After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a “one-time price adjustment” from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, “We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.” And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters. (In fact, tariffs generally lead to price increases for imported and domestic goods, because the latter face less foreign-price competition.)

It’s true that affordable goods and services are not, on their own, the definition of the American dream. But they’re a necessary component of it, and trade is one of the most important drivers of that affordability. Until recently, Republicans understood this quite well.

American workers are also American consumers who must devote a sizable chunk of their income to essential goods such as clothing, food, shelter, and energy—goods made cheaper and more plentiful by international trade. Produce and clothing from Latin America, lumber and energy from Canada, footwear and electronics from Asia, wine and cheese from Europe: All of these and more help Americans stretch their paychecks and live happier, healthier lives. Thanks to the internet, moreover, we benefit from internationally traded services too, whether it’s an online tutor in Pakistan, a personal trainer in London, a help-desk employee in India, or an accountant in the Philippines. And we gain from better or cheaper domestic goods and services that are forced to compete with imports on quality or price.

Overall, studies conservatively estimate that American households save thousands of dollars a year from the lower prices, increased variety, and global competition fomented by international trade. This increased purchasing power means not only that Americans have more “stuff” but also that their inflation-adjusted incomes are higher. As we just learned the hard way, bigger numbers on your paycheck mean nothing if you’re forced to spend even more on the things you need and want. In fact, one of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics. Money left over can also be saved for a rainy day or invested in things such as education and retirement.

[Rogé Karma: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

The counterargument—until recently associated with the political left—is that cheap and varied consumer goods are not worth sacrificing the strength of America’s domestic-manufacturing sector. Even if we accept that (questionable) premise, however, it doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs, because those tariffs will hurt domestic manufacturing too. About half of U.S. imports are intermediate goods, raw materials, and capital equipment that American manufacturers use to make their products and sell them here and abroad. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these imports increase domestic-manufacturing output and jobs. Thus, for example, an expanding U.S. trade deficit in automotive goods has long coincided with gains in domestic automotive output and production capacity, and past U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum caused a slowdown in U.S. manufacturing output. Even if domestic manufacturers don’t buy imported parts, simply having access to them serves as an important competitive check on the prices of made-in-America manufacturing inputs. This is why Trump’s recent steel-tariff announcement gave U.S. steelmakers a “green light to lift prices,” as The Wall Street Journal put it.

Imports such as construction materials, medical goods, and computers also support many U.S. service industries. And imports are important for leisure and economic mobility. By trading for necessities instead of making them ourselves, Americans have more free time to use for fun or self-improvement (and more disposable income to pursue such things). According to a new study in the Journal of International Economics, “between 1950 and 2014, trade openness contributed to an additional 20 to 95 hours of leisure per worker per year”—invaluable time we can devote to entertainment, family, community, or education.

“Access to cheap goods” isn’t the American dream, but it sure helps us achieve it. This is particularly true for low-income workers who have tight budgets and little leisure time. Shelter, food, transport, utilities, and clothes accounted for approximately 68 percent of the poorest 20 percent of U.S. households’ annual expenditures but just about half of the richest 20 percent of households’ spending. It’s easy for someone worth, say, $521 million, like Bessent, to pay a few bucks more for everyday goods and still achieve his goals and ambitions; it’s far more difficult for a single mom with four kids to do the same.

Democrats used to be the ones offering a false choice between Americans’ access to affordable (often imported) stuff and our economic well-being. In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama told a union-sponsored-debate audience in Chicago that “people don’t want a cheaper T‑shirt if they’re losing a job in the process.” And Bernie Sanders famously said in 2015 that Americans “don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”

Back in those days, Republicans defended the link between trade and American prosperity. Today, only a few party outcasts, such as Mike Pence, dare to do so. Trump’s allies have made very clear that they are trying to achieve a dream. It just isn’t America’s.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Trump hands the world to China. New York belongs to Trump now. Intimidating Americans will not work. The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials. Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity

Evening Read

Illustration by Julia Rothman

Flaco Lives

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Hélène Blanc

Read. Haley Mlotek’s new book is a divorce memoir with no lessons, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Watch. The third season of Yellowjackets (streaming on Paramount+). The show is more playful and ridiculous than ever before, Shirley Li writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Republican senators have confirmed a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter to lead the nation’s intelligence community and a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as its health secretary. This morning, however, they saved some of their sharpest questions for a Cabinet nominee who, until last month, served alongside them as a GOP member of Congress.

President Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary, former Oregon Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, knew she’d face a skeptical Republican audience during her Senate confirmation hearing. Last year she supported a major pro-union bill known as the PRO Act, a decision that has scrambled ideological alliances and thrown her nomination into doubt. The idea that a pro-union candidate might lead a Republican labor department was once unthinkable. But Trump’s nomination of Chavez-DeRemer comes at a time when the party’s base includes an unusually large number of union members. Her supporters have hailed her as a bridge between that new constituency and the GOP’s traditional business wing. Now, her fate could show how much Trump’s GOP is willing—or able—to bend Republican orthodoxy on organized labor.

[Read: The one Trump pick Democrats actually like]

When Trump picked her in November, Chavez-DeRemer initially won praise from Democrats while drawing criticism from conservative lawmakers. This morning, those Republican holdouts began grilling her right away. They pressed her to explain why, as a member of the House, she co-sponsored a bill that would make unionizing easier and undermine the GOP’s longstanding opposition to the labor movement. “Yes or no: Do you still support the PRO Act?” asked Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which is overseeing her nomination process.

Chavez-DeRemer didn’t answer directly. Instead, she distanced herself from the PRO Act without completely repudiating it; she had signed onto the bill, she maintained, in order to be “at the table” to help write labor laws that would affect her constituents. “The bill is imperfect,” Chavez-DeRemer said.

Her nomination has earned an unusual mix of endorsements. Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, is an enthusiastic backer of Chavez-DeRemer. So is Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Indiana, who once challenged O’Brien to a fight. The two have since bonded over their support for Chavez-DeRemer. Mullin told the committee this morning that she was “uniquely positioned in the center” of labor policy. “If Sean and I can come together on this, then if nothing else that should set some type of example.”

Chavez-DeRemer, whose father was a member of the Teamsters for decades, co-sponsored the PRO Act in July during her only term in the House. She was only the third House Republican to do so. Conservatives saw the move as an election-year ploy by a moderate trying to save her seat. (If it was, it didn’t work; she lost in November.) Democrats were pleasantly surprised by her nomination over conventional anti-union alternatives, and they signalled they might vote for her confirmation.

But Republicans such as Cassidy and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky made clear that Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act was a problem, even though the bill stands little chance of becoming law whether or not she gets confirmed. Both represent states with so-called right-to-work laws that would be threatened by its enactment. Chavez-DeRemer could win confirmation without their votes if Democrats provided some support, but not if Republicans decide to prevent her nomination from reaching the Senate floor. A few conservative advocacy groups, including one founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, urged the GOP to reject her. And Democratic backing is not guaranteed: Some in the party have vowed to oppose all Trump nominees to protest Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government, and others wanted to see whether Chavez-DeRemer would stand by her pro-union record.

[Annie Lowrey: The rise of the union right]

At this morning’s hearing, Chavez-DeRemer’s answer on the PRO Act initially didn’t seem to satisfy either party. Both Sanders, the committee’s top Democrat, and Paul repeated Cassidy’s question nearly verbatim. “Do you support the PRO Act?” Sanders asked her. “I support the American worker,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “I am gathering that you no longer support the PRO Act,” Sanders said in response.

Paul, who had previously said that he would oppose her nomination over her support of the PRO Act, got an answer more to his liking. When he asked Chavez-DeRemer whether she opposed a specific provision in the bill that would overturn anti-union laws in states such as Kentucky, she said yes. Paul later told reporters the response might make him reconsider her nomination.

By the end of the hearing, Chavez-DeRemer appeared to have solidified her chances at confirmation. Democrats had not turned en masse against her, and Republicans showed little indication that they were prepared to defeat a Trump Cabinet pick for the first time. “You did very well,” Cassidy told her. And with that, Chavez-DeRemer’s supporters in the room erupted in applause.

“We’re so back,” one reporter whispered to another.

All of the chairs in the White House briefing room were filled, and reporters and photographers were crammed into every available nook and cranny. I was standing in the back, squeezed in between a window and a none-too-pleased Secret Service agent.

The sight was reminiscent of the COVID briefings of 2020: President Donald Trump gripping the sides of the lectern in the White House briefing room, pursing his lips as he looked out at the journalists yelling and jockeying for his attention.

And just like in 2020, Trump used a national calamity to try to score political points and denigrate his foes. Fourteen hours after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter outside Washington last night—the first crisis of the young administration, a moment to console a stunned and grieving nation—Trump repeatedly implied that the crash was the fault of his Democratic predecessors and of DEI policies.

