Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

[Jonathan Chait: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

[Olga Khazan: Putin is loving this]

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the Brutal American]

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.

Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one. No less important, though, is the influence of marginal intellectuals and podcast ranters, who provide ideas for an angry but empty man. These ideas range from the merely dangerous (the unitary executive) to the religiously authoritarian (Seven Mountains Dominionism, or Catholic integralism) to the deranged (let’s get to the bottom of the John F. Kennedy assassination, shall we?). There are, finally, the structural elements and conditions that brought us to this moment: the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, the pervasive failures of American governing elites, and the popular rejection of identity-driven policies.

This mix of influences holds true ofor foreign policy as well. Trump’s policy toward Europe, and specifically Ukraine, is motivated by his understanding of NATO as a mismanaged protection racket, his animus toward Ukraine, and his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside these idiosyncratic grievances of a man who cannot separate the personal from the public, however, are ideas that Trump has absorbed from those around him.

The so-called international-relations realists, and even the advocates of the “restrainer” school of American foreign policy, have the unrealistic notion that values should play no role in foreign policy and an unrelieved contempt for those who think otherwise. They are tempted to play at being Metternich. This was on display, for example, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to a journalist from Breitbart News that although the United States might not be completely successful at prying apart Russia and China, we could at least try to do so, apparently understanding as we do Russia’s interests better than Moscow does.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

In this case, the secretary (not to mention his interviewer) forgot that the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China had coame at a time when Russia and China had waged a border war against each other and the Soviet Union was contemplating a preemptive strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The tinhorn Talleyrands of Foggy Bottom might also have considered that suave statesmen do not announce to a crackpot news outlet that splitting the enemy coalition is the purpose of their European policy.

The idea—and it is an idea, though a very bad one—that the administration will make the United States safer by cutting a deal with Russia over the heads of our European allies is the kind of folly that only mediocre statesmen who think they are sophisticated tough guys can come up with. Such a deal would undermine America’s greatest international strengths—its alliances and its credibility—and reward two malicious powers whose hostility is profound, deeply rooted (in ideology and in fear of democratic contagion), and ineluctable. Or as my grandmother once said about someone who thought themselves clever, “Smart, smart, stupid.”

But it is also crucial to grasp the underlying forces at work here. Europe’s long dependence upon the United States for its fundamental security is untenable. This has been clear for a very long time indeed—so clear, in fact, that even as a naive, newly minted assistant professor, I understood it more than 40 years ago:

The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.

The eruptions of the Trump administration against NATO come in this context; conceivably, they were bound to come. Versions of the same critique, with much less vitriol, have been offered repeatedly, including by far friendlier administrations.

[Read: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

Deeper yet, European trust in a benign and protecting United States is the product of some selective memory. AlthoughWhile it is true that for nearly 80 years, the United States extended protection, including its nuclear umbrella, over Europe, let us not forget the bitter acrimony that has periodically beset the alliance. Furious debates over the rearmament of Germany, America’s betrayal of Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956, mass hostility over the Vietnam War, the deep European antipathy to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe, and American skepticism toward German Ostpolitik, not to mention the various perturbations of American economic and monetary policy, created repeated alliance crises. For that matter, this American visiting Europe in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, could not expect and did not receive an altogether pleasant reception.

The East European states have reason for warmer feelings towardabout the United States, which in the later stages of the Cold War did indeed help them with covert aid. But they are not entirely wrong to have felt abandoned by Washington before that and stymied in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse by American administrations that, rather than exploit Russia’s weakness, chose to appease the countryit, and were reluctant to admit them into NATO.

But the roots of U.S.-European tension are even more profound. Those 80 years of alliance were anomalous. Over a near quarter millennium, the relationship has been ambivalent. Most Americans descend from people who departed Europe in search of a new and better life. We are the people who left, and for the most part are glad we did. War with European powers occurred periodically, and could have been worse—France and the United States came close to blows over Mexico after the Civil War, and the lovely fortifications in Quebec City were designed to defend against American fleets. For their part, American leaders knew full well that the governments of France and Great Britain greatly preferred the Confederacy to the Union, and would not have been displeased at the breakup of, as it was then known, the Great Republic.

