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This morning, President Donald Trump used the standard diplomatic channel—his Truth Social account—to announce retaliation against Canada for Ontario’s new electricity tariffs, which were themselves retaliatory.

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th,” Trump wrote. The rest of the message is much stranger, again promising the annexation of Canada: “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.”

Earlier this evening, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, pulled back the electricity tariffs after securing a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the White House dropped its threat. Ford likely recognized that no matter how belligerent a stance Trump takes, he can be easily induced to change his mind.

Consider what’s happened with tariffs over the past 45 days. On February 1, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, to take effect on February 4. On February 3, he announced a one-month pause in implementation. On February 26, he said he might not actually impose the tariffs until April 2; the next day, he said they’d start on March 4. On March 2, Lutnick suggested that the tariff situation was “fluid.” On March 4, the tariffs went into effect after all.

Confused yet? We’re just getting started. That afternoon, with stock markets reacting poorly, Lutnick suggested that the tariffs might be rolled back the next day. Indeed, on March 5, Trump announced that he was suspending parts of the tariffs related to auto manufacturing until April. And then, on March 6, he suspended all of the tariffs until April. Trump once told us that trade wars are “easy to win.” Now he seems unsure about how to fight one, or whether he even wants to.

If the defining feeling of the start of the first Trump administration was chaos, its equivalent in this term is whiplash. The president and his aides have been changing their minds and positions at nauseating speed.

Many of the reversals seem to come down to Trump’s caprices. On February 19, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator.” About a week later, he disavowed that. “Did I say that? I can't believe I said that,” he told reporters. “I think the president and I actually have had a very good relationship.” The next day, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office, sent him packing, and began cutting off military help to Ukraine. This afternoon, the U.S. restarted military and financial aid once again.

Another leading cause of whiplash is Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Last week, the General Services Administration put up a list of more than 400 buildings that the cost-cutting crew had deemed inessential for government operations. The inventory included some eye-raising entries, including the Robert F. Kennedy building—headquarters of the Justice Department—and the main offices of the Labor Department and the FBI, but also some peculiar ones, such as steam tunnels underneath Washington, D.C. (One imagines that the wrong buyer could cause a great deal of mayhem with those.) Within hours, more than 100 entries had been removed from the list; by the next day, it was gone entirely, replaced by a “coming soon” message—though not before revealing a semi-secret CIA facility.

DOGE and other efforts to slash the federal workforce keep overstepping and requiring reversals. In some cases, officials seem to be discovering that the things Trump wants are either impracticable or too politically toxic to effect. Musk posted on X that if federal workers didn’t respond to an email, it would be tantamount to their resignation. Then the threat was removed. Then Musk sent another email. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, only to be called back to work. Some workers who accepted a buyout offer were then fired; others had the offer rescinded. Musk tittered over canceling and then uncanceling Ebola-prevention programs, though some officials dispute that they were actually uncanceled. The administration planned to shut down the coronavirus-test-distribution program, then ultimately suspended but did not end it; it killed but then resuscitated a health program for 9/11 survivors.

Trump isn’t just going back on specifics. Some of his core campaign propositions are also looking shaky. Despite campaigning on the deleterious effects of inflation, he now says that it’s not a top priority. He promised booming wealth for Americans; now he can’t rule out a recession and is warning that people will need to endure some pain (for what higher purpose, he hasn’t made clear). And even though Trump has long said that he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security, Musk is now targeting them and calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

This kind of vacillation creates an obvious credibility problem for the president and his administration. As I wrote during Trump’s first presidency, foreign leaders quickly concluded that he was a pushover, easily convinced by flattering words. Trump practically always folded in a negotiation. This history, combined with his mercurial moods, mean that counterparts don’t assume they can take him at his word. In the case of Canada, Trump seems to have come out with the worst possible outcome: Canadian leaders believe he’s deadly serious about annexing the country, a quixotic goal, but they have no reason to take his bluster about tariffs, which he can actually impose, all that seriously.

The situation might be even more dangerous if observers took Trump at his word. His dithering has given markets the jitters, but the economic impacts might be more dire if traders acted as though they expected him to follow through on all of his tariff threats. (After he said this past weekend that a recession is possible, markets plunged. Did investors believe he had some secret plan up his sleeve until then?)

Uncertainty is bad for markets, but the problem is larger than that. One of the most fundamental roles of the state is to create a sense of consistency and stability for society. That provides the conditions for flourishing of all kinds: economic, artistic, cultural, scientific. Trump is both seeking to seize more power for himself and refusing to exercise it in a way that allows the nation to flourish.

