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.

For a few years, Democrats were so regimented that one could almost forget Will Rogers’s well-worn quip that he was not a member of any organized political party but rather a Democrat. After Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss in 2016, the congressional team of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer quickly took charge. They were mostly able to keep a fractious coalition together through Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term. Democrats won the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, despite noisy complaints about the inconstancy of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the party managed to enact a huge legislative agenda.

That seems a long time ago now. The party was able to force Biden out of the 2024 race, but much too late. After Trump’s win, Democrats did a great deal of hand-wringing about what went wrong, but they don’t seem to have learned much. Their inability to find their footing was on painful display during last night’s non–State of the Union address. Not only could Democrats not figure out an effective response to Trump’s speech; they couldn’t even settle on one or two ineffective responses.

First-term Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan got the unenviable duty of giving the official Democratic Party response, and delivered a workmanlike, solid speech that, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, nonetheless “failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics” and thus felt a little irrelevant.

Ahead of Trump’s speech, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned his caucus not to become the story. It didn’t work. This morning, the bible of Washington conventional wisdom, Politico Playbook, declared that “the reaction in the chamber was the story.”

A few Democrats decided to skip the speech altogether, but not enough for the boycott to be apparent in footage or images from the House chamber. Dozens of women in Congress wore pink as some sort of protest, but the message was so vague as to be illegible as anything other than generic protest. Other members brandished little signs—I saw them variously mocked as church fans, auction paddles, or table-tennis paddles—with text including “FALSE,” “MUSK STEALS,” and “SAVE MEDICAID.” (They at least opted against brandishing egg cartons as a comment on inflation.) A group of Democrats invited laid-off federal workers to join them, but without the microphone, they didn’t have much way to draw attention to their guests. Representative Jasmine Crockett posted a lip-synch to “Not Like Us,” for some reason. The scene-stealer was Representative Al Green, a veteran showman who got himself ejected for heckling Trump a few minutes in.

None of this matters a great deal in the specifics. The State of the Union (and its off-year sibling) don’t tend to have much lasting political or policy import. But the image of Democrats sitting glumly in the chamber—a mostly passive audience for Trump, neither supporting him nor meaningfully resisting him—felt like a metaphor for their broader messaging struggle. If Green’s act, complete with a cane waved at the president, was a bit buffoonish, at least he looked like he cared.

My social-media feeds were flooded last night, as they have been over the past few weeks, with progressives wincing, groaning, and gnashing their teeth about Democratic fecklessness. This is not merely an online phenomenon, as MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem recently reported. Only one in five voters approves of the party’s leadership, and they’re underwater even among Democrats (40 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove).

Part of the problem may be that Democrats respond to each new crisis slowly. Jeffries seems to be eyeing the coming budget battle as his moment to flex power. Republicans are unlikely to be able to pass a bill that satisfies both far-right lawmakers and vulnerable moderates, which means they will need House Democrats’ help to pass a bill. As a matter of tactics, Jeffries may be right, but it’s a very old-school, procedural approach to a moment that Democrats are simultaneously trying to convince voters is chaotic and unprecedented.

During his speech last night, Trump claimed a historic electoral mandate, despite one of the narrowest wins in recent memory. Democratic leaders speak like they have accepted that as true. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Even insofar as Jeffries is technically right, Democrats’ best leverage is in motivating the roughly half of the country that voted against Trump. “No We Can’t” is a bad way to do that. That’s one reason that, as I wrote last week, the odds of a progressive equivalent to the Tea Party—a large grassroots movement that furiously opposes Republicans but also has little use for the Democratic establishment—are higher than ever.

If anything good comes from last night’s speech, perhaps it will be the hastening of the end of the State of the Union, a bloated, obsolete ritual. The president is required under the Constitution to report to Congress annually, but that has taken the form of a speech only since 1913. When I was a kid, the State of the Union felt majestic: a moment of comity and decorum, where the president and Congress sat on a mostly equal footing and the focus was on policy.

