In the months leading up to February 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden warned that such an action would trigger “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed”—a threat that many European leaders echoed.

To Daleep Singh, the White House’s top international economic adviser at the time, Biden’s threat could mean only one thing: freezing Russia’s central-bank reserves. The Central Bank of Russia held more than $630 billion in assets, making it the largest sanctions target in modern history. If any entity was too big to sanction, this was it. Maintaining the bank’s teeming coffers was Putin’s attempt to “sanctions-proof” his economy, ensuring that Russia could prop up the ruble and pay for imports even under financial attack. Yet about half of the bank’s reserves were in dollars, euros, and pounds, which in practice left them vulnerable to Western sanctions. At the stroke of a pen, U.S. and European leaders could order their banks to block the accounts of Russia’s central bank, rendering much of Putin’s cash pile inaccessible.

This essay has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

“Big nations don’t bluff”: This mantra, which Biden was fond of reciting, rang in Singh’s ears the day after Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on the Central Bank of Russia, Singh believed, would put Biden’s credo into action. The option was so extreme that it had never received thorough vetting on either side of the Atlantic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was concerned that freezing the central-bank reserves would push other countries away from using the dollar as their go-to reserve currency. The dollar’s global dominance allows America to absorb economic shocks, borrow cheaply, and run large deficits. Yellen was uncomfortable risking these privileges for the sake of punishing Putin.

But in Europe, a momentous political shift was under way, with street protests against the Russian invasion drawing out hundreds of thousands of people. Singh’s European counterparts assured him that if the White House was ready to sanction Russia’s central bank, their governments would follow. Yellen was hard to convince until a phone call from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, her old colleague from his tenure as head of the European Central Bank, persuaded her to relent. Within hours, the United States was on board.

Just two days after the invasion began, the members of the G7 issued a statement committing to target Russia’s central bank. “You heard about Fortress Russia—the war chest of $630 billion of foreign reserves,” Singh told reporters in a background briefing. “This will show that Russia’s supposed sanctions-proofing of its economy is a myth.”

Three years on, the sanctions against Russia’s central bank stand as both a triumph and a warning. In narrow terms, they worked exactly as Singh hoped: They caught Putin off guard and deprived him of his deepest pool of hard currency. The frozen reserves, valued at nearly $300 billion, have also helped underwrite tens of billions in Western aid to Ukraine. As Donald Trump embarks on his much-anticipated peace negotiations, they will provide important leverage—Putin will be desperate to recover them, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will press to redirect them toward his country’s reconstruction.

[Read: The sanctions against Russia are starting to work]

But the sanctions failed in one crucial way. The fact that Moscow was blindsided by them suggests it grossly underestimated the severity of the penalties it would face. Although the U.S. and its allies had developed an extensive menu of possible sanctions before the invasion, they never reached consensus on how far they were willing to go. They left Putin to divine the meaning of “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed,” and Putin—as he so often did—read Western ambiguity as weakness.

If Biden and other world leaders had committed ahead of time to the actions they would eventually take, they might have had a much better chance of staving off Putin’s invasion. Deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act. Putin never saw the sanctions coming—and that was precisely the problem.

“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Economic warfare has always offered nations a way to advance their interests without resorting to violence.

For most of history, imposing serious economic pressure required the deployment of military forces: ships blockading ports, armies laying siege to cities. As recently as the 1990s, the United Nations embargo on Iraq relied on warships patrolling the Persian Gulf. But over the past two decades, America has pioneered a more potent and nimble style of economic warfare. In a world where finance and supply chains are deeply globalized, Washington learned to leverage economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar and advanced semiconductor technology—against rivals. Now, by merely signing documents in the Oval Office, the president can impose economic penalties far more severe than the blockades and embargoes of old.

This new age of economic warfare began innocuously enough: with Stuart Levey, a little-known lawyer who led a brand-new division of the Treasury Department from 2004 to 2011, trying to prove President George W. Bush wrong. Iran’s nuclear program was racing forward in the mid-2000s, and Bush lamented that America had “sanctioned ourselves out of influence” with the country. The only options, seemingly, were to go to war or let Iran join the ranks of nuclear-armed states. Levey set out to show there was another way.

In the years that followed, Levey and his colleagues overhauled U.S. sanctions policy. They drew on their legal expertise and their understanding of the financial sector’s risk calculus to conscript multinational banks into a campaign to isolate Iran from the world economy. Prodded by Congress, they tested the limits of their new economic weapons—they even found a way to freeze more than $100 billion of Iran’s oil money in overseas escrow accounts. Over time, this economic pressure helped spur political change in Iran and opened a path to the 2015 nuclear deal. The United States had managed to put Iran’s nuclear aspirations on hold—as Barack Obama boasted, “without firing a shot.”

The Iran deal had its critics, but one thing was beyond dispute—sanctions worked. In fact, the deal’s toughest opponents argued that America had traded them away too soon: The pressure was working so well that if the U.S. had just kept it up, the Iranian regime might have permanently relinquished its entire nuclear program or, better yet, collapsed. But a key reason the sanctions were so successful—winning grudging acceptance even from the likes of China, India, and Russia—was that Obama expressly deemed them a means to an end. They were intended to pressure Iran to concede to nuclear constraints and then be lifted. This is just how things played out.  

As the Iran deal was being negotiated, Putin shocked the world by sending “little green men” into Crimea and swiftly annexing the territory. Determined to punish Russia for this flagrant imperial land grab, but unwilling to risk war with a fellow nuclear power, U.S. officials again reached into their economic arsenal. Russia was a trickier target than Iran: It was much bigger and more integral to the world economy. European countries depended on Russian oil and gas. If sanctions wreaked too much havoc on Russia, the fallout would quickly reach Europe and then the United States. As a result, the Obama administration stitched together a sanctions coalition with the European Union and the rest of the G7. This alliance imposed sanctions that, surgical though they were, quickly sent Russia’s economy spiraling. The collapse of world oil prices in the second half of 2014 supercharged their impact, and by early the following year, Putin was eager for a truce.

Up until that point, the United States had used its economic arsenal wisely. But then it made a costly error. The unexpected severity of Russia’s economic crisis frightened European leaders, who feared it would spill over into their own countries. Instead of insisting that the West press its advantage, Obama endorsed a European-brokered cease-fire to freeze the Ukraine conflict and refrained from ratcheting up pressure—even after Russia violated the cease-fire and interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin drew a lesson from this experience: Western leaders lacked the stomach to sustain real economic pressure on Russia—and even if they proved him wrong, he could just wait them out.

[Watch: ‘War and cheese’]

That assumption held up when Trump came to power. Far from strengthening sanctions on Russia, he allowed them to atrophy. Meanwhile, he ripped up the Iran deal and tried to bludgeon Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, leading Iran to restart its nuclear program. Trump’s policies on Russia and Iran gravely undermined the strategic value of American sanctions. Putin had done little to concede to U.S. demands, yet he was rewarded with a reprieve. Iran, by contrast, had complied with a deal to dismantle core parts of its nuclear program—only for the U.S. to reimpose penalties two years later. World leaders drew another troubling lesson: Even if they did exactly what Washington asked of them, they might still face the brunt of America’s economic arsenal.   

