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We warned you last month to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” In a recent study conducted about consumer products, researchers concluded kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants, which you do not want anywhere near your hot food. After the article was published, its author received reports, possibly exaggerated, of people in Burlington, Vermont, throwing their black plastic spatulas out en masse. You should too.

That article was just the appetizer. This episode of Radio Atlantic is the entire meal, coming to you in time for Thanksgiving. We talk to its author, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, about every other plastic thing in your kitchen: cutting boards, nonstick pans, plastic wrap, slow cookers, sippy cups. Read it before you cook. And prepare to hassle your plastic-loving hosts. Politely.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Well, it’s Thanksgiving—the day on the American calendar centered most around food, when we gather together to cook for our families and friends. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about our kitchens and the things in them that we should maybe be worrying about.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, we’re here to ruin your Thanksgiving. A little bit. Just kidding. Mostly.

What I’m talking about is an Atlantic story from a few weeks ago that hit a nerve with people.

The headline of that story was, “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula,” and I’m joined in the studio by the author of that story, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, who writes about science and the environment. Hi, Zoë.

Zoë Schlanger: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: Um, I have a black plastic spatula.

Schlanger: Oh no.

Rosin: I do. I’ve been using it for so many years that I can’t—you know what, Zoë? I have two black plastic spatulas.

Schlanger: Because the first one started melting?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Because the first one just ate into my brain, and I didn’t—

Schlanger: It told you to acquire a second.

Rosin: It told me to acquire a second. Exactly.

So, okay. You said the black plastic utensils are “probably leaching chemicals” into our cooking, and I want to understand why. But I will say that your story opened up a whole bunch of worries besides the spatula that I want to run by you, not just for me, but for a lot of my friends. And I’m sure that happened to you as well.

Schlanger: Oh yes.

Rosin: Yeah. Were a lot of people writing you?

Schlanger: Everyone was texting me. Someone texted me that the entire town of Burlington, Vermont, was throwing their spatulas out the window at the same time.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You know what? I absolutely believe that. That’s an incredible image. Were people texting you like, What about this? And what about that? And what about this other thing?

Schlanger: Absolutely. There’s a lot of discussion about how to tell silicone apart from plastic, whether different color plastic was okay, which, like—spoiler alert—probably not, but black is worse.

Rosin: I feel like what’s going to happen on Thanksgiving—sorry, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. We really do wish you the best and most peaceful Thanksgiving. People are going to be sneaking into—if they’re not the cooks, they’re going to be sneaking into the kitchen of whoever is cooking and, like, monitoring their kitchen utensils and implements just in case.

Schlanger: I love that.

Rosin: Anyway, it’s better than political arguments, so it’s not so bad.

Okay, let’s start with what you wrote about. Why should I throw out my black plastic spatula? Which by the way, I haven’t done. It’s only because you’re here with me in person in the studio.

Schlanger: So I have to convince you?

Rosin: You have to convince me face-to-face because it sounds like other people you know have thrown theirs out, but I haven’t.

Schlanger: So the reason black plastic spatulas are particularly concerning, and I will caveat this by saying you should really throw out any plastic spatula you have of any color, but black plastic has this particularly noxious place in our product stream because it can’t be fully recycled.

Recycling plants just ignore black plastic. They can’t really see the plastic that’s black, because they use optical sensors. So that means, instead of coming from a clean recycling stream, some black plastic products seem to be made out of dubious recycled products, particularly e-waste—electronic waste—often abroad with very little oversight.

And electronics are imbued, often, with flame retardants. So we’re talking about, like, the black plastic housing on your computer monitor or your cell phone or your keyboard. Those can all have flame retardants in them to keep them from catching fire. And flame retardants are associated with a huge range of health hazards, from cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues.

And then they may end up remolded into implements that are touching your food, which they were never meant to be part of. And then you use those implements with heat and oil, which are all things that encourage these compounds in the plastic to migrate out of the object. And then you just eat a lot more of those gross things.

Rosin: Wow. That was a lot. I’m going to slow that down, so I understand. Okay, there are so many facts I learned there. I just want to make sure I learned them correctly. Black plastic is probably recycled from electronics?

Schlanger: Right. Not all of it is. Certainly there could be new, pure black plastic that is not coming from recycled e-waste, but there’s no way to tell.

Rosin: Now, regular plastic in a recycling facility gets rid of these toxins—is that what happens? Like, it can notice them and get rid of them, but in black plastic it just can’t be treated properly?

Schlanger: No, actually. There’s lots of toxins in all recycled plastic, but we’re mostly just talking about flame retardants here. And in the U.S. and in lots of other places, there are laws against or rules against combining electronic waste with the general-consumer recycling flow. So really, these flame retardants are never supposed to get into your consumer products, but they are.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s the black plastic. It can have flame retardants in it. It might come from e-waste. What about gray, white, red—all the other color spatulas? I do have two black ones and one gray one. So what about those?

Schlanger: Why plastic, though? It’s just, it’s—well, first of all, from a purely utilitarian perspective, plastic’s just a terrible thing to use when you’re dealing with a hot pan.

I mean, the thing melts. It’s just not a very durable product. But plastic of all colors probably has stuff in it that you don’t really want interacting with your food. I mean, at the very bottom of this long list is microplastics. If you have a piece of plastic that you’re using regularly in the kitchen, it’s sloughing off microplastics into your food.

Rosin: No matter what? This is nothing to do with heat. It’s just giving off little flakes?

Schlanger: It’s, like, use.

Rosin: Dandruff—just like plastic dandruff is coming off.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) Exactly like dandruff. I mean, one thing I also noticed in people’s kitchens is how common a plastic cutting board is. And that’s just you slicing chunks of plastic into your tomatoes every single time. And I get why people have it. It’s easier to make it sanitary, and they wash quite well. But it’s just not worth it. You can use anything else.

The other problem with most plastics is that there are other molecules in that material—in that base polymer—that are added there to make the plastic flexible or make it really thin, and those things are broadly called “plasticizers.”

They include things you might have heard of, like phthalates, that have also been associated with lots of harmful health outcomes. Basically, there’s no good plastic, particularly not in your kitchen.

Rosin: Okay, so no cutting boards. I’m not going to give you “no good plastics” yet. I have to go through it a little slowly. What about storage containers? Like, I have just a million plastic storage containers.

Schlanger: Can you tell me more about them? Are they hard and sturdy, or are they like what you got your takeout in, like, seven months ago, and you’re still using them?

Rosin: Both? (Laughs.) Both. I have a couple of these very hard ones with the click-in tops, but then those get lost because those are the most used. So they end up in my kid’s backpack, and they end up at school. And so then we just revert to the 3,000 takeout containers that we have sitting around.

I can already see—I already feel bad. Okay. What’s coming?

Schlanger: I mean, I get it. It’s like, there’s so much convenience to this. So typically, my understanding is—one rule of thumb is that harder, sturdier plastic is maybe shedding fewer phthalates than the very flexible ones, but they could be shedding other compounds of concern.

And the thing about containers is that if you’re putting something in that container that is fatty—if it has an oil, an animal fat, anything like that—lipids encourage these compounds to migrate out of the plastic and into the food. These plasticizers I was talking about are lipophilic, meaning they easily transfer when in contact with fats. So we’re often putting our leftovers in these bins, and, almost always, those have some kind of fat. And then it also depends if you’re heating things in that plastic. Heat is something that degrades plastic quite readily.

(Laughs.) I see you smirking and—

Rosin: —I am going to confess something now. This is what I think happens to most of us: We know, and we don’t know. So we sort of know what you said, and then it goes into a short-term memory hole.

So what I know and don’t know is that my son loves leftovers. He loves leftovers. Like, he’ll take it over anything for lunch the next day. Of course he microwaves it. Like, of course he puts it in the takeout container, takes it to school, and then microwaves it. That’s like a perfect storm, right?