Those days are long gone. Hectoring—both by and directed at—the president is now standard. In a funny hot-mic moment before Trump started last night, Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson were caught joking about how hard it is to sit through a long speech on the dais. “The hardest thing was doing it during Biden, when the speech was a stupid campaign speech,” Johnson said.

This is an ironic remark, given the strident, partisan speech that followed, but he’s not wrong: The State of the Union has become just another political rally. Several Supreme Court justices have already concluded that it’s not productive, seemly, or fun to be there, and they skip. Picking a low point of Trump’s speech last night is challenging—elevating himself above George Washington? Telling a debunked lie about Social Security beneficiaries? Reprised threats against Greenland and Panama?—but some of the most uncomfortable moments were a showdown between Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom he called “Pocahontas,” as well as Trump’s repeated, needless attacks on Biden.

It’s hard to think of any reason most Democrats would want to attend Trump’s State of the Union next year, where they will surely be browbeaten and used as partisan props but are unlikely to learn anything new about his policy agenda. That would be a much stronger and clearer message than anything Democrats tried this year. But then again, we haven’t seen the party unite much around its best interests lately.

Related:

Democrats are acting too normal. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American Russia is not winning. What ketamine does to the human brain

Today’s News

Donald Trump paused auto tariffs for Mexico and Canada for a month, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. A divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze, kicking the issue back to lower courts. The Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to cooperate with America’s plans for peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

By Olga Khazan

These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

DOGE gets a foreign ally. The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine Chatbots are cheating on their benchmark tests. The taxpayers are going all in on crypto.

Culture Break

Mauro Pimentel / AFP / Getty

Take a look. These photos show the 2025 Carnival season under way across Europe and the Americas.

Read. Chimamanda Adichie’s first novel in 12 years depicts troubled relations between men and women—but no tidy resolutions, Tyler Austin Harper writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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

The key to understanding this morning’s Supreme Court ruling unfreezing American foreign aid is that two different rulings are at issue here, and teasing apart those technicalities reveals a loss that is perhaps more significant for the Trump administration than is first apparent.

The two orders both come from U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali. There’s his underlying temporary restraining order (TRO), which remains in effect (and which the government has neither tried to appeal nor sought emergency relief from), and then there’s his more specific order, which purported to enforce the TRO by obliging the government to pay somewhere from $1.5 billion to $2 billion of committed foreign-aid funds by February 26. It was that order that the government tried to appeal, and from which it sought emergency relief first in the D.C. Circuit Court and then in the Supreme Court. By issuing an “administrative stay” last Wednesday night, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily absolved the government of its obligation to comply with that order—but not with the underlying TRO, which generally requires the government to spend money that Congress has appropriated for foreign-aid funding.

Against that backdrop, the Court’s ruling today is more than a little confusing. Let’s start with what’s clear: A 5–4 majority (with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees) denied the government’s application to vacate Judge Ali’s enforcement order. The Court’s ruling contains only one meaningful sentence, and it is maddeningly opaque:

Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed, and in light of the ongoing preliminary injunction proceedings, the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.

This sentence (or, perhaps, an earlier draft of it) provoked a fiery and more than a little hypocritical eight-page dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, joined in full by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. But before getting to the dissent, let me try to read a couple of tea leaves out of this cryptic but important passage.

[Adam Serwer: Why Trump thanked John Roberts]

First, I think it’s meaningful that the majority denied the government’s application rather than dismissing it as moot. In English, that is the majority signaling that the government likely still must comply with the “pay now” order—the second of the two—albeit not on the original timeline. If the majority thought that the “pay now” order was no longer live because the deadline had come and gone, then the proper disposition would have been to dismiss the application as moot, not to deny it. (Indeed, although there are good reasons to not rely upon dissents to figure out what the majority held, Alito’s dissent seems to reinforce this reading.) This may seem like a very thin reed, but it’s a distinction I can’t imagine was lost upon the justices. The majority (and, apparently, the dissent) seems to agree that the government remains under not just the general obligation of the original TRO but the specific obligation of the “pay now” order.