U.S. sanctions policy grew more arbitrary under Trump. With the exception of Russia, he was as sanctions-happy a president as America has ever had. He levied so many sanctions—against Iran, Venezuela, China—that countries all over the world took steps to shield themselves. The Russian central bank traded most of its dollars for euros and gold. China sought new ways to promote its own currency internationally, releasing a digital version of the renminbi and creating a homegrown financial-messaging-and-settlement platform.

U.S. officials often initiate sanctions campaigns in the heat of a crisis and scramble to react to unfolding events. The latest iteration of American economic warfare, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has been different: U.S. officials knew months ahead of time that Russia was gearing up to invade. They had the opportunity to use sanctions to deter Russian aggression rather than punish it after the fact. But following years of deploying economic weapons in an erratic and incoherent manner, the opportunity went to waste.

After the central-bank freeze that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions were a disappointment. If Moscow didn’t foresee the one big sanction that might have deterred the invasion, it certainly did foresee the smaller ones that were coming—and had plenty of time and resources to prepare.

[Read: What makes Russia’s economy so sanctions-resistant?]

In December 2022, months after the move against the central bank, the United States and its allies made their first serious attempt to target the lifeblood of Russia’s economy: oil sales. Under the new regulations, known as the “price cap,” U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 a barrel.

The price cap was not as extreme as the central-bank freeze, but it packed a punch. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: Its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.

But as with the central-bank sanctions, America and its allies were too worried about economic blowback to act decisively. They took nearly 10 months after the start of the invasion to impose the price cap. As a result, Russia raked in a whopping $220 billion from oil exports in 2022, contributing to the highest single-year energy revenues the Kremlin has ever collected. Perversely, this was almost as much hard currency as the West had frozen when it sanctioned Russia’s central bank. To make matters worse, the West also built loopholes into the policy to avoid even the slightest possibility that it could cause an oil-supply crunch and exacerbate inflation. Russia took full advantage, amassing a “shadow fleet” of secondhand oil tankers and designing state-backed insurance schemes—and the impact of the price cap eroded. Today, with Trump back in the White House, the prospects of strengthening the policy look slim.

The United States uses sanctions a lot, and yet it has hardly perfected the art of economic warfare. Compared with the way the Pentagon prepares for conventional war—including recruiting and training professional troops, devising plans, and rehearsing them repeatedly—the U.S. agencies responsible for economic war are still playing in the minor leagues, using ad hoc processes and a rudimentary policy apparatus.

Sanctions are like antibiotics: They work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately. For some purposes, they’re simply the wrong tool; sanctions didn’t change the regimes in Iran or Venezuela, despite the best efforts of the last Trump administration, nor could they be expected to.

In other cases, sanctions have the potential to work, but only if they’re administered in strong enough doses over a long enough period to avoid resistance. This is the problem the United States has faced in confronting Russia: Washington and its allies ratcheted up sanctions incrementally, giving Russia time to adapt and build resistance along the way. As a result, Biden failed to deliver a knockout blow to Russia’s economy—and Putin, yet again, seems confident he can get a reprieve, no matter what he does in Ukraine.     

This article has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

Sick of it. Stop and think about that phrase. Trump inserted it into a stream of falsehoods, produced over several days, many of which he must have known to be untrue. He has been lying about the origins of the war, about Zelensky’s popular support, about the levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, about the extent of European funding, about the status of previous negotiations. But sick of it—that, at least, has the ring of truth. Trump is genuinely bored of the war. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it started. He doesn’t know how to stop it. He wants to change the channel and watch something else.

Also, he has no cards: That probably reflects Trump’s true belief as well. For Donald Trump, the only real cards are big money and hard power. Players, in his world, are people whom no court can block, no journalist can question, no legislator can oppose. People whose money can buy anything, whose power cannot be checked or balanced.  

But Trump is wrong. Zelensky might not have money, and he might not be a brutal dictator like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Yet he does have other kinds of power. He leads a society that organizes itself, with local leaders who have legitimacy and a tech sector dedicated to victory—a society that has come, around the world, to symbolize bravery. He has a message that moves people to act instead of just scaring them into silence.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, stop and remember what happened on the night it began. I’d had plane tickets to Kyiv that week, but my flights were canceled, and on February 24, 2022, I stayed up and watched the war’s start on television, listening to the sounds of explosions coming from the screen. That night, everyone expected Russia to overrun its much smaller neighbor. But that capitulation never came. Six weeks later, I made it to Kyiv and heard and saw what had happened instead: the hit squads that had tried to kill Zelensky; the murders of civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb; the Ukrainian journalists who had driven around the country trying to tell the story; the civilians who had joined the army; the waitresses who had started cooking for the troops.

Three years later, against all obstacles and all predictions, the civilians, journalists, soldiers, and waitresses are still working together. Ukraine’s million-man army, the largest in Europe, is still fighting. Ukraine’s civil society is still volunteering, still raising money for the troops. Ukraine’s defense industry has transformed itself. In 2022, I saw tiny workshops that made drones out of what looked like cardboard and glue. In 2024, Ukrainian factories produced 1.5 million drones, and this year they will make many more. Teams of people in underground control centers now use bespoke software to hit thousands of targets every month. Their work explains why Russia has taken territory only slowly, despite being on the offensive for most of the past year. At the current rate of advance, the Institute for the Study of War estimates, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine.

Russia doesn’t have the resources to fight indefinitely against that kind of organization and determination. Putin’s military production is cannibalizing his country’s civilian economy. Inflation has skyrocketed. The only way Putin wins now—the only way he finally succeeds in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty—is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war.

He wins by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine, because Zelensky has no cards, and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either. That’s why Putin’s money bought American influencers in Tennessee and probably many other places, too, and it’s why his propaganda supported the pro-Russian far right in Germany’s elections yesterday, along with other pro-Russian parties across the continent. Putin can’t win on the ground, but he can win in his enemies’ heads—if we let him.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Europeans and Americans, Democrats and Republicans, can resist the temptations of boredom and distraction. We can refuse to give in to the cynicism, nihilism, and lies of Russian propaganda, even when they are repeated by the president of the United States. And we can refuse to believe that Ukraine has no cards, that we have no cards, and that the democratic world has no sources of power other than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Three years into this war, the stakes are the same as they were on the night it began. Putin, who yesterday launched one of the largest attacks of the entire war, still seeks to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty, civil society, democracy, and freedom. He still wants to show the world that the era of American power is over, that America will not defend allies in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. He still wants to nullify the rules and laws that kept Europe peaceful for eight decades, to create instability and fear, not only in the countries that border Russia but across the continent and even around the world.   