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s not the best. It’s great that he is eating leftovers. We don’t like food waste either.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Schlanger: Yeah. Microwaving plastic is one of those ones that I just don’t do anymore.

So heat degrades plastic. Cold—my understanding is that cold actually makes plastic a bit more chemically stable, at least in the short term. But then, I have seen at least one paper that found that the cycle of heating and freezing, if you use the same container to do both many times, will also enhance degradation and also enhance those plasticizers leaching out.

And that was a study that was looking at, actually, farmers. They put these big plastic tarps over their fields to suppress weeds, and those get heated and frozen over and over again. So I assume you could apply that to consumer plastic goods too. It’s all polymers. It’s all the same base material, but that was done in farm fields.

Rosin: Interesting. So is where we’ve landed with plastic, no plastic at all? Or, Use the hardest plastic you can find? Like, what about those very sturdy plastic containers, or are we just going for Pyrex glass?

Schlanger: I have now transitioned entirely to glass in my own kitchen. And I think that that’s more of a risk-tolerance thing. We all do things that will slowly kill us, and it’s sort of choosing which things those are. I mean, we’re bombarded by problematic compounds in every aspect of our life, and you cannot eliminate them all. So if you want to use your sturdy plastic containers to store fat-neutral things, like crackers, that’s probably fine.

Rosin: I think what you’re saying is that I should send my son to school with his leftovers in a glass Pyrex container.

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s heavier, which is a pain, but I’m saying yes, definitely.

Rosin: You’re saying yes.

Schlanger: And I don’t know how old your kids are, but some of these things matter a lot for children, because one of the big concerns about plastic additives getting into our bodies is that they mimic estrogen and can have endocrine-disrupting properties, meaning they mess with your hormone system.

And for a developing hormone system in a child, that’s especially crucial. It’s also crucial for pregnant people or people of childbearing age. So there’s different moments when it’s really critical to avoid this stuff.

Rosin: Okay, so we have to throw out those plastics. We do have to cook, though. We’re back preparing the Thanksgiving meal. What is a substitute for the plastic spatula? What kind of spatulas do you have?

Schlanger: I have silicone spatulas—they’re great—wooden spatulas, and stainless-steel spatulas.

Rosin: Interesting. I just got my first wooden spatula. My friend’s mother, who lives in Norway, gave it to me, and it was made by hand by her neighbor on the farm. And I don’t understand why I’ve never used a wood spatula before. It’s fantastic. Like, it’s so good.

Schlanger: It’s a great material. I think people hate that you can’t really put them in the dishwasher, but you just rinse it off. No big deal.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So silicone. Is silicone always okay? What is silicone?

Schlanger: Silicone, to my understanding, is made out of a number of things, but notably silica, which is essentially sand, which is the same thing that glass is made out of.

So as far as we know now, silicone is inert. It’s considered not reactive with food or with body material, with fat, or anything like that. So I think all signs right now point to silicone being a very good choice. I know that at very high temperatures, I think if you’re baking at above 400 or 500 degrees, silicone can emit a gas of some kind that might be a problem, but if you have to bake in something that isn’t stainless steel or ceramic or cast iron, that’s not the worst thing in the world. I’m pro-silicone for now. I mean, maybe we’ll learn something else later.

[Music]

Rosin: When we return, Zoë and I keep going through the kitchen list, from sippy cups to gas stoves.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So no plastic spatulas. Sort of no plastic storage containers. I asked people on Instagram—I posted your article, and I asked people on Instagram, and I got a lot of questions from people about other things in their kitchen. So can I run them by you?

Schlanger: Please.

Rosin: Okay. No. 1: sippy cups. They’re always labeled as BPA-free plastic. I remember that. Even when I had little kids, everything was BPA-free. Does that make a difference?

Schlanger: In a way, it does. BPA was researched intensively. We know it’s bad, and so everyone’s trying to avoid making things with it. But then what companies went and did was create a bunch of alternatives to BPA, which at least some research finds is not any better than the BPA. The way that chemicals are regulated in this country is: No one has to really prove they’re safe before they go in the market.

And so we have a trickle of information coming out that suggests that the replacements aren’t any better. I would say no to plastic sippy cups.

Rosin: Whoa. Whoa. You said it, though. Okay. Just to be very accurate about this, you said “a trickle of information.”

So there was a kind of panic about BPA. People created replacements for BPA. But we just don’t know yet if they’re better, and the early signs are that they may not be. Is that a fair summary?

Schlanger: Exactly. There was this moment in, like, 2015, 2016 when there was a smattering of studies coming out highlighting the BPA replacements and looking at their potential toxicity and finding that they might just be as endocrine disrupting as BPA was. So the thing with BPA is that it mimics estrogen in the body, which is not something you want to keep adding through your diet.

And it’s associated with all kinds of issues—thyroid issues, fertility issues. And researchers on these few studies I saw back then found that the replacements were as estrogenic or more so.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. I really want to Google, What is a safe sippy cup? But instead, I’m going to ask you. Do you know what a safe sippy cup is?

Schlanger: I was actually talking to this pediatrician about this for a story, and she was talking about how the rest of the world gives their kids things in stainless-steel containers. Like, it’s just, you know—you don’t have plastic plates for kids. You just have stainless-steel ones that they can throw on the floor.

And I know they make stainless-steel ones with, like, the silicone sippy tops and stuff for kids now.

Rosin: It’s interesting. I think we think of stainless steel as something—like metallic. There’s something that we resist about stainless steel, like it’s going to taste different or something. But you’re saying it’s safer.

Schlanger: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. “Oh yeah,” you say. That means it’s definitely safer. (Laughs.)

Okay. Another one that people ask me a lot about—a lot, actually—were the black plastic lids on coffee cups.

Schlanger: This just occurred to me recently. I mean, yeah. Presumably, if it’s black plastic, there is a chance it came from that material stream of recycled e-waste. And the last thing you want is scalding hot, foamy, creamy coffee passing through a little black plastic hole into your mouth. It’s not ideal. So I actually just got coffee right before this and did not take a lid.

Rosin: Yes, this is absolutely true: Someone sent me that request on Instagram—Please ask Zoë about black plastic coffee lids—almost at the instant that the barista in the place that I was put the black plastic coffee lid on top of my coffee, and I had the same reaction you did. I was like: Of course! And just flipped it right off again.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh boy. Okay. So No. 2 on Instagram that people asked a ton about—I bet you can guess: nonstick cookware.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: So many questions about nonstick cookware. Are there different kinds? Do I throw it out the second it has a scratch on it? Like: What do I do about nonstick cookware?

I think there’s a whole bunch of sort of short-term memory-hole feelings about it. Like, Ah, I kind of read this thing. But then, I like my pan, so I forgot about it.

Schlanger: Yeah. So I’d start by saying that the issue with nonstick—Teflon is one brand name for this, but there’s a bunch of them—nonstick pans are coated in a class of chemicals called PFAS. And these are also coating things like our raincoats, our hiking boots. Just anything that is nonstick is basically made out of these compounds that we’ve now found are very bad for our health in high concentrations.

So the people who are really affected by this are the ones living near a plant that made PFAS, and now their water supply has been contaminated for 30 years, or people who live near an Army base where they are using a lot of firefighting foam, which is full of PFAS. But then you zoom in on people using individual products, and it becomes a little hazier.

We do know that the PFAS in your pan becomes unstable at high temperatures. So there’s lots of warnings on these things that you’re not really supposed to use them to cook at, you know, temperatures higher than 400 or 500 degrees.

But who doesn’t accidentally leave their pan on the stove sometimes and scorch it, and then it smells terrible? You’re breathing in fumes from PFAS, most likely. You mentioned scratched coatings. It’s super easy to scratch. Actually, the No. 1 response to the “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula”—when I was like, Just get stainless-steel ones—people were like, But it’ll scratch my nonstick pan. And just, my response to that is: Throw out your nonstick pan.

