A collective of women ought to have a name, the way a mass of finches are a “charm,” or parrots a “pandemonium.” The struggle would be to find a term that accurately describes what an assembly of women can do together, and also how markedly different each woman—and group—is from the next. What word can possibly encapsulate the joy of women singing in harmony, the unease with which they might circle one another, the trust and distrust that can grow among their ranks?

In Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, The Unworthy, women are quickly classified. The unnamed protagonist, who writes her story in secret from a former monastery, is one of the titular “unworthy,” a woman given shelter from the toxic, dusty, climate-ravaged outside world but granted no special honors besides, potentially, her survival. Above the monastery’s unworthy hover the “Minor Saints,” “Diaphanous Spirits,” and “Full Auras”—women who have, respectively, had their tongues sliced out, their eardrums punctured, and their eyelids sewn shut—all of whom are elevated (if you want to call it that) to a holy status. These are the “chosen”: With their mauled faces and special privileges (real meat and vegetables instead of the crickets the unworthy eat), they are simultaneously revered and loathed from the very start of the story. The “enlightened,” who hover over even the “chosen,” are locked behind a black door and never seen. Hierarchies breed a hell of a lot of sycophancy and resentment, and this one is no different.

Unlike the bunker in The Unworthy, this brand of female dystopia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All-female communities tend to be weirdly polarized in the cultural imagination. They’re either paradigms of peace and love or bastions of PMS-motivated backbiting. Particularly in genre fiction, the lines can be very stark. In Herland, the 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the author of the proto-feminist school-curriculum staple “The Yellow Wallpaper”—three male explorers discover a community in which women live and reproduce without men. They are awed by the women’s sense of harmony and fitness. Joanna Russ’s snarling 1975 novel, The Female Man, creates four societies. In one of them, women live without men—and without murder and sexual assault—and in another, the two sexes literally battle for dominance. The message of such stories is clear: On their own, women are free of the burden of violence and inequality.

The appeal of reading about female utopias has recently reached a new zenith. The novel I Who Have Never Known Men was published in 1995, but after its 2022 reissue, it has gone viral on BookTok and sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States. In the book, a group of women live in underground cages on a planet that some believe is not their own. They don’t know how they got there, but one day their guards flee for no clear reason, and they eventually establish a harmonious and cooperative society. There is sadness and death, but never real strife. Even when they must hurt one another—the narrator “know[s] what to do” with a knife to put her suffering sisters out of their misery—the bloodshed is compassionate.

[Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book]

This sunny side of dystopia stands at odds with a countervailing notion of women in isolation—the kind often perpetuated by novels set in boarding schools or convents—which dictates that woman’s natural enemy is woman. In the classic of the genre, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, most women trapped in a theocratic future America are forced to enslave or torture other women, but some of them actively enlist as foot soldiers in the effort. And outside the genre, girls in novels including Andrés Barba’s orphanage-set Such Small Hands and Mona Awad’s Bunny turn to cruelty when the walls close in on them.

On the surface, The Unworthy appears to fit squarely into this second canon. Yet Bazterrica’s world building and character development transcend this typology: The monastery is a hellhole masquerading as a shrine, and the women who walk its halls are both fiercely loyal and self-cannibalizing. In Bazterrica’s first novel to be translated into English, the similarly dystopian Tender Is the Flesh, human flesh is an industrialized commodity. In The Unworthy, she has similar preoccupations, focusing on how eagerly women might (proverbially) eat one another up. What stands out, though, is how readily she moves between the two opposing notions of what all-female communities can be. She shows us women pushed to extremes, who react with extreme behavior—but can they be faulted for that?

None of this is to say that The Unworthy occupies any sort of middle ground. The novel opens with malice: “Someone is screaming in the dark,” the unnamed narrator writes. “I hope it’s Lourdes. I put cockroaches in her pillow and sewed up the slip, so they struggle to get out, so they crawl under her head or over her face (and into her ears, I hope, nesting there, the nymphs damaging her brain).” Animosity is a founding principle of the story—and of the unworthy’s community. In this bunker run by the “Superior Sister” and an unseen, Wizard of Oz–like “He,” bloody punishments are so frequent that they have become the group’s currency. Women stick needles in one another’s nipples and are made to lie down on glass. They volunteer to walk on burning embers or take floggings with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Still, they are not only grateful to be there but desperate to climb the devotional ladder.

The group’s motto is “Without faith, there is no refuge,” which sounds like a standard religious tenet until you read it literally: If the women don’t commit, they will be without a home. The planet is essentially a desert. “The wars,” the narrator writes, “coincided with the disappearance of many territories, many countries, beneath the ocean.” The protagonist grew up in a world “that was degrading minute by minute. A world where water was scarce, and there was no school, no electricity. A world of floods, in which eight months of rain fell in less than an hour.” Bands of adults hunted packs of wild children. The novel’s rendering of global destruction goes beyond most climate fiction—there isn’t a drop of hope or a speck of verdure. No place can guarantee safety, but the Superior Sister implies that the holiness of the monastery’s “enlightened” inhabitants keeps it safe. It’s a tale as old as time: Pray to the right god, sacrifice in the right ways, and protection will encircle you.

