The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles is live streaming its view of the celestial treat.

The Brooklyn Nets ended their seven-game losing streak with an upset victory against the undermanned Los Angeles Lakers.

Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.

Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.

For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”

The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.

This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.

The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.

[Read: What America owes the planet]

Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.

Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?

“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.

This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.

By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.

The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.

To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.

Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.

[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]

In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.

The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.

In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.

The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.

The battle for California’s water pitted ranchers against water barons and still echoes today.

She was found at her home in the Hollywood Hills after dying by suicide, said the Los Angeles medical examiner's office.

LeBron James becomes the first player in NBA history to score 50,000 combined points as the Los Angeles Lakers beat the New Orleans Pelicans 136-115.

Award winners and nominees headed for a night of partying across Los Angeles after the Oscars ceremony concluded.

The director Sean Baker probably didn’t predict this outcome  while he was filming Anora, his latest small-budget indie project, in the snowy Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach—that a couple years later, he’d be accepting Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was one of five prizes that his spiky indie dramedy collected on Hollywood’s biggest night. After a drawn-out awards season in which the biggest contenders seemed often in flux, Anora dominated at a fun if elongated Oscars ceremony.  This year’s Best Picture winner also took home Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. Four of those trophies went to Baker, tying a record for individual wins in a night with the legendary Walt Disney; Anora’s young star Mikey Madison received the Best Actress trophy, in a fairly shocking upset over the widely tipped-to-win Demi Moore.

Anora is an unconventional Oscar juggernaut. As Baker reminded audiences from the stage, it’s a true indie picture, made for $6 million and with no huge names in the cast. But after  a triumphant debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the coveted Palme D’Or, Anora continued marching toward industry-wide recognition. The movie’s success is the culmination of a career that’s seen Baker making the most of shoestring budgets and filming whole movies on an iPhone. But Anora—which bested blockbuster heavyweights like Wicked and traditional awards fare like A Complete Unknown—was an especially incongruous winner this year, as it received its flowers during a notably old-school Academy Awards ceremony. This year’s show reminded me of the extravagant, zingy celebrations of cinema from my youth, with a highly competent host leading the viewer through nearly four hours of speeches, montages, and musical numbers.

[Read: The filmmaker who wants to wake us from the American dream]

Some might see the event’s duration as a problem. Indeed, concerns over the Oscars’ length have led to some strange truncations of the show in recent years. (Remember in 2022 when the producers cut some awards categories from the live broadcast, presenting them before it began?) This year reused the 2024 ceremony’s fairly ingenious solution to the runtime problem: Just start the whole shebang earlier. The live broadcast started at 4 p.m. in Los Angeles, which meant even the comparably roomy proceedings wrapped up during primetime on the east coast. And though some familiar causes of bloat, such as performances of each of the Best Song nominees, were absent, nature abhors a vacuum and this year’s showrunners found plenty of other superfluous moments to include.

To be clear: I think the excess is great. The Oscars should be long, indulgent, and for the fans; the ceremony happens once a year, and it should be staged at the same absurd scale as something like the Super Bowl. Any attempt to impose rigor and order on them tends to backfire in some unexpected way anyway. This year, the show’s 97th edition, there was very little tweaking to the proven formula. Conan O’Brien served as emcee, about as seasoned a choice imaginable for a first-time host, and he did exactly what an Oscar host is supposed to do: tell pithy jokes about the nominees, do a couple of silly, scripted bits, and otherwise keep things moving with a smile on his face. O’Brien has been a pro at that sort of thing since I was in elementary school.

The choice of O’Brien as host also set the expectation that this was probably not going to be a politically charged Oscars. The comedian’s brand is more focused on irreverence than commentary; he offered one glancing gag noting that Anora is about “standing up to a powerful Russian,” but little else in that vein.. He took a couple of cheerful swipes at the Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón over her past inflammatory tweets, but otherwise steered clear of Oscar politicking, too; this was not a night where it felt like an attendee might take the stage to slap a presenter. Instead, the tone was self-serious, yet still fun, as exemplified by musical numbers celebrating the leading ladies of Wicked, the recently deceased producer Quincy Jones, and the James Bond franchise.