During the wWorld wWars, the United States exploited its European partners and allies. It demanded repayment of loans made in the first war in a common cause, and used its leverage in the second to break up Britain’s imperial preference system and speed up the collapse of the European empires. The Marshall Plan was magnificent, but it was also an act of self-interest. And from the American point of view, it was enough that thrice in the 20th century, the United States rescued Europe from what, viewed in the largest perspective, were three attempts at collective suicide driven by nationalism, fascism, and Communism.

Americans and Europeans have been different and remain so, even if it is now possible to get excellent wine, bread, and coffee in the United States and jeans and rap music in Europe. Their concepts of liberty, free speech, and the appropriate roles of government are not the same, as J. D. Vance noted at the Munich Security Conference, although he should have had the courtesy and good sense to emphasize how much we have in common, and acknowledge that the differences were none of his business.

[Read: ‘What the hell is happening to your country?’]

The cast of mind has ever been different. As Henry Adams said, “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” True enough, and the fact that English is now the lingua franca of Europe does not make American politics and culture any more transparent or predictable to those who reside on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the long run, a more normal kind of American administration will return. With it will also return productive and predictable relationships, cooperation, and friendship. But after the past two months, there cannot, and should not ever be, trust. One Trump administration was a mistake; two Trump administrations will be read, correctly, as a divergence that can never be repaired. The Atlantic alliance can be rebuilt, but its foundations will never be the same, and in some ways that is not an entirely bad thing. A well-armed Europe—even including, as the Polish prime minister has recently suggested, one with a larger group of nuclear powers—will be a good thing. A Europe free of its unnatural material and psychological dependence on the United States will benefit both sides.

As for the Trump administration, however, the mistrust should be of a completely different order. The man, the ideas, and the structural conditions have created a hellish synthesis, and Europe faces at this moment the utmost peril. If it frees itself of its psychological dependence, opens its treasuries, and unleashes the energy of its democratic societies, it can defend itself, including Ukraine. In the meanwhile, and with the deepest regret, I say that any European leader who believes any promise that comes out of the mouth of a Trump-administration official is a fool. For four years at least, you are in grave danger, because you simply cannot trust us.

BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg explores how Moscow has warmed to Trump's America.

Until this year, public-health officials have abided by a simple playbook for measles outbreaks: Get unvaccinated people vaccinated, as quickly as possible. The measles component of the measles, mumps, and rubella shot that nearly all American kids receive today is “one of the best vaccines we have,” William Moss, a measles expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Two doses in early childhood are enough to cut someone’s risk of getting measles by 97 percent. And vaccination is the only surefire way to slow the spread of the wildly contagious disease.

In the weeks since a measles outbreak began in West Texas and spilled into neighboring New Mexico, local health departments have run that play, scrambling to set up free vaccination clinics. The federal government, though, appears to be writing its own rules for the game. The epidemic has already surpassed 200 known cases. But that’s likely a drastic undercount, experts told me. And it appears to have claimed at least two lives, including that of a six-year-old unvaccinated child. And yet, the CDC waited to release its first statement on the outbreak until a month or so after the epidemic began, and even then, it didn’t directly urge parents to get their kids up-to-date on MMR shots.

More recently, the Department of Health and Human Services has called for doses of the vaccine to be shipped to Texas; at the same time, HHS is working on dispatching vitamin A to the region, and the department’s new secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is overinflating the importance of those supplements in managing measles. In some parts of Texas, vitamin-A-rich cod-liver oil is flying off shelves, while some parents are doubling down on their hesitations over vaccines.

When reached for comment, an HHS spokesperson noted that the “CDC recommends vaccination as the best protection against measles infections,” but added that “Secretary Kennedy and HHS are committed to aggressively handling the measles outbreak with a comprehensive, all-of-the-above approach to do what we can to save lives.”

The United States has long had small groups of people who have opted out of vaccination, but in this outbreak, the first major one of Trump’s second term, the fracture between the unvaccinated and the worried well is looking especially stark. Many of the people most eager to get a shot are the ones who need it least: young, healthy individuals nowhere near a detected outbreak, who already have all the MMR doses they’ll likely ever need. Meanwhile, those who would most benefit from vaccination have been pointedly reminded that doing so is a personal decision, as Kennedy has put it—a framing that could add to the growing death toll.