The war will only end, truly end, when Putin gives up these goals. Don’t accept any peace deal that allows him to keep them.

A quarter century ago, Vladimir Putin gathered 21 of Russia’s top oligarchs in the Kremlin to let them know that he, not they, held power in Russia. The young Russian president (not yet for life) informed them that they could keep the wealth they’d amassed if they complied with his political goals. Partnership with Putin held out the prospect of safety, and even greater riches. “We received confirmation,” an attendee named Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky said, “that the development of Russian business is one of the state’s top priorities.”

Most of the oligarchs submitted, but those who didn’t went to prison or into exile, lest they fall prey to the country’s epidemic of window-plunging deaths. (Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, putatively for fraud and tax evasion, but really for supporting independent media and opposition parties.) Since then, affinity for Putin has been a sine qua non of high-level economic success in Russia.

An eerily reminiscent scene played out late last year at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Winter Palace, where Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s loyalty enforcers, met with Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The weather was more pleasant, and presumably neither party contemplated defenestration as a settlement alternative, but many other details seemed to echo. “Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms,” The New York Times reported. Because Trump had recently warned, “We are watching [Zuckerberg] closely, and if he does anything illegal” during Trump’s second term, “he will spend the rest of his life in prison,” this opportunity must have sounded enticing. Zuckerberg indicated that he would not in any way obstruct Trump’s agenda, according to the Times, and foisted blame for any prior offenses onto subordinates.

By the time Trump assumed power, Zuckerberg was lavishing him with praise. “We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies,” he gushed of the man who had once threatened him with prison, “that prioritizes American technology winning. And that will defend our values and interests abroad.” His rehabilitation complete, Zuckerberg assumed a place of pride at Trump’s inauguration, alongside Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other titans of industry. His eyes were now on the future, and the promised Trumpian Golden Age.

The president’s public communion with the business titans who have submitted to him has been analyzed as a signal of his authoritarianism and his alliance with the rich. But it also reveals another emerging aspect of Trumpism: his rejection of the capitalist principles that ultimately generate prosperity.

Trump has never believed in the invisible hand—in leaving people alone to pursue self-interest in a free market; in letting market forces allocate capital and arbitrate any given company’s success or failure. Nor does he even believe in traditional mercantilist protection. He believes, like Putin, in political control of the economy’s commanding heights—success for those executives and companies who please him, failure for those who don’t. And he seems to be seeking that control more actively than he did in 2016.

Already, Trump’s words and actions have brought about a psychological transformation within the executive class. Presidents and business leaders have sometimes tangled, or formed partnerships, but the combination of fear and solicitousness that Trump now commands is wholly new.

After the election, The Wall Street Journal reported, businesses began looking at steps such as “buying the Trump family’s cryptocurrency token” and scrubbing their websites of Democratic-friendly language. Stanley Black & Decker took down an old post-insurrection statement saying it would “use our voice to advocate for our democracy and a peaceful transition of power,” and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. A steel executive hoping to win Trump’s approval to purchase U.S. Steel held a press conference in Butler, Pennsylvania—a holy site in the MAGA universe since the assassination attempt at a rally there in July—where he declared, “America First!”

Bezos has not renewed his financial support for the Science Based Targets initiative, which works with businesses looking to cut emissions. After Trump gave Musk, the largest donor to his campaign, a limitless portfolio to reshape federal policy, businesses began to see Musk’s commercial empire as a route to political favor too, as the Financial Times noted in February. Visa struck a payment-processing deal with Musk’s controversial social-media site, X, while Amazon boosted its planned marketing there. Musk’s former rivals hastily reconsidered their rivalries: JPMorganChase dropped a lawsuit against Tesla (the company said the timing was coincidental), and Jamie Dimon announced on CNBC that he had “hugged it out” with Musk after a long feud.

The Journal, as America’s most prominent business paper, has documented this cultural transformation in remarkably clear terms. Sentences like this began appearing regularly after the election: “Executives across the corporate sphere are working to get in the good graces of the new administration” (November). “Titans of the business world are rushing to make inroads with the president-elect, gambling that personal relationships with the next occupant of the Oval Office will help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath” (December). “Companies seeking Trump’s favor have plenty to gain” (January). The newspaper that American capitalists consult to find out how to run their businesses is informing them that they must gain Trump’s favor if they want to get ahead.

It would be naive to depict this behavior as totally novel. For decades, big companies have spent great sums on lobbying, and their executives have long made pilgrimages to Washington to advance their interests. And they’ve often gotten results.

But Trump appears to be ushering in a change not only in the degree of government favoritism, but also in kind. And the velocity of the transformation, coming as it does alongside a cascade of tumbling norms, can obscure how differently he is operating.

The change can be seen most blatantly in the media industry, which has drawn Trump’s gaze more than any other. Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, spiked endorsements of Kamala Harris, claiming they would give off the appearance of bias, but then after the election made personal statements praising Trump or his Cabinet picks, as if that somehow wouldn’t. Since then, several major companies have settled lawsuits that Trump had brought against them, and that likely would have been defeated if not laughed out of court. ABC, owned by Disney, donated $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle his complaint that George Stephanopoulos had described Trump as having been found liable for rape (he was found liable for sexual abuse). After incoming Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr warned Paramount executives that their merger bid could be at risk because of Trump’s anger at CBS, which Paramount owns, the network reportedly began talks to settle a frivolous $10 billion lawsuit complaining that 60 Minutes had edited out unflattering portions of its interview with Harris. Even after the presiding judge expressed extreme skepticism at the merits of Trump’s lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from Facebook after the January 6 insurrection—a right it clearly possessed as a private entity—Zuckerberg offered up $25 million in penance.

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Putting the screws to media owners in particular, especially early on, seems to follow the same playbook that Putin and other strongmen have used to consolidate their power. So does finding opportunities for personal enrichment along the way. (Putin, a lifelong public servant, has become one of the world’s wealthiest men.) Filing weak or groundless lawsuits and expecting his targets to settle for fear of government retribution appears to be a perfectly legal way for Trump to collect baksheesh.

Although Trump has so far devoted the most attention to media businesses, he has not ignored the broader economy. Every economic-policy decision he makes is a potential weapon to punish dissent or reward his friends, beginning with tariffs.

[David Frum: The price America will pay for Trump’s tariffs]

Trump has never described himself as a free-market purist, and his enthusiasm for levying imports is his best-known deviation from his party’s traditional economic philosophy. This impulse is often described as a protectionist instinct, aimed at helping shield key industries or American businesses generally. But in fact, Trump’s tariff strategy, if you want to call it that, hardly advances any coherent economic goal. He has threatened tariffs on countries for non-economic reasons, and levied tariffs on industrial inputs, such as aluminum and copper, that make American industries less, not more, competitive by raising their costs. Trump apparently believes that tariffs are borne by foreigners, and are therefore an untapped source of free money from overseas. He enjoys the idea of using them as levers to extract diplomatic concessions as well.

