperate people make poor choices.

The post Why many Americans would trade democracy for more money appeared first on Salon.com.

Granted, there are (literally) one or two outliers, like Zelda Williams’ perfectly fine 2023 film “Lisa Frankenstein.” But even that movie dilutes Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel to a fraction of its story, reducing all of the text’s thematic resonance to a footnote along with it. And that nuance is critically important. Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” is a story of creation, birth, love, fear, exile and loneliness. A woman’s perspective is inextricable from its text. There’s a good reason why “Frankenstein” is favored in gothic literature curricula over Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: Shelley’s novel has infinitely more to parse. “Frankenstein” is rich with subtext yet highly accessible. It’s not dense, it doesn’t blabber on and it certainly doesn’t reek of masculine self-obsession. Yet, the bulk of people — down to a fraction of a percent — who have been given the power and financial means to adapt “Frankenstein” have been men.

(Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in “The Bride”

This reality alone makes the existence of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature “The Bride!” something of a marvel. Not only has Gyllenhaal taken the reins from cinema’s patriarchal collective, but she’s implemented a distinctly feminine gaze, as complex and fascinating as the social implications tucked away between the lines of Shelley’s original text. Gyllenhaal has flipped the focus from Frankenstein’s Monster to his female companion, who is destroyed in Shelley’s book before she’s ever given life. James Whale’s 1935 freakquel, “Bride of Frankenstein,” imagined the companion briefly alive, sporting a white-streaked, electric-shocked bouffant before being killed by the Monster moments after her genesis. The Bride didn’t speak. She never even got to clunk and thud her way through any farmhouses or laboratories like a bewigged bull in a china shop. She was a woman functioning as a titillating climactic spectacle, who died with little more than a scream.

Gyllenhaal’s reimagining is the other side of the coin, so ultra-obsessed with giving the Bride (Jessie Buckley) her agency that it frequently forgets there’s a narrative arc happening around her. Across two hours, Buckley’s Bride shoots, kicks, contorts, dances, scrapes, whizzes, licks and screams, all the while coming no closer to her true self than she was at the start of the film. She’s more caricature than character; an idea without a purpose. That’s also the point. “Frankenstein” is largely about the journey to self-actualization and the destruction left in the wake of this ceaseless human pursuit. Shelley’s story is so moving precisely because it’s tinged with firsthand knowledge of the despair that comes with being misunderstood and othered at no fault of one’s own. These facets are also what make her “Frankenstein” so sweepingly unforgettable, and with “The Bride!,” Gyllenhaal isn’t trying to adapt the text so much as she’s eager to replicate the energy of Shelley’s voice.

“The Bride!” is surprising and strange, perplexing and aggravating. At times, it’s downright bad. But through all of its muddled schlock, Gyllenhaal’s film never once loses its distinctly feminine ambition, and that makes “The Bride!” a far more faithful “Frankenstein” adaptation than any made by a man.

Then again, Gyllenhaal is perfectly forthright with her affinity for Shelley’s perspective, opening her film with a small revelation hidden from the trailers. Buckley plays both the Bride and the ghost of Mary Shelley. Shelley’s disembodied spirit is trapped in a beautifully rendered grayscale netherworld, where she harnesses the rage of unfulfilled potential to possess a young woman named Ida (pre-Bride Buckley) in hopes of continuing her tragic tale from beyond the grave. These vignettes are where Gyllenhaal’s directorial eye shines the brightest, and where “The Bride!” brims with promise — just before the first of the film’s several unexplained narrative shifts.

Where this story takes place — which metaphysical realm it’s actually set in — is skimmed over entirely. The viewer can’t understand whether “The Bride!” is set inside of the sequel novel Shelley is crafting in the film, whether Shelley’s ghost has somehow willed a new reality into being, or if we’re just supposed to go along with it and connect the dots ourselves with what little we’re given. It’s a near-catastrophic narrative oversight that, like a handful of other plot holes, reeks of studio meddling by Warner Bros. after early test screenings failed to meet expectations. It would appear that Gyllenhaal’s film has been ironically hacked up and reassembled, but the Frankenstein’d version of “The Bride!” that we’re left with works because it wills itself to. If you can suspend the frustration long enough to meet Christian Bale’s Monster, Frank — himself somehow a real scientific creation, survived from the 1800s, as well as a product of Shelley’s imagination — you’ll manage a decent enough experience with the film.

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That’s really what “The Bride!’ is best for: the experience. Not since “Cats” has there been a more misguided yet enterprising work of big-budget, intellectual property cinema. Gyllenhaal zips between tones and styles with a ferocious abandon. Even when her film is utterly befuddling, it’s a joy to behold. Few films of this caliber are allowed to take swings so big, and Gyllenhaal delights in raising her audience’s eyebrow before shooting them with a needle full of Botox to make the expression stay frozen in its puzzled place.

Shortly after a young Ida falls to her death — a symptom of her erratic possession by Shelley’s ghost — Frank arrives in 1930s Chicago in search of a companion. The good Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) agrees to help this poor, destitute soul. Before we know it, Ida has become the Bride: a walking, talking realization of the Monster’s companion, remixed from her 1935 cinematic progenitor and stricken with verbal outbursts in olde English every time Shelley’s ghost hits her with a “knock, knock.” Before long, Frank and the Bride are on the road and on the lam, invigorating the nation in their path. With a few cop killings under their belts and an increasing lack of shame over their atypical appearances, these lovers-on-the-run light a powder keg and ignite a country repressed by misogyny and corruption.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Bale as Frank and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ronnie Reed in “The Bride”

There is no shame in Gyllenhaal’s game, and her honest excitement to dabble with references and emotion is refreshing, even when these moments grate. An entire sequence pays homage to the Riot Grrrl movement, where women across America paint themselves up like the Bride and hold men at gunpoint, screaming, “This is a brain attack!” It’s beyond inane and so undercooked that it can’t manage to horseshoe its way back to brilliant, but there’s no other way I’d like it. In referencing punk culture, Gyllenhaal whiffs her mark, which is somehow even more punk. It’s impossible to watch “The Bride!” without thinking about the fact that Warner Bros. poured $80 million into such a bold vision, and that — at least seemingly — a good portion of it remains intact in the final film. Gyllenhaal leans into the bizarro world she’s crafting as it’s taking form. Eventually, the atonal structure becomes the film’s nature. It’s as if “The Bride!” is learning more about how to be a movie as it goes along, just as Frankenstein’s Monster understands the facets of his humanity as Shelley’s novel progresses.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in “The Bride”

Call that a stretch if you like, but I’d argue the film is more meta than its harshest critics will give it credit for. “The Bride!” is a film about being one thing when the world tells you to be another, and — as we’ve already seen with Guillermo Del Toro’s more faithful, Oscar-nominated adaptation — viewers take much kinder to the standard, thousandth retelling of “Frankenstein” than something like Gyllenhaal’s version, which is a truly fresh idea. She reimagines the Bride character with the same wild chaos and directorial scope that this movie swims in; the same initiative with which Shelley wrote her novel.

When “Frankenstein” was first published without Shelley’s name, and chatter about its author began to spread, an early commentary in the British Critic scorned the dissonance between Shelley’s womanhood and the novel’s monstrous narrative. “The writer of it is, we understand, a female,” the piece read. “This is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should, and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

While I don’t suspect “The Bride!” will be met with this same revisionist praise later in its life, there is something remarkable about the dual “aggravation” of expectations that Gyllenhaal and Shelley’s works share. They are a testament to making whatever you want to make, no matter how it turns out or is received; of swinging for the fences the second you get the chance, knowing that the opportunity is never promised; of smashing the square peg into the round hole until it breaks through the surface, creating something new altogether. “The Bride!” is a monster of its own making that isn’t trying to earn its exclamation point — it’s declaring it. And as off-putting as it may be, this rebellion from pleasant form is innately, delightfully feminine.

The post “Frankenstein” needed a woman’s touch appeared first on Salon.com.

Only when they return to Ohio, and Fusco lays eyes on his fiancée’s large and well-appointed home, does he transform into Mr. Hyde. Fusco sits her down in the apartment they share to discuss his problem with their relationship: her body. He’s used to dating women who keep it tight, he explains. And Barrett, who works the long hospital shifts required to save people’s lives, isn’t cutting it.

“So I’m trying to like, I don’t know. Somebody who works out all the time and has a different type of, I don’t know,” he stammers. “It’s just someone who does . . . Pilates every day, or someone who’s working out every day. In those situations, it’s hard for me to be like, physically, when we’re in that moment, into it.”

With saintly calm, the too-good-for-him Dr. Barrett packs her things and returns to her peaceful castle.

(Netflix) Jessica Barrett and Chris Fusco in “Love is Blind”

Later, at a couples mixer, Fusco drunkenly brays about how terrible the sex was. Then he tries to seduce his second choice, fellow cast member Bri McNees, by offering to whisk her away to the local Four Seasons and letting her know he has a Charles Schwab account. As he does this, Connor Spies, McNees’ intended, stands a few feet away.

We watch “Love Is Blind” for all the usual reasons. The mess? Sure. Its sense of romantic optimism? Not if you’ve been paying attention! But Chris Fusco’s “I’m just not that into smashing you” speech and boozy peacocking have made him the face of a moment. He’s a grade-A reality TV villain and a gift to content creators, fueling a slew of analyses and clapbacks. One TikTok user posted a video of his Pilates speech being projected onscreen in her psychology class, as a case study.

To women nodding along while reading tales of alpine divorces and ghostlighting filling their social media feeds, Fusco is the typical catch in the increasingly polluted dating pool. And to those who watch “Love Is Blind” while noticing an overall decline in our ability to relate to one another, he’s proof that the show’s matchmaking success rate probably was doomed to decrease over time.

Finding love has never been easy. I say this as someone who never had to deal with modern dating horrors, but has close friends who do, if they haven’t surrendered to heterofatalism entirely. My husband and I watch “Love Is Blind” with one of those nearest and dearest, and we three approach each season like rabid sports fans who are only in it to yell at the TV.

Since “Love Is Blind” was minted at the start of the pandemic, it follows that the further we get from its February 2020 debut, the more frequently antisocial patterns learned during lockdowns are emerging.

The convenience technology that got us through the pandemic also made it easier than ever to avoid other people. Delivery apps reduced the need to leave the house for groceries and other supplies. Apps also facilitated no muss sexual encounters; nobody wanted to catch the virus, or feelings. This has been the case since the dawn of mobile devices and algorithmic personalization, but forced separations may have turned curt, unexplained goodbyes into a perceived relationship norm. The “Sex and the City” generation was left agog at their heroine being dumped via Post-It note; today, Carrie Bradshaw is just as likely to be abandoned by a suitor dropping their text thread without explanation.

Others try to resume them by picking up that chain months after they’ve left a date on read — or ghostlighting, as it’s been dubbed.

But then, a little frustration at a cowardly lack of social etiquette is better than, say, a date abandoning you in the middle of a wilderness hike, i.e., the alpine divorce.

(Netflix) Chris Fusco in “Love is Blind”

Pandemic technology reliance fostered an expectation of a frictionless existence, including in our romantic lives. Many of us are still figuring out that being around other people doesn’t work that way – and there’s no better evidence of how harsh that lesson can be than watching “Love Is Blind” in its later seasons.

Mind you, smart women and men were making foolish partner choices ages before young men flocked to Andrew Tate, whom Fusco casually namedrops to McNees. In ye olden times, hapless manchildren genuflected before Erik von Markovik, aka Mystery, the high priest of the “seduction community” profiled in 2005 in Neil Strauss’ bestseller “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.” Mystery and his kind mainstreamed the practice of negging, which speculates that insulting a woman is the key to piquing her interest.

But that was when people were obligated to inconvenience themselves by leaving their creature comforts to rawdog the same air as strangers in bars. The simultaneous rise of social media and consumer apps removed that complication. Tinder’s 2012 launch moved the mating hunt onto our phones, and now single servings of strangers can mosey right to your doorstep. As for those less inclined to submit to some digital catalog call, there are and have always been chatrooms, forums, and online gaming communities enabling like-minded people to gather without meeting in the flesh.

“Love Is Blind”’s gamification dangles the promise of a deeper emotional connection, which was especially appealing when lockdowns closed community third spaces and further cemented TV as a dominant cultural hub.

For a few couples, its premise has worked. Season 1 matched Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton. Season 4 united Tiffany Pennywell and Brett Brown; their marriage is still going strong, as are those of fellow participants Chelsea Griffin and Kwame Appiah, and Bliss Poureetezadi and Zack Goytowski.

(Netflix) Emma Betsinger and Mike Gibney in “Love is Blind”

But the show’s marriage track record petered out since, coinciding with a reported rise in global loneliness that hasn’t abated since the world reopened — that, and the mainstreaming of casual misogyny. You may even recognize manosphere dictums sprinkled within otherwise normal-seeming conversations on “Love Is Blind” — comments equating dominance with male desirability and drawing a correlation between a man’s annual salary and his masculinity. Or defining a solid relationship as one where a woman isn’t too much of a bother.

Witness the tortured love story of Emma Betsinger and Mike Gibney. Betsinger is a childless-by-choice adoptee, concerned that her potential children might inherit the cancerous skin condition that required her to undergo multiple surgeries. Gibney, who has never lived with a woman, wants a womb of his own. He proposes to her, intending to change her mind while assuring Betsinger and her loved ones that he isn’t pressuring her. Then he ditches her at the altar.

Day trader Alex Henderson confuses his betrothed Ashley Carpenter with a shifting backstory involving frequent moves and overlapping dating histories, all attributed to his “nomadic lifestyle.” In the same argument where he issues a veiled suggestion that Carpenter abandon her job, he blames his lack of sexual initiation on her menstrual cycle.

Meanwhile, Brittany Wicker says yes to Devonta Anderson soon after they begin dating, but when he discovers she said yes to her wedding dress before they met, he finds that scary and clingy. The slightest hint of conflict sends him marching off in a silent funk, actually. When they call off the wedding, Wicker chooses to see that decision as a relationship pause, while Anderson bids her farewell by saying, “We will be in touch,” with the soulless formality of a Truth Social post sign-off. (“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”)

(Netflix) Brittany Wicker and Devonta Anderson in “Love is Blind”

Survey after survey places statistics behind anecdotal testimonies about our inability to romantically connect. A January 2025 report from the Survey Center on American Life found that 57% of single men and 54% of single women feel pessimistic about finding a suitable partner, although there are more single young men (59%) than similarly unattached young women (44%). You’ve no doubt read about the male loneliness epidemic, but more recent findings by Pew Research Center show that young women are equally as lonely, with 16% of men and 15% of women reporting feeling “lonely or isolated all or most of the time.”

Some theorize that women more effectively cultivated their alone time during the pandemic, choosing to develop new skills or prioritize self-care.

Of course, based on what Henderson, Gibney, Anderson and Fusco claim, it’s not that they lack for a social life but, rather, a similarly disposed person who offers none of the conflict inherent to any relationship with a real live human.

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Against all odds, Season 10 yielded two marriages. Christine Hamilton and Dr. Vic St. John got engaged so quickly and exhibited so little tension that people called them adorable but boring or, worse, ringers. They were spared the unease of the Cabo San Lucas couples retreat and sent to Malibu instead due to budgetary restrictions and their lack of triangular tension.

Their relative normalcy, and that of fellow marrieds Amber Morrison and Jordan Faeth, is a soothing contrast to the textbook Fusco fiasco and the rest of the season’s red flag bearers. But it’s getting increasingly apparent that this experiment’s purpose isn’t to see whether love is blind, but whether there’s any hope of finding it at all. In America, we should say.

The good news is that the show’s format has been replicated in many other countries. Our domestic selections may be going the way of Fusco, but I hear Sweden is for lovers. Maybe I need to watch that version to find out.

The “Love Is Blind” 10th season reunion episode debuts at 6 p.m. PT/ 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, March 11, on Netflix.

The post Why the “Love Is Blind” experiment was doomed from the start appeared first on Salon.com.

Determined not to be left behind in the contest for maximal self-ownership, Donald Trump was up early on Saturday morning to issue, even by his standards, an incoherent stream-of-unconsciousness Truth Social post. It came complete with classic Trump moves: upside-down run-on sentences, the leaders of unidentified nations (no doubt holding back tears) saying “Thank you President Trump” and a self-canceling proclamation that Iran had “surrendered to its Middle East neighbors” and was now “THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,” but was also, somehow, unlikely to surrender or collapse “for many decades” into the future. I’m not much good at the poker table, but I believe that’s called a tell.

Life is too short to spend much of it troubled by the unbelievable stupidity of the people supposedly in charge of this country. We give each other these lectures, right? Stay hydrated, touch grass, see your friends, tell the people you love that you love them. Still though: How did we get here?

Unfortunately, there’s a real war happening to real people, including more than 150 children who were apparently killed when a U.S. missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran on Feb. 28. So let’s get back to Hegseth, a classic example of the MAGA-sphere’s sociopathic inability to perceive other people as real or other perspectives as potentially legitimate. He somehow managed not to start pumping iron or drop to the stage for push-ups during his press appearance rather than using words, those known tools of the woke mind virus and trans agenda. It might also have been a tell for the “secretary of war” — now in charge of a war that isn’t a war — to loudly insist that the greatest military power in the history of the world is “winning” against an adversary with one-fourth its population, severely damaged military and civilian infrastructure, and an economy crippled by sanctions, mismanagement and environmental crisis. Who was he trying to convince?

First and foremost, of course, there’s the only audience that matters: Hegseth’s boss at the top of the worm-eaten executive branch, the guy whose skin appears to literally be rotting off his frame and who claims not to have “the yips” about using ground troops in a war of indefinite duration that was launched on invented premises with constantly shifting objectives.

Another Hegseth target was surely the mainstream media, which has been purged from the Pentagon and has been so badly burned by this administration’s relentless lies that it’s now disconcertingly reluctant to cheerlead for a war the public doesn’t want. (We can of course exempt Bari Weiss and CBS News, still boldly chasing the pseudo-centrist, pro-MAGA “vibe shift” that expired six months ago.) And let’s not forget the spineless but increasingly restless Republicans in the House and Senate, who can see the mounting daily cost of Trump’s Iran war — which by now could easily have funded the Obamacare subsidies they voted down — and who already fear an electoral Waterloo in November.

If Hegseth were capable of self-awareness, we might suggest that he was striking macho-man poses on the deck of a sinking ship in an effort to convince himself that his personal brand, along with the rest of the MAGA enterprise, wasn’t headed straight for the historical dumpster. Let’s put it this way: This recycled Fox News frat boy, whose bottomless stupidity and moral emptiness make the now-cashiered Kristi Noem look like a nuanced thinker, seems to be experiencing doubts he cannot quite suppress. If that’s how it’s going, then “America” isn’t winning anything, regardless of what does or doesn’t happen in Tehran.

We shouldn’t skate past the loaded question that lies beneath the surface of Hegseth’s bluster: Is the U.S. truly in the driver’s seat for this misguided war, or did Trump and his underlings get lured into this conflict by Bibi Netanyahu? Different things can simultaneously be true here; it’s not exactly a yes-or-no question. American neocons have longed to take down the Iranian regime since the early years of that nation’s Islamic revolution, and Trump’s decision to go to war represents an unexpected victory for foreign-policy hawks like John Bolton, his now-despised first-term national security adviser. Netanyahu has urged every American president since Bill Clinton to do this, and until now they have all resisted. That said, the increasingly toxic hard-right Israeli government and its relentless American supporters, as I wrote last week, have exercised a persistent long-term distortion effect that has reshaped U.S. policy and both political parties, and is only now starting to be decoupled.

It would be foolish to make confident predictions about what will happen in this war, except to say that nearly all potential outcomes are likely to create much bigger problems down the road. I make no claims to military expertise, but here’s my sophisticated meta-analysis of what actual military experts say: Nobody knows anything. There’s a cautious consensus that U.S. and Israeli forces are now playing beat-the-clock against a possible missile gap: They hope to destroy Iran’s extensive arsenal of ballistic missiles before the U.S., Israel and the Gulf states start to run out of expensive Interceptor missiles and other air-defense tech, which may or may not be in short supply.

You can find experts who argue that the semi-decapitated Iranian regime is close to collapse and searching for an exit strategy right next to experts who argue that Trump and his advisers have blundered into a Heffalump trap lovingly constructed from their own arrogance and moral blindness — with lots of help from Netanyahu — and will soon need to make excuses for another U.S. humiliation on the global stage. Many Salon readers, and many Americans in general (if we go by opinion polls), are likely to find the latter scenario disturbingly plausible.

But we don’t need to know exactly what will happen in this war to conclude that it was a bad idea, based on bad premises, that will lead to more bad things. As for the pundits and think-tankers and accused thought-leaders who once seduced themselves into supporting George W. Bush’s post-9/11 wars and are now repeating the exercise, like traumatized mice returning to the spot in the maze where the cheese used to be, what is there to say? The intellectual class has never been immune to the pathological American conviction that history is bunk.

There’s a painful well of comedy to be mined, as observed above, in the Trump administration’s ‘roid-ragey, AI-slop-infused war propaganda. In this case, the war itself is propaganda, a desperate effort to shift the narrative away from the Epstein files, the massively unpopular ICE crackdown and the stagnating economy, among other symptoms of the regime’s political implosion. None of this is entirely new: Since at least the Vietnam era, America’s attempts to project strength on the global stage have often looked like embarrassing weakness. But the shameless bigotry, delusion and narcissism of the MAGA regime acts as a force multiplier, revealing and accelerating the declining empire’s worst tendencies.

If military experts are perplexed about how things are going in the Middle East, foreign-policy experts are not. A survey of 949 international relations scholars conducted by researchers at William & Mary and the University of Georgia found that nearly 87 percent opposed the U.S. decision to attack Iran, while 81 percent believed the attacks would “probably” or “definitely” make the U.S. less secure. Financial markets have declined sharply since the war began while crude oil prices have spiked, from less than $70 a barrel to more than $90. More to the point for Donald Trump, gasoline prices in the U.S. are now higher than they were before the 2024 election, which might give him the “yips” in a way that the deaths of human beings never will.

American war-planners, it would seem, never considered the possibility that Iran would respond with “a massive and escalating bombardment” of its Gulf neighbors, which George Washington University scholar Marc Lynch describes as a clear and coordinated strategy meant to inflict “global economic pain to build pressure for a cease-fire.” Autocratic leaders of the prosperous Gulf states, Lynch writes, viewed Trump as a friend but now feel a “sense of betrayal” that he launched a war alongside Israel without consulting them, threatening their perceived “immunity from regional politics” and leaving them open to “catastrophic fallout” no matter how the war ends. Those sultans and emirs and sheikhs are learning “that the United States cannot be relied upon to protect them,” a historical lesson that counts double when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, who has no actual friends and no loyalty to anyone.

Trying to look manly and tough when your entire regime, from the top on down, consists of shifty characters with a wide range of obvious personality disorders might seem like a categorical error. But it’s a core principle of MAGA ideology, which teaches believers that there is no truth and that any level of cowardly and shameless behavior in service to the leader is a show of strength.

There’s no point in trying to catalog all the excuses Trump’s minions have offered about why they started this war and what its goals are. Plan A was threadbare, and they never had a Plan B. His followers don’t care, and the rest of us are inured to the endless lies. On Friday, Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” landing the phrase on the front of the New York Times. Shortly afterward, Karoline Leavitt explained that away as a metaphor: Maybe the Iranians would somewhat surrender, sort of unconditionally, without knowing they were doing that. These pathological losers are making America look like a failed state before the whole world, which might be funny if it weren’t terrifying.

The post Behind Trump’s war fever lies profound weakness appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump and his handpicked team of the worst people you can imagine (his incompetent, mewling kakistocracy) are gleefully attacking women, immigrants, universities, public education, scientists, LGBTQ+ folks and our historic allies, as well as nonpartisan experts in economics and governance and foreign affairs — everything, in fact, that has made America creative, prosperous and secure.

It’s gotten so dire under Trump that good people of all sorts are leaving the country in numbers not seen since the Depression.

Another obvious irony is that MAGA’s self-styled supreme leader of this Christian white nationalist movement is no Christian. As a serial sexual predator, a habitual perpetrator of fraud, the most relentless liar on the planet and a lifelong supplicant of Mammon, Trump is by every measure anything but a follower of Jesus Christ. (While we are pointing out incongruities, it should be noted that with his very weird daily troweling-on of pancake makeup, he’s also only rarely “white.”)

As reported by Jonathan Larsen on his Substack, “The F**king News,” some U.S. military commanders have been telling their troops that the war on Iran is a Christian war. So it is more than fair to critique these so-called Christian leaders.

It hardly seems worth taking the time to pick apart Trump’s performative Christianity. He’s the guy who hawks Bibles and yet cannot name even one line of scripture he admires. (It’s too personal, you see. Oh, and he’s “probably equally” both an Old Testament and New Testament guy, 50–50.)

As a cultural Christian — I’m the grandson of a minister and was raised Presbyterian, and was active while our daughters were young — I’m not given to quoting scripture. Religious belief is personal, and I don’t appreciate it when people evangelize to me or, you know, try to write their beliefs into public policy. But this passage from Proverbs (6:16–19) is uncanny suited to our moment:

There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflicts in the community.

A quick check online shows that versions of that have been floating around in various online memes for some years. (For instance, back in 2019, Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, was attacked by Trump supporters for posting the passage without comment.)

