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.

Smollett, who is black and gay, was accused of lying about being the victim of a racial attack in Chicago.

Just 50 days before his reelection, Donald Trump took the time to hawk a new crypto platform.

If the country does not build out its cryptocurrency ecosystem, “we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best,” Trump said on a livestream on X. “It’s very young and very growing. And if we don’t do it, China’s going to do it.” The livestream was sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which has given Trump the title “chief crypto advocate” and his sons, Barron, Eric, and Donald Jr., that of “Web3 ambassador.”

World Liberty Financial is the brainchild of Zak Folkman (the creator of an advisory firm called Date Hotter Girls LLC) and Chase Herro (an affiliate marketer who previously sold colon cleanses). It is a get-rich-quick scheme, and not one that seems designed to enrich its customers.

It is also an emblem of a financial world that Trump’s election seems set to supercharge, populated by young men who have seen their economic prospects stagnate, their faith in the United States falter, and a champion in a baggy business suit and a red baseball cap emerge. Think of it as the bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.

[Christopher Beam: The worst of crypto is yet to come]

Its first major market sector: day-trading. I don’t mean old-fashioned, small-dollar equity investing done at the kitchen table. I mean hyper-speculative betting done with borrowed money on mobile apps, as investors shitpost and infinite-scroll. Market-moving rumors come not from corporate conferences, but from sites like YouTube and the Subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). Users at times coordinate to buy up a certain stock with the explicit goal of screwing over a hedge fund that had bet the stock would go down.

That’s what happened four years ago with GameStop: Redditors helped to push the share price up 8,000 percent. Now so-called meme stocks are resurgent. GameStop spiked this spring. Tesla climbed when Trump won. (Tesla is both a blue-chip stock and a meme stock; Elon Musk, the company’s founder, is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest advisers, as well as being a storied internet troll and the owner of the social-media platform X.) “This rally seems unsustainable, even if you believe in the long-term growth story for the stock,” David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Bloomberg. “It makes no sense.”

As noted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, this trading behavior is in part driven by market democratization. A decade ago, the fintech firm Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, allowing individuals to buy stocks or other financial assets without paying any fees. Today’s apps also allow users to purchase fractions of a stock and do not set minimum balances, ushering in less wealthy investors.

The barriers to entry are low, yet the risks are high. Today’s young day-traders tend to make frequent transactions and gravitate toward exotic trades, when research shows that investors generate the best returns when they make simple investments infrequently. The apps encourage the piling-on of risk through push alerts, promotions, and other gamifications.

The second crucial market sector: sports betting. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning commercial sports betting outside of Nevada. That paved the way for more than three dozen states to okay the practice; 30 states also allow residents to make wagers online.

It would be hard to overstate how much this has changed pro sports and the fan experience over the past half decade. Commentators talk about fantasy leagues and prop bets as much as they talk about the game; advertisements for sportsbooks are ubiquitous; millions of spectators keep DraftKings and FanDuel up on their second screen. An estimated two in five American adults engage in sport betting. One in four online bettors has wagered more than $500 in a single day. Americans staked $120 billion last year, double what they did in 2021.

Many die-hard fans love the rise of sports betting: It’s entertaining, engaging, a way to support your favorite players and dunk on your friends. Still, in a survey, 37 percent of online bettors said they “felt bad or ashamed” for losing money. Nearly 40 percent said they bet more than they should; nearly 20 percent said they lied about the extent of their betting, and the same share said they lost cash that was meant for their day-to-day financial obligations. A strong majority supported the federal government “aggressively” regulating the market, “to specifically protect customers from compulsive gambling.”

Third and last is crypto, which boomed into the mainstream a decade ago. Today, roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto. Sites such as Robinhood and Coinbase make purchasing easy. (Buying bitcoin used to take significant know-how and days of waiting.) The most recent bust, in 2022, seems to have done little to deter crypto’s most ardent fans.

There might be more of them soon. For years, Trump was anti-crypto. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter five years ago. He added: “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

Today, he’s not just promoting shady crypto start-ups. He’s promising regulation that would allow banks to offer crypto assets to clients, making the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Industry-friendly rules would lead to a flood of cash entering the crypto markets, enriching anyone with assets already in their wallets, but also increasing volatility and exposing millions more Americans to scams, frauds, and swindles.

Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino. Many folks trade crypto and meme stocks on the same platform, thumbing over to a second app to keep their sports bets going, thumbing over again to post their wins and losses. Apps have made the experience social. They have also made staking money as frictionless as ordering Uber Eats.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]

The players in this casino are overwhelmingly young men, roughly 40 percent of whom are into sports betting and crypto. (A smaller minority is actively trading.) No surprise, Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me, when I called to ask about the bro-economy. “Risk skews male, period, for good and for ill,” he said. “There’s this greater willingness, appetite for, vulnerability to, tolerance of risk.” He appreciated how the activities gave guys something to do together and talk about with one another. He also noted how many young men felt shut out of traditional wealth-building strategies, such as homeownership.

Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.

Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

Power-hungry presidents of both parties have been concocting ways to get around Congress for all of American history. But as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, legal experts are worried he could make the legislative branch go away altogether—at least for a while.

Several of Trump’s early Cabinet nominees—including Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—have drawn widespread condemnation for their outlandish political views and lack of conventional qualifications. Their critics include some Senate Republicans tasked with voting on their confirmation. Anticipating resistance, Trump has already begun pressuring Senate GOP leaders, who will control the chamber next year, to allow him to install his picks by recess appointment, a method that many presidents have used.

The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune of South Dakota, has said that “all options are on the table, including recess appointments,” for overcoming Democratic opposition to Trump’s nominees. But Democrats aren’t Trump’s primary concern; they won’t have the votes to stop nominees on their own. What makes Trump’s interest in recess appointments unusual is that he is gearing up to use them in a fight against his own party.

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

If Senate Republicans block his nominees, Trump could partner with the GOP-controlled House and invoke a never-before-used provision of the Constitution to force Congress to adjourn “until such time as he shall think proper.” The move would surely prompt a legal challenge, which the Supreme Court might have to decide, setting up a confrontation that would reveal how much power both Republican lawmakers and the Court’s conservative majority will allow Trump to seize.

“None of this has ever been tested or determined by the courts,” Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. If Trump tries to adjourn Congress, Glassman said, he would be “pushing the very boundaries of the separation of powers in the United States.” Although Trump has not spoken publicly about using the provision, Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer well connected in Republican politics, has reported that Trumpworld appears to be seriously contemplating it.

Trump could not wave away Congress on his own. The Constitution says the president can adjourn Congress only “in case of disagreement” between the House and the Senate on when the chambers should recess, and for how long. One of the chambers would first have to pass a resolution to adjourn for at least 10 days. If the other agrees to the measure, Trump gets his recess appointments. But even if one refuses—most likely the Senate, in this case—Trump could essentially play the role of tiebreaker and declare Congress adjourned. In a Fox News interview yesterday, Speaker Mike Johnson would not rule out helping Trump go around the Senate. “There may be a function for that,” he said. “We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

Presidents have used recess appointments to circumvent the Senate-confirmation process throughout U.S. history, either to overcome opposition to their nominees or simply because the Senate moved too slowly to consider them. But no president is believed to have adjourned Congress in order to install his Cabinet before. “We never contemplated it,” Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s second term, told me. Obama frequently used recess appointments until 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority by making them when Congress had gone out of session only briefly (hence the current 10-day minimum).

