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Americans keeping close track of political news may have been toggling their screens today between Senate confirmation hearings: the second day of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of Health and Human Services, and the first for Tulsi Gabbard’s for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel’s for FBI director. But each of those three hearings deserves the public’s full attention: Donald Trump’s nominees offered new glimpses into their approaches to policy, truth, and loyalty to the president.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Day Two

Ahead of Kennedy’s first day of hearings, our colleague Nicholas Florko noted that the HHS nominee is no stranger to conspiracist statements: “RFK Jr. has insinuated that an attempt to assassinate members of Congress via anthrax-laced mail in 2001 may have been a ‘false flag’ attack orchestrated by ‘someone in our government’ to gin up interest in the government preparing for potential biological weapon threats. He has claimed that COVID was ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,’ and that 5G is being used to ‘harvest our data and control our behavior.’ He has suggested that the use of antidepressants might be linked to mass shootings.”

“If Republican senators skirt around [Kennedy’s] falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings,” Nicholas wrote, “it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights … He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality.” But Kennedy’s sleights didn’t serve him quite as well today as he might have hoped.

At several points, senators encouraged Kennedy to acknowledge that vaccines are not the cause of autism, but instead of confirming what numerous studies have shown to be true, Kennedy insisted that he would need to “look at all the data” before coming to any conclusions. “The room went silent today during Senator [Bill] Cassidy’s closing questions,” Nicholas noted when we spoke this afternoon. “Cassidy was practically begging Kennedy to recant his previous statements on vaccines. Kennedy, like everyone else in the room, had to know this was a make-or-break moment for his confirmation. But despite the potential fallout, Kennedy refused, promising only that he would look at any studies presented to him disproving a link between vaccines and autism.”

The nominee for HHS secretary also showed, for the second day in a row, his lack of understanding about basics of the Medicare system, fumbling his answers to a series of rapid-fire questions from Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. Hassan also shared that she is the mother of a 36-year-old with cerebral palsy, and accused Kennedy of relitigating settled science on the fact that vaccines do not cause autism. “It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place,” she argued.

Cassidy, whose vote could prove key to whether RFK Jr. is confirmed, said after today’s hearing that he is “struggling” over whether to confirm Kennedy.

Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard came into her confirmation process with a history that raises questions about her commitment to national security (she has, among other things, met with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and expressed sympathetic views toward Russian President Vladimir Putin). As our colleague Tom Nichols wrote in November, “Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.”

The topic that ultimately received much attention in her confirmation hearing today was her refusal to say whether Edward Snowden is a traitor. Despite pressure from Democratic and Republican senators, Gabbard refused to answer the question, repeating that Snowden had broken the law and that she would take steps to make sure whistleblowers know how to properly make a complaint. Gabbard also revealed that she was unable to extract any concessions in her 2017 meeting with Assad. “I didn’t expect to,” she said.

Gabbard’s potential confirmation will depend on how her somewhat incoherent set of policy views sits with Republican senators. Last week, our colleague Elaine Godfrey explored the one through line—besides ambition—that has guided Gabbard’s otherwise inconsistent political career.

Kash Patel

Donald Trump is not always clear about what he means when he refers to “DEI,” but presumably it involves how someone’s identity is taken into consideration during the hiring process. In this morning’s press conference addressing the tragic plane crash last night, Trump asserted, without evidence but crediting his “common sense,” that DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration was at fault.

It was odd, then, that a few hours later, Republican senators used Patel’s confirmation hearing to highlight his identity: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked about examples of racism Patel has experienced, and Senator Mike Lee of Utah acknowledged the struggles Patel and his father must have faced as racial minorities in the United States and Uganda, respectively. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as if he were reading from a book report about the Gujarati people, lauded the religious diversity in Gujarat, India, where Patel’s family is originally from, omitting the state’s extreme tensions and violent history. Patel opened his own remarks by acknowledging his family’s journey from abroad. He invoked the phrase Jai Shri Krishna, a standard greeting for a sect of Hindus seeking blessings.

Patel was calm and still—he became riled up only when questioned by Senator Amy Klobuchar about his past suggestion that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’” But he was walking a tightrope. Today’s hearing may be the rare instance when Patel has publicly broken with Trump, to whom he has otherwise been unequivocally loyal. He refused to explicitly state that Trump lost the 2020 election, but he also said, “I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement.”

