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Ronald Reagan

The Only Question Trump Asks Himself

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › ukraine-trump-putin-zelensky-russia › 681988

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

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

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

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

[Jonathan Chait: The real reason Trump berated Zelensky]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s Own Declaration of Independence

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 03 › trumps-own-declaration-of-independence › 681944

Long live the king!

Down with the king!

President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.

Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.

But the president has also asked advisers in recent days about moving the Declaration of Independence into the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to describe the planning.

Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original document. Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building, in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession. The original is behind heavy glass in an oxygen-free, argon-filled case that can retract into the wall at night for security. Because of light damage to the faded animal-skin parchment, the room is kept dimly lit; restrictions have been placed on how often the doors can even be opened.

But to the relief of aides, subsequent discussions appear to have focused on the possibility of moving one of the historical copies of the document, not the original. “President Trump strongly believes that significant and historic documents that celebrate American history should be shared and put on display,” the White House spokesperson Steven Cheung told us in an email.

Displaying a copy would still enshrine history’s most famous written rejection of monarchy in the seat of American power. The document is reprinted in textbooks nationwide and is recognized the world over as a defiant stand against the corrupting dangers of absolute power. It declares equality among men to be a self-evident truth, asserts that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and offers a litany of grievances against a despotic ruler.

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads the 1776 repudiation of British King George III’s dominion over the American colonies. (Spokespeople for the National Archives declined to comment on Trump’s request and whether a Declaration display in the Oval Office is imminent. White House aides also declined to share the timing of when the document might arrive in its new West Wing home, if it is coming at all.)

Since returning to power, Trump has moved quickly to redesign his working space. He has announced plans to pave over the Rose Garden to make it more like the patio at his private Mar-a-Lago club, as well as easier to host events with women wearing heels. He has also revived planning for a new ballroom on the White House grounds. “It keeps my real-estate juices flowing,” Trump explained in a recent interview with The Spectator.

Golden trophies now line the Oval Office’s mantlepiece. Military flags adorned with campaign streamers have returned. And portraits of presidents past now climb the walls—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Gilded mirrors hang upon the recessed doors. A framed copy of his Georgia mug shot appears in the outside hallway. And the bright-red valet button, encased in a wooden box, is back on the desk.

In addition to the National Archives’ original Declaration, the government has in its possession other versions of the document. The collection includes drafts by Jefferson and copies of contemporaneous reprintings, known as broadsides, that were distributed among the colonies.

Alarmed by the deterioration of the original Declaration in the 1820s, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to create an engraving of it with the signatures appended. That version forms the basis of the document since reproduced in school history books—the one with which most Americans are familiar. Adams tasked Stone with engraving 200 copies—but in what passes for a mini 19th-century scandal, Stone made an extra facsimile to keep for himself, the documents dealer and expert Seth Kaller told us.

Many of those Stone copies of the document have now been lost; roughly 50 are known to survive, Kaller said. The White House already has in its archives at least one of the Stone printings. Kaller told us that one of his clients who had recently purchased a Stone facsimile was visiting the White House when President Barack Obama asked him whether he could help procure a Stone printing for the White House.

“The client called me, and I said, ‘I can’t—because, one, there aren’t any others on the market right now, and two, the White House already has one,’” Kaller told us. In 2014, Kaller visited the White House to view the Stone Declaration, which the curator displayed for him in one of the West Wing’s rooms. (The White House curator’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether the Stone copy still resides under its purview.)

It is unclear where Trump first got the idea to add a Declaration to the Oval Office’s decor. Since returning, Trump has shown interest in the planning for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the document’s signing. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order to create “Task Force 250,” a White House commission that will work with another congressionally formed commission to plan the festivities.

Trump and the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who owns four Stone engravings and is a historical-documents aficionado, also met privately at the White House last month, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump had decided weeks earlier to replace much of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Arts so that he could install himself as chair, replacing Rubenstein.

Previously, Rubenstein had worked with the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies to have a modern copy of the Stone Declaration, placed in a replica of a historic frame, displayed at U.S. embassies around the globe.

“Because the Declaration of Independence has—like the Stars and Stripes—become a symbol of the United States, and because the Stone copy of the Declaration is the most recognizable version of that historic document, I thought it would be appropriate to have a new copy of a Stone Declaration placed in each of the American embassies around the World,” Rubenstein wrote at the time in a booklet describing the history and importance of the Stone facsimiles. “My hope was that everyone who visited an American embassy would see not just our flags, but also this unique symbol of our country.” (Rubenstein did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kaller told us that he thinks moving the original document in its special enclosure to the Oval Office would likely cost millions of dollars. But a Stone printing would be far simpler to exhibit, requiring only getting “the lighting right in a display case,” he said. The reason Quincy Adams commissioned the Stone version, Kaller added, was in part for this very purpose.

And if Trump decides he wants it, he will likely get it—even without the powers of a king.

Trump and Vance Shattered Europe’s Illusions About America

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › trump-and-vance-shattered-europes-illusions-about-america › 681925

A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process these events, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: Not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterwards, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

[Read: A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction]

These are not the actions of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternate reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many ceasefires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a ceasefire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

[David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary]

But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing in public about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the last decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

Democrats Are Acting Too Normal

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › democrats-trump-address-congress › 681914

American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic. If the president’s speech was poor or faltering, the opposition can only pile on for a few minutes.

So pity Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who got handed the task of a response to Donald Trump’s two hour carnival of lies and stunts. Slotkin gave a good, normal speech in which she laid out some of her party’s issues with Trump on the economy and national security.

It was so normal, in fact, that it was exactly the wrong speech to give.

But first, it’s important to note that it was a good speech. Slotkin wisely decided to forego any stagey settings, appearing in front of neatly placed flags instead of in her office or a kitchen. She gave a shout-out to her home state while managing to avoid folksy familiarity or posturing. She also stayed away from wonkery, speaking in the kind of clear language people use in daily conversation. (Okay, there was some thudding language about investment and “jobs of the future,” but these are minor speechwriting offenses.)