[Watch: What’s behind Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks]

Any attempt by Trump to force Congress into a recess would face a few obstacles. First, Johnson would have to secure nearly unanimous support from his members to pass an adjournment resolution, given Democrats’ likely opposition. Depending on the results of several uncalled House races, he might have only a vote or two to spare at the beginning of the next Congress. And although many House Republicans have pledged to unify behind Trump’s agenda, his nominees are widely considered unqualified, to say the least. Gaetz in particular is a uniquely unpopular figure in the conference because of his leading role in deposing Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy.

If the House doesn’t block Trump, the Supreme Court might. Its 2014 ruling against Obama was unanimous, and three conservative justices who remain on the Court—John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—signed a concurring opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, saying they would have placed far more restrictions on the president’s power. They wrote that the Founders allowed the president to make recess appointments because the Senate used to meet for only a few months of the year. Now, though, Congress takes much shorter breaks and can return to session at virtually a moment’s notice. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists,” Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote of the recess-appointment power, “and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the president to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”

The 2014 ruling did not address the Constitution’s provision allowing the president to adjourn Congress, but Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me that the conservatives’ concurrence “is inconsistent with the extreme executive overreach” that Trump might attempt: “As I read them, this machination by Trump would not meet their definition of constitutionality.”

Thanks in part to those legal uncertainties, Trump’s easiest path is simply to secure Senate approval for his nominees, and he may succeed. Republicans will have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, so the president-elect’s picks could lose three GOP votes and still win confirmation with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance. But the most controversial nominees, such as Gaetz, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for defense secretary), could struggle to find 50 Republican votes. And as Thune himself noted in a Fox News interview on Thursday night, Republicans who oppose their confirmation are unlikely to vote for the Senate to adjourn so that Trump can install them anyway.

Thune, who had been elected as leader by his colleagues only one day before that interview, seems fine with helping Trump get around Democrats. Letting Trump defy Thune’s own members and neuter the Senate is a much bigger ask. Then again, if Trump takes his power play to the limit, the new majority leader won’t have a say at all.

Illustrations by Matt Rota

On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo. The woman, Hideko Hakamada, led a procession of lawyers and supporters carrying a broad, sky-blue banner, and as they approached the courthouse, a throng of some 300 people began clapping and chanting encouragement. A cluster of TV-news crews had set up nearby, and Hideko turned to greet them.

As she told the court later the same morning, she had come to right a wrong that had been done in that very building 55 years earlier. Hideko Hakamada is the sister of Iwao Hakamada, a former professional boxer whose long struggle for justice has become one of the most celebrated legal causes in Japanese history. He was found guilty of murdering four people in 1966, in a trial so flawed that it has become a textbook example of wrongful conviction.

Hakamada was sentenced to death, and spent the next five decades in a state of debilitating fear. Prisoners in Japan are not told when they will be executed; they listen every morning for the footsteps that could precede a key turning in their cell door and then a short walk to the hanging chamber. No warning is given to their lawyers or family members. Hakamada spent longer on death row than anyone else in history, earning a spot in Guinness World Records. He wrote eloquently about the daily mental torture he endured, and in the end it drove him mad. His agony changed the lives of many people around him, including one of the original judges, who became convinced of his innocence and spent the rest of his own life racked with guilt.

In recent years, Hakamada, who is now 88, has become a symbol in Japan not just of wronged innocence but of what is known as hitojichi shiho, or “hostage justice.” Police in Japan have the power to hold suspects and interrogate them for months without giving them access to a lawyer. The goal is to extract a confession, which Japanese prosecutors see as the centerpiece of any successful criminal case. Hakamada was subjected to brutal interrogations for 23 days—lasting up to 16 hours a day—until he signed a confession (which he recanted soon afterward).

These routine practices have led to a conviction rate of 99.8 percent for cases that go to trial. They have also led to so many accusations of coercion that there is now a Japanese word for the phenomenon—enzai, meaning “false accusations leading to imprisonment.” The system is also heavily weighted against granting retrials that might give convicted people a second chance. In Hakamada’s case, it took more than 50 years for him to receive one.

The Japanese fixation on obtaining confessions is centuries old. As Takashi Takano, a prominent Tokyo attorney and a critic of the system, explained to me, it is rooted in a belief that the state must elicit remorse from offenders in order to rehabilitate them and bolster social harmony. One of Takano’s clients was Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan CEO, who was smuggled from Japan in a musical-equipment box in 2019 after being arrested on charges of financial misconduct and interrogated for hundreds of hours. The Ghosn case gave the outside world a rare glimpse of the power of Japanese prosecutors.

The facts of the Hakamada case were egregious enough to anger even insiders. In 2014, a judge released Hakamada from prison, granting him a retrial and delivering a stinging rebuke to the police, strongly suggesting that they had fabricated the evidence—a pile of bloodstained clothing—that had helped convict him. According to the judge, the man who supervised Hakamada’s interrogation was known among lawyers as the “king of torture.” The long-delayed retrial concluded in May, and Hakamada was finally acquitted in late September.

At this point, Hakamada may be beyond understanding what his exoneration means. He has sometimes said things that suggest he believes he was never in prison. He appears to have survived only by escaping into an imaginary world where he is all-powerful—a king, an emperor, even “the almighty God.” (Hakamada embraced Catholicism while in prison.) But the prospect of a retrial helped galvanize a reform movement led by lawyers, ex-judges, other wrongly convicted people, and even some Japanese boxers, who see Hakamada as both a figure of heroic suffering and the victim of a lingering social prejudice against their sport. These advocates have been pushing Japanese officials to rewrite the laws that undergird the practice of hostage justice. Many of them have drawn inspiration from Hakamada’s own prison writings, copied and passed around in samizdat form.

“Conscience is the only voice that protects the life of an innocent man,” he wrote in a journal entry in 1981, when he was still lucid. “The voice of conscience echoing ever louder and higher for as long as the agonizing nights last.”

When I first saw Iwao Hakamada, he was sitting at a table in the third-floor apartment he shares with Hideko, eating cooked eel and rice from a bowl. He still has the small, sturdy frame of a featherweight boxer, along with a large, sloping forehead and small eyes that give him the look of a sleep-addled bear.

Hideko, who had met me at the door, introduced me to her brother. I bowed a greeting, but Hakamada glanced up only briefly and went back to his eel and rice. The apartment was relatively large by Japanese standards, and it struck me that it must have seemed vast when Hakamada was released from his tiny cell. With Hideko’s encouragement, I said a few words about why I was there and asked my first question, about why he had become a boxer.