Overall, Patel seemed to be trying to carefully toe a line, answering questions about the culture-war issues that Trump and congressional Republicans care about—Senator Marsha Blackburn, for example, asserted during the hearing that the FBI prioritizes DEI and “counting Swiftie bracelets” over conducting investigations—while attempting not to alienate the employees he hopes to lead. Pressed by Blackburn, Patel made a vague statement about the “high standards” FBI employees must meet.

Related:

RFK Jr. has a lot to learn about Medicaid. What everyone gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The memo that shocked the White House The near misses at airports have been telling us something. Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold. Jonathan Lemire: “What I saw at Trump’s first press conference”

Today’s News

Officials announced that there are no survivors in the crash last night between a U.S.-military Black Hawk helicopter and a regional American Airlines passenger jet landing at an airport near Washington, D.C. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter, and 64 people were on the flight from Wichita, Kansas. Donald Trump appointed Christopher Rocheleau as the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency had not had an administrator since the start of Trump’s new term. Eight hostages were released from Gaza by Hamas, and Israel released 110 Palestinian prisoners.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Don Peck interviews Nicholas Carr about h​​ow online life has rewired our brains.

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“The ‘exciting business opportunity’ that ruined our lives” Trump’s war on meritocracy If Iranian assassins kill them, it will be Trump’s fault, Tom Nichols writes. Don’t politicize aviation safety. The return of snake oil Why Meta is paying $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something

By Faith Hill

I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.

Read the full article.

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Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters that he’s a fighter, a fearless champion who always has their back. Such guarantees, however, apparently do not apply to people who worked for him when they’re threatened by foreign assassins. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the former Pompeo aide Brian Hook have all been targeted by Trump for political retribution. They are also being targeted by the Iranians, but the regime in Tehran has marked them all for death.

The president may be spoiling for a fight with career bureaucrats and “woke” professors, but when it comes to Iranian assassins, he is willing to walk away from men who carried out his orders. Milley, Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook all served in Trump’s first administration—he appointed them to their posts—and they were part of the Trump national-security team when the United States killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a strike in January 2020. In 2022, an Iranian national was arrested and charged with trying to arrange Bolton’s murder, and American intelligence believes that other officials—including Trump himself—have been targeted by Iran because of their involvement in killing Soleimani.

The Biden administration briefed the incoming Trump administration on these threats and on the security details it had authorized to protect Bolton and others. Last week, Trump removed the details protecting Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook; yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed the guards around Milley and announced that he would be investigating Milley for undermining the chain of command during Trump’s first term. Trump also revoked the security clearances held by all four men.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The revocation of security clearances is petty, but it harms the administration more than it does any of these men. Retaining a clearance helps former federal employees find work in the consulting world, and it is typical to hold on to them after leaving government service. (I was offered the opportunity to keep mine when I left the Naval War College.) But at more senior levels, clearances allow people in government to get advice from former leaders. Some of these people could have been of significant help to Trump’s staff during a crisis, although Trump himself is unlikely to care about that possibility.

Removing the security details, however, could have deadly consequences. The Iranians seem determined to seek revenge for the killing of Soleimani, and sooner or later, they might succeed. (“The Iranians are not good but they’re very enthusiastic,” a former Pentagon official said in October. “And of course, they’ve only got to get lucky once.”) And the Iranians aren’t the only threat out there; the Russians have no compunctions about attacking people in their home country, often using gruesome methods.

Trump takes such threats very seriously where he is concerned. When Biden officials alerted Trump to the danger from Iran, Trump asked for more security from the U.S. government, and during his campaign, according to The New York Times, he even asked that military assets be assigned to protect him, something usually provided only to sitting presidents.

Lesser mortals, however, must fend for themselves: Trump and Hegseth not only took away the security details of these former policy makers but did so with significant publicity, almost as if to broadcast to America’s enemies that anyone who wanted to settle scores with these officials would get no trouble from the current White House. (Trump also canceled protection for 84-year-old Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been the target of multiple threats from other Americans.) Trump despises critics such as Bolton and Milley, and it is unsurprising that he has no obvious issue subjecting them to physical danger. But even some Republicans —who should be used to this kind of vengefulness from the leader of their party—have been shocked, and are trying to get Trump to reverse course. They are particularly concerned about Pompeo and Hook, loyalists whose lives have been placed in jeopardy for sins that are known only to the president.