In the version I saw recently, above the verses is a photo of Trump, showing off some of the haughtiest eyes you’ve ever seen (imagine one of those tough-guy official portraits inspired by his mugshot, or the glare he gives a reporter who dares to ask him a real question). But, gosh, the manchild leader of the everyday American found himself a millionaire at the age of eight, so I guess he has an excuse for overall haughtiness, compared to the likes of you and me. He simply never learned better.

I may be only a cultural Christian, but as an old friend told me recently, she could go for more cultural Christians these days.

The post Trump’s misguided “Christian” war is anything but appeared first on Salon.com.

Days before Storrie’s episode, The Athletic announced that Minnesota Wild defenseman Quinn Hughes — fresh off besting Team Canada to win Olympic gold with the U.S. men’s hockey team in Milan — would join Storrie on the show before heading over to appear on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Monday.

In another reality, Hughes’ cameo would have been viewed as a nice tip of the hat to the world of “Heated Rivalry,” a romantic drama about hockey players from rival teams – one Canadian, one American – falling in love. But in this darkest of timelines, Hughes and his brother, Jack, were caught in a widely circulated video showing them partying with FBI director Kash Patel and laughing as Donald Trump made a dig at the U.S. women’s hockey team, who also won gold.

“I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team, you do know that?” Trump said after inviting the men to visit the White House. If he didn’t, he added, he’d “probably be impeached.” At this, America’s hockey dudes laughed dutifully and dude-ily, unaware of how disgusting people would find this tidbit of locker room talk.

None of this should have been Connor Storrie’s problem. But the “Heated Rivalry” of it all provided an opportunity for reputational laundering nobody at NBC or with Team USA could pass up.

So on “SNL,” as Storrie’s monologue winds down, we see the Hughes brothers take the stage to polite applause and a few hoots. A little banter ensues, making way for the real surprise guests: fellow Olympic hockey champions Megan Keller and team captain Hilary Knight. The audience roars as Keller and Knight flank Storrie before Knight jokes, “It was gonna be just us, but we thought we’d invite the guys too.”

“We thought we’d give them a little moment to shine,” Keller adds.

See what “SNL” did there?

An uncritical viewing designates this as another “all’s well that ends well” gag. Whether it came together after producers took stock of the rising fury or was planned all along is irrelevant; we’re supposed to appreciate that “SNL” made a show of giving all the gold medalists their deserved spotlight. Regardless of the media’s outsized focus on the men’s victory (“The Boys of Team USA,” crows a Free Press headline prominently featured on CBS News’ website) and this brazen example of how women’s sports accomplishments are relegated to a lower status that men’s, Lorne Michaels is once again here to remind us that the whole mess is laughable and all things are equal.

After all, this is men’s hockey’s first team gold since 1980’s “Miracle on Ice.” And the women? “The last time we did that was two whole Olympics ago,” Knight deadpans.

So yet again, Michaels and the “Saturday Night Live” producers placed an up-and-coming performer in the role of scandal laundering.

I’d argue Ayo Edebiri got a rawer deal in 2024 when she was pressed into setting up former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who opposed marriage equality and transgender rights, with a joke about Haley’s refusal to cite slavery as the Civil War’s primary cause. Even so, Storrie has to figuratively shine up a team of athletes who probably never watched his show in front of the millions of fans who ardently do.

(Will Heath/NBC) Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie on “Saturday Night Live”

Michaels has long responded to criticisms about “SNL” being left-leaning (which it has been, historically) or humanizing odious far-right figures (which it does more often these days) by claiming that his show is politically neutral.

If neutrality equals toothlessness, I have no rebuttal to that assessment. “Saturday Night Live” has never demonstratively risen to the challenge of satirizing Trump or any of the treacherous absurdity he’s foisted on us. Even when Alec Baldwin capitalized on his celebrity to poke at Trump’s orange peel during his first presidency, it wasn’t up to the task. The show has offered even less of a challenge during this more unhinged second administration.

But the Olympic hockey incursion on a night that should have entirely belonged to Storrie is an apt metaphor for the show’s constant slips and stumbles on what it thinks of as political middle ground. Keller and Knight were rewarded with proximity to Storrie and the best punchlines, but neither Quinn nor Jack Hughes had to indicate in any way that they had joined America’s president in slighting them.

“Saturday Night Live” will always be a safe space for politicians who don’t mind laughing at themselves. That includes objectively horrendous people. Anyone lampooned with a scintilla of brutality knows that an appearance can temporarily inoculate against accusations of humorlessness. In the worst cases, it gives the audience one last chance to laugh in someone’s face before they vanish into obscurity.

For this reason, one of the smartest moves Sarah Palin made was showing up during one of Tina Fey’s dead-ringer impressions to mark the end of her time as a vice presidential candidate. This season, Fey dropped by to impersonate freshly ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Who knows, she may reprise that role this weekend when Ryan Gosling hosts.

But I wouldn’t put it past Michaels to persuade Noem herself to pop in and lay a few aw-shucks jokey-jokes on we, the people. Like everyone else in Trump’s circle, she is just human after all . . . of those Immigration and Customs Enforcement kidnappings and killings she oversaw.

Olympic athletes, in contrast, are meant to be apolitical figures representing their home nation’s highest ideals. The circumstances leading to this PR black eye for the men’s hockey team are anything but – and a sharper, braver comedy show would have done a smarter job of acknowledging that while moving the biscuit across the ice.

“Saturday Night Live” hasn’t been that show for some time – probably not since the last time the men’s hockey team won gold. But its ineffectual japing, and Michaels’ inability to help himself when it comes to normalizing repugnant behavior in the name of chasing the zeitgeist, makes it a popular stop on the image rehab express. Since Quinn and Jack’s mother, Ellen Hughes, did her part by dropping by “Today” in her capacity as a USA women’s hockey player development consultant, so must her sons make the NBC rounds.

Despite their enthusiastic appearance at the State of the Union address – the women’s team was also invited but declined, citing scheduling conflicts –  I’m guessing the men’s team does not want history to remember them as Trump acolytes. Some have offered their version of repentance for their behavior, while Jack Hughes, a center and alternate captain for the New Jersey Devils, could only muster a “You’re in the moment” excuse when The Athletic asked him about the situation. “It is what it is now,” he said a couple of days before his “SNL” appearance, “but we have so much respect for the women’s team, they have so much respect for us. We’re all just proud Americans and we’re happy that we both swept the Olympics.”

Others have asked for the public’s grace, including women’s hockey champion Abbey Murphy, who addressed the controversy on a recent Barstool Sports hockey podcast episode by saying, “We never felt anything bad from them . . . it’s sad they even have to apologize for anything.”

Regardless, the U.S. men’s hockey team became synonymous with the standardized misogyny from which “Heated Rivalry” offers a refuge.

Bringing Keller and Knight onstage somewhat sweetened the awkward position in which the show placed Storrie, but it doesn’t entirely ameliorate the White House’s intrusion into both hockey teams’ Olympic glory. Instead, the bit reduced a palpable slight to just another funny slip-up.

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Did any of this take away from Storrie’s “Saturday Night Live” debut? In the main, not so much. “Heated Rivalry” stans applauded the actor’s good-natured handling of the situation and flipped over the unannounced but entirely expected appearances by his co-star and best friend, Hudson Williams.

Not much else about the episode was as memorable as these treats, which means “SNL” successfully washed the dirt of another scandal out of our newsfeeds yet again,

The part that continues to stink is that the show used both an actor who portrays a queer hero and women’s excellence to scrub away our indignance without requiring their male counterparts to lend any muscle at all. That Quinn and Jack Hughes agreed to be the butt of the joke by simply standing there is enough in the show’s non-partisan judgment. But without their presence, the audience would have understood that Olympic gold shines just as brightly when women hockey champions are wearing it, especially in the pleasing glow of a much-adored star like Storrie.

“Saturday Night Live” airs at 8:30 p.m. PT/ 11:30 p.m. ET Saturdays on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.

The post “Saturday Night Live” has a middle ground problem appeared first on Salon.com.

By “the thing,” I don’t mean that he wore a shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist and stuffed a small floral arrangement into his pants, though he did do that. No, the thing Morrissey did was complain — into a microphone, from an enormous stage, to a sold-out crowd — about how unfair it is that he has been silenced. “The fact that I’m on this stage is an incredible accomplishment in itself,” he said. “Because, as you know, the jealous bit*hes tried to get rid of me.”

The crowd roared; the band members directly behind Morrissey tried very hard not to smirk. “But thanks to you [crowd whoops] and thanks to me [crowd screams] I’m still here.” Then the drummer counted them in and god’s favorite messy bit*h clambered down off the cross for “Now My Heart Is Full.” The crowd continued to go wild for the remainder of his set, which ended with a full arena singing along with the closing number, The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

2026 is, on paper, a big year for Morrissey. “Make-Up Is a Lie,” his 14th solo album, dropped on Friday; his tour in support of it, despite a predictable flurry of cancelled shows, is underway; and it’s the 40th anniversary of The Smiths’ breakthrough album, “The Queen Is Dead.” But as his lament to the O2 arena’s sold-out crowd made clear, it’s simply another year in which Moz will revel in victimhood and rail against his legion of music-business enemies: The thought-police punters, the overwoke music press and a record industry so united in thwarting his genius that simply being onstage is an accomplishment.

(Gus Stewart/Redferns/Getty Images) Morrissey performs at the O2 Arena in London, England

“Being a former Morrissey fan is like being trapped in an abusive relationship with your first great love. No matter what he does or says, you somehow dust yourself down and immediately hark back to the bliss of early discovery,” wrote Kevin Maher in a recent Times of London essay. Within the piece itself, Maher makes it clear that the only way to tell the difference between a former Morrissey fan and a current Morrissey fan is to be caught in the act of a jangly reverie that slingshots us back to simpler days, when Steven Patrick Morrissey was the wordy, literate, excruciatingly sincere Pope of Mope.

We all know better, of course. “Never meet your heroes” isn’t the shibboleth of Morrissey fans, since the 66-year-old singer is known for unfailing kindness to fans. The warning is more along the lines of “Never read your hero’s political opinions, but also good luck trying to avoid hearing about them.”

“Make-Up Is a Lie” underscores perfectly the widening gulf between being a fan of Morrissey and rooting for the man himself. It is a collection of tracks that underachieves in every category other than self-obsessed bellyaching. A Paste review pulls no punches: “Morrissey really has outdone himself with this one, shattering all preconceived notions of his modern mediocrity. We expected something anodyne and forgettable, but what we received was far worse: an actively terrible album. Do not listen to it.”

In other words, the album isn’t bad because of its creator’s political views; it’s bad because it’s bad. The title track is a tinny synth beat over which he sings the phrase with varying levels of dramatic fillips. The cover of Roxy Music’s “Amazona” strips out all the edge from the original’s jagged freak-out. The single “Notre-Dame” is a conspiracy theory whose scant lyrics are so repetitive that it’s tempting to think that they’re a comment on the hamster-wheel mind of an obsessed truther, in this case, one convinced that the 2019 Paris cathedral fire was the work of Islamic terrorists. Would the inherent anti-Islam sentiment be less offensive if “Notre-Dame” were a banger? Not to me. But the whole production is hackneyed enough to suggest that Morrissey had nothing in the chamber beyond a not-at-all-cryptic assertion of “We know who killed you.”

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It’s notable that the few people who have applauded both “Make-Up Is a Lie” and Moz’s onstage pity parties seem to be flying the flag in hopes of — say it with me — triggering the woke mob. “Morrissey really is the last rock rebel,” swooned Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. “Being at The O2 felt electrifying. We knew we were in the presence of a man frowned upon by the self-righteous. A man who through sheer bloody-mindedness managed to escape the clutches of that most ravenous of beasts: cancel culture.”

But apart from a few conservative-is-the-new-punk dorks, most of Morrissey’s fans aren’t interested in using his enduring popularity as a cudgel against their ideological foes. They know he leans towards racist and has a martyr complex, but they also reject the notion that continuing to listen to him is tantamount to co-signing his histrionics. They’ve been separating the art from the artist since they first realized that Morrissey was a jerk, years ago.

Corey, 54, recalls that, in his middle school, “people I hung out with loved The Cure, and part of that was because Robert Smith was lovable — he was the cuddly goth. We loved The Smiths, but were we like, ‘Oh, that Morrissey, he’s so endearing?’ I don’t think so. He was a charming as*hole.” My friend Rose confirms, without hesitating, over text: “I do not like him. I never did. But I love the music of The Smiths. His B.S. won’t stop me listening.”

I recently revisited the letters sent by Morrissey to U.K. music papers like NME and Melody Maker in the late 1970s, which I recall reading as a teen when they were printed in Spin, or maybe Details. More than a decade before Nick Hornby wrote “High Fidelity,” Steven Morrissey was pure, uncut record-shop guy: supercilious, brimming with confidence in the superiority of his own taste — and also, mortifyingly, too much of a fan to be cool about it, a reminder that fan is an abbreviation of a longer word.

In these letters, Morrissey is spoiling for a fight, needlessly combative in platforming his faves and scorning everyone from Aerosmith to The Ramones to The Police for the crime of not being the New York Dolls. One of his rare raves, for The Buzzcocks, closed with a bit*hy flounce: “Both this letter and The Buzzcocks themselves will probably be filed and forgotten. But for now, they are the best kick-ass rock band in the country. Go and see them first and then you may have the audacity to contradict me, you stupid sluts.”

These writings are Morrissey’s Rosetta Stone: More than any snotty interview or self-flagellating lyric, they are proof that Morrissey did not “become” anything. He was always the guy who wanted to poke at people and pick petty fights and stick a hand right next to your face and insist I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you! An edgelord. A proto-troll. But doctor, I am Bigmouth.

Rose asks if I saw a thing on Threads: The daughter-in-law of a Boomer actress posted that, during COVID, Morrissey left a note at her mother-in-law’s house. This combination of phrases — “a letter,” “COVID,” “mother-in-law” — brings several possibilities to mind, none of them good. Was Morrissey going door-to-door with vaccine-denial talking points? Was the note an anti-immigrant rant? Was the mother-in-law a woke culture crusader in league with Morrissey’s many industry foes?

The thread was written on March 3 by Mindy Stern, a Los Angeles writer whose mother-in-law was British actress Samantha Eggar. “On the evening of January 13th, 2021, still in high COVID, I dropped off food at [Eggar’s] doorstep and went home,” she wrote. “About 15 minutes later, she texted us this picture and asked if I had also left this at her door as a joke.” There’s a CD of Morrissey’s 2020 album, “I Am Not a Dog on a Chain,” with a handwritten, all-caps note that reads “Hello Samantha, Would you be agreeable to tea — with me? Morrissey.”

“WTF, had Morrissey actually been at her house??” Stern wrote. She and her husband asked to check the Ring footage and sure enough, there he was, wearing a blue sweater and a mask that appeared to have cats printed on it. His body language wasn’t Stage Morrissey, but the anxious, boyish hovering of someone who’s spent years wanting to ask one of his movie-star faves to tea and just realized it was now or never. (Eggar died in 2025 at 86).

(Taylor Hill/Getty Images for Morrissey) Morrissey

“As you can imagine, we were out of our minds,” Stern continued. “Screaming, singing, imagining their meet up . . . I mean, f*ck yes. For context, my MIL had boyfriends with names like Kris Kristofferson and Ed Ruscha. She was less impressed [and] actually annoyed he had the gumption to show up unannounced. Announced shmannouneced! It’s Morrissey! She agreed to listen to his music, so we sent her a “best of” in the hopes she’d meet him.”

And then, the kicker: “An hour or so passed, she texted us: if he’s so miserable, why doesn’t he just kill himself already?”

It’s a perfect Morrissey story. It’s got mystery, surprise and humor. Most importantly, it’s got rejection. Morrissey probably did long to have tea with Eggar. But the pathos of not getting to do so, of asking and being turned down, is so much truer to his indelible self-conception — a bit more proof that though he has gotten so much already (fame, adoration, legacy) he can’t get what he wants this time.

It’s also a clue to why people who thoroughly loathe the person Morrissey is now — and, arguably, the person he’s always been — aren’t waiting around for him to do better. For all of his narcissism and tiresome bluster and woe-is-me wallowing, he’s always known exactly what it is to have the fevered, irrational devotion of a fan. His whinging and lashing out have made for diminishing returns, creatively, but damn if he isn’t consistent.

And I’d argue that people don’t continue to be fans because they suspect he’s going to ever do anything as good as “The Queen Is Dead” or “Your Arsenal.” They don’t think he deserves endless chances to prove that he’s not as big a Boomer cliché as Eric Clapton or Van Morrison. Figuring out what musical icons are worth holding on to comes down to maintaining an equilibrium of brilliance and bulls*t. The man who once sang “I’d rather be famous than righteous or holy” always knew what he was about, even if the rest of us didn’t.

The post Morrissey was always a jerk appeared first on Salon.com.

Two weeks from today will mark the 23rd anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq; it brings a profound feeling of déjà-vu for me.

On the night of March 19, 2003, I sat at home watching the news — tense, sad and angry. I held pen and paper in my hand, ordering my children to be quiet as they moved between playing and watching the screen. I had skipped dinner with them and my wife, and it was not yet bedtime for the little ones.

We were watching CNN. Like other American networks, they had positioned cameras on the rooftops of the Al-Mansur and Palestine hotels in Baghdad.

At first, the feeling was eerie; the cameras peered into a city with dimmed lights, shrouded in silence.

Then, at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time (4:35 a.m. in Baghdad), the Athan al-Fajr, or dawn prayer, suddenly rose from the darkness of the Baghdad feed. From the numerous mosques along the Tigris, the sound on the TV was a layered, overlapping chorus of multiple mu’adhins. It was melodic and haunting, even as the world waited for the “shock and awe” to begin.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in New York and Aaron Brown, on the ground in Baghdad, acknowledged the sound directly:

Blitzer: “Aaron, right now, we’re not hearing air raid sirens. We’re hearing the call to early morning prayers, the first prayer of the day for Muslims. Maybe I’ll be quiet for a second and you might be able to make it out behind me. Just listen for a second.”

Brown: “As you look at Baghdad, it is eerie… you don’t see any sense of panic in the city, any sense of movement in the city, or frankly any sense of war in the city.”

About an hour later, as the first strikes hit, Brown highlighted the surreal nature of this split-screen reality: “It is hard to imagine what it would be like to live in this city at a time like this, to know what had happened and what is likely to happen.”

When President George W. Bush appeared live, nearly an hour later, CNN used a “picture-in-picture” format, which was still somewhat unusual. On one side was the president’s face; on the other was the live, active bombardment of Baghdad.

Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq had just expired.

Bush declared: “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

I stayed awake all night. My children were eventually put to bed, but my wife stayed up to watch with me for a few hours, her expression stoic.

It was too late for me to send reports for the following day’s edition of Asharq Al-Awsat, my London-based Arabic-language newspaper. Communication was not as advanced as it is today; the paper did not yet have an online edition, and we still used the telephone for routine contact.

When I went to my Washington office early the next morning, I saw parts of Saddam Hussein’s defiant speech, in which he declared: “The criminal, reckless little Bush and his aides committed this crime that he was threatening to commit against Iraq and humanity.”

My boss in London usually called me right after the daily reporters’ meeting, which drew up a blueprint for the day’s coverage.

When I picked up the phone, I began to weep loudly, repeating: “Al-Tatar dakhalo Baghdad” (“The Tatars have entered Baghdad”)

I must explain that the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols (or Tatars) remains a traumatic event deeply engraved in the Arab and Muslim mind as a definitive historical defeat. My boss was no less saddened, but our deadlines would not wait and we began to construct our coverage of the invasion.

During the period between that initial attack and the U.S. ground invasion, I covered press conferences at the White House and the State Department, and also experienced personal encounters, or perhaps confrontations, with Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Powell had just returned from New York after his now-infamous presentation to the U.N. Security Council, where he held up a small vial of white powder to illustrate the alleged danger of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons. “My colleagues,” he insisted, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” We now know that all of that was false, to Powell’s everlasting shame.

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I was one of five Arab correspondents invited to meet with Secretary Powell in his office. While seated to his immediate left at a conference table, I asked a question that clearly irritated him. He looked at me directly and said, “Your questions seem to be more about Islam; this has nothing to do with religion.” His tone remained civil and diplomatic, but the underlying friction was clear.

By that time, I had already reached the conclusion that the Bush administration’s  “War on Terror” was, in many ways, a military campaign against Muslims in general

The following week, I interviewed Condoleezza Rice at the White House, alongside another Arab journalist. Rice was a primary architect of the Iraq invasion, famously warning about Saddam’s supposed nuclear program: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

I irritated her as well by “playing the race card.” I implied that, as a Black woman, she was an unlikely choice to lead the call for the invasion of a country in what we used to call the Third World. I also mentioned that Black American soldiers would certainly be among the casualties.

My déjà-vu experience today derives from that same kind of “shock and awe.” Indeed, the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran is much larger than the initial stage of the Iraq war. Another American president is declaring, on dubious or threadbare evidence, that another Muslim country is endangering U.S. security.

The tragic cycle of history feels poised to repeat itself. America has eliminated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just as it eliminated Saddam Hussein two decades ago, but just as much uncertainty hovers over what lies ahead. This current escalation suggests that the U.S. war machine is once again ignoring the human cost of “decapitation strikes,” as we saw with the apparent American missile strike on a Tehran girls’ school. For someone who wept at seeing the modern Tatars enter Baghdad, the prospect of a similar fate befalling Tehran is more than a strategic policy shift. It is the return of a recurring but never-banished nightmare about one civilization attacking another, driven by blind hatred.

The post Trump continues the “war on terror”: First Baghdad, now Tehran appeared first on Salon.com.

During the 2016 campaign the country was still dealing with fairly regular terrorist attacks from followers of ISIS, and despite Trump’s professed disdain for the leadership that took the U.S. into Afghanistan and Iraq, it was clear when you listened closely to him that he was contemptuous of their apparent unwillingness to take the gloves off. He was never some kind of peacenik. After all, Trump confessed to being a big fan of torture, casually saying, “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your a*s I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.” 

He repeatedly stated his belief that the U.S. should have “taken” Iraq’s oil. His supposed isolationism was nothing more than a crude way of differentiating himself from the decisions of his predecessors. 

Trump was talked out of military action by his advisers more than once during his first term, and he seemed more or less content with ordering assassinations and limited bombing strikes. But there was one big decision he made in 2019 that telegraphed and previewed his true beliefs about warfare: his pardoning, over the strenuous objections of the military brass, of service members and contractors accused of war crimes.

One was known to shoot at unarmed civilians to “make them afraid” and was serving a 19-year sentence for ordering the murder of two unarmed Afghan villagers. Another was awaiting trial on charges of killing a suspected Afghan bomb maker. Then there was the Navy SEAL who had been accused and acquitted of murder but was convicted of posing with a mutilated corpse of an Iraqi soldier. Over the objections of top SEAL commanders, Trump reversed his demotion and invited him to a Christmas party at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump made his philosophy known in October 2019 when he tweeted, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” At the time, it seemed odd that he tagged “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth in the post. But Hegseth had been publicly and privately lobbying for the pardons, and he and Trump had a meeting of the minds on the subject.

Aside from all Hegseth’s character flaws and a lack of experience that should have disqualified him for the job, it was largely that episode that horrified so many political observers when Trump nominated him as defense secretary. Here was someone who openly supported war criminals, defended the barbarity at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and believed torture to be justified. 

Now that Trump has finally let his warmongering flag fly the way he always wanted to, we are seeing exactly how dangerous this partnership may end up being. 

Hegseth’s intentions as secretary were never secret. Since his confirmation he has crusaded to rid the Pentagon of “wokeness,” by which he means any desire for diversity, intolerance of racism and bigotry, and adherence to the rules of war. He has purged the military’s top brass of many of its Black and women officers, and he took an ax to the Judge Advocate General’s office, which administers the military justice system. All of this was done in service of his aim of returning the Pentagon to a “warrior ethos” — which is really nothing more than a simple-minded call to be more macho and violent. The fact that he chose to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War should settle any dispute about his worldview.

Now that Trump has launched a growing war with Iran, which he seems convinced will result in Middle East peace — something he announced he had achieved with the Gaza ceasefire deal — we are about to see how this warrior ethos works in practice. 

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From the carnage inflicted on Indigenous and enslaved peoples to barbarity in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war — celebrated repeatedly by Trump during the 2016 campaign — and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, America has plenty of blood on its hands. Atrocities have been a feature of warfare since time began. But over the centuries, humans developed rules of warfare designed to, at least in theory, minimize the blood-letting. Since the horrors of the 20th-century’s two world wars and the development of technology that can deliver mass injury and slaughter, it has become more important than ever. 

America used to at least give lip service to the rules of war, if only for the self-serving reasons that it would protect their own troops. But Trump and Hegseth’s overwhelming hubris seems to preclude even that as a concern, with the defense secretary callously dismissing the deaths of American service members and the president shrugging off the possibility of reprisals on American soil. 

On Feb. 28, just as the war had started, an airstrike hit an elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab, near the adjacent naval base operated by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. More than 175 civilians were reportedly killed, many of them children.  According to the New York Times, the available evidence suggests it was a U.S. missile that hit the school. The administration says they are investigating. 

No one has implied this was a targeted attack. One assumes that it was a mistake resulting in “collateral damage,” as the military likes to call it. But it is a perfect example of the kind of stories we are going to start seeing juxtaposed with Hegseth’s grotesque rhetoric in these first few days of the war. He has cheered the conflict as having “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.” The Israelis, he said, are “good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” Hegseth’s irresponsible commentary will have the effect of robbing the U.S. military of any benefit of the doubt, as it well should. 