Today, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University who has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. This, too, calls into question the stability of the rule of law—specifically, the long-standing fact that the First Amendment and due process apply to legal permanent residents. (Last month, I wrote that Trump’s actions were showing that his commitment to free speech was bogus. He seems determined to prove me right.) The first months of the Trump presidency have been whiplash-inducing, but in the long term, the failure to set and follow consistent rules threatens national pain much worse than a sore neck.

Related:

Mahmoud Khali’s detention is a trial run. The free-speech phonies

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants. The only question Trump asks himself

Today’s News

Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day cease-fire if Russia accepts the plan proposed by the United States. Ontario suspended its 25 percent electricity surcharge for some U.S. states after Donald Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum for Canada. The former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who started a widespread crackdown on drugs, was arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing,” Annie Lowrey writes. Maybe don’t invite a recession in.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty.

Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext

By Jonathan Chait

The [Trump] administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

On my evening to-do list once I finish this newsletter: Pick up my copy of my colleague Olga Khazan’s Me, but Better at my local bookstore. In 2022, she wrote one of my favorite Atlantic stories ever about her three-month attempt to change her own personality. In the book, which is out today, she goes deeper. Olga is a very funny writer and great at sorting through and explaining complicated science, but for me, what makes her such an outstanding journalist is her ability to see and question a lot of the things that most people take for granted. I feel safe guessing that her research didn’t change that part of her personality.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer.

In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus. The administration announced that it was slashing $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It followed up this action by detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia as a grad student last year. The arrest was carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism. It called in police to clear out a building takeover by anti-Israel activists. Just a few weeks ago, two Barnard students were expelled after disrupting an Israeli-history course and distributing flyers depicting a Jewish star being stepped on by a jackboot.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

If you wish to understand the thought process that led to this point, a good place to begin would be a short missive written last month by Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo argued that the ascendant right needs to reject left-wing “cancel culture,” but not settle for returning to liberal norms. “All cultures cancel,” he wrote. “The question is, for what, and by whom.” This echoed, either consciously or unconsciously, Vladimir Lenin’s famous dictum, “Who, Whom?,” by which he defined politics as entirely a question of which class would dominate the other, rejecting any possibility of liberal accommodation.

Rufo chose as his explanatory example the case of Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after his exposure for having written openly racist posts (including, literally, “I was racist before it was cool”), only to be rehired after a public intervention by Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. “The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture,” Rufo explained, “demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.”

The key term here is loyalty. Protection would be afforded only to allies. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward,” Rufo argued, which would enable the right to “protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

The sole guiding principle at work is the defense of allies and the punishment of foes. Trump and his allies may purport to be following other values, but they barely bother with even the pretense of consistency. Trump will claim to defend free speech while launching a campaign to punish campus demonstrators on the basis of their viewpoints. (Many anti-Israel protesters have espoused ghastly political views, including support for the October 7 murders, but free speech means nothing if not preventing the government from punishing ideas it disagrees with.) He will occasionally justify his repression as simply a crackdown on disorder and other forms of misconduct, while granting sweeping pardons to the perpetrators of a violent mob assault on the Capitol.

That spirit of pure will to power—who, whom—has defined the administration’s gleefully selective approach to “combating” anti-Semitism, which in practice seems to mean using anti-Semitism as a pretext to intimidate its opponents while simultaneously cultivating its own anti-Semitic faction.

Trump’s rise over the past decade has broadened the Republican coalition in many ways—including by pulling in far-right activists previously considered too racist to be permitted in the tent. During his first campaign and presidential term, Trump courted these factions with wink-and-nod rhetoric: calling his movement “America First” (a label previously used by the isolationist right before World War II), gesturing toward the “Great Replacement” theory (the idea, circulated by white supremacists, that mass immigration is a left-wing plot to transform American politics and culture), attacking his Republican critics as “globalists,” and refusing to denounce even virulently racist figures, such as David Duke, who supported him.

During his second term, the embrace is far less subtle. Winks and nods have been replaced by public Nazi salutes. Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker, recently received a special intervention from the White House allowing him to travel to the United States, presumably because he is loyal to Trump. (The president has denied involvement in that decision.) His extensive list of moral abominations includes overtly anti-Semitic statements, including praise for Hamas and the October 7 attacks.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump has turned the GOP into a white-supremacist or Nazi party. The still-disturbing reality is that he has brought white supremacists and Nazis into the coalition. As such, they receive his protection.