“Because I decided I needed to be strong,” he replied. It was a promising start for a man who was said to have lost touch with reality. But then he got up quickly and walked away, signaling that the interview was over. Hideko had warned me that her brother was no longer capable of telling a stranger his story.

Nonetheless, the long arc of his incarceration—from passionate self-defense to deepening despair to encroaching insanity—is captured in some 5,000 handwritten letters and journal entries that Hakamada produced in prison. In a sense, those pages are where his soul resides, perhaps more so than in the ghostly old man who was now sitting in a leather armchair in the next room. They were the real reason I had come.

Hideko got me a cup of tea and began carrying heavy boxes of Hakamada’s prison letters and journals to the table, brushing off my efforts to help. She is small but impressively fit for her age, with a habitual expression of resilient good humor on her face. The pages are in bound volumes, each one as thick as a bible.

She began leafing through them, showing me how Hakamada’s handwriting had changed over the years. It starts out wobbly and cartoonish; he had never been a good student, she said. He was the youngest of six siblings born to a working-class family in a village near Shizuoka, a quiet boy who loved animals and used to bring home cats and birds and give them names. Hideko was the second-youngest, by her own account a tomboy and a loudmouth. “He would imitate what I did,” she said. He began boxing when he was 19—there was a gym nearby—and turned professional at the age of 23, boxing 19 matches in a single year (a record in Japan). But he decided to retire after an injury, and eventually got a job at a small miso factory not far from his parents’ home. He married a local woman, and the couple had a child.

Hideko paused, resting her hand on one of the binders, and then told me about the night that changed everything: June 30, 1966. A fire broke out after midnight in the home of the miso factory’s director, and after the flames had been put out, investigators discovered the burned bodies of the director, his wife, and two of their children. They had all been stabbed to death. The following morning, Hakamada went to his parents’ house, where Hideko was still living, to talk about the shocking news. Meanwhile, the police settled on Hakamada as the most likely suspect among the firm’s employees, believing the crime to have been an inside job and apparently seeing his boxing skills as proof of a capacity for violence.

Matt Rota

During the 23 days of interrogation in a Shizuoka station house, the police used methods that were common in Japan when authorities were trying to extract a confession: sleep deprivation, threats, beatings. I spoke with two other people who had tried to maintain their innocence in similar circumstances, and both told me they had become so physically and emotionally spent that they would have said or signed almost anything to escape. The confession Hakamada ultimately signed is implausible on its face: He admitted to multiple scenarios, all of which seem to have been suggested to him by the police. Cash had been stolen from the home, but the police were never able to trace any of it to him.

“Please, God, I am not the killer,” he wrote in one of many letters to his mother during the first trial. “I am screaming it every day, and one day I hope people will hear my voice that reaches them through this Shizuoka wind.”

Hakamada could not have known it, but one of the judges who faced him as he first entered the courthouse in 1967 was a silent rebel against the Japanese way of justice. At 30, Norimichi Kumamoto was only a year younger than Hakamada, but in most ways their lives could not have been more different. Kumamoto was the eldest of four children, and had been recognized as brilliant from an early age. In pictures, he is austerely handsome, with creased brows and a firmly set mouth. He was well known at university, one of his classmates, Akira Kitani, told me, not just for his intellect but for his displays of brazen independence in a culture that fostered conformity. During the oral part of the bar exam, Kumamoto argued with his examiners—a shocking act of insubordination. “He won the argument, but they failed him” for talking back, Kitani, who later became a distinguished criminal-court judge, told me. (Kumamoto went on to earn the top score out of 10,000 students after he was allowed to retake the exam.)

Kumamoto also stood out for his interest in defendants’ rights. Seiki Ogata, a Japanese journalist who wrote a book about the judge, described him as an admirer of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 Miranda decision requiring that suspects be read their rights before being interrogated. This was an unusual perspective in a country where law-enforcement officials have openly declared their belief that, as one of them put it, “the right to silence is a cancer.”

Kumamoto appears to have sensed that something was wrong soon after Hakamada’s trial began. The prosecutors had no plausible evidence tying Hakamada to the crime and no plausible motive for him to have been involved in the killings. Years afterward, according to Ogata’s biography, the judge recalled being moved by the boxer’s air of confidence as he asserted his innocence; unlike some other defendants, Hakamada did not seem drawn by an urge to explain himself. “I rather feel that we are being judged from now on,” Kumamoto remembered telling one of the two other judges hearing the case, according to the biography. (Some serious criminal trials are handled by three judges in Japan.)

Almost a year into the trial—the Japanese justice system tends to take its time—the police claimed to have discovered a pile of bloody clothes at the bottom of a miso tank from the factory. They declared—though they could not prove—that the clothes were Hakamada’s, and that he had hidden them there after the murders.

Judge Kumamoto thought the discovery of the new evidence was far too convenient to be real. The bloodstains were oddly fresh-looking on clothes that were said to have been stewing in a miso vat for 14 months, and at trial, the clothes would be shown not to fit Hakamada. Kumamoto wanted to acquit. But according to Ogata, the other two judges on the panel, both senior to him, could not believe that the police or prosecutors had coerced a false confession.

Such faith remains common among Japanese judges. Some spend an entire career on the bench without once delivering an acquittal. “In theory, the prosecutors monitor the police, and the judge monitors the prosecutors,” Hiroshi Ichikawa, who spent almost 13 years as a prosecutor and is now a defense lawyer, told me. “But it doesn’t work like this at all. The prosecutor basically does what the police want, and the judges follow what the prosecutor wants. So the criminal-justice system is basically controlled by the police.”

Prosecutors are afraid to cross the police, who have much larger investigative resources, and often cover up their mistakes. Ichikawa startled me by disclosing that he had once, as a prosecutor, personally threatened to kill a suspect if he didn’t confess. He said his former colleagues mostly haven’t changed their ways.

In the summer of 1968, after weeks of difficult arguments among themselves, the three judges in the Hakamada trial held a vote. Kumamoto was alone in finding Hakamada not guilty. Then came a second blow: As the presiding judge on the panel, he was obliged to write the decision justifying the verdict.

Kumamoto reluctantly agreed—to refuse might have ended his career—but he produced a 350-page document that is a poignant record of a tortured conscience. He criticized the investigators’ tactics at length and appeared to be headed for an acquittal. But he then concluded that the defendant was guilty and must be executed.

Another judge who reviewed Kumamoto’s ruling many years later told me that the document was “very unusual, to the point that it’s abnormal … If you read the verdict, you can see that there was not just disagreement but serious conflict of opinion” among the judges.

Kumamoto refused to sign his own ruling. He said he tried to visit Hakamada in jail to apologize, but was not granted permission. “Kumamoto believed the higher courts would overturn the verdict, but they didn’t,” Ogata, his biographer, told me. “In the end, he felt really responsible for what happened.” That feeling would shape the remainder of his life.