[Read: Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity]

In another time, Americans would rally to protect their own from the agents of one of their most dedicated enemies. Today, most citizens seem either unaware or unperturbed that the president of the United States is exposing his own former staff to immense risks. Nevertheless, it should be said clearly and without equivocation: President Trump will bear direct responsibility for any harm that could come to these people from foreign actors.

This is far more than Trump’s usual pettiness. He has always considered the oath of federal service to be little more than an oath of loyalty to him, and he has always been willing to threaten his opponents. (In 2018, he apparently considered handing Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, over to Moscow, a move that provoked a level of outrage that seems quaint today.) Trump’s message in this second term is that friends and subordinates are literally disposable if they cross him: He will not only humiliate and fire them, but he will also subject them to actual physical danger.

This escalation of Trump’s vindictiveness should serve as a very personal warning to anyone willing to work for him in his second term. Senior officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and other organizations are routinely asked to go head-to-head with representatives of some of the most dangerous nations on the planet, and to contribute to operations against those regimes. In the past, such officials could do so knowing that their own government would do everything it could to keep them—and their family—safe from foreign agents. As one of Bolton’s former deputies, Charles Kupperman, told the Times: “Trump’s national security team must provide guidance based on their assessment of what needs to be done to protect America without regard to their personal security.”

Good luck with that. No one who works in defense or national-security affairs can assume that, when Trump orders them to cross America’s many enemies in the world, he will protect them from foreign vengeance. Trump has now made clear that he will abandon people who have taken risks in the service of the United States—even those who were following his own orders—if they happen to displease him. (Or, in the case of Pompeo and Hook, for no apparent reason at all.) Hegseth, for his part, may have no real idea what he’s done, and may merely be courting favor from a boss who has elevated him far beyond his abilities. But Trump knows better; he is himself the survivor of an assassination attempt, and no level of security was enough when he thought the Iranians were gunning for him.

People still considering whether to serve Trump can have no illusions about what awaits them. True leaders take responsibility for their team. Trump is no such leader; he will, on a whim, place other Americans in danger and then, as he famously put it in his previous term, take no responsibility at all.

Few of Donald Trump’s foibles have gone undissected, but one glaring thing remains underappreciated: He does not care about U.S. national security.

Once you consider Trump’s record from this perspective, many of his past and present actions become more coherent. (The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently made a version of this point on Substack.) Why else would a president—to choose a few examples—nominate Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard for his Cabinet, haphazardly store highly classified documents on a ballroom stage, or publicly call on Russia to hack a former secretary of state’s emails?

This is not to say, as some of Trump’s critics have, that he is against American national security. It doesn’t mean he’s a Manchurian candidate, a saboteur trying to tear down the United States on behalf of some foreign adversary—Trump appears to have come by his hostility to rule of law and the Constitution on his own. Rather, he’s simply indifferent, just as many of Trump’s most audacious lies are less intentionally misleading than completely uninterested in truth.

[David A. Graham: What Trump did in Osaka was worse than lying]

“Trump is the only thing he’s interested in,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during Trump’s first term, told me. “He’s not really interested in domestic security, either, or anything else.”

Nor is this to say that Trump’s appointees don’t care about American national security. Tulsi Gabbard, his nominee to be director of national intelligence, has a very strange collection of views that she seems to honestly feel would improve America’s position in the world. Her lengthy meeting with the now-deposed Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad appears to have been prompted by sincere but misguided convictions.

Other Trump appointees also hold views that may diverge from “the blob,” as detractors sometimes describe the foreign-policy establishment, but people like National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy–Designate Elbridge Colby are viewed as serious, thoughtful people with a command of their fields.

[Read: Trump’s plea for Russia to hack the U.S. government]

Pete Hegseth, too, seems to care a great deal about the future of the country—but Hegseth is plainly unqualified to be secretary of defense, and a president who cared about national security would not put him forward to lead the Defense Department. Hegseth has never run any organization near in size and complexity to the Pentagon; the ones he has run, he’s run into the ground. Many eyewitness accounts suggest he has, or has had, serious issues with alcohol abuse. (Hegseth denies any drinking problem and says he will not drink as secretary.) None of this even gets into his serial adultery and past accusations of sexual assault. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) His primary qualifications for the nomination are that he looks good on TV and that he’s been a consistent cheerleader for Donald Trump.