[Read: The remarkable rise of the feminist dystopia]

Except the horrors keep coming, despite the unworthy’s muttered prayers. The narrator’s notes, which she keeps tied to herself underneath her tunic or tucked under wooden floorboards, document her transformation from partial believer to total apostate as tension inside the community ratchets up. Lourdes, she of the cockroach pillowcase, leads a campaign of terror worthy of Robespierre. The women turn on one another more and more. The dynamic unravels even further when a stowaway—who has dragged herself through a hole in the wall—is found at the monastery and deemed clean and worthy enough to join their community. Lucía, the newcomer, possesses a gift, and a moral compass, and the hierarchy of the place begins to shift.

Bazterrica’s story—so cinematically gruesome that it could have been written as a treatment for an A24-produced horror film—comes at a strange inflection point for women in this country. (It was originally published in her native Argentina in 2023.) During recent elections, the media have sometimes treated women as a monolithic voting block; some analysts have credited or blamed them for Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s electoral victories, regardless of the clear reality that they do not universally share one another’s hopes, fears, or best interests.

The Unworthy strips away the idea, implicit in I Who Have Never Known Men and its ilk, that women are inherently good stewards, that their leadership would bring humanity into some kind of karmic balance. It does so not because it disdains women, but because it sees them. Lourdes is dastardly but pathetic. Lucía saintly but carnal. The narrator possesses a kind of bravery that can’t be activated on its own. We learn that the Superior Sister “fought in the water wars, the most violent ones, in which the millenary tribes were bombarded, and that she defended her own until the very end, that she was a prisoner, a slave, that she escaped.” Or so we are told. What we know is that she grips her power like a cane that supports her whole weight.

Depicting women in all their complicated glory isn’t especially novel or valiant, but Bazterrica’s novel tries something that most writers shy away from. She makes manifest the rot inside every human, and the tendency to portray them as sinners or saints. She does so not by eschewing extremes, but by embracing them, putting her women in an unendurable situation and then watching their moral compass whirl about in some fictional version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ugly times create ugly behavior—unless, that is, you can muster your righteous fortitude and carry on in the right direction.

There seems to be a limit to how anti-vax is too anti-vax in the Trump administration. Yesterday, hours before Dave Weldon was slated to begin his Senate confirmation hearing for CDC director, the White House pulled his nomination. Weldon, a physician and former Republican congressman, has long questioned the safety of vaccines. In a meeting last month, he reportedly told one senator that routine childhood vaccines were exposing kids to dangerous levels of mercury and may cause autism. (Both claims are false.)

Weldon has denied that he’s anti-vaccination, but his views on vaccines seem to have been his undoing. In a written statement he gave to me and other outlets, he suggested that at least two Republican senators were threatening to vote against him, and that this became “clearly too much for the White House.” But those two senators, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine, voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an ardent vaccine critic who would have been Weldon’s boss as health secretary. Perhaps Weldon’s biggest problem was that he said the quiet part out loud. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy sidestepped calls for him to declare unequivocally that vaccines do not cause autism, and appeared to convince lawmakers that he’d let Americans make their own decisions about vaccines. “I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking either of those vaccines,” Kennedy told senators.

Kennedy is already breaking that promise. As cases of measles are popping up in states across the country—leading to America’s first measles death in a decade—he has propped up unproven treatments such as cod-liver oil. Though Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine helps “protect individual children from measles” and contributes to “community immunity,” he also baselessly questioned its “risk profile” in an appearance on Fox News earlier this week. (In extremely rare instances the vaccine can have serious side effects.) Kennedy’s subversion of vaccines, subtle at times, glaring at others, goes far beyond the measles outbreak. The health secretary is “using the federal government to undermine vaccination in all the ways that it can,” Matt Motta, a vaccine-communication researcher at Boston University, told me. Weldon may have crossed a red line for lawmakers. But in just over a month on the job, Kennedy has taken more steps against vaccines than perhaps any other top health official in modern American history.   

[Read: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade]

Kennedy’s wishy-washy comments about the measles vaccine may persuade more parents not to vaccinate their children—which means that more children will get sick, and perhaps die. But his other actions will have an even broader, longer-lasting effect on the overall U.S. vaccination system. Earlier this week, the administration terminated NIH research grants probing how the government can address vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine promotion might seem separate from access, but the two are intertwined, Motta said. Research into vaccine promotion often explores issues such as whether people know where to get shots or whether insurance will cover them. (A spokesperson for Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

All the while, the research that the government now is funding may only serve to further sow vaccine distrust. The CDC is reportedly launching a study probing the link between vaccines and autism—even though the connection has already been thoroughly studied and debunked. A 2014 meta-analysis of more than 1 million children found “no relationship” between shots and the condition. Even if the new study comes to a similar conclusion, simply funding such research has consequences, Jennifer Reich, a vaccine-hesitancy researcher at the University of Colorado Denver, told me. The NIH’s new research plays a “powerful symbolic role of making” the link “feel like it is unsettled,” she said.