Right-wing anti-Semitism has exploded as a consequence of the Trumpist no-enemies-to-the-right principle. Elon Musk has made X both more central to conservative messaging and distinctly friendlier to anti-Semitic messages. Just this past week, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan credulously interviewed a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

It is true that anti-Semitism has also surged on the left, frequently disguised as anti-Zionism. The key difference is that it has utterly failed to gain legitimacy within the Democratic Party. Indeed, the movements that have given comfort to anti-Semitism on the left have exuded hostility toward the Democrats, sometimes even expressing a preference for Trump. Democrats have managed to keep left-wing anti-Semitism marginal because they recognize that it exists. By denying right-wing anti-Semitism, Republicans have allowed it to spread.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How colleges should address anti-Semitism]

Jew hatred is now crossing a threshold of political viability such that even prominent Republicans in safe congressional seats hesitate to denounce it. Consider this telling response by Senator Lindsey Graham to Kingsley Wilson’s anti-Semitic invective: “I’m not gonna tell them who to hire, but I do know that Trump doesn’t believe any of the things she’s talking about, and I’ll leave it up to them to determine if they think she’s the right spokesperson. If what you say about these posts are true, then she’s completely off-script with President Trump.”

Graham is trying to signal, as tepidly as possible, that the White House should fire Wilson by calling her “off-script with President Trump.” But by saying he won’t tell Trump whom to hire, he frees the president from any standard of accountability. Graham opposes anti-Semitism, but his opposition must yield to the highest imperative, Trump is always right.

The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy.

On the campaign trail last fall, President Donald Trump promised a “new era of soaring income, skyrocketing wealth, millions and millions of new jobs, and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.” On Fox News this weekend, he promised a “period of transition.” He added: “It takes a little time. But I think it should be great for us. I mean, I think it should be great.” When the host asked, “Are you expecting a recession this year?” he didn’t say no.

The White House has traded a message of prosperity now for a message of prosperity soon, forecasting that the budget cuts and tariffs the Trump administration is implementing will redound to the country’s welfare in the near future: Businesses will bring their overseas operations back to America; a leaner government will leave more income for American firms and households. But economists doubt that the Trump administration’s policy changes will promote growth. And Trump’s message isn’t inspiring confidence among businesses and consumers. That alone might be enough to pitch the country into a downturn.

Already, Trump’s policies are slowing down the economy. The administration has kicked off a global trade war. It announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, spurring the Canadian government to retaliate with its own tariffs, which then spurred Washington to retaliate for the retaliation; abruptly reversed some of the levies; increased tariffs on China, causing China to impose tit-for-tat measures; added tariffs to aluminum and steel products; proposed “reciprocal” tariffs on countries with taxes on American goods; and floated the idea of putting export tariffs on American agricultural products.

The tariffs are slowing trade and increasing costs for American consumers. Companies including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have warned that they will have to bump up prices as import costs rise. Moreover, the unpredictability around the implementation of the tariffs has led to chaos in the markets. An index of policy-related uncertainty hit its highest-recorded level, aside from the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses are less sure of the country’s prospects now than they were after 9/11 or during the housing-market collapse in 2007. Manufacturing firms are pulling back on investment; companies are slowing down mergers and acquisitions; firms are downgrading their earnings estimates. The stock market has lost $4 trillion in value, as traders dump equities for safer investments.

Asked to clarify the White House’s trade policies this weekend, Trump responded: “We may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, or we may go up.” Businesses should stop whining about needing policy certainty, he said: “They always say that we want clarity,” but they “have plenty of clarity.” The real issue, he argued, was that “our country has been ripped off for many decades, for many, many decades, and we’re not going to be ripped off anymore.”

Beyond new taxes on businesses and consumers, the Trump administration is rescinding federal contracts and firing tens of thousands of federal workers, in many cases illegally. These cuts have not yet shown up in the jobs report, but economists expect them to, starting next month. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, estimates that the government has let more than 60,000 workers go—enough to wipe out nearly half of the employment gains the economy notched last month—and notes that private businesses are amping up layoffs as well.

The Trump administration argues that the country has to go through a “detox period,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it. Yet the administration is not just cutting waste and eliminating fraud. The cuts at the IRS, for instance, are likely to reduce federal revenue by denying the government the resources it needs to audit high-income taxpayers. The Social Security cuts could interfere with seniors’ ability to access their retirement benefits.