[Read: He could have talked about anything else]

Trump offered no evidence to support his claims but repeatedly cast the blame on others, even as bodies were still being pulled from the frigid waters of the Potomac River just a few miles away.

“Because I have common sense, okay?” Trump said, when asked how he had concluded that diversity programs—programs that Trump claimed were put in place by the Biden and Obama administrations—were to blame. “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

The crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people and was the first major crash in the United States involving an airline in more than 15 years. Trump’s instinct after the tragedy was yet again to choose divisiveness. On social media, within hours of the collision, he offered not condolences but conspiracy theories: “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.” As he did so often in his first term, he was reacting to a crisis as an observer and not as the president, who has the resources of the federal government at his disposal and the responsibility of getting answers.

And then, in his briefing-room appearance today—the first of his 10-day-old second term—Trump offered a few initial notes of sympathy, and then turned almost immediately toward castigating DEI, leaving several correspondents to turn and shake their heads in disbelief.

“I put safety first,” Trump said. “Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

Trump showcased his instinct to immediately frame tragedies through his own ideological or political lens, facts be damned. And it’s a pattern: Earlier this month, he blamed the Southern California wildfires on Democratic politicians and suggested that illegal immigration was the cause of a terrorist attack in New Orleans, even though the attacker was a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

When pressed today, he snapped at reporters (“I think that’s not a very smart question—I’m surprised, coming from you”) and called on friendlier faces from conservative-leaning outlets, who tossed him softballs. He admitted that the crash was still under investigation and that the cause was not yet known. But he was quick to claim that the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered its standards under President Barack Obama (“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white’”) and that his administration was restoring them, despite the hiring and spending freezes his team has aimed to put in place.

But summarizing Trump’s remarks on air-traffic controllers doesn’t quite capture the experience of sitting through them:

Can you imagine, these are people that are, I mean, actually, their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have. Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened, because of the stress when you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it.

Seated to the right of Trump was a phalanx of supportive aides—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—who would all get brief turns at the microphone to weigh in on the tragedy and praise Trump’s leadership.

Trump’s eyes darted around the room. His hand, with its index figure outstretched, would move in little circles as he considered which reporter to call on. Then it would steady, and he would point deliberately, selecting one person in a sea of outstretched hands, gesturing that he or she was being granted the privilege of asking the president the next question.

Similarly freewheeling question-and-answer sessions became the hallmark of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with Trump performing for the cameras—often for more than an hour at a time—and exuding the bravado of someone who believed that he alone could steer the nation through the greatest public-health crisis in a century. Trump couldn’t get enough of those press conferences. He pushed to hold them as close to the 6 p.m. evening news as possible to increase viewership; he used them to take swipes at his political opponents, including then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who tended to hold his own COVID briefings earlier in the day.

But instead of being reassuring, fact-based public-service announcements, the briefings were defined by falsehoods, politicization, and outlandish recommendations to inject disinfectant. Those nightly battles, Trump’s closest aides believe, helped seal his defeat in the 2020 election. He came across as incompetent, desperate, eager to shift the blame. He ignored suggestions to turn the briefings over to then–Vice President Mike Pence, the head of his COVID task force, or to a team of doctors and scientists. He kept going to the podium day after day. By the time he finally abandoned the briefings, he trailed Joe Biden by six points in the polls.

Both Hegseth, a former Fox News host, and Duffy, once a reality-TV star, have significant experience in front of the cameras. But a White House official told me that there was never a question that Trump himself would brief the press after the crash.

And when the news conference ended after 36 minutes, the reporters, some with dazed expressions, filed out of the briefing room. As I navigated the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a fellow journalist’s phone and the text message he had just sent:

“WTF.”

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”

In the hours after Donald Trump returned to power, Jacob Chansley, already in a celebrating mood, became exuberant. Chansley, who is also known as the QAnon Shaman, a nickname he earned for the horned costume he wore during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, did what any red-blooded MAGA American might have done in his situation. “I GOT A PARDON BABY!” Chansley posted on X last night. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”

In the lead-up to Inauguration Day, Trump had spent a lot of time talking about getting revenge on his political enemies. But in one of his first moves as president, Trump decided to treat his supporters to some forgiveness. Last night, he pardoned all of the nearly 1,600 people who had been convicted for their involvement in the Capitol riots. He commuted the sentences of 14 insurrectionists who remained in prison, allowing them to go free. Paired with his order for the attorney general to dismiss “all pending indictments,” Trump has effectively let everyone convicted for their actions in the January 6 attack off the hook.