A myopic focus on the purported connection between vaccines and autism is exactly what some lawmakers feared would color Kennedy’s term as secretary. During Kennedy’s confirmation, Cassidy, a physician, raised concerns that Kennedy and his MAHA movement may undermine science by “always asking for more evidence and never accepting the evidence that is there.” Cassidy, who did not respond to a request for comment, may soon have more reason for disappointment. He ultimately voted to confirm Kennedy based on a plethora of promises and his belief, as he said in a speech on the Senate floor, that RFK Jr. would “work within current vaccine approval and safety-monitoring systems.” Yet Kennedy has already hinted that he will change those systems: “We have a vaccine-surveillance system in this country that just doesn’t work,” he recently said on Fox News, adding that “the CDC in the past has not done a good job at quantifying the risk of vaccines. We are going to do that now.”

Since RFK Jr. entered office, the health agencies have not abandoned all responsibilities surrounding vaccinations. CDC officials have been directly coordinating with the local Texas health department at the epicenter of the measles outbreak, including helping design outreach materials encouraging vaccination, according to internal emails I received as part of a public-records request. A letter addressed to parents from a local health official, for example, states: “I strongly encourage you to have your child vaccinated as soon as possible.”

Perhaps Weldon’s defeat signifies that Washington wants more pro-vaccination efforts like that. But he makes for an easy scapegoat: Unlike RFK Jr., he lacks a devoted fan base backing him up. Kennedy doesn’t need Weldon to do real damage to America’s vaccine infrastructure. The changes he has made so far are likely only the beginning. If Kennedy keeps up this pace, America’s vaccine system may look fundamentally different in one year, or two. The stand against Weldon changes nothing about that.

An eephus pitch is one of baseball’s many pieces of niche ephemera. It’s a weird trick throw that’s barely ever glimpsed in the professional game—an arcing lob of the ball, traveling at half the speed or less than a normal pitch; it exists only to catch batters off guard. In the director Carson Lund’s beguiling debut film, also called Eephus, a player named Merritt Nettles (played by Nate Fisher) specializes in tossing the pitch and rhapsodizes about its time-stopping sorcery: “It’s kinda like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen—poof, the game’s over.”

If the previous paragraph made your eyes glaze over, you may not be the movie’s intended audience. But to me, these details are pure poetry, and so is Eephus. The plot-free hangout flick quietly has a ton to say about baseball’s eternal appeal, even as the sport weathers the passage of time. Set during the 1990s in Massachusetts, it follows the last recreational-league matchup between two groups of shambling, beer-guzzling baseball enthusiasts; they’re clashing once more before a planned development will pave over the site. Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime.

The film begins with the league’s sole enthusiast, Franny (Cliff Blake), settling onto the grass with his portable card table, his pocket binoculars, and his scorecard; slowly, the players begin to dribble onto the field. In red are the members of a team called Adler’s Paint, and in blue are the Riverdogs. The history between the two squads is irrelevant, and there’s barely any information to glean from their overheard dialogue. Instead, Lund (who also co-wrote the film’s script with Fisher and Michael Basta) revels in the minor details, such as the players’ many forms of inventive facial hair and their cute little practice rituals. The drama that does arise feels minor, too, such as a brief moment of panic when the Riverdogs realize that their ninth player hasn’t shown up yet, which would force them to forfeit.

[Read: Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule]

Otherwise, Eephus’s story never goes anywhere. Even though it’s clear that at least some of the actors know how to play the game, there isn’t much intense activity to take in. Over and over, the viewer sees shots of players briefly crouching in anticipation of something happening (namely, the delivery of a pitch to a batter), then relaxing when it doesn’t. That’s the magic of baseball: blissful anticipation, with the occasional chance for real action.

In lieu of narrative progression, Lund is singularly intent on generating an atmosphere that makes the viewer feel like they’re perched in the bleachers. The perfectly calibrated sound design contributes to this heavily; it is expansive and plangent, with the clack of the bat and popping of the ball heard more distinctly than the yelled instructions or friendly banter from base runners. The director’s attentive scene-setting helps transform Eephus into a dispatch from another era—a memory bouncing through the decades to somehow reach theaters today.

The throwback vibe is further cultivated by the cast, which comes across like a cheerfully old-school collection of performers. Among them is the Boston Red Sox alum Bill “Spaceman” Lee, one of Major League Baseball’s best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch back in the 1970s, who appears in a cameo role. The rest of the actors, most of them unfamiliar names, look like they could have walked onto the set through a time tunnel; their stringy beards, craggy faces, and protruding guts recall those of the players from Lee’s era. The renowned 95-year-old documentarian (and fellow Bostonian) Frederick Wiseman also joins to dispense pearls of wisdom in voice-over, dropping well-known quotations from the ball-playing greats between innings.