A president who cared about national security would not have publicly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said; Kremlin operatives promptly tried. Nor would he defer so egregiously to Vladimir Putin, blaming “U.S. foolishness and stupidity” for strained Russo-American relations. He would also not summarily dismiss DHS advisory committees and work to dismantle key cybersecurity bodies simply because he was angry that they undermined his lies about the 2020 election.

[Read: Trump blames bad relations with Russia on everything but Russia]

A president concerned foremost about national security does not systematically alienate key allies, attempt to intimidate them, or question whether he’d stand by basic treaty obligations, such as NATO’s Article 5. Nor would a president who was interested in national security withhold duly appropriated funds to a key ally like Ukraine in the hope of obtaining a personal political favor. He would not use the military as a prop, whether in creating a show at the border or cinematically calling off strikes on adversaries.

A president focused on national security would not abscond with dozens of boxes full of highly sensitive national-security documents, storing them mixed up with golf shirts and newspaper clippings and leaving them on a stage in Mar-a-Lago, unsecured. (He would also not, as federal prosecutors alleged, refuse to return them when subpoenaed. Trump denied this.) Nor would he pardon violent rioters convicted in an assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump has revoked security details for Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and his former adviser Brian Hook, all of whom worked in his first administration. Bolton told me he wasn’t shocked, because when he resigned from the White House in 2019, Trump immediately ordered protection removed. “Normally, somebody in that job gets protection for three months, six months—there’s no set formula,” he said. “But because you have information you don’t want your adversaries to get, it’s not a perquisite. It’s for the protection of the government.”

[Read: Why the president praises dictators]

Caring deeply about national security is not the same as being good at it. U.S. history is littered with examples of catastrophic choices made by conscientious officials. The architects of foreign policy in the George W. Bush administration truly believed that toppling Saddam Hussein would improve security in the Middle East and American interests. They were wrong. Conversely, Trump’s first term saw some foreign-policy wins, including the Abraham Accords and the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Other gambits that seemed more aimed at personal glorification—or a Nobel Peace Prize—such as his summit with Kim Jong Un flopped.

Even if Trump’s approach does sometimes produce wins, however, he is more motivated by pique, personal benefit, attraction to autocratic leaders, or pursuit of adulation. Those, more than a calculation about what’s best for the nation, are what guides Trump.

Joe Biden has now left office, but the fight over the meaning of his Middle East policies is only just beginning.

Biden’s defenders argue that he left the incoming Trump administration with the strongest American position in the region in decades—and that his decision to back Israel to the hilt following the Hamas attacks was hard but ultimately strategically correct. Biden’s detractors within the Democratic Party argue that he caused irreparable harm to America’s interests and undermined international norms by what they see as his unquestioning support for Israel regardless of a steadily mounting civilian death toll.

Both sides’ arguments have their merits—and which of them ends up winning the debate matters, because the Trump administration and administrations to come will set their policies based in some part on how Biden’s foreign policy is remembered.

Undeniably, the Trump administration inherits a region that looks dramatically different—in a way that favors U.S. interests—from the one that Donald Trump left in 2021. America’s principal adversaries in the region—Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Hamas—are all in retreat.

Iran in particular has suffered humiliating losses over the past six months, mainly but not exclusively at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces. For more than four decades, Iran had worked to construct a “Shia crescent” of aligned forces that stretched from its territory through Iraq and into Lebanon to squeeze Israel and its majority Sunni Muslim neighbors.

This would-be Iranian empire has collapsed. The regime of the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, and his father before him, is gone after half a century in power. Israel has eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership and has otherwise battered the group beyond recognition. Aides to President Biden swept into Lebanon while bombs were still falling to negotiate a cease-fire and shepherd a political process. In a rare diplomatic triumph for the administration, those efforts helped Lebanon usher in a new president and prime minister, both of whom Hezbollah would surely have blocked were that group still powerful enough to do so. Biden’s aides also deserve credit for working closely with Trump’s team to win a cease-fire in Gaza during the administration’s waning days.

Iran’s regional power has long rested on three pillars: support to militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah; conventional missiles and other weapons; and an incipient nuclear program. Other than Yemen’s Houthis, Iran’s proxies have been humbled. So, too, has its conventional military posture, as Israel and its partners, including the United States, swatted Iran’s missiles aside not once but twice in 2024. Only Iran’s nuclear program remains (more on that in a bit).