Second, the clause about the district court clarifying the obligations that the government must fulfill to comply with the TRO strikes me as an invitation to Judge Ali to do exactly that—to issue a more specific order that (1) identifies the particular spending commitments that he believes the government must honor to comply with the TRO and (2) gives the government at least a little more than 48 hours to do so. The upshot is that, even if the Trump administration doesn’t have to pay the money immediately, it will have to do so very soon. That’s small solace to the organizations and people who have already had their lives upended by the spending freeze, but it’s a bigger loss for the Trump administration than the text may suggest.

Third, the timing of the ruling is striking. The Court handed down the order right at 9 a.m. this morning—less than 12 hours after the end of President Donald Trump’s address to Congress last night. It is just about impossible to imagine that the ruling was still being finalized overnight (or that the chief justice was somehow influenced by his awkward moment with Trump). If not, then there appears to have been at least some choice on the Court’s part to hand down the ruling after the president’s speech and not before it at the close of business yesterday—perhaps to avoid the possibility of Trump attacking the justices while several of them were in the audience. I’ve written before about the problem of the Court timing its rulings—and how it underscores the extent to which the justices are, and ought to admit that they are, playing at least some politics even with what should be a straightforward procedure for releasing rulings when they’re ready. This at least seems like it might be another example.

And fourth, here’s that 5–4 lineup again. Back in January, I wrote about how this particular 5–4 alignment (the chief justice, Justice Barrett, and the three Democratic appointees) is starting to show up in cases “in which the Chief Justice’s elusive but not illusory institutional commitments, and Justice Barrett’s emerging independence, are separating them from the other Republican appointees. For a host of reasons that I suspect are obvious, we may see more such cases sooner rather than later.”

On one hand, it’s a bit alarming that Kavanaugh joined the dissent. On the other hand, for those hoping that the Court is going to be a bulwark against the (mounting) abuses of the Trump administration, it’s a cautiously optimistic sign that there may well be at least five votes to support lower-court rulings attempting to rein in those abuses.

In many ways, the dissent is far more illuminating than the majority’s order. As is unfortunately often the case with respect to Alito’s dissents from emergency applications, this one combines a remarkable amount of hypocrisy with statements that are either materially incorrect or, at the very least, misleading.

[Read: ‘Constitutional crisis’ is an understatement]

On page three of the ruling (page two of the dissent), for example, Alito writes that “the Government must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste—not because the law requires it, but simply because a District Judge so ordered.” Of course, this completely misstates both the theory of the plaintiffs’ lawsuits and the gravamen of Judge Ali’s order. The whole point is that the law does require it—that Congress has mandated the spending and that the contractual obligations have been fulfilled. Indeed, Judge Ali’s “pay now” order is about work already completed for which the money was already due. If there is authority for the proposition that the government is not legally obliged to pay its bills, Alito doesn’t cite it. Yes, there may be separate questions about the courts’ power to compel the government, but that’s not the same thing as whether the “law requires” the government to pay its bills. Do the dissenters genuinely believe that the answer is no?

Alito also makes much out of the argument that sovereign immunity bars the claims against the government. But the Supreme Court has already held that relief under the Administrative Procedure Act can run to whether the government is obliged to pay expenditures to which the recipients are legally entitled. Alito asserts that actually ordering the government to pay those expenditures is something else entirely; suffice to say, I think that’s slicing the bologna pretty thin. His argument would have more force if Judge Ali’s “pay now” order was about funds for which the administrative processes haven’t fully run. But here, they have. And so it’s just a question of whether federal courts have the power to force the government to … enforce the law.

In that respect, contrast Alito’s analysis here with his dissenting 2023 opinion in United States v. Texas—in which he would have upheld an injunction by a single (judge-shopped) district judge that effectively dictated to the executive branch what its immigration-enforcement priorities must be. In explaining why the Biden administration should lose, he wrote:

Nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of “executive Power,” which seriously infringes the “legislative Powers” that the Constitution grants to Congress. At issue here is Congress’s authority to control immigration, and “[t]his Court has repeatedly emphasized that ‘over no conceivable subject is the legislative power of Congress more complete than it is over’ the admission of aliens.” In the exercise of that power, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a law that commands the detention and removal of aliens who have been convicted of certain particularly dangerous crimes. The Secretary of Homeland Security, however, has instructed his agents to disobey this legislative command and instead follow a different policy that is more to his liking.