But we can’t necessarily ask everyone to do that. I get that. It’s so convenient to make an egg in a nonstick pan. I haven’t done it in years, but I hear it’s great.

Rosin: (Laughs.) That was amazing, Zoë. That was a great judge-but-not-judge.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I don’t mean to sound judgy, but honestly, cast iron is just so much better.

Rosin: I’ve recently come to that conclusion. I noticed that my first reach for everything, including an egg these days, is my cast-iron skillet. So I’m like, Why don’t I just get a few more of those and call it a day, you know?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: So you do not use nonstick pans?

Schlanger: So I grew up in a house with a parrot when I was young, and bird owners know that cooking with nonstick pans could result in the death of your bird, so I just grew up not having them around.

Rosin: Why?

Schlanger: I think it’s because the gas volatilizes. PFAS, the nonstick compound, its fumes get in the air, and birds are much more sensitive than humans, like all small animals.

Rosin: This is a literal canary in a coal mine.

Schlanger: Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

Rosin: I feel like that image, more than anything you’re gonna say, is gonna convince people: If they had a bird, that bird would be dead. So these are real.

Schlanger: I mean, yeah. I feel like it’s the kind of thing with, like, dogs and chocolates. Like, they won’t die every time. But there was a chance, so we didn’t have it in the house. But there was never a discussion about it being bad for human health. It was just like, No, you have a pet bird. You can’t have nonstick.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. So no nonstick pans. Another one that came up, and this is specifically related to Thanksgiving: marinating things in plastic. Like, it is something that people do. It’s something that people do on Thanksgiving. Is that a problem?

Schlanger: I wouldn’t do it. My understanding is that—I was thinking about, like, sous vide bags too, you know?

Rosin: Yeah, like brining turkeys or sous vide bags. There’s a whole bunch of ways that meat and plastic have to do with each other.

Schlanger: It would violate my personal rule about, like, putting fatty things next to plastic, because I just know the chemistry of that means it encourages migration of compounds out of the plastic and into your food.

But my understanding is that the bags specifically designed for this are considered food grade and often can be labeled “phthalate-free” now. So there is knowledge about this in the consumer market enough for companies to make things that are less harmful. That’s not to say they’re not potentially problematic.

I mean, the way I think about this is: Everything could affect you negatively a little bit. And we are so bombarded by problematic things in our everyday life getting into our bodies, and you just want to lower your dose. So it’s kind of choosing how to lower your dose.

It’s not that your turkey bag is going to kill you. It’s that you’re just adding a little extra, and you don’t need to.

Rosin: Right. So if you needed to brine something, and you put it in, say, a glass bowl with plastic wrap on it, is it just that—oh God.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, so no to that, just because the plastic wrap would touch it. So in fact, you should just use tinfoil, is what you’re saying.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm. Or you just put a plate over it. Like, you don’t even need all this stuff. You know, plastic wrap’s gone through all these iterations. It used to be made out of much more harmful stuff, and then they eliminated some of it. I just avoid it.

Rosin: Really? You have no plastic wrap?

Schlanger: No.

Rosin: So you’re making a cake. What do you put over it? You just put a cake topper?

Schlanger: A bowl.

Rosin: You put a bowl or a cake topper? Okay. I’m trying to think of any other use I have for plastic wrap, particularly on Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: I wrap—you know, you get cheese, and you have to wrap it in something, so it doesn’t go bad immediately. I have—this is going to make me sound so crunchy—but I have those beeswax wraps. It’s like cloth waxed in beeswax, and that’s what people—people used to just use wax paper for everything. You can just do that.

Rosin: And you can reuse that, so that’s good. Okay.

I’m already imagining some of the people listening to this podcast walking into the kitchen of their parents and friends and causing all kinds of trouble. And this one is real trouble, but I’m going to ask you anyway, because a couple of people asked me about it: natural-gas stove.

So like, hassling your friends or parents about their natural-gas stove would be, like, a really, really low move. But I’m going to ask you anyway. There’s just so much talk about this. It was a big deal, like, a year ago. What about it?

Schlanger: So we know it’s not great to be in a home with a natural-gas stove. We know that it is associated with higher rates of child asthma, just breathing problems in general. You’re inhaling things like benzene. That said, many people have them. I have one. I’m a renter in New York. There’s no way I’m not going to have a gas stove. I can’t ask my landlord to buy a beautiful induction stove for me.

But one thing that makes a big difference is using your overhead vent, just gently turning on your family’s overhead vent while they’re cooking can actually take a lot of the problematic compounds out of the air.

Rosin: Oh really?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: Okay.

Schlanger: It’s not totally a fail-safe. It doesn’t get it all out. It would be nice if we all had induction stoves. But I also get, it does sometimes feel good to cook over fire.

Rosin: Yeah. One day I will make the transition, but I’m so used to seeing the fire. But I understand.

Schlanger: I will say that that is a really elaborate PR job by the natural-gas industry too. Do you remember this? There was this moment when they were, like, hiring Instagram influencers to promote gas stoves and things like that.

Rosin: Because it’s one of those things that seems good and natural but is the exact opposite. Like, it looks like the thing that you should be cooking things on, but in fact, it’s the unnatural option.

Schlanger: Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. So what else are we missing for Thanksgiving that we don’t know about? One just came to me: parchment paper. I bake a lot with parchment paper.

Schlanger: As do I. And I only recently learned that some parchment paper is coated in PFAS. That’s what makes it nonstick. So you actually want to check. And I recently got parchment paper that’s coated in silicone instead and is nice and nonstick because of that, and it doesn’t cost any more.

Rosin: Oh really? You have to look online and see what it’s coated with. Interesting.

Anything else we’ve forgotten about the Thanksgiving dinner? Let’s just do a tour. So you walk into an average kitchen. There are containers with plastic wrap on them. We’ve already covered that. There are things that have been cooked with nonstick pans. We’ve already covered that. There are deadly spatulas. We’ve covered that. (Laughs.)

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Anything else that we are forgetting for a typical Thanksgiving meal that could kill you?

Schlanger: Right. None of this is going to kill you, but I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy a slow cooker and pressure cooker, and I really wanted to get an Instant Pot. And then I went online and looked at their disclosures on the website, and it turns out those can contain PFAS. I was really surprised by that because the basin of an Instant Pot is just a stainless-steel bowl, but my assumption is there’s something in the lid that is in the food-contact surface that is also PFAS.

So just basically, many, many other kitchen appliances are coated in a nonstick layer of PFAS. I also tried to buy a toaster oven, like, for the counter, so I wouldn’t have to turn on my gas oven every single time I wanted to bake something, and a lot of those—the entire interior is just coated in PFAS.

Rosin: Interesting. So how do you figure—so your rule is: Very much limit plastics to almost no plastics, and definitely no PFAS.

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: And how do you know if something has PFAS? Like, I wouldn’t have guessed about an Instant Pot, which I do have, or about a toaster oven, which I don’t have. But I wouldn’t have guessed about either of those.

Schlanger: They put it on their website. If you look in, like, the Materials and Care section of most of these things, it’ll let you know.

Rosin: Okay. So maybe now that we have—would you say, is there any way to say that we haven’t ruined people’s Thanksgivings? Like, no. We’ve made them less stress-free? Possible? Depends when they listen to this?

Schlanger: Well, it’s so important to remember: Stress is also a major health hazard, so I don’t want anyone to get super stressed out about this or blow it out of proportion. You’re not going to die because of any of this, but you are just accumulating things you don’t need in your body.

Rosin: Your kitchen is just slightly less stress for you. Like, you look around your kitchen, and because you’re attuned to microplastics, you just don’t see them everywhere. So in fact, for you, it’s less stress.