In Trump’s telling, the people he pardoned were viciously and unfairly punished for what happened at the Capitol. Yesterday, he called the rioters “hostages.” Some of those pardoned included goofy characters, such as Chansley, who seemingly did not arrive at the Capitol intending to overthrow the government but got swept up in the moment. Chansley wasn’t exactly going out of his way to avoid the chaos of the day, however: He left a note on then–Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.” Among those pardoned was Adam Christian Johnson, otherwise known as “lectern guy”: On January 6, he carried then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s podium around the Capitol, smiling and waving in a now-viral photo. “I’m ashamed to have been a part of it,” he said to a judge in February 2022, before he was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to 75 days in jail. “Got a pardon … now … about my lectern,” Johnson wrote on X before later asking Trump to free the men imprisoned for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Among the rioters granted clemency by President Trump there are also longtime militia leaders who planned carefully for the riot. They have been implicated in actively conspiring to violently overtake the Capitol and attack police officers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, and Kelly Meggs, who led its Florida chapter, were among the 14 people whose sentences were commuted. Meggs allegedly participated with his wife in weapons training to prepare for the attack. Before the president intervened, both were slated to spend more than a decade in prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy. According to the Department of Justice, Rhodes and Meggs had organized “teams that were prepared and willing to use force and to transport firearms and ammunition into Washington, D.C.,” and tried “to oppose, by force, the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

Of the 14 people whose remaining prison sentences were commuted by Trump, nine were affiliated with the Oath Keepers and five with the Proud Boys, another violent far-right group. At least one other militia leader was outright pardoned: Enrique Tarrio, a former head of the Proud Boys, is now free long before the end of his 22-year sentence. Though he wasn’t in Washington during the insurrection, Tarrio egged on Proud Boys who entered the Capitol, posting on social media that he was “proud of my boys and my country” and telling his supporters, “Don’t fucking leave” moments after rioters entered the Capitol. In private messages, he took credit for the attack: “Make no mistake,” he wrote, “we did this.” Some of the Proud Boys, including top members Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, went inside the Capitol, where they “overwhelmed officers,” according to the Department of Justice. Biggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Rehl to 15.

Of course, it wasn’t just militia members who seemingly arrived at the Capitol with violence in mind. Also among those pardoned was Eric Munchel, who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after entering the Capitol clad in a tactical vest and carrying zip ties, with which he intended to “take senators hostage,” according to the judge who heard his case. The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity—as long as they’re loyal to Trump. Should an extremist on the right break the law, he can reasonably hope for Trump to pluck them out of the justice system. This is one of the key ingredients to the perpetuation of political violence across society—a belief among those who might carry it out that they can do so, and that they’ll get away with it.

In that sense, the pardons mark what’s to come. The insurrection was the culmination of increased militia activity during the first Trump administration. But after the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys continued to operate while many of their leaders and members were in prison, but in a less publicly visible way than before. Even without militia groups operating at their peak levels, political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.

*Lead-image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Peterson / Redux; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Evan Vucci / AP; Getty.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report into his investigation of Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion is an atlas of roads not taken—one to a land where Trump never tried to overturn the election, another where the Justice Department moved more quickly to charge him, and another where the Supreme Court didn’t delay the case into obsolescence.

One of the most beguiling untrod paths is the one where Smith charged Trump with insurrection against the United States. The nation watched Trump try to overturn the election, first through spurious lawsuits and then by instigating a violent riot on January 6, 2021, in a vain attempt to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. A conviction for insurrection would have prevented Trump from returning to office, but when Smith indicted Trump in August 2023, he didn’t charge him with insurrection.

Smith’s report, which was released early this morning, finally explains why. In doing so, it shows how the United States legal system is and was unprepared for a figure like Trump. The framers of the law simply didn’t contemplate a sitting president trying to use the vast powers of the federal government to reverse the outcome of an election.

[Read: The cases against Trump—a guide]

Most of the report, which runs to about 150 pages, focuses on the crimes that Smith did charge, the evidence behind them, and why he believes he would have convicted Trump if he’d had a chance to try them. Instead, Smith moved to dismiss the charges in November after Trump won reelection, citing Justice Department rules that bar the prosecution of a sitting president. Even if he had not done so, Trump had vowed to fire Smith and close the case immediately upon taking office. (Smith also dropped charges in another case related to Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. His report on that case was not released, because charges are still pending against Trump’s erstwhile co-defendants.)