[Read: Conan O’Brien understood the assignment]

These segments were conceptually loose—why was The Substance star Margaret Qualley suddenly onstage jerking her limbs to Paul McCartney’s Bond theme song “Live or Let Die”? I couldn’t really tell you, but the moment felt like the kind of forgettable, florid nonsense that graces even the most polished of Oscar ceremonies. Every year, the show’s producers try to think of new ways to celebrate movies, but the hoariest methods are usually best. There were some playful twists this year, however, such as performers addressing craft-award nominees directly to spotlight their work, or the stage opening up to reveal the orchestra playing the nominated scores.

But largely, Oscar night was pleasantly familiar, a respite after years of relatively chaotic ceremonies. This year’s event did have a little more pep to it than last year, when Oppenheimer swept the big awards, however. Several films picked up trophies: Behind Anora in number of wins was The Brutalist, which ended up taking three categories (Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Score). Dune: Part Two and Wicked each earned two technical trophies, while Emilia Pérez, the nomination leader, won for Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song. Emilia Pérez’s turnout in particular was a fall from seeming dominance, perhaps precipitated by Gascón’s controversy.

Or perhaps not. Anora reigned supreme at many of the guild awards that presage the Oscars, which tend to be the best predictors of these things. Despite the film’s offbeat subject matter—about a sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son—and its screenplay filled with hectoring insults and curse words, Anora is a screwball romantic comedy at its heart. Its story clearly spoke to the widest swathe of voters, even if many pundits predicted that the tonier, more highfaluting adult drama Conclave would emerge as a consensus winner. (That film, about a Papal conclave gathering to select a new Pope, had to make do with a sole win for Adapted Screenplay.)

Baker, a chipper presence each time that he took the stage, passionately read from a piece of paper for his Best Director win. He argued for the primacy of the theatrical experience, a message that he’s been pushing throughout this awards season. Intentionally or not, the show around him was doing the same, harkening back to an older Oscars vibe—before streaming cinema and shortened cinematic “windows” were a problem anyone in the audience had to deal with. Anora is currently one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners ever, but its $15 million domestic gross is a relative success for such a small-scale work in this day and age. Baker’s hope, which is one I share, is that his Oscar success will spur studios to re-evaluate the importance of both the moviegoing experience and art that reaches beyond big-budget homogeny. The Oscars, amidst all their silliness, remain one of the best ways  to get people watching interesting films of all sizes.

As soon as Conan O’Brien strode onto the Oscars stage Sunday night, he looked like he belonged there. He was self-deprecating, telling the crowd to sit down before he continued, even though no one was standing. He found Demi Moore in the audience and greeted her with a grin; he had just played a pre-recorded clip of himself emerging out of her back as a nod to her work in the Best Picture-nominated body horror film The Substance. He took several steps across the set and quipped, “I’m walking to show I have control of the stage.”

He really did have control. O’Brien has never hosted the Academy Awards before, but the comedian seemed like a veteran of the gig as he kicked off the show. That’s in part because he spent three decades working in late-night television—writing bits, interviewing celebrities, and commanding all kinds of audiences as a host. As the writer Vikram Murthi observed last year, O’Brien “is one of our last classic entertainers.”

But O’Brien’s success at the Oscars is also a result of his ability to balance the silly with the serious; every now and then, he even embodied both at the same time. His tonal agility as a performer made him well-suited to a ceremony that came on the heels of two major events—the presidential election and the wildfires in Los Angeles that destroyed entire neighborhoods—while Hollywood itself has been enduring a tricky time: Studio productions have largely vacated Los Angeles after the pandemic and the dual strikes, streaming platforms continue to disrupt the traditional theater business, and a series of scandals have plagued several of the nominees seated inside the Dolby Theater. O’Brien has been going through a rough few months, too; his parents died within days of one another in December, and he evacuated his home amid the fires. His job, on top of charming both the A-listers in the room and those watching at home, requires knowing when and how to make his audience not only laugh, but also listen.

He proved adept at the task from the jump. In some moments during his monologue, he played the role of the conventional Oscars emcee: He encouraged the crowd to applaud Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, the stars of Wicked, for their performances at the  beginning of the show. He poked light fun at the Best Picture nominees, and teased some of the assembled actors by showing their pre-fame headshots. (The image shown for Timothée Chalamet, for instance, was that of a sonogram.)