The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing. Consumers are still being battered by high prices, particularly for housing; credit-card debt and default rates are climbing; the labor market is seizing up, with workers afraid to quit their jobs and hiring rates falling. As a result, indexes of consumer sentiment and small-business optimism are plunging. Last month, households became more pessimistic about current labor conditions, future business conditions, future income, and future employment prospects, the Conference Board reported.

Voters’ fear of a “detox period” or a “period of transition” could itself force the country into a literal vibecession, as households, feeling dour, pull back. Consumer spending makes up roughly two-thirds of the economy, and consumers make spending decisions not only on the basis of their own finances but also on their sense of where the country is headed. Reading the headlines on tariffs and hearing about DOGE-related job cuts, some families might put off the purchase of a new car. Others might cut short a summer vacation, decide to wait on a home-improvement project, or quit ordering pizza on Fridays. At the same time, firms might decide to wait on building a new plant or expanding into a new region, reducing employment gains and sapping revenue from other firms.

A downturn could result—or, even worse, given the tariffs’ impact on prices, a period of stagflation. Congress and the Federal Reserve would be faced with the choice of increasing spending and lowering interest rates to help create jobs, or lowering spending and increasing interest rates to hold down prices, incapable of doing both at the same time. The Trump White House might compound the pain by, as Elon Musk suggested, slashing Medicaid and Social Security benefits to finance tax cuts for rich households.

“It takes a little time,” Trump said of his promised boom. “But I think it should be great.” Instead, we might have a recession. We might have it soon. It definitely won’t feel great.

The wonder of the American supermarket is the way it exists outside of seasons. Stroll into any major grocery store on a dreary winter day, and you’ll find a bounty of fresh summer fruits and vegetables waiting for you: avocados, tomatoes, berries, bell peppers, cucumbers, squash, and green beans. The American supermarket does not, however, exist outside of economics. These fruits and vegetables are largely grown in Mexico, meaning they are roped up in President Donald Trump’s trade war. Last week, he enacted 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico; two days later, he backtracked, suspending most of the tariffs until April 2. (His 20 percent tariff on products from China remains in effect.) Presuming that the president follows through, expect lots of goods to get more expensive: tequila, lumber, that $11 handheld vacuum you bought from Temu on a whim. But perhaps the most direct way that Americans feel the tariffs will be at the grocery store.

Nearly 60 percent of the fresh fruit in the United States is imported, as is more than one-third of the country’s fresh vegetables. Most of that travels in from Mexico, but Canada also plays a part in America’s food supply. Twenty percent of the country’s vegetables, by value, come from our neighbor to the north. For all the debate around what people should eat, one thing pretty much everyone agrees on is that fruits and veggies are good for you. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on a campaign to “Make America healthy again,” has promoted numerous dangerous ideas about the American diet—but he’s right that Americans aren’t eating enough greens. The tariffs will worsen the problem. “People are going to immediately eat less fruits and vegetables, and will more likely rely on processed foods,” Mariana Chilton, a public-health professor at Drexel University and the author of The Painful Truth About Hunger in America, told me. A direct consequence of Trump’s tariffs could be pushing Americans to eat worse than they already do.

Ideally, tariffs could be offset by growing more produce in the U.S. That is precisely what Trump calls for as part of his “America First” agenda. But as The Atlantic’s Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, doing so would require an overhaul of the food system: “More land would have to be dedicated to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and less of it to grains and sweeteners. It would also mean addressing labor shortages, increasing the number of farmers, finding suitable land, and building new infrastructure to process and ship each new crop.”

So how much more expensive will produce get? The tariffs apply to the value of a product at the border, not the retail price, so it’s not as simple as just slapping on a 25 percent surcharge on avocados. Over the course of the next year or so, if the tariffs take effect, the Budget Lab at Yale projects a 2.9 percent increase on fruits and vegetables. “These sound like small numbers,” Ernie Tedeschi, the lab’s economic director, told me. “These are not small numbers.” It’s the equivalent of “two years’ worth of fresh-food inflation in one fell swoop.” And that 2.9 percent increase is an average, meaning it encompasses all produce prices—including fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. If you’re a big tomato eater and you like a side of green beans, the tariffs are going to especially hurt.