The 1968 death sentence was a reckoning for everyone in the Hakamada family. Hakamada’s mother, who had been healthy and strong, fell into despair and died two months after the sentencing. His father died not long afterward. Hakamada was so attached to his parents that his siblings kept the news from him for more than a year. He continued to write to his mother regularly, and finally the siblings decided they had to tell him. “I felt a great shock, and my whole body instantly froze,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “I could do nothing except look at my uncontrollably trembling hands. Feeling the trepidation like dark waves overtaking my body, I was taken by the urge to curse every being in this world.”

Hideko showed me more of Hakamada’s writings from the years that followed. He studied hard in prison, and his kanji characters become impressively neat and elegant, in perfectly ordered lines; they look like the work of a different person. His thoughts are more focused. He talks about the details of his case, and sometimes expounds on the nature of freedom and solitude. In a letter from December 1976, he describes feeling relief and inspiration after meeting with students from a human-rights group: “They believe I’m innocent. That’s why they support my cause. It’s clear that the verdict of the high court is nonsense … It is extremely brutal and unfair, prejudiced, to give a sentence based on a factual error.”

Hakamada also wrote a diary entry addressed to his son, who was 2 and a half years old when he was arrested. “Son, I want you to grow up honest and brave,” he wrote.

There is no need to be afraid. If someone asks how your father is, you should reply like this: My father is battling an unfair iron chain … Son, as long as you try to do good and survive by learning lessons even from this society that is full of agonies and unkindness, I will be able to return to you in good health not too far in the future. I will prove to you then that your father never killed anyone and that the police know it best, and that the judge is the one who must feel most sorry.

He seems to have been referring to Judge Kumamoto, though the entry does not say so.

Hakamada’s wife had divorced him while he was in prison. It was there Hakamada learned that the boy had been placed in an orphanage and that the letters he sent to his son never reached him, Hideko told me. She said she has not seen the boy since he was a toddler, and seemed reluctant to talk about him. But her brother sometimes still calls out his son’s name: Akira. He would be 60 years old today.

Some of the letters and meditations Hakamada produced in prison are lyrical. “For some reason, moonlight gives me hope and peace,” he wrote. “When I think that many people outside prison are also looking at the moon, I feel a sense of freedom with other people who also gaze at the moonlight.”

Although he was on death row, Hakamada remained both hopeful and angry throughout the 1970s, sure that his conviction would be overturned on appeal. At times, he wrote about other cases of wrongful conviction that he became aware of through friends or lawyers. “This scream that I have continued to vocalize has not been listened to for the past 13 years,” he wrote to a boxing commentator. “The lack of responsibility of Japan’s justice system is so serious that my skin boils from anger.”

In 1980, Japan’s supreme court confirmed Hakamada’s death sentence. Six months later, the man in the cell next to him, who had become a friend, was taken out one morning without warning and hanged. This was a period of terrible suffering, Hideko told me. She felt as if her heart would stop every time she heard about an execution on TV. Hakamada’s journal entries and letters are a dark window into his state of mind. “Death-row inmates unanimously agree they fear execution very much,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “In fact, it’s not the execution itself they fear: They fear so much the mind that fears execution. This agony, the pain that comes from extreme anxiety, completely differs from the pain and suffering accompanied by the concept of death.”

A shadow seemed to fall over Hideko’s face as she showed me some of the pages that followed, from the 1980s. “He started to talk about people sending him signals by radio waves,” she said, pointing to the Japanese script. Later, there was talk of monkeys in his cell with him, and he started wearing bags on his head and arms to protect himself from harmful emanations.

Among the most striking letters are those in which Hakamada seems to be persuading himself that he can find meaning in his suffering. “My wish to win innocence is something that is purified and deepened when I accept loneliness,” he wrote from his cell, a concrete box about seven feet on each side. “Loneliness is certainly very sad and painful, but it is never meaningless. When one endures and humbly accepts loneliness, one will surely realize the deep meaning of the path to victory.”

But as the years passed with no hope of release—and with sudden execution a daily possibility—his mind continued to unravel. You can see it in his handwriting, which gradually loses its discipline and becomes loopy and uneven again, as if he were returning to his childhood self. At times, he seemed to hover between madness and reason within a single paragraph:

I am the king of Japan. I want to run flat out, as fast as I can. If I won my freedom, first I would make this boundless dream come true, cutting through the wind with shoulders and hips. Just thinking of it makes my body ache. Could I be champion if I just kept on running? When I was young, I used to think so. But now I have another answer ready.

All through the decades of Hakamada’s imprisonment, Kumamoto was tormented by his role in the case. He resigned his judgeship in disgust less than a year after the verdict, a shocking decision for someone who had been seen as a rising star. He found work as a lawyer and university lecturer. He also became an alcoholic. Two marriages ended in divorce. He grew estranged from his two daughters, who didn’t understand the source of his misery until many years later, Ogata told me.

According to Ogata, Kumamoto once turned himself in to the police, saying he’d committed a murder; he may have been drunk at the time. He seems to have carried Hakamada everywhere, like an accusing ghost. On learning that Hakamada had embraced Catholicism in prison, Kumamoto also embraced Catholicism. At one point, he went to a church and asked to confess his sins, because he “wanted to feel closer” to him, Ogata wrote in his book.

Kumamoto appears to have kept his belief in Hakamada’s innocence almost entirely to himself. Japanese judges are expected to remain silent about their deliberations, and stoicism about one’s suffering has long been a part of Japan’s culture, perhaps especially for men. But in 2007, while living in retirement in southern Japan, Kumamoto began hearing about an emerging movement to free Hakamada, which had attracted the attention of some lawmakers. He sent a note to one of the activists, offering to help. Soon afterward, he appeared on a public panel about the death penalty, where he discussed his role in the trial and declared that he believed Hakamada was innocent. He also made an apology. “This is the moment when something that had been stuck in my throat and was suffocating me finally disappeared,” Kumamoto later told his biographer.

Kumamoto’s comments were reported widely in Japan, partly because he had violated the judicial code of silence. He spoke again at a session of Japan’s Parliament. The story of his long-repressed guilt and grief captured the public’s imagination, and gave rise to a feature film that was released in 2010, titled Box: The Hakamada Case, in reference to Hakamada’s career as a fighter. It was not a great movie—dramatizing a man sitting alone in a cell for almost five decades is hard—but the film did help draw more attention to Hakamada’s situation, both in Japan and beyond.

Hideko met Kumamoto at the time of his public apology. She told me she was deeply grateful to him for what he had done. Her brother was still locked up, but he was no longer seen as a monster. “Since the news report went out, the world has changed,” she said. “Even strangers greeted me on the street with a smile.”

Hideko has become something of a public figure in her own right. A manga-style graphic novel about her was published in 2020. She has the kind of life force that you sense the moment you walk into a room—her head cocked slightly, her eyes gleaming with amusement. She seems immune to regret, and laughs so often that it is easy to forget what she has been through.