[Read: The Trump backers who have buyer’s remorse]

And to her credit, Slotkin reminded people that Elon Musk is an unaccountable uber-bureaucrat leading a “gang of 20 year olds” who are rummaging through the personal data of millions of Americans. As a senator from a state bordering Canada, she asked if Americans are comfortable kicking our sister nation in the teeth.

So what’s not to like? Slotkin—like so many in her party lately—failed to convey any sense of real urgency or alarm. Her speech could have been given in Trump’s first term, perhaps in 2017 or 2018, but we are no longer in that moment. The president’s address was so extreme, so full of bizarre claims and ideas, exaggerations and distortions and lies, that it should have called his fitness to serve into question. He preened about a cabinet that includes some of the strangest, and least qualified, members in American history. Although his speech went exceptionally long, he said almost nothing of substance, and the few plans he put forward were mostly applause bait for his Republican sycophants in the room and his base at home.

It’s easy for me to sit in my living room in Rhode Island and suggest what others should say. But in her response, Slotkin failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics. As a former Republican, I nodded when Slotkin said that Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave at what Slotkin called the “spectacle” of last week’s Oval Office attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But is that really the message of a fighting opposition? Is it an effective rallying cry either to older voters or to a new generation to say, in effect, that Reagan—even now a polarizing figure—would have hated Trump? (Of course he would have.) Isn’t the threat facing America far greater than that?

[Read: Lawful, but enormously destructive]

Slotkin’s best moment was when she pleaded with people to do more than be mere observers of politics, and said that doomscrolling on phones isn’t the same thing as genuine political engagement. And she issued her own Reaganesque call to remember that America is not just “a patch of land between two oceans,” that America is great because of its ideals. But her admonition to her fellow citizens not to fool themselves about the fragility of democracy, while admirable, was strangely detached from a specific attack on the source of that menace.

Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or RFK Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense? Trump took time to recognize and praise all three of those men in his speech. So why not ask that question—directly and without needless throat clearing about the importance and necessity of change?

Slotkin’s response reflected the fractured approach of the Democrats to Trump in general. Some of them refused to attend tonight’s address, some of them held up little ping-pong paddles with messages on them (a silly idea that looked even worse in its execution), and others meandered out. One, Representative Al Green of Texas, got himself thrown out within the first minutes, a stunt that only gave Speaker Mike Johnson a chance to look strong and decisive, if only for a moment.

I’m not a fan of performative protest, and initially I thought the Democrats who chose to attend the address made the right call. But when Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” they could have left en bloc, declaring once they were outside that they would take no part in any further demeaning of the House chamber—or, for that matter, of American democracy. Instead, they sat there and took it, their opposition to Trump a kind of hodgepodge of rage, bemusement, boredom, and irritation.

Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November. Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.

Slotkin is a centrist—as she noted, she won in areas that also voted for Trump—and her victory in Michigan proved that centrism can be a powerful anchor against extremists. But centrism is not the same as meekness. America does not need a “resistance,” or stale slogans, or people putting those slogans on little paddles. It needs an opposition party that boldly defends the nation’s virtues, the rule of law, and the rights of its people.

America’s Cultural Revolution

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › trump-america-cultural-revolution › 681863

The takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem like an afterthought in the furious drama of President Donald Trump’s first month in office. The abandonment of the transatlantic alliance, proposals to annex territory on multiple continents, the evisceration of national institutions, and overt claims to kingship are such eye-popping departures from precedent that the leadership of a somewhat stuffy, self-consciously elite performing-arts venue seems negligible by comparison. But Trump’s peculiar preoccupation with the Kennedy Center is symptomatic of a profound change in the nature of American power since his inauguration: America is undergoing a cultural revolution. “This is going to be great television,” Trump said at the end of Friday’s stormy session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It may as well be the motto of his administration.

It is a new kind of cultural revolution. Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is the overturning of the political order by the country’s entertainers. The American culture industry has overwhelmed politics: Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.

The Trump administration has been consistent in its veneration of show business, if in nothing else. The president has put a WWE executive in charge of education, made a Fox News talking head his secretary of defense, installed a celebrity conspiracy theorist to lead the National Institutes of Health, handed control of Medicare to a TV doctor, and appointed a right-wing podcaster as deputy director of the FBI. Elon Musk is running government reform because he can live-post it. Dr. Phil accompanies ICE on raids. Trump’s Cabinet picks resemble the cast of a reality-television show by design: Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved.

In his farewell address, President Joe Biden described the incoming administration as an oligarchy. He was mistaken. It is rule by performers: a “histriocracy.” Anyone who wants to understand what is happening in American politics needs to understand it on those terms.

In 2016, a reality-TV star’s rise to the presidency was novel, and seeing that surprise triumph as an anomaly was still possible. No longer. The 2024 election was not just evidence of a rightward shift among traditionally Democratic voters, or of rising anti-government patriotism, but a clarification of how fundamentally American politics has shifted the ground from which its meaning derives.

Politics has become an offshoot of spectacle. Trump has left intellectuals grasping for historical analogies: Is he a fascist or a populist? Is he a latter-day Know Nothing or a modern demagogue? The analogies are unsatisfying because they fail to account for popular culture as a political force, the way it has scrambled traditional dividing lines. Trump has Orthodox Jewish grandchildren and is a hero to the white-power movement. He won a record percentage of Arab American votes, then appointed an ambassador to Israel who claims that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.” He enjoys fervent support among evangelicals despite the fact that his character is a living contradiction of every value they revere. These paradoxes would not be possible in a politics that selects the country’s leadership on the basis of ideas and character. They make sense if brute exposure determines who wins.