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

But Iran isn’t the only U.S. rival on the retreat in the Middle East. Russia, bled dry by the war in Ukraine and unwilling (and likely unable) to intervene again on Assad’s behalf, finds its treasured warm-water port in Syria now at risk, because the new government in Damascus is anxious to expel foreign militaries from its territory.

Some of Biden’s aides have been telling their colleagues and journalists that the position in which they are leaving the region vindicates the president’s decision—backed by his closest aides but disputed by many other advisers—to support Israel to the fullest extent since the horrific October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. Sources in the administration have told me that, as they see it, no U.S. president will have inherited such favorable terrain in the globally strategic region since Bill Clinton came into office in 1993.

These claims infuriate the president’s many critics in the Democratic Party. They argue that Biden and his team, through their policies in the Middle East, have done incalculable damage to America and its image across the globe, and that any strategic gains will ultimately be proved ephemeral as Hamas and Hezbollah rearm and reassert themselves in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. Pointing to tens of thousands of dead Palestinian and Lebanese civilians—and the use of American weapons in killing them—they claim that Biden undermined international norms to a greater extent than Trump did in his first term. These critics are largely unpersuaded by and impatient with American and Israeli arguments that Hamas alone necessitated this level of carnage by using human shields, or that a high civilian death toll was inevitable in densely urban terrain. The Department of State under Antony Blinken, they complain, had no evident problem assessing war crimes in other jurisdictions yet never seemed to have enough evidence to do so in the Palestinian territories.

Some of Biden’s Democratic critics are particularly despondent that Trump—never a huge fan of Israel’s wars, which don’t play very well on television—was able to seize the mantle of peacemaker, forcefully directing Israel to arrive at a cease-fire agreement before even taking office. Many Americans have embraced isolationism after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some progressives worry that the Democratic Party anachronistically remains “the party of war.” Other critics—and I include myself here—argue that largely ceding all major questions of policy and strategy to Israel in 2023 and 2024 was an unforgivable choice for the world’s only superpower to have made.

The Biden administration will not be remembered for injecting much fresh thinking into American foreign policy. Almost all of Biden’s senior aides were also senior aides to President Barack Obama, and many of the most senior stayed the full four years rather than making room for younger talents. Whether the next Democratic administration similarly staffs itself with alumni from the Biden administration will largely depend on which assessment of the president’s policies prevails within the party.

My biggest worry about the next four years is that a weakened Iran will seek solace and protection in the acquisition of nuclear weapons. A new nuclear era in the Middle East could erase many of the past year’s strategic gains. The Trump administration can try to degrade or slow Iran’s nuclear development through military action, but the only way to stave it off altogether is through a process of diplomatic engagement, similar to the much-hated Iran deal of 2015. Trump, ever the pragmatist, might confound his more hawkish aides by reaching out to Iran in its moment of weakness and his moment of strength. He would be wise to do so.

*Sources: Samuel Corum/Getty; Ilia Yefimovich / picture alliance / Getty; Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency / Getty.

The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.

Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.

Literary scholars—Nafisi is an English professor—are not known for their page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution in the hope of putting her American education to use by teaching English at a university. Instead, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for young women in her living room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that gives the memoir its name, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, as well as one of Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life stories of young Iranians in the heady decades following the 1979 revolution. Her book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.

[Read: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran was never turned into a film before now, mostly because Nafisi didn’t like the proposals she’d received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis came around, as he recounted to a New York audience on January 13, after a special screening of the film. The Israeli director managed to convince Nafisi of his vision—and then to secure the funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as the shooting location, given that Tehran was not an option.

When the book was initially released in 2003, the American zeitgeist, shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s global War on Terror, was rife with debates about the representations of Muslim women and life in the Middle East. Nafisi’s was one of several popular memoirs by Iranian women published during this period, including Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series (2000–03). And perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of it bearing little relation to the book’s content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq War, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives because she portrayed the travails of Iranians under an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he saw no difference between her and American soldiers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.

More than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents just as the book did, and even more so because of the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the film as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and called its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the film peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”

The idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian because of its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of women under its rule, was always patently ridiculous. The claim bears up particularly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does best, and the reason her work has endured, is precisely to refuse cartoonish portrayals and basic morality plays.

In Riklis, known for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in films such as Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her book finds an able interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The film isn’t neutral. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities in the early years after 1979, imposed mandatory veiling on women, and banned books they didn’t like. But neither is it a simple story of scary Islamists versus heroic women resisters.