In 2023, Alito dismissed the view that courts could not push back against the president in such cases as a “radical theory.” In 2025, apparently, it’s correct. I wonder what’s changed?

Finally, Alito offers what I would euphemistically call a remarkable discussion of why the harm that the plaintiffs are suffering is insufficient to overcome the government’s case for a stay:

Any harm resulting from the failure to pay amounts that the law requires would have been diminished, if not eliminated, if the Court of Appeals had promptly decided the merits of the Government’s appeal, which it should not have dismissed. If we sent this case back to the Court of Appeals, it could still render a prompt decision.

In other words, the plaintiffs are being harmed not by the government’s refusal to pay them but by the D.C. Circuit’s refusal to exercise appellate jurisdiction over Judge Ali’s “pay now” order. I don’t even know what to say about this argument other than that, if that’s how irreparable harm worked, well, emergency relief (and the role of intermediate appellate courts) would look a heck of a lot different.

Alito closes by accusing the majority of imposing “a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.” This comes back to the central analytical flaw in the dissent: The “penalty” to which Alito is referring is the government’s underlying legal obligation to pay its debts. Debts aren’t a penalty; they are the literal cost of doing business. And if this is the approach that these four justices are going to take in all of the spending cases to come, that’s more than a little disheartening.

[Read: Trump tests the courts]

As for what comes next, well, I’m not entirely sure. We know that Judge Ali is scheduled to hold a preliminary injunction hearing tomorrow. It is very possible that before then (or shortly thereafter) he will reimpose some kind of “pay now” mandate that, with the hints from the Supreme Court majority, is a bit more specific and has a slightly longer timeline. Of course, the government could seek emergency relief from that order, too, but I take today’s ruling as a sign that, so long as Judge Ali follows the Court’s clues, at least five justices will be inclined to deny such relief. That doesn’t do anything immediately for the plaintiffs and other foreign-aid recipients who are continuing to suffer debilitating consequences. But it does suggest that, sometime soon, the government really is going to have to pay out at least some of the money at issue in these cases (and, as important, perhaps other funding cases too).

The broader takeaway, though, is that this is now the second ruling (the first was Dellinger) in which the Court has, in the same ruling, moved gingerly but at the same time denied the relief that the Trump administration was seeking. Two cases are, obviously, a small data set. But for those hoping that even this Supreme Court will stand up, at least in some respects, to the Trump administration, I think there’s a reason to see today’s ruling as a modestly positive sign in that direction.

Yes, the Court could do even more to push back in these cases. But the fact that Trump is already 0–2 on emergency applications is, I think, not an accident, and a result that may send a message to lower courts, whether deliberately or not, to keep doing what they’re doing.

This article was adapted from a post on Steve Vladeck's Substack, One First.

Donald Trump’s highly public schism with Volodymyr Zelensky has yielded the kind of doublethink that is common in personality cults. Those believers who approve of the policy hail the great leader’s strategic genius. And those who oppose it cast the blame elsewhere, constructing ever more elaborate accounts of Trump’s strategy to avoid acknowledging the obvious: Trump has an affinity for Vladimir Putin.

In the first category, you can find members of the so-called national-conservative movement, who have long rationalized Russia’s aggression and opposed American support for Ukraine. “Trump understands what establishment figures do not: that U.S. voters are no longer willing to allow Washington to write checks on the American people’s account,” the national-conservative intellectual Rod Dreher wrote exultantly after Zelensky’s Oval Office browbeating. Christopher Caldwell, another natcon writer, argued in The Free Press that Trump’s posture toward Ukraine “is a deeper and more historically grounded view than the one that prevailed in the Biden administration,” rejecting Joe Biden’s view of the war as a “barbaric” invasion. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s admirers include the Russian government itself, which has congratulated him for “rapidly changing foreign policy configurations,” which “largely coincides with our vision.”)