[Stephen Marche: Welcome to the burning ’20s]

As the grand soap opera of this American presidency unfolds, displays of rage and wonder fill every moment: get-rich-quick schemes, rigged games, vengeful punishments. The audience is hurried from one hustle to another. The distinction between a con and a joke has blurred. The great circus showman P. T. Barnum prophesied the rise of Trump when he declared: “Let me furnish the amusements of a nation and there will be need of very few laws.” The connection between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy is more than genetic. Norman Mailer, in his famous essay on the 1960 Democratic Convention, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” noticed a mysterious sadness that gripped the spectators, which made sense only when he saw the future President Kennedy in the flesh: “The Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” Trump’s Cabinet is the staggering consequence that Mailer could not calculate.

Ronald Reagan in the 1980s made the connection between celebrity and power even more explicit; he rose after a career in which perhaps his most famous role was starring opposite a chimpanzee. The “Great Communicator” told corny jokes and knew that television was everything. The Republican Party “won one for the Gipper,” as Reagan’s campaign slogan had it. When his administration abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, releasing news media from any obligation of impartiality, it prepared the way for histriocracy without government interference.

Rule by performers is distinct from autocracy. The ruling performers serve the narrative needs of their fans first and foremost. Policy will always be an addendum to the show. The overturning of Roe v. Wade had compelling emotional heft for Trump’s base, a soul-stirring final scene to the movie that had been playing in their minds for generations: “We beat the cosmopolitan elite to save babies.” The happy ending was that abortion became illegal in much of the United States.

But winning for show is very different from having a desired effect on the world. Since 2018, the rate of abortions has, by most accounts, kept rising—not that anybody seems to care, because the narrative impulse is the primary political driver. In fact, the restrictionist policy’s failure provides an opportunity for endless sequels. Trump has served the pro-life movement’s storyline needs by creating the conditions for an increase in abortion numbers: so many more bad people to punish, so many more babies who need saving. In a politics determined by performance, outcomes are epilogues that nobody reads.

[Read: Trump’s conquest of the Kennedy Center is accelerating]

The reality of rule by performers is profoundly disconcerting to American intellectuals’ self-conception of their government’s dignity. This is the message of the Kennedy Center’s takeover that the D.C. political elite has been so slow to register. If you think it’s a joke to have RFK Jr. in office, that’s the point. Jokes gather attention. Attention creates exposure. Exposure drives power. The greatest asset for any politician today is a bottomless narcissism that requires unremitting attention to satisfy.

Rule by performers doesn’t need to impose an autocrat’s lies on the people; people do it to themselves through their entertainments. In 1984, George Orwell described doublethink as the kind of intellectual gymnastics demanded by a totalitarian society: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” Reality television and the WWE demand similar distortion-effect gymnastics; their audiences willingly suspend their disbelief and gladly accept events they know are artificial as real. The audiences come to political debate already prepared for the blurring of illusion and reality. “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived,” Barnum understood, which is why they called him the “Prince of Humbugs.” In Trump, they have a king.

As forewarned, America has amused itself to death. Histriocracy is much less stable than traditional autocracy—wilder, more unpredictable. Turbulence is to be expected, as creating drama is the point of the government and the source of power. No doubt, the Kennedy Center will be consumed by a whirlwind of thrills and chills over the next four years. But when a circus departs, it leaves behind dirty streets, empty pockets, and lingering regrets. Under rule by performers, only one law is inviolable: The show must go on, until the curtain falls.

The Putinization of America

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2025 › 02 › putinization-america › 681837

We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.

Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the “fall” part.

The sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again.

Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who had already done his share of damage before anointing the former KGB lieutenant colonel to be his successor in 1999. But those who dismissed my warnings that yes, it can happen here at the start of Trump’s first term, in 2017, got quieter after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and are almost silent now.

Trump’s personal affinity for dictators was apparent early on. His praise for Putin and other elected leaders turned strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was tinged with undisguised envy. No feisty parliament to wrangle. The free press turned into a propaganda machine for the administration. The justice system unleashed against the opposition. Elections staged only for show. What’s not to like?

[Read: Behind the American right’s fascination with Viktor Orbán]

Putin and Russia always held a special place in Trump world, however. Russian intelligence and propaganda worked full-time to promote Trump once he won the Republican nomination to face Hillary Clinton in 2016. WikiLeaks, long in the service of Russian intelligence but still nurturing its old whistleblower image, fed hacked documents to a naively cooperative American media. The Mueller Report makes the degree of cooperation between various Russian assets and the Trump campaign clear—damningly so, despite years of MAGA crying “Russia hoax” because Special Counsel Robert Mueller decided not to prosecute.

Trump made Paul Manafort his campaign chair in May 2016, turning the Russia alarm bells into air-raid sirens for anyone paying attention. Manafort was a former fixer for Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich, who attempted to thwart Ukrainians’ desire to join Europe only to be deposed by the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and forced to flee to Moscow in 2014.

Manafort’s recent expertise was mostly in money and reputation laundering. Adding him to the campaign when Trump’s oddly pro-Putin rhetoric (“strong leader,” “loves his country,” “you think our country is so innocent?”) was already drawing attention seemed a little too on the nose: Why double down? From affinity, the campaign tilted into deeply suspicious fealty toward the Kremlin. Manafort’s subsequent plea of guilty for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and Trump’s later pardon, only threw more wood on the raging collusion fire.

Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term. It annexed Crimea and entered eastern Ukraine, offering up feeble pretexts about protecting Russian speakers (whom it bombed indiscriminately), Nazis in Ukraine (also, naturally, the Jews running Ukraine), NATO expansion, and so-called Ukrainian separatists. Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, attempting to take Kyiv in what the Kremlin famously planned to be a three-day special military operation. The timing led Trump and his defenders to say that he had been tough on Russia: The invasion would never have occurred on Trump’s watch.

Now that the second Trump administration is racing to tick off every point on Putin’s long wish list, the reason for this has become clear. In Trump’s second term, Putin was expecting him to abandon Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia, create divisions within NATO, and leave Ukraine relatively defenseless before Europe could get organized to defend it. That is, exactly what is happening today.

