Although Trump's shadow continues to loom over the Republican candidates, there is a broad understanding that the former president remains key to winning the party's primaries.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur running for the Republican presidential nomination, has initiated a war against what he views as an outdated, establishment foreign policy. He is deeply skeptical of NATO. He wants to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, detach Russia from China, and compel Taiwan to defend itself without America. He also proposed reducing American financial aid to Israel, a stance long considered politically impossible on the right, before saying he would do so only with Israel’s approval. This week, Ramaswamy attempted to justify such stands with an essay in The American Conservative called “A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine.”

Invoking Presidents George Washington, James Monroe, and Richard Nixon—whom Ramaswamy has called “the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country, probably in all of American history”—the article appears to be an effort to lend coherence and gravitas to Ramaswamy’s worldview. It also seems to be an attempt to counter the attack by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley that he has “no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” In the article, Ramaswamy promises to restore American national pride and identity after decades of feckless liberal internationalist and neoconservative policies. “We will be Uncle Sucker no more,” he writes.

[David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest]

It would be foolish to underestimate Ramaswamy, who has vaulted past many of his detractors to become a breakout star in the GOP primary. And at a moment when Republican support for the war in Ukraine is plummeting, his call for retrenchment, much like Donald Trump’s denunciation of the Iraq War in 2016, is perfectly pitched to appeal to the party’s nationalist wing. But just how realistic and viable is his vision?

The truth is that Ramaswamy is slapping the realist brand onto a hodgepodge of policy proposals that are divorced from reality. Realism is about a number of things—the balance of power, national interests, spheres of influence—but one thing it is not about is wishful thinking. Yet that is what Ramaswamy is peddling. His vision is no less dogmatic than the neoconservatism he professes to despise, substituting the belief that America should intervene everywhere with the conviction that it shouldn’t intervene anywhere. And his proposals almost seem calculated to injure, not promote, American interests.

Like more than a few Republicans these days, Ramaswamy is obsessed with China, which he depicts as the locus of evil in the world, and cavalier about Russia, which stands accused of perpetrating war crimes in the heart of Europe. He does not explain how China’s current troubles—a faltering economy, an aging population, grave environmental problems—can be reconciled with his portrait of a totalitarian power about to turn a new generation of Americans, as he averred in a speech at the Nixon library, into “a bunch of Chinese serfs.”

[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth]

Ramaswamy’s demagoguery about China is reminiscent of the apprehensions voiced by American conservatives after World War II, when the GOP contained an “Asia First” wing, led by Senator Robert A. Taft and others who disparaged American aid to Europe and claimed, improbably, that American military supplies to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would allow him to easily topple the communist dictatorship on the mainland. Ramaswamy seems to want to avert a conflict with Beijing, but his truculent calls for confronting China would render a fresh world war more, not less, probable.

In his American Conservative essay, Ramaswamy lauds Nixon as the president whose foreign policy he most admires. “He got us out of Vietnam,” Ramaswamy writes. Not exactly. As president, Nixon embarked upon the policy of “Vietnamization” to reduce American troops, but he needlessly expanded the war with a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge, led by the genocidal Pol Pot, ended up coming to power in 1975. No less addled is Ramaswamy’s grasp of the history of Nixon’s opening to China. He announces that, as president, he would carry out a new version of what Nixon accomplished in 1972 by traveling to China—visiting Moscow in 2025 to create peace with Russia and then “elevate [it] as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.” But Nixon never sought to isolate the Soviet Union; he sought to create a stable equilibrium among the three countries, pursuing what he and Henry Kissinger called “triangular diplomacy.” In addition, Nixon and Kissinger hoped that a web of economic ties between America and the Soviet Union would constrain its propensity to expand abroad—the very approach that Ramaswamy now condemns when it comes to long-standing American policy toward China.

Declaring that “Putin is the new Mao,” Ramaswamy claims that he will be able to woo the Russian leader away from China. He proposes to bow to Russian suzerainty over the territories it controls in eastern Ukraine and oppose Ukrainian membership in NATO “in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” But as others have noted, those two countries do not have a military alliance. In any case, Putin has repeatedly displayed no interest in serious peace negotiations over Ukraine, a country that he remains wholly intent on reducing to the status of an imperial Russian colony.

[David Frum: The next U.S. president will need to defeat isolationism]

Like Trump before him, Ramaswamy tries to disguise his apparent animus toward democratic countries by scorning what he maintains is Western Europe’s piddling military spending. But Central and Western Europe’s military outlays reached $345 billion last year, almost 30 percent higher than they were a decade ago. The obstacle to real reform, we are told, is an ossified NATO bureaucracy that is pushing liberal internationalist missions whenever and wherever it can. Ramaswamy claims that he would transform NATO into a “strictly defensive military alliance”—as though it were an imperialist power marauding around the world looking for wars to wage.