[Read: Climate change comes for baseball]

Looking backwards feels inherent to baseball, and I mean this in the warmest manner possible. The game is like the Academy Awards or burger making: an American tradition that, in my opinion, needs little in the way of reinvention. Still, although Lund isn’t going for any major tear-jerking moments, his movie invokes the melancholy sense of something important passing into the mists. None of the characters is able to use a smartphone or check social media, given the period setting, but the couple of kids sitting in the stands observe the amateur teams’ particular brand of fun as if it’s from the Stone Age.

Lund cited the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as an inspiration for Eephus. The comparison is apt on a surface level; Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a famous example of “slow cinema” set in a soon-to-be-closed Taipei theater—an antiquated edifice not unlike an aging ballpark. The film discursively follows some of the picture house’s regulars as they attend its last showtime. Beyond their similar presentations, it’s also Eephus’s kindred spirit thematically: Each one is a quirky ode to a particular hobby that is still extant in our life, albeit becoming something of a relic. Eephus succeeds as a beautiful portrait of a specific pastime. It’s also, delightfully, a low-stakes hang with some dudes swigging Narragansetts—much like baseball itself.

The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]

Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.

Americans hold all sorts of views on tariffs. Some are opposed on free-market grounds. Others are in favor for reasons of national security or to bring back American manufacturing. Those debates are part of a normal democratic process. But President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have shown that a principled discussion over tariff policy is simply not on the agenda, because the administration’s tariff policy is nonsense.

What we have is chaos. One U.S. uncertainty index of economic policy, which goes back to 1985, has been higher at only one point in the past 40 years: when the coronavirus pandemic began. That, of course, was a global phenomenon that the United States could do little to avoid. What’s going on now, by contrast, is entirely self-inflicted.

[Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Chaos is Trump’s calling card, but few could have expected how quickly the president would ricochet all over the place on the size, nature, and timing of—not to mention the justifications for—one of his signature policies. Before markets can adjust to one pronouncement, the world’s smartphones buzz in unison announcing that the wealthiest nation in the world, whose dollars hold up the global financial system, is hurtling in another direction once again.

Just consider this abridged timeline of the most significant twists and turns thus far:

November 25, 2024: Trump posted on Truth Social that on the first day of his new term, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25 percent Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders.”

January 20, 2025: The first day of Trump’s term. No tariffs announced. Instead, Trump signed a memo directing the Commerce secretary to “investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits.”

January 26: After the Colombian president rejected U.S. military flights carrying deportees, Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods. Colombia threatened to respond but deescalated before the new taxes were put in place.

February 1: Tariffs against China, Mexico, and Canada are on.

February 3: Tariffs (for Mexico and Canada) are off.

February 4: Chinese tariffs go into effect, and the Chinese government announces retaliatory tariffs as well as export controls on key minerals.

February 11: Trump imposes a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum from all countries.

February 13: Trump threatens reciprocity to any country enacting tariff policies against the United States.

February 25: Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on copper.

February 27: Canada and Mexico tariffs maybe coming back on?

March 1: In the middle of a housing crisis, Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on lumber and timber.

March 4: Okay, yes, the Canada and Mexico tariffs are back on.

March 6: Just kidding, only for some stuff.

March 9: Tariffs “could go up,” Trump says on Fox News.

March 11: Ontario threatens 25 percent tariffs on electricity, causing Trump to promise a 50—yes, 50—percent tariff on Canadian aluminum and steel. By the end of the day, both countries backed off these threats.

March 12: A big day for tariffs. The 25 percent tax on all imports of steel and aluminum go into effect, and in retaliation, the European Union enacted duties on $28 billion worth of American goods, while Canada announced $21 billion in tariffs on American goods.

March 13: Not to be outdone, Trump threatened 200 percent tariffs on wine and other alcoholic beverages from Europe.

To recap, the United States is now in a trade war with its largest trading partner (Canada), its second-largest trading partner (the European Union), its third-largest trading partner (Mexico), and its fourth-largest trading partner (China).

It’s obvious to the point of cliché that businesses rely on regulatory—and fiscal—policy predictability in order to plan hiring, capital investments, and pricing strategies. And that means these past few weeks have been very rough. How can you begin a capital-intensive project if you have no idea what anything will cost? The chaos of the current trade policy is a strange parallel to the chaos that the Trump administration has unleashed on the federal government. One difference is evident, however: Although markets expected the new president to go on a deregulatory spree, they failed to take his affinity for tariffs seriously—or at least thought things would be executed a little more deliberately.  

An adviser to prominent energy companies told me that because “infrastructure projects require five to 10 years for permitting and construction,” some of her clients are pausing normal business decisions. “The current environment is so chaotic that it’s difficult to understand effects [on] permitting pathways, community approvals, and supply-chain costs.” She requested anonymity to speak freely about her clients’ struggles in the early days of the new Trump administration.