But Trump lost to Biden in 2020, and, entering his 23rd year in power, Putin needed a new conflict to distract from the dismal conditions in Russia. Dictators always wind up needing enemies to justify why nothing has improved under their eternal rule, and once the domestic opposition is eliminated, foreign adventures are inevitable. Putin didn’t expect much resistance from Ukraine or from the West, which he had successfully corrupted, bluffed, and bullied for decades. But then an unlikely hero appeared in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who, it turned out, could perform a phenomenal impression of Winston Churchill under enemy fire.

Ukraine’s brave resistance to the supposedly overwhelming might of the Russian military lasted long enough to force the United States and Europe to join its defense, albeit reluctantly and slowly. Three long years have passed. Iranian drones crash nightly into Ukrainian civilian centers; Russian artillery and missiles reduce entire cities to rubble; China supports Russia’s attempt at conquest while hungrily eyeing Taiwan. Three years of documented reports of Russian torture, rape, and the mass kidnapping of children. North Korean soldiers have arrived to fight and die in Russia’s invasion, while NATO nations stand by, letting Ukrainians die in the war NATO was created to fight. Yet somehow Ukraine holds the line while Russia’s military losses grow and its economy wobbles.

Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased.

Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away.

Russian democracy had no institutional memory, no immune system to fight off these attacks. It was like a baby deer hit by a locomotive. The Russian Duma, purged of real opposition, became a Putin cheer squad under the new United Russia party. Judges and the security services fell in line or were removed in purges. Oversight was twisted into enforcement of the presidential will. Economic policy aimed to nationalize expenses and privatize profits, looting the country to line the pockets of a few dozen well-connected oligarchs. Foreign policy also moved out of public view, conducted by billionaires in resorts and on yachts. A flood of Russian money washed over European politicians and institutions. Kremlin troll farms and bots made social media into a national and then global weapon.

If all of this is starting to sound a little familiar, welcome to the Putinization of America, comrade! Trump’s deference to the Russian autocrat has become full-blown imitation. Musk’s promotion of Kremlin-friendly candidates in Germany and Romania and his attacks on Ukraine are bizarre but not random. Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance.

Trump didn’t campaign on cutting cancer research and foreign aid any more than he did on threatening to annex Greenland and Canada or lifting sanctions on Putin’s dictatorship and extorting Ukraine. What these things have in common is that they provoke conflicts with allies, which then allow him to distinguish the truly loyal.

Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Ronald Reagan gave a famous speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 in which he said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size … A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” As a “Reagan Communist” myself back in the U.S.S.R., I sympathize with those who want to shrink and limit government power. But replacing it with a junta of unaccountable elites—the Putin model—is not an improvement.

Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control.

But why has Trump made Putin’s agenda his top priority? The GOP has been compliant with every Trump move so far, but a few members still take issue with Trump calling Zelensky a dictator while cozying up to Putin. So why pick fights with his narrow congressional majorities over Russia so early, with such urgency? The same could be asked of Musk’s reckless slash-and-burn tactics with DOGE, which are beginning to provoke backlash as popular programs are cut and job losses pile up, along with lawsuits.

We may never know why Trump is so perversely loyal to Putin. We don’t know exactly why Musk went all in for Trump and Russia or what his deep conflicts of interest in the U.S. and China portend. But the urgency of their actions I do understand, and it’s a dire warning.

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever. They are racing to the point where they will not be able to afford to lose control of the mechanisms they are ripping up and remaking in their image. What such people will do when they believe that mounting a coup is the lesser risk to their fortunes and power cannot be predicted.

There may be a Pulitzer Prize awaiting the person who discovers the answer to the question “Why?” But stopping Putinization—the looting by cronies, the centralization of authority, the moving of decisions into unaccountable private hands—is the vital matter of the moment. Trump admiring Putin is far less dangerous than Trump becoming him.

The ‘Gulf of America’ Is the Wrong Fight to Pick

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › trump-gulf-renaming-order › 681704

The executive order rechristening the body of water known internationally as the “Gulf of Mexico” is not an easy document to take seriously. Portions of it read like a child’s research paper: “The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species.” The import of this and other facts is never quite explained. Perhaps the snapper will taste better now that it comes from the “Gulf of America.”

So, no, this is not a serious document. Is it an illegitimate one? The Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news-gathering organizations, appears to think so. Last month, a few days after Donald Trump issued the order, the AP announced that it would continue using the name “Gulf of Mexico.” This week, the Trump administration retaliated by barring the AP’s reporters from covering White House events, placing the agency in an unenviable bind. The AP argues, convincingly, that denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment. To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have—especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it’s a fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place.

A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from “legally questionable” to “plainly unconstitutional.” The “Gulf of America” rebrand is not one of them. A federal law passed in 1890 and updated in 1947 empowers the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “standardize” how the federal government refers to places. The board answers to the secretary of the interior, who answers to the president. That’s the same legal authority under which the Obama administration changed the name “Mt. McKinley” to “Denali.”

[David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat]

In fact, if Barack Obama hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the body of water between Mexico and Florida today. In physics, every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. In the Trump era, every progressive action generates an opposite MAGA reaction—but not an equal one. Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” began by changing “Denali” back to “Mt. McKinley.” Then, like an infomercial pitchman—but wait, there’s more—Trump tossed in the “Gulf of America” change, almost as a bonus.

Substantively, the stunt has nothing in common with the Obama administration’s decision on Mt. McKinley. The state of Alaska formally requested the change back in 1975, hardly a time of rampant woke excess, on the basis that “Denali”—the mountain’s historic name, still widely used by Alaskans—was a much better fit than “Mt. McKinley,” after a president who had never set foot in the state. Still, at a certain level of abstraction, Trump’s campaign to rename (and re-rename) mountains, gulfs, and military bases follows the same logic as the progressive version. Renaming a base named for a Confederate general, or a school named for a racist ex-president, is a declaration that values have changed since the days when those names were seen as acceptable. But in a democracy, values are determined by majority rule, and they don’t shift in only one direction. They can shift back.