Ramaswamy’s candidacy has exposed real rifts within the GOP over foreign policy. The Wall Street Journal denounced him for seeking to sell out Ukraine, and National Review asked whether “he’s auditioning for a geopolitical game show instead of the presidency of the United States.” To some extent, his comments can be dismissed as bluster. But he and his fellow self-proclaimed realists—a cluster of activists and thinkers at places such as The American Conservative, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—are responding to a genuine, if dismaying, phenomenon in the American electorate. No one is trying to exploit it more audaciously than Ramaswamy, who continues to offer chimerical promises about restoring America’s national identity. We now know better than to disregard such salesmen.

Popular sentiment has a role in the political life of all nations, but the Jewish state, born after two millennia of persecution and yearning, offers a particularly strong case study in how emotion can affect politics—underlying everything from ideology to the drawing of lines on a map. The last six months alone has seen a surge of strong sentiment, ironically, over the question of who gets to decide whether a particular law is “reasonable.” The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have filled with passionate protestors, their faces distorted by crying or yelling, waving giant flags as water cannons force them off their feet. And the debate has been colored as much by argument as by resentment, anxiety, pride, and a plethora of other potent feelings.

Two new books, Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State, zero in on those emotions, like love and fear, which are so seldom acknowledged for what they are but play an outsize role in shaping politics.

Though written from different angles—Illouz is a prominent sociologist, and Penslar is a distinguished historian—both echo the brilliant Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Historians have always acknowledged the impact of emotions on the body politic. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides emphasized how fear led the Spartans to declare war on Athens, how fear deafened Athenians to the reason of Pericles, and how fear made them vulnerable to the demagoguery of Cleon. But Thucydides also emphasized the role of love, noting that Pericles failed to persuade his fellow citizens to love Athens and lamenting that Alcibiades, Pericles’s unworthy successor, seduced the Athenians with his proposal to invade Sicily—generating a bolt of eros that, after galvanizing the city, led to its eventual downfall.

More than two millennia later, fear and love are still tearing us apart and bringing us together. Both Illouz and Penslar consider these and other emotions. On the dark side, there are the usual suspects: resentment, disgust, and (in Penslar’s case) hatred; on the light side, Illouz focuses on pride as well as love, while Penslar takes up gratitude.

Consider fear. Illouz paraphrases a famous remark by Thomas Hobbes in writing that when Israel was born, fear was born as its twin. She neglects to add that Hobbes insisted that the news of the Spanish Armada invasion in 1588 caused his mother to give premature birth to him. As for Israel, the fear that accompanied the country's founding stemmed not just from the news that the Arab armies were invading in response to its announcement of independence but also from the “quasi-metaphysical belief,” as Illouz puts it—stoked by centuries of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic experiences that climaxed in the Holocaust—that the world, quite simply, demanded the annihilation of the Jews.

This sense of constant threat is an active force in the country, where fear is permanently installed over the political landscape, giving rise to what Illouz calls a “securitist democracy” whose politics are shaped by existential imperatives. Of course, she does not dismiss the serious and several threats that confront Israel. (Among the people she interviewed were three women who belong to a kibbutz in the northwestern Negev, where “constant fear” dictates their daily schedules and sentiments.) But Illouz also emphasizes the crippling fears that inform the lives of Arabs living in Israel. As a lawyer in East Jerusalem observes, one “lives with the constant threat of incarceration, of stop and frisk … You are in constant fear of being in the wrong place.”

[Read: After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently]

In the realm of fear, the demagogue is king. The fear spurred by a clear and present danger can have a positive consequence, forging a sense of unity and community where none had before existed. Much more often, however, fear is exploited by political leaders for partisan goals inimical to the nation’s well-being. Illouz describes the dependence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long political career—he has served as Israel’s prime minister longer than Franklin Roosevelt did as America’s president—on his relentless and skillful manipulation of fear. Illouz even goes so far as to say that Netanyahu wrote the playbook to which Donald Trump’s political career is an appendix. Netanyahu’s rhetoric, she concludes, portrays a state of Israel divided between two camps: “one that would defend the survival of the state, another that would threaten it.”

Similarly, Penslar associates Netanyahu with what the author calls “Catastrophic Zionism,” which combines and capitalizes on the “fear for the survival of Jews outside Israel and those in the state of Israel itself.” Like Illouz, Penslar emphasizes that Netanyahu fueled this fear on the eve of the 2015 elections, when his campaign deliberately blurred the line between Palestinians living in the occupied territories and those who were Israeli citizens, sending a text message warning supporters that “Arab voters [are] moving in droves to the polling stations.” It was a winning strategy for Netanyahu, as it was for other populists one year later. In 2016, as British voters prepared to vote on the Brexit referendum, posters appeared picturing droves of nonwhite migrants under the bold red warning Breaking Point, while American voters, poised to vote in the 2016 presidential election, listened to the Republican candidate Donald Trump warning against droves of drug dealers and rapists massing at the southern border.