Schlanger: Yeah. I walk around all day. There’s so many inputs to my body I can’t control. But at least I can control the ones in my kitchen.

Rosin: Right. Your kitchen is a little sphere of control. I actually really like that idea.

Now, I’m having a Friendsgiving this year, and I am now actually gonna drive to my friend’s house who does most of the cooking and “evacuate” the dangerous utensils from his kitchen.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I hope he thanks you and doesn’t get really pissed off. That could go either way.

Rosin: (Laughs.) As I fling away all his spatulas.

Schlanger: Are you going to bring him replacements?

Rosin: I guess you’re right. If I throw away all his spatulas, before I do that, I have to bring him silicone replacements for sure.

Schlanger: That seems only reasonable. I will say, you know, on other Thanksgivings, my two sides of my family have very different ideas about all this. So there is, like, one home I’d go into where basically everything is, you know, natural products and the other side where everything would be microwaved in plastic.

Rosin: Wow. So how do you handle that situation?

Schlanger: You just mostly have to live and let live. It’s like, also, you know, if I’m their daughter, and they’re not reading my articles, there’s not much I’m going to do, you know?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. I didn’t realize that was your actual parents. That’s funny. Yeah, I suppose the last thing we should do is give advice to people who walk into a kitchen, and everything has been, you know, baked in the microwave in plastic containers.

Schlanger: You just eat that meal, and go back to your own kitchen, and think about your own choices. I mean, okay, this is all to say: You eat in restaurants all the time. Restaurants are using plastic constantly. It’s really just like, you lower your own dose when you can.

Rosin: Yes. I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about policing everybody’s plastics and everything you put in your body. It’s about controlling what you can. And your own tiny or big or however size your kitchen is, that is a sphere you can control, so you might as well do that. And that’s a lovely thing. And everything outside of that, don’t worry about it.

Schlanger: I think so. I think that’s the moral here.

Rosin: Okay. Excellent. Thank you, Zoë.

Schlanger: Thank you.

Rosin: Happy Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: Happy Thanksgiving.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the turkey. Enjoy the mashed potatoes. Enjoy the stuffing. And enjoy all the plastic you’re eating.

The BBC investigates what led to him contacting Iranian agents while working for the British Army.

Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, the former Army National Guard major and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has no clear policy or management experience that qualifies him to run the Pentagon. What he has instead is a reactionary streak—one that’s evident in his view that women should no longer have combat roles in the military. In his recent book The War on Warriors, he implies that women service members who have received military honors for their bravery were decorated because of “an agenda.”

These comments reflect a broader tendency among Trump and his allies to treat every evolution in social norms as a triumph of “wokeness”—a DEI project gone awry. Having women in combat roles “hasn’t made us more effective,” Hegseth said in an appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast earlier this month. It “hasn’t made us more lethal.” Hegseth seemed to suggest that women and men cannot behave professionally alongside each other. “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated,” he said. “And complication in combat means casualties are worse.”

Hegseth’s nomination may be in jeopardy following revelations that he paid a legal settlement to a woman who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her at a conference in Monterey, California. (Hegseth has said their interaction was consensual. Local police investigated the incident at the behest of an emergency-room nurse who’d treated the alleged victim, but no charges were filed.) After Trump announced his surprise pick, supporters of women in the military were quick to criticize Hegseth’s views, albeit without naming him. In an interview with NBC News, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin repeated a well-worn defense of gender diversity: that women “make us stronger.” Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, was more emphatic. “Don’t lecture me about women in combat,” Milley said at an event Wednesday. “Women have been in combat … No one gives a shit if it’s a woman or a guy to pull that trigger; you’re still dead.”

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Yet even these well-meaning defenses of female service members’ equality sounded incomplete—like what you might expect to hear when men argue over what women can do. If the talking points are rusty, perhaps that’s because the role of women in combat hasn’t been much in the news since the final restriction was lifted in 2013. By 2012, when President Barack Obama began to consider a formal rule change, more than 130 women had died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though they technically had not been in combat. This is because women were excluded from combat roles such as artillery and close battle, but that distinction was becoming harder to maintain as the nature of warfare changed. The Pentagon had been slowly placing women in more dangerous roles in order to address staffing needs, even allowing them onto submarines. But the military still upheld a long-standing prohibition against deploying women for “direct ground combat,” or DGC.  

[Jackie Munn: I felt more welcome in combat than I did on base]

As the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars dragged on, the Pentagon was ultimately reduced to semantic games that downplayed women’s roles, assigning them to combat troops but insisting, in accordance with DGC restrictions, that they were not waging war. The most absurd example involved the Marine Corps, which launched so-called female engagement teams to patrol among, make contact with, and gather intelligence from civilians in Muslim countries where strict cultural rules prohibit interactions between women and men. The female teams were deployed with Marine Expeditionary Units, assigned to be with or attached to combat units but technically not in combat.  

The Pentagon ended up changing the DGC prohibitions because they were no longer sustainable for military purposes. Men with higher ranks and much greater responsibility than Hegseth long ago recognized that ending combat exclusion wasn’t primarily a matter of women’s equality, but of military readiness. Besides, the distinction between combat and noncombat roles had begun to vanish. As one Army official observed in 2012, in a “nonlinear battlefield, there are no safe jobs.”

Up to now, efforts to reverse the Obama-era rule change have been quite limited, not least because women’s presence in the military hasn’t been terribly revolutionary in practice. Physical-fitness requirements continue to be rigorous. The Associated Press reported this week that only about 4,800 women are currently qualified for Army infantry, armor, and artillery jobs. The standard still demanded of the most elite combat roles means that the Navy’s Special Warfare combat crew has only two women and the Air Force’s special-operations team has three.

The numbers don’t seem to matter to a nominee who has built his reputation on a broad sense of grievance and on claims that the military is putting DEI concerns first. “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” he said on the Shawn Ryan Show. How much Trump agrees with Hegseth isn’t entirely clear, although the president-elect has complained about “woke generals” in the past. Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric takes little account of what’s really going on: The military’s rules have changed to catch up with how military personnel operate in the real world, even if it annoys culture warriors on Fox News.

For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold—command over 2 million American military personnel—he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Hegseth began his involvement in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party’s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth’s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.

Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years—American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024)—lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.

A foundational tenet of Hegseth’s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.

[David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. “Being a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,” he writes—an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. “In previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn’t get to fight in a war.” (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth’s thesis—the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump—goes unmentioned).

Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”

(The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)

One episode looms especially large in Hegseth’s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the “Deus Vult” symbol—a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.

The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden’s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth—who protests that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol—the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.

He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. “I fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,” he writes. “Then I was accused of being one.” This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade as a model to emulate.

In any case, evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are “poisonous”; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by “German socialists.”

Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, “American Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.”

The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. “Yes, our modern social sciences—like ‘political science,’ previously known as ‘politics,’ and ‘social studies,’ previously known as individual disciplines like ‘history, economics, geography and philosophy’—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,” he writes. “Let that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools—public and private—today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.” Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

[Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern]

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay—where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted, most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces—Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. “The nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, ‘international rights’ of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,” he writes. “Not to mention the debate about the ‘rights’ of assholes (I mean, ‘detainees’) at Gitmo.”

Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and if necessary shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest throughline of all three books is the cross-application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his).

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges Hegseth’s readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, he writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule, because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists … You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A Defense Secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

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Donald Trump’s decision to tap Pete Hegseth for his Cabinet is one of his nominations that some are reading as pure provocation. Aside from being a veteran, Hegseth has little qualification to lead the Department of Defense. He’s a Fox News host who has written a screed against DEI in the military. He has faced an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies, but the Trump team is not balking. “We look forward to his confirmation,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, said in reply to news reports about the allegation. At another time in our history, many lines in Hegseth’s latest book alone might have disqualified him on the grounds of being too juvenile. In the introduction of The War on Warriors, he criticizes the “so-called elites directing the military today”: “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy-asses.”