America had already squandered most of its moral authority with the Iraq debacle, and Trump’s paeans to peace notwithstanding, it’s clear that we’ve now embraced a mercenary foreign policy in which there are no rules nor restraint. The president said as much in January when he was asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” 

It appears he meant it.

The post Trump and Hegseth are writing their own rules of war appeared first on Salon.com.

Crucial “Scream 7” narrative details began circulating as far back as late 2025. By January, entire plot summaries were floating around social media, while the movie-logging platform Letterboxd was review-bombed with leaks and poor ratings. Boycotters were not afraid to go low. To them, it was an eye for an eye — well-earned justice after the film’s production company, Spyglass Media, fired the franchise’s new final girl, Melissa Barrera, after Barrera posted on social media in support of Palestine in late 2023. And as public sentiment has continued to shift toward Barrera’s view over the last two-and-a-half years, support for the boycott intensified, backed by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Film Workers for Palestine and more. Almost overnight, “Scream 7” became a politicized film. And as is the case with most politicized issues these days, the boycott was met with its own stalwart opposition, dead set on supporting the film not just despite the boycott, but because of it. While there’s no doubt the boycott irreversibly shifted public perception of the franchise in its rebooted state, “Scream 7” managed a record-breaking opening weekend gross of $63.6 million, the franchise’s largest before inflation is adjusted. Like it or not, “Scream 7” was proof that all films — even the goriest, silliest slashers — have the potential to be political.

(Paramount Pictures) Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox in “Scream 7”

Not so, if you believe filmmaker Wim Wenders, who carelessly expressed the opposite in the opening press conference of last month’s Berlin International Film Festival. A journalist at the presser began by mentioning the Berlinale’s institutional loyalty “with the people of Iran and Ukraine.” He then teed up a question about the German government’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Gaza, asking, “Do you, as a jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?” A bit of an unfair question, as jury member Ewa Puszczyńska noted, but an unsurprisingly unfair one given the culture we live in. Nevertheless, Wenders interjected with a rash answer. “We have to stay out of politics. We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of the people, not the work of politicians.”

Though there is some nuance to Wenders’ statement, it rang entirely false and uncaring in a world replete with politicism, and shrouded the festival’s proceedings in a muck of controversy. Film is political because it affects and reflects the average person’s habits and quality of life in the same ways policy does. Right now, the tides are mid-shift. The ground is unstable. When studio mergers are set to change film as we know it, and the seventh film in a relatively innocuous horror franchise can become a political lightning rod, cinema has never been more immediately and imperatively political.

Wenders should understand the impactful potential of cinema better than most. Most known and loved for 1984’s “Paris, Texas,” the filmmaker has more recently devoted his work to nonfiction storytelling. In 2014’s “The Salt of the Earth,” Wenders chronicled the contemporary work of internationally revered photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who dedicated his life to documenting global societies in series that opposed war and social injustice. And in 2018’s “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word,” Wenders was given rare access to Western religion’s most prominent figurehead as he preached progressive values around the world. Even something like “Perfect Days” — Wenders’ most recent narrative film, a simple but moving meditation on the beauty of life and routine — has the potency of politics in its bones.

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But we live in an age where even our most prolific artists are afraid to say the wrong thing. In the internet age, ignorance has a price, and to avoid paying it, some would rather say nothing at all, even as the window for silence quickly closes. After more than 100 artists in the film industry signed an open letter criticizing the festival’s silence, Wenders alluded to this phenomenon in a prepared statement at the Berlinale’s closing awards ceremony. “Cinema is more resistant to oblivion, and certainly longer-living than the short-lived attention span that the internet offers, while your urgency reaches places our films cannot,” Wenders said.

“Activists are fighting mainly on the internet for humanitarian causes — namely, our dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well. As the Berlinale films clearly show, most of us filmmakers applaud you. All of us applaud you. You do necessary and courageous work. But does it need to be in competition with ours? Do our languages need to clash?”

In short: yes and no. The internet’s demand for the right response, all the time, is designed to corner people. Cinema can and should speak for itself. Films are statements, and these statements don’t always arrive when they’re requested. But as the reaction to the Berlinale’s messy initial press conference showed, representatives of the art form have a duty to swallow their fear of misspeaking — at least when they’re given a platform as a juror for a major international film festival. This political climate might be the trickiest modern society has ever navigated, but true artists aren’t afraid to adapt if it means staying in step with the very world their art observes.

(Nina Westervelt/Variety via Getty Images) Mason Gooding, Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega and Courteney Cox at the premiere of “Scream VI”

It’s even more remarkable, then, that Melissa Barrera refused to back down or apologize after her 2023 reposts gained traction and ignited controversy. At the time, Spyglass issued a statement, saying that Barrera’s posts “flagrantly [crossed] the line into hate speech,” claiming that the posts were antisemitic and were “false references to genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

Curiously, though, every “Scream” film is now owned by Paramount Pictures, which has distributed the most recent trio of films after Paramount Global acquired the catalog from Dimension Films — a former subsidiary of Miramax — in 2020. On its face, that may not look suspicious. But in July 2025, Paramount settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump to the tune of $16 million. That same month, the FCC approved the pending merger of Paramount with Skydance Media, leaving many to conclude that the settlement was a pay-to-play way of moving the merger along. Now, Paramount Skydance Corporation holds the highest bid to acquire Warner Bros. after Netflix backed out. And if everything goes the way things look at the time of writing, Paramount Skydance will successfully subsume one of cinema’s preeminent studio giants.

This also means that Paramount (and I’ll refer to the company as that for expediency’s sake) will have a monopoly on the films audiences see. They will control what films get made, and by whom. Given that Trump criticized Netflix staffer Susan Rice on Truth Social just two weeks ago, it doesn’t take an eagle-eyed reader to make the correlation that the president did not want Netflix to have Warner Bros. Paramount, on the other hand, is a much better owner in the conservative administration’s eyes. They’ve already done a number on CBS News, shifting the longstanding program to the middle-right. And if the merger goes through, Paramount could also control the majority of films we see.

That’s a frightening thing, considering Paramount has already announced plans to continue rehabbing disgraced “Melania” director Brett Ratner’s career with a new “Rush Hour” film. They’ve also tapped the equally toxic — and just as shoddy —  filmmaker Max Landis for a new “G.I. Joe,” after Landis was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by multiple women. To put it very plainly: Paramount does not want dissenting voices among its roster, and is all too happy to not only overlook allegations against the filmmakers the company employs, but actively seek them out to give them jobs. Is it really any wonder that Paramount just so happens to distribute the very franchise that Barrera was ousted from? If the new final girl of the “Scream” series wouldn’t play nice and stick to the script, they’d simply toss her away and pay Neve Campbell to return.

While cinema is an inherently political art form — anything put to celluloid or digital has the power to influence people at the same level as politics — it shouldn’t have to be political to this degree. The average person shouldn’t have to fret that bold ideas and wondrous cinematic visions are being gatekept from them by the people in a boardroom clinging to a conservative agenda. And yet, this is the reality that we face; the barrel of the gun that we’re staring down together. Right now, politics is intertwined with almost every facet of big business, no matter what type of business it is, and that objectively sucks.

But maybe there’s a little bit of hope, buried somewhere beneath the rubble. At last Sunday’s Actor Awards, producer Scott Stuber — a key growth figure for Universal in the early 2000s and former chairman of Netflix Films — told Variety that he hopes something good can come from the losses of the potential merger. “I’m hoping there will be new companies that rise up and are entrepreneurial,” Stuber said. “I hope there are all kinds of new places. And you look over the last 50 years, companies like New Line, A24, Miramax, they came out of [entrepreneurial spirits]. And I hope a bunch of people who, unfortunately, may lose their jobs band together and create something great.”

Stuber has a very silver-linings perspective that is, it must be said, rife with privilege. But he also isn’t necessarily wrong, either. The ’90s saw a major renaissance in independent filmmaking that has bled into the new millennium, and scrappy young artists are being given new chances every day as distributors like A24, NEON and their contemporaries move further into film production. Even outside of smaller studios, there’s a renewed chance for independent artists to take bold swings. This is the moment for combative, exciting and unpolished filmmaking; the time to donate a few bucks to the GoFundMe your weird but cool college roommate is starting up to produce their first short film; the time for guerilla productions and picking up the camera to make something fun with your friends. Radicalism is the enemy of big politics, and there’s nothing quite so radical as making and enjoying art on our own terms.

The post Film is — and always will be — political appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump, the so-called “president of peace,” is here to overcome the “stupid and naïve” deals of previous presidents, he has said, by waging war with those countries that won’t make a deal with us — after we broke the last deal we had with them.

On Wednesday Trump announced the U.S., in cooperation with Israel, had “completely obliterated” Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons “a number of months ago” and then, seconds later, told us we had to attack the Islamic Republic on Saturday “because in two weeks they’d have a nuclear weapon.” From obliteration to a viable threat in months. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment — and is almost certainly a complete fabrication. Which part? It’s Trump, so probably both statements. We didn’t obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities months ago, and they likely weren’t two weeks away from firing a nuclear weapon when the U.S. and Israel attacked them on Saturday.

The administration still hasn’t told us what imminent threat actually prompted the war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said we were dragged into it. Trump said we dragged Israel into the conflict because he had a “feeling” we were about to be attacked — so he acted first. In the Indian Treaty Room Wednesday afternoon, the president backtracked and seemed to support Rubio’s contention. 

The administration has laid out four objectives in attacking Iran: to stop the country from producing new missiles, eliminate its navy, prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon and ensure Iran “cannot continue to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.” Trump called Iran the “world’s number one sponsor of terror,” but he also said he thought the U.S. and Iran would be able to negotiate.

“We thought we had a deal, but then they backed out,” Trump said. “Then they came back and we thought we had a deal, and they backed out. I said, ‘You can’t deal with these people. You got to do it the right way.'”

There is little doubt what the president meant by “the right way.” White House Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us from the briefing room Wednesday afternoon that Trump is a president of “peace and diplomacy first” but also a “man of action,” and that the “specter of a nuclear-armed Iran ended” with Operation Epic Fury.

As she rattled off all the property that has been destroyed and the people that have been killed, Leavitt sounded like an anchor on “NFL Game Day” talking about game highlights. “Absolutely crushed,” she said of Iran, observing that the country was “paying in blood.” If it sounds like a cheap rip-off of the WWE, well, that’s how Trump rolls. Leavitt also leaned into her favorite antagonist — the press. There has been “a lot of misreporting and intellectual dishonesty” from the media, Leavitt said, before she once again engaged in intellectual dishonesty and provided disinformation to us as to why America is in an undeclared war with Iran. 

We really shouldn’t over analyze this. Donald Trump took action because he wanted to. And, as usual, whatever he says afterward is inconsequential and often irrelevant to the action he has already taken. He simply bombed Iran because he felt like it. He threatened Spain, our ally — like he did Greenland, which is also our ally — simply because he wanted to. Trump loves trying on his big boy pants and threatening anyone he wants. As Leavitt told us Wednesday, the president doesn’t bluff. He floats trial balloons and if no one pushes back, he pushes forward.

He broke a nuclear deal with Iran, crafted by the Obama administration, that ensured the regime could not develop nuclear weapons. Then he bombed them. Then he wanted to negotiate with the Islamic Republic and said they’re difficult to deal with. No one doubts they are difficult to deal with, and few want to. Leavitt said Iran’s leaders “lied, they delayed, they tried to string the United States along.” Or as my father, the car salesman, would describe it, “they were negotiating.”

No one wants to side with Iran, but the real question is why we would expect them to negotiate with us after Trump reneged on the last deal. What are negotiation tactics for one man is fodder for war to others — especially if one or both sides are spoiling for a fight.

Trump was certainly doing that. His decision to go to war is a clear effort to unite the country against a long-time foreign enemy. It has the effect of diverting attention from quieting the dystopian actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in many of our larger cities, the shooting and detention of American citizens, and the still-volatile scandal surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files. 

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After 47 years of Iran’s violent rhetoric and behavior, Trump said the U.S. has had enough. If you agree with the president — and on the face of it many will — then we should also hold our own country responsible for its past actions. The U.S., in partnership with Britain, overthrew a democratically-elected Iranian government in 1953 and supported the shah because of a J.R. Ewing “oil business” mentality that existed among America’s government, richest oil companies and closest ally.

Today’s Iranian leadership is the twisted child born from U.S. foreign policy at the height of the Cold War and the reaction of the radical religious movement that exploited and filled Iran’s power vacuum.

The White House tried on Wednesday to praise those who have given their life to this most recent and confusing horror show. The six American service members who died in this undeclared war were “heroes,” Leavitt said. “The best of us. They laid down their lives for their country.”

Who would say otherwise? What we all want to know is why? Why now? Despite the many stories told by Trump and his staff, those questions remain mostly unanswered. The administration’s inability to effectively convince the American people of the need for action has also deeply divided Congress, which is hardly a shock in today’s confusing political environment. Again, confusion is the brand.

The only thing that makes sense is that the reason for these and future casualties is because the president of peace, who “has solved eight wars,” determined that someone had to die — and their number came up.

Donald Trump said he hated war. He promised he’d keep us out of forever wars. He started one in Iran. His recent post on Truth Social said we had enough weapons to wage war forever and it would be productive in Iran. I guess he’s created a carve out. 

It is not a coincidence that on Feb. 11, Benjamin Netanyahu visited Trump at the White House. We do not know what was said between the two men, and while correlation is not causation, the Israeli prime minister didn’t travel to Washington and meet privately with the president to discuss the back nine at Mar-a-Lago. Those closest to Trump have hinted that they engaged in “very important” and “strategic” communications. It seems we may now know what that was about. 

Who dragged whom and where they dragged each other is irrelevant. They have opened Pandora’s box in the Middle East. It is a distraction and a stratagem. It sows confusion. It is Donald Trump’s brand.

The attorney general has been called before a subcommittee to discuss her handling of the Epstein scandal? Bomb Iran. The stock market took a dive? Bomb Iran. Trump’s immigration policy is tanking? Bomb Iran. Gas still isn’t at $1.85 a gallon? Bomb Iran. Trump is betting on several things, the key of which is keeping us so confused that we never notice what’s going on. 

Trump has already declared Operation Epic Fury an unqualified success. If it were to end today, maybe so. Few are mourning the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even in his own country. But the creeping fog of war is messy, and beyond anyone’s control. The administration’s decision to bomb Hezbollah in Lebanon means the war is already spreading and could easily grow out of control.  

In a 212-219 vote, the Republican-controlled House on Thursday rejected a resolution that would have restricted Trump’s war in Iran. The Senate had blocked a similar war powers resolution the day before. “I hope this one doesn’t come back to bite us in the a*s,” a Texas GOP representative told me. “I don’t know if we have a handle on this yet.”

There is little doubt that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a political lightweight incapable of passing a mirror without pausing to smile and preen. If things take a turn for the worse, it is doubtful he has the wisdom and gravitas to handle it.  

But Trump doesn’t care about that anymore. He just wants to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever reason that strikes his fancy at the time. And no one has yet stopped him.

The post With Iran, confusion is the point appeared first on Salon.com.

For the administration’s critics, Noem’s dismissal will be especially pleasing. Since she was confirmed by the Senate in January 2025, the former secretary, even by the low standards set by a Cabinet filled with toadies, has excelled in debasing herself to please her boss. To meet the eye-popping deportation numbers set as goals by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, she turned the Department of Homeland Security into a disaster zone that was as inept as it was lawless.

Noem transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to function as an authoritarian secret police, but without the sleek, efficient evil a Hollywood rendering would bestow on the SS. Federal immigration agents were instead slipping on ice or shooting unarmed protesters, all while whining about how persecuted they were. She herself became a public joke because of her over-the-top portrayal of a corrupt apparatchik, complete with her vicious dog-shooting story, ridiculous flattery of Trump and demands for ever-fancier private jets to share with her partner in repression — and adultery, if credible reports are to be believed — Corey Lewandowski.

But if there was one symbol that resonated the most for Noem’s grasps for power, it was her face. The 54-year-old appears to have undergone such extensive plastic surgery in an attempt to mimic Trump’s cartoonish ideas of what is “hot” in a woman that she is both hard to look at and impossible to match to photos of her younger, normal-looking self. Many women in the president’s orbit have adopted what has become known as “Mar-a-Lago face,” a look that includes heavy fillers, cosmetic procedures and caked-on makeup to be visibly appealing to a man who apparently avoids wearing his glasses in public. When a Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, was published in December, it became notorious for, among other revelations, a photograph of press secretary Karoline Leavitt that appeared to show extensive injection spots for lip filler. (The president, unbothered by the appearance, keeps openly lusting over Leavitt’s “machine gun lips” that “don’t stop.”) But no one has gotten more attention for her dramatic visual transformation than Noem.

In the end, though, Noem could not save herself, and for reasons that are related to why she likely felt the pressure and need to have plastic surgery that most men in her position don’t reckon with: gender. As a woman, the former secretary was far more disposable to Trump than a man in her position. It’s a lesson she should have learned when he passed her over as a potential running mate for the charisma-free JD Vance. The same president who was found civilly liable by a jury for sexual assault, who calls female reporters “piggy” or scolds them for not smiling, who spent over a decade partying with Jeffrey Epstein will be pleased to have a woman to blame for his administration’s hemorrhaging of public support on what was once his biggest issue, immigration.

It would be one thing if Noem were uniquely incompetent. But as bad as her press coverage has been, it is no worse than what many of the men occupying top spots in the administration are facing.

Pete Hegseth has repeatedly confirmed suspicions that he, as a former Fox News host with a rumored drinking problem, isn’t up for the job of defense secretary, from the time his team accidentally leaked confidential battle plans to an Atlantic reporter to his recent tantrum when news outlets published the names and photos of service members killed in the Iran war.

FBI Director Kash Patel is just as comically corrupt as Noem, whether abusing his private jet privileges to hang out with the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Olympics or reportedly diverting agency resources to surround his girlfriend with security like she’s a princess.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick got caught in an obvious lie about his relationship with Epstein, insisting he barely knew the man, when in reality they were business partners who were photographed on vacation together.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to be beloved by Trump, even as he has made dubious claims about childhood diseases, oversaw a purge of medical and science professionals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggested that bird flu be allowed to spread unimpeded, falsely linked Tylenol to autism and continues to pursue dangerous and unpopular anti-vaccine policies, despite promising he would leave vaccines alone during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

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A telling detail showing the role gender played in Noem’s dismissal is reports of Trump’s dislike of her rumored affair with Lewandowski. It’s unlikely that the president, with his long list of confirmed and rumored adulteries, is experiencing a newfound moral disapproval of infidelity. And despite reports of a tense confrontation following Noem’s congressional hearing on Tuesday, he also seems to like Lewandowski personally. After all, Trump has kept him around for over a decade. But the widespread coverage of Noem and Lewandowski’s relationship in reputable outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic paints the adviser as the secondary person in the relationship. Lewandowski is portrayed in a role that, on the right, is usually reserved for women: as Noem’s support staff, cheering on her presidential ambitions and making sure she has her favorite blanket on the plane. To Trump, who has rigidly hierarchical notions of gender, that probably seems emasculating.

But more than anything else, Noem is in many ways taking the fall for Stephen Miller. While she is morally and professionally responsible for her blunders as secretary, she was also reportedly acting on direct orders from the White House deputy chief of staff, who appears to be the most powerful person in the administration besides Trump.

It’s Miller who set impossibly high arrest quotas for ICE that could only be met with policies Noem enacted, such as targeting people with legal asylum status for deportation or encouraging mass detentions on flimsy grounds that are usually overturned by courts. The blatant white supremacist imagery and rhetoric coming from DHS sounds far closer to Miller’s overheated rhetoric about the evils of diversity than Noem’s more careful language. And it’s Miller who was seen dancing with Noem to “Ice, Ice Baby” at the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party.

The Department of Homeland Security’s failures are objectively as much, if not more, the fault of Miller than Noem, but there is no evidence he is paying any price for setting an agenda that was bound to go as badly as it has. To the contrary, the simultaneous announcement of GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma as Noem’s replacement, suggests there will be no scaling back from Miller’s demands on the department should he be confirmed by the Senate. He is a belligerent MAGA foot soldier who has drawn headlines in the past by complaining that teaching kids anti-racism impedes on lessons about Jesus.

Swapping Noem for the Mullin is an even trade, with one notable exception: He’s a man, and she’s not. Like a lot of men who please Trump, Mullin pretends to be a tough guy without actually backing it up. That was always where this was headed, no matter how much Trump-pleasing work Noem did — or had done. 

The post Mar-a-Lago face couldn’t save Kristi Noem appeared first on Salon.com.

Because of Gabbard’s past support of whistleblowers, increased public profile as DNI and ongoing rumors concerning the state of her relationship with Trump, which has appeared to be in constant flux, this case has attracted substantial media attention since it was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 2. The story has many layers, and the media has missed several key points involving Gabbard’s conflict of interest and how the whistleblower system has been an abject failure.

“Exquisitely” classified

As an attorney who represented Thomas Drake, one of the earliest intelligence community whistleblowers to have used the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I know this territory intimately.  

According to the Journal, an intelligence community whistleblower filed a highly-classified complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), an independent watchdog office, in May 2025. Among the allegations was a claim that Gabbard’s office blocked the proper distribution of the complaint for eight months — including to Congress — for political reasons. Another alleged that lawyers, presumably from the DNI’s Office of General Counsel, failed to refer a potential crime to the Justice Department for political reasons.

We don’t know the substance of the intelligence report underlying the whistleblower complaint, but the government claims it is “exquisitely” classified, which raises an immediate problem: That’s not a real classification level. The report apparently involves an intelligence service intercepting a conversation between two foreign nationals about Iran and Jared Kushner’s influence on his father-in-law, the president. At the time, the Trump administration was considering a strike on Iran, which in fact occurred at the end of June 2025.

Under law, the ICIG is required to assess whether a whistleblower complaint is credible within two weeks of receipt. If the complaint is deemed credible and raises an “urgent concern,” the inspector general then has seven days to share it with lawmakers. This is where things started to go sideways.

Sinister snafus

On June 4, 2025, acting ICIG Tamara Johnson initially determined that the complaint met the definition of an “urgent concern” under applicable law, but she could not determine whether the allegations were credible. Specifically, she found that the allegations involving restricted distribution did not appear credible, while she was unable to reach a determination on the failure-to-refer allegations. 

A few days later, Johnson received new information that gave her clarity and led to her finding that the restricted distribution allegation did not appear credible. She was still, though, unable to assess the credibility of the failure-to-refer allegation. In an interview with MeidasTouch, the whistleblower’s lead counsel, Andrew Bakaj, also conceded that he’s “not familiar as much with that particular [failure-to-refer] allegation.” I don’t know what that means exactly, other than that perhaps both Johnson and Bakaj found the failure-to-refer allegation trickier to navigate. That could have been because it’s hard to prove a negative, or because they weren’t sure it amounted to a possible federal crime that would legally require them to refer it to the Justice Department.

Whatever the case, neither finding was shared with the whistleblower or their counsel for a staggering eight months, an omission that created a second problem. If the whistleblower had learned of the credibility and urgent concern determination in a timely manner, that would have allowed them to go to Congress last summer. Instead, the government is now scrambling, saying that its unprecedented delay proves the claim could not have been urgent.

Regardless of the government’s determination, the whistleblower is still permitted to share the complaint directly with Congress. The only hiccup is that the DNI must provide guidance on how to do so securely, which brings us to a third problem: Instead of providing guidance, Gabbard — the former champion of whistleblowers — apparently sat on the complaint for eight months and stonewalled the whistleblower and their lawyer. 

And worse, during this delay, she reportedly planted a mole in the ICIG’s office to snitch about the situation directly to her — obviously compromising the office’s independence. This fourth problem makes the first three look like sinister, rather than innocent, bureaucratic snafus.

How the whistleblower process should have worked

According to reports, the employee properly followed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) — a misnomer because what it actually provides is an investigative process, not protection. Under the ICWPA, an intelligence community  employee “who intends to report to Congress a complaint or information with respect to an urgent concern” may do so to their intelligence agency’s inspector general or the ICIG. A determination must be made within 14 days on whether the complaint appears credible and raises an “urgent concern.” Those initial steps appear to have occurred. 

Once the ICIG determines that the complaint credibly raises an urgent concern, they  then forward it to the relevant agency head — in this case, Gabbard — who has a week to transmit it to the congressional intelligence committees. 

I’m surprised that no one has pointed out that since she and her general counsel were subjects of the complaint, Gabbard and her office have a clear conflict of interest in making any determination. This made it clearly inappropriate for them to have played a substantive or even a procedural role in its handling. This is spelled out under a number of different authorities, including executive branch ethics regulations, which cover the DNI, and intelligence community constraints. 

It’s baffling, to say the least, that Gabbard did not recuse herself from this matter.

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But her inaction worsened the conflict. Instead of making a determination and then notifying the whistleblower’s counsel — or letting him know they did not have enough information to do so — Gabbard doubled down. During the eight months she held onto the complaint, she apparently stonewalled the whistleblower and refused multiple times to supply their lawyer with guidance on how they could securely share the complaint directly with the congressional intelligence committees, which was the whistleblower’s statutory right. When the delay became public, Gabbard responded by tossing up a confetti of excuses. 