We tend to hate the things we fear. With great care and clarity, Penslar traces not just the long  history of hatred aimed at Jews by anti-Semites and many anti-Zionists. He also tracks the hatred that most Zionists directed at the British during the mandate governing Palestine from 1918 to 1948—a hatred that shifted to Palestinians after independence. His summary of Israel’s denial of its citizens’ own anti-Palestinian hatred and its baleful consequences is especially powerful. Though many Israelis, Penslar writes, “bore the knowledge of what they had done during the 1948 war, the instruments of official memory … presented a sanitized version, denying not only the violence wrought by Jews against Palestinians but also the presence of hatred and rage behind it.”

We also hate those things which disgust us. In another of her books, From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum measures this emotion’s noxious effects on societies. Whereas anger, which can lead to urgent political or social reforms, has its uses, disgust is worse than useless. As Nussbaum argues, it leads at best to “escape and disengagement” and at worst to racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. Illouz, who cites this book of Nussbaum’s, argues that disgust also fuels anti-Arab sentiment in Israel, a trend boosted by what she calls “disgust entrepreneurs” whose task is “to create, engineer, and reinforce disgust from some groups to others.”

One trailblazing entrepreneur was among America’s most toxic exports: Meir Kahane, the founder of Israel’s ultranationalist and racist Kach Party. His extremist views on citizenship, marriage, and education—all of which align with a politics of purity driven by fear of contamination—set the standard for admirers who now have prominent roles in Netnayahu’s government, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current national-security minister, who belonged to Kach’s youth movement, and Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister, who called for “wiping out” a West Bank town that was recently at the center of violent actions against settlers.

Ben-Gvir spoke at a commemoration for Kahane last year and reminded his audience, “Ultimately, Rabbi Kahane was about love.” That love can be as problematic as it is powerful was underscored by Ben-Gvir’s proviso that Kahane loved Israel “without compromise, without any other consideration.” In a superb account of the ties that bind Eros and Eretz Israel, Penslar reveals the pivotal role played by historians and novelists—not just Jewish writers such as Heinrich Graetz, whose sentimental historical narratives about Jews over the centuries won a wide following in Europe in the 19th century, but also Gentile writers such as George Eliot. The eponymous hero of the latter’s novel Daniel Deronda, a noble and sensitive youth who discovers his Jewish roots, in effect became Victorian England’s rejoinder to the self-interested, unscrupulous character of Fagan from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist— Deronda was someone with whom Jewish and Gentile readers could fall in love.

Penslar pursues the impact of literary works on the evolution of American Jewry’s emotional ties to Israel well into the 20th century, including a long glance at Leon Uris’s Exodus. Published in 1958, the novel sold more than 20 million copies and galvanized American Jewish readers. As they became enamored with the characters Ari Ben Canaan and Kitty Fremont, they fell even more deeply in love with the idea of Israel—albeit an Israel where all Israelis were portrayed as brave and brilliant and all Arabs as untrustworthy and unworthy. (Penslar gives short shrift, though, to the film version. Was I the only American teenager who, when he left to work as a kibbutz volunteer, was humming Ernest Gold’s theme song?)

[Read: Israel has already lost]

Just as love can unite a people, a love that is built on excluding others can also divide. Illouz offers a sobering account not only of the deepening animosity between Israelis and Palestinians, but also of the persistent acrimony between Israel’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities. It is no secret that Netanyahu’s Likud party has won the support of Sephardic voters by exploiting their resentment over the discrimination they have experienced. As Illouz argues, Likud’s populist and nationalist rhetoric has seduced the Mizrahim—Jews of Afro-Asian descent—despite the fact that the leadership is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and their neoliberal policies penalize the very people who support them. As a result, she concludes, “nationalism has come to be a class marker, as it has become the identity of those who stand diametrically opposed to … the ‘cosmopolitan class.’”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Illouz and Penslar both conclude their books by investigating hopefulness as an emotion. Israel, after all, originated as a great vessel of hope for people across the world—nationalism as a kind of redemption for a long-suffering people. Illouz suggests that hope, in principle, can strengthen the bonds of fraternity not just among the nation's own members but with other countries as well, opening the way to dialogue, tolerance, and justice. Perhaps, but there is something forlorn in hoping that hope will carry the day. Given recent events in Israel (and the United States),  Penslar’s conclusion, tragically, carries greater weight. He reminds us that the Hebrew word for hope is tikvah, whose literal biblical meaning is “cord” or “rope”—“something to hold onto.” Many of us now find ourselves grasping this cord more tightly than ever before.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell appeared to briefly freeze up and was unable to answer a question from a reporter at an event in Kentucky on Wednesday, weeks after he had a similar episode in Washington.