Before the 1960s, when the measles vaccine became available in the U.S., the virus infected roughly 3 to 4 million Americans each year. In most cases, the disease would resolve after a few days of cough, fever, and a telltale rash. But measles can also quickly turn dangerous, causing complications as severe as pneumonia and brain swelling. Researchers have estimated that the virus can infect 90 percent of the unimmunized people it comes into close contact with, and roughly one out of every 1,000 cases will result in death. One study found that, in the era before the vaccine, up to half of all infectious-disease deaths in kids might have been caused by measles. Those who survive the disease are sometimes left with permanent brain damage; the virus can also warp the immune system, wiping out the body’s memory of past infections and vaccines, which leaves people more vulnerable to disease.

In the U.S., getting measles as a child—and risking all of those horrors—was once considered a grim matter of course. Decades of vaccination helped the U.S. eliminate measles by the year 2000 and keep the virus mostly at bay since then. But the cracks in that wall have been widening. For a virus as contagious as measles, vaccine coverage needs to remain above 95 percent to prevent outbreaks. A drop of even just a couple of percentage points in immunization can double the virus’s attack rate, Mark Jit, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me. In many parts of the U.S., that’s now a real threat: Nationwide, less than 93 percent of kindergartners were fully vaccinated against measles for the 2023–24 school year. Unvaccinated and undervaccinated people also tend to cluster; the outbreak in West Texas, for instance, has hit particularly hard in Gaines County, which is home to a Mennonite community wary of the health-care system, and which has a kindergarten-vaccination rate of just 82 percent.

Vaccine-uptake rates in the region appear to have risen in the weeks since the outbreak began. But several experts told me they were disturbed by the lack of strong, consistent messaging from federal leadership. In the past, outbreaks have prompted immediate vaccine advocacy from the federal government: During a 2018–19 measles outbreak clustered in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, the CDC director, Robert Redfield, and HHS secretary, Alex Azar, issued joint statements emphasizing the importance of vaccination. Redfield called on health-care providers to “assure patients about the efficacy and safety of the measles vaccine”; Azar stressed that the safety of the shots “has been firmly established over many years in some of the largest vaccine studies ever undertaken.”

People aren’t necessarily taking their first cues from federal appointees. Studies show that health-care-provider recommendations are a major factor in people’s decisions about vaccination. But national messages can still cue local health officials and physicians to double down on their efforts, Robert Bednarczyk, an epidemiologist at Emory University, told me. And some of the most powerful health partnerships can involve community leaders with cachet among families. During the 2018–19 measles outbreak, public-health officials made “deliberate attempts to work with religious leaders,” whose recommendations would be trusted, Moss told me. Those efforts seem lacking in this current outbreak: One pastor in Seminole, Texas, told the Associated Press that he hadn’t received any direct outreach from public-health officials, and wasn’t engaging with parents in his congregation about vaccines.

A statement from HHS released this week did give some emphasis to the potency of measles shots. But it also continued to echo Kennedy’s constant praise of vitamin A as a top-line method to manage the virus, a statement now also highlighted on the CDC website. Vitamin A deficiency can worsen a case of measles that has already begun—but those deficiencies are estimated to affect less than 1 percent of Americans. Kennedy has also called out steroids and antibiotics as measles-fighting tactics, but those interventions, too, are more geared toward reducing the severity of disease once it’s already set in. “The vaccine is the only thing that stops people from getting infected,” Jit told me. And casting supplements and drugs as comparable to, or even preferable to, prevention is especially dangerous for a disease that has no cure or antivirals.

When vaccination is framed as just one option among many, parents might think twice about opting into a shot for their kid, Rupali Limaye, a health-communications scholar at George Mason University, told me. Kennedy has also framed vaccination as a personal choice, and something about which parents should “consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options”—all couches, Limaye told me, that make doing nothing an especially convenient option. “That, to me, is automatically going to lead to more morbidity and more mortality,” she said.

Meanwhile, primary-care physicians such as Sarah Turner of Lutheran Health Physicians, in Indiana, are getting frantic questions from patients who are asking if they need boosters or early shots for their infants, not yet old enough for their first MMR. Although some people, those born before 1989, may have received only one dose of MMR in childhood and be eligible for another, in most instances, the answer to those questions is usually no—especially if local cases haven’t been detected and a family isn’t planning to travel into an area where measles is rampant, Turner told me. Protection from the vaccine is thought to last for decades, maybe even an entire lifetime, in most people: “If you have two doses of measles vaccine, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Shelly Bolotin, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, told me.