The Budget Lab expects a 1.7 percent bump on food prices overall. But this, too, wouldn’t be evenly distributed. On the opposite end of the cost spectrum, packaged foods would be among those least affected. They are made with imported fruits and vegetables, some of which may be coming from Mexico and Canada, but the overall amount tends to be negligible. (There just isn’t that much tomato on a frozen pizza.) “There might be other things that those food companies may be importing,” David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State, told me, such as packaging. But “the pressure there is going to be a lot lower than in the actual fresh produce.”

In other words, Twinkies may get a little more expensive, while tomatoes may get a lot more expensive.   That’s going to make it harder for people to eat healthy, Sarah Bowen, a sociologist at North Carolina State University, told me. In her research interviewing moms about their food choices, “one of the things that came up again and again was that people wanted to buy healthier food, and especially fresh fruit, but they couldn’t afford it,” she told me. “We asked moms, ‘If you had more money to spend on food, what would you buy?’ And by far the most common answer was fresh fruit, specifically strawberries, grapes, things that kids like.” Even if you can swing it, there is a point where the discerning—or even vaguely price-conscious—consumer hits a limit and thinks, You know what, no. “It’s clear that people are already very worried about food prices,” Bowen said.

Of course, these changes will happen only at the margins. Lots of people might still buy an avocado that costs an extra 50 cents. And tariffs could have a perverse and uncomfortable upside, Caitlin Daniel, a researcher at Harvard, told me. Among the first purchases to go when budgets get tight is food that “people want to cut anyway,” she said—salty snacks, cookies, soda. That would be a limited victory. “In general, you’re probably going to see a decline in consumption of fresh produce, and that’s not good,” she said. The millions of Americans who already don’t eat enough vegetables will have even more of a reason not to do so. Even before the tariffs, fresh fruits and vegetables made up only “roughly a tenth” of the average middle-class grocery budget, Tedeschi said, drawing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey data.

The solace is that Americans still have plenty of ways to cut their broccoli costs. “There’s some latitude for substitution,” Daniel said. Instead of buying fresh, people might buy canned or frozen options “with really no change in diet quality,” she said. America grows tons of other fruits and vegetables; most of the country’s spinach, for example, is already grown domestically.

Price alone cannot explain why Americans eat the way they do. But the tariffs could underscore just how fundamental it is for understanding the country’s diet. Daniel has found in her research that people go to great lengths to continue eating fresh produce even when cash-strapped. “Whether people cinch up at the level of trying to buy from cheaper retailers,” she said, “going in on more couponing, shopping at multiple stores in search of deals—all of these things are going to contribute to what the ultimate impact on health is.” Tariffs or no tariffs, telling people what to eat is less effective than ensuring that they’re actually able to buy it. For an administration that wants to “Make America healthy again,” raising the prices of fruits and vegetables might not be the place to start.

Bank of America axed a slew of investing banking jobs on Monday, sources told Reuters.

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Photographs by Jake Dockins

Peter greeted me in the mostly empty gravel parking lot of a Mennonite church on the outskirts of Seminole, a small city in West Texas surrounded by cotton and peanut fields. The brick building was tucked in a cobbled-together neighborhood of scrapyards, metal barns, and modest homes with long dirt driveways. No sign out front advertised its name; no message board displayed a Bible verse. No cross, no steeple—nothing, in fact, that would let a passerby know they had stumbled on a place of worship. When my car pulled up, Peter emerged to find out who I was.

He hadn’t been expecting a stranger with a notepad, but he listened as I explained that I had come to town to write about the measles outbreak, which had by that point sent 20 people from the area to the hospital and caused the death of an unnamed child, the disease’s first victim in the United States in a decade.

Of course Peter knew why Seminole was in the news. He had heard that President Trump was asked about the outbreak here during a Cabinet meeting, and he told me that he didn’t like the attention. The Mennonites were being unjustly singled out. It wasn’t like they were the only ones who came down with measles. The coverage, he insisted, was “100 percent unfair.” He didn’t think it was just the Seminole area that had problems; he said that he had family in Canada and Mexico who had also gotten measles recently. I told him I’d heard that the child who’d passed away might have come from his congregation. He said that was true.

Peter dug the toe of his boot into the gravel. I asked him if he knew the family. His voice broke slightly as he answered. “That’s our kid,” he said.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

The first case in the West Texas outbreak was announced on January 29. The official tally in the region grew to six over the next week. By Valentine’s Day, it was up to 48. On February 26, news went out that a child had died; by that point, 124 cases had been confirmed across nine counties, making the outbreak the largest that the state had seen in 30 years. The official count now stands at just about 200, and another person who was diagnosed with measles just died across the border in New Mexico.