The more that politicians mess around with place names, the more important it becomes for avowedly apolitical institutions to respond according to consistent principles. This is not so easy to do. In its style-guide update, the AP said that it would continue using “Gulf of Mexico” because the Gulf is an international body of water that has been known by that name for 400 years. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world,” it said, “the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” It would, however, honor the change back to “Mt. McKinley” because, it said, “the area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.” (The Atlantic’s style guide matches the AP’s on this matter.)

But the federal law giving Trump the power to rename Denali applies explicitly “to both domestic and foreign geographic names.” If the AP is going to follow the federal government’s legally valid naming conventions, then it should go along with “Gulf of America” by default, no matter how stupid it sounds. Carving an exception because of the Gulf’s 400-year history is arbitrary—the same sort of appeal to tradition that reactionaries make to prevent progressive-coded changes. Why, indeed, should modern society continue to honor a name imposed by Spanish conquistadors? Nor is it uncommon for different countries to call a shared body of water by different names: What Americans call the “Rio Grande,” Mexicans call the “Rio Bravo.” This has not caused any kind of breakdown of the collective geographic imagination.

News organizations routinely change how they refer to places, and many of these decisions carry the whiff of politics. In 2019, the AP announced that the Ukrainian city of Kiev would henceforth be spelled “Kyiv.” (Chicken Kiev would remain untouched.) “To many Ukrainians,” the AP explained, “the former spelling Kiev appears outdated because it is associated with a time when Ukraine was part of the Russian and Soviet states, rather than an independent country.” That is a perfectly understandable reason for making the change, but it is also, on its face, a political one. By contrast, news organizations have resisted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s request to refer to his country as “Türkiye”—even after the U.S. State Department agreed to do so in 2023.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

These sorts of principled judgments are, as I said, hard to make. Trump makes them harder still by blowing past all standards of reasonableness or good faith, leaving high-minded institutions struggling to adapt. Even the best-designed rules break down when one side starts playing a completely different game. What if our president had decided to call it the “Gulf of Trump”? What if he had tried to rename the Atlantic Ocean? The man forces us to contemplate the previously unthinkable, because there is no norm or tradition that he won’t abrogate. For 134 years, “follow the Board on geographic names” was a simple, commonsense rule to follow. Then Trump got his hands on the Board.

None of this means that the Gulf of Mexico is now actually the Gulf of America in any kind of objective or even linguistic sense. Trump controls the Department of the Interior but not the English language. More than 12 years after it was renamed for Governor Hugh L. Carey, New Yorkers still refer to the passage between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn as the “Battery Tunnel.” Washington, D.C.’s airport was named for Ronald Reagan in 1998; many if not most residents still call it “National.” The American people can decide for themselves whether to go with the “Gulf of Mexico” or the “Gulf of America.” And if you ever find yourself at a loss, here’s a tip: You can always just call it the “Gulf.”

How Progressives Broke the Government

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › why-nothing-works-marc-dunkelman › 681407

Ed Koch was angry—and perhaps a bit embarrassed. It was the spring of 1986, and his Parks Department had wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. At the height of the crack epidemic, the ice-skating facility’s closure hardly represented the worst of New York’s problems. But the Parks Department’s ineptitude fed a notion that the city was fundamentally ungovernable. A mayor famous for cheekily asking New Yorkers “How am I doing?” appeared not to be doing very well at all.

The trouble had begun six years earlier, when the happy little attraction near the Plaza Hotel was abruptly closed for repairs. Having constructed the rink during the go-go years following the Second World War, the city then let it decay. To cut costs, the Parks Department started to explore the possibility of replacing its clunky brine-based refrigeration system with Freon, which was purported to cost $20,000 less a year to operate. So, in 1980, city hall ordered the rink shut down, the pipes beneath it torn out, and the whole system uprooted to make way for a $4.9 million replacement that was to take less than three years to complete.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back.

The project quickly went sideways. After ripping up the old system, a contractor installed 22 miles of new pipe for the Freon. But when that initial phase was completed, the department had yet to secure a contractor to pave over the new piping. For more than a year, it was exposed to the elements; flooded by an underground stream; and, according to subsequent investigations, subjected to stray electric currents. When, in 1982, pavers were finally hired, engineers underestimated how much concrete would be required to cover the pipes. Rather than call for more, the pavers diluted the insufficient supply. Then, to protect the delicate piping, they chose not to deploy vibration machines typically used to collapse air pockets in concrete. The result was predictable. When the job was done, the ice on the surface melted. The rink simply didn’t work.

The mayor seemed to have little choice but to order the Parks Department to begin anew. To rip up the piping. To abandon the new technology. To revert to the traditional refrigeration system. That, of course, would require the department not only to close Wollman for another two years but to add another $3 million to the taxpayers’ tab. The whole thing was looking like an unmitigated public-relations disaster until, almost by the grace of God, Koch received an unexpected reprieve: A local developer offered to step in and make things right.

[Read: Privatization is changing America's relationship with its physical stuff]

In an unusual arrangement, Koch cut a deal to pay the developer to take control of the rink project, complete it for a fee, and hand it back to the city. “If it costs less, we’ll pay less,” the mayor explained when some questioned the wisdom of trusting someone outside government to do something that would typically have been handled by a public authority. “If it costs more, he’ll pay.”

Lost in the focus on the city’s incompetence was a more nuanced reality. More than 60 years earlier, the New York state legislature had passed a law designed to prevent mayors (and the machine bosses who controlled them) from throwing municipal construction gigs to politically connected contractors. At the time, progressives in both parties rightly presumed that the state was rife with graft—that construction companies were bribing municipal officials to secure contracts at inflated prices. Wicks Law had aimed to solve the problem by requiring cities to hire, separately, the lowest-bidding general construction, plumbing, electrical, heating, and ventilation contractors on any municipal project slated to cost more than $50,000. Mayors were prohibited from hiring general contractors. As a result, Ed Koch’s Parks Department was legally prohibited from hiring a single firm to deliver a project on time and on budget.