These misalignments are a pattern in the U.S.’s reaction to infectious disease. During the worst days of COVID, too, politicians hocked dubious treatments for the virus, and anti-vaccine sentiment roiled in underimmunized communities, while some of the worried well sought out extra shots before it was clear they needed them. More recently, when mpox cases began to explode in the United States in 2022, a broad swath of Americans clamored for shots—even though the outbreak was, from the start, concentrated among men who have sex with men, who didn’t receive focused resources for weeks. And as H5N1 cases in the U.S. have risen over the past year, public worry has concentrated on the safety of pasteurized dairy products, rather than the real risks to dairy and poultry workers.

Measles is not a forgiving virus. It moves so quickly that it can capitalize on any defensive wobbles or holes in protection. As childhood-vaccination rates continue to lag and the nation’s leaders continue to dismiss data and undermine scientific rigor, experts worry that outbreaks such as these—and the country’s muddled responses to them—will become a deadly norm. Global rates of measles are rising, giving the virus more opportunities to slip into the United States. At the same time, the percentage of American children potentially susceptible to measles has grown in recent years, Bednarczyk’s research has shown. When more sparks hit more kindling, conflagrations will grow. Just over two months into 2025, the U.S. has already logged more than 150 measles cases—more than half of the total cases documented in all of 2024. If the U.S. has any hope of containing this crisis—and the ones that will surely follow—it’ll have to succeed at concentrating its resources on those most at risk.

President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.

Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”

Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).

Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

[Read: Hungary joins the DOGE efforts]

All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.

DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.

But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.

Many in the GOP have reveled in the brash way that Musk and his young team of engineers have strode into government agencies, seized the computers, and slashed jobs and budgets. And few Republicans have been willing to publicly challenge Musk, who has taken on hero status with many on the right and wields an unfathomable fortune with which he can punish his political foes. But important figures within the president’s orbit—including some senior staffers and outside advisers—now quietly hope that the cuts, as Trump himself posted on social media yesterday, will be done with a “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”

“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after yesterday’s meeting. But, he added, “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Six weeks into Trump’s term, the White House has declined to say how many people have left the federal government so far, or how many more it wants to see fired as it looks to reshape the government’s civil service of 2.3 million workers. Democrats, shaking off their despondency after November’s elections, have rallied against Musk, trying to save agencies such as USAID and warning that all Americans, no matter their political party, would feel the impact of DOGE cuts to agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture. Musk paid them no heed, trashing Democrats’ objections to his more than 219 million followers on X and wielding an actual chain saw onstage at a conservative conference last month. Days later, he directed that an email be sent to the entire federal workforce asking workers to justify their employment by listing their accomplishments of the past week.

That was the breaking point for several Cabinet members. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among the officials who voiced complaints to their staff and to the White House that Musk was usurping their authority, one of the White House officials told me. Their agencies, along with many others, instructed employees not to reply to Musk’s email, and the government’s main personnel agency later said that responding was voluntary, neutering DOGE’s threats. Trump’s Cabinet officials broadly agree with DOGE’s mission—to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but object to the seemingly haphazard way it is being executed.

[Juliette Kayyem: Is DOGE sure it wants to fire these people?]

That pushback from inside the administration was combined with rising public anger about the cuts that exploded at several lawmakers’ town halls in recent weeks. From Georgia to Kansas, Republicans took sharp criticism about the cuts, including from some in the crowds who described themselves as Trump voters and veterans. The National Republican Congressional Committee told lawmakers this week to postpone holding any further town halls. The anger reverberated to Capitol Hill this week, with several Republicans privately urging DOGE to slow down.

Majority Leader John Thune said on CNN on Tuesday that Cabinet secretaries should retain the full power to hire and fire, a belief he later reiterated privately to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to one of the White House officials who was briefed on the call. This person told me that in recent weeks, Wiles has also relayed to Trump other GOP lawmakers’ concerns about Musk, including that the constant drip of stories about DOGE slashing key jobs is distracting from their political messaging on issues such as immigration and taxes.

Musk was invited to a Senate lunch on Wednesday, a meal that took place just hours after the Supreme Court delivered a significant blow to the Trump administration in one of several ongoing legal fights over spending cuts. In the meeting, lawmakers later told reporters, several senators urged Musk to better coordinate with Congress by giving them more visibility into his process. They also offered to make the cuts permanent by enshrining them in legislation.

Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters afterward that the “the system needs to be fine-tuned to coordinate between DOGE and Congress and the administration,” and that Musk needs to be better about addressing senators’ concerns. Musk, in the lunch, distanced himself from some of the more unpopular firings. Hours later, he had a similar meeting with House Republicans, some of whom voiced unhappiness with that day’s news reports about plans to fire 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers, thousands of whom are veterans themselves, in a move that would likely delay vital services to those who have served the country in uniform.

Trump also grew angry at those reports, snapping at aides that he did not want to be seen as someone who betrayed veterans, many of whom he believes voted for him, an outside adviser who spoke with the president told me. That, when combined with the complaints from his advisers and worries that Musk was beginning to drag down his own poll numbers, prompted him to call for the meeting with the DOGE leader and the Cabinet heads at the White House yesterday.

The meeting soon grew volatile, according to an official present, with Rubio snapping back at Musk when the billionaire accused him of not moving fast enough with his firings. Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also clashed over the quality of air-traffic controllers, while Doug Collins, who runs the Department of Veterans Affairs, urged that any layoffs be done more carefully. Trump agreed. Details of the meeting were first reported today by The New York Times. In addition to announcing that the Cabinet secretaries would be in charge of firings, Trump said that similar meetings would be held every two weeks.

“Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement when I asked if Musk’s role is shrinking.

Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, said in a statement: “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.” The Departments of Defense and Transportation, the FBI, and the VA, as well as DOGE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk later wrote on X that the meeting was “very productive.” Yet for some in MAGA’s populist wing, the moment was perceived as a humiliation for the billionaire. They rallied around efforts to protect the Pentagon and the authority of Hegseth, a popular figure on the right. A cartoon of Trump walking Musk like a dog on a leash was passed around on the Hill and in right-wing-media circles. Some predicted that Trump would soon jettison his billionaire completely.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

The White House insists that Musk’s work will continue. The Office of Personnel Management outlined plans this week for a new wave of firings, offering guidance to cut entire teams and job categories. Most of those fired so far have been probationary employees, who are typically new hires with fewer job protections.

Democrats, who see Musk as a potent political target for their party, have downplayed the significance of Musk’s seeming demotion.

“I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed.” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, told me. “It’s not about government efficiency and effectiveness. It’s about crippling the federal workforce because he sees it as a threat to him instead of a service provider to the country.”

In an effort to ward off other court challenges, the administration has also tried to stress that Musk, who is a special government employee, is not technically running the U.S. DOGE Service; instead, the White House said last month, DOGE is administered by Amy Gleason, a former health-care executive who worked for the agency in a previous iteration.

The claim was undermined, however, by Trump’s own words: When he spoke before Congress on Tuesday night, he repeatedly referred to Musk as the head of DOGE.

Donald Trump wants to get back into the casino business. These days, the onetime owner of the infamous Taj Mahal casino is not interested in slot machines. He is set on a much newer kind of gambling: crypto. Yesterday, the president signed an executive order creating both a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and a “Digital Asset Stockpile” made up of different kinds of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin stockpile, which presumably will be the larger of the two, amounts to “a virtual Fort Knox for digital gold,” Trump said during a crypto summit at the White House earlier today. “‘Never sell your bitcoin.’ That’s a little phrase that they have. I don’t know if that’s right or not. Who the hell knows.”

There are reasons for governments to stockpile essential commodities. America has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve to protect against disruptions in the global oil market or for use during natural disasters or other emergencies. China’s strategic pork reserve helps the government keep prices stable, and South Korea recently had to pull from its strategic cabbage reserve during peak kimchi season. But a crypto reserve would serve none of these functions. The ostensible idea is that stockpiling crypto could help “drive economic growth and technological leadership,” as a fact sheet for the executive order states. But unlike oil or even cabbage, crypto does not serve the core functioning of society. It’s a volatile, highly speculative asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for. It’s hard to think of anything that would be less useful for America to stockpile.

“Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” is a lofty name for what Trump’s executive order actually has done: taking crypto the government already owns and counting it. Over the years, the United States has seized crypto assets as part of criminal and civil proceedings. The current value of bitcoin alone is estimated to be $17 billion. Why Trump seems set on pushing forward with this idea isn’t hard to see. The mere existence of something called a crypto reserve could benefit the president. Trump himself has gone all in on the crypto industry of late—even releasing his own memecoin, $TRUMP. On Sunday, he previewed his executive order on Truth Social: “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World,” he wrote. “We are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Many other powerful members of his administration have crypto ties. That includes David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is now Trump’s crypto and AI czar, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. (Sacks has said he sold all crypto holdings prior to the start of the administration; Lutnick has agreed to divest his business interests by mid-May.) Elon Musk has previously indicated that he owns crypto assets, but hasn’t publicly addressed possible conflicts of interest since the crypto reserve was announced. I reached out to Musk, the White House, and the Department of Commerce for comment but did not hear back.