In the second category, you have Trump defenders who support Ukraine, and reacted to Friday’s events with dismay. To resolve their cognitive dissonance, or perhaps to retain their influence, they do not blame Trump for initiating the breach with Zelensky. Instead, they blame Zelensky.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

The Ukrainian president’s responsibility for the crisis includes such actions as failing to dress properly. “I mean, all Zelensky had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say ‘Thank you,’ sign the papers, and have lunch,” complained Scott Jennings, who had reportedly been considered for White House spokesperson and performs essentially the same function for CNN. “That’s it. And he couldn’t do that.”

Ah yes, the tie. Apparently Trump and his supporters care deeply about the tie. If we take this line of argument seriously, it posits that the United States reversed its foreign policy based on an outfit choice—and this argument is being made as a defense of Trump’s judgment.

A related and only slightly less damning defense is that Zelensky erred by arguing with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance when they presented him with a series of pro-Russian positions during their photo op. Trump insisted, falsely, that security guarantees for Ukraine were unnecessary because Putin would never violate one. (He praised Putin’s character and spoke wistfully of how the two men had to endure the “Russia hoax” together.) “Why on earth did Zelensky choose to fact-check Trump in front of the entire world rather than debate the wisdom of a ceasefire behind closed doors?” demands conservative columnist Marc Thiessen, a foreign-policy hawk who has sought to steer Trump toward his own view.

This viewpoint has influenced some mainstream media coverage of the fateful White House meeting. A recent Politico story filled with inside-Trump-world reporting, for example, suggests that Trump was eager to cut a deal, if only Zelensky had flattered him sufficiently: The Ukrainian president “infuriated Trump last week with his public suggestion he was swallowing Putin’s disinformation—a response to Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine started the war.” Or perhaps the source of Trump’s split with Ukraine is revealed by him regurgitating Russian propaganda blaming Ukraine for the war, rather than Zelensky correcting him.

Trump may be vain and childish, but he does have some substantive beliefs. Lindsey Graham, another Trump-worshipping Republican hawk, told The New York Times that he had warned Zelensky before the meeting, “Don’t take the bait,” and publicly criticized the Ukrainian president for not following his advice. But how did Graham know there would be bait? Perhaps because Trump has spent years expressing sympathy for Russia and contempt for its enemies, including Ukraine and the Western alliance.

[Read: Did Russia invade Ukraine? Is Putin a dictator? We asked every Republican member of Congress]

Trump’s Russophilia used to stand almost unique within the Republican Party. But he has brought large segments of the right around to his position, and many of them have turned Zelensky into a hate figure. The enthusiastically anti-Ukraine conservatives are happy to credit Trump for reversing the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv. Say what you want about the tenets of national conservatism; at least it’s an ethos. The more traditionally anti-Russian conservatives, by contrast, need to find a way to disagree with the outcome of the Oval Office meeting without seeming to criticize Trump. That is how authoritarian political cultures operate: The only permissible way to express disapproval of the leader’s choices is to pretend they were someone else’s.

This leads to absurd logical contortions. Anti-Russia conservatives treat their putative objections to Zelenky’s conduct as legitimate standards that he could have met, as if this is a game with fixed rules. Presented with the obvious objection —that Elon Musk had dressed even more slovenly in the Oval Office and a Cabinet meeting just a few days before—the National Review editor in chief, Rich Lowry, retorted, “When Zelensky is named the head of DOGE, he can do the same and get away with it.” Yet no principle of decorum says that a head of state can’t wear a military uniform in the White House but “the head of DOGE” can wear a T-shirt and baseball cap. Everything about this solemn rule is made up, including the position “head of DOGE.” If you have ever watched a school bully, you may recall that accusing their victim of violating some rule or standard, and then flouting the standard themselves, is part of the abuse, a way of signaling that they hold all the power.