But Trump has also used tariffs to gain personal and political leverage over American businesses. During his first term, Trump levied broad tariffs and then entertained a parade of executives pleading for exemptions, which his administration doled out at its whim. The Office of the United States Trade Representative fielded more than 50,000 requests from domestic businesses for exceptions to the tariffs on Chinese goods alone, while the Commerce Department sifted through almost half a million waiver requests. Trump’s decisions were often arbitrary—Bibles got a tariff exception, on the apparent basis that their costs needed to stay low, but textbooks did not.

One study of the exceptions, published by the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, found that firms that had donated to Trump or hired staff from his administration were more likely to receive tariff exceptions. The tariffs, and the ability to hand out exceptions without any oversight or method, were “a very effective spoils system allowing the administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies,” the authors concluded.

A 2019 investigation by the Commerce Department’s inspector general reported “the appearance of improper influence in decision-making” in the waiver process. In his second term, Trump has managed to solve this problem—if you define problem as the exposure of corruption rather than its existence—by firing, to date, the inspectors general at 18 federal agencies, including Commerce.

Trump’s greatest advantage in this regard is that he has never professed adherence to any standard of fairness. When he discusses his plans to regulate businesses, or reward them with tax breaks, he does so in nakedly transactional terms. The business community understands that every decision the federal government makes, whether it involves antitrust enforcement or taxation or criminal justice, will be meted out on the basis of Trump’s political and personal whims. Trump does not even pretend otherwise, because the pretense would undermine his power.

Presidents may not be angels. But they used to follow a general presumption of leaving the task of picking winners and losers to the private sector. They likewise observed a wall between public and private interest that we can barely recognize today.

Seventy-two years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower selected Charlie Wilson, the head of General Motors, as his defense secretary. Skeptical members of Congress quizzed Wilson as to how he would put aside residual loyalty to his former company. Wilson confessed, “For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The confession scandalized the country. Although Wilson was trying to say that General Motors benefited from national prosperity, the very possibility that he might conflate the interests of his former employer with those of the country was beyond the pale.

[From the April 2018 issue: Is Big Business really that bad?]

At the moment, large swaths of government policy are being dictated by the current CEO of a car company. And yet it is unfathomable that the Trump administration would deem Elon Musk’s dual role unethical, let alone demand that he step down from Tesla and his other companies as a condition of public service. Musk, like Trump, respects no distinction between his personal financial interests, those of his political party, and those of the country. The seamless connection between political power and personal wealth tells everybody who belongs to the upper class or aspires to it that their safest path is to join the ruling claque.

This is alarming for any number of reasons. But, not least among them, it violates the key precept of any free-enterprise system: that market competition dictates which businesses succeed or fail. Through innovation and creative destruction, this kind of competition yields national prosperity.

The nature of Trump’s economic vision—populist? nationalist? traditional conservative?—has been the subject of endless debate. The reality is that he brings together the least attractive elements of capitalism and socialism, fusing heavy-handed state control with high inequality, and entrenching a set of oligarchs who serve simultaneously as the ruling party’s victims and co-conspirators. The more that political favor displaces market competition as the basis of corporate success, the worse things will get.

It may seem to Americans influenced by Trump’s well-crafted persona as a business genius or lulled by the record of his first term (when he inherited a growing economy) that he will bring some pro-business magic to his second term. Yet favoring incumbent businesses (as long as they stay on his good side) is not the same as favoring healthy free markets. Putin is in some ways a great ally of Russian business, and the country’s economic elite supports him, but Russia’s economy should be seen by intelligent advocates of capitalism as a vision of hell.

The end point of Trump’s vision for the economy would be unrecognizable to generations of innovators. It would sacrifice the openness and opportunity that make America the most enticing destination for entrepreneurs across the world, while locking into place and even celebrating excesses of wealth. If Americans think that by empowering Trump, they have traded away some of their equality, civic decency, and political freedom for prosperity, we may find one day that we have sacrificed them all.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fear Economy.”

Apple (AAPL) said Monday that it will invest $500 billion in the United States over the next four years, with a focus on supporting domestic manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

Read more...

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

When the Department of Government Efficiency stormed the federal government, it had a clear objective—to remake the government, one must remake the civil service. And in particular, the team of Elon Musk acolytes “focused on accessing the terminals, uncovering the button pushers, and taking control,” Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Shane Harris, and I wrote this week in an investigation into the DOGE takeover. Computers, they figured, run the government.

DOGE members and new political appointees have sought access to data and IT systems across the government—at the Treasury Department, IRS, Department of Health and Human Services, and more. Government technologists have speculated that DOGE’s next step will be to centralize those data and feed them into AI systems, making bureaucratic processes more efficient while also identifying fraud and waste, or perhaps simply uncovering further targets to dismantle. Musk’s team has reportedly already fed Department of Education data into an AI system, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer recently appointed to the General Services Administration, has repeatedly spoken with staff about an AI strategy, mentioning using the technology to develop coding agents and analyze federal contracts.

No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns. As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers, which we obtained, “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Mark Gibson / Getty.

This Is What Happens When the DOGE Guys Take Over

By Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Matteo Wong and Shane Harris

They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world’s wealthiest online troll.

On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located. They were interrupted while trying the handles of locked office doors.

“Hey, can I help you?” asked an employee of the agency that was soon to be forced into bureaucratic limbo. The DOGE crew offered no clear answer.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

DOGE and new Trump appointees’ access to federal data and computer systems is growing in both breadth and depth. Defense technologies, Americans’ sensitive personal and health data, dangerous biological research, and more are in reach. Within at least one agency, USAID, they have achieved “God mode,” according to an employee in senior leadership—meaning Elon Musk’s team has “total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more,” Charlie Warzel, Ian Bogost, and I reported this week. With this level of control, the USAID staffer feared, DOGE could terminate federal workers in “a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia.”

In the coming weeks, we reported, “the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration.” Just how far Musk and his team can go is uncertain; they face various lawsuits, which have thus far had varying success. The team may be trying to improve the government’s inner workings, as is its stated purpose. “But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems,” Charlie, Ian, and I wrote, “some are beginning to worry that [Musk] might prefer to destroy” the government, “to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Grasping the scale of President Donald Trump’s assault on American governance is no small matter. The administration is challenging laws, claiming the right to reinterpret the Constitution, questioning judges’ powers, and arrogating new powers to itself. Seeking to convey the gravity of the situation, many commentators have labeled what’s happening a “constitutional crisis.”

That’s a mistake—not because what’s happening is not serious, but because it is so serious. This week, the Trump administration came the closest it has thus far to outright refusing to follow a judge’s order, after days of comments from Vice President J. D. Vance, Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk, and others questioning whether a president must follow court rulings. That’s a threat to the very basic question of whether a president is subject to the law or not—especially when so many things that Trump has done appear plainly illegal.