A government stockpile could boost crypto prices. In crypto-speak, the ethos of the industry is: “Number go up.” In plain English, that means pushing the price of crypto assets higher and higher. The way to do that is to find buyers who will pay more, a phenomenon sometimes called the “greater-fool theory.” Investing in something that is overvalued or intrinsically worthless might be the smart thing to do, if you can eventually find someone on whom to pawn it off at a higher price. A crypto reserve effectively turns the U.S. government into the next greater fool. Trump’s executive order also calls for the government to look into buying more bitcoin, a move that could push up the value of crypto. (Trump said that the actions taken to establish the new reserve would not cost taxpayers any money, but provided few details on how this would be achieved.)

Trump already has had an effect on crypto values. In his Truth Social announcement on Sunday, he named five coins that would be included in the stockpile: bitcoin, ether, Solana, Cardano, and XRP. This is exactly what you would not do if you wanted to efficiently and affordably assemble a government crypto reserve; naming the specific coins that the United States intends to later include in a stockpile should cause the prices to immediately spike. And that’s just what happened. The coins Trump mentioned shot up in value. Crypto holders had the chance to make a tidy profit selling off some of their coins—despite the fact that the stockpile in the end simply included bitcoin and all other crypto assets seized by the government, rendering the details in Trump’s posts moot.

Any government that trades in crypto raises concerns about how the currency could be used. Because crypto transactions can be done anonymously, they provide an almost unparalleled mechanism for bribery and corruption. Investing in crypto doesn’t mean a nation is using the currency as an illegal backdoor, but the problem is the difficulty in knowing if it were.

Now that the president has created a crypto reserve, he will want crypto prices to keep rising—otherwise the stockpile will be worthless. Driving the prices higher would require a steady stream of positive news. But the good news is already drying up, it seems. Trump’s executive order did not go over well with crypto traders, who were hoping that the government would do more than shift around the coins it owns: The price of bitcoin plummeted immediately after the order was announced.

At a certain point, even good news isn’t quite good enough. Buy the rumor; sell the news, as the old saying goes. Eventually, the U.S. government will be stuck with a bunch of crypto, searching for ways to drive the price higher and having no one to sell it to. If Trump keeps feeding the crypto hype machine, he may benefit—and the rest of us may be stuck with the bill.

Historians like to play a parlor game called periodization, in which they attempt to define an era, often by identifying it with the individual who most shaped the times: the Age of Jackson, the Age of Reagan. Usually, this exercise requires many decades of hindsight, but not so in the 21st century.

Over the past 25 years, the world has bent to the vision of one man. In the course of a generation, he not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own country, and in neighboring countries, but set in motion a chain of events that has shattered the transatlantic order that prevailed after World War II. In the global turn against democracy, he has played, at times, the role of figurehead, impish provocateur, and field marshal. We are living in the Age of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps, that fact helps explain why Donald Trump’s recent excoriation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office felt so profound. The moment encapsulated Putin’s ultimate victory, when the greatest impediment to the realization of the Russian president’s vision, the United States, became his most powerful ally. But Trump’s slavish devotion to the Russian leader—his willingness to help Putin achieve his maximalist goals—is merely the capstone of an era.

Nothing was preordained about Putin’s triumph. Twenty years ago, in fact, his regime looked like it might not survive. With the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian influence in its old Soviet satellites quickly withered. The threat was that democratic revolution would spread ever closer to the core of the old empire, Moscow, as it had in the dying days of communism. Indeed, as Putin prepared to return to Russia’s presidency in 2012, after a stint as prime minister, protests swelled in Moscow and spread to other Russian cities, and then kept flaring for more than a year.  

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Preserving his power, both at home and abroad, necessitated a new set of more aggressive tactics. Resorting to the old KGB playbook, which Putin internalized as a young officer in the Soviet spy agency, Russia began meddling in elections across Europe, illicitly financing favored candidates, exploiting social media to plant conspiracy theories, creating television networks and radio stations to carry his messaging into the American and European heartlands.