Though the material included is damning, it’s also mostly known. News reports, the House January 6 committee, and Smith’s initial and superseding indictments had already laid out how Trump tried to steal an election that he knew he had lost—first by filing bogus lawsuits and pressuring state officials; then by attempting to corrupt the Justice Department; next by trying to convince Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes; and finally by instigating his followers to attack the Capitol. The evidence is no less conclusive or horrifying for its familiarity.

The insurrection-charges discussion, however, is new. It shows that Smith did seriously consider whether the law applied but concluded he would struggle to convict Trump under it—not because what happened was not an insurrection, but because the laws were written too narrowly, such that although Trump appears to have violated the spirit of the law, he may not have broken its letter. (Smith writes that no one has been charged with violating the law in question for more than a century.)

[Quinta Jurecic: Trump secures his get-out-of-jail-free card]

A conviction of insurrection would have been far more consequential than convictions on the charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct, and conspiracy against rights, which Smith did bring. Felons are entitled to hold federal office—as Trump will prove on January 20—but the law stipulates that anyone convicted of insurrection or rebellion “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

But Smith saw several challenges to bringing charges under the law. First, he would have had to prove that what happened on January 6 was an insurrection. As he notes, multiple courts have described the events as an “insurrection.” Smith “recognized why courts described the attack on the Capitol as an ‘insurrection,’” but was still worried about establishing this fact under such an obscure and little-used law. He considered past cases, but they didn’t offer any guidance on what the legal standard for an insurrection is, or how it is different from a riot.

He also found that case law tended to treat insurrection as an attack against a sitting government, rather than an attempt to remain in power—an autogolpe, in political-science terms.

[Read: The paperwork coup]

“The Office [of Special Counsel] did not find any case in which a criminal defendant was charged with insurrection for acting within the government to maintain power, as opposed to overthrowing it or thwarting it from the outside,” Smith writes. “Applying Section 2383 in this way would have been a first, which further weighed against charging it, given the other available charges, even if there were reasonable arguments that it might apply.”

Smith faced yet another complication. Trump cleverly instigated his followers to attack the Capitol, and suggested that he was coming with them, but he instead returned to the White House and watched the chaos unfold on TV, rather than take part. (As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has written, Trump often uses this mafia-boss tactic of encouraging his minions to act without ever explicitly implicating himself.)

What about inciting an insurrection? Smith saw reasonable arguments that Trump’s actions met even the high legal bar the Supreme Court has set for incitement—“the evidence established that the violence was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay”—but Smith didn’t have any direct evidence of Trump saying the full scope of violence was his goal, so he worried that bringing charges against Trump for inciting an insurrection would be risky.

[David A. Graham: Trump gets away with it]

Besides, Smith couldn’t find any examples of prosecutions where a defendant was charged who didn’t actively participate in the act. “There does not appear to have ever been a prosecution under the statute for inciting, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to rebellion or insurrection,” he wrote. “Thus, however strong the proof that he incited or gave aid and comfort to those who attacked the Capitol, application of those theories of liability would also have been a first.”

This led Smith to conclude that, given the other charges, “pursuing an incitement to insurrection charge was unnecessary.”

But necessity is in the eye of the beholder, and lawyers can only see so much. Smith’s decision is understandable but shows why criminal law was always an unreliable method for holding Trump to account. Smith’s remit was to hold Trump accountable to the law, a relatively narrow task. And although the Justice Department ought to have moved faster—Smith was appointed to take on the case only in November 2022 and then acted with speed—the more consequential error was the Senate’s failure to convict Trump at his impeachment trial in February 2021.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Donald Trump’s Mafia mind-set]

As Smith writes in a different context in his report, impeachment has a different aim than prosecution. “When Congress decides whether a President should be impeached and convicted, that process does not depend on rigorously adjudicating facts and applying law, or on finding a criminal violation. Instead, the impeachment process is, by design, an inherently political remedy for the dangers to governance posed by an office holder who has committed ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’”

But some Republican senators, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, believed that voters were so irate about the January 6 attacks that Trump was a spent force. As a result, these senators didn’t need to risk the ire of his supporters by voting to convict Trump. The Senate voted 57–43 to convict, short of the two-thirds majority required to convict Trump and then bar him from future office.

Two years later, some legal scholars tried to make the case that Trump had committed an insurrection and broken his oath of office under the Fourteenth Amendment. But courts ruled that only Congress could make such a determination, which was politically never going to happen. Only political processes—voters’ choices and impeachment—could have definitively prevented a second Trump presidency.