Trump’s base was poised to explode at Zelensky—for his shirt, for his alleged lack of gratitude—because Trump has signaled that he is their enemy. In their desperation, anti-Russian conservatives have reversed the obvious causation.

[Read: The real reason Trump berated Zelensky]

During Trump’s first term, the theory that he loved Putin was complicated by his inability to overcome resistance by bureaucrats and his own hawkish advisers. This created room for analysts to accept explanations for Trump’s stance other than simple affinity for Putin. Now, however, he is able to quickly carry out such steps as cutting off weapons to Ukraine without sneaking around or being slow-walked by mid-level staff. Meanwhile, he publicly blames Ukraine for the ongoing war and accuses Zelensky of being a dictator who spreads hatred against Russia. The theory that Trump trusts and wants to help Putin can parsimoniously explain his rhetoric and actions.

It is the alternative theory, that Trump is playing a clever geopolitical game, that relies on whispered conversations and intricate double-meaning interpretations of his public positions. A Wall Street Journal reporter deduces from “nearly a year of Trumpworld chatter and (sometimes secret) talks with foreign officials” that Trump’s real strategy is to “split Russia from China” and that “there is no way the US will sell Ukraine down the river.” In some foreign-policy circles, analyses discerning a far-reaching plan from wisps of buried evidence are considered sophisticated, while positing that Trump simply believes the things he says almost daily on camera is considered slightly nutty.

Whatever you want to say about the anti-Ukraine right’s moral posture, it is at least able to grasp the reality of Trump’s position: He wants to leave Ukraine at Putin’s mercy. The anti-Russia Trumpers, with their missing-tie theory of Trump’s Russia strategy, and their convoluted efforts to explain away his plain wishes, are the ones who have drifted into the realm of fantasy.

The exchange was so awkward, it should have been followed by the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song. While President Donald Trump was shaking hands down the aisle, exiting the House chamber after his address last night, network cameras caught him as he turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, patted him on the back, and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” Roberts, whose back was to the camera, then headed for the exit.

We can’t know precisely what the president meant, but Trump does have a lot to thank Roberts for. After all, the chief justice and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court helped rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, completely gutting the ban on insurrectionists holding office in order to allow Trump to run for president again following his attempt to seize power by force after the 2020 election. Then Roberts and the other conservative justices manifested an absurd, imperial grant of presidential immunity, with no textual basis in the Constitution, to shield Trump from criminal prosecution, and in so doing set the stage for a despotic second term during which Trump will try to ignore court efforts to impose limits on his power.

In fairness, Roberts has not been as supplicant as some of his colleagues. He has been willing to occasionally refuse Trump demands; this morning, Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the three Democratic appointees in declining to overturn an order from a lower court to unfreeze $2 billion in USAID funding. The underlying dispute here is more high-stakes than it might sound; the Trump administration is publicly, though not yet in court, claiming the right to usurp Congress’s constitutional authority over spending, which, if sustained, would bring the country closer to dictatorship. The dissent was so unhinged that one might conclude that there are only five votes on the Supreme Court to uphold the basic constitutional structure. But even though Roberts went against the president on this occasion, he is unlikely to be a reliable check on Trump’s lawlessness. Trump may well have more to thank Roberts for in the future.

[Read: Trump tests the courts]

Any casual observer of the Supreme Court can see what many prestigious constitutional lawyers can’t, which is that the conservative justices are frequently accomplices to Trump’s assault on democracy—a flag signaling support of the January 6 insurrection flew outside Justice Samuel Alito’s house. (Alito, vital specimen of right-wing masculine energy that he is, blamed his wife.) That sort of open partisanship is a bit inconvenient for Roberts, however, who during his confirmation hearing famously compared justices to umpires calling balls and strikes in a baseball game. A more appropriate sports analogy for how Roberts and his right-wing comrades approach cases appeared a few months later, when several referees in the Italian soccer league were implicated in fixing matches for top teams during the 2006 Calciopoli scandal.