She was 35 when Hakamada was convicted of murder, and it turned her into a pariah, along with the rest of the family. The local papers were full of stories portraying her brother as a demon. She got hate mail from strangers. She grew lonely and depressed, and drank herself to sleep every night for three years, she told me. But she pulled herself together, recognizing that she was her brother’s only hope. She visited him in prison as often as she could. She lived alone, working long hours at a government office and then at an accounting firm. I later learned—from the graphic novel about her life—that she had been briefly married as a young woman, but she’d never mentioned that to me. In a sense, she was married to her brother’s cause.

Starting in the ’90s, with Hideko’s help, a movement to exonerate Hakamada slowly coalesced. It attracted a diverse collection of people, and some pursued the cause with the kind of nerdy obsessiveness characteristic of otaku—a Japanese term for a person with a consuming hobby. One volunteer performed meticulous experiments with bloody clothing soaked in miso over long periods to show that the prosecution’s claims in the original trial did not hold up. These experiments were so rigorous and well documented that they were cited by the defense at Hakamada’s retrial many years later.

Among the movement’s most passionate supporters were Japanese boxers. One of them, a retired bantamweight champion named Shosei Nitta, started accompanying Hideko on her prison visits in the early 2000s. Then he began going alone, once a month. “You couldn’t converse in a normal way, except about boxing,” Nitta told me when I visited him at his Tokyo boxing gym. Nitta cocked his arm, showing me how he and Hakamada would discuss the best technique for a hook punch. Dozens of champion boxers protested in front of the supreme court, calling for a retrial.

Among the many things the boxers did for Hakamada was reach out to Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the American prizefighter who was catapulted to fame after Bob Dylan wrote a song about his wrongful murder conviction. (He served 19 years behind bars before his release in 1985.) Hakamada himself had written to Carter in 1989, congratulating him on his exoneration and pledging to “follow in your footsteps.” Two decades later, a fellow boxer traveled to the United States and brought back a videotape of Carter offering his support to Hakamada, who was still on death row.

“In the boxing community, we share this mysterious bond,” Nitta told me. “But in mainstream society, it’s not really approved of. We are trying to resist this prejudice, and I think that is why Hakamada means so much to us.”

Social prejudice appears to be a common thread in many wrongful-conviction cases in Japan. One of Hakamada’s death-row companions—their cells were adjoining—was a man named Kazuo Ishikawa, who belongs to the burakumin, the descendants of a feudal caste that was consigned to low-status jobs and still suffers from discrimination. Ishikawa was convicted of a 1963 murder on the basis of a coerced confession and a ransom note, even though he was illiterate at the time. He was paroled in 1994, but has always maintained his innocence and is still, at age 85, trying to clear his name.

Hideko and her eclectic band of boxers and otaku have helped elevate a broader effort to address the flaws in Japan’s criminal-justice system. More people are coming forward to contest their verdicts, and several nonprofits have sprung up to support those they believe to have been wrongly convicted. There is now an Innocence Project Japan, inspired by the American group formed in 1992, that uses DNA evidence to challenge convictions. The movement has had some modest victories: Defense lawyers have gained more discovery rights and have pushed back against detention orders. Some police interrogations are now recorded. A “lay judge” initiative, begun in 2009, allows a mixed panel of three professional judges and an average of six citizens to decide guilt and sentencing in some serious criminal cases.

There have also been setbacks. A lawsuit challenging Japan’s long-standing practice of notifying death-row inmates only hours before their execution—which likely played a role in driving Hakamada insane—was dismissed by the Osaka district court in April.

Change of any kind comes slowly in Japan, where those who question authority are more likely to be slapped than rewarded. Most people seem to have deep confidence in the justice system, and they are not entirely wrong: Japan incarcerates far fewer people per capita than the United States, partly because prosecutors are cautious about pressing charges for less serious crimes. Sentences tend to be relatively light, especially for those who admit their guilt and express remorse. Prosecutors believe they have a responsibility to help offenders return to a useful life.

But they bridle at the notion that justice can be arrived at through a messy legal tussle, as in American courtrooms. In Japan, the legal system behaves more like some archaic deity: kind to those who accept its judgments, and merciless to those who do not.

Matt Rota

In 2014, after his legal team had spent more than 30 years pleading for a retrial, Hakamada was finally granted one by a district court. Hideko was then 81 years old and retired. She went to the prison to give her brother the good news, trailed by a film crew. As she was leaving, a guard offered her boxes full of her brother’s belongings. Hakamada then walked into the room and sat down next to her. The judge, it turned out, had ordered Hakamada’s immediate release. Hideko was totally unprepared. They had to ask for a ride from the film crew, but Hakamada, who hadn’t been in a car in decades, got motion sickness. They ended up spending the night in a Tokyo hotel before heading home to Hamamatsu, the city where Hideko now lives.

Hideko struggled to get her head around the magnitude of what had just happened. The judge had not only released Hakamada and granted a retrial; he had taken a sledgehammer to the entire case. He asserted that the investigators appeared to have faked the evidence. He cited DNA evidence, not available during the first trial, showing that the blood on the clothes from the miso tank was neither Hakamada’s nor the murder victims’.

It might have ended there. The judge had made clear that he believed Hakamada was innocent, and his ruling seemed unanswerable. Instead, prosecutors appealed his call for a retrial. As Hakamada moved in with his sister and began readapting to a world he had not inhabited since the mid-1960s, his case staggered from one false ending to another. Finally, in 2023, the Tokyo High Court affirmed his right to a retrial. Prosecutors, who were widely expected to give up, declared that they would seek his conviction for murder all over again.

There was little logic in their decision. They had no new evidence, and their chances of victory were near zero. But as Makoto Ibusuki, a professor at Tokyo’s Seijo University and an authority on wrongful convictions, explained to me, Japanese prosecutors tend to see their institution as infallible. There may have been an added spur in this instance. The prosecutors who brought the original case had been accused in the 2014 ruling of using fabricated evidence. David Johnson, an expert on the Japanese legal system who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me that their successors may have felt obliged to defend their reputation.

The retrial, which began in October 2023, was like a bad case of déjà vu, with the same exhibits of bloodstained clothes and miso tanks that had been used half a century earlier—though the state quietly withdrew Hakamada’s discredited confession. “The prosecutors just repeat what has already been said,” Hideko told me. “The expressions on their faces said, Why do we have to be here? ”

For all its frustrations, the retrial gave a big platform to opponents of hostage justice. The movement’s buoyant mood was on display at a memorial service I attended this past April at a Tokyo meeting hall. It was held to honor a man who had been exonerated years earlier after serving nearly three decades for murder. I found myself chatting with an 80-year-old man in an ill-fitting brown blazer who said he had served 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. We were standing by a big picture window, and he pointed out the headquarters of the National Police Agency across the street. He had been tortured in there for weeks on end, he said, in a basement room with no windows and no clocks. “I understand completely how an innocent man ends up writing a confession,” he said.

But much of the Japanese public does not understand. The widow of the exonerated man being honored gave a brief but powerful speech, during which she said her father hadn’t wanted her to marry a man who had been convicted of a crime, because he believed that “the courthouse never lies.”