An outbreak—even one this big—should not have come as a surprise. Vaccination rates have dipped in many states, including Texas, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In Gaines County, where Seminole is located, the measles-vaccination rate among kindergartners is just 82 percent, well short of the estimated 95 percent threshold for maintaining herd immunity. Even that alarming figure would appear to undersell the local problem. Many children from the county’s Mennonite community, which numbers in the thousands, are unvaccinated, but they won’t get picked up in state tallies, because they are either homeschooled or enrolled in nonaccredited private schools, which are not required to collect such data.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

Even in the midst of a measles crisis, persuading parents in rural West Texas to vaccinate their children, or just to get tested for the virus, is an uphill battle. Zach Holbrooks, the executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, told me that he’s spent the past month trying to get the word out, particularly to the Low German–speaking Mennonite community. He asked three local churches if he could set up a mobile testing site on their property. They all refused. “I think there’s some sentiment that they’re being targeted,” he said, “and I don’t like the fact that they feel that way.” His team did create a drive-up testing site at a county events building next to the city park, and not far from the Masonic lodge. But he said that it gets very few visitors—about two or three a day. As a result, no one really knows the outbreak’s total size.

[Read: America is botching measles]

Help from the federal government has been slow to arrive. Weeks into the outbreak, the Department of Health and Human Services directed 2,000 doses of vaccine to be sent to Texas. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed HHS secretary, initially reacted to the outbreak by claiming that it was “not unusual.” Since then, he has repeatedly reminded the public that the decision to be immunized is a personal one, even while acknowledging that vaccines “not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity.” He has also claimed that good nutrition might be sufficient to protect people from the worst effects of measles. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times,” Kennedy falsely told Fox News’s Marc Siegel in an interview last week. He’d had “a very, very emotional and long conversation” with the family of the child who had died, he said; and later added that “malnutrition may have been an issue in her death.” Local health officials told The New York Times that the child who died had “no known underlying conditions.” A spokesman for HHS declined to comment.

There are a half dozen Mennonite congregations in Seminole, according to Google Maps. Peter’s church isn’t listed among them. Aside from a nonprofit filing, it does not appear to have any online presence. I knew of its existence only because I’d met a Mennonite man from another congregation at a coffee shop that morning and asked whether he knew the family of the child that had died. He said he’d heard they were from this church. When I asked him where it was, he responded with a word in Low German. That turned out to be a nickname for a neighborhood a little ways outside of town. After circling county roads for a while, passing a mix of homes, horses, and farm equipment, I stopped and asked for help from a group of boys playing in a field with rocks and sticks. They pointed in unison. The church was just half a mile up the road.

That’s where I encountered Peter, a wiry 28-year-old man with an angular face who wore a dark-colored, Western-style shirt and jeans. His English was uncertain, and he spoke with a light German accent. Sometimes he responded to my questions with silence.

He declined to reveal his daughter’s name or the family’s last name. Peter was perplexed by the national news coverage, and he did not seem eager to draw more attention to his family and community. He gave only his daughter’s age: She was 6 years old. When I asked him to describe her in more detail, he waved his hand, said she liked what other kids liked. But as we stood in the parking lot, he told me the story of what happened.

Peter’s daughter had been sick for three weeks. The family knew it was measles. He said they took her to the hospital at one point, and she was given cough medicine. “That’s it,” he recalled. “They just say, ‘Go home.’ They don’t want to help us. They say, ‘It’s just normal; go home.’” (A spokeswoman for the Seminole Hospital District declined to comment, citing privacy laws.)

Photograph by Jake Dockins

It wasn’t normal, though. Her condition continued to deteriorate, so they brought her back to the doctors. “She just kept getting sicker and sicker,” he told me. “Her lungs plugged up.” Her heart rate and blood pressure dropped, and the doctors put her on a ventilator. “We were there Saturday ’til Monday, three days … and then it was worse, very bad.” Peter shook his head and stared at the ground. He said his daughter died on Tuesday night from pneumonia, which is a common infection in severe measles cases.

Peter’s daughter was not vaccinated. Mennonite doctrine does not prohibit inoculations or modern medicine in general, though I encountered plenty of suspicion among Mennonites I spoke with in Seminole. I met a father who said that he wanted to vaccinate his two daughters but that their mother didn’t think it was a good idea. A grandmother told me she knew of several children who had been given the measles vaccine and were “never the same after that.” A man who'd spent his career installing irrigation equipment said he was suspicious of vaccines in part because he believed that the government had lied about the origins of COVID.