Amateur Hour

When the fracas became public, Gabbard decided to litigate it on X and go personal on the whistleblower, inadvertently telegraphing her weak position. She posted a Trumpian tweet: “Senator Mark Warner and his friends in the Propaganda Media have repeatedly lied to the American people that I or the ODNI ‘hid’ a whistleblower complaint in a safe for eight months…This is a blatant lie.” 

Her spokesperson characterized the complaint as a “politically motivated individual weaponizing their position in the Intelligence Community, submitting a baseless complaint and then burying it in highly classified information to create false intrigue.” (Since that individual remains anonymous, I’m not sure how Gabbard is assessing their motivations, and whatever those motivations might be, it’s irrelevant to the merits of the complaint.)

Gabbard’s often-contradictory excuse salad for the irregularities in handling the complaint didn’t help matters. The delay, she variously said, was due to the government shutdown, the complaint was a nothingburger, it required special handling because of its highly-classified content, it was found not credible, staff overturn slowed down processing, it was administratively closed, it was just gossip — and now it is subject to “executive privilege.” 

This last excuse is especially concerning. Executive privilege is the president’s power to withhold sensitive information and private discussions from Congress and the judicial branch to guarantee frank conversations with other executive branch officials. To my knowledge, no presidential administration has ever claimed that raw foreign intelligence itself is subject to executive privilege. While it has occasionally been asserted with regard to senior White House aides’ communications, in this case it’s unclear who, exactly, is asserting executive privilege over the intelligence report, on what basis and why. 

The icing on the cake of Gabbard’s nonsense, though, was when she claimed she wasn’t even aware of her responsibility to produce security guidance to the whistleblower’s counsel. As a lieutenant colonel in the military and a former congresswoman who served on the Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence & Special Operation, coupled with her admirable support for whistleblowers in the past, her alleged ignorance of how DNI works with respect to intelligence community whistleblowers defies credulity.

Whistleblower Déjà Vu​​

After 9/11, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake began having contact with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the ICWPA regarding a number of urgent concerns, including the NSA’s mass domestic surveillance that stripped away privacy protections for Americans. The process ultimately backfired on him. When the New York Times exposed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, the government needed a fall guy. The agency referred Drake for criminal prosecution in what was the signature Espionage Act case of this century. The charges ultimately collapsed, but not before putting Drake through a harrowing ordeal detailed by The New Yorker, “60 Minutes” and the documentary “Silenced.”

In 2019, another inspector general whistleblower used the ICWPA to complain that Donald Trump engaged in improper dealings with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, alleging that the president pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political opponent, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. In that case, which eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, the inspector general deemed the report credible and an urgent concern, and forwarded it to Joseph Maguire, Trump’s acting DNI, who stopped the process cold. Maguire later said in a congressional hearing that he initially did not transmit the complaint to Congress because of executive privilege concerns.

Here we are again, having washed, rinsed and repeated the process with the same shampoo in a different scent. Some members from the Gang of Eight — the bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence committees — read a version of the whistleblower complaint, but it was apparently redacted. Some Democrats complained it may not have contained enough information to have allowed lawmakers a proper evaluation of the allegations.

Back in 2013, a number of people — ironically including one on the Gabbard whistleblower’s team — criticized Edward Snowden for not “going through proper channels.” Rather than blaming whistleblowers for not using corrupted channels, it’s time to admit that making the director of national intelligence an intermediary in the reporting process is a major error of the ICWPA. The position of DNI was created to fix major structural failures in how U.S. intelligence agencies coordinated before 9/11. It was supposed to improve information-sharing, not stymie it.

It has failed on all counts.

We don’t know why Gabbard continues to aggressively obstruct this whistleblower complaint. It sounds like she’s more concerned with protecting Jared Kushner, and perhaps Trump himself, than the public she’s supposed to serve. But we do know this: The ICWPA system for intelligence community whistleblowers depends on the knowledge, trust, credibility and good faith of the director of national intelligence. It’s a fatal flaw to make that person an intermediary, much less a gatekeeper, on a whistleblower’s path to congressional oversight. 

Tulsi Gabbard is clearly unqualified, unfit and too compromised for her job. But the ICWPA is ill-suited for those it is supposed to protect.

The post Tulsi Gabbard’s conflict of interest — and hypocrisy appeared first on Salon.com.

That is how the president strategizes. And let’s face it, it’s worked pretty well for him so far. 

Trump recovered his fortune by being rescued by a game show producer. Aside from being found civilly liable by a jury for sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll and being convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush-money case, he has managed to evade accountability for all of his crimes and abuses of power. Tens of millions of Americans even put him back in the White House after he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election and inspired an insurrection. He seems to think all this came about as a result of his strategic brilliance, or maybe his genetic superiority. But the fact is that it’s just plain old luck. Some people have more of it than they deserve, and he is definitely one of them. Over the course of his life, Trump has made decisions that would have destroyed the fortunes and reputations of anyone else. His greatest superpower is the ability to survive his own monumentally terrible judgement. 

Now, as he wages war against Iran in a widening conflict that is quickly engulfing the entire Middle East, Trump is putting that preternatural resilience to what may be its greatest test. The Islamic Republic is proving an able military enemy, and with only one ally — Israel — at his side and tepid public support, the president has no plan for how win or for what comes next. Apparently, he’s just going to “figure it out.” 

Part of that, the nation discovered on Tuesday, is an old method: using the CIA to arm and train unorganized opposition. The Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is in talks about arming Kurdish forces to lead an effort to “dislodge the regime.” According to CNN, the CIA is already engaged on the ground and Trump has been speaking with Kurdish leaders.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the rumors of a Kurdish insurgency “completely false.” But the New York Times reported that the CIA had already “given small arms” to pro-American Kurdish forces in Iran before the current war started in hopes of destabilizing the Islamic Republic. 

The CIA and U.S. military’s use of foreign militias has a long — and checkered — history spanning at least 65 years. The record shows that they have rarely had any positive effect, and most often, they have made situations worse. 

Throughout the Cold War and beyond, America attempted to overthrow governments or fight proxy wars that often led to wider conflicts or the imposition of regimes that were worse than those they replaced. Far too often, it was done for the same reason Trump is citing now with Iran — to install, or at least create the conditions for, a new regime that “we can work with.” And sometimes, that has meant having little concern for the country’s people or democracy.

Consider the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 or the Reagan administration’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista government. The former saw the CIA, in a plan that began under Dwight D. Eisenhower and was approved by his successor John F. Kennedy, training a group of Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro to make a secret landing in Cuba and fight their way to Havana, leading a popular uprising to topple the president. The group were captured immediately, leading to international embarrassment for the U.S. and for the young president, who took responsibility in public and, behind closed doors, vowed to never trust the CIA again. 

In 1963, the agency supported a military coup by South Vietnamese forces against Ngo Dinh Diem, the country’s president. The act, which was intended to stabilize the country in its fight against North Vietnamese communists, did the opposite, helping to transform America’s role in the conflict from advisory to an all-out war that left over 58,000 U.S. service members — and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian military and civilians dead.  

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, under successive Republican and Democratic administrations, the CIA supported Operation Condor, a network of right-wing dictatorships throughout Latin America including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. 

Then there are the more recent covert adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 1980s, the U.S. supported the Mujahadeen militants in their war against the Russians. Unfortunately, the Mujahadeen became disillusioned with their helpful allies and became the Taliban. That didn’t work out too well either. The CIA had been in Iraq in various capacities for decades before the first and second war, and they even went in prior to the 2003 invasion to — wait for it — establish contact with the Kurdish forces to secure their help. 

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But perhaps the most relevant precedent in Iran is the original CIA-backed overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s democratically-elected prime minister, in 1953, which restored power to Reza Pahlavi, the last shah. This was done primarily to restore control of Iranian oil fields, which Mossadegh’s government had nationalized, to British energy companies. As with Afghanistan, this act sowed seeds of resentments and helped lead to the revolution in 1979, which got us to where we are today. 

The first days of the war have been chaotic, as Trump, members of his administration and his congressional allies have given competing rationales to justify the war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seems to have landed on the doltish explanation that because Israel was planning to attack Iran, the U.S. had no choice but to join the campaign to preempt Iranian retaliation against American assets in the region. The implication of this slip was stunning: That America was a passive, secondary partner to Israel and could wield little influence over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For his part, Trump said on Tuesday he just “had a feeling” they were going to attack.

The administration has been all over the map, insisting that they were annihilating Iran’s nuclear program, which they previously claimed to have obliterated; degrading the regime’s missile capability; promoting regime change and supporting a popular uprising; and making sure Iran can’t project power in the rest of the Middle East. Trump even suggested the war was revenge for Iranian threats against him.

It’s impossible to be sure just why they chose to attack the regime when they did, other than the fact that Trump has almost certainly been persuaded by the likes of Rubio and long-time Iran hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that it will mean another path to glory. The problem is that they apparently forgot to plan what comes next. 

Trump has said that he hopes Iran will be another Venezuela, a simple decapitation mission in which the people who replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s supreme leader who was killed on Saturday in an air strike, would be eager to be bought off and do his bidding under threat of more bombing and carnage. But a problem emerged. Trump complained that the people he’d apparently been told were good candidates to become his puppets have all been killed. “I guess the worst case is we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person,” he said to reporters in the Oval Office. “That could happen.”

Indeed it could.

Trump exhorted the Iranian people to rise up against the government and threatened the authorities, telling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps via video they would get immunity if they laid down their arms. Who they are supposed to surrender to is unclear, to say the least, and how any of this could possibly come to pass without a U.S. presence on the ground is virtually impossible. While Trump has said that hasn’t ruled out sending in combat troops, it’s hard to imagine that he’s so far gone that what the Defense Department has dubbed Operation Epic Fury would be nothing compared to the fury unleashed by the American people if he launched some kind of ground invasion. 

We had better hope Trump gets lucky once again. Otherwise, the results of his and Netanyahu’s war in Iran are likely to be as successful as previous U.S. efforts at regime change have been — which is to say not successful at all.

The post Trump’s new plan for Iran doomed to backfire appeared first on Salon.com.

Hence, people love Alex Trebek’s “Jeopardy” and Darnell Hayes’ “Black Jeopardy” on “SNL.” Minus a few champions who enjoy insane winning streaks on the former, we can’t predict who will win; even contestants with a genius I.Q. can be defeated by someone with bulletproof strategy.

“Black Jeopardy,” on the other hand, lands its jokes by fooling the audience into thinking it knows how the contestant Kenan Thompson’s Darnell sets up as the stooge will perform, then quickly turns that assumption on its ear. Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa from “Black Panther,” for example, was entirely out of his depth when called upon to answer questions about American black culture.

So was Elizabeth Banks’ Allison, playing a white woman (“I don’t see color, so it’s just Jeopardy to me!”) and Tom Hanks’ Doug, who shows up to “Black Jeopardy” wearing a MAGA hat. Only after Allison realizes that she can’t win regardless of what she does can she get points on the board —“That is the blackest thing you said all day, Allison!” Darnell tells her.

Doug, meanwhile, kills it on “Black Jeopardy” and seems to prove that Doug is on the same page as  Darnell and fellow contestants Keeley and Shanice…until they get to the sketch-ending category “Lives That Matter.” We don’t see how Doug answers, but since he refers to Darnell and his competition as “you people” earlier in the sketch, the viewer makes up her own conclusions.

“SNL” opens the post-monologue section of its most recent episode, hosted by Emmy winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge, with an obvious game show called “What’s Wrong with This Picture?”  that does not approach the level of sharpness as those “Black Jeopardy” episodes.

But as another unofficial TV competition sketch that runs later in the episode proves, the flatness of “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” can’t be chalked up to a lack of brand recognition. Rather, its weakness is because the joke lacked a point and barbs beyond its contestants being too stupid to see the plain-as-day errors in the pictures, such as a saw inside of a refrigerator.

Much more effective was the midday local newscast that degenerated into a contest pitting the two black anchors against the two white anchors, with each reading headlines about violent crimes and non-violent crimes, guessing the racial identity of the perpetrators and keeping a tally of black offenders versus white ones.

Even the weatherman gets in on it, announcing the upgrade of a tropical storm to a hurricane. “We’re calling this one Hurricane Chet, and that’s a white man’s name if I’ve ever heard one.” At the risk of draining the funny out of the sketch’s humor by explaining the joke, it works on several levels (ugh, I know) as a commentary on racial prejudice, internalized assumptions about minorities and crime, and the media’s role in perpetrating those assumptions via news coverage.

So this was ostensibly supposed to be a sketch about the news, that really became a game show/sporting event with race relations as the stakes.

Equally as obliquely, I suppose, will we slide into the reason for bringing all of this up in the first place: this point may provide a clue as to why the first two politically themed cold opens of the NBC sketch variety program’s 45^th season have fallen flat.  Nearly every tidbit of news yielded by the impeachment inquiry, including the event that kicked it off, has transformed an already ridiculous administration into a complete parody of itself.

Therefore any impersonation of the weeks’ events cannot match the twisted humor of what actually is occurring. An administration headed by a man who proposed fortifying our 1,954 mile southern border with a moat filled with alligators and snakes, and meant it, is already a fully realized farce. And how does one successfully and directly parody a farce? There must be a way, but “Saturday Night Live” hasn’t stumbled upon it.

Thus Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of Trump in the season premiere feels more like an reenactment with marionettes than a comic interpretation of what’s happening inside Trump’s head. Similarly, the star of this week’s opener is not Matthew Broderick, making an unexpected cameo as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but the Parseltongue-speaking puppet snake representing Trump advisor Stephen Miller.

Beck Bennett’s imitation of Vice President Mike Pence and Kate McKinnon’s lizard-like Rudy Giuliani are the same as they ever were, and like Baldwin’s Trump, they capture the essence of the real people they’re representing. The news of the past few weeks defeats their role as a release valve.

Granted, that role has been decreasing in value for some time now. “SNL” and Baldwin’s impressions of Trump the Candidate used to make its politically topical skits must-watch late night television for the laughs.

Post-inauguration versions have varied in pointedness, becoming increasingly dependent on A-lister cameos of administration officials to make a mark, starting with Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of Sean Spicer. These appearances and the unforgettable imitations of officials from administrations and campaigns past work because they parody isolated moments of unadulterated lunacy within a political administration running like a typical, normal circus.

It’s the reason Matt Damon killed as a pre-Supreme Court confirmation Brett Kavanaugh by throwing in a few quotes from his Senate Judiciary Committee appearance, screaming at the top of his lungs and gulping down water like the Earth was drying up. The Kavanaugh confirmation was a farce with terrible, depressing consequences. Damon’s impersonation gives the viewer the very limited comfort at shaming the devil by laughing at him.

Now that Trump’s administration has transformed from a carnival sideshow into a three-ring catastrophe, “SNL” parodies are only slightly tweaked versions of 24/7 reality, ameliorating very little. The last two cold opens gave us about as much to laugh at as an Investigation Discovery crime re-enactment.

In contrast, the edition of National Public Radio’s news quiz-as-game show “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” that aired the same weekend as the Phoebe Waller-Bridge episode of “SNL” earned solid laughs by simply, precisely mining the Trump news cycle for laughs during its Trump Dump segment, a true-or-false lighting round.

When host Peter Sagal asked panelist Tom Bodett if the New York Times’ report of Trump requesting the feasibility of a snake-and-alligator-filled moat was true, Bodett won a point.

But when Faith Salie was asked, “True or False: On Wednesday, Donald Trump responded that the idea that he, quote, wanted a moat stuffed with alligators and snakes, unquote was ‘fake news,’” and Salie answered “true,” Sagal corrected her. “No, it’s false! He said that the idea that he wanted a MOOT was fake news.” Sagal also caught the show’s third panelist Helen Hong with a similar devil-in-the-details regarding Rudy Giuliani’s text exchange with a reporter that he was considering a lawsuit against the so-called “swamp.”

It goes without saying that I am not a comedy writer, and the live audience for “Wait Wait” likely has a slightly different notion of what’s funny than the typical “SNL” viewer. However, their taste in humor probably isn’t too far apart.

The bigger point is that a gentle public radio news quiz somehow managed to deliver a cleverer jab about This Week in Stupid than “SNL” did in its White House skit: so absurd is our situation that a person cannot accurately quote the substance of a news story without including a malapropism or an incorrectly typed description of legal action that a) does not exist, and b) could not exist. (How does one sue “The Swamp”? And what is a “jaw suit”?)

You’ll note that this was a game show about the news, in which the only prizes are bragging rights and an audience member’s chance to have Bill Kurtis provide the voice for the outgoing message on their phone’s answering service.

This isn’t to imply that “SNL” should jam all of its political parody in a faux game show format. At this point, moving the action any place besides the White House or Capitol Hill will do.

“Weekend Update” had a field day with the developments surrounding the impeachment inquiry, but neither its headline-based zingers nor McKinnon’s Elizabeth Warren could compete with Bowen Yang’s Chinese Trade Representative Chen Biao, vamping it up as the attention-loving figure in the middle of negotiations between the U.S. and China. “I’m running tariffs, so this is my time, I’m having my moment, I’m basically the Lizzo of China right now. And it turns out I’m 100 percent that trade daddy!”

So yeah – actual fake newscasts are perfect stages for parody, as are fake reality shows, fake sitcoms and fake dramas. Future “Saturday Night Live” political parodies could be more effective if they were removed from the White House and inserted in any of those other formats.

Game shows, however, have stakes and harvest tension from the factor that chance plays in each moment – the smartest player might not beat the devil, and the luckiest person can be undone by a whammy. They remind us of how unfair life is, a truth that like Trump’s moat/moot confusion, brings to mind one of the finest “SNL” sketches ever: Jesse Jackson’s “The Question Is Moot,” which aired in October 1984, a few weeks before the presidential election that resulted in Ronald Reagan’s second term in office.

Jackson’s host allows announcer Don Pardo to pose questions to contestants such as, “When is the next reappearance of Halley’s comet scheduled?” only to cut them off before they answer.

“It doesn’t matter. The question is moot. The White House is locked behind cement barricades. The President confesses he’s afraid to go to church because terrorists are after him. The nuclear holocaust machinery is moving into place. As a matter of fact, it’s moving into Brooklyn Harbor right now. They’re demonstrating down there all night long. The Battleship Iowa, carrying nuclear warheads, arrived today. So we probably won’t live to see Halley’s Comet come again. Next question: Barbara?”

Looking at the sketch now, it’s mind-boggling how relevant the issues Jackson brings up in his answers are to our world today. He talks about tax cuts for the wealthy and the expansion of the national’s poor and racial divisions before replying to another contestant’s question about whether they’ll ever have a chance to answer a question with, “The question is moot! Under the Reagan Administration, answering questions is no longer a priority. One-liners, smiles, styles, and profiles.”

He continues, “Issues like education, health care and social programs have to take a backseat to a trillion-dollar military build-up, and a $700 billion tax cut for the rich. As a matter of fact, 90,000 corporations last year made profits and paid no taxes, while people making $2000 below poverty paid taxes.”

Those “SNL” writers knew what they were doing when they placed Jackson, the third-most popular Democratic contender behind Gary Hart and eventual party nominee Walter Mondale, into this setting. All of politics is staged, and most of it scripted. Shows like “Saturday Night Live” serve to pull back the curtain and reveal the synthetic nature of the law-making and deal-forging that goes into running the country and impacting our lives. It’s all a comedy, it’s all a drama.

In this latest examination of possible law-breaking on the part of the nation’s top executive and his enablers, a head-on caricature isn’t the way to go. Efforts to game the system against the majority population have always been afoot, but now that we’re getting a sense of how brazen and ludicrous the latest examples are, perhaps the best way to take a jab that concept is a game show.

May we suggest… “Idiotest”? “The Weakest Link”? “Dirty Rotten Cheater”? The possibilities are endless, although “Jeopardy” works too.

The post How can “Saturday Night Live” parody a farcical administration? appeared first on Salon.com.

The lone exception was the 2020 presidential election. Cornyn accepted Joe Biden’s victory as legitimate, and he pushed back — “gently,” in the words of the Texas Tribune — in the weeks after the election when Trump fired Chris Krebs, an election security official at the Department of Homeland Security who called the president’s claims of fraud were “unsubstantiated.” Still, Cornyn voted against Trump’s impeachment following Jan. 6. But three years later, after the president declared his candidacy for president in 2024, he said “President Trump’s time has passed him by.” (He later admitted he was wrong about that.)

The Texas senator has since been a devoted foot soldier — and a tremendous help to Trump. As one of the most powerful members of the Senate, Cornyn is prolific at passing bills and raising money. He’s been the majority whip and very nearly became the majority leader in 2024, losing only to Sen. John Thune of South Dakota by 5 votes. If Texas Republican voters wanted an effective, strong leader who has been successful at pushing right-wing policy, they could not do better than Cornyn.

As it turns out, that is not what the Lone Star State’s GOP primary voters wanted. On Tuesday, a slim plurality of Republican voters picked Cornyn as the nominee in November’s Senate race, a dismal result that sends the contest into a run-off against MAGA firebrand Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. As of Wednesday morning, with 94% of votes counted, Cornyn had received 41.9%, with Paxton trailing close behind at 40.7. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a latecomer to the race who was an early backer of Trump in 2024, earned 13.5% of the vote and will not advance to the run-off. The election, which will take place May 26 with early voting beginning six days earlier, promises to get ugly.

Were Paxton to prevail in May, he would be a nightmare candidate for the GOP in such an important election. He’s a bundle of red flags and, at a vantage point from outside the reality distortion field that is the MAGA movement, Paxton has no discernible upsides. But as we have learned, in today’s Republican Party, scandal and corruption don’t hurt candidates. To the contrary: Being the worst has become a selling point to GOP voters, who conflate odious behavior with being a “fighter” on behalf of their increasingly tribalistic interests.

Paxton frequently brags about being an evangelical Christian, and he has even argued that his faith should be imposed on students in public classrooms. He also had a messy public divorce that involved a confession of adultery. This became the focus of his 2023 impeachment trial — which was led by other Republicans — due to accusations that he broke the law and abused his office to cover up the affair and get his mistress a job. But that episode is just one in a staggeringly long list of corruption scandals dating back to his time in the Texas statehouse in 2008 and includes an indictment over securities fraud and an FBI investigation of potential bribery.

On top of the relentless odor of scandal emanating from Paxton, his actions in office would likely alienate swing voters in a general election. He loves wasting taxpayer money on go-nowhere lawsuits that excite bigots and conspiracy theorists, but that annoy everyone else. He targeted Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue over false claims that Tylenol causes autism. He went after a school district for not forcing the Ten Commandments on students. He sued to overturn the 2020 presidential election by block swing states from having their votes for Joe Biden counted. He’s repeatedly filed suit against out-of-state doctors for prescribing abortion pills to women in Texas. He tried to stop community organizers from registering people of color to vote.

Paxton often loses these lawsuits, but that’s not the point. His apparent aim is to stir up the MAGA base and please an extensive network of far-right billionaires who have spent the past two decades turning the Texas GOP into a fascistic, Christian nationalist party. 

State Rep. James Talarico, the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, will no doubt be pleased if he’s pitted against Paxton in November, and so will many down-ballot Democrats. (Talarico’s opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, conceded and endorsed Talarico on Wednesday morning after telling supporters the night before that Democratic voters had “been disenfranchised” in Dallas County. ) The attorney general would likely energize Democratic voters to turn out against him. Cornyn spent a record-setting amount of money reminding Republican voters of that problem, but his efforts weren’t enough. The very qualities that will hurt Paxton in a general election — his reported corruption and his belligerent personality — are what endear him to the people who turn out to vote in Republican primaries.

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Last month, Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark posted the findings of a focus group of Texas Republican voters illustrating that Paxton’s aura of scandal is his main selling point to the party’s MAGA base. Most of these voters didn’t want to say that they like it when politicians are hypocritical. But as Longwell explained, Paxton’s bad behavior gets interpreted as evidence that he’s a “fighter” who is willing to cut corners to “get things done.”

“If I was voting on deacons for our church, definitely Ken Paxton wouldn’t be part of it, would not have my vote,” one woman explained. Instead, she backed the attorney general because “politically, I thought he would represent us.”

The entire MAGA base, but especially evangelical Christians, have spent years inhaling propaganda painting them as victims of an oppression campaign at the hands of a woke mob. They’re told by fundamentalist preachers and religious leaders that they’re engaged in “spiritual warfare” with a powerful cabal of progressives who want to destroy Christianity and steal their children’s hearts, minds, bodies and souls. These claims are validated by Trump, who falsely asserts that children are being forced to change genders behind their parents’ backs and releases nonsense “reports” claiming that Christians are the targets of rampant religious discrimination.

Despite his personal behavior, Paxton has endeared himself to conservative Christians by deploying the same lies about MAGA’s alleged persecution. With Trump’s assistance, Paxton portrayed Republicans who were prosecuting him during his impeachment trial as “RINOs” — Republicans In Name Only — who were secretly working for Democrats to destroy him because of his success at advancing the right-wing cause. This was all nonsense; Republicans who opposed him were just as conservative as his supporters, but they held a residual desire for the state’s top enforcement agent to be an ethical, law-abiding citizen.

But MAGA voters love villains, foolishly convincing themselves that a candidate who demonstrates a professed willingness to break laws or flout ethics will redound to their benefit. This dubious quality is framed as a form of self-defense against those dastardly liberals. They don’t want to be the bad guys, they tell themselves, but the evil Democrats gave them no choice but to fight dirty.