The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and ’90s remarkably well for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t speak; he was able to pull this off with the help of a carefully chosen cast of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country, is at her height as Nafisi, whom she plays as confident but humane, by turns brazen and vulnerable.

The young women of the clandestine class include Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of the film’s most delightful performances), who, unlike most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even before the revolution and defends an ideal of modesty as virtue; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces make her an object of fascination to the less experienced students, but who turns out to be suffering from domestic abuse.

In Nafisi’s apartment, the students are far from the prying eyes of the regime and also of men (even the professor’s husband is barred from their meetings). They construct for themselves, in that all-female room, a little literary republic that survives the years of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has the students practice a Jane Austen–era dance as part of their study of Pride and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.

The film also ventures beyond that cloistered space. Bahri (Reza Diako), a devout 1979 revolutionary, is nevertheless an avid student in Nafisi’s class at the university before it is shut down. Despite their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri form a bond. Early in the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the best she’s ever received from a student, even in America. The two reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, having lost an arm. He has used his family connections to the regime to obtain a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, showing at the Tehran film festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is presented with complexity and without sentimentality, neither papering over political differences nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.

In this way, both film and book avoid didacticism. And in doing so, they demonstrate exactly the point Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to stir empathy across seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Great Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a true human feeling, not a symbol of Western perfidy, as some of her more revolutionary students claim it to be. The latter advocate banning the book. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into teams for and against.

[Mona Simpson: Book group in chadors]

Nafisi calls on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee at the wartime deaths of pro-regime peers, she enjoins them not to become like their oppressors. And she is no dogmatic opponent of Islam, only of religiously inspired repressive government: At one point Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew. She never missed a prayer. But she wore her scarf because she was devout, not because she was a symbol.” (I am not the only critic with a Muslim background who found this line powerful.)

The point here isn’t just to repeat the liberal platitude that “the problem isn’t with Islam but with its repressive enforcement.” Rather, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to treat all that surrounds them as a field of symbols. People are worth more than that, she tells them and us, as though echoing the Kantian dictum to treat one another “as an end, never merely as a means.”

This message about the humane power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran a work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering. And the fact that now, more than two decades after the book’s release, and at a time of regional tension, an Israeli filmmaker has worked with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s book to the screen gives the film a special power.

The audience at the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in common was the experience of being gripped by a story about the capacity of literature to reveal us to one another as ends rather than as means. The setup might sound mawkish. But I recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the film as truly one for these times.

Sometimes politics resembles one of the weirder branches of modern physics or a fantasy version of biology. Time may seem to run backwards; solid things turn out to be insubstantial; black holes swallow up the light; the dead may walk the Earth, ghouls crawl out of cleft rocks, velociraptors not only reappear but learn to speak and, alarmingly, open doors.

That is how American politics feels at the moment. By and large, however, Newtonian physics and traditional biology still apply, and that is worth remembering as we watch the Trump administration’s circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly.

Like most administrations, including those of considerably more sedate chief executives, that of the 47th president has decided to way overinterpret its mandate. The brute facts remain: Donald Trump received a plurality of votes (albeit a decisive majority in the Electoral College); the Republican Party is holding on to the House of Representatives by a hair and has a slim majority in the Senate. The administration may hate civil servants and seek to undermine their job security, but it will discover that it needs them to keep airplanes flying safely, the financial system functioning, drugs safe for use, and food fit for consumption.

Gravity still works—if somewhat unreliably. Politicians who overinterpret narrow wins in a divided country get pulled back to Earth, usually by the midterms. But not just that—the federal system of government gives a lot of power to the states, and although Congress has become anemic and irresponsible, most state governments have not. And so the governor of Florida has declined to appoint the president’s daughter-in-law to a vacant Senate seat, and the governor of Ohio has passed on one of the president’s more socially awkward tech billionaires for another. These are small but interesting indications of gravity reasserting itself.

Lawyers, by the thousand, in and out of state governments, create their own gravitational field. The poorly paid lawyers of the Justice Department can sue only so much, and the Supreme Court will turn out to be—as it did during the previous Trump administration—less reliably Trumpist than the president would wish. (The most pro-Trump justices are Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two of the conservatives he did not appoint.) Even the appalling sweeping pardons of the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists have their limits. If any of those people attempt violence in Maryland or Virginia or anywhere else outside of D.C., they will discover that assault and other crimes there are tried in state