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Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani’s attacks on democracy are attacks on people. Fall’s vaccine routine didn’t have to be this hard.

Wilder and Clearer

Consider the Kool-Aid Man. He is large, red-faced, perpetually stuck in the late ’80s, and, whenever he breaks through walls? Celebrated. Our 45th president, much like the Kool-Aid Man, has aligned his personal brand with gleeful destruction. And, at least among GOP leaders and his steadfast base of supporters, Trump’s product remains extremely popular.

Ever since his political rise eight summers ago, Trump’s opponents have been naively clinging to the hope that he might one day say or do something so awful as to alienate even his most ardent fans. This will never happen. The premise itself is flawed—Trump’s enduring appeal is derived from his ability to storm past perceived barriers. Were he to suddenly start walking through doors like the rest of us, he’d lose his bad-boy sheen.

Trump’s recent statements, namely on the idea of imprisoning his enemies if reelected and the specter of political violence, are prime examples of just how flawed this “reckoning” idea really is. At the moment, his rhetoric is as heightened as it’s ever been, and yet his dominance in the Republican presidential primary continues. He’s currently polling at an average of about 50 percent, with his closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at just under 15 percent. The rest of the field is fighting to break out of the single digits.

Trump’s 2024 challengers have failed to unite in opposition to him. During last week’s GOP debate, former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie each took their best shot at condemning Trump in relation to January 6, yet neither appears to have even a remote chance of winning the nomination. Most of the others hemmed and hawed. The majority of the field raised their hands in the affirmative as to whether they would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted criminal. That night, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized Trump as “a guy who’s running 40 points ahead, who tried to end the constitutional republic, and whose braying mobs chanted for the murder of one of the guys on stage.” Taken as a whole, the event had a disturbing patina of resignation and nihilism.

Trump, of course, didn’t even bother to show up and field questions from the Fox News moderators. Instead, he staged counterprogramming: a sitdown with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter). The pair’s conversation was ominous. Rather than wave off Carlson’s questions about the possibility of conflict on American soil, Trump was disconcertingly vague and threatening: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.”

Yesterday, the former Fox host Glenn Beck asked Trump whether he would “lock people up” if he becomes president again. Trump replied that he would have “no choice because they’re doing it to us,” referring to his own criminal indictments.

Even Trump’s mug shot, which the art critic Jerry Saltz deemed “the most famous photograph in the world,” carried a palpable rhetorical message. As my colleague Megan Garber observed, Trump’s scowl symbolizes his power. “He treats his mug shot as our menace.”

It keeps working. All of it. As we approach September, some four months ahead of the Iowa caucuses, it’s looking less and less likely that anything could slow Trump’s march to the nomination. Rather than being humbled by a jailhouse booking, Trump transformed even that event into a product he could monetize. (A “Never Surrender!” mug-shot T-shirt will set you back $34; a mug-shot coffee mug is a comparative steal at $25.) Citing self-reported campaign data for the past three weeks, the former president’s team sent an email blast yesterday with the subject line “ICYMI: Trump fundraising spikes after Fulton County mugshot, surpassing $20M in August.” (These emails barge in multiple times a day, not unlike the aforementioned Kool-Aid Man.)

Trump’s messaging is simultaneously wilder and clearer than ever. He portrays himself as a martyr and a victim, and, according to the arc of his hero’s journey, he believes that he will return home to the White House as a victor. Trump has shrewdly ascertained that, even eight years later, America can’t look away from the epic saga that is his life. Or, as another recent campaign-email subject line read: “Another disgrace I have to tell you about.”

Related:

The mug shot is a warning. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump.

Today’s News

Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm and is traveling across Florida and into Georgia and other parts of the Southeast. A federal judge ruled that Rudy Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers after he claimed that they had mishandled ballots during the 2020 election. Narcan, the opioid-overdose antidote, will for the first time be widely available over the counter and online next week at major retailers, including Walgreens and CVS.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question: What would you ask the Republican presidential candidates? The Weekly Planet: Kylie Mohr asks: What happens when the heat repeats?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: David Lees / Getty; Grzegorz Czapski / Alamy; The J. Paul Getty Museum

In Praise of Heroic Masculinity

By Caitlin Flanagan

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Molly Fairhurst for The Atlantic

Read. Alicia Kennedy’s first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, lays out the benefits of a meatless diet—without scolding those who find the idea hard to swallow.

Watch. The third and final season of Reservation Dogs (streaming on Hulu) fleshes out its ensemble with backstories that illustrate the lasting effects of grief.

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Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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