There’s not a shred of evidence that people like Paxton or Trump are actually warriors for any cause outside of their own ambition. The great irony is that Cornyn, and others like him, has done far more to advance conservative policies than Paxton, with his flashy but groundless lawsuits, ever has. But the results of Tuesday’s primary show that Texas Republican voters are divided. Paxton’s style ran neck and neck with Cornyn’s substance. If the former trumps the latter in May’s runoff, it could easily benefit Talarico and Democrats.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to reflect Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s concession and endorsement of Texas state Rep. James Talarico as the Democratic nominee.

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And today? Barely a week after the Regency-style drama’s fourth season resumed, you’re much more likely to stumble into a “Heated Rivalry” night at your local drinking hole than any recreations of the ‘ton’s gracious luxury. Three months after the hockey romance premiered on HBO Max, the world remains obsessed with Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander, as well as the actors who play them, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. More accurately, as Storrie joked in his recent “Saturday Night Live” monologue, it’s women doing the pining.

Compared to Netflix’s established period hit, the prospect of two pro hockey stars falling for each other holds more heat than the forbidden affair blossoming between Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), a nobleman, and Sophie Gun (Yerin Ha), a maid and illegitimate daughter of a lord.

(Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max ) Connor Storrie and Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova in “Heated Rivalry.”

This is the first time that new “Bridgerton” episodes dropped amid another serialized romance’s cultural mania. Nobody is suggesting viewers are choosing one over the other; different as they are, their audiences overlap. Still, it can’t escape notice how quaint Benedict and Sophie’s assignations appear in the wake of Illya and Shane’s famished banging, regardless of their shared “cottage” settings. The overall ho-hum reaction to the Netflix drama’s Cinderella storyline may have something to do with how long it took Ben and Soph to smash compared to Illya and Shane’s sex-forward relationship.

But there’s also the sensation that this new season is setting us up to fully appreciate the next stage of the revolution that “Bridgerton” already began, and that the “Heated Rivalry” craze confirms we’re eager to embrace. Both shows foreground queer characters – bisexual men and women, specifically – whose attractions aren’t discounted or given short shrift.

“Heated Rivalry”’s Ilya loves men and women, so does Benedict Bridgerton — and Francesca (Hannah Dodd), Benedict’s newly widowed sister. “Bridgerton” threw coming-out parties for both at the end of Season 3, when Benedict tumbled into the sheets with the convention-flouting Lady Tilley Arnold (Hannah New) and her lover Paul Suarez (Lucas Aurelio), while Francesca married the equally introverted John Stirling, the Earl of Kilmartin (Victor Alli).

The show’s conscious racial integration of 19th-century society, which was once considered revolutionary, is now as standard as its happy endings. Overcoming the piddly obstacle of the class barrier supposedly dividing Benedict and Sophie was less of a question than a matter of which divine device would be manufactured to smooth their way to the altar.

(Liam Daniel/Netflix) Yerin Ha as Sophie Baek and Luke Thompson as Benedict Bridgerton in “Bridgerton.”

But Ilya and Shane risk far more than reputational ruin in “Heated Rivalry.” Taking their relationship public poses a risk to their livelihoods and personal safety. There’s real danger in their taboo affair, and that makes it especially hot.

Benedict’s first on-screen encounter was satisfying too, validating his stirrings for both sexes by presenting it to the audience instead of merely hinting at his orientation. Francesca, meanwhile, seems to have enjoyed John’s company more than his sexual technique.

That doesn’t depreciate their love but, rather, contextualizes Francesca’s fertility frustrations and her inability to achieve a “pinnacle,” as she put it, during intercourse. But her quiet excitement upon receiving John’s cousin Michaela Stirling (Masali Baduza) for an unexpected visit to their London home intimates that Cupid isn’t finished with those two, either.

That we’re contemplating these shows’ import in relation to each other indicates how starved viewers are for realistically developed romance and honestly rendered desire.

Cultural analysts are still puzzling over what makes “Heated Rivalry” so enduringly popular. It isn’t simply about the sex — although, yes, it certainly helps that the cinematography and intimate choreography amplify Storrie and Williams’ physiques.

But what has taken the public by surprise is the fervor with which the audience has consumed Jacob Tierney’s adaptation of author Rachel Reid’s hockey romances – and rewatched those episodes, many times. Like “Bridgerton,” our “Heated Rivalry” obsession is related to a hollow longing for connection pervading society right now. But where viewers passionately seized on “Bridgerton” to seek relief from the midwinter malaise of the pandemic, the wave of “Heated Rivalry” fandom contradicts a supposed mass unease with eroticism.

You may be familiar with the headlines about the 2025 Teens & Screens survey finding that Gen Z collectively cringes at onscreen depictions of sex. This is a surface reading of what UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers finds regarding its respondents’ views concerning relationships. Yes, 60.9% said they want to see more representations of friendship than sex onscreen, but that is related to their lack of interest in watching toxic relationships play out, one of the tropes they’re least interested in seeing.

(Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max) Connor Storrie in “Heated Rivalry.”

Ilya and Shane place sex before emotional intimacy, which would seem to refute those findings. But so does the “Bridgerton” enemies-to-lovers model defining its opening seasons. Whatever people may say they want, tension-free romances are boring. But so are heteronormative ones, especially in a Regency-styled world, a point of agreement shared by showrunner Jess Brownell and Quinn when Brownell decided to change the character originally known as Michael into Michaela.

Francesca and Michaela’s upcoming hero romance has been in motion for some time and promises to grant queerness a front-and-center visibility that was cut short when Benedict ended his romance with Lady Tilley and Paul. And yet, “Bridgerton” also endorses Benedict’s queerness in the latest season’s sixth episode, when he comes out to Sophie.

“I am capable of caring for you, just as I have cared for women I have known who are of the ‘ton,” he says, before pointedly adding, “just as I have cared for some men whom I have known intimately. And I refuse to be at all ashamed about that.”

In that exchange, “Bridgerton” speaks aloud its writers’ dedication to underscoring Benedict’s security in his queer identity – an element it has in common with “Heated Rivalry” and its portrayal of Ilya’s unashamed libido.

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(Liam Daniel/Netflix) Hannah Dodd as Francesca Bridgerton and Masali Baduza as Michaela in “Bridgerton”

Each version of rhapsodized eroticism is grounded in a concept of relationship safety. For all the fuss over Shane and Ilya’s muscular encounters, no aspect of them occurs without one asking the other if what is transpiring also feels OK. Meanwhile, the entirety of Benedict’s relationship foreplay, like everyone else’s, is verbalized. This is also why the friendship budding between the typically flummoxed Francesca and the freewheeling, adventurous Michaela late in the season is as pleasurable to witness as it is crucial to foreshadowing the writers’ plans for those two.

How they come to love each other almost certainly won’t resemble anything we see on “Heated Rivalry.” But both stories woo us with worlds free of weaponized heteronormativity and the very real sensation of imperilment many of us are feeling. That these romances represent consideration as the ultimate seduction makes them not merely release valves, but emotionally liberating escapes. As Sophie says to Benedict in the wake of his radical openness, “Love is always a thing to be proud of. The world needs more of it.” So does TV.

“Bridgerton” streams on Netflix. “Heated Rivalry” streams on HBO Max.

The post Watching “Bridgerton” in a “Heated Rivalry” world appeared first on Salon.com.

After hours of staring at my laptop screen, the glow of my microwave clock providing an extra bit of light in an otherwise dimly-lit apartment, I finally gather the motivation to step into my kitchen. My refrigerator is stocked with a few ingredients (kumato tomatoes, lemons, mini pears, apples, a box of arugula and a carton of eggs) and my pantry holds the usual (pasta, rice, beans). I’m hungry but can’t decide what to eat. And because I waited until the very last moment to feed myself, I’m running low on energy to actually cook. Instinctively, I grab my phone, open Uber Eats and order food from my go-to neighborhood restaurant. I’m relieved, yet hit with a pang of guilt.

For years, I’ve been stuck in a love-hate relationship with third-party food delivery apps, including DoorDash and Grubhub. They’re always available when I need nourishment and comfort. They’re enticing, luring me in with the promise that my strongest cravings (perhaps, even, the best meal I’ve ever eaten) are just a few clicks away. But the apps have also become a default setting I struggled to override. They’re habit-forming. Takeout for dinner leads to takeout for breakfast the following morning, then takeout for lunch, and maybe more takeout for dinner again. They’re expensive and unsustainable. Soulless and unfulfilling. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve finally asked myself, “Should I delete my food delivery apps for good?”

Food delivery, which saw a significant surge in usage during the pandemic, remains high in demand, especially among younger consumers. In 2024, nearly three of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data from the National Restaurant Association. In a survey conducted by the group last year, 37 percent of adults said they order delivery once a week. That statistic was higher among Gen Zs and millennials, with 41 percent saying they rely heavily on food delivery.

As dining and social habits shift, more restaurant operators are being encouraged to offer delivery services via mobile apps.

“The surge in usage among these younger adults is largely attributed to the increased availability and use of mobile apps,” says Dr. Chad Moutray, the National Restaurant Association’s Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. “We all know that smartphones are as essential as food and oxygen to younger customers, and the convenience those restaurant apps provide integrate into their lifestyles. So, if operators want to tap into that market, they must be available through mobile apps.”

But emotions surrounding food delivery services remain mixed. In a January report, The New York Times surveyed almost 900 readers on how they use the apps. Many were cognizant of both the benefits and drawbacks of regular food delivery. Perks include more freedom, more time, an abundance of choices, more socialization, and even less socialization for those who only want to stay at home. On the flip side, there’s impulsive spending (some readers said they’ve ordered a single item for delivery), more food waste, guilt and costly credit card bills.

Food delivery apps aren’t inherently bad, per se. For those with chronic disabilities or mobility issues, the apps are necessary. But they can certainly be overused by casual consumers — so much so that the apps become a bad habit.

In navigating my own relationship with food delivery apps, I’ve realized that ditching the apps was the best thing I could do for my health, wallet and home kitchen. It was after tallying my December spending that I finally deleted them cold turkey in January.

Here are the factors that ultimately influenced my decision:

The hyper-convenience

In an age of widespread digitization and innovation, where technology permeates nearly every aspect of daily life, food delivery apps flourish because they provide convenience.

The convenience of modern life is “seductive,” writes Dr. Alex Curmi, a psychiatrist and trainee psychotherapist, for The Guardian. However, that doesn’t mean it’s beneficial in the long term.

“Modern hyper-convenience is a kind of deal with the devil. It is seductive because it appeals to our instincts, but it surreptitiously depletes us,” Curmi states. “It has made it easier to get by, but in many ways harder to truly succeed. Human flourishing and happiness is not just about subsistence, but also depends on growth, dynamic problem-solving, and solidarity through hardship.”

Indeed, food delivery gives us instant gratification. Yet, it prevents us from connecting with the foods we eat. Increased use of food delivery apps means less time in grocery stores, choosing and understanding specific ingredients. It also results in less time spent cooking. According to a 2025 study by Yash Babar, a professor at the Wisconsin School of Business, people living in counties where food delivery platforms were introduced spent an average of nine percent less time cooking daily than before.

I felt that nine percent in my own kitchen — in the dust gathering on my Dutch oven. After a week of ordering health bowls for lunch, I had forgotten what it felt like to truly know the food on my plate. What variety of tomatoes was used in my bowl? What was used to marinate the chicken? How long did it take to cook the rice? What individual ingredients made up this dressing? And how long did it even take to put everything together?

The high cost

The biggest consequence of using the apps was the financial strain. Service fees, delivery fees, tax and tips, combined with the astronomically high cost of food in New York City, made regular food delivery unfeasible.

As I review receipts from past orders, I’m haunted by several. There’s an order from my local taqueria: a small bag of chips, a small plastic cup of guacamole, and two medium-sized burritos totaled $52.18. I don’t even remember if the burritos were good. There’s another from my favorite bagel shop: a lox sandwich came to $26. And there’s the time I was craving Italian food: two orders of rigatoni ragu totaled $63.18.

Food delivery persists even as food inflation remains high and many families nationwide struggle to afford groceries. While overall food prices continue to climb, groceries rose even faster than restaurant food in early 2026, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for food-away-from-home (which includes restaurant foods and other food service purchases) increased 0.1 percent during that same period, while food-at-home (which includes groceries) increased 0.6 percent.

It’s no secret that food delivery prices are outrageously high. “Up to 91% More Expensive: How Delivery Apps Eat Up Your Budget,” reads a 2020 headline from The New York Times. “The Year Food-Delivery Prices Went Insane,” reads a 2023 headline from Intelligencer. “Food deliveries are getting more expensive — but we can’t stop ordering,” reads a 2024 headline from Business Insider.

The National Restaurant Association’s 2025 survey also found that a majority of consumers would take advantage of off-premise dining options, including delivery, takeout and drive-thru ordering, more often if they could better afford it.

The ethics

Unbeknownst to most consumers, high commission fees, delivery fees and payment processing fees enforced by food delivery apps are hurting restaurant profit margins, forcing some to shut down.

“These platforms do not only connect consumers to restaurants — they fundamentally alter the nature of competition in the marketplace,” says Manav Raj, a Professor of Management at The Wharton School, who is an author of a 2025 study looking into how food delivery apps affect the national restaurant industry.

According to NYU Stern Dean J.P. Eggers, who co-authored the study, their research found that “digital delivery platforms disproportionately impact younger, less established restaurants.”

“This poses a long-term risk to industry dynamism, potentially stifling innovation and leading to stagnation,” Eggers continues, adding that “in high-cost urban areas, the intensified competition and margin pressures from these platforms could result in a proliferation of vacant storefronts in once-vibrant, high-traffic neighborhoods.”

Food delivery drivers are struggling too. Many face dangerous work conditions, especially in major cities, often working long hours without proper access to public restrooms, the New York Times reported in 2020. Because delivery drivers are independent contractors, they aren’t guaranteed minimum wage nationwide or additional benefits. In New York City — where there are around 60,000 restaurant and grocery delivery workers, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection — a landmark minimum pay law requires third-party food delivery apps to pay workers a minimum of $21.44 an hour, not including tips. The legislation also requires apps to offer an option to give at least a 10 percent tip before or during checkout.

Before the new rules went into effect on Jan. 26, Uber and DoorDash filed a joint federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, alleging that the laws on how they display tipping options violate the First Amendment. A recent report from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection found that since Uber and DoorDash changed their tip options to appear after customers place their orders, their delivery drivers have lost over $550 million in tips.

In the end, there’s no clear “winner” within the food delivery ecosystem. And it also doesn’t seem like food delivery apps are retiring anytime soon. For those who are attempting to quit the apps for good, our biggest act of rebellion, now, is returning to our home kitchens. Cooking. Revelling in the labor. And savoring our hard work.

Tonight, at 8 p.m., I’m roasting those kumato tomatoes and scrambling the eggs. It’s not revolutionary. But it’s mine.

The post Yes, you should delete your food delivery apps appeared first on Salon.com.

Many others have also suffered because of the Trump administration’s policies. We must never forget their names. They are real human beings and not collateral damage. Power and policy are not abstractions — they hurt real people’s bodies, minds and lives, and the well-being of the larger community.

On Feb. 26, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee from Myanmar who spoke little English, was found dead on a street in Buffalo, New York. Reported missing on Feb. 19, he was dropped off by Border Patrol agents at a coffee shop, on a cold day, alone. He had no shoes, only the orange booties given to him at a detention center.   

Alam was in the country legally, but he had been detained for almost a year in the Erie County jail and released on a misdemeanor plea deal. Border Patrol took him into custody and determined they could not legally deport him. He had been arrested after a minor altercation with police; Alam was apparently too confused to follow their orders.

His son told Reuters that his father could not read, write or use electronic devices. The family lives on the other side of the city, miles away from the coffee shop. After releasing him, Border Patrol apparently did not attempt to contact Alam’s family or his attorney.  

Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan told CNN that Alam’s death embodies “bad policing [and] bad human beings.” The behavior of the federal agents, he said, was “inhumane” and an example of “why we do not cooperate with ICE, Homeland Security and Border Patrol.”

In a statement to the Daily Beast, Customs and Border Protection said that Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance” and was left at “a warm, safe location near his last known address.” The Trump administration is supposedly “investigating” Alam’s premature death. Whatever the finding may be, bureaucratic legalese will not bring him back to life, and Border Patrol’s callous actions are part of a much larger pattern of behavior.

There are widespread reports of inhumane treatment and violations of human and civil rights — including excessive force, lack of medical care, and physical, sexual, emotional, and other forms of abuse — in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol detention centers across the country. Reports indicate that children and other vulnerable people are also being mistreated.

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These stories come in addition to other Kafkaesque reports about the real people being ensnared in the administration’s cruel mass deportation machine. U.S. military veterans who served with distinction are being deported. Members of the LGBTQ community are being sent back to countries where they are likely to be killed. College students are being grabbed at airports or taken from their dorms by federal agents and put in detention for immediate deportation.

According to the Guardian, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — three times the number of deaths in 2024.

On CNN’s “NewsNight,” commentator and GOP strategist Scott Jennings tried to minimize Alam’s death, arguing that “it’s reasonable to assume you’re going to have individual interactions where something goes awry.” Host Abby Phillip was disgusted. “I think some people would say there is a way to do this that respects human life…respects the lives of people who are here, trying to seek a better life, trying to do the best they can, and doesn’t treat them as disposable,” she responded.

But moral callousness is a defining feature of the Age of Trump.

The president’s approval ratings are in a tail spin, with only 39% of Americans approving of his immigration policy. Trump has also lost a modest amount of support among Republicans for his immigration policy. This reflects a broader collapse, where his overall approval is now at historic lows.

But context matters in what constitutes a morality test of the American people. Despite the drop in Trump’s levels of approval, the numbers remain damning. Tens of millions of Americans continue to support the administration’s mass deportation policies.

A Fox News survey taken between Jan. 23-26 — the very time frame in which Pretti was killed in Minneapolis — asked registered voters if ICE agents were “too aggressive,” “not aggressive enough” or “about right.” Seventeen percent said ICE is not aggressive enough. In essence, one in six Americans want federal agents to be even more violent and reckless.

This pattern continues. According to the results of an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll taken in February after the killings of Pretti and Good, 31% of Americans support the tactics that ICE is using. The number is much higher — 70% — among Republicans. 

Why does such a large percentage of the public — and, more specifically, Republicans and MAGA conservatives — continue to support the administration’s campaign of abuse and violence?

Political polarization and media echo chambers have shaped a narrative where many Americans believe that immigrants are hardened, violent criminals. In reality, immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than native-born Americans.

Republicans and Trump voters are more likely to be authoritarians, and research shows they possess a high social dominance orientation. Political scientists and other experts have repeatedly found that this group is also more likely to be nativist, racist and hostile to non-whites, and to believe that so-called real Americans are white.

This corresponds to the centuries-long history of state-sponsored violence against non-whites, immigrants and those deemed to be the Other. The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign continues this history of violence.

Perhaps most troubling, many people enjoy watching members of the marginalized, othered group being subjected to violence and other abuse. Research has also shown that members of Trump’s MAGA coalition, along with self-identified conservatives more broadly, are more likely to possess what social psychologists describe as the “dark triad” of personality traits —  Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy — and to lack empathy.  

Resisting its pull requires that people of conscience and others who support real democracy engage in acts of moral witnessing and radical empathy. They must not turn away. Bearing witness means physically standing with the stranger, the Other, the victim — placing one’s body between them and the power of the state and its enforcers. This will be scary and uncomfortable for many Americans. But overcoming that fear and engaging in collective action will build momentum, and a type of muscle memory, where the new rule becomes action and not inaction. 

Authoritarians and other bad actors depend on inertia among the public, and a type of collective decision rule where most default to accepting the daily horrors and wrongdoing. In this, they become complicit through tacit consent.

More than ever, we should be standing up and saying “Not in my name.” Or in the names of Alex Pretti, Renee Good and Nurul Amin Shah Alam.

The post America’s enduring appetite for Trump’s deportation cruelty appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump has now used the U.S. military twice since the first of the year — a mere 59 days — to topple heads of state. In early January, he staged a successful military incursion into Venezuela and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and first lady to bring them back to the U.S. to stand trial. Most observers assumed that America had deposed Maduro as a means of toppling Venezuela’s corrupt government and paving the way for elections and a restoration of democracy. There was even a shadow government waiting in the wings that had been legitimately elected two years before. Led by opposition figure Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism, it was ready to take the helm.

But no: Trump had apparently made a deal with what remained of the Maduro regime. He would leave them in power to do as they wished in exchange for opening up Venezuela’s oil fields to American companies. Since America’s incursion, Trump has shown no interest in the democratization of the country or accountability for anyone but the former president. What will happen to Venezuela is anyone’s guess. But it appears that as long as they agree to hand over billions in oil revenue to the U.S. under threat of military action, they will have a free hand. 

Then there is Iran. This past weekend, the United States, in partnership with Israel, bombed the Islamic Republic for the second time in less than a year. In June 2025, the U.S. military deployed its most powerful non-nuclear weapon to destroy underground bunkers used by the Iranian government to house their nuclear program. At the time Trump said the facilities had been completely obliterated, but no proof was ever offered of that claim. Now he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bombing the country again, ostensibly because they still need to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Or is it that they want to help the protesters? Or do they want regime change? The answer keeps changing. 

The administration didn’t bother with the usual constitutional and statutory niceties, and as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye explained, Trump has felt little need to explain his actions to the American people. He believes he has an unfettered right to use American power, whether economic or military, at his total discretion without any consultation or approval from Congress. The administration had been having talks with the Iranian government which, by all accounts, had agreed to nearly all their demands, but Trump decided to bomb anyway, proving that he had always intended to do it and the talks were just a delaying tactic. (On Sunday, the president told The Atlantic in a short interview that he had agreed to keep talking, even as the air strikes continue.)

As with Venezuela, the initial round of attacks on Iran successfully decapitated the government, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and many of his top lieutenants. But the Islamic Republic is a very different country than Venezuela, a full-blown authoritarian theocracy with a large and powerful military and plenty of high-tech armaments. With a population of 90 million, it is roughly three times larger than Iraq, and although the country is in bad economic straits, it is divided politically. There is a large anti-government resistance, but it is reportedly mostly unorganized, and the heavily-armed Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which has tentacles extending deep into the country’s economic and industrial sectors, has shown no signs of splintering.

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Nonetheless, Trump seems to think — likely at the behest of Netanyahu and people like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an Iran hawk — that the country is so weak that the Revolutionary Guard will lay down their arms under his threats and agree to make one of his hallowed deals. Trump told the New York Times on Sunday night that despite his paeans to the Iranian protesters, he really has no problem with the regime staying in place. He said, “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” I’ll bet that comes as a surprise to Netanyahu. 

Meanwhile, Vivian Salama at the Atlantic reported that the administration is so excited about their military “victories” that Cuba is next on the list. One official told Salama, “the president is feeling like, ‘I’m on a roll’; like, ‘This is working.’” One important goal of the Venezuelan operation was to halt oil shipments to Cuba, which has had the effect of leading the island’s economy closer to collapse. The Cuban people are suffering greatly, which seems to be part of the plan. 

Trump is very excited at the prospect of a “friendly takeover” and has talked about the fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in talks to “make a deal.” There’s no word on what that deal might be, whether he’s thinking of making them a colony with Rubio as its viceroy, or simply turning it over to Florida Republicans to do with as they please. 

Salama reported that the president “sees himself as the first modern American leader with the guts to complete what others only flirted with: map-changing transformations across the world.” But if you look at the countries he’s chosen to target with military action so far, what you really see is that these are all countries that have defied U.S. power in one respect or another — and he’s decided to teach them a lesson. 

What is happening is basically a gang war. Trump is taking over other gangsters’ turf and taking out their leaders. There’s no need to completely change their crews. After all, they’re in the same business. It just means that they now need to report to him — while showing loyalty and ensuring protection. 

If you think that’s far-fetched, consider what Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl when the reporter asked him about Khamenei’s death. “I got him before he got me,” he said. “They tried twice. Well I got him first.”

There’s no “Donroe Doctrine” or some great global imperial strategy. Donald Trump is simply a mob boss who thinks he’s settling all the family business.

The post Trump’s foreign policy has no rules appeared first on Salon.com.

In recent weeks, a lot of those who went along for the ride as #pizzagate expanded into QAnon — those who, in other words, had no problem believing that the former secretary of state was raping, murdering and eating children — have responded to revelations from the files with a victory lap. The files don’t validate most of QAnon’s most lurid accusations (the adrenochrome, the child-eating, the Satanic rituals), but no matter. As with every Q prediction that failed to materialize — so, all of them — believers are rebounding quickly: Okay, maybe Comet Pizza wasn’t really running a child sex ring from the basement it doesn’t have . . . but there sure are a lot of references to pizza in these files.

The Epstein files were always going to be a gift to conspiracy theorists, and have indeed resulted in a raft of brand new theories, including one that has Epstein alive and well and living in Israel. But parsing the tranches of documents — the most recent release puts the total at roughly 3.5 million pages — turns out to be making normies feel suspicious too. All over social media, people with no ties to conspiracy communities are unsettled by what they reveal: The sheer breadth of Epstein’s network, the casual references to abuse, the confirmation of everything that hid in plain sight.

There’s no order to the files themselves: No indexing, no differentiation between material evidence and uninvestigated complaints, missing files and overenthusiastic redactions — a build-your-own-conspiracy board minus the red twine. The result is that “the Epstein files are kind of like the Bible: Whatever you’re looking for, with enough confirmation bias you can find it,” says Anna Merlan, a staff writer at Mother Jones and author of the 2019 book “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.”