Yet he also played the unruly jester: He championed Babygirl, a 2024 film that was snubbed by the Academy, and skewered Amazon’s recent purchase of the James Bond franchise. He also deployed several harsh punchlines about the actor Karla Sofía Gascón, whose resurfaced tweets—a series of bigoted missives, including one about the Oscars themselves—essentially sank her Best Actress campaign. After the crowd gasped at his reference to Gascón, O’Brien seemed delighted, pointing at the audience, rubbing his hands together, and even jogging in place. “I’m having fun,” he said, smiling impishly.

O’Brien’s giddiness was key to his opening act. It softened the strangeness of some of his gags, whether it was verbally sparring with his longtime friend Adam Sandler, requesting the Conclave star John Lithgow’s help to shame speech-givers into wrapping up, or performing an ironic song-and-dance number about not wasting time onstage the way that previous hosts and presenters have. These moments aren’t new to awards shows; Sandler has become a pinch hitter for live TV lately, and practically every Oscars host calls out how long the ceremony runs. But O’Brien made plain how much he sought to entertain, to hold everyone’s attention at any cost.

Perhaps that’s why he successfully delivered the segment that others in his position would have tried to quickly gloss over: a serious, direct-to-camera appeal about the importance of filmmaking, especially during less-than-ideal times. “In moments such as this, any awards show can seem self-indulgent and superfluous,” he began, “but what I want to do is have us all remember why we gather here tonight. … Even in the face of terrible wildfires and divisive politics, the work, which is what this is about, the work continues, and next year, and for years to come, through trauma and joy, this seemingly absurd ritual is going to be here.”

He paused. “I will not,” he said as the crowd began to laugh. “I am leaving Hollywood to run a bed and breakfast in Orlando, and I’d like to see you there.” It was classic Conan: goofy and ridiculous, but earnest in his excitement, too. He’d said in an interview last week that all he wanted out of the hosting gig was “to have fun onstage.” He clearly did. So did those off of it.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post almost 12 years ago, he went out of his way to assuage fears that he would turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he wrote at the time. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” For much of his tenure, Bezos kept that promise. On Wednesday, he betrayed it.

In a statement posted on X, Bezos announced an overhaul of the Post’s opinion section, expressly limiting the ideology of the department and its writers: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In response, the Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned.

This is the second time in the past six months that Bezos has meddled in the editorial processes of the paper—and specifically its opinion page. In October, Bezos intervened to shut down the Post’s presidential-endorsement process, suggesting that the ritual was meaningless and would only create the perception of bias. Many criticized his decision as a capitulation to Donald Trump, though Bezos denied those claims. Several editorial-board members resigned in protest, and more than 250,000 people canceled their subscription to the paper in the immediate aftermath. Some interpreted this week’s announcement similarly, saying that the Amazon founder is bending the knee to the current administration; the Post’s former editor in chief, Marty Baron, told The Daily Beast that “there is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests.” Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[Chuck Todd: Jeff Bezos is blaming the victim]

Whatever Bezos’s personal reasons are, equally important is the fact that he is emboldened to interfere so brazenly. And he’s not alone. A broader change has been under way among the tech and political elite over the past year or so. Whether it’s Bezos remaking a major national paper in his image or Elon Musk tearing out the guts of the federal government with DOGE, bosses of all stripes are publicly and unapologetically disposing of societal norms and seizing control of institutions to orient the world around themselves. Welcome to the Great Emboldening, where ideas and actions that might have been unthinkable, objectionable, or reputationally risky in the past are now on the table.

This dynamic has echoes of the first Trump administration. Trump’s political rise offered a salient lesson that shamelessness can be a superpower in a political era when attention is often the most precious resource. Trump demonstrated that distorting the truth and generating outrage results in a lot of attentional value: When caught in a lie, he doubled down, denied, and went on the offensive. As a result, he made the job of demanding accountability much harder. Scandals that might otherwise have been ruinous—the Access Hollywood tape, for example—were spun as baseless attacks from enemies. Trump commandeered the phrase fake news from the media and then turned it against journalists when they reported on his lies. These tactics were successful enough that they spawned a generation of copycats: Unscrupulous politicians and business leaders in places such as Silicon Valley now had a playbook to use against their critics and, following Trump’s election, a movement to back it. Wittingly or not, nobody embodied this behavior better than Musk, who has spent the past decade operating with a healthy contempt for institutions, any semblance of decorum, and the law.