Trump has threatened to criminally prosecute those who criticize the Court, declaring that they should be “put in jail,” consistent with the right-wing belief that the right to free speech allows people to say only what conservatives want them to say. But as is often the case, no critic of the Court could implicate the conservative majority’s partisanship as effectively as Trump’s own behavior.

In his own way, the president agrees with the liberal critique that the Roberts Court is a partisan institution, with a majority that will generally do what he wants. He just believes that this is both good and exactly how it should be. Perhaps the only person who is still in the dark about what the Supreme Court has become is Roberts himself.

A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process these events, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: Not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterwards, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

[Read: A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction]

These are not the actions of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternate reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many ceasefires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a ceasefire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

[David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary]

But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing in public about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the last decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

Here are some of the highlights from Donald Trump’s speech to the US Congress.

In his Congress speech, Trump made claims about Mexico's extradition of drug lords, aid to Ukraine and immigration.

BBC Verify has looked into several claims made by Trump during his speech to Congress.

When President Donald Trump said that he might try to take over the U.S. Postal Service, he suggested that he could dramatically improve how Americans send and receive mail. The beleaguered institution, Trump insisted last month, would “operate a lot better.”

Hardly anyone agrees.

The president is reportedly considering an executive order to fire the Postal Service’s board of governors and subsume the independent agency into the Commerce Department. I discussed the plan with lawmakers, union officials, and postal advocates in both parties; nearly all of them told me it would likely degrade America’s mail system and threaten the agency’s ability to provide universal service across the country.

Moving USPS into the executive branch would grant Trump tighter control over the service and could subject it to the indiscriminate cuts driven by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. “What I see happening in these other agencies is likely to happen to the Postal Service,” Philip Rubio, a historian who has written two books on the agency, told me. “And those results will be just as devastating.”

Like many of the president’s early proposals, this one is legally dubious and would surely prompt court challenges. Congress would almost certainly have to approve any change to the structure of the Postal Service, which is a year older than the United States.

[Philip F. Rubio: Save the Postal Service]

The agency is at once cherished by the public—polls show that it’s one of America’s most popular institutions—and pilloried by politicians, who regularly complain about the USPS’s budget deficits and slow service. But few people have attacked the Postal Service more viciously than Trump has. “The Post Office is a joke,” he said during his first term, when he briefly tried to block Congress from bailing out the agency during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. A presidential commission headed by Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, recommended privatization—a step that Trump said in December he was “looking at.” According to The Washington Post, he discussed the possibility with Howard Lutnick, the new secretary of commerce, who ran the president’s transition team.

Advocates of the Postal Service say that putting the agency under the Commerce Department would be just as misguided. For one thing, the department is less than one-tenth the size of the USPS, which has more than half a million employees. And although the Trump administration has promised to streamline bureaucracy, his USPS scheme would add another layer of it—one with virtually no relevant experience, John McHugh, a former Republican member of Congress, told me. “The likelihood would be that things would slow down even more,” said McHugh, who now runs the Package Coalition, a group representing some of the Postal Service’s biggest commercial customers. As Rubio told me, “You’re not just moving boxes across town. This would basically be stealing an agency.”

The president has encountered little resistance as he’s cut off foreign aid, kneecapped federal agencies, and attempted to fire thousands of civil servants. Republicans haven’t tried to stop him, and the courts have struggled to keep up. There’s good reason to think that will change, however, if Trump comes after the mail.

The sheer scale of the Postal Service can be difficult to comprehend. It delivers nearly half of the world’s mail and reaches a network that dwarfs those of FedEx and UPS, its main private-sector competitors: some 33,000 post offices and retail centers, and more than 160 million delivery points.

For much of its history, the USPS—originally known as the U.S. Post Office—operated as an extension of the presidency. The position of postmaster general was one of the most powerful jobs in government and usually belonged to a close ally of the president. (Benjamin Franklin was the first.) The thousands of lower-level posts in the agency went to party loyalists as patronage. That arrangement lasted nearly two centuries. Then, in 1970, Congress transformed the department into the independent U.S. Postal Service. Today, the president appoints its board of governors, who serve fixed terms and hire the postmaster general.