Fortunately for Koch, his collaboration with the outside developer was a huge success. The project cost less than the original estimate—$750,000 less—and the rink opened ahead of the holiday season. But from a public-relations perspective, the developer’s success just seemed to highlight city hall’s incompetence. The Parks Department, as columnists and reporters liked to remind the public, had wasted six years and $13 million on a project the private sector managed to complete in six months and at roughly a sixth of the cost. Asked about the lesson learned from the whole episode, the developer responded: “I guess it says a lot about the city.” The government was fundamentally incompetent. The municipal bureaucracy was a nightmare. Even liberal New Yorkers, many of whom reviled President Ronald Reagan, would have been tempted to nod along to his famous quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Not long thereafter, a reporter traipsed over to Central Park to interview members of the public. A local man enjoying a skate was asked his impressions of the rigmarole. “Anybody who can get anything done right and done on time in New York is a bona fide hero,” the skater replied. And it’s probably safe to say the developer would have agreed. His name, as it happens, was Donald Trump.

Roughly a century before the fiasco in Central Park, the Progressive movement was launched to address the same perception of government incompetence. City halls around the country, caught in the grip of rapacious political machines, simply couldn’t get things done—mayors and governors couldn’t build sewer and water lines, couldn’t maintain parks and school systems, couldn’t manage the nation’s messy transition from farm to factory. Progressivism emerged to stand up a system that would work. But the reformers drawn into the movement were torn between two ideas about how to turn things around. Some, adopting a perspective that would come to be associated with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, believed that the key was returning power to the individuals and small businesses that had defined 19th-century life. Others, many of whom would align themselves with Theodore Roosevelt, took the opposite view, having grown convinced that imbuing bigger, more robust bureaucracies with new power—public-service commissions and public authorities, for example—was the only realistic way to overcome the power wielded by the political hacks and charlatans then dominating American life.

The tension between these two ideas—Brandeis’s Jeffersonian impulse to push power down and Roosevelt’s Hamiltonian impulse to push it up—became the most consequential divide within Progressivism. Faced with the pernicious influence of monopolistic corporations, for example, the two camps were at odds over whether to prioritize efforts to break up trusts, thereby enabling competition from below, or to subject corporate behemoths to more stringent regulation from above. The Jeffersonians scored a handful of major victories before the First World War, including breaking up monopolies such as Standard Oil. But in the decades that followed, Progressivism’s Hamiltonian impulse came to predominate, advancing the notion that big, powerful government was the key to doing big, important things. The New Deal was defined by an alphabet soup of robust bureaucracies empowered to wield enormous authority—the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority among them. And while the Jeffersonian impulse did not fade entirely—Wicks Law was passed in the 1920s—the Progressive project largely sought to empower what many would come to call the “establishment.”

[From the March 1940 issue: America can build]

Then, in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the teeter-totter tipped back across its fulcrum. The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s—the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, an environmental reawakening, second-wave feminism, Watergate—soured reformers on the very establishment they’d helped erect. Rather than empower centralized institutions, they would now endeavor to rein them in, placing guardrails around various power brokers and giving voice to the ordinary people the establishment ignored. The movement became culturally averse to power. Over the past half century, that Jeffersonian impulse to check authority—to return influence to the meek among us—has become progressivism’s abiding priority. And rarely do those inside the movement register that, entirely apart from the influence of conservatism, these two warring impulses cut in separate directions.

The saga at Wollman Rink encapsulates the underlying dynamic. Wicks Law had been passed with good intentions—a Jeffersonian check on municipal corruption. Mayor Koch had wanted the Parks Department to restore the rink for good reason—here was a Hamiltonian bureaucracy endeavoring to serve the public. Combined, however, progressivism’s two impulses served to render government incompetent. And the resulting gridlock wasn’t just a black eye for public institutions. It cleaved an opening for a figure like Trump.

Over the past half century, progressivism’s cultural aversion to power has turned the Democratic Party—purportedly the “party of government”—into an institution that almost instinctively seeks to cut government down. Progressives are so fearful of establishment abuse that reformers tend to prefer to tighten rather than loosen their grip on authority. The movement discounts whatever good the government might do in service of ensuring that it won’t do bad. And that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.

Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective. But for progressives, that reality can quickly become a distraction. They can’t control the MAGA agenda—but they can offer a more palatable alternative. If the progressive agenda is going to have a chance—if government is going to be given the leash required to combat inequality, to solve poverty, and to fight prejudice—progressives will first need to convince voters that government is capable of delivering on its promises. At present, progressives are too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why they so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Their cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.

America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in all these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves.

Nothing seems to work. And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, both sides in any given debate—those who want to change things and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policy making into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The tires screech. But the car remains in place.

The political effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government is captured by moneyed interests; that it lines the pockets of the powerful few; that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do more to pursue the public interest.

Ordinary people who experience the morass of inept bureaucracy will, like the New Yorkers frustrated with Mayor Koch’s inability to restore Wollman Rink, be tempted to turn to someone with the individual moxie to get the job done. That was Donald Trump’s appeal in the mid-1980s, and he employs the same basic rationale as an iconoclastic politician on the national stage. But it’s not just that unrepentant Jeffersonianism doesn’t work. Ordinary people aren’t monolithically averse to power. They don’t want public authority abused, but they know that progress is impossible without leadership. And insofar as the subtext of contemporary progressive ideology is that anyone wielding power is in the wrong, the movement alienates itself from voters who might otherwise support its agenda.

This is the crux of the political argument for rebalancing progressivism’s Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses. The movement supports growing government so that it can take a stronger hand in protecting the vulnerable. But then progressives excoriate government as a captured tool of the patriarchy. Those of us who style ourselves progressive typically gloss over that tension for a simple reason: It’s awkward and confusing. Most progressives want to both empower government to combat climate change and curtail government’s authority over a woman’s right to choose. And squaring that circle is more intellectually difficult than standing strong against Trumpism, or calling out conservative bigotry, or attacking the figures eager to steer the country toward fascism. There’s no storming the barricades in support of a healthy balance between contradictory impulses. And so progressives typically retreat into reflexive anti-conservatism.