Focusing on scandals and inflammatory rhetoric, however, may serve as a diversion from a bigger, more alarming strategy. The real danger of Hegseth’s appointment lies in the role he might play in Trump’s reimagined military. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with the staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s grander plan to centralize control. “He’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump,” Nichols says.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There is such an overwhelming amount of noise around Donald Trump’s proposed nominees—their histories, their scandals, their beliefs—that it’s easy to lose sight of one important pattern, which is Trump placing people in charge of critical Cabinet positions who are utterly loyal to him, so ultimately the real control of those agencies lies with the White House.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today we are going to talk about a key pillar of that strategy to centralize control: Trump’s plans for the military.

Rosin: Okay. Ready?

Tom Nichols: Ready.

Rosin: Our guest is staff writer Tom Nichols, who’s a professor emeritus at the Naval War College.

Tom, welcome to the show.

Nichols: Thanks, Hanna.

Rosin: So there is so much to talk about in terms of Trump’s proposed appointments, but today we’re going to talk about military- and security-related appointments because they are such high-stakes positions. From Trump’s choice during this transition period, what are you picking up about his attitude towards the military establishment?

Nichols: I think his appointments, particularly for secretary of defense—and some of the rumors that have been floated out of Mar-a-Lago about prosecuting military officers and wholesale firings—these are really direct shots at the senior officer corps of the United States, and I think of it as a direct attack on our traditions of civil-military affairs.

He is trying to send a message that from now on, America’s military officers are supposed to be loyal to him, first and foremost, and not the Constitution, because he still carries a pretty serious grudge against a lot of top military and civilian people during his first term as president who got in his way—or he thinks got in his way—about doing things like, you know, shooting protesters and using the military in the streets of the United States. So he’s sending a pretty clear message that this time around, he’s not going to brook any of that kind of interference.

Rosin: So you think the source of his resistance or hostility towards the military are specific actions that they prevented him from taking, or is it things that, say, generals have said about him—negative things that they’ve said about him?

Nichols: Oh, I don’t think we have to pick between those. He believes in a world where he has total control over everything, because that’s how he’s lived his life. So, of course, he’s angry about all of that stuff—reportedly, you know, going back to things like Bob Woodward’s accounts, where he calls the defense secretary and says, I want to kill Bashar [al-]Assad, the leader of Syria, and James Mattis says, Yeah, okay. We’ll get right on that, and then hangs up the phone and says, We’re not doing that.

Rosin: Right. So he doesn’t want anyone to say, We’re not doing that, anymore?

Nichols: No matter what it is and no matter how unconstitutional or illegal the order, he doesn’t want anybody to say, We’re not doing that. And remember, the first time he ran, he said things like, If I tell my generals—“my generals,” which is a phrase he loves—if I tell my generals to torture people, they’ll do it. And of course, immediately, a lot of very senior officers said, No. No, sir. We will not do that. That’s an illegal order. We can’t do that. He doesn’t want to hear any of that guff this time around.

Rosin: So one thing is: He doesn’t want any future resistance from military leaders who might, you know, counter things he wants done. Another is: He seems to be purging from the past. NBC reported this weekend that they were drawing up a list of military officers who were involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, seeing whether they could be court-martialed. How do those two things fit together? Why is that part of the picture?

Nichols: Well, the most important thing about that report from NBC is: It’s not about Afghanistan. If it really were about that and people were looking at it closely—you know, you have to remember that a big part of why that was such a mess, and Biden bears a lot of responsibility for that bungled pullout, but Trump’s the guy who negotiated the agreement and demanded that everybody stick to it.

So this is not about Afghanistan. This is about two things: It’s telling former officers who crossed him that I am going to get even with you. I think a lot of this is just him trying to cut a path to get to people like Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And it’s also a warning for the future that says, No matter what you do, no matter where you go, even if you retire, I can reach out and touch you. So if you’re a colonel or a captain or a general or an admiral, and you think about crossing me, just remember, I will get you for it.

And that’s what I mean about an attack on civil-military relations. Because the other problem, and the reason this whole Afghanistan thing is such nonsense, is these were officers who were following the legal and lawful orders of their commander in chief. If this report is confirmed, it’s a huge muscle flex to say, There is no senior military officer who’s beyond my retribution if he doesn’t, or she doesn’t, do what I want done—no matter how illegal, no matter how unconstitutional, no matter how immoral. All I want to hear out of you is, Yes, sir, and that’s it.

Rosin: Can he do this? In other words, can you reach deep down enough in the military hierarchy to actually accomplish what he’s trying to accomplish?

Nichols: Sure. It doesn’t take many people. There’s a bunch of kind of legalistic stuff that’s going to be difficult. The military—and I’ve actually counseled other people not to get wrapped up in the legality stuff, because that’s not what this is about. This is an effort at political intimidation. But you’d have to find people who are going to hold an Article 32 hearing. It’s kind of like—the military has its own version of, like, a grand jury, and you’d have to find people willing to do that, but you could reach down and find some ambitious and not very principled lieutenant colonel somewhere who says, Sure. I’ll be that prosecutor. I’ll do that.

You don’t need thousands and thousands of people. You just need a handful of men and women who are willing to do this kind of stuff. And yeah. Sure—he can get it done. Remember, this is the president who decided that the military didn’t have the authority to punish its own war criminals and intervened and started handing out dispensations.

Rosin: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s talk about someone who encouraged him not to punish those war criminals.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: And that is Pete Hegseth, who he nominated for secretary of defense. Tom, in the circles of military people you know, how did people react to that nomination?

Nichols: Well, I’ve been careful not to ask anybody I know who’s still serving, because I don’t want to put them on the spot. But a lot of the people that I worked with and a lot of my colleagues from my days working with the military, I think the first reaction was something along the lines of: If this is a joke, it’s not funny. Are we being pranked? Are we being punked? I mean, the idea of Pete Hegseth running the Defense Department was so spectacularly bizarre—it’s right up there with Matt Gaetz running Justice.

And so now, as it’s sinking in, I think there’s a real horror here—and not just about what could happen in foreign policy. I mean, my biggest clench in my stomach is thinking about a nuclear crisis where the president really needs the secretary of defense—needs this sober and mature and decent man to give him advice—and he turns, and what he gets is Pete Hegseth. You know—

Rosin: Let’s say who Pete Hegseth is, now that you’ve painted the picture—

Nichols: Well, let me just add, though, that for a lot of my military friends and former military friends, there’s a whole other problem, which is: Unlike other departments, the secretary of defense holds the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

Rosin: Wait. What do you mean? You mean because, because—why? What do you mean by that?

Nichols: Well, because those folks who serve in our military are completely dependent on the DOD for their housing, their medical care, where they’re going to live, what places they get assigned to, you know, all of that stuff. The SecDef doesn’t make those decisions individually every day, but if he turns out to be a terrible manager, the quality of life—and perhaps the actual lives of people in the military—can be really put under a lot of stress and danger by somebody who just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s not like—Ben Carson’s a good example, right? Ben Carson was sent to HUD. He had no idea what he was doing. The department pretty much ran itself. And it’s not like the daily life of hundreds of thousands of people were going to be affected because Ben Carson didn’t know what the hell he was doing. That’s different than people who live under a chain of command to which they are sworn to obey, that goes all the way to the E-Ring of the Pentagon, to the chair Pete Hegseth would be sitting in. That’s a very different situation and very dangerous.

Rosin: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I mean, at HUD, you go home at 5 o’clock.

Nichols: Exactly.