Peter said that he has doubts about vaccines too. He told me that he considers getting measles a normal part of life, noting that his parents and grandparents had it. “Everybody has it,” he told me. “It’s not so new for us.” He’d also heard that getting measles might strengthen your immune system against other diseases, a view Kennedy has promoted in the past. But perhaps most of all, Peter worried about what the vaccine might do to his children. “The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” he said. “We don’t like the vaccinations, what they have these days. We heard too much, and we saw too much.”

During our conversation, several families arrived and went inside the building behind him. Mennonites are known for coming to the aid of fellow community members. Earlier in my visit, I’d heard a story about how Mennonites had paid off the mortgage of a young mother in the area whose husband had died in an accident. I asked Peter if he was getting enough support. He nodded: “Food, money—whatever we need.” Peter does construction for a living. He and his wife have four other small children. A couple of them appeared as we talked, grabbing at his sleeve, trying to get his attention. He leaned down to reassure them.

The death of his daughter, Peter told me, was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. “Everybody has to die,” he said. Peter’s eyes closed, and he struggled to continue talking. “It’s very hard, very hard,” he said at last. “It’s a big hole.” His voice quavered and trailed off. “Our child is here,” he said, gesturing toward the building behind him. “That’s why we’re here.”

Peter invited me to come inside the church building. He walked over to the door and held it open. I entered a small, dark, airless room with about a dozen chairs. Peter’s daughter was lying in the middle in a handmade coffin covered with fabric. Her face, framed by blond, braided pigtails, showed no sign of illness. Everything was white: her skin, her dress, the lining of her coffin, the thin ribbons that formed little bows on the cuffs of her sleeves. Her hands were clasped just below her chest. Members of her family were seated all around. No one looked up when I walked into the room. The only sounds were the trill of someone’s cellphone alert and the dry, hacking cough coming from one of her sisters in the corner.

It’s easy to dismiss statistics, to forget what they represent. Before the measles shot was introduced in 1963, the number of deaths caused by the disease in the United States each year was somewhere from 400 to 500. The CDC puts the mortality rate for childhood measles at one to three in 1,000, with one in five cases requiring hospitalization. Thanks to vaccines, the memory of that suffering has largely faded from public consciousness, at least in the developed world.

What happened in Seminole, though, was a grim reminder. The day after meeting Peter, I visited the vaccination clinic across the street from the hospital where he had first taken his daughter. I had planned to interview people who were there to get their shots, but no one showed. It occurred to me that I was now at some modest risk myself. Families from Peter’s church had cycled through the visitation service the day before, sharing air inside that stuffy room amid their grief. Like a lot of people born before 1989, I’d gotten only one measles shot as a kid, so out of an abundance of caution, I rolled up my sleeve and got a booster. Later that day, I met up with Zach Holbrooks for lunch and asked him how many other people had gotten shots that morning. It turned out to be just one, and that one was him. He, too, had received just a single dose of the vaccine in childhood, so it seemed wise to get another.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

After lunch, I made the six-hour drive back to Austin, where I live, past the pumpjacks slowly bobbing for oil and the towering wind farms. There’s nothing I heard in Seminole that I haven’t also heard from crunchy liberal friends at home who choose not to vaccinate their kids because they believe that vaccines contain toxins that cause autism or that childhood diseases bolster the immune system. (For the record, the 1998 paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism has been retracted, and research indicates that contracting measles can degrade your body’s ability to fight other infections.) Nor are Peter’s views that unusual in conservative corners of the country. A recent poll found that nearly one-third of all Republican and Republican-leaning voters, for instance, think that routine inoculations are “more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent.” That’s the gist of what I heard from multiple Mennonites I interviewed. They are far from alone.

At one point in the parking lot, Peter had asked me why his daughter matters to the rest of the country. I’d struggled in the moment to come up with an answer. For Peter and his family, the loss of their daughter is a private tragedy, one that would be excruciating no matter how she died. The fact that she died of measles, though, is a sign that something has gone wrong with the country’s approach to public health. Twenty-five years ago, measles was declared “eliminated” in the United States. Now a deadly crisis is unfolding in West Texas.