Criticizing your adversaries is not, in and of itself, a terrible political strategy. When the other side supports unpopular ideas—separating children from their parents at the border, limiting women’s bodily autonomy, stripping away environmental protections, cutting Social Security and Medicare—there’s little downside to drawing the public’s attention to its agenda. But for progressives, there’s danger in that appeal. A movement consumed by exasperation over how so many people could have voted for Trump, or supported his agenda, or excused his conduct after losing in 2020, will be less inclined to correct its own errors. If progressives put making government work not on the periphery of the movement’s agenda but at its center, voters might be less vulnerable to the sirens of the populist right.

[Read: The perception gap that explains American politics]

There is, of course, an authentic and powerful reason for progressives to worry about making government hum. A government that operates expeditiously—a public authority with fewer guardrails—will inevitably be used not only to serve progressive desires but to pursue conservative ends as well. Any change that would have made it easier for the Obama administration to identify well-intentioned “shovel ready” projects in 2009 and 2010, or for clean-energy companies to build transmission lines through Arkansas and Maine, or for developers to build affordable housing in New York and California, might well have opened the door for someone else to build a legion of coal-fired power plants or gentrify minority neighborhoods.

But that’s a risk progressives today need to take, a bargain they need to accept. A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism. Voters are drawn to figures like Donald Trump not because public authority is too pervasive, but because government can’t deliver. His refrain that the “deep state” has sold the ordinary citizen out—that insiders are constantly making “bad deals” on the nation’s behalf—lands, in no small part, because voters have witnessed the incompetence. Lionizing government and then ensuring that it fails is a terrible political strategy. The movement needs to change course not only because it’s bad policy, but because it’s bad politics as well.

That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than 50 years old, has run its course. Today, the core obstacle to progressivism’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back.

Trump Takes Over the Kennedy Center

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 02 › trump-kennedy-center-arts › 681613

Updated at 7:48 p.m. on February 7, 2025

Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he first came to Washington. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to let that happen again.

Trump plans to announce the dismissal of multiple members of the Kennedy Center board as soon as today, a group likely to include recent appointees of former President Joe Biden; among those on the current board are the Democratic political strategist Mike Donilon, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Democratic National Committee finance chair Chris Korge. The White House has also had discussions about having Trump himself installed as chair of the board, according to two people familiar with the purge, who requested anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

(Several hours after this article published, Trump confirmed the news, writing on Truth Social that he planned to make the Kennedy Center “GREAT AGAIN” by terminating “multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He wrote that he planned to announce a “new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” adding, “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”)

“The Kennedy Center has received no formal notifications from the White House about what you’ve reported,” Eileen Andrews, the center’s vice president of public relations, told us before Trump put out his Truth Social post.

Trump never attended the Kennedy Center’s annual gala event during his first term, as artists protested his administration and threatened to boycott Kennedy Center events at the White House. Now Trump is making clear that he will not be sidelined again from the most celebrated cultural institution in Washington.

“The attitude is different this time. The attitude is Go fuck yourself,” said one of the people familiar with the planning. “It’s ridiculous for four years for Trump and Melania to say, ‘We’re not going to the Kennedy Center because Robert De Niro doesn’t like us.’” (De Niro was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009 and spoke at the 2024 event.)

Trump’s relationship with the arts world has long been strained. During his first year in office, all 17 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a nonpartisan advisory body whose members at the time had been appointed by President Barack Obama, resigned over what they called Trump’s “hateful rhetoric” following the white-nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump later disbanded the group, rather than replace the committee, which was established by Ronald Reagan.  

Later that year, three of the five artists recognized at the annual Kennedy Center Honors said they would not attend or were considering a boycott of the traditional White House reception before the gala, citing various objections to Trump’s leadership. Trump, in response, canceled the reception and became the first sitting president not to attend the gala at any point in his term since its inception in 1978.

Trump showed a similar lack of interest in the National Medal of Arts, the government’s highest award for artists and arts patrons, which the president oversees. In his first term, Trump distributed just nine medals, including an award to the musicians of the U.S. military. Obama had awarded 76 medals over eight years, and Biden gave out 33 during his four-year term.

Trump was more circumspect about the Kennedy Center, alternately praising and criticizing federal funding for the institution. “They do need some funding. And I said, ‘Look, that was a Democrat request. That was not my request. But you got to give them something,” Trump said in 2020, when asked about a proposed $25 million in additional funding as part of a COVID-relief bill. “The Kennedy Center, they do a beautiful job—an incredible job.”

Weeks later, he changed his position. “I hated putting it in the bill because it’s just not appropriate,” he said of the funding.

If Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center board, he would replace the philanthropist David Rubenstein, who has held the post for 14 years but signaled that he will move on after September 2026. A week after Trump’s second inauguration, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter announced her own plans to step down at the end of the year.

For his second term, Trump is taking a more assertive approach to a range of cultural institutions. Within hours of his inauguration, he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which Biden had revived in 2022, preempting any possibility of another mass resignation. He then moved to impose his own views on government-funded cultural projects.

Nine days into his second term, he signed an executive order restarting planning for an idea from his first term: a national “Garden of American Heroes,” location to be determined. Trump had previously named 244 honorees—52 of them women—who would get statues, including figures from science, sports, entertainment, politics, and business, as well as some of the nation’s founders. (The family of at least one would-be honoree, the anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, later asked that he not be included.)

Trump also moved quickly to impose his vision on plans for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—July 4, 2026, also known as the Semiquincentennial. He created a new advisory panel, called Task Force 250, that he will chair to support a congressionally funded organization that has already begun planning events.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he wanted the Semiquincentennial celebrations to last more than a year, from Memorial Day 2025—just 15 weeks away—until July 4, 2026. He proposed a “Great American State Fair” in Iowa as one component, an homage to the state’s own summer fair tradition but featuring pavilions from each state. He also promised the creation of a new national high-school sporting contest, called the Patriot Games, to take place alongside the fair. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” he said in 2023.