Conspiracy theories are now part of the mainstream culture and political landscape in ways that are both more overt and more quotidian, than previously. And each new one is more likely to reach an audience that wasn’t looking for it. In the summer of 2020, amidst the mounting spread of COVID, Merlan wrote a piece for Vice called “The Conspiracy singularity has arrived” that reported on the strange and unlikely alliances she had begun seeing in her conspiracy research. People who were already deep into conspiratorial belief systems — anti-vaccination zealots, for instance — were suddenly crossing ideological paths with QAnon folks; health and wellness influencers were suddenly preoccupied with 5G and 15-minute cities. “Conspiracy communities that have previously only brushed past each other like schools of fish borne along on different currents are suddenly, abruptly, swimming in the same direction,” Merlan wrote.

In the United States, the convergence of disparate conspiracy theories that began during the initial pandemic lockdown and multiplied as the 2020 election grew closer were, Merlan recalls, “being drawn together in a sort of grand unified theory of COVID, to create a single explanation for everything that was going on.” She sees this happening anew: The hydra-headed sprawl of the Epstein files is a new singularity “where everything is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, and everything comes back to the Epstein story.”

This isn’t an unreasonable response, because everything that a grand unified theory of Epstein implies — the power, the importance, the influence, the menace — describes exactly the person Epstein wanted to be. He befriended the men of science and culture he invested in because he sought out people whose worldviews he suspected aligned with his own and whom he could likely trust to keep his secrets.

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The recent four-episode series of the podcast “Behind the Bastards” called “How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World” lays out how the predator’s fingerprints came to be on the most consequential discourses and zeitgeists of the early 21st century, from Black Lives Matter to Gamergate to #MeToo. But Merlan emphasizes that no one should mistake his Forrest Gump–like ubiquity for impeccable timing: “[Epstein] had so much to do with so many famous and powerful people, and was involved in so many things. So part of the reason we’re seeing [the Epstein files] and going, Wow, he’s everywhere, he’s the grand unified answer to every bit of corruption that is plaguing us is because, by design, he tried to be everywhere. He worked very, very hard at it.”

“Behind the Bastards” points out, as just one example, that Epstein’s philanthropic interest in scientific research was sparked by either fear and resentment of others (transgender people, Black people) or connected to his own eugenic desires: Cloning himself, operating an elite breeding farm at his New Mexico ranch. He wasn’t interested in capital-S Science, but in funding research that would validate the beliefs he already held.

Conspiratorial thinking, Merlan points out, follows a couple of key patterns: It flourishes in times of political and social upheaval, and it tends to resonate within minoritized groups “who are systematically kept from participating fully in society.” The conspiratorial thinking of the Epstein Class was a privileged twist on the latter — a result not of being marginalized but of fear that they might be: Donald Trump was not notably interested in conspiracy theories until he began feeling personally attacked by Barack Obama’s presidency; Trump began seeding racist citizenship theories not because he was materially disempowered, but because he recognized that Obama’s success and likeability far outpaced his own.

Likewise, Epstein saw #MeToo as a problem to be neutralized because the success of any social movement in which women were treated as reliable narrators of their own exploitation would impede his own racket. Characterizing Epstein as a turn-of-the-millennium Forrest Gump or Tom Ripley or even Waldo is an easy goof, but it’s more accurate to identify him as a reactionary snowflake on high alert for any social, political or technological shift that might eventually challenge the status quo at scale. “We’ve always known that powerful men get away with sexual abuse in a way that other people do not,” says Merlan. “The Epstein files are further confirmation that there are different systems of justice and different systems of accountability for different kinds of sex criminals.”

The files are symbolically powerful because everything about them — the records of emails with well-known academics, the name-drops of those well-known academics to others, the confidence represented by his lazy, typo-strewn communication style, the sheer volume of accumulated materials — invites a reading of Epstein as omniscient, industrious and hungry for knowledge. The mechanics of searching the documents for bold-faced names play up his omnipresence, emphasizing his connections to forward-thinking industries while obscuring that he leveraged most of these connections in pursuit of regression and impunity. Epstein wasn’t an architect of democracy’s downfall; he was just one of its fluffers.

The increase in conspiracy theories that has followed the release of the Epstein files suggests that the event horizon of the files has come and gone. Now they’re just fodder for more conspiracies: Austin Tucker Martin, the man who was shot and killed at Mar-A-Lago late last month when he was discovered trying to break into the resort with a gun and a gas can, was supposedly reacting to information in the Epstein files. A decade of living in a conspiracy-pilled world has affected all of us, but the impact of a larger erosion of truth is what allowed that world to take shape.

Merlan notes that it’s common for people who might not actually believe in conspiracy theories to also not resist their pull — “Republic of Lies” is about how living in a country that has from the start been conspiracy-minded makes us more likely to either buy in or tune them out. “We know that conspiracy theories wax and wane throughout history,” she says, “and we know that periods of social stability [are] correlated with slightly less visibility of conspiracy theories, and times of social instability with more people discussing conspiracy theories openly. [Conspiracy theories] appeal to people who feel locked out of systems of advancement, who feel that the functions of American society are not working well for them. And that is true for more and more people as the wealth gap widens and other kinds of inequality get worse, as we live through this age of mass instability where a lot more people are not able to achieve what they were told was the American dream — as we see things like the Epstein files, and as we see evidence of people getting away with behavior that’s not just reprehensible but criminal.”

But just as there was enough accumulated dislike of Hillary Clinton to make #pizzagate unnecessary, in the end, to defeat her (Rolling Stone’s 2017 forensic investigation of the hashtag found that, despite the network of bots and fake social-media accounts created to push it, didn’t actually go viral until after the election), there’s no shortage of confirmed corruption within American political and social systems to make conspiracy theories fee a little redundant. We already know plenty about systems of inequality that have impacted Americans as much as any incursion of lizard people ever could. We know about FBI-led assassinations, secret drug experiments, private health insurers, the for-profit prison pipeline, media consolidation and disinformation platforming. And we certainly know that men will create all manner of chaos in their desperation to distract from their own misdeeds.

So why is the frame of conspiracy still so often the default one? Merlan thinks it’s because “conspiracy theories are a useful framing if you are looking to place blame on a specific person or group of people — and that’s always what so many of the political ones come back to. It’s how things like xenophobia work. And when the social ills we’re facing are as complicated as they are, conspiracy framing works to simplify them enough that they target a useful scapegoat.” Beyond that, the opportunity to make money from promulgating conspiracies is larger than it’s ever been. The one problem now “is that so many other people trying to do the exact same thing. It’s a problem of congestion — but it’s still making a lot of people very rich.”

The post The Epstein files are conspiracy-pilling everybody appeared first on Salon.com.

Yet again, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), the down-and-out heiress to a disgraced media empire, finds herself embroiled in scandal. This time, her troubles have potentially massive legal ramifications, ones that stand to implicate her and her equally posh husband, Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Desperate to repair their reputations, Yasmin and Henry let themselves be wooed by the charismatic Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) on his quest to make the fictional payment processor Tender into the most powerful banking app in the world. But after months in their high-level posts at the company, some globe-trotting sleuthing by Yasmin’s sometimes-friend and former colleague, Harper Stern (Myha’la), has revealed Tender’s operation to be all smoke and mirrors. Yasmin and Henry are perched at the very top of a house of cards, and there’s a strong wind coming just over the horizon.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Myha’la and Marisa Abela in “Industry”

After 10 seconds, “Veridis Quo” fades, and the episode cuts from black to Henry and Yasmin privately assessing their next moves, analyzing how they were suckered by Whitney’s predatory charms. In the course of six episodes, the trio went from being business acquaintances to the three points of a carnivorous love triangle built on sexual deviancy, criminal blackmail and corporate espionage at the hands of Whitney’s escort-turned-assistant, Hayley (Kiernan Shipka). “Surely it was obvious that I couldn’t stand the little creep,” Yasmin tells Henry. “He was in our house, practically swallowing you.” But backtracking and regrets have no place here. It’s too late. Yasmin and Henry fell prey to Whitney and Hayley’s twisted game, compromising their judgment for physical pleasure and zigzagging across the Kinsey scale in the process.

But in “Industry,” that’s all par for the course. In the cutthroat world of finance, everything — kindness, friendship, sex — is a means to an end. The goal is capital gain, and there’s nothing and no one that can’t be quite literally massaged in the pursuit of that target. Swapping spit is as good as swapping intel, and all of the trading is done inside, if you catch my drift. If time is money, and money is power, then who these characters spend their time with directly correlates to how wealthy and financially secure they can become. Gay kisses and scenes of queer physical affection aren’t exactly titillating, or worse, made into inspiring coming-out vignettes perfectly primed for Pride season watchlists. “Industry” isn’t even particularly concerned with the now-banal sentiment that “gay characters can be flawed and bad, too!” Because it’s not that these characters are good or bad. Like the rest of us, their morality and sexuality don’t exist in a fixed state. They are as fluid as the money that controls their existence. And in a show where sex and capital are so intertwined, true intimacy has become the most precious, powerful currency.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Kiernan Shipka in “Industry”

When “Industry” premiered in 2020, Down and Kay were focused on young, aspiring traders, green to the game and gunning for a coveted spot on the Pierpoint trading floor. The fictional London investment bank was the epicenter of the show’s universe, the place where deals were made and trust was broken. It was the sight of plenty of sex, too. Turn on any episode from the show’s first two seasons, and you’re likely to see cocaine being boofed from someone’s bare butt in a conference room, or Yasmin encouraging her former coworker Robert (Harry Lawtey) to ejaculate onto a bathroom mirror, commanding him to lick it off. Pierpoint was where boundaries were pushed and power plays had their efficacy challenged, making “Industry” the ideal combination of “Succession” and “Gossip Girl” — the dream for anyone who enjoys when television meets at the intersection of smart and sexy.

But it was when characters stepped outside Pierpoint that things got really interesting. Suddenly, the rules weren’t so rigid. Deception had less sway on the regulated trading floor than it did in the wild, and in the seedy streets and trendy nightclubs of London, physical and financial lust blurred. In the show’s very first episode, key Pierpoint investor Nicole Craig (Sarah Parish) sexually harasses Harper in the back of her town car. When Harper recoils, Nicole sets her sights on Robert, frantic to snare a young trader in her web. It’s a despicable deed — one that will come back into the fray later in the series’ tenure — but one that succinctly reflects the show’s dynamics. Whether the viewer wants to linger on a character’s supposed sexuality is their choice. Kay and Down prefer to keep it all murky, tossing their sharp-toothed players back and forth across the sexuality spectrum with no intention of keeping them in one place for too long.

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That unpredictability isn’t for everyone. There are numerous reasons why “Industry” hasn’t exploded in the way that, say, HBO Max’s smash obsession “Heated Rivalry” has. Despite the two shows sharing a throughline of raunchy queer sex, “Heated Rivalry” is too hung up on making its queer characters likable. For all of their will-they-won’t-they indecision and steamy sexual tension, the show’s star-crossed lovers, Ilya Rosenov (Connor Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), consistently play it safe.

But there’s a time and place for that, too. Viewers deserve to see happy endings and tame love stories as much as they deserve to see bodily fluids dripping down a mirror. Still, it’s surprising that both shows stream on the same platform in America, but their audiences have yet to truly overlap. In the weeks after “Heated Rivalry” wrapped its first season, evangelists of the gay hockey show toyed with the idea of switching to “Industry,” which was premiering its fourth season in early January.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Max Minghella and Kit Harington in “Industry”

Yet, the show’s viewership and larger cultural conversation have yet to translate. “Industry” hasn’t received the same breakthrough popularity as “Heated Rivalry,” presumably because its gay sex is not in service of storylines about love and romantic relationships. All of the fornication in “Industry” is transactional. For Kay and Down’s characters, cash is a sexuality, and it manifests in panting, lascivious physical connections that fuel their misconduct. New York Magazine features writer Emily Gould put it best when she posted, “I’ve tried to switch hyperfixations from ‘Heated Rivalry’ to ‘Industry,’ but the problem is that, whenever characters on ‘Industry’ have sex, you’re like ‘WOAH YIKES’ and not ‘yesssssss.’”

“Heated Rivalry” leaned into its gay smut, but it drew the line at correlating sex and manipulation — funny, considering that, for half of its first season, Shane and Ilya are psyching each other out on the ice with sensual mind games. Their dynamic was far more about stimulating the viewer than surprising them. And it worked. The show garnered a massive international audience, and in that respect, flirted with progress. For a blip in this post-Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” era, when queerness is once again taboo, the counterculture went mainstream.

But where’s the fun in that? Treachery can be exciting too, even progressive. In a converse way, Kay and Down’s reluctance to be so clean, so shiny and so heteronormative with their characters is just as forward-thinking as any media that conjures a conventional picture of equality. “Industry” is leaps and bounds ahead because it refuses to define anyone strictly by their sexuality. Here, progressiveness isn’t derived from depicting queer people as singularly, unceasingly good or bad. The show also doesn’t hold its characters in some opaque sexual purgatory, either. There doesn’t have to be any big discussion about queerness or coming out because it isn’t necessary; everyone knows the score, and that knowledge levels the playing field. Anyone could be an enemy or a lover — often, they’re both. The uncertainty is what makes “Industry” so exciting, and its rare moments of real intimacy so effective.

In its fourth season, “Industry” has moved almost entirely beyond Pierpoint, consequently ratcheting up the dramatic friction tenfold. Without the narrative strictness demanded by the investment bank’s setting, anything can and will happen. Yasmin and Harper are both clamoring for stability. And though their paths diverged after they respectively left Pierpoint, their soft spot for each other remains. Whether they like it or not, walking through the Hell of finance together has bonded them forever. They’re closer than friends, but not fused like enemies. Still, Harper and Yasmin’s existences are inextricably linked, gnarled together in a helix of favors and bargains. And as this season of “Industry” reaches its big finale, the two women find that the tie binding them has shortened once again.

Harper knows Yasmin’s in deep trouble. Yasmin knows Harper’s the one who sank her and Henry into this mess — the person set to blow on Tender’s house of cards. Over drinks, they reminisce about where they started and where they’re heading. They talk about all of the things that have been left unsaid, buried by their never-ending battle of wits. Yasmin wipes her tears, and Harper puts a comforting hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Do you want to go out?” Yasmin asks. Cue the synthetic flute chords of “Veridis Quo,” scoring their mutual melancholy.

(Simon Ridgway/HBO) Marisa Abela and Kiernan Shipka in “Industry”

Few things are a better calling card for queer counterculture than a Daft Punk deep cut. “Veridis Quo” begins gently, repeating its opening chords and creating an atmosphere of soft sorrow until a drum line and a synth bleed into the song, defying the instrumental’s bittersweetness. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the sight of Harper and Yasmin, dancing together at a club, relieved to have waved the white flag, at least for tonight. As the synth grows louder, the two kiss under the dance floor’s blue and yellow lights. It’s not a coming-out scene. It’s not the beginning of a romance. It’s an indescribable closeness, more potent than any dividend. Melting into one another on the ground outside the club, smoking cigarettes, Yasmin tells Harper, “We’re here forever, even if we can’t be.”

Tomorrow, everything will go back to normal. Actions will face their consequences, and Harper and Yasmin’s closeness may be but a distant memory. But it’s because their love is fleeting that it’s special. For a brief moment, neither of them wants anything more than to be close to each other. In the cold world of “Industry,” that’s love.

The post In “Industry,” queerness is capital appeared first on Salon.com.

The joke isn’t funny, I agree. That’s because it comes too close to the truth. There are various ways to understand the U.S.-Israeli bombing attack on Iran launched on Saturday morning, which has killed several hundred people so far, including the Iranian regime’s senior religious leader, Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. None of them have anything to do with democratic legitimacy or coherent geopolitical strategy. This pseudo-war is based on false or dubious premises, has little or no popular support and professes unclear or unachievable goals.

This disastrous turn of events should shame America, and shame the world. Indeed, it exposes yet again the disgraceful failures of both American politics and global diplomacy, as well as the unrelenting and apparently incurable moral blindness of U.S. foreign policy. Whether “we,” to use an objectionable term of art, actually learned anything from 20 years of catastrophic and self-destructive war in Iraq and Afghanistan has now been decisively answered in the negative.

Consider this passage from a recent New York Review essay by Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama. Rhodes is ostensibly discussing former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War, but the contemporary resonance is both obvious and intentional:

What led men like him into rooms where they made decisions regarding a country they knew nothing about?  … What innate confidence in our own special character leads the U.S. government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy?

Rhodes has experienced something of a road-to-Damascus conversion since leaving the White House. He understands all too well that American exceptionalism remains a powerful and dangerous form of hopium, and that a vanishingly small number of Americans in the elite classes are entirely immune to the high. Donald Trump and his inner circle launched this unnecessary and self-destructive war, driven by their aggressively ignorant meme-fueled understanding of global relations, but everyone in the ride-along camp or the “hmm, maybe” contingent must share the blame. It’s been profoundly disorienting to hear mainstream commentators, including some who identify as liberals, flirting once again with the phrase “regime change,” as if they were late-night texting that seductive bad-boy ex they can’t resist.

Anyone who persuaded themselves to vote for Trump based on his supposed peacenik or isolationist philosophy — may Maureen Dowd’s 2016 New York Times column on “Donald the Dove” live on in infamy — was volunteering to get rolled like the proverbial drunken rube at the county fair. We know that much, and we should also know by now that for Trump, the entire drama is about him.

In the two-dimensional Plato’s cave of Trump’s mind, the fate of the Iranian people and the prospect of regional war in the Middle East are flickering shadows on the wall. History, for Trump, is literally his story: This is an act of personal and political desperation, a supposedly daring roll of the dice aimed at rescuing his corrupt and crumbling regime by attaching it to a glorious American victory.

Considered in narrow functional terms, the Iran attack is not likely to achieve its stated objectives or to redeem the narrative of Trump’s presidency. That’s not especially reassuring under these volatile and unpredictable circumstances: By far the most likely outcomes are significant medium-term blowback for both Israel and the U.S., and worsening misery for the Iranian people.

There is literally no precedent for bombing a country into regime change, and Trump’s only saving grace, in this context, is that he’s too chicken-hearted to send in ground troops. Late on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to boast that Khamenei was “no longer with us,” although Iranian state media refused to confirm that for almost 24 hours. It’s already clear that Khamenei’s death does not mean that the Islamic Republic’s political and religious leadership, which is a complex bureaucratic hierarchy, has been decapitated or seriously damaged. A temporary successor has already been named and Iran’s elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, remains in power.

Iran is a complex and dynamic society of 93 million people, which has been persistently and almost deliberately misunderstood by most Westerners, especially American political elites. There is clearly widespread internal opposition to the theocratic regime, especially in Tehran and other major cities, as recent large-scale protests and the government’s violent crackdown have made clear. But there’s no coordinated Iranian revolutionary or resistance movement that stands ready to stage a violent rebellion based on a midnight speech delivered by Florida Man in a USA baseball cap.

Reza Pahlavi, son of the former U.S.-supported shah who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution of 1978, says he is eager to reclaim the throne — of a nation where he hasn’t lived for 48 years. No doubt there are Iranians, both at home and in the global diaspora, who would welcome a U.S.-sponsored coup or even a military invasion. But it requires a high level of neocon self-delusion — a disorder to which Donald Trump was supposedly immune — to imagine that would be the general response.

Most people in Iran would almost certainly be eager to resist any such outside intervention, not because they are fans of the current government but because they value national sovereignty, an issue that Trump’s neo-imperialist foreign policy seems to view as bewildering or irrelevant. Why in the world should Canadians or Greenlanders, just for example, want to be those things when they could be third-string Americans?

To be entirely fair, faint signals of resistance can be detected from unlikely quarters. Trump has squandered so much political capital over the past year-plus that the habitually craven Democratic leadership in the House and Senate — after consulting opinion polls, no doubt — has come out in nearly unanimous opposition to this misadventure. Some Democrats now hope to push a symbolic but fruitless vote on the War Powers Act, although Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat reborn as a hardcore Israel supporter, has pronounced himself a “hard no.”

The New York Times expressed its collective sad in a medium-strength editorial that briefly drifts into “regime change maybe sometimes shrug” territory before returning to approximate reality. The Washington Post, having demoted itself to eager-beaver MAGA water boy, published several hundred words of feckless dithering simultaneously suggesting that a full-on ground war might be necessary and that a “comprehensive case has yet to be made” for any war at all.

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None of this makes up for the shameful collapse of America’s political system mentioned above, in which Congress, at first reluctantly and then enthusiastically, has abandoned its oversight function of the executive branch in favor of posturing and complaining. And it’s no good avoiding the Netanyahu-shaped elephant in the room: Israel’s far-right government and its well-funded American supporters have exercised such a persistent distortion effect on U.S. foreign policy that it’s difficult to see where it begins or ends.

Netanyahu has sought to push the U.S. into all-out war with Iran throughout his entire political career, endlessly retailing the same dubious narrative — now entrenched in the American political vernacular as a pseudo-fact — that the Iranians were days or weeks away from building a nuclear bomb. Given that Iran presents no plausible military threat to the U.S. and was clearly eager to reach an agreement that would avoid military confrontation, it’s reasonable to ask which nation’s interests were of primary importance in launching this war. (Israeli officials made a point of noting that their forces were first to strike Iran, and that their bombs had killed Khamenei.)

As for the rest of the world, shame and hypocrisy abound. Tepid objections have come in from U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who has become an increasingly pathetic figure on the world stage, along with a handful of neutral, uninvolved or insignificant nations. But Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — just moments ago a shining hero of the global anti-Trump resistance! — has fully signed on to this unprompted Yank aggression, as has Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. They still know how to behave when America cracks the whip, as do British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the other European leaders who have scuttled back into their mouse-holes and said little or nothing. This war will lead nowhere good — and then the collective shame over how we got here will, as usual, be swept under the carpet and forgotten.

The post Trump’s war on Iran: America’s shame, and the world’s failure appeared first on Salon.com.

In the hours and days that followed, social media boiled over with rage on behalf of the “Sinners” stars, directed at the man who shouted the slur, John Davidson, the subject of the biographical drama “I Swear.” Accompanying that rage was a fresh explosion of ignorance about Tourette syndrome, the condition that caused Davidson to tic involuntarily throughout last Sunday’s ceremony.

Davidson, who has a symptom of Tourette’s called coprolalia, told Variety that he shouted at least 10 different offensive words during the awards, and the BBC censored all of them except the N-word. This happened despite the BBC airing a pre-recorded version on a two-hour delay. That gave editors ample time to discern what to excise, which included filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. stating “Free Palestine” while accepting an award for “My Father’s Shadow,” his feature-length debut. But somehow the epithet slipped through.

I deeply empathize with Jordan and Lindo — and Davidson, who has expressed profound regret in the days since. But the person for whom I feel the most compassion wasn’t even in the room.

(Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/Getty Images) John Davidson at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards

Shayla Amamiya is one of several Black content creators with Tourette’s who have made thoughtful videos explaining what it means to have this disability. Amamiya’s reaction to the BAFTAs circulated the most widely of all of them because, like Davidson, she also has coprolalia, explaining that even she has the N-word as a tic.

“Does this mean that I use them regularly? Does this mean that I mean them? Does this mean that I can control what I say? No, it does not,” she says. “That’s not how coprolalia works. That is not how Tourette syndrome works.”

For performing this service, Amamiya was hounded off the Internet. Racist trolls snipped excerpts of her statement to further weaponize their anti-Black racism. But some Black users heaped abuse on her, too, for saying, “This is not me saying that people don’t have the right to be offended. However, you can’t be offended when a disabled person is disabled.” Hence, my fatigue.

This situation is uncommon. Our nerves are frayed, leaving little patience for nuance. People of color are under siege right now, and so are people with disabilities. Tourette’s is misunderstood, and coprolalia, a symptom of the condition that leads to involuntary swearing, slurs, or other socially unacceptable words or phrases, is even more so. It only affects about 10-15% of people with the disability, according to the Tourette Association of America, yet it defines Tourette’s in the minds of many. It is possible to recognize that Jordan and Lindo should not have been subjected to a racist, dehumanizing slur while carrying out a venerated task, and that better care should have been taken to prevent Davidson from being placed in such a mortifying position.

But this furor lands at a time when even America’s president treats bigotry like a joke. So when an outburst born of misfiring neurons is heard around the world, the overwhelming immediate reaction is to pillory the person who said it, when we should be asking why the international media entity broadcasting it allowed it to be audible.

Regardless of circumstance or intent, that word’s impact knocks the wind out of a person. Where a portion of the public has gone terribly wrong is in indicting the people who have no control over saying it.

“The ableism is so painful to view, and so is the racism,” Amamiya shared in a follow-up text post. “Both sides are understood. But there should be no reason why I’m seeing people say that people with Tourette’s shouldn’t be out in public, that we should be separated, or that we should wear muzzles like DOGS. We are all human  . . . and I hate that two communities are people pit [sic] against each other.”

Knee-jerk rage and ignorance are the internet’s primary fuel sources, so it wasn’t a matter of whether the conversation about the BAFTA debacle would go off the rails, but when.

A week after the fact, most people finally seem to understand that the BBC and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts shoulder the blame for this situation. Both the broadcaster and the arts charity released official apologies, and the BBC promised to investigate the matter. Reaching that conclusion took a lot longer than it should have. On the same night as the ceremony, Lindo told Vanity Fair that he and Jordan simply “did what we had to do” at the podium before revealing that nobody from BAFTA spoke to them directly after they presented.

(Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA) Host Alan Cumming speaks on stage during the EE BAFTA Film Awards

Others took issue with BAFTA’s delay in sending the ceremony’s host, Alan Cumming, to the podium to read what they deemed to be insufficient efforts to make amends: After Cumming explained that Davidson’s tics are involuntary, he said, “We apologize if you are offended tonight.”

A version of the broadcast that included the slur was also still available on the BBC’s iPlayer on Monday, leading to more apologies.

Since then, Variety published a source’s assurance that Warner Bros. execs sounded the alarm with BAFTA right after it occurred and asked that the offending word be removed from the BBC’s broadcast. That this didn’t happen has sparked a back-and-forth about culpability, with Deadline reporting BAFTA’s assurance that it made the BBC and the broadcast’s producers aware that the slur was audible shortly after Davidson blurted it.

From the audience’s perspective, and especially viewers from either or both marginalized populations at the center of this, this is yet more evidence that insult and discrimination are just part of the price of visibility and achievement. But then, as my colleague Sophia Tesfaye observed in her analysis of Donald Trump’s most recent act of televised logorrhea, bigotry is now considered routine.

Welcome to the aftermath of diversity, equity and inclusion’s demise.

Trump joked about the N-word while speaking to military officials and posted a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on his Truth Social account, expressing zero shame in either case. Under his administration, official government agencies’ websites and social media pages have parroted white supremacist slogans and propaganda. Major broadcasters give these outrages the same weight as other headlines. And the issue isn’t limited to legacy media and right-wing politicians, either. Google had to apologize when its automated news alert on this BAFTAs invited curious readers to “see more on” the offending word, hard R and all.

As BBC viewers have pointed out in the BAFTAs aftermath, we shouldn’t rule out that the broadcaster that aired “The Black and White Minstrel Show” for 20 years might not have viewed the N-word as problematic language.

After all, in 2019, the BBC took heat for reprimanding journalist Naga Munchetty for saying that Trump’s call for four non-white Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to countries “from which they came” was “embedded in racism.” A year later, the BBC aired a white person using the slur during a 2020 report about a racist attack, prompting more than 18,600 complaints. Those are just a few reasons that people question the BBC’s insistence that this was a simple mistake.

Regardless, there are folks, including Jamie Foxx, who asserted that it was Davidson, not the broadcaster, who intended to do damage. There are also disability advocates, including singer-songwriter Jamie Grace — who also has Tourette’s — who agree that he should take some responsibility.

“We have a medical condition, not an excuse to be careless. They are not the same thing,” Grace says in her Instagram response. “We’re asking for accessibility, not an open door to cause harm.”

Davidson has expressed his horror at the ordeal, telling Variety that he wondered why he was seated near one of the many microphones placed throughout the venue. Once he realized Lindo and Jordan heard that offensive tic, he removed himself from the auditorium.

He also said he’s reached out to directly apologize to Jordan, Lindo and “Sinners” production designer Hannah Beachler, who revealed in an X post that the Tourette’s advocate said the N-word in her presence as well.

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“I know we must handle this with grace and continue to push through. But what made the situation worse was the throw-away apology of ‘if you were offended’ at the end of the show,” Beachler wrote in her post. “Of course, we were offended . . . but our frequency, our spiritual vibration is tuned to a higher level than what happened. I am not [steel], this did not bounce off of me, but I exist above it. It can’t take away from who I am as an artist.”

True. But it does cloud the gleam of what should be a high-spirited award season for the people who made “Sinners” and “I Swear” — two movies about resilience in the face of violent ignorance.

Yes, it’s exhausting. An awards event that should be remembered for celebrating inclusive art and advocacy ended up confronting the audience with the unglamorous reality of the world’s ugliness — and that no amount of social status or institutional power can protect anyone from dealing with it.

The post The BAFTAs have us arguing over the wrong words appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump has only a few real priorities in his second term: tariffs, revenge, money and legacy. His continuing obsession with the 2020 presidential election falls under the revenge category, and instead of it waning as an active concern, it actually seems to be gaining steam. The recent FBI raid of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize the stored ballots from that race looks to be just the opening salvo in a much larger strategy to interfere in the 2026 midterms. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump is contemplating an executive order declaring a national voting emergency, citing the same law the Supreme Court just declared he could not use when it came to imposing tariffs. 

Trump has been hinting around at this, posting on Truth Social a couple of weeks ago, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” 

Since the president’s inability to accept his loss has made all of us experts on what the Constitution says about elections, this bleat was rightfully dismissed as yet another asinine rant. Article I of the Constitution makes it clear that the states are charged with the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives… but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” It says nothing about the president taking over the voting system because he thinks there’s an “emergency.” In fact, it says nothing about the executive at all. 

If you’re wondering where Trump got such a ridiculous notion, look no further than the usual suspects, some of whom have been around for decades, pushing insane conspiracy theories and assassinating the characters of Democratic candidates around election time. It’s long been a GOP cottage industry, and a lucrative one. 

According to the New York Times, Trump’s director of “election security and integrity” is a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, one of the most relentless 2020 election deniers who was considered to be a “fringe menace” in the first Trump administration. He was involved in the attempts to overturn the election and has continued to pursue the case ever since. Olsen has been given the power to criminally refer cases to the Justice Department, and he was revealed to have instigated the search warrant for the Fulton County raid. But he is one of many 2020 denialists working throughout the administration in jobs related to elections. 

The Times’ reporting focuses on two outside activists who are pushing Trump to sign this executive order, which is being touted as a “17 page draft” that explains the legal rationale for using the National Emergencies Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, neither of which confer any executive jurisdiction over voting. The main instigator is a newer name in GOP dirty-tricks circles. Peter Ticktin is a lawyer and former New York Military Academy schoolmate of Trump’s who worked on the attempted coup in 2020. The other is a much more familiar and shady name in GOP politics: Jerome Corsi, the man who made “swift boating” a household term. 

Corsi first made his name over 20 years ago when he wrote “Unfit for Command,” the book that smeared then-Massachusetts senator and Democratic nominee John Kerry in his 2004 presidential bid against George W. Bush. Corsi’s book was a patented right-wing hit job, dishonestly targeting Kerry as nothing more than a rich boy liar who faked his heroic war record. But his approach was particularly cunning: The accusation he leveled at Kerry mirrored the real story of Bush’s National Guard service.

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Corsi’s next projects were aimed at Barack Obama, starting in 2008 with his book “The Obama Nation.” He followed that in 2011 with “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”, a smear that Trump had taken to the top of the charts. Corsi was also alleged to have worked with one of the original dirty tricksters — and long-time Trump friend and mentor — Roger Stone on the Wikileaks campaign against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

One of the great ironies of this latest round of underhanded campaign tactics — and yet another example of Corsi’s old “I know you are but what am I” strategy — is that this proposed emergency executive order is based on thoroughly debunked accusations of foreign interference in the 2020 election involving China. The story goes that the Chinese government manufactured phony identification cards to help people vote for Joe Biden — and that former FBI Director Christopher Wray covered it up. This wild theory, which was based on some 20,000 fake drivers’ licenses being seized in Chicago, most of which were intended for college students to get into bars, recalled the ridiculous audit of ballots in Arizona, in which conspiracy theorists were looking for the presence of bamboo in the paper’s composition. (And there are about half a dozen more conspiracy theories about foreign interference.)

Since multiple investigations found Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump and his accomplices naturally said that China interfered in 2020 — and now they are using it as an excuse to sow doubt about and hijack the 2026 midterms. And Corsi, the man who was involved in some of the back-channel work to disseminate the Russian hacks of Clinton’s emails in 2016, had the chutzpah to say, “Here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” 

You cannot make this stuff up. 

Election denialism is Trump’s personal contribution to the degradation of our political culture. When all is said and done, it will remain his most enduring legacy. No president before him has ever been so willing to create mistrust in the electoral system to cover for his own failures. Remember: This is someone who said before any votes were cast in 2016 that he would only accept the election results if he won. 

But the work of smearing Democrats and causing havoc in elections is a Republican specialty, and some of the people who’ve been making a tidy living at it for decades are on board for one more ride.

The post Trump is swift boating the midterms appeared first on Salon.com.

This season of “The Traitors” has been, from a food perspective, deeply strange.

There was Michael Rapaport whose “primitive” eating habits were compared to those of Dorinda Medley’s cavapoo. The image of a man who lost all sense of ceremony in a show that is almost completely about leaning into the avant garde and fantastical pomp of a Scottish castle. Rob Rausch being borderline pornographic with the boiled eggs. Stephen Colletti innocently slicing turkey and unintentionally sparking one of the most wild crashouts in “Traitors” history.

Meals feel less like a relaxing reprieve after long, arduous missions and more like a tension-filled calm before a storm you’re 100% certain is coming — and may very well take you with it. If I had the threat of murder looming over my head, I wouldn’t have an appetite either.

But by far, the most interesting food moment of this season hasn’t been the eggs, the turkey or the cold, unspreadable butter. It’s the smoked salmon.

Though, on a show where even “Top Chef” winner Kristen Kish reportedly had to intervene about food quality, that bar is not especially high. “I’ve offered to consult on culinary needs for future seasons. The question is, will the budget for culinary consultant come out of the smoked salmon budget?” Kish wrote in an Instagram post lamenting about the general struggle of eating and cooking while on the show.

The sea-sourced shining star doesn’t just look good, it has become a fixation. A recurring joke. A source of stress. A marker of status. Something cast members continue to talk about in interviews, podcasts, and social media long after they’ve left the Highlands.

In this castle of constant anxiety, the salmon has quietly emerged as the most coveted resource of all.

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This is not entirely new. Longtime viewers will remember that during the first celebrity season, Phaedra Parks — an all-star Traitor and an early adopter of self-preservation tactics — frequently prioritized securing salmon at breakfast, sometimes while other contestants were still mourning the freshly murdered. In retrospect, Phaedra may not have been cold. She may have just been hungry.

In a recent interview, Eric Nam said Kish was “fearless” in her mission to get better food on set. Nam said there were a few times he secretly delivered packets of miso soup to Kish during filming. “I needed some umami and some salt,” she added. 

“I am grateful to be fed and I understand what a hard job it is to do catering and crafting all of this stuff, I get it. I’m not saying anything about those individuals,” said Kish, “All I’m saying is that I had so many different ideas that could have been more… flavored.” She also noted that at one point she shared a McFlurry with Rob Rausch (jealous). 

Season 4, however, has turned the salmon from a background indulgence into a full-blown subplot. Multiple cast members have confirmed some version of the same thing: if you were late to breakfast, you were out of luck. 

“It was a struggle to get the salmon,” said Real Housewife and former Miss United States Candiace Dillard Bassett to People,  “It was only like two pieces for all 20 of us. If you were last at breakfast, you got no salmon.” 

Maura Higgins has openly complained about missing out, venting about the injustice of arriving to find — once again — that the salmon was gone. Dorinda Medley has described the unspoken rule bluntly: you had to get there early, because once the salmon disappeared, what remained was… less compelling. Monét X Change has admitted that when she did get to the salmon first, she took as much as she could, because you didn’t know when you’d get another chance. 

Mark Ballas posted a TikTok breaking out into dance for “when you get the last piece of smoked salmon at breakfast.” Stephen Colletti made his love for the fish clear, posting a video longingly staring at a full case of salmon in a supermarket. Even Ron Funches joked on Instagram that he wanted some salmon “to go” after he was banished. 

The salmon went fast. People noticed. People cared. Fans have taken it upon themselves to exploit this inner-castle joke even further, posting recipe videos for when you’re craving “‘Traitors’ salmon” and frequently referencing the breakfast dish in their spoofs and satirical content. 

Taken together, these comments paint a picture that feels almost more stressful than the roundtable: a high-stakes morning ritual where timing, luck, and social awareness determine whether you get the one thing on the table that actually feels nourishing.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get an answer from Peacock about whether or not the amount of salmon available and the placement on the table was strategic. However, let me whip out my beige trench coat and magnifying glass as I tell you: My investigation did uncover some interesting questions about the origins of this salmon.

We want what the Traitors are having

Peacock representatives confirmed in an email that the fish at breakfast was “locally sourced Scottish smoked salmon, from various local providers.” They also noted that “it was arranged on platters with a small wedge of lemon and some garnish.” Maybe those were some of the aromatics Kish convinced the team to add to the contestants diet.

“[Kristin] was leading the charge early on and was like, ‘What can we do to get some aromatics introduced to our meals here,’” said Stephen Colletti on a podcast, “We’re just getting like sad chicken over here. Lunchtime would just be like a boiled chicken and it was like, ‘Can we do something?'”

But this is where it gets interesting. When I reached out to Salmon Scotland, the voice of the salmon sector that represents “every company involved in salmon farming in Scotland, as well as other key players along the Scottish salmon supply chain,” its representative could not confirm which farm was providing the salmon. I was left wondering: Is the salmon on “Traitors” really from Scotland? 

After a week of emailing tourism boards, industry groups and award-winning salmon farms, I ended up right back where I started: Salmon Scotland, just to triple-check they didn’t represent the maker. They did not. But on the course of my long international, interweb journey, I did end up with a new name in my back pocket: Acme Smoked Fish.

There’s just one problem. Acme Smoked Fish is based in Brooklyn. Although the company offers many varieties of “Scottish-style” smoked salmon, Brooklyn, New York is notably not Scotland. So I sent an email and waited with bated breath to see if I had finally found the smoked salmon. The next day, I received a response: “Acme Smoked Fish is not the supplier of the salmon featured on The Traitors.”

Sigh.

I hit another wall in my search to find this infamous and supposedly life-changing salmon. A salmon so consistently coral, so perfectly sliced that it melts in your mouth, glistening with so much naturally rich Omega-3s that it’s like a fatty halo shining on the plate. A luxurious, silken bite that may even be worth murdering for… Can you blame me for continuing to search?

We want what the traitors are having.

That said, a spokesperson for Acme Smoked Fish noted that since the show is filmed in Scotland, it is probably sourced locally. They also said they’ve been loving the buzz around smoked salmon on this season of the show. “It’s been so fun to see contestants enjoying smoked salmon on a daily basis… Anytime smoked salmon becomes part of the cultural conversation, it’s a win for the category.”

Salmon as strategy

Of course Peacock won’t confirm my theories about production using the salmon as strategy. But if I know anything about this cast after watching them consistently for the past two months, I can almost guarantee at least one of those divas asked to be in an earlier group to secure a salmon breakfast (I’m looking at you, Johnny and Tara).

Monét X Change said that even though she “loves the UK” it’s not a region known for its food.

“The food in the United Kingdom is not one to be admired, uh, a cuisine that a people like to eat. So when you find something that works, baby, all of us were like, ‘The salmon!’,” she said on a podcast, “We can’t eat these hard ass boiled eggs. We don’t want this mushy salad thing. The salmon. The salmon looked clean… It’s like nice, delicious smoked salmon. So, that’s why the salmon was all the rage — because it was the most edible thing there.”

If everything else on the table was, by consensus, borderline inedible, securing salmon in the morning wasn’t just sustenance. It was a power move. This is where breakfast turns into strategy.

“The Traitors” is exhausting. Filming days are long. Nights run late. Traitors are often awake until the wee hours filming turret scenes. Faithfuls are slowly unraveling as they realize they trust no one. The Scottish weather is cold, gray and relentless. People are being “murdered” before breakfast. I’m shocked that Season 2’s Kate Chastain is the only person who’s begged to be banished.

Under those conditions, food stops being decorative. It becomes functional.

Smoked salmon is high in protein, rich in fat, filling without being heavy — the kind of food that actually stabilizes you. It’s not flashy, but it’s grounding. In a game designed to erode your sense of reality, the salmon becomes something solid. Reliable. A way to start the day feeling like a human being instead of a chess piece.

Which may explain why cast members keep talking about it like it was a lifeline, not a luxury.

A good smoked salmon can change your life

There’s also a geographical logic here. The show is filmed in Scotland, a country far better known for its landscapes than its comfort cuisine. Haggis has its defenders, but it is not, for most Americans, a food you crave under emotional duress.

Scottish smoked salmon, on the other hand, is genuinely excellent. The cold waters, traditional curing methods, and long-standing fishing culture make it one of the country’s most respected exports.

“American consumers have long had an affinity with Scotland and its produce,” said a spokesperson for Salmon Scotland, “The cold, clear waters and strong tidal flows around Scotland’s coast allow salmon to grow steadily, developing the distinctive flavor and texture that has made it a global favorite.”

If you’re going to serve one food well in a castle in the Highlands, salmon is a smart bet. It’s the UK’s top food export, and Scottish salmon exports to the United States were valued at £301 million in 2025 — up 34%  from the previous year. In other words: Americans are already obsessed.

There’s also a clear difference between Scottish salmon and fish of other regions. The most obvious being its vibrant orange color. This salmon definitely stands out on a plate (and on a screen); to the point where I initially thought it might be fake, stage-salmon. But no, Scottish salmon gets its color largely from its diet of shrimp and krill. Some say that the strong currents and cool temperatures of Scottish waters slow the growth of the fish which helps create a more flavorful, buttery texture. In 1992, Scottish salmon was awarded the Label Rouge, a prestigious mark of quality from French authorities indicating a superior food product. It was the first fish and the first non-French product to receive this designation.

“Produced in the west coast, Highlands, and islands of Scotland, the sector provides around 850 million healthy, nutritious meals every year and supports jobs in rural and coastal communities,” said Salmon Scotland, “We are confident demand in the United States will continue to grow.”

By this point in the season, the salmon has become something else entirely: an inside joke between the cast and the audience.

Fans on Reddit joke that the salmon gets more screen time than certain contestants. Viewers half-seriously speculate that hoarding it should be a legitimate reason for murder. “I wonder if they’re intentionally not giving them enough salmon to so create discord and chaos,” said one viewer, “It’s gotta be such good salmon. A good smoked salmon can change your life.”

The breakfast table, once a neutral space, now feels charged with meaning — who arrived first, who looks relaxed, who’s chewing contentedly while others watch. The quest for where the salmon actually comes from — my sole reporting focus for an entire week.

It’s funny because it’s small. And because it’s human.

For all its dramatic speeches and elaborate challenges, The Traitors works best when it reminds us that everyone involved is just tired and hungry. Does it really matter where the salmon comes from? The salmon obsession isn’t really about luxury. It’s about survival. About finding one small, reliable pleasure in a game designed to strip everything else away.

In a castle full of lies, the salmon is a point of camaraderie. And honestly, at this point, we’re all rooting for it.

The post Salmon is the real “Traitors” power player appeared first on Salon.com.

“Pretty in Pink,” released in theaters 40 years ago this week, exemplifies an ideal marriage of the two. Its opening sequence is both graceful and conspicuous; its exposition is entirely legible, yet so very charming that its plainness doesn’t matter one bit. John Hughes — who wrote the film’s screenplay but deferred direction to his collaborator, Howard Deutch — had a way of making even the obvious seem natural. As a writer, Hughes was gifted with a heavy hand and a soft touch. His early characters were consistently archetypal, plucked from the average high school experience. Scripts were packed with bad-boy rebels, spoiled teen queens and uncool misfits of all kinds. Hughes also keenly understood that, because these personalities were so familiar, his characters wouldn’t stand out to viewers unless they pushed their paradigm. These had to feel like real people with stereotypical flair, teenagers who were boxed into a category simply because that’s what high school social politics demand. And in just three minutes of exposition, Hughes and Deutch nimbly convey that Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh is both your conventional artsy wallflower and a singularly special young woman.

As the camera follows a suburban Chicago street sweeper along its early morning route, it stops at a modest house, perched on the other side of the train tracks. The clear shot of the tracks seems a bit transparent, sure, but it’s an effective way for Hughes to immediately let us know that Andie and her unemployed father, Jack (Harry Dean Stanton), are working class. Andie’s socioeconomic status is integral to her character. It’s part of what makes her desperate struggle for some adolescent normalcy so resonant. Yet, before she passes her high school threshold and dives into the brutal deep end of upper secondary education, it’s all cool. Andie spends her morning enjoying the ritual of building her outfit. She leisurely puts on her stockings. She pores over a drawer of unorganized jewelry to find the right piece. She grabs a perfectly pink jacket facing the opposite direction from the rest of the things in her closet. Andie’s disorganized but inventive, and that’s exactly the way she likes it.

The first time we meet Andie’s boss and would-be mentor, Iona (Annie Potts), it’s immediately clear why the two get along so fabulously. Iona is perched on a table by a windowsill, stapling albums to the ceiling as decor to liven up the record store she runs — not that the place needs much livening-up, considering Iona’s look. She’s gelled some of her hair into spikes while the rest hangs in a ponytail behind her head, as if she misremembered “business in the front, party in the back” while getting ready in the morning. Together, Andie and Iona are an unyielding, uniquely punk duo. They’re an unstoppable force up against an immovable object, a confident, funky bowler hat matched with a black latex dress. They won’t change for anyone…until, suddenly, they do. For all of the film’s expository merit, for all of the care and efficiency Hughes exhibited in creating such wonderful and instantly lovable women, “Pretty in Pink” flubs the landing. And all for a couple of ho-hum, wearisome men.

Like so much media geared toward young people in the late 20th century, “Pretty in Pink” revolves around an event in every American teenager’s life so pivotal, so life-altering and so very defining that it could make or break the entire high school experience: prom. Or, at least that’s the way the prom seems when you’re 17 — a perception that’s coincidentally fueled by the very same media. Andie wants to go to prom, but she’s not sweating it. In all likelihood, she’ll spend the weeks leading up to prom rebuffing invitations from her persistent best friend, Duckie (Jon Cryer), until reluctantly accepting just to save face.

But Andie’s hopes shift when one of the uber-popular rich kids at her school, Blane (Andrew McCarthy), strolls into the record shop one afternoon, looking for a music recommendation. Andie tosses a few flirtatious barbs across the checkout counter, inquiring if Blane will be paying with cash or an American Express Platinum card. To her surprise, Blane can take her well-meaning jabs just fine, a far cry from the stuck-up girls in her English class and Blane’s pretentious friend, Steff (James Spader), whose fragile egos bruise at a mere withering glance. This is it! This could be Andie’s man, her future, her prom date! Endless possibilities flash before her eyes. And in the same instant, Andie’s dreams of a romance with her star-crossed lover begin to cloud her better judgment.

(Bonnie Schiffman/Getty Images) Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer and Andrew McCarthy

What’s special about “Pretty in Pink” is ironically what makes Andie and Iona’s character arcs so frustrating. These are two women who know who they are from the jump, and the audience never spends a single moment trying to discern that, either. Iona and Andie have total agency. They’re scrappy and ambitious. Creation comes naturally to both of them; playing with personal aesthetics is a means of liberating oneself from the status quo. When Andie goes to school in outfits that she made herself, and Iona greets shoplifters with a severe asymmetrical wig and a loaded staple gun aimed at the face, these decisions are not indicators of class or etiquette — they’re bold personal choices. Andie and Iona would rather go their own way than try to keep up with anyone else, and they’re not ashamed of that, no matter how many people tell them that they should be. When Andie defends herself from the girls bullying her in her gym class and gets sent to the principal’s office for it, she refuses to offer a polite apology. “I’m getting a better education than I deserve, and I’m fortunate that the good people of this community allow me to attend this school,” Andie says sarcastically. “I understand everything, Mr. Donnelly, and I don’t need to have it explained to me. I live it.”

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Hughes’ script supplies Andie with a fount of vivacious wit and self-assurance, which is what makes watching her dull her shine as the film progresses so confounding. After a bit more flirting, Blane looks for Andie to ask her out on a real date and finds her taking her lunch period in the school’s courtyard, where all of the oddball students hang out. Seated next to her, Blane quietly admits, “I’m not really into all this sh*t, you know?” For the first time in his high school career, he’s as uncomfortable as the popular crowd has made it for Andie every day of the last four years. Yet, Andie holds her head high in the hallway while Blane’s is bowed in the courtyard, dodging stares. If this is a move to level the playing field and show Andie that his interest in her reaches beyond their material differences, the least Blane could do is not disparage where she spends her time and how she chooses to spend it.

As clearly as Andie might be able to see herself, it’s far more difficult for her to see the flaws in her burgeoning romance with Blane until they become glaringly apparent. Really, that’s just being a teenager. When we’re young and dreaming of having the kind of love we’ve only read about in books and seen in movies, it’s easy to be swept away by the first decent person who offers you attention. Figuring out who and how you love takes trial and error, two things Andie and Blane both endure while trying to fit into each other’s respective worlds.

(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) James Spader in “Pretty in Pink”

But “Pretty in Pink” fails to truly acknowledge that Andie operates at a much more consequential social disadvantage than her new boyfriend. Blane might have to brush off Duckie’s occasional curtness, but that’s the extent of his woes. Andie, however, must tolerate Steff and everyone else in Blane’s circle constantly telling her that she’s lesser than the rich kids she’s newly mingling with. She’s humiliated at parties and taunted in hallways. She has to care for her lush, out-of-work father while Blane enjoys the cushy comfort of financial stability. And despite witnessing all of this, Blane can’t bring himself to be honest with Andie when it all becomes too much for him, lying to her to save face and insulting her intelligence in the process.