Rosin: It’s not like that—it’s not like that in the Department of Defense. So it’s totally obvious to you and the people you know why he’s unqualified. Can we just quickly make that case? So he was a weekend host, Fox & Friends. He did end up serving overseas, and I think he has a Bronze Star.

Nichols: He was a major. Yeah, he actually was a major. I think he has two Bronze Stars. Look, I’m, you know—

Rosin: So how does that compare to other people who’ve held this position?

Just so we know.

Nichols: Well, other people who have held these positions had long experience in the national-security and national-defense realm as senior executives who have come all the way up. Look—I think Don Rumsfeld was one of the worst secretaries of defense ever, but he had served in related capacities and had administered a gigantic company that he was the head of. Now, that doesn’t mean he had good judgment, but he—you know, the Defense Department ran every day, and things got done every day.

Ash Carter was a well-known—for, you know, 30 years—a well-known defense intellectual who had contributed substantively to everything about defense, from conventional forces to nuclear weapons. I think one thing people need to understand is how much of dealing with the defense department is just dealing with the intricacies of money.

Hegseth’s going to sit at the top of all that, with no experience in any of this—not in budgeting, not in strategy, not in dealing with allies. I keep having these just head-spinning moments where I think about the first day in the office, and Pete Hegseth has to make calls to his equivalents, to his opposite numbers, as they do in this job. That’s another thing that you don’t do if you’re the secretary of HUD—you don’t call all the housing secretaries on the planet to say hello. Hegseth is going to be on the phone with the Russian minister of defense. He’s going to be on the phone with the Chinese minister of defense. The people that have had these jobs have had exposure to folks like that. This is a guy who’s done none of that— nothing. There’s literally zero background.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, what he lacks in qualifications and experience and everything else, he seems to make up for in this very forceful ideology that he has. I spent the weekend reading his latest book, [The] War on Warriors. Can we just talk about it for a minute?

I mean, here’s what I understand about it. He tells this kind of alternate history of the downfall of the American military. It basically adds up to DEI. It goes: While we were fighting in Afghanistan, we missed the real war, which was happening at home, which was, you know, women in combat roles and DEI all over the place—so basically, a war against what he calls “normal dudes,” who have always fought and won our wars.

Now, I’m going to torture you by reading one passage, and then I would love to get your opinion about how widespread this ideology is, this idea that the culture war has utterly shaped the military. Is he an outlier, or do a lot of people think this? So here’s the quote: “DEI amplifies differences, creates grievances, [and] excludes anyone who won’t bow down to the cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon. Forget DEI—the acronym should be DIE or IED. It will kill our military worse than any IED ever could.”

Where do these ideas come from? Is this just sprouted from his own head, or is there—inside the military, as far as you know—like, a grand resistance against DEI initiatives?

Nichols: This comes from, like, morning editorial meetings at Fox.

Rosin: Uh-huh. (Laughs.)

Nichols: Because I worked with senior military officers, including a lot of my students who had just come back from deployments, and you just didn’t hear anybody talk this way about, you know, Marxism rampant in the Pentagon and DEI is destroying us—in part, because a lot of those folks were standing right next to people that Hegseth would say were DEI promotions. This is kind of the out-of-control bro culture that Hegseth came up in, and some of it’s just generational, I suppose, within the military. But what I found is actually that the military, for all of its flaws, is a pretty meritocratic institution.

Have there been cycles of this, where there’s a lot of sensitivity training and DEI issues? Yeah, of course, because we’re a more diverse country. I’m sorry, but welcome to the world of the 21st century. And what Hegseth and other guys are doing in that book—which is just kind of a big, primal, bro-culture yawp—is saying, I just don’t like this.

So I just think the idea that somehow Hegseth—he wasn’t chosen because of this. He was chosen because he’s a fawning sycophant to Donald Trump. He looks good on TV, which is really important to Trump. And he basically has made it clear, he’ll do anything Trump tells him to do, which is—I think you see this in all of Trump’s appointments.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So to summarize: He hates DEI. He pushed Trump to intervene in the case of those service members who were accused of war crimes.

What is this reimagined military? Like, how do you think Trump sees a reimagined military? What is the American military for? What is it doing under his vision? I mean, if it’s just window dressing—like, he wants a nice parade, and he wants a lot of military officers parading with him, and he wants it to look a certain way—that’s one thing. But if the intention is to use it for mass deportations or for turning against internal protesters, then that’s different. Then we’re living in a different country.

Nichols: And he just said that, right? He said, I’m going to do mass deportations, and I’m going to get the military involved. And one thing I can tell you that I know from more than 25 years of teaching military officers: They hate the idea of any internal role. The ethos of the American military officer is that they are there to defend the United States and not to be in the streets of the United States. And this is an old tradition that goes back a long way. And Trump just doesn’t care about that. He thinks it’s his private security force to be ordered around at his beck and call.

Rosin: I will say, about Hegseth: Most of the things in his book did not surprise me. The one thing that did surprise me is: It does seem to be a sustained argument for why the left is the actual enemy, like a foreign enemy. He talks about how they move, how they fight, how to root them out. I mean, the language is very resonant with Trump’s idea of “the enemy from within.”

Nichols: Right. I mean, part of the problem I had with it, you know, is that sometimes I—you just kind of stop and say, This is childish, right? That it comes across as this really sort of adolescent fantasy of, you know, the “internal enemy,” and how, you know, Christian warriors like me are going to save America, and all that stuff.

Rosin: And what men do and what women do and all that.

Nichols: Well, that’s the thing. I think, interestingly enough, if there’s stuff in the book that could really hurt him in terms of his nomination, ironically, it is the utter contempt with which he speaks of women not being in combat. And, of course, Hegseth knows better. I mean, in a foreign deployment, there’s a lot of places where a combat role and a noncombat role are separated by yards. Just ask Tammy Duckworth.

But, again, it’s this culture of, What would his future—because you asked what Trump’s future Army would look like. But, again, Hegseth—and I keep coming back to this word adolescent or juvenile—it’s lots of tough white guys with, you know, beautiful women cheering them on, going into battle from foreign shores to the streets of Baltimore or San Francisco, if that’s what it takes, all in the name of this kind of civilizational rescue.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we move from defense to intelligence. Who is Tulsi Gabbard, and what are her qualifications for the director of national intelligence?

[Break]

Rosin: Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s move on to her. She’s his pick for director of national intelligence. She also served in the military, the Hawaii National Guard. You’ve called her a national-security risk, but before we get into that, what does the director of national intelligence do? Why was that office founded?

Nichols: Right. After 9/11, after all the reports and postmortems, one concern was that every part of the American intelligence community, and there’s, like, a dozen and a half agencies that do this stuff—NSA, CIA, the FBI—that they weren’t talking to each other. I have to say, back at the time—I was against this, and I still am—they bolted on this big office called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that DNI is supposed to ride herd on all of these intelligence agencies.

Now you’re supposed to have this one person who represents the community, who kind of straightens out these internal squabbles and has access to everything, because the DNI sits on top of the CIA, the NSA, and all the other agencies. And that’s a really potentially powerful office.

Rosin: Okay, so good timing. It’s now a big and powerful office. That’s the job. What’s your reaction to the pick?

Nichols: Well, she literally has no experience in any of this—nothing, zero, like, not even tangentially. Her supporters say, Well, she’s a lieutenant colonel. Yes, and her deployments were as support missions to a medical unit, a police unit, and a civil-affairs unit.

She’s, even in the military, never had anything to do with intelligence, intelligence gathering, analysis—nothing. Her only other qualifications are that, you know, she was in Congress and attended committee hearings. But she wasn’t on the Intelligence Committee. So you have somebody who has no executive experience, has no intelligence experience, has no background in the field but is, just like Pete Hegseth, totally loyal, totally supportive, and looks good on TV.

Rosin: Right. And why is she a security risk?