Trump’s newfound interest in the arts represents a departure of sorts. In his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to pull funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two major sources of support for arts and cultural programs around the country. But appropriators in Congress overruled him, and by the end of his term, annual funding was up slightly from the beginning of his term, sitting at more than $167 million for each agency. (The number rose to $207 million during Biden’s presidency.)

This time around, Trump has asked the chairs of both the arts and humanities endowments to join Task Force 250. Nina Ozlu Tunceli, the top lobbyist at the nonprofit Arts Action Fund, who has worked for decades with Congress to secure arts funding, told us she is hopeful that Trump’s interest in the 250th celebration will provide “a very good lifeline” for the endowments’ funding.

Still, Trump’s executive order calling for the “termination” of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government will become a source of tension—and another way for him to assert his will on the arts. In recent budgets under Biden, House appropriators praised the endowments for “addressing equity through the arts” and “diversity at the national endowment.” “The [Appropriations] Committee directs the NEA to continue prioritizing diversity in its work,” read a section of the budget for fiscal year 2023.

Given the changes that have already begun under Trump, Ozlu Tunceli said, “those programs will definitely be removed.”

What Does the Department of Education Actually Do?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › what-does-the-department-of-education-actually-do › 681597

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump really knows how to sell someone on working for him. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job at putting yourself out of a job,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office. That’s Linda McMahon, whom he’s nominated to lead the Department of Education. The president promised that he would abolish the department during the campaign, though doing so would require an act of Congress. But he’s been vague about what that would mean—and one reason might be that many people are a little vague on what the department actually does.

Republicans have been calling for an end to the Department of Education basically since it was established, in 1979. The specific arguments have varied, but they’ve usually boiled down to some version of the idea that education decisions should be made at the local level, rather than by the federal government. As President Ronald Reagan discovered when he tried to axe the department, this is more popular as a talking point than as policy.

Contrary to what some attacks on the department say or imply, it doesn’t determine curricula. Those are set at the state and local levels, though the federal government does sometimes set guidelines or attach strings to funding in exchange for meeting metrics. During the Obama administration, Tea Party activists railed against “Common Core” standards, which they said were federal overreach. In fact, Common Core was neither created nor mandated by the federal government. The Obama years actually saw the federal government step back from control by ending No Child Left Behind, a controversial George W. Bush initiative.

One of the Education Department’s biggest footprints nationally is as a distributor of federal funds. Drawing from its roughly $80 billion budget, it sends billions to state and local school systems every year, especially to poorer districts, via the Title I program, which aims to provide equal education through teacher training, instructional material, and enrichment programs. The department also provides billions in financial aid—both through programs like Pell Grants and, since 2010, by making student loans directly to borrowers—and it runs FAFSA, the widely used mechanism for student financial-aid requests. (Less than 5 percent of the federal budget goes to education.)

The Education Department also enforces rules around civil rights—most notably through Title IX, which prevents discrimination in federally funded education on the basis of sex and has been interpreted to govern issues including equality in athletics programs and how schools handle sexual harassment and sexual violence. President Joe Biden also expanded protections for transgender students by issuing rules through the department banning discrimination “based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.” These powers have made the department a major target for conservatives. (The Trump administration promptly withdrew Biden’s rules.)

Trump’s platform called for the end of the Education Department, but in an interview with Time last year, Trump suggested a “virtual closure.” He was vague about what that would mean. “You’re going to need some people just to make sure they’re teaching English in the schools. Okay, you know English and mathematics, let’s say,” he said. “But we want to move education back to the states.” This doesn’t make clear how he’d manage this enforcement, nor what would happen to federal education spending. Federal funds accounted for about 14 percent of state and local education funding in the 2022 fiscal year, the most recent data available—a lifeline for many districts, and especially crucial in some red states that have supported Trump.

Some of the president’s allies have been more specific about their plans. Project 2025, for example, wants to dismantle the Education Department as well. The document suggests that the government could simply distribute education funding to states to use as they see fit, with no conditions. In practice, that would likely mean red states funneling more money into charter schools, religious education, and other alternatives to public schools. (Project 2025 is skeptical of what it calls “the woke-dominated system of public schools.”) The plan would return student lending to the private sector. But even Project 2025 foresees many of the Education Department’s functions, such as Title IX matters and the Office of Postsecondary Education, being dispersed to other parts of the federal government.

While Trump talks about getting rid of the Education Department, his actions say otherwise. “Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda,” my colleague Lora Kelley reported in November. Yesterday, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes in women’s sports. To do so, he’s using—you guessed it—the power of the Education Department.

Other conservative priorities, such as shutting down diversity programs, probing and punishing anti-Semitism on campuses, and attacking affirmative action in admissions, are being run through the Education Department. These functions could be shifted elsewhere, including to the Justice Department, but Trump is still actively pursuing them.

And there’s the rub. A president could, in theory, get rid of the Education Department, but most presidents, including Trump, can’t and don’t want to get rid of the things it does. The situation is reminiscent of the federal grant freeze last month. Trump campaigned on cutting spending, and many people cheered. But once his administration tried to do it, swift backlash—including from Republicans in Congress—forced him to retreat. Slashing government spending is a popular idea in the abstract. The problem is that at some point you have to start cutting off the specific programs that people actually like and need.

Related:

Trump wants to have it both ways on education. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

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The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. Gazans don’t need a riviera. They need water. The spies are shown the door.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s deadline for federal workers to accept a deferred resignation buyout. The Justice Department agreed to temporarily restrict Department of Government Efficiency staffers from having access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payment system. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that his plan for Gaza would involve Israel turning Gaza over to the United States after the fighting ceases. He added that no U.S. soldiers would be needed.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive, Kate Cray writes. The philosophy is hard on parents and children alike. The Weekly Planet: Trump is inheriting an environmental disaster, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk.

By Arthur C. Brooks

As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”

Read the full article.

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Read. Up until 1968, government bureaucrats oversaw British theater. They censored countless works of genius—and left behind an archive of suppression, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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