Just as the Soviet Union used the international communist movement to advance its goals, Putin collected his own loose network of admirers, which included the likes of the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who venerated Putin for waging a robust counteroffensive on behalf of traditional values, by claiming the mantle of anti-wokeness. The fact that so many Western elites abhorred him titillated these foreign fans.

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration

One of Putin’s core objectives was the protection of his own personal fortune, built on kickbacks and money quietly skimmed from public accounts. Protecting this ill-gotten money, and that of his inner circle, relies on secrecy, misdirection, and theft, all values anathema to democracy.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Kleptocrats, in the mold of Russian oligarchy, ardently desire to sock away their money in the relative safety and quiet anonymity of American real estate and banks. Not so long ago, a bipartisan consensus joined together to pass laws that would make it harder for foreign kleptocrats to abuse shell companies to move their cash to these shores. But, as one of his first orders of business, Trump has shredded those reforms. His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

As Putin has sought to impose his vision on the world, Ukraine has been the territory he most covets, but also the site of the fiercest resistance to him—a country that waged revolution to oust his cronies and that has resisted his military onslaught. Until last week, the United States served as the primary patron of this Ukrainian resistance. But the Trump administration has surrendered that role, thereby handing Russia incredible battlefield advantages. Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine's depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization's very survival.

[Garry Kasparov: The Putinization of America]

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Now, with a like-minded counterpart in the White House, he no longer needs to make a case against democracy to his own citizens. He can crow that the system is apparently so unappealing that even the United States is moving away from it.

Updated: 2025-03-08 07:00:00
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days]

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

[Read: Russia is not winning]

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb.The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

[Read: What Europe fears]

Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

When I was a child, in the 1990s, there was only one kind of salt; we called it “salt.” It came in a blue cylindrical container—you probably know the one—and we dumped it into pasta water and decanted it into shakers. I didn’t know that any other kind existed, and the women who taught me to cook didn’t seem to, either: Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Moosewood Cookbook all call, simply, for “salt” in their recipes.

But about a decade ago, I started buying coarse kosher salt instead of the fine, uniform, iodized table salt I’d grown up with. I do not remember why. As my friends grew up and started building their own pantries, many of them also made kosher salt their default. These days, The New York Times calls explicitly for kosher salt in nearly all of its recipes, as does Bon Appétit. Two of the most influential cookbooks of the past decade, The Food Lab, by J. Kenji López-Alt, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat, both devote paragraphs to the benefits of kosher over table salt. It is now “the lingua franca of restaurant kitchens”—as Mark Bitterman, who has written four books about cooking with salt, put it—and a cheffy shibboleth in home kitchens, too. You can find Diamond Crystal, the coolest brand, in the background of the famously verisimilitudinous restaurant show The Bear, and on cooking influencers’ beautiful countertops; in 2023, when Trader Joe’s started carrying it, chef Reddit exploded in enthusiastic all caps.

Pretty much everyone eats salt, every day, and it’s different now. Yet even kosher salt’s most fervent converts may not entirely understand how it’s different.

Kosher salt, like all salt, is NaCl—sodium ions electrostatically bound with chloride ions and arranged in a crystal formation. Unlike certain specialty salts, it doesn’t have unique properties by virtue of its provenance; it’s not collected from the coast of France or mined from a mountain in Pakistan. Kosher salt is just big salt.

It’s also more expensive than table salt. You might assume that this is because it has been manufactured according to a stringent set of religious rules. But much iodized table salt is kosher—that is, prepared in adherence with Jewish dietary law—and what we call “kosher salt” isn’t categorically kosher: If you’re feeling pedantic, the right term would be “koshering salt,” because its oversize, craggy crystals are best for drawing the blood out of animals during kosher slaughter.

America’s great salt swap began in the 1980s, when farmers’-market culture and the health-food movement helped American chefs acquaint themselves with specialty ingredients, Bitterman told me: Himalayan pink salt; “bad-ass, real good” fleur de sel from France.

But by and large, chefs settled on kosher as their go-to. They did this for a reason so unbelievably basic that I laughed out loud when I first heard it: Kosher salt is easier to pick up. “Table salt is too hard to pinch,” Adam Ragusea, a food YouTuber, told me. “I mean, just try it. Anyone who’s reading, just try it. Just pick it up … It’s a pain in the ass, and it’s messy.”