But the abstraction of constitutional crisis obscures the immediate danger, making what’s happening seem like an issue more for legal experts and policy wonks than for the everyday Americans who stand to lose not only essential government services but also fundamental rights. “A president refusing to abide by the law or the Constitution and ignoring court orders to stop his illegitimate actions would be a constitutional crisis like a bank robbery is a cash flow crisis,” Joseph Ura, a political scientist at Clemson University, told me via email.

A recent New York Times article reported that many legal scholars believe that the country is in a constitutional crisis, but it began by acknowledging, “There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis.” The law, for all its careful parsing of language, has a weakness for this sort of I-know-it-when-I-see-it formulation, but if even the professors can’t define it, how can the general public? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor, warns that “we've got our toes right on the edge of a constitutional crisis,” which also raises interesting questions about the topography of a crisis.

At one time, appeals to the sanctity of the Constitution might have swayed more people, but one reason Trump has been able to dominate U.S. politics for so long is that voters are not feeling protective of their institutions. About six in 10 people in a 2022 New York Times poll said the constitutional order needs major reforms. In 2023, Pew found that just 4 percent of Americans think the political system is working very well. And in 2024, voters selected a guy who’d tried to overturn the previous election. Regardless of what law professors think, the populace has already decided that the Constitution is in crisis.

Perhaps I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I don’t think that means they want an unaccountable leader who is not beholden to laws, courts, or Congress. Already, Trump’s approval rating is down, and his disapproval rating is up. I noted last week that some of his supporters are regretting their choice. Many of the effects of sloppy cost cutting are going to be even more unpopular once voters feel them. But appeals to a system they’ve come to distrust are not the way to rally them.

A “constitutional crisis” certainly sounds bad, even if you can’t say what it is. But whatever fresh shock the term might have provided has been dulled by years of use. Google Trends tells a story of desensitization. Going back to 2004, there are sporadic spikes of interest in the term, such as during the 2008 financial crisis and around government shutdowns during the Barack Obama presidency. Then the line starts bouncing around like a flea when Trump takes office the first time. It calms again during the Biden administration but takes off on a dizzy, vertical ascent when Trump returns to office in 2025.

Commentators who labeled previous moments “constitutional crises” may not have been crying wolf, exactly, though in retrospect perhaps the term could have been reserved for the worst moments—January 6, for example—for maximum clarity. Regardless, you can’t hear about a problem on and off for years without it becoming less urgent. Trump isn’t just destroying norms; he’s established a state of crisis as the new norm.

And insofar as people do think of this as a “crisis,” that might only further empower Trump—who’s responsible for it in the first place. That’s because, in times of crisis, Americans usually look to the president to act quickly and decisively. That can be good in a bona fide external crisis, like an attack by a foreign country or a pandemic, but that’s not what’s happening now. “To the extent we’re in a crisis, it’s a crisis of too much executive energy,” Ura told me.

The better alternative is to describe exactly what’s happening: The president is taking actions he doesn’t have the power to take, disrespecting the rule of law, and attempting to revoke long-established rights. He is portraying himself as a king. Soon, he may openly defy an order from a duly appointed and confirmed federal judge. That would be a step closer to the end of American democracy than anything since January 6. Call that a catastrophe, call it lawlessness, call it a threat—just don’t call it a constitutional crisis.

Related:

Trump says the corrupt part out loud. Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises. Donald Trump says, “We are the federal law.” Why is everyone talking about getting “oneshotted”? Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing.

Today’s News

Federal Judge Dale E. Ho delayed a ruling on the Justice Department’s request to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and appointed an external lawyer to present arguments challenging the department’s request.

Caleb Vitello, ICE’S acting director, was reassigned to another role in the agency. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass removed Fire Chief Kristin Crowley for her handling of last month’s wildfires.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Haley Mlotek’s new memoir and history of divorce finds a fresh way to talk about the dissolution of a marriage, Boris Kachka writes. Atlantic Intelligence: “No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns,” Matteo Wong writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

A movie that has fun with the inevitability of death Photos of the week: Goat grabbing, flying fox, elephant orphanage

Evening Read

Illustration by Anna Morrison. Source: Archivio GBB / Alamy.

When Robert Frost Was Bad

By James Parker

Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, drift and coil and tangle with one another eternally. Robert Frost, who turned 20 in 1894, uncertain of his gift, bouncing among stray gigs (actor’s manager, repairer of lights at a wool mill) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had written a poem called “My Butterfly.” It begins like this: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …” It is what it is, a bad poem. A random-feeling extrusion of lyrical matter, like something that might come out of the tube when you pull the lever marked Poetry.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Source: Getty.

Watch. Check out one of these 26 movies that critics were wrong about.

Read. Fernando A. Flores’s second novel, Brother Brontë, boldly rethinks the U.S.-Mexico border.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Whatever term you use, our domestic drama has made it easy for many Americans to overlook just how angry our neighbors to the north are about Trump’s rhetoric around Canada, whether it’s tariff threats or talk of annexation. Last night, Canadians got a chance to strike back in the final of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off, and they took it, defeating the United States in overtime despite a pregame pep talk from Trump. To understand the stakes, I checked in with Nat Frum, an avid Canadian American hockey fan and the son of my colleague David Frum. “This was just a hockey game in a made-up, brand-new tournament created to replace an increasingly irrelevant all-star game—but it felt so much more than that,” Frum wrote in an email. “This felt like the only way Canada could fight back against these past two months of Trumpism and man, did it feel good to see that maple leaf raised on American soil.” It turns out American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to miracles on ice.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

President Donald Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.  

Brown has been the target of criticisms from some Republican senators as well as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, all of whom argued that he was too “woke” and too concerned with diversity in the armed forces. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth suggested that Brown, who is Black, may have risen to his position through racial preferences. “We’ll never know,” he wrote, in a classic just-asking-questions dodge.

But Trump should know. He’s the president who nominated Brown to be Air Force chief of staff in 2020. (Biden appointed Brown as chairman in 2023.) Trump gave no reason for the firing and Hegseth issued a boilerplate statement thanking Brown—who is only the second African American, after the late Colin Powell, to hold the position of chairman—for his distinguished service.

The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president—specifically so that the chairman (again, like the head of the FBI) does not become a partisan political appointment.

Obviously, Trump has no use for such conventions and believes that every senior official in the United States should be a personal appointee of the president—so long as that president is him. If U.S. military leaders are in any doubt about the necessity of absolute loyalty to Trump, they need only look to Brown’s replacement. Instead of tapping another serving four-star, Trump has reached out to a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine, whom Trump tonight said was unjustly passed over for his fourth star by “Sleepy Joe Biden” despite being “highly qualified and respected.”