Nichols: Because her views about people like Assad and Putin would really be disqualifying.

Rosin: Can you just—what are her views that she’s voiced? What has she said?

Nichols: Right. Putin is misunderstood. We basically caused the Ukraine war. There’s a kind of seriousness issue with Tulsi Gabbard, too. I find her sort of ethereal and kind of weird, to be honest with you. But she said, Zelensky and Putin and Biden—they all need to embrace the spirit of aloha.

Rosin: Oh, boy. Yeah.

Nichols: Yeah. So, you know, I’m sorry, but if you have a top-secret, code-word, compartmented-information clearance, I don’t really want to hear about how you think you should help Putin embrace the spirit of aloha.

With Assad, it’s even scarier. I mean, she has been an apologist and a denier of some of the terrible things he’s done. She met with him outside of government channels when she was a congressperson, and she took a lot of flak for that. And she said, Well, I just think you have to listen to everybody. You can’t solve these problems unless you go and listen.

Rosin: Yeah. So as far as you could tell, what’s the long game here? Is Trump just looking for someone who will stay out of his way so he can communicate with whatever foreign leaders he wants in whatever way he wants, and there won’t be anybody looking over his shoulder?

Nichols: There’s some of that. He resists adult supervision in everything, as he has in his whole life. But I think there’s something much more sinister going on here. If you really want to subvert a democracy, if you really want to undermine the thousands and thousands of people who work in the federal workforce and do things that are pretty scary—you know, investigate your enemies, send troops into the streets, and so on—the three departments you absolutely need are Justice, Defense, and the intelligence community.

Justice because you control the national cops, the FBI, and the national courts. The military because that is a huge source of coercive power, obviously. And the intelligence community because information is power, but also because the intelligence community is one of the other two branches that actually has people in it who have some control over coercive means, who have some ability to use violence.

So I think that he’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump. And that means you at the CIA, you at the FBI, you at the Justice Department, the courts, the cops, the military. And I think that’s what’s going on here.

And I’ll add one other thing: If all of these nominees get turfed, that doesn’t mean the people coming in will be better.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You know what this is reminding me of? Our colleague Peter Pomerantsev, who writes about autocracy and democracy—he always talks about how fear and humor are closely linked in an eroding democracy. Because there is a sort of, like, troll-joke factor to some of these nominations, but underneath it is just this chilling fear that you described. Like, a strategy of the triumvirate of power, you know?

Nichols: Absolutely. And they get you used to it by doing things that are so shockingly unthinkable that it becomes thinkable.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I mean, imagine if we were sitting here, you know, five years ago. Actually, let’s talk about Hegseth again for one moment: Hegseth’s extramarital affairs apparently helped cost him the leadership of the VA.

Rosin: Yeah, you know, Tom, I was remembering that when I was first a reporter, the kind of thing that would sink a nominee was you failed to pay your nanny’s taxes.

Nichols: Or John Tower—drinks too much, hard drinker.

Rosin: And now we have a nominee with a sexual-assault allegation. Now, he denies the allegation, but he did end up paying the woman who accused him as part of a nondisclosure agreement. And it’s like, Nah, he’s fine, you know.

Nichols: Yeah, I know: Whatever. I mean, again, writing the kind of book he wrote would almost—the preface to that book should have been, I want to never be confirmed for anything ever.

Rosin: Right.

Nichols: Right? And this was my argument about why we shouldn’t have elected Donald Trump back in 2016. He wears down our standards to the point where vulgarity and crudeness and criminality and incompetence all just become part of our daily life. When I look back ten years, just in a decade of my life, I think, The amount of change that has happened in the political environment in America is astonishing, and purely because we have signed on to this kind of, as you say, sort of comical and trashy but chilling change, you know, step by step by step, every day. We didn’t do this all in one year. We did this, like, you know, the frog-boiling exercise.

Rosin: Yeah, I feel that way about the last two weeks. You glided by this, but I just want to say: Unless Trump gets around the usual rules, all of these nominees do still need to be approved by the Senate.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: So you would likely need four senators to oppose. What are the chances of that happening?

Nichols: My big fear—you know, I suppose I could start every sentence these days with, “My big fear,” you know. (Laughs.) One of my many fears is that Gaetz is the political equivalent of a flash-bang grenade that is just thrown into the room, and everybody’s blinded, and their ears are ringing, and they’re like, Oh my God, Matt Gaetz. What kind of crazy nonsense was this? And when everybody kind of gets off the floor and collects themselves, Trump says, Okay, fine, I’ll give you Gaetz. And then he gets everybody else.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I’m writing something right now, actually, where I argue that the Senate should take these four terrible nominations—Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, and throw in Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.], who is not a threat to the existence of the United States but to the health and well-being of millions of its children—just take these four as a package, and say, Look—you’re gonna get a lot of other stuff. You’re not getting these four. That’s the end of it. Because if they go one by one by one, Trump will wear them down. And I think that’s what I’m worried about. Now, with that said, the Senate, you know, my old neighborhood—the one thing that the senators love is the Senate.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Nichols: Meaning, they love the institution.

Rosin: They love to have the power of the Senate, the decorum of the Senate.

Nichols: Yeah. They believe in the institution. I mean, you know, you can see it with somebody like Susan Collins. Susan Collins loves being a senator and loves the romance of the Senate itself more than, you know, than anything. And they don’t like a president walking in and saying, Listen—I want some guys, and the way you’re going to do this is with a recess appointment, where you’re going to go out and take a walk. They don’t like that. And I wonder if John Thune really wants to begin his time as Senate majority leader—one of the most important positions in the American government—being treated like a stooge.

Rosin: Well, that’s what we’ll be watching for. Thank you for joining me today, Tom.

Nichols: My pleasure, Hanna. Always nice to talk with you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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.

As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

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He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

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William McGreanery died on 15 September 1971, a week after a soldier opened fire from an Army observation post.

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.

Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.)

Consider where all three were nine years ago. Hegseth was an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran serving in the Army Reserve, backing Marco Rubio for president from his relatively new perch as a Fox News commentator. Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii and the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee; she’d resign the next year to back Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president. Gaetz was a little-known representative in the Florida state House, with plans to run for his dad’s state Senate seat in 2016. Even today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.

After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies—that’s a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us,” he said. “These are people that understand first principles; they love freedom, and they love free markets.” Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups.

By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. “The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” he wrote. He’s remained a loud critic of Pentagon brass, including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s Cabinet]

Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. Gabbard says she believes this is because of criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris. Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.

Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses. (My colleague Elaine Godfrey reported that Gaetz has shown videos of naked women to colleagues; Gaetz was a leading opponent of a revenge-porn law in the Florida legislature.) 

More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.

[David A. Graham: The terminally online are in charge now]

What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.

Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer. But Hegseth is personally well liked and already collecting support from powerful Republicans. Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)

If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.

We Americans are a vulnerable and divided people. The election today isn’t just about choosing which politicians should lead us; this is only one issue before us. We have to decide what sort of country we want to be, and how we want to be understood—by ourselves, and by the world.

Domestic political differences are usually superficial and temporary. But the divide we’re seeing doesn’t seem like a momentary rift. We have to heal our deeper rifts and remember that we are one people. If we don’t address these rifts, we will be a country in perpetual crisis, suffering from economic instability and social turmoil. And we will be weak in the face of our actual adversaries. These adversaries know how to exploit our weaknesses. If we don’t try to bridge our internal differences, we’re handing our enemies a gift.

In the Army, I saw firsthand the power of unity in the most challenging possible circumstances. I served, fought, and sometimes risked my life alongside people who didn’t share my background or beliefs. We had no choice but to break down the walls that separated us, to set aside our differences and focus on what bound us together: our mission and our loyalty to one another. Those experiences taught me that respect and understanding aren’t luxuries—they’re survival skills. They’re what make us strong in the face of adversity. What I try today to convey to my fellow Americans, especially those who didn’t serve in uniform and didn’t learn on the battlefield that nothing at all really divides us, is that we need to spend much less time tangling ourselves up in anger and distrust.