That structure has shielded the Postal Service from political influence but not from financial challenges. People have been using the mail less and less for decades. Annual losses have piled up, and Congress accelerated them in 2006 by requiring the agency to prepay billions every year into a health-care pension fund. The struggles of the modern Postal Service have made it a ripe target for reformers and politicians, including some conservatives who have long wanted to privatize it.

In an effort to turn the USPS around, the board in 2020 appointed as postmaster general Louis DeJoy, a logistics-company executive and Trump donor (who announced last month that he is preparing to step down). DeJoy’s connection to Trump initially alarmed Democrats and their allies in the postal unions, who accused DeJoy of sabotaging service during the pandemic to aid Trump’s reelection. But the Postal Service ably handled the high volume of mail ballots, and he later made peace with some Democrats by mustering Republican support for legislation that eased the agency’s pension burden and preserved six-day mail delivery.

In 2021, DeJoy unveiled a 10-year program for the Postal Service called Delivering for America, which tried to account for a national shift in demand from mail to packages. Prioritizing reliability over speed, he scrapped air transportation for mail and the agency’s promise that letters would reach their destination in three days or less.

[Read: America is drowning in packages]

Four years in, the project appears to be faltering, which Trump could use to try to justify a takeover. In January, the Postal Regulatory Commission issued a scathing assessment of DeJoy’s plan and urged the agency to reconsider it. “Unfortunately, the Delivering for America plan isn’t working. The numbers are frightening,” Art Sackler, who runs the advocacy group Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, told me. (A spokesperson for DeJoy did not respond to a request for comment. The USPS board of governors has reportedly hired a law firm in preparation to sue if Trump threatens its independence; its chair, Amber McReynolds, also did not return requests for comment.)

The political backlash to DeJoy’s plan could be a warning for Trump: It has come from parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for him. To cut costs, DeJoy proposed reducing mail collection in many rural areas, a decision that infuriated some Republicans in Congress who represent them. “We have waited, and we have waited, and we have waited for better delivery,” GOP Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told DeJoy during a hearing in December. “You’ve exhausted my patience on this.”

Hawley told a local TV station a couple of weeks later that he would oppose any plan to privatize the Postal Service, calling it “a very bad idea.” Yet that’s precisely what some postal-industry leaders think would result from subsuming the agency into the Commerce Department. With more control over the USPS, Trump would face fewer obstacles if he wanted to sell it off, in whole or in part. “It’s a massive step towards breaking up the post office and turning it over to the billionaires,” Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, told me.

Industry advocates are most worried about Trump’s plan because of its likely effect on rural areas. Unlike its private competitors, the agency delivers medications and other important packages to the country’s most remote areas no matter the cost; indeed, when UPS and FedEx take orders in rural areas, it is often USPS that carries packages on the final miles of their journey. Deeper cuts to the agency could endanger that guarantee of universal service, and rural Americans would probably suffer the most.

Democratic Senator Peter Welch of Vermont—by some measures the most rural state in the nation—told me that service is currently so bad that he is open to a reorganization plan, even one that returns the agency to the executive branch. But Trump would have to come to Congress for approval and present a much more specific proposal than anything he’s offered so far. “This is typical of how Trump operates,” Welch said. “There are literally no details here.”

The politicians whose rural constituents would stand to lose the most are the president’s Republican allies, such as Hawley. McHugh, who represented a right-leaning rural district in New York for 16 years, told me that the Postal Service tends to be the last thing lawmakers think about “unless something is going wrong.” Then the outcry is swift and comes from many corners—seniors who rely on the mail, businesses large and small.

“Try to close a post office,” McHugh said. “Your phones will be ringing. There’ll be pickets at your front door.” So far, he noted, GOP lawmakers are keeping quiet about Trump’s postal plan because it hasn’t taken shape and he’s issued no executive order: “Right now, it’s kind of business as usual.” But, McHugh added, “that can change really, really quickly.”

US President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress was briefly disrupted as Democratic lawmakers heckled him.