A nonpartisan group of some 200 Parliament members now wants to make it easier for defendants to receive a retrial and is preparing to propose amendments to the law. But getting any such measure past Japan’s powerful Justice Ministry will not be easy. It is dominated by prosecutors, and has sent clear signs that it is opposed to reform.

When Hakamada got out of prison, Hideko didn’t ask him about his time on the inside. “I was waiting until he spoke,” she told me. But he never has. Occasionally, he refers obliquely to his time there as “training,” as if it had been preparation for some otherworldly combat.

He talks about being visited by the spirits of his dead friends, the ones who were led away to the execution chamber, where a prison official stands behind a blue curtain and presses a button that ends a person’s life. “When he first came here, he’d say there were spirits of the dead trapped in the closet,” Hideko told me. “He’d tap on it and try to release them.”

Hakamada’s days revolve around a long, mostly silent, drive that he is taken on every afternoon, his eyes focused on the passing streets. He believes that evil influences lurk unseen, Hideko told me, and that he alone can fight them, like the boxer he once was. “He feels very strongly that he must surveil,” she said. “He needs to go all over Hamamatsu city. To surveil and protect.”

The acquittal that arrived in September was a balm for Hideko and her supporters. But it came too late for one of them. Judge Kumamoto, the author of the 1968 decision, was already seriously ill with cancer when Hakamada was released. The two men’s lives had been deeply intertwined for decades, but they had never met outside the courtroom.

In early 2018, Hideko brought her brother to Kumamoto’s hospital bed; he was pale and skeletal, an oxygen tube strapped under his nose. He looked to be on the verge of death, though he would live for two more years.

The meeting was captured on film. The two visitors, dressed in heavy winter clothes, appear somber and dumbstruck as they gaze down at the stricken man. Her brother didn’t seem to understand whom he was looking at, Hideko told me. But Kumamoto clearly knew the face of the man he had condemned 50 years earlier.

“Iwao,” the judge said, in a scratchy whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “A Boxer on Death Row.”

One of the many troubling consequences of Donald Trump’s reelection is that he will largely avoid responsibility for his conduct in his four criminal cases. No other criminal defendant in American history has had the power to shut down his own prosecution. This is an unprecedented and wrenching affront to the principle that no one is above the law.

The potential exception is the New York State case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election.

Justice Juan Merchan recently granted the parties’ joint request to pause the New York proceedings while both sides consider what should be done in light of Trump’s reelection. Trump’s attorneys claim that the case must be dismissed altogether to avoid “unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.” Even the district attorney’s office said it wants time to consider how the court should balance the “competing interests” of the jury verdict and the needs of the office of the presidency.

Out of an abundance of caution, Merchan avoided a preelection sentencing that potentially could have influenced the election. But the election result changes nothing about the criminal case. Now that the election is over, sentencing should proceed promptly.

[Quinta Jurecic: Bye-bye, Jack Smith]

Once in office, Trump may cancel federal prosecutions of himself and his allies. He has threatened to use the Justice Department to pursue political opponents. He may seek to bend the justice system to his will in unprecedented ways. But that doesn’t mean the DA or Merchan should “obey in advance” by abandoning the jury’s verdict.

Trump’s attorneys are essentially arguing that the election wipes the slate clean, that the people have spoken and all criminal matters must be dismissed. His former attorney general William Barr made a similar point in an interview with Fox News, where he called on prosecutors to drop all the pending criminal cases. “The American people have rendered their verdict on President Trump,” Barr argued. Prosecutors, he said, should “respect the people’s decision and dismiss the cases against President Trump now.”

What nonsense. The election was not a “verdict” on Trump’s criminality. A majority of voters apparently concluded that Trump’s criminal cases were not disqualifying—just as the sexual assaults, pandemic response, efforts to overturn the last election, and many other things apparently were not disqualifying. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen or that Trump is not legally and morally responsible.

No doubt all public-official defendants would like to be able to say that winning their next election means everyone should just forget about their alleged crimes. That’s not how our system works. An election is not a jury verdict, and winning an election doesn’t make you any less guilty.

When it comes to Trump, the New York case may be the rule of law’s last stand. As president, Trump is sure to swiftly kill off the two pending federal prosecutions—the classified-documents case in Florida and the January 6 case in D.C. He may not even need to do it himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department have already begun discussing how to wind down the cases, based on the DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

Even if the current Justice Department were to attempt to keep the cases alive somehow—such as by merely agreeing to pause them until Trump is out of office in four years—the new Trump Justice Department will simply dismiss them. Trump may pardon his co-defendants and co-conspirators, and may even try to pardon himself.

Unlike with the federal cases, Trump cannot unilaterally make the state prosecutions go away. The Georgia case is currently mired in appeals over whether the DA should be disqualified for a conflict of interest. But although the Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president does not bind the states, the reality is that a state will not be allowed to put a sitting president on trial. If prosecutors survive the appeals, the trial might proceed against the remaining defendants in a year or two. But any potential trial of Trump is sure, at a minimum, to be postponed until he is out of office—and who knows whether there will be any appetite to pursue the case at that point.

That leaves New York. Until he granted the most recent extension of time, Merchan was set to rule on November 12 on Trump’s claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity requires dismissal of his convictions. That argument is a long shot, because almost all of Trump’s relevant conduct in the case took place before he was president. And although Trump is arguing that a few items of evidence in his trial should have been barred by immunity, those claims are unlikely to derail the convictions. Assuming Merchan denies the motion to dismiss, sentencing was set for November 26—until the election results cast that into doubt.

The sentencing should go forward. The argument by Trump’s attorneys that the entire case should be dismissed based on his reelection amounts to nothing more than a claim that a president (or in this case, a president-elect) is above the law and may never be held criminally accountable. Thanks to the election results and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, that appalling claim may often be true—but it doesn’t have to be in this case.

The defense claim that sentencing would unconstitutionally impede “Trump’s ability to govern” is laughable. Trump is not yet the president. He’s not responsible for governing anything other than his transition. A sentencing proceeding would involve a few hours in a New York courtroom—probably less time than a round of golf. He could squeeze it in.

[David A. Graham: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

The defense may be suggesting that if Trump were sentenced to prison, that would interfere with his duties. It’s true that a prison sentence could be problematic. If Merchan were inclined to sentence Trump to prison, he would likely stay that sentence pending appeal. Once Trump was in office, even if the convictions were affirmed, the state presumably would not be allowed to jail the sitting president.

In the unlikely event of Merchan trying to jail Trump immediately, a higher court would undoubtedly intervene. The federal courts are no more likely to allow a state to jail the president-elect than to allow a state to jail the president.

But Merchan has sentencing options short of locking up the president-elect. He could impose a fine and/or sentence Trump to probation, suspending the service of any probationary period until Trump leaves office. He could even impose a jail sentence but similarly suspend that until Trump is no longer president.