Before I left the church that day, Peter and I talked for a few more minutes. “You probably know how it goes when somebody passes away,” he said. “It’s hard to believe.” Peter told me he didn’t have anything more to say. Really, what more could be said? Something unbelievable had happened: A young father was grieving the death of his 6-year-old from measles.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is “a dictator without elections,” with only a 4 percent approval rating. The war in Ukraine is “madness” and “senseless.” Although it is true that Russia is currently “pounding” Ukraine, “probably anyone in that position would be doing that right now.” Kyiv is “more difficult, frankly, to deal with” than Moscow.

This Russian propaganda could be easily dismissed, were it not being verbalized by President Donald Trump. I was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019; I know that his view on Putin has remained constant for years. In saying recently that dealing with Putin is easier than with Zelensky and that Putin would be “more generous than he has to be,” Trump has simply reprised the sentiments of his first term. In July 2018, when leaving the White House for a NATO summit (where he almost withdrew America from the alliance), then later appointments with Prime Minister Theresa May in England and Putin in Finland (where he seemed to back Putin over U.S. intelligence), Trump said that his meeting with Putin “may be the easiest of them all. Who would think?” Obviously, only Trump.

But now he has turned U.S. policy on the Russo-Ukraine war 180 degrees. Instead of aiding a victimized country with enormous agricultural, mineral, and industrial resources in the heart of Europe, bordering on key NATO allies, a region whose stability and prosperity have been vital to American national security for eight decades, Trump now sides with the invader. Ukrainians are fighting and dying for their freedom and independence, as near neighbors such as Poland’s Lech Walesa fully appreciate. For most Americans, “freedom” and “independence” resonate, but not for Trump.

He has gone well beyond rhetoric. In a nationally televised display, he clashed with Zelensky face-to-face in the Oval Office, ironically a very Wilsonian act: open covenants openly destroyed. Trump suspended U.S. military aid to Ukraine, including vital intelligence, to make Zelensky bend his knee. Even when Trump “threatened” Russia with sanctions and tariffs, the threat was hollow. Russia is already evading a broad array of poorly enforced sanctions, and could evade more. On tariffs, U.S. imports from Russia in 2024 were a mere $3 billion, down almost 90 percent from 2021’s level, before Russia’s invasion, and trivial compared with $4.1 trillion in total 2024 imports.  

[Jonathan Chait: The real reason Trump berated Zelensky]

The Kremlin is delighted. Former President Dmitry Medvedev wrote on X: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud.”  

This is serious, and may be fatal for both Kyiv and NATO. Trump has sought for years to debilitate or destroy the alliance. He doesn’t like it; he doesn’t understand it; he frowns on its Brussels headquarters building; and, worst of all, it was deeply involved in not only Ukraine but Afghanistan, which he didn’t like either. Trump may ultimately want to withdraw from NATO, but in the near term, he can do serious-enough damage simply to render the alliance unworkable. Recent reports that Trump is considering defending only those NATO allies meeting the agreed defense-spending targets mirrors prior suggestions from his aides. This approach is devastating for the alliance.

What explains Trump’s approach to Ukraine and disdain for NATO? Trump does not have a philosophy or a national-security grand strategy. He does not do “policy” as Washington understands that term. His approach is personal, transactional, ad hoc, episodic, centering on one question: What benefits Donald Trump? In international affairs, Trump has suggested repeatedly that if he has good personal relations with a foreign head of state, then America ought to have good relations with that country. While personal relations have their place, hard men such as Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un are not distracted by emotions. Trump thinks that Putin is his friend. Putin sees Trump as an easy mark, pliable and manipulable.

Trump says he trusts that Putin wants peace and will honor his commitments, despite massive contrary evidence. Notwithstanding considerable efforts, Zelensky has never escaped the “perfect” phone call precipitating Trump’s first impeachment. Of course, that call turned on Trump’s now-familiar extortionist threat to withhold security assistance to Ukraine if Zelensky did not produce Hillary Clinton’s server and investigate other supposed anti-Trump activity in Ukraine aimed at thwarting his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

[Gal Beckerman: The key mismatch between Zelensky and Trump]

The entirely personal nature of Trump’s approach also manifests itself domestically. Trump is now reversing what Joe Biden did in Ukraine, just as in his first term, he reflexively reversed Barack Obama. Trump derided Obama for not providing lethal military assistance to Ukraine, so he did just that, sending missiles and more.

Ronald Reagan knew how to handle nations that might commit unprovoked aggression against U.S. interests. Trump clearly does not. This does not reflect differences in strategy, which Trump lacks. Instead, it’s another Trump reversal, this time of The Godfather’s famous line: It’s not business; it’s strictly personal.

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