[Peter Wehner: How to prevent the worst from happening]

On the day in Afghanistan when I was wounded, and when three of my fellow soldiers, and a  civilian American-government employee, made the ultimate sacrifice, nothing divided me from my fellow citizens. Nothing at all. But back home, we are driven by a cycle of rhetoric that pushes us further apart. We’ve allowed ourselves to be pulled into silos of belief, where headlines and sound bites define who we are and whom we see as “other.” But we cannot let these forces tear us apart. We must find a way back to one another, not just for our children’s sake but for our own survival as a nation.

I learned something else in battle: We are all dependent on one another. I trusted people of different religions, different backgrounds, different beliefs—and they trusted me. We understood that we were one unit, and that we had to refuse to let anyone or anything break that bond. What is true for an Army unit is true for the nation: We must not let anyone break us apart.

This isn’t just about politics. It’s about our identity. We can’t afford to lose sight of what makes us strong: our ability to work through our differences, to respect one another even when we disagree. Our enemies know this. They know that the easiest way to weaken America is to fuel division from within, to make us believe that we’re enemies rather than partners. If we want to keep them from using this division against us, we have to reclaim the value of national unity.

Our greatest strength lies not in agreement, because we’re always going to disagree. We don’t even have to like one another. I learned in the Army that liking one another matters less than loving one another. We have to love what we have in common, even if we disagree. Our strength is in our shared commitment to one another as Americans. We have to listen to one another, we have to commit to not tearing one another down, and we have to show one another that we’re bigger than our differences.

After the votes are counted, we’ll have a choice to make. We can let our anger fester, exacerbating the kind of division that benefits only those who would see us weak. Or we can take this moment to turn toward one another, to seek understanding over judgment, to stop letting anyone—politicians, pundits, news channels—tell us whom we should hate or fear.

[Read: Election Day is just the beginning]

This isn’t easy work. It takes courage to open ourselves to perspectives that challenge our own. But we owe it to ourselves, to our neighbors, and, yes, to the next generation, to try. Our enemies would love nothing more than to see us fail. Let’s deny them that satisfaction. Let’s be the nation we know we can be—strong, resilient, and united, not in perfect agreement, but in purpose and respect for one another.

Now is the time to rise above what divides us, and reclaim our common goal. This election is not an ending, but a beginning—a moment to choose a path of empathy, resilience, and respect. The challenges we face—from threats abroad to struggles here at home—demand a unity that transcends politics. We cannot afford to see one another as enemies; our true strength lies in our ability to hold together even in disagreement. America was built on the resilience and diversity of its people, on a willingness to struggle and compromise to find common ground. Let us commit, today and every day, to building a nation where our differences deepen our resolve, where our shared purpose makes us strong. If we truly believe in America, we must believe in one another. Our future depends on it.

In June, Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and pro–Donald Trump activist, sat down for a chat with Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who instigated an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 over his refusal to pay grazing fees.

In the video—posted on the America Happens Network, which has aired documentaries such as Bundy vs. Deep State and the series Conspiracy Truths—Raiklin explained that tens of thousands of service members had refused to comply with a Defense Department mandate that all personnel receive a vaccine for COVID-19, because they did not want to be “experimented on with an unsafe and ineffective, what I call ‘DNA-mutilation injection.’” He told Bundy that the “illegal” mandate, since rescinded, was to blame for the “total destruction of our constitutional order.”

“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)

Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.

Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”

Raiklin did not explicitly call for violence, even though he praised Bundy as “quite the legend” for his aggressive opposition to federal authority. Rather, he said he wanted “appropriate lawful justice”—but archly suggested that this should come from outside the court system. Raiklin chooses his words carefully, even when they are freighted with menace. Bundy asked how the ex-soldier would treat the federal prosecutors in his own case, and Raiklin replied calmly, “I would conduct the most peaceful and patriotic legal and moral and ethical actions that they’ve ever experienced in their life.”

A New York native with a degree from the Touro Law Center, in Central Islip, Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer. He served as an intelligence officer in the National Guard in several states as well as in the regular Army, deploying to Jordan and Afghanistan. Among his numerous commendations and awards is the Bronze Star Medal, given for meritorious service or acts of valor in a combat zone.  

He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.

Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.”   

To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.

The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.

Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.

Raiklin’s future in a Trump administration is uncertain. But he is close to major figures in Trump’s orbit, particularly Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was indicted for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.

Raikiln is also a board member of America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that has pursued conservative causes for decades, of which Flynn is the chair. Other board members have amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory—promoted by the QAnon movement, of which Flynn is an ally—that some Democratic politicians kidnap, torture, and eat children.

Like Raiklin, Flynn has long railed against suspected deep-state actors, whom he has accused of torpedoing his career in intelligence. Flynn was regarded as a brilliant tactical intelligence officer when he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But after he became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, senior intelligence officials worried that his erratic management style and conspiratorial attitudes made him unfit for the job. Top intelligence officials pushed Flynn out in 2014, after an unhappy and sometimes-tumultuous two-year tenure. James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time, is on Raiklin’s list.

A few years later, Trump named Flynn to be his national security adviser, a position he held for just 24 days. Flynn resigned in February 2017, following revelations that he’d had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and given misleading statements to senior administration officials.

A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.

[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]

Raiklin is not shy about his aspirations. I sent him an email, requesting an interview about his deep-state list. Rather than reply, he posted a screenshot of my message on X and said he would “much rather discuss” the subject, as well as the direct appointment of electors through state legislatures, “with Americans operating in good faith.” He suggested a number of conservative podcasters he thought fit the bill.

Raiklin invited me to post my questions on X, “in the interest of public transparency and exposure and [to] show the world you are operating in good faith.” So I did.  

“What is the purpose of this list?” I asked. “Why did you select these people? Do you intend to do anything to the people on this list?”

Raiklin replied with links to videos of interviews he had already done with conservative media figures, including the former television star Roseanne Barr. On her show, Raiklin explained that although the deep state went by many other names—“permanent Washington,” “the Uniparty,” “the duopoly”—“I just simply call them war-criminal scum.”

“I happen to be the guy that said, You know what? I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let me expose them by name, date, place, transgression, category. And let’s start educating the country on who they are, so that they’re not able to walk anywhere, whether it’s in the digital space or physical space, without them feeling the, let’s just say, wrath of their neighbors, friends, relatives, family.”

Barr then sang to Raiklin lyrics from “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” to his obvious delight.

It’s hard to know whether Raiklin is a true believer—and potentially dangerous—or just a profiteering troll. His unwillingness to respond to direct questions from a journalist suggests the latter.

After I pressed Raiklin to answer me, rather than post interviews he’d done with friendly hosts inclined to agree with him, he invited me to direct further questions through Minnect, an app that lets you solicit advice from self-professed experts. According to his Minnect profile, Raiklin’s current rate for answering a question via text is $50. For $100, he’ll provide a recorded video response. A video call, “for the most personalized advice,” will run you $20 a minute, with a 15-minute minimum.

“Are you asking me to book you for a fee?” I wrote in his X thread. I wanted to be sure I correctly understood Raiklin’s proposal. He replied, “And 50% of the revenue created from the article you write. Send the contract to [his email] for my team to review.”

I declined.

A few days later, he was back to campaign work, exhorting state officials to intervene in the presidential election.

“Republican State Legislatures just need to hand their States’ electors to Trump, just like the Democrat elites handed the primary ‘win’ to Kamala Harris,” he wrote Wednesday on X, adding, “276 electors on Nov 5 ... CheckMate! Then we can Castrate the Deep State and Crush the Commies immediately on January 20, 2025.”