Trump apparently met Caine on a trip to Iraq in 2018. The president later recalled that first meeting during remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019. He claimed that Caine—call sign “Razin” Caine—was insistent that ISIS could be defeated in a week if America committed enough force to the effort. Trump said that Caine then donned a MAGA cap, and said: “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.” Trump added that he told Caine he was not allowed to do that, “but they did it.”

If the president is telling the truth about this exchange, Caine shouldn’t be in the job. Senior officers, by law and military regulations, must avoid shows of partisan fealty, and such displays should never be the basis for promotion. The story, if true, is a strong indication of Trump’s political motives; Caine’s behavior, in any case, disqualifies him from the job. He appears to have had a fine career, and while it is not typical to pull an officer out of retirement to take the chairman post, it is not unprecedented. But Trump, who has apparently been telling this story for years, is not choosing Caine because of his background; he’s elevating Caine in position and rank because he wants a chairman who is wholly devoted to him.

The message to the rest of the military could not be clearer. Trump loathed Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley, and has floated the idea that Milley should be executed for actions he took as chairman. (This idea came to him shortly after the publication of this magazine’s profile of Milley, by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which detailed how Milley protected the Constitution from Trump.)

Trump and Hegseth have announced their intentions to fire several other senior officers—and perhaps even most ominously, including the head lawyers of each of the services. Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government. None of this has anything to do with effectiveness, or “lethality,” or promoting “warfighters,” or any other buzzwords. It is praetorianism, plain and simple.

For months, the actor Karla Sofía Gascón had been reaping the rewards of leading a prestigious film. She plays the title character in Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman and seeks to build a more virtuous life. The Spanish-language musical has faced waves of backlash since its release last year—but it has also found a devoted fan base among awards bodies.

Gascón was one of its anchors: She delivered an impassioned speech dedicated to the trans community at the Cannes Film Festival, where she shared the Best Actress prize with her castmates. When Emilia Pérez won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy last month, Gascón movingly addressed the audience. She made history shortly thereafter, becoming the first openly trans performer to earn an Oscar nomination. A relative unknown in the United States, the Spanish actor personified a message of tolerance and acceptance; Emilia Pérez, despite all of the criticism surrounding it, looked to have elevated a star who matched the heroism of Emilia Pérez herself.

But her momentum soon came to a halt. A journalist discovered an array of Gascón’s tweets dating back to 2016 that contained racist language and crude jokes about a range of marginalized communities. In response, the actor stopped following the typical awards-season playbook: She posted defensive updates on Instagram, sent a long-winded statement without the assistance of a public-relations team to The Hollywood Reporter, and personally scheduled a lengthy, tearful interview on CNN en Español. Gascón became Hollywood’s persona non grata, just under a month before the Academy Awards ceremony.

[Read: A film impossible to have mild feelings about]

The actor’s trajectory represents one of the most dramatic implosions of an awards run in Oscars history. Twists and gaffes happening at the tail end of a race—for which this year’s voting round ended on Tuesday—are nothing new. (Gascón’s fellow Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres weathered her own controversy this season; a clip of her wearing blackface in a comedy sketch resurfaced last month. The I’m Still Here star responded by releasing a measured apology.) But the nature of Gascón’s fall is unusual. Rarely has a nominee’s curated image—that of a righteous up-and-comer, applauded by an industry eager to demonstrate its tolerance—so thoroughly differed from the one conjured by her personal online accounts. Her case is a fascinating look at how industry status can collide with the social-media era: In spite of the awards season’s purported aims to celebrate cinema, a performer’s off-screen narrative can matter just as much as their work.

Gascón’s diminished chances of winning a trophy arguably resulted not so much from the resurfacing of her bigoted tweets, but mainly from the way she diverged from established public-relations guidelines. Oscar campaigns tend to be carefully controlled endeavors, and Netflix, Emilia Pérez’s distributor in the United States, has one of the most experienced awards-strategy teams in Hollywood. The streamer had helped turn Gascón from an unknown in the U.S. into a contender—and on the same day that her old posts garnered attention, Netflix circulated her official apology. “As someone in a marginalized community,” read the standard-issue statement, “I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain.”

But soon afterward—and reportedly without clearing her plans with Netflix—Gascón went rogue. She sent The Hollywood Reporter an additional statement claiming that her tweets were misunderstood, at times even by herself. (“Sometimes I, myself, am not even aware of having written something negative,” she wrote.) She shared thoughts on Instagram about her words being taken out of context. And she scheduled the CNN en Español interview, during which she argued that she’d done nothing wrong. She also claimed that her co-stars—including Zoe Saldaña, the Supporting Actress Oscar front-runner—supported her “200 percent,” despite no public evidence that they shared her sentiments. “I have not committed any crime, nor have I harmed anyone,” she said. “I am not a racist, nor am I anything that all these people have taken it upon themselves to try to make others believe I am.”

The more Gascón tried to salvage her reputation by herself, the more those associated with the film pulled away from her. Shortly after Emilia Pérez nabbed 13 Oscar nominations—the most of any movie this year—Netflix began removing billboards in Los Angeles that singled her out; the company has reportedly restricted her access to the team’s travel funds, making it harder for her to attend more precursor award ceremonies. Gascón responded to comments from the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, about her “self-destructive approach” by pledging on Instagram to stay silent going forward. Earlier this month, Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, addressed the scandal, calling the controversy “a bummer.” (The company is also “reevaluating” its strategy for vetting actors’ social-media accounts, she said.)

[Read: The Oscars have left the mainstream moviegoer behind]

Gascón’s attempt to control her image is singular in its audacity. None of her fellow awards contenders this season has made such bold, unfiltered moves while trying to convince Academy voters that they’re worthy of a trophy. Even before her tweets resurfaced, the Emilia Pérez star had begun deviating from the film’s standard promotional press campaign by chiding Torres’s social-media strategy. Criticizing another nominee’s tactics is an inadvisable step for someone on the Oscar track; the act can come off as combative, and the Academy can penalize attacks against fellow contenders. “There are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and Emilia Pérez down,” she claimed in an interview. “That speaks more about their movie than mine.” Gascón later retracted the remarks and explained that she wasn’t targeting her competitor, but merely trying to admonish “toxicity and violent hate speech on social media.” And then, when her past social-media posts came up, she completely ignored the rules of how to face a blowback. She could have followed in Torres’s footsteps—the I’m Still Here actor had just demonstrated how effective sticking with a standard mea culpa can be—yet once again, Gascón diverged from the norm.

Not everyone follows the Oscars playbook, of course. But the other most unconventional campaign this year is notable because it’s so thoroughly unlike what Gascón is doing. Timothée Chalamet, who’s up for his performance as Bob Dylan in the musical biopic A Complete Unknown, certainly seems to be defying the rules of typical press tours, surprising his look-alikes at a contest in New York City and riding a Lime bike onto the red carpet at a premiere, among other antics. Chalamet’s efforts have worked in part because he is an established, controversy-free celebrity, a household name with movie-star appeal. If anything, his well-received run so far, even if he doesn’t win the Oscar, underlines what made Gascón’s Hail Mary fail: Chalamet’s calculated, personality-driven stunts evoke the youthful renegade appeal of the cultural icon he played, courting chatter but not criticism.