At this point, the details of the sentence are less important than the sentencing taking place. Justice requires that the criminal process be completed. The defendant has been found guilty by a jury. The next step, in the ordinary course, is for the judge to impose a sentence. That will formalize Donald Trump’s record as a convicted felon. Even if Trump ends up with no substantial sentence, that’s an important legal and historical statement.

Once he is sentenced, Trump’s attorneys may appeal his convictions. That can proceed with almost no involvement from Trump himself. The appeals process will be handled by the lawyers and will not interfere with any of his presidential duties. His convictions may be affirmed on appeal or they may be tossed out, but there’s no reason the regular criminal process can’t continue.

Although the idea was unthinkable to many of us, a criminal can be president of the United States. The people have spoken, as Trump’s attorneys and supporters would say. But just as Trump’s criminal cases did not prevent his reelection, the election should not prevent the regular criminal process in New York from concluding. This sentencing must proceed.

Brazil's Supreme Court has been evacuated as federal police swarm the area to investigate the evening attack.

Local officials told the AFP news agency that a body was found outside the building in an apparent attack.

Donald Trump will begin his second term as president the same way he began his first—with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate.

The GOP scored its 218th House-race victory—enough to clinch a majority of the chamber’s 435 seats—today when CNN and NBC News declared Republicans the winner of two close elections in Arizona. How many more seats the Republicans will win depends on the outcome of a few contests, in California and elsewhere, where ballots are still being counted. But the GOP’s final margin is likely to be similar to the four-seat advantage it held for most of the past two years, when internal division and leadership battles prevented the party from accomplishing much of anything.

Such a slim majority means that the legislation most prized on the right and feared by the left—a national abortion ban, dramatic cuts to federal spending, the repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Joe Biden’s largest domestic-policy achievements—is unlikely to pass Congress. “I don’t think they’re even going to try on any of those things,” Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to former Speaker Paul Ryan during Trump’s first term, told me.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

Trump’s biggest opportunity for a legacy-defining law may be extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire next year and won’t need to overcome a Senate filibuster to pass. He could also find bipartisan support for new immigration restrictions, including funding for his promised southern wall, after an election in which voters rewarded candidates with a more hawkish stance on the border.

In 2017, Trump took office with a 51–49 Republican majority in the Senate and a slightly wider advantage in the House—both ultimately too narrow for him to fulfill his core campaign promise of axing the ACA. Next year, the dynamic will be reversed, and he’ll have a bit more of a cushion in the Senate. Republicans gained four seats to recapture the majority from Democrats; they now hold a 53–47 advantage, which should be enough to confirm Trump’s Cabinet picks and judicial nominees. The impact on the Supreme Court could be profound: Trump named three of its nine members during his first term, and should Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are both in their 70s, retire in the next two years, he would be responsible for nominating a majority of the Court.

Yet on legislation, Republicans will be constrained by both the Senate’s rules and the party’s thin margin in the House. Republicans have said they won’t try to curtail the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for circumventing a filibuster. “The filibuster will stand,” the outgoing Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, declared on the day after the election. But he’ll be only a rank-and-file member in the next Congress. McConnell’s newly elected successor as party leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, reiterated his commitment to the legislative filibuster after winning a secret-ballot election for the role.

How many votes are needed to pass bills in the Senate won’t mean much if Trump can’t get legislation through the House, and that could be a far more difficult proposition. The two speakers during the current Congress, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, each had to rely on Democrats to get major bills passed, because the GOP’s majority proved too thin to govern. With Trump’s backing, Johnson should have the votes to stay on as speaker when the new Congress convenes in January. (When Trump addressed House Republicans today in Washington, the speaker hailed him as “the comeback king” and, NBC News reported, the president-elect assured Johnson he would back him “all the way.”)

But the Republican edge could be even narrower next year if Democrats win a few more of the final uncalled races. Trump’s selection of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to serve as United Nations ambassador and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida to serve as national security adviser could deprive Republicans of two additional seats for several months until voters elect their replacements. (Senator Marco Rubio’s expected nomination as secretary of state won’t cost the GOP his Florida seat, because Governor Ron DeSantis can appoint an immediate replacement.)

[Read: Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition]

Still, the GOP has reason to hope for a fruitful session. During Biden’s first two years in office, House Democrats demonstrated that even a small majority could produce major legislation. They passed most of Biden’s agenda—though the Senate blocked or watered down some of it—despite having few votes to spare. And Trump exerts a much tighter grip on his party than Biden did on congressional Democrats. Unlike during Trump’s first term, few if any Republicans hostile to his agenda remain in the House. His decisive victory last week, which includes a likely popular-vote win, should also help ensure greater Republican unity.

“I think we will have a much easier time in terms of getting major things passed,” predicts Representative Mike Lawler of New York, whose victory in one of the nation’s most closely watched races helped Republicans keep their majority. “The country was very clear in the direction it wants Congress and the presidency to go.”

Trump might even hold sway over a few Democrats on some issues. Because Trump improved his standing almost everywhere last week, the House in January will include many Democrats who represent districts that he carried. Two House Democrats who outran their party by wide margins, Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, refused to endorse Kamala Harris, while several candidates who more fully embraced the party’s national message underperformed. Nearly all Democratic candidates in close races echoed Trump’s calls for more aggressive action to limit border crossings, which could yield the new president additional support in Congress for restrictive immigration legislation.

[Mike Pesca: The HR-ification of the Democratic Party]

Like most House Republicans, Lawler endorsed Trump, but he ran on a record of bipartisanship and told me he’d be unafraid to defy the president when he disagreed. As a potential swing vote in a narrow majority, he could have more influence over the next two years. Lawler told me Monday that the GOP should heed the voters’ call to focus on issues such as the economy, border security, tax cuts, and energy production. Pursuing a national abortion ban, he said, would be “a mistake.” And Lawler serves as a reminder that enacting legislation even in an area where Republicans are relatively unified, like tax cuts, could be difficult: He reiterated his vow to oppose any proposal that does not restore a costly deduction for residents of high-tax states such as New York and California—a change that Trump supports but many other Republicans do not.

Trump showed little patience for the hard work of wrangling votes during his first term. Now he’s testing his might on Capitol Hill—and displaying his disdain for Congress’s authority—even before he takes office. Though he didn’t endorse a candidate to succeed McConnell, he urged all of the contenders to allow him to circumvent the Senate by making key appointments when Congress is in recess. After he won, Thune wouldn’t say whether he’d agree. Trump apparently wants the ability to install nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services?—who can’t win confirmation by the Senate.

“The Trump world does not give a damn about normal processes and procedures and traditions and principles of the prerogatives of certain chambers,” Buck, the former GOP aide, said. “They just want to do stuff.” The fight could be instructive, an early indication that no matter how much deference the new Republican majority is prepared to give Trump, he’ll surely still want more.

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A note from Tom:

As we were about to publish this newsletter, Donald Trump announced that he has asked the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a military veteran who has no experience in leading large organizations and no serious background as a senior leader in national-security affairs, to be his secretary of defense. This is exactly the kind of unqualified nomination that I was warning could be looming after this first group of nominees were announced—and it explains why Trump is determined to bypass the U.S. Senate to get some of his nominees confirmed. I will have more to say about Hegseth soon.