The big companies are in a better spot than small businesses. As we’ve already seen when the Big Three automakers were able to get direct relief from the tariffs, large companies that can provide Trump with good PR are able to get carve-outs from tariffs. But small businesses are less suited to absorbing shocks and are less likely to stay abreast of the day-to-day shifts of tariff policy. Many will be unable to game the system.

Uncertainty may also be paralyzing the labor markets. As my colleague Rogé Karma reported last month, job switching is at its lowest level in nearly a decade, even though the unemployment rate remains low. Part of what’s going on is that lack of confidence in the future breeds risk aversion: Employers are too rattled to make a bet on a new hire, and employees are too worried to leave a safe position.

[Read: A great way to get Americans to eat worse]

Some people—such as those who are worried that a backlash may invigorate American support for free markets—would like the public to believe that the country is in the throes of an “economic masterplan” and that the chaos of this moment will cohere into a reasonable strategy. Color me skeptical. For one, the president and his team have yet to articulate a consistent set of arguments for supporting his vision. Instead, the justifications for the tariff policies change as fast as the policies themselves.

If the tariffs are about rebalancing America’s trade and restoring its manufacturing greatness, then why are they being removed? If they’re about improving America’s negotiating position vis-à-vis bordering nations on issues such as fentanyl and immigration, then why are we putting them on Canada?

Is Trump doing this to make Americans richer? Is he doing this to balance the budget? To hit back at other countries for their unfair policies? For national-security reasons? To solve the child-care-cost crisis?

As the Yale Law professor Jerry Mashaw wrote for Fordham Law Review, “The authority of all law relies on a set of complex reasons for believing that it should be authoritative. Unjustifiable law demands reform, unjustifiable legal systems demand revolution.” That our elected officials are required to explain themselves, to give reasons for the actions they take, is a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Without clear reasons, it’s not just businesses that are at stake. It’s democratic governance.

But if sifting through Trump’s roiling sea of rationalizations is important for democratic purposes, it’s also personally significant. Every business, worker, and consumer in the country has a stake in figuring out the why and what of tariffs.

[Read: Don’t invite a recession in]

Ideologues across the political spectrum resent the American voter’s materialism. Environmentalists moan that the public refuses to bear higher energy costs in order to help mitigate the effects of climate change; animal-rights advocates worry that people won’t pay to ensure better treatment of livestock; farm advocates who already benefit from distortionary subsidies have even advocated for price floors. Now it’s the economic populists insisting that the public should be willing to pay higher prices on the path to restoring American greatness. On Truth Social, Trump posted an article with the headline “Shut Up About Egg Prices,” and Republicans are insisting that it’s worth it to “pay a little bit more” to support the president. But “America First” has always been a better slogan than organizing principle. When people have the option to pay for domestic goods at higher prices, they opt out, time and again.

The speed with which Republicans have gone from hammering Democrats about high grocery prices to justifying the inflationary effects of tariffs is remarkable. Yet Republicans are likely to learn the lesson that Democrats did last November: Before they are Republicans, Democrats, or even Americans, my countrymen are consumers first.

Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30..

I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow.

These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?

[Jonathan Chait: Democrats show why they lost]

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

Even as he disavowed the idea that solving the guy problem should involve some promotion of testosterone-laced pandering, Auchincloss suggested that the party ought to find its way to a more positive, inspirational message. “We need to embrace a culture of heroism, not a culture of victimhood. Young men need models for their ambition,” he said.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me, “There’s a worry that when you start talking about gender differences and masculinity, that you’re going to very quickly get in trouble.” The Democratic Party, he thinks, has not been purposeful enough in opening up a conversation with men in general and young men specifically. “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.”

For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era—a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me. “There’s a lot of worry that all of those traditional male characteristics are somehow illegitimate.”

So far, the GOP seems to be doing a far more effective job of engaging male voters in ways that reflect the reality of today’s popular culture. Trump has embraced UFC’s Dana White, and has made grand entrances at MMA fights. (Years before he ran for president, Trump would appear at pro-wrestling events, and he is a member of the WWE hall of fame.) “We have to go where people are consuming culture and sports and entertainment,” Auchincloss told me, “and talk about issues of the day in a way that is coded for political orientation but that is more broadly accessible and interesting.”

Last fall, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona tried this Go where the men are concept. “We should do anything to reach out to voters,” he told me. “And that means men.” Gallego argues that Democrats have been too hesitant to directly address men’s everyday reality, and that this is a grave mistake. “Black, Latino, and white men are not doing well in this country. They’re not obtaining college degrees,” Gallego said. “If we were to look at the numbers and just take out the gender, we would say, Wow, that group of Americans needs some attention. But all of a sudden, if you add the little m next to that, it’s somehow something that we shouldn’t be worried about—and I reject that.”

Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said.

The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.”

No one I spoke with suggested that the Democratic Party would (or should) ever abandon its positions on women’s rights. “I don’t think you have to move away from anything to be inclusive of other things,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told me. One possible Democratic plan, so far as I could discern it, was to keep expanding the parameters of acceptable discourse and opinions, rather than box themselves in. Clyburn said he was surprised to see so many young men break for Trump in November. He believes that his party has gotten itself into a quagmire. “We’ve set ourselves up for this messaging war that we’re losing,” Clyburn told me. “In the last election,” he said, “sound bites that developed around gender inequity caused serious problems. And they’re still causing problems.”

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

Or maybe sound bites are not the problem.

Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim—It’s the economy, stupid—he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans. They also suggested that the project of winning back the working class and the project of winning back men were one and the same.

Voters, the admittedly simple theory goes, will support the candidate and party that they believe will improve their daily lives. The MAGA movement has done a keen job of tapping into the discontent and resentment that many men feel over declining job prospects. Democrats need to compete by offering a material path out of despair.  

“The young men that I’m talking to are not in love with politics, period,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me. “They want their lives to work. And it’s important that people feel you walking with them and hearing them.” Warnock was adamant that, contrary to certain media narratives, Trump did not triumph in a landslide victory. “He won by the margin of people’s disengagement, because they feel the ways in which the democracy is becoming increasingly undemocratic,” he said. “And my job is not for them to hear my voice; it is to give the people their voice.”

The crucial way to reengage disaffected men, multiple Democrats told me, is to champion an economy that “works like Legos, not Monopoly,” as Auchincloss put it. “An economy where we are building more technical vocational high schools, and we are celebrating the craftsmanship of the trades so that young men have a sense of autonomy and being a provider.” Murphy said that his party should aim to build the sort of middle-class prosperity that enables one breadwinner to support a family of four, allowing one parent to choose to be a homemaker.

But if Democrats believe that Lego economic policies could be popular, they also know that many voters associate the party with government handouts and top-down programs, which, on the whole, are not very popular. This is something the MAGA movement has figured out, painting all Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites.

For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class—which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me. Rather, authenticity is the only way to make true connections. Voters don’t want to be humored, she believes; they want to be heard. “People who are trying to signal some kind of an alignment with the working class are just undermining themselves,” she said. “The donor class needs to pay more attention to how rooted a candidate is in their community, and less about whether or not a candidate ticks every ideological or policy box.”

She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are—and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives. “There are so many nonpolitical ways to communicate your values that haven’t been respected or exercised,” she told me. Gluesenkamp Perez has gained a national profile for the way she aims to speak for the sort of blue-collar America that many Democrats realize they’ve become disconnected from. She and her husband own an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, and she won reelection in a Republican district that’s supported Trump in the past three elections. “Being able to make a clutch last for 500,000 miles—that’s really cool to a lot of people,” she told me.

“I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” she said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them.”

What became clear from my conversations was that Democrats want to get back to eye level with their potential voters, particularly men. But, as Clyburn and others acknowledged, the party’s progressive social agenda can be an obstacle to its moderate wing. At her town halls, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she has found her constituents especially fired up over the rules about trans women in sports—an issue that Trump has inflamed.

“What I saw was that those people were mostly people that had been driving their girls to sports practice for 12 years, and their kids’ best shot at going to college was a scholarship,” she told me. “This was an argument about resource access, not about morality.” Gluesenkamp Perez has sometimes crossed over to side with the GOP, but she recently voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports.

She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them. A genuine curiosity about the lives of the people who send you to Congress is not a mere nicety but an essential quality for Democrats who seem remote to the people they represent. “A lot of my colleagues just go out there and try to explain stuff to people all the time,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “A lot of us don’t really have confidence that the spreadsheets they’re pointing to are the full picture.”

Just being real could help Democrats appeal to voters of all stripes, but they have to hope that it will resonate with disaffected men—particularly young men—who may have turned toward Trump. Democrats may not have to bend their values completely out of shape to suit the political environment, but they can’t afford to write anyone off.

As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime.

It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned.

Rubio’s letter notified DHS that he had revoked both targets’ visas, setting in motion plans for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and attempt to deport them, according to a senior DHS official and another U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the operation against Khalil took shape.

In addition to the two names in Rubio’s initial letter, the State Department has also sent the names of “one or two” more students whose visas it has revoked, according to the DHS official, who described the first group of names as an opening move, with “more to come.”

The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said.

Khalil, 30, a graduate student who became a prominent leader of campus demonstrations against the war in Gaza last spring, was taken into custody one day after Rubio sent the letter to DHS. The circumstances of his arrest and detention have set off alarms about the Trump administration’s willingness to test First Amendment protections and wield its power over noncitizens in order to intimidate protesters.

Trump has said on social media that Khalil’s is “the first arrest of many to come.”