Meanwhile, Gascón’s defensive behavior, by turns rebellious and inflammatory, undid the storyline she and Netflix had cultivated for months: that the actor intimately understood why Emilia Pérez succeeded with so many awards-season voters, many of whom are Gascón’s peers. Gascón’s character in the film is supposed to epitomize the human capacity for good, and for overcoming flaws with grace. After the actor’s tweets resurfaced, she emphasized that “light will always triumph over darkness” in her Netflix-approved apology; the statement repositioned Gascón as remorseful about her past, just like Emilia had been. But if Gascón appeared to exemplify the film’s message early in its journey toward Oscar glory, she has come to embody a different narrative—that of a shocking, largely self-inflicted public collapse. It’s not the kind that tends to win someone an Oscar.

For years now, politics in Brazil have been the fun-house-mirror version of those in the United States. The dynamic was never plainer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally charged the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 co-conspirators, with crimes connected to a sprawling plan to overthrow the nation’s democracy and hang on to power after losing an election in October of 2022.

That the charges against Bolsonaro sound familiar to Americans is no coincidence. Bolsonaro consulted with figures in Donald Trump’s orbit in pursuit of his election-denial strategy. But the indictment against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader went much further than Trump did, allegedly bringing high-ranking military officers into a coup plot and signing off on a plan to have prominent political opponents murdered.

In this, as in so many things, Bolsonaro comes across as a cruder, more thuggish version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, shrewdly, to try to retain his electoral viability after his January 6 defeat; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He attempted so violent a power grab that the institutional immune system tasked with protecting Brazil’s democracy was shocked into overdrive.

The distortion in the mirror is most pronounced with regard to this institutional response. While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030. Interestingly, that decision wasn’t even handed down as a consequence of the attempted coup itself, but of Bolsonaro’s abuse of official acts to promote himself as a candidate, as well as his insistence on casting doubt, without evidence, on the fairness of the election.

The U.S. might have done the same thing. In December 2023, Colorado’s secretary of state refused to allow Trump’s name on the state’s primary ballot, following the state supreme court’s judgment that his role in the events of January 6, 2021, rendered him ineligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the move, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.

My home country, Venezuela, faced a roughly analogous situation in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez moved to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution, which contained no provision for him to do so. Cowed, the supreme court allowed him to go ahead. Venezuela’s then–chief justice, Cecilia Sosa, wrote a furious resignation letter, saying that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being murdered.” The result in Venezuela was the same as that in the United States: The rule of law was dead.

I can’t help but wish that U.S. jurists had shown the nerve of their Brazilian counterparts. In their charging documents against Bolsonaro, Brazil’s prosecutors don’t mumble technicalities: They charge him with attempting a coup d’état, which is what he did. Brazilian law enforcement didn’t tie itself up in knots appointing special counsels; the attorney general, Paulo Gonet, announced the charges himself. The conspiracy “had as leaders the president of the Republic himself and his candidate for vice president, General Braga Neto. Both accepted, encouraged, and carried out acts classified in criminal statutes as attacks on the … independence of the powers and the democratic rule of law,” Gonet said.

[Anne Applebaum: What rioters in Brazil learn from Americans]

Contrast that with the proceduralism at the core of the case against President Trump. After an interminable delay that ultimately rendered the entire exercise moot, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump not for trying to overthrow the government but for “conspiring to obstruct the official proceeding” (that would lead him to lose power) as well as “conspiring to defraud the United States”—a crime so abstract that only a constitutional lawyer knows what it actually means.

In ruling Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office, Brazil’s elections court did not engage in lengthy disquisitions on 19th-century jurisprudence, as the U.S. Supreme Court did in the Colorado case: They said that he had serially abused his power, which is what he did, and which is what renders him unfit for office. This bluntness, this willingness to call a spade a spade, was something the American republic, for all its institutional sophistication, seemed unable to match.

As recently as 2014, one would have been hard-pressed to find anyone willing to forecast that Brazil’s institutions would prove more effective than those of the United States at protecting democracy from populist menace. Maybe Brazilians are just more comfortable with, and accustomed to, holding national leaders to account: The current center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, spent more than two years in prison for corruption after his last stint in power. (Lula was ultimately freed and allowed to stand for office again when courts ruled that the judge in his initial prosecution was biased.) Or maybe it was the speed of response: Rather than waiting months or years to move against the rioters who took over the country’s governing institutions, the Brazilian police started jailing them and investigating the coup conspiracy almost immediately after it took place.

But the biggest difference is that dictatorship is a much more real menace in Brazil, a country that democratized only in the 1980s, than it is in a country that’s never experienced it. Older Brazilians carry the scars, in many cases literal ones, of their fight against dictatorship. This fight for them is visceral in a way it isn’t—yet—for Americans.

Brazil has demonstrated how democracies that value themselves defend themselves. America could have done the same.

A vocal group of conservative intellectuals really, really wants Americans to have more babies. The movement is small, but it doesn’t lack for high-profile adherents. Vice President J. D. Vance, a father of three, recently proclaimed, “Very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.” Elon Musk, a father of at least 12, posted in 2022, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” A recent Department of Transportation memo even instructed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” It was signed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine.

If messages like these somehow do not get you in the mood to procreate, well, that’s precisely the problem.

It’s a problem, specifically, for the pronatalists: a group whose members are overwhelmingly conservative, usually religious, and almost always the parents of three or more children. They espouse the view that America’s declining birth rate is an alarming trend we ought to try to reverse. Seventeen years ago, the national birth rate was at the minimum level for a society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Since then, it has fallen well below that, with no signs of bottoming out. In response, a loose cohort of intellectuals, writers, thinkers, and policy makers are doing their best to make friends in high places, get a policy agenda together, and make Americans make families again.

This won’t be easy. The pronatalists combine conservative social nudges (get married, start a family) with liberal policy objectives (give parents more money, upzone the suburbs), which makes for tricky politics. At a time of increased abortion restrictions, many liberals find them creepy—busybodies at best and eugenicists at worst. And many conservatives think they’re Trojan horses for socialism, cloaking their desire to spend taxpayer money in family-values rhetoric. Like parenting itself, giving birth to a broadly popular pronatal movement will take a lot of hard work.

Until recently, the idea that humanity might be growing too slowly would have seemed absurd. During the second half of the 20th century, experts—many swayed by the book The Population Bomb—were far more worried about the opposite problem. They feared that overpopulation would lead to widespread famine and potentially even societal collapse.