So far, the new Trump administration has a chief of staff, a “border czar,” and a national security adviser; all three are White House positions controlled by the president. Donald Trump has also reportedly named six people to senior positions that require Senate confirmation: secretary of state, United Nations ambassador, secretary of homeland security, secretary of defense, CIA director, and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (He has also chosen an ambassador to Israel.) His first picks are neither very surprising nor very impressive, but this is only the beginning.

His co–campaign manager Susie Wiles will make White House history by becoming the first female chief of staff. People around Trump seem relieved at this appointment, but she’ll likely be saddled with Stephen Miller as a deputy, which could get interesting because Miller apparently has a tendency to get out of his lane. (According to a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Bender, Miller attended a tense meeting that included Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As the nation’s leaders debated what to do, Miller interjected and said that America’s major cities had been turned into war zones. General Milley, Bender writes, turned to Miller, pointed at him, and said: “Shut the fuck up, Stephen.”)

The rest of the appointments are unsurprising, given the limited pool of Republicans willing to serve in another Trump administration. (Some Trump loyalists such as Senator Tom Cotton have reportedly declined a role in the administration, likely protecting their future for the 2028 GOP race to succeed Trump.) Marco Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees in the Senate, was a reasonable choice among the Trump coterie to become America’s top diplomat as secretary of state.

Likewise, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida is a reasonable choice for national security adviser—but again, that’s in the context of the now-smaller universe of national-security conservatives in politics or academia willing to work for Trump at this point. He is a veteran, and like Rubio, he has served on relevant committees in Congress, including Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Waltz may be a credible voice on national security, but he was also a 2020 election denier. He pledged to oppose certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win and signed on to an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election. He changed his mind—but only after the events of January 6.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, meanwhile, was bound to be rewarded for her loyalty. Although Vice President–elect J. D. Vance took the gold in the race to replace the disowned Mike Pence, Stefanik was a comer even by the standards of the sycophantic circle around Trump, and so she’ll head to the United Nations, a low-priority post for Trump and a GOP that has little use for the institution. A former member of Congress from New York, Lee Zeldin (who was defeated in the 2022 New York governor’s race) will head up the EPA, another institution hated by MAGA Republicans, thus making Zeldin’s weak—or strong, depending on your view—legislative record on environmental issues a good fit for this administration.

This afternoon, Trump announced that John Ratcliffe will serve as CIA director. Ratcliffe previously served as director of national intelligence and will now be in a post that is functionally subordinate to his old job. Ratcliffe is a reliable partisan but an unreliable intelligence chief. The most baffling move Trump has made so far is the appointment of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Noem served four terms in Congress and is in her second as governor. She has very little relevant experience, especially as a government executive. (South Dakota might be a big place, but it’s a small state; DHS has more than 260,000 employees, making it a bit more than a quarter the size of the entire population of Noem’s home state.) DHS is a giant glob of a department—one I have long argued should never have existed in the first place and should be abolished—that has seeped across the jurisdictional lines of multiple institutions and, unlike some other Cabinet posts, requires someone with serious leadership chops.

DHS will also be central to some of Trump’s most abominable plans regarding undocumented immigrants—and, potentially, against others the president-elect views as “enemies from within.” (The “border czar” Trump has named, Tom Homan, once falsely implied that some California wildfires were worsened by an undocumented immigrant.) In that light, Noem is perfect: She is inexperienced but loyal, a political lightweight with no independent base of support or particularly long experience in Washington, and she can be counted on to do what she’s told. She will be no John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen, her confirmed predecessors at DHS, both of whom were on occasion willing to speak up, even if ineffectively.

This first passel of nominees should gain Senate confirmation easily, especially Rubio. (Sitting members of the chamber usually have an easier time, as do people who have close associations with the Senate.) And given Trump’s history and proclivity for mercurial and humiliating firings, few of them are likely to be very long in their post, and are probably better than the people who will later replace them.

But that in itself raises a troubling question. If Trump intends to nominate these kinds of fellow Republicans, why is he insistent that the new Senate allow him to make recess appointments?

For those of you who do not follow the arcana of American government, Article II of the Constitution includes a provision by which the president can make appointments on his own if the Senate is in recess and therefore unable to meet. The Founders didn’t think this was a controversial provision; sometimes, presidents need to keep the government running (by choosing, say, an ambassador) even when the Senate might not be around—a real problem in the days when convening the Senate could take weeks of travel. Such appointments last until the end of the next legislative session.

For obvious reasons, the Senate itself was never a big fan of a device—one that presidents routinely used—that circumvents constitutional authority to confirm executive appointments, especially once the practice got out of hand. (Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, George W. Bush made 171, and Barack Obama made 32.) The Senate’s response was basically to be wilier about not declaring itself in recess even when there’s no one around, and when President Obama tried to push through some of these appointments in 2012, the Supreme Court sided with the Senate.

Now Trump wants to bring back the practice. The obvious inference to draw here is that after some fairly uncontroversial nominations, he intends to nominate people who couldn’t be confirmed even in a supine and obedient Republican Senate. Perhaps this is too clever, but I am concerned that this first pass is a head fake, in which Trump nominates people he knows are controversial (such as Zeldin) but who are still confirmable, and then sends far worse candidates forward for even more important posts. Kash Patel—a man who is dangerous precisely because his only interest is serving Trump, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro has reported—keeps bubbling up for various intelligence posts.

“Ambassador Elise Stefanik” and “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin” might not be great ideas, but they are not immediate threats to U.S. national security or American democracy. “CIA Director John Ratcliffe,” by contrast, is cause for serious concern. If Trump is serious about his authoritarian plans—the ones he announced at every campaign stop—then he’ll need the rest of the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department all under firm control.

Those are the next nominations to watch.

Related:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll. (From 2018)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The HR-ification of the Democratic Party Anne Applebaum: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine. Genetic discrimination is coming for us all.

Today’s News

The judge in Trump’s hush-money criminal case delayed his decision on whether Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies should be overturned after his reelection. A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Louisiana law that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, calling the legislation “unconstitutional on its face.” Louisiana’s attorney general said that she will appeal the ruling. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation. An independent review found that he failed to sufficiently report the late barrister John Smyth, who ran Christian summer camps and abused more than 100 boys and young men, according to the review.

Evening Read

Illustration by Mark Pernice

AI Can Save Humanity—Or End It

By Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie

The world’s strongest nation might no longer be the one with the most Albert Einsteins and J. Robert Oppenheimers. Instead, the world’s strongest nations will be those that can bring AI to its fullest potential.

But with that potential comes tremendous danger. No existing innovation can come close to what AI might soon achieve: intelligence that is greater than that of any human on the planet. Might the last polymathic invention—namely computing, which amplified the power of the human mind in a way fundamentally different from any previous machine—be remembered for replacing its own inventors?

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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