The ICE agents who arrested Khalil on March 8 were from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which typically handles counternarcotics, counterterrorism, and other transnational crimes, rather than civil immigration enforcement. Khalil’s attorney did not respond to inquiries today.

[Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants]

A copy of the charging document ICE filed—published yesterday by The Washington Post—suggests that the government’s formal allegations against Khalil were drafted in haste.

The document, called a Notice to Appear, identifies Khalil as a citizen of Algeria who was born in Syria. It states that he was admitted to the United States “at unknown place on or about unknown date,” even though DHS is the federal entity in possession of visa holders’ entry data.

The document then appears to make a significant error, according to Andrew Rankin, a Memphis immigration attorney who has been following Khalil’s case.

It states that Khalil became a legal permanent resident under a specific statute in immigration law, which is true, but refers to the wrong one. “The document was written very unprofessionally,” Rankin told me. “When DHS realizes what they’ve done, they’ll be begging the judge to let them correct it.”

Although the State Department has broad latitude to revoke a foreign student’s visa and DHS can deport them, someone with legal permanent residency—a green-card holder—has to be stripped of that status by an immigration judge before they can be deported.

That routinely happens when a green-card holder commits a serious crime. But Khalil has not been charged with a crime. Trump-administration officials are trying to remove him using an extraordinary and seldom-cited authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the secretary of state to personally determine that an immigrant’s presence in the United States has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

[Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext]

Troy Edgar, who was confirmed earlier this week as DHS deputy secretary, struggled to explain that rationale during a contentious NPR interview broadcast this morning. When Edgar claimed that Khalil had engaged in anti-Semitic political activities in support of Hamas, the NPR host Michel Martin pressed Edgar to say what specific laws he’d broken or whether he had engaged in pro-Hamas propaganda.

As Edgar grew flustered, he told Martin she could “see it on TV.”

“We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Edgar said.

Martin asked if protest activity constitutes “a deportable offense.” Edgar didn’t answer.

At Columbia, Khalil was one of the protest movement’s most prominent figures. Administration officials say his criticism of Israel fueled anti-Semitism on campus and aligned with the violent radicalism of terrorists. But their case for his deportation rests with the rarely tested authorities of the secretary of state to expel someone based on U.S. foreign-policy interests.

Immigration attorneys tracking the case say the administration is looking to test the boundaries of U.S. immigration law and speech protections. The First Amendment does not protect speech that incites violence, Rankin noted. Trump officials, including Rubio, claim that Khalil and other protesters threatened and intimidated Jewish students, but have not cited specific acts.

“There are kids at these schools that can’t go to class,” Rubio told reporters this week, referring to Jewish students, many of whom had faced harassment. “You pay all this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even go to class.”

“If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” he added. “If you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.”

The day after Khalil’s arrest, the government whisked him to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His attorneys said they were unable to speak privately with him for several days.

If U.S. immigration courts side against Khalil and declare him deportable, he could file an appeal. If he loses, his attorneys could ask a U.S. district court in Louisiana to stop his deportation. Because he is in Louisiana, his case would fall under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a reputation as the nation’s most conservative appeals court. Two DHS officials said the government moved him to Louisiana to seek the most favorable venue for its arguments.

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

Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration lawyer and the author of a widely used legal sourcebook, said the government’s claims against Khalil have no recent comparison, and would likely be precedent-setting. “This is a test case,” he said.

Khalil’s lawyers are trying to get him returned to New York. A district-court judge in New York has barred the government from deporting Khalil until his case is resolved, but the judge has not ordered the administration to return him to New York. Khalil is scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in Louisiana on March 27.

In a filing Thursday night, Khalil's attorneys told the district court in New York that their client was being punished for engaging in legally protected protest activity. “The Trump administration has made no secret of its opposition to those protests and has repeatedly threatened to weaponize immigration law to punish noncitizens who have participated,” his attorneys said, asking the court to bring Khalil back from Louisiana, order his release, and block the government’s case.

Trump-administration officials view the moves targeting foreign students as part of their wider immigration-enforcement crackdown. Trump is planning to invoke executive authorities, including a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as soon as tomorrow, according to a White House official who was not authorized to discuss internal plans.

Trump has grown frustrated that the pace of deportations has lagged behind what he promised on the campaign trail, and he has urged DHS officials to accelerate their efforts, the official said. He also said the president may try to use the 18th-century law to target specific groups, including suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Trump previewed that move while he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. The White House official cautioned that the timing was fluid and the administration may not publicize it in advance, because it is convinced that press leaks have hindered previous deportation operations.

Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.

He denounced the European Union as “hostile” and “abusive” while threatening to ratchet up tariffs on some of its most famous goods by 200 percent. He openly mused about annexing Greenland while sitting in the Oval Office across from the head of the military alliance that would be called to defend it. He vowed to escalate a trade war with Canada while threatening its very right to exist as a sovereign nation.