Something strange happened next: None of those predictions came true. The population continued to grow, but famine was not widespread, and collapse did not come. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, fertility rates steeply declined, most dramatically in rich countries. Rather than exploding, the global population-growth curve began to level off. At first, few noticed. After all, the birth-rate decline came on gradually. A decade ago, the U.S. total fertility rate was only slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Now, however, that number is 1.6 and falling fast, even as polls show Americans believe that the ideal number of children is two to three. This poses a dire economic problem. Social Security, Medicare, and other old-age programs can’t survive at their current generosity if the number of tax-paying workers continues to decline. Even economic growth itself becomes challenging once a low enough fertility rate is reached; fewer workers means a smaller economy. In East Asia, where the worldwide birth-rate drop has been most pronounced, every country faces serious economic challenges resulting from low fertility; all are now furiously trying to encourage birth. In South Korea, where the total fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.68, every 200 fertile-age adults can expect to give life to 68 children; those children will produce 23 grandchildren, who will result in only eight great-grandchildren. That’s a 96 percent population decline over the course of three generations, and that’s if fertility stops decreasing and finally holds steady.

The negative effects of low fertility at home can be mitigated to some degree with immigration, but birth rates are plummeting all over the world—Mexico’s is 1.8—and the amount of immigration sufficient to outweigh the local birth dearth would be a political nonstarter, a kind of Great Replacement theory come to life. To avoid becoming South Korea someday, America needs more babies.

Making that happen is the task the pronatalists have taken on. The effort is new, but beginning to get organized. As of 2023, there’s an annual Natal Conference, and last week, there was a panel at the U.S. Capitol featuring Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a member of the Republican leadership. Every conservative think tank seems to suddenly have an “expert” on birth rates. (Liberal and centrist pronatalists exist, too, but they’re less numerous and less vocal.)

The intellectual force behind the movement lies mainly in a cluster of culturally conservative writers. These include Bethany Mandel, a writer and homeschooling mother of six; Tim Carney, a father of six who wrote Family Unfriendly, a recent book about society’s hostility toward big families; Patrick T. Brown, a father of four and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank; and Daniel Hess, a writer more commonly known by his X username, MoreBirths. The informal ringleader is Lyman Stone, a 33-year-old father of three who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

[Lyman Stone: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?]

They generally advocate for a three-pronged approach to lifting the birth rate. First are cultural nudges, which mostly entail spreading the word that kids are more blessing than burden. Second are supply-side housing-reform policies, intended to make it easier for would-be parents to afford a place to raise a family. (“Want fecundity in the sheets? Give us walkability in the streets,” Carney writes in Family Unfriendly.) Finally, there are economic incentives, which resemble the types of family-friendly welfare-state policies familiar to Northern Europeans: child allowances, baby bonuses, long parental leaves.

Stone argues that implementing such policies in the U.S. would have a significant effect. He estimates that pronatal economic policies in France, including maternity leave, child allowances, pregnancy protections at work, and higher Social Security payments for parents, have boosted the French population by 5 to 10 million people. Policy matters, he argues, not just culture.

You might expect such a progressive-sounding agenda to have attracted an enthusiastic liberal following. Not so much. In fact, left-of-center Americans are more likely to be anti-natalists. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many people who identify as liberal, and four times as many people who identify as very liberal, think too many children are being born than think not enough are.

To the extent that they’re even familiar with the pronatalist argument, liberals seem to find it creepy and off-putting. The main cause of the global birth-rate decline was women’s growing autonomy and access to contraception. Liberals understandably fear that trying to reverse the decline might involve undoing the progress that triggered it. (This is more or less the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Atwood novel in which right-wing theocrats revolt over low fertility, and institute sex slavery and totalitarian patriarchal rule.)

Some liberals also pay attention to the context in which pronatalist messages are transmitted and who is embracing them. Vance’s “I want more babies” quote, for example, came at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Liberals might even know that the birth rate is still far above replacement in much of sub-Saharan Africa and wonder whether pronatalists are worried specifically about a lack of white babies. “For many progressives and liberals, this conversation is tainted by a sense of it being reactionary, conservative, even sort of fascist,” Rachel Wiseman, an “anti-anti-natalist” leftist writer told me.

Then, as one former senior policy aide to a Republican lawmaker told me, “there’s the Elon of it all.” (He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash for criticizing fellow Republicans.) Musk, the most well-known pronatalist in the world, is also perhaps the most disliked person in liberal America after Donald Trump. Musk is known to have had 12 children with three partners. (Last week, a conservative influencer claimed to be the mother of his 13th child, born five months ago, though Musk has neither confirmed nor denied that he is the father of her child.) He had twins via IVF with an executive at one of his companies while a surrogate was pregnant with the child he was having with his longtime partner Grimes, who was reportedly furious when she found out. Having a dozen kids is good for the birth rate, but making big families look messy and dysfunctional is probably not.

The conservative pronatalist intellectuals, who seem to crave the ideological embrace of liberals, are self-conscious about their creepiness problem. Moore, who last month introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the child tax credit, told me, “Any effort to make this a right or left issue is nonsense and counterproductive.” He and his allies go to great lengths to clarify that they aren’t into eugenics or patriarchy and that they want more babies of all skin colors. “The people who give pronatalism a bad name care for it for reasons that I think are rather unseemly,” Brown told me. “And so it becomes icky because, well, those bad people are very concerned about it.”

Women of childbearing age skew liberal, so liberals’ distaste for pronatalism is a long-term problem. But, at a moment when Republicans have a trifecta in Washington, pronatalists face a more immediate issue on their own flank: Most Republicans still want to slash government spending, not increase it.

[Read: The coming Democratic baby bust]

“There’s a lot of headwinds to a pronatal conservative policy because Republicans have long distrusted urbanist talk, or talk of government supporting people in need,” Carney told me. Many traditional Republicans look at the pronatalist policy agenda (give money to parents, loosen suburban zoning rules) and wonder what happened to the party of fiscal restraint, anti-welfare politics, and the strictly zoned Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Stone told me that many old-guard Republicans are worried about incentivizing single motherhood. “On some level, we have to be able to say, ‘Look: Supporting people having families is worth it,’” even if that means money flows to unwed parents, he said.

Anti-welfare Republicans aren’t the only intra-coalitional enemy. Pronatalists also face resistance from the so-called Barstool Right, the class of epicurean, anti-woke young men, usually thin in ideology but thick in leftward-pointing resentment. “This is fucking idiotic,” Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder, wrote on X above a video of Vance clumsily arguing for lower tax rates on parents. “If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.” (Neither Vance nor Portnoy signaled any awareness of the fact that, thanks to the child tax credit, the tax code already favors parents.)

Still, the pronatalists think they are winning, if slowly. Stone told me he understands there to be “a few” Vance staffers tasked with getting Congress to raise the child tax credit in this year’s reconciliation bill. Whether or not that happens, the pronatalists feel they are operating on a longer time horizon.

“Short term: maybe; long term: yes,” Brown told me when I asked if he was optimistic. But they had better not move too slowly. If convincing people takes too long, there might not be enough people left to convince.