Kosher salt is simply better for the way chefs tend to season their food, which is frequently, and without measuring, by eye and by feel. No one wants to be fiddling with a teaspoon on the line at a busy restaurant during the dinner rush. “You can really feel it sort of touching your fingers, and leaving your fingers,” Chris Morocco, the food director at Bon Appétit and Epicurious, told me, whereas finer salt “has a tendency to want to slip away.”

Kosher salt’s migration to home kitchens started in the late ’90s, when the Food Network became a cultural force. Its big crystals suddenly had an added benefit: They look great being pinched out of a saltcellar and flung around on television, or at least better than table salt does being juddered out of a shaker. (Ina Garten, one of the network’s early celebrities, has described Diamond Crystal kosher salt as “always perfect.”) As television turned chefs into celebrities, their fans began trying to emulate them at home.

At the same time, recipes, like the rest of media, were moving online, and their tone was changing. Older cookbooks, Morocco told me, assumed a lot of knowledge on the part of their readers: “Recipe language was very terse. They were not really holding your hand too much.” Online, recipe writers had unlimited space, a broader potential audience, and a business imperative to build a relationship with their readers. So their guidance became chattier and more descriptive, designed for a home cook who was eager to learn—and who could hold recipe developers more immediately accountable, yelling about bland soup or bad bakes in the comments section.

“Salt to taste,” which had for decades been a standard instruction in most savory recipes, gave way to specific measurements. But different salts have different densities, meaning a teaspoon of one brand can be recipe-ruiningly saltier than that of another. So recipe developers needed to be able to recommend a standard salt. Being chefs, they already liked kosher. In 2011, Bon Appétit, which was then becoming a major resource for Millennials teaching themselves how to cook, adopted Diamond Crystal as its house salt.

This is all a little funny. Restaurant chefs started using kosher precisely because it was easy to use without measuring—now home cooks are measuring it out by the teaspoon. And a movement that espoused seeking the ideal ingredients for every dish resulted in widespread adoption of a one-size-fits-all salt.

In doing so, modern cooking has inadvertently all but abandoned one of the most significant public-health advances in history. A few years ago, a 6-year-old girl showed up at a medical clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, her neck so swollen that it looked like she’d swallowed a grapefruit whole. After a series of tests, doctors figured it out: She was iodine-deficient. Her thyroid—the butterfly-shaped gland that is responsible for just about everything the body does, and which requires iodine to function—had swelled in an attempt to capture any microgram of iodine it could from her bloodstream.

For centuries, thyroid dysfunction was endemic; millions of people around the world suffered from slow heartbeats, weakness, muscle fatigue, sluggish metabolism, and brain fog. When, in 1924, American manufacturers introduced artificially iodized salts, it was a miracle, right there on the shelf in the grocery store. Within a few years, the thyroids of the developed world were working again.

Recently, however, doctors have started reporting more cases of iodine-deficient hypothyroidism—and our salt preferences may be at least partially to blame. Kosher salt, as you have probably guessed, does not contain iodine. Neither do most ultraprocessed foods, the main vehicle by which most people in this not-exactly-sodium-deficient country take in salt.

Iodine deficiency can be serious, but is eminently treatable. (Pregnant women should be particularly attentive to their iodine levels, the UCLA endocrinologist Angela Leung told me, because deficiency can result in birth defects.) The 21st-century rise in hypothyroidism might therefore be less a cause for alarm than a chance to rethink our contemporary salt orthodoxy. Kosher’s dominance, to hear Bitterman tell it, “doesn’t come out of magic or merit—it’s cookbook writers and chef culture, a weird confluence of circumstances brainwashing everyone at the same time.” What’s great for chefs may not be great for home cooks. Kosher salt isn’t inherently better, and in some cases may be worse.

I’ve now spent hours on the phone with salt connoisseurs—at one point, Bitterman earnestly described a certain type as “luscious” and “warm”—and have come around to the view that we should all be more open to using different salts for different purposes, in the same way that well-outfitted cooks might keep different types of olive oil on hand. Flaky fleur de sel is great for finishing dishes; flavored salt is perfect on popcorn. And for everyday cooking, iodized table salt is just as good as kosher—preferable, even, if you’re worried about your iodine levels. Sure, all the recipes now call for kosher salt, but a solution exists: Ignore the instructions and season intuitively. Like a real chef would.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Kosher Salt Is Actually Just Big Salt.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.