But when it came to the authoritarian leader in Moscow, President Donald Trump boasted of his relationship with Vladimir Putin and declined to say that he would pressure his Russian counterpart to agree to concessions as part of a cease-fire deal with Ukraine. Trump’s sympathies seemed to lie with America’s foe over its friends, further unnerving already-whiplashed allies watching anxiously as the president’s handpicked envoy met with Putin at the Kremlin.

And that was all today—a day not unlike many in the early weeks of this new administration.

Trump’s proclamations underscored how quickly the new president has reoriented U.S. foreign policy and the nation’s global priorities. Old allies are now economic rivals. Friendly neighbors are territories to be seized. Authoritarians—not just Putin, but also the leaders of China and North Korea—are to be respected and, potentially, transformed into partners with whom to carve up spheres of influence.

The dizzying day began, as it so often does, with an early-morning social-media post.

Trump took to Truth Social to escalate his trade war with the European Union, vowing to impose 200 percent tariffs on European wine and champagne in a move that worsened anxiety among consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. He reacted angrily after the EU retaliated against a first wave of U.S. tariffs, with the bloc hitting back by levying 50 percent tariffs on imports of U.S. whiskey and other products. Trump deemed the tariffs “nasty.”

Trump wrote, “The European Union, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World [was] formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.”

His claim was both untrue and adversarial. The EU, which has long prized good relations with the U.S., was acting in response to Trump’s initial tariffs, established the day before on goods such as aluminum and steel. EU leaders have made clear their hopes to do away with the tariffs but vowed to stand up for the continent by targeting politically sensitive goods in the U.S. in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive posture.

“We will not give in to threats,” Laurent Saint-Martin, France’s minister delegate for foreign trade, posted on X. He added that Trump “is escalating the trade war he chose to unleash.”

The tariffs were greeted with dismay by Americans who enjoy the continent’s wine—and by Wall Street, which took yet another trade-war tumble.

The markets were further buffeted by Trump’s insistence later in the day that he would not back down from an April 2 deadline to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods. The president has waffled on tariffs with America’s neighbor to the north, imposing one set on steel and aluminum earlier this week only to remove it hours later, but he declared in the Oval Office today that this time, he will follow through.

Trump has repeatedly misstated the size of Canada’s existing tariffs on U.S. dairy and lumber products and has wildly exaggerated the amount of fentanyl coming across the border. His broadsides against Canada have poisoned feelings toward the U.S. in Ottawa. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” the nation’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, said this week. Yet Trump has not stopped talking about adding Canada as his nation’s 51st state, his rhetoric escalating from taunt to threat, with many Canadians viewing it as an existential worry.

“We don’t need anything that they got. We [buy Canadian goods] because we want to be helpful, but it comes a point when you just can’t do that. You have to run your own country,” Trump said today. “And to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state.”

Trump delivered that ominous observation in his first meeting of his second term with Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general. Canada is a member of NATO, and an attempt to annex it by force would trigger the 75-year-old alliance’s mutual-defense pact, known as Article 5, which theoretically could pit the rest of the West against the United States. But Trump further poked at NATO by suggesting that he also has his eye on another piece of land—Greenland, a territory of Denmark—and hinting that he may even send troops there.

“We really need it for national security. I think that’s why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security,” Trump said. “You know, we have a couple of bases on Greenland already, and we have quite a few soldiers, and maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers.”

For years, Trump has lusted after Greenland, which is rich with minerals and sits in a strategic location in the North Atlantic. But Denmark has refused to discuss a transfer or sale, even as Greenland this week elected a party that favors gradual independence. Rutte chuckled while Trump discussed Greenland, drawing the ire of some Danish officials, including Rasmus Jarlov, the chairman of Denmark’s defense committee, who said that his nation does “not appreciate” Rutte “joking with Trump about Greenland like this. It would mean war between two NATO countries.”

But even as Trump delivered those threats, he pulled his punches with Putin. For weeks, he and his administration have aligned themselves with Moscow’s view of the war in Ukraine. Trump has declared that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is “a dictator,” that Ukraine started the conflict, that Ukraine would not be allowed to enter NATO, the alliance designed as a bulwark against Russian aggression. Trump belittled Zelensky in the Oval Office last month, and his now-lifted pause in U.S. intelligence sharing with and military supplies to Ukraine allowed Russia to gain territory on the battlefield. Even as Trump’s emissary Steve Witkoff traveled to the Kremlin to see if Russia would agree to the 30-day cease-fire proposal developed by the U.S. and Ukraine, the president declined to say today that he would push Putin to take the deal or to make any concessions.

“I don’t want to talk about leverage, because right now, we’re talking to them, and [the talks] were pretty positive,” Trump said. “I hope Russia is going to make the deal too, and I think once that deal happens … I don’t think they’re going back to shooting again. I think that leads to peace.”

Moments later, Trump went on to declare that he “got along very well with President Putin.” This time, Rutte didn’t laugh.