While Iona’s love interest isn’t quite so blunt, her transformation certainly is. When she begins dating the owner of a local pet shop, Iona immediately falls in step with her yuppie new beau. Hurt and in desperate need of her friend, Andie goes to see Iona to ask for her ruffly pink prom dress, a keepsake she promised Andie if ever she wanted it. But when she arrives at Iona’s apartment, Andie is shocked to see that a coiffed perm, light makeup, a sensible suit and a string of pearls have replaced her friend’s beehives and gelled spikes. “Either it’s all those drugs I took in the ’60s, or I am really in love,” Iona says, relenting that she looks like somebody’s mother. And, to Andie, she is.

Iona is the sweet, sage maternal figure Andie fiercely craves but won’t admit to wanting. But that doesn’t mean that she has to look matronly, either. Iona and Andie are such a perfect mother-daughter match because they have similar personality quirks and sartorial appetites, a genuine family resemblance. Neither of them needs to tone it down for the world to like them — something Hughes’ script conveys so plainly by how quickly the viewer falls for this dynamic duo. And yet, both Andie and Iona shirk their individuality for stability, leaving those singular, oh-so-charming elements of their characters in the dust when wealthy men come calling.

Granted, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The film’s big ending — where Andie finds Blane alone and ashamed at prom and decides to take him back, culminating in their final kiss — wasn’t part of the final script. “Pretty in Pink” originally concluded with Andie and Duckie together, sharing a dance at the prom, which test audiences disliked so much that they booed the screen. Cryer claims the reaction made Hughes worried that viewers would perceive this finale as an encouragement not to cross class lines. Ringwald, on the other hand, felt it never made sense for Andie and Duckie to end up together in a film told like a Cinderella story. Months after the film’s initial production wrapped, a reshoot was scheduled for the new, crowd-pleasing ending.

While the new conclusion made some sense for Andie — a lovestruck teenager still trying to balance perspective with hormones — Iona altering her appearance so drastically for a man remains uncharacteristic. Love makes us do crazy things, but watching both women deflate their shoulder pads and play the smiling girlfriend directly conflicts with the character arcs and emotional beats throughout the film, even if it’s how the story must inevitably be structured. The final ending doesn’t make “Pretty in Pink” a poor film by any means, just a product of its time. Mainstream teenage romances of the ’80s were fashionable and predictable. Audiences wanted happy endings, and far more often than not, they got them. And even though these characters deserved far better than the screenplay their era would allow, it doesn’t mean their impact is for naught. When starry-eyed “Pretty in Pink” devotees think of Andie and Iona, we think of their looks, their personalities and their willingness to fight for themselves. (Alright, maybe their hair, too.) Those are the elements that have made these characters such iconic, powerhouse examples of individuality for 40 years and counting, and they’re the same ones that will keep “Pretty in Pink” an indelible part of culture forevermore.

The post The women of “Pretty in Pink” deserved better appeared first on Salon.com.

But Democratic grandees have to get it through their heads that ICE is too politicized, too bloated and too corrupt to be reformed into anything like a legitimate agency of government operating under the rule of law. One might as well hope that the Ku Klux Klan could be reformed into a charitable social organization. ICE must be dismantled and another, different agency built over its bulldozed ruins.

To understand why that’s necessary may require a fuller examination of the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency’s full title. It was conceived in a lie, birthed through political logrolling by panicky politicians who didn’t know what they were doing, and housed within an equally dysfunctional parent bureaucracy. As a professional staff member of Congress, I was present at the creation. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, except as a congressional effort to be seen as “doing something,” and an attempt to divert attention from George W. Bush’s failure to take seriously the many warning signs that preceded the worst terrorist attack in our history. In retrospect, it looks even worse than that.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave rise to many evils. One of the most pernicious and least recognized was the Bush administration’s scapegoating of federal intelligence and law enforcement over the disaster. That there was complacency and lack of focus in the bureaucracy is incontestable. There often is. But if there was complacency and lack of focus in the lower ranks, the responsibility lay with the captain of the ship — President Bush — and his executive officers, meaning the vice president and Senate-confirmed senior administration officials.

9/11 was less an intelligence agency failure than a cognitive intelligence failure of the Bush cabinet. In early August 2001, while Attorney General John Ashcroft (who relegated terrorism to a lower priority than the Clinton administration did) was staging a major press conference on the menace of internet porn, Bush was dismissing the CIA presenters of the President’s Daily Brief on Aug. 6, which stated, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” “You covered your ass,” Bush told them, before going back to golf and brush-cutting during his four-week vacation.

At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld was fulminating over a Soviet-style bureaucracy in the Defense Department and dreaming of a future ballistic missile defense rather than attending to current threats. Ashcroft formally rejected a $50 million FBI request to hire additional counterterrorism agents and intelligence specialists on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks.

On the Navy’s principle that a ship’s captain is automatically responsible if the vessel runs aground or suffers some other avoidable mishap, Bush was clearly in charge and responsible, a circumstance aggravated by his flippant disregard of the CIA’s threat briefing. Given his nonfeasance and blame-shifting, a functioning parliamentary system would have removed him, just as the British Parliament forced the resignation of Neville Chamberlain after the Norway debacle in 1940. In this country, the supposed remedy is impeachment, but ever since Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, accountability for presidents has been practically nonexistent.

Congress, having bought into the Bush cabinet’s scapegoating of the bureaucracy, proceeded to solve this supposed bureaucratic failure by creating a lot more bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security, a brand new Cabinet agency with a huge budget, designed to perform a hodgepodge of functions loosely defined as securing the “homeland,” a sinister-sounding name rarely used in colloquial English. (We may wonder: Who pulled that name off the shelf?)

DHS pulled into its structure several preexisting agencies, such as the Coast Guard, which continued to perform their traditional missions. But now they performed them under an additional bureaucratic layer, DHS departmental management, which added no value. The department also contained wildly disparate functions: What does FEMA have to do with collecting customs duties, and what does either of those have to do with cybersecurity? Yet they were all thrown into the same department. DHS was and is less than the sum of its constituent parts.

As a new agency staffing up rapidly, DHS wanted to hire people fast. Thus it became a dumping ground for everybody’s brother-in-law or the sons of rich donors to the Republican National Committee. This aspect received national exposure after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, when we could all witness the sterling performance of FEMA director Michael D. Brown, whose previous disaster-relief experience consisted of breeding Arabian horses. His accomplishments also provided a catchphrase that summed up the competence of the Bush administration: “Heckuva job, Brownie!”

ICE itself was a classic bureaucratic creation. The legacy organizations dealing with immigration were the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Border Patrol, both under the Department of Justice. It would have been logical to consolidate them into one agency within DHS, but some administrative genius made the Solomonic decision to form two different agencies with overlapping functions, Customs and Border Protection and ICE. CPB has gone on to greater infamy for its corruption (for instance, agents taking bribes from drug smugglers) and even for its cameo role in the Jeffrey Epstein saga: providing concierge service to the serial abuser during his frequent trips to Little St. James Island (which became known to Caribbean locals as Pedophile Island).

For a decade after its 2003 creation, DHS was a governmental orphan, given that even a nascent bureaucratic empire has to establish its headquarters in Washington, where space is precious and physical proximity to the Capitol or the White House correlates with access and influence. In 2013, DHS finally opened its headquarters on the disused tracts of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental institution best known as the postwar home of modernist poet Ezra Pound, whose wartime radio broadcasts from Rome on behalf of Mussolini were sufficiently unhinged that he was found mentally unfit to stand trial. In Washington, where everyone takes himself seriously, few saw the irony.

DHS has always been a problem child, but under the second Trump regime it has reached new levels of corruption. Under the stiletto heel of current secretary Kristi Noem, along with her presumed lover and de facto deputy secretary, Corey Lewandowski, the department decided to purchase a $70 million Boeing 737 MAX8, allegedly to deport illegal aliens. But the department has not explained why a jet supposedly meant as a flying prison van seats only 18 passengers while boasting showers, a kitchen, a bar and a bedroom with a queen bed, as well as four large flat-screen TVs. In the Trump Cabinet, having your own luxury jet is simply a means of keeping up with the Joneses.

With Noem’s attention focused on her need to travel in the style of a Persian Gulf emir, the actual administration of the department has suffered. Around 10 percent of all DHS employees have left in the past year, and 80 percent of senior management has been fired or demoted. Apparently, “leadership” in Noem’s world means instilling a culture of fear. Whatever institutional knowledge might have been built up over the last two decades is gone. America is in a highly precarious security situation because of this: Cyber-defenses against attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure are now weaker, and with Trump contemplating an attack on Iran, the potential for disastrous asymmetric retaliation has risen, even as DHS leadership concentrates its attention on its own perks and pursuing vendettas against career employees.

The current state of DHS and its components is exactly what a jaundiced observer of the Trump regime might have expected. Identifying, understanding and countering overseas terrorist threats is hard. Detecting and defending against cyber-hacking is perhaps harder, and requires both expertise and critical thinking. Such qualities are not in demand in Trump’s regime. On the other hand, abducting kindergarteners is easy. Teargassing bystanders is easy. Shooting protesters is easy, and requires no brains at all, just brute force and a pathological disposition. In retrospect, it is easy to understand this reprioritization — from keeping Americans safe to harassing and tormenting them — that DHS and its agencies have undertaken.

DHS is a disaster, but not just as a matter of bureaucratic complication, jobs for the boys and systemic corruption. In the long run, the more significant issue for both the rule of law and the concept of federalism was the creation of a single huge agency comprising both intelligence and law enforcement functions and with a wide remit that was fuzzily defined. Did Congress create a ministry of the interior like those found in authoritarian states, a centralized, politicized and unaccountable police function operating at the behest of an autocrat, and overriding local sovereignties and local law enforcement? At a remove of more than two decades, we can conclude that it did.

We are now seeing the results of 20 years of lax oversight of this bureaucratic monstrosity. It has only recently been reported that DHS has issued administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit and Discord, demanding the names, addresses and phone numbers of social media users who criticized ICE or identified the location of its agents. All the companies except Discord have complied. One of the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes — as with Russia’s FSB investigating social media critics of Vladimir Putin, or Chinese security agencies “sanctioning” citizens imprudent enough to complain about their political masters — has firmly lodged itself in the so-called Land of the Free.

For decades, Congress has not done a competent job of exercising control over the agencies for which it appropriates money. In the case of ICE, the agency has slipped every bond of congressional oversight. How can Congress even attempt to perform oversight when its own members are barred from ICE facilities?

When the Republican majority rubber-stamped the Trump regime’s budgetary request last spring, it not only appropriated $10 billion for the agency’s “regular” budget, but a “supplemental” $75 billion. At the current rate of exchange, ICE’s current budget is slightly larger than the £62 billion budget for the entire British defense establishment, which includes an army of 75,000 troops, a nuclear submarine-equipped Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force.

With its mammoth cash infusion, ICE has gone on a hiring spree that has more than doubled its personnel from 10,000 to 22,000 in less than a year. Even the most careful organization is unlikely to increase its personnel on such a scale and maintain quality. In the case of ICE, with its notorious reputation and its ability to wave $50,000 bonuses before potential recruits, it is easy to imagine the sort of people it will entice.

According to the testimony of former ICE counsel Ryan Schwank, the agency has cut 240 hours from its 548-hour recruit training program. The classes cut, Schwank said,

included classes on the fundamentals of the Constitution and the officers’ duties within the structure of our legal system. They cut out classes on — multiple classes on use of force, multiple classes on how to use their firearms safely. They took out testing requirements that were set to allow us to measure whether or not the cadets that were coming out of the academy could actually exercise their authority in a safe and lawful fashion. They took out classes that tied back to our understanding of due process within the legal system.

Add to that the ICE agents’ habit of wearing masks, a practice usually confined to criminals, Klansmen and Putin’s FSB, and any reasonable person can conclude that we now have an American secret police — not in embryo, but fully achieved.

Imagine the end of the Trump regime and the reinstitution of rule of law. Maintaining anything resembling ICE — ideologically extreme, disdainful of the Constitution, armed to the teeth and with access to real-time information on the location of the president and his Cabinet — and you have the recipe for a potential coup. If a motley rabble of civilians nearly overthrew the government on Jan. 6, 2021, future prospects with an intact version of the current ICE are much darker.

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ICE is broadly unpopular with the American public. While a plurality favors reforming it, as opposed to abolishing it or leaving it to operate as it does today, when offered a straight-up choice between abolishing or retaining ICE, a slight plurality already favors abolition. Even then, the public is responding without the full facts or a full context, as they do in most polls.

It is incumbent on Democrats to go on offense for once, to lead public opinion, to explain why this agency is so pernicious, and to impress upon low-information Americans who may still believe it only arrests undocumented aliens that ICE harasses legal residents and even citizens, and that the alleged “bad apples” among its personnel are so numerous that they’ve spoiled the whole barrel. If Democratic politicians cannot convince a majority of Americans that kidnapping 5-year-olds is intolerable, then either the party ought to fold its tent like the antebellum Whigs or there is something seriously wrong with the character of the American people — in which case the American experiment in democracy is over.

Some may object that abolishing ICE while creating another agency to perform the same functions (or at least those that are legal and constitutional) is purely symbolic. But symbolism is important in maintaining a democratic society under the rule of law. When the Allies occupied defeated Germany, they systematically removed the symbols and regalia of Nazi rule, as at the Nazi Party’s rallying grounds at Nuremberg. Does anyone think it would have been a good idea to keep an allegedly “reformed” Gestapo in place as a postwar law enforcement agency?

That same logic should apply to DHS, its parent agency. Perhaps the department’s cybersecurity operation, a new function that was only of great importance after 9/11, can be spun off as an independent agency, given the heightened government-wide role in countering hacking and cybercrime over the last two decades. As for its traditional functions, they should be reintegrated with their former parent departments, where once upon a time functioned with far less controversy, and where they would no longer constitute the building blocks of a secret police ministry.

It is long past time for America’s political class to admit that it made a dreadful mistake. DHS was yet another product of the Bush administration’s lies and Congress’ frequently buffoonish need to take action without understanding the problem. So let’s get rid of ICE for good, and break up DHS.

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The incident seems to have triggered a bizarre reaction from President Donald Trump, who the next day threatened or promised to send a “great hospital ship” to Greenland, claiming on a Truth Social post that it would help “many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!”

The order, accompanied by an AI-generated illustration of a World War II-era hospital ship flying the U.S. flag, was confusing to many, and justifiably so. It wasn’t clear  what had motivated Trump’s supposed gesture of generosity, or why the post made no mention of the submarine rescue. Denmark’s leadership politely said “no thanks,” but it turns out they didn’t have to: No ship was ever “on its way” in the first place. The U.S. operates two hospital ships: one is currently docked at an Alabama shipyard while the other is on its way to Panama, which is pretty much in the opposite direction from Greenland. No presidential order has been issued to send any ships of any description to the island nation in the North Atlantic — and even more to the point, none was needed.

As many others have noted, Denmark and Greenland have health care systems that are far superior to our own. Polls have shown Greenlanders prefer what they’ve got. If anyone should be receiving hospital ships, it might be lower-income Americans struggling with the rising cost of health insurance, which the Trump administration has made much worse.

As to why Trump made this strange pronouncement, reporting by the Wall Street Journal suggests it was the result of a convoluted game of telephone between the White House, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (who is also Trump’s envoy to Greenland) and a native Greenlander who apparently supports the proposed U.S. seizure. But none of that entirely explains why Trump said something was happening that definitely wasn’t, and that hadn’t been discussed in any official capacity, beyond the fact that stuff like this happens a lot with this administration.

That entire pseudo-event was one one of those blink-and-you-miss-it moments that get drowned out in the endless baying insanity of our collective reality. But as metaphors go, there couldn’t be a better one for the hobbled state of public health under Trump: aimless demands for things that won’t materialize and that no one asked for. Unfortunately, as amusing as this is on a certain level, it will have real-world consequences that could take decades to repair and cause millions of needless deaths.

Nothing is more acute here than Trump’s recent announcement of what could be called his own made-up version of the World Health Organization. As the Washington Post reported last week, the administration is working on a “global disease surveillance” project that seems designed to duplicate the WHO’s work under the United Nations, but at roughly three times the cost. It comes only weeks after the U.S. officially withdrew from the WHO — that announcement was one of Trump’s first acts in his second term — while also completely gutting USAID, the foreign-aid wing of the U.S. government, a move that has led to an estimated 834,000 deaths so far, more than two-thirds of them children. By 2030, the death toll from these and other cuts could rise to 22 million people.

The secretiveness of Trump’s WHO clone proposal suggests that he, or someone in his administration, actually understands that protecting public health on a global scale is important. So long as human bodies are fallible to disease, we will need labs studying viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites to see which ones could cause major problems. We also can’t do this work in isolation, because pathogens like bird flu and Nipah virus don’t respect borders. If we want to have a global economy, that means inviting the risk of outbreaks, disease and mass death. Indeed, history is filled with examples of this, from the medieval Black Death hitchhiking along the Silk Road to the “Russian flu” pandemic of the late 19th century that was accelerated by trains and steamships.

All of this is precisely why the WHO was formed in 1948, just two years after Trump was born, with outsized influence from the U.S. Its professed goal is to prevent sickness that hurts our economic interests and overall wellbeing. Americans crafted this global organization in ways that directly benefited our nation, and for the most part it worked. The WHO helped eradicate smallpox, established a framework that led to a dramatic worldwide reduction in tobacco use and helped control numerous pandemics, from Ebola to mpox to Zika.

Many valid criticisms can be raised about the WHO, especially regarding its important mistakes during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were regrettable delays in admitting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is airborne, along with inconsistent messaging, and a pattern of rolling out vaccines in rich countries well ahead of poorer ones.

But the WHO’s failures aren’t happening in a vacuum. As a 2025 scoping review put it:

The politicization of global health governance, intensified by nationalist populism and the decline of liberal internationalism, posed significant ethical and operational challenges to the WHO during the pandemic. These dynamics constrained the organization’s ability to act independently and exposed vulnerabilities within global health systems. Moreover, great power competition, disinformation and the rise of authoritarianism further undermined the WHO’s mandate to ensure equitable health outcomes globally.

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Trump’s criticisms of the WHO are markedly different from those. He has accused the organization of being “China-centric” and downplaying the severity of the virus as it first began spreading in the Chinese city Wuhan. He did the exact same thing, of course, once COVID began spreading in the U.S., which is a major reason why the WHO became so useful to him as a deflection. For its part, the WHO has refuted Trump’s accusations that it played favorites or responded too slowly, while underscoring that it’s trying to learn from its mistakes.

Trump is correct in saying that the U.S. has paid a much higher proportion of WHO costs than other nations. His replacement idea, however, will cost about $2 billion, according to the Post’s investigation. That’s roughly three times higher than the previous average average of $680 million per year in U.S. WHO dues. Arguably some of the initial costs of Trump’s venture are related to building infrastructure, but none of that will be nearly as easy as the president seems to think. As far back as Trump’s first term, public health experts argued that “Withdrawal from WHO would have dire consequences for U.S. security, diplomacy, and influence,” because the organization “has unmatched global reach and legitimacy.”

The WHO’s secret ingredient isn’t money. It’s trust, something that took decades for the WHO to earn through repeated successes. And trust is exactly what America lacks around the world right now as Trump bullies other nations, abducts their leaders and threatens war in the Middle East, not to mention his saber-rattling against longtime allies like Greenland.

It’s hard to imagine that Trump’s version of the WHO will spur the development of new polio vaccines, work to advance health equity for migrants and displaced populations or seek to negotiate a ceasefire in Sudan. Yet these are all things the WHO has done just within the last several months, amid decades of similar accomplishments. It’s not like other organizations haven’t sprung up to compete with the WHO. But outfits like the Gates Foundation and World Bank still don’t have the same level of resources, let alone command the same kind of global respect. Much like Trump’s absurd Board of Peace, which is geared up to operate like a less democratic U.N. clone, his WHO initiative has no hope of accomplishing its stated goals if most of the world resists it. Just this week, Zimbabwe rejected a health deal from the U.S. worth some $360 million over concerns about how the Trump administration would handle the data.

It took generations to get public health to the point we enjoy now, where average life expectancy in many places exceeds 80 years and we don’t have to worry too much about diseases like polio, smallpox or even relative newcomers like HIV. Instead of leaving the WHO, we should be reinforcing its mission. Again, no one claims the WHO is perfect and there’s much room for improvement. Such gaps are not abstract — they represent real human lives that are lost or mangled. Yet it’s pretty clear that Trump’s attempts to reinvent the wheel here will create more such gaps, not less.

This is yet another Trump-manufactured crisis whose consequences will be hard to fully wrap our heads around for decades. Pandemics and health disasters have ripple effects that churn through generations. Our government is only inviting more of them with this phony attempt to create a global public health body that puts America first. Electing someone else in 2028 won’t be nearly enough to change course. It will take a lot more time and effort to rebuild.

Trump’s fake WHO is only a small slice of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is about removing most of the government’s responsibility to help people stay healthy and instead blaming ordinary people for getting sick. For Trump’s administration, dumping the WHO and recreating it to MAHA specifications comes with the added benefit of controlling and dismissing undesirable or overly “woke” health information, as we’ve already witnessed under the stewardship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of Health and Human Services. Roughly half of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s surveillance databases have gone dark, while some U.S. health data has disappeared entirely. Despite the old saying, what you don’t know can hurt you. Trump is driving us back to the days before germ theory, when infection and disease transmission were mysterious. But not understanding what made you sick won’t stop it from killing you.

As for sending that hospital ship to Greenland, Jeff Landry still wants to make that happen. He loyally told the Wall Street Journal that it might need to wait until summer, when one of the U.S. hospital ships will complete its maintenance. Landry emphasized that he wouldn’t consult either Greenland or Denmark about it; whether they need or want the damn thing is apparently irrelevant. That’s the Trump health care brand in a nutshell: You’ll get less and pay more, whether you like it or not.

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This explains why authoritarians and other enemies of democracy systematically target schools, universities, science, the arts, libraries, the independent news media and Fourth Estate, museums — anywhere knowledge is produced and critical thinking is taught. To control society, you must first control how people think. But such attempts are almost always contested.

A recent Washington Post story documents how a group of historians, scholars and volunteers are pushing back against the Trump administration’s attempts to remake the Smithsonian museum system in the name of patriotic education — what is in practice a Trump-MAGA indoctrination program — and to purge “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from other sites of public memory, such as memorials and national parks.

References to Trump’s impeachment and role in Jan. 6 and attempts to nullify the 2020 Election, had been removed by Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. But this winter, James Millward, a 64-year-old historian, decided to turn the museum into a teaching space where he corrected the historical record by handing out printouts which told the truth: Trump was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.”

Millward, the Post reported, had “no sense of the drama that was about to unfold.” But being an expert on Chinese history, he knew what censorship and state propaganda looks like. Feeling “unease at seeing history being ‘snipped and clipped and disappeared,’” he dubbed his process “guerrilla teaching.” 

Millward co-founded Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, which “spent thousands of hours documenting every corner of the [museums]” to document the changes being made under pressure from the administration. But his efforts at teaching the truth quickly attracted attention.

A group of guards appeared, some with guns and handcuffs, and told Millward it was against policy to hand out literature or engage in protests in the museum. They closed the gallery. Millward decided to leave, disturbed and troubled “that something as dramatic as clearing the whole gallery could happen simply by me trying to tell people what had been on the wall the week before.”

Henry Giroux, social theorist and author of “Assassins of Memory,” a book that examines the politics of erasure, was not surprised. He framed what happened to Millward in even starker terms, calling it “not merely an administrative dispute over what counts as art or what is culturally important.” Giroux said, It is an attempt to discipline public memory by intimidating those who refuse to narrate the nation as innocent. History must serve authority rather than interrogate it. The Smithsonian is being turned into an apparatus of ideological containment.”

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What’s happening at the Smithsonian is part of a larger project in which Trump and the larger white-right want to create a fictionalized version of American history and life where the only people who have a legitimate claim on the country are wealthy white men. This is history as an authoritarian exercise in narcissism. In this alternate reality, Black and brown Americans, women, LGBTQ people, the disabled, immigrants, non-Christians, the poor and working class are at best a supporting cast. At worst, they are erased entirely, or cast as the anti-citizen, the Other, the enemy. 

Real history and real facts terrify authoritarians. The triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and long Black Freedom Struggle, the women’s rights movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, the labor movement and other peoples’ movements in the United States and around the world are threats, reminders of the potential of collective action. They must be deleted, distorted or ignored. A usable past is a dangerous past.

But such attempts at censorship and rewriting the past are not strengths — they are weaknesses. “Only a regime uncertain of its legitimacy must police the past so aggressively,” Giroux said. “Authoritarian regimes — the Nazis, Stalin, Pinochet — have always understood that memory, culture, and education are crucial battlegrounds. Each appeared omnipotent, yet their obsession with silencing historians and artists revealed a profound fragility. Only insecure power fears memory.”

Millward and his compatriots are occupying a vital part of the growing resistance against Trumpism. “They are modeling democratic vigilance,” said Peter McLaren, emeritus professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The Smithsonian Institution does not belong to transient administrations but to historical time itself. If memory is reduced to décor, democracy will breathe shallowly.”

As the president’s authoritarian project expands, Americans who believe in democracy and freedom of thought will face a daunting reality: that having no museums at all will be better than lie-filled ones.

In the future, resistance against Trumpism could very well mean taking photos of truth-telling exhibits before they are whitewashed or removed, hiding banned books and so-called degenerate art and secreting away important historical, cultural and artistic materials the regime wants erased. In ways small and large, the American people will have to become protectors of truth and reality itself.

James Millward showed us what that looks like. He knows that democracy is not an abstraction. It is something we do and live.

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