[Read: The flattening machine]

Trump’s first term was chaotic and run like a reality-television show; as a policy maker, he was largely ineffectual, instead governing via late-night tweets, outlandish press conferences, and a revolving door of hirings, fallings-out, and firings. But it wasn’t until the 2020 election and the events leading up to January 6 that Trump truly attempted to subvert American democracy to retain power. Although he was briefly exiled from major social-media channels, Trump got away with it: The narrative around January 6 was warped by Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters, and he continued to lead the Republican Party. This, along with the success of Trump’s 2024 campaign—which was rooted in the promise of exercising extreme executive authority—was a signal to powerful individuals, including many technology executives and investors, that they could act however they pleased.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

Trump winning the popular vote in November only amplified this dynamic. CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg pledged to roll back past content-moderation reforms and corporate-inclusivity initiatives, viewed now as excesses of the coronavirus-pandemic emergency and an outdated regime of overreach. Bosses in Silicon Valley, who saw the social-justice initiatives and worker solidarity of the COVID crisis as a kind of mutiny, felt emboldened and sought to regain control over their workforce, including by requiring people to return to the office. Tech executives professed that they were no longer afraid to speak their mind. On X, the Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia (who now works for Musk’s DOGE initiative) described the late 2010s and the Joe Biden era as “a time of silence, shaming, and fear.” That people like Gebbia—former liberals who used to fall in line with the politics of their peers—are now supporting Trump, the entrepreneur wrote, is part of a broader “woke-up call.”

The Great Emboldening has taken many forms. At the Los Angeles Times, the billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong paved the way for Bezos, spiking a Kamala Harris endorsement and pledging to restore ideological balance to the paper by hiring right-wing columnists and experimenting with building a “bias meter” to measure opinions in the paper’s news stories. For some far-right influencers, this supposed MAGA cultural shift offers little more than the ability to offend with no consequences. “It’s okay to say retard again. And that’s great,” one right-wing X personality posted in December. Musk and others, including Steve Bannon, have taken this a step further, making what appear to be Nazi salutes while mocking anyone in the media who calls them out.

The DOGE incursion into the federal government is the single best example of the emboldening at work—a premeditated plan to remake the federal government by seizing control of its information and terrorizing its workforce with firings and bureaucratic confusion. It is a barely veiled show of strength that revolves largely around the threat of mass layoffs. Some of DOGE’s exploits, as with a few of Trump’s executive orders, may not be legal, and some have been stopped by federal judges. As my colleagues and I have reported, some DOGE staffers have entered offices and accessed sensitive government data without the proper clearances and background checks, and have bypassed security protocols without concern. But the second Trump administration operates as though it is unconcerned with abiding by the standards and practices of the federal government.

Bezos’s long-term plans for the Post beyond overhauling its opinion section aren’t yet known. But the timing of his decision to change the direction of its op-ed coverage tracks with the behavior of his peers, many of whom are adhering to the tenets of the Elon Musk school of management. When Bezos acquired The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, its value to the tech baron was largely reputational. The purchase solidified Bezos as a mogul and, perhaps just as important, as a steward and benefactor of an important institution. Not meddling in the paper’s editorial affairs wasn’t just a strategy born out of the goodness of his heart; it was a way to exercise power through benevolence. Bezos could be seen as one of the good guys, shepherding an institution through the perils of an internet age that he profited handsomely from. Even if he stewed privately at the paper’s “Democracy dies in darkness” pivot in the first Trump administration, stepping in to influence coverage likely would have felt like too big a risk—an untenable mixing of Church and state.

But the DOGE era offers a permission structure. In a moment of deep institutional distrust, Trump 2.0 has tried to make the case that anything goes and that previously unthinkable uses of executive power—such as, say, dismantling USAID—may be possible, if executed with enough shamelessness and bravado. Bezos may or may not be turning the Post’s opinion section into a state-media apparatus for Trump and his oligarch class. Either way, the pivot is a direct product of the second Trump era and mirrors the president’s own trajectory with the United States government. Become the figurehead of an institution. Try to control it by the old rules. When that doesn’t work, take it by force, break it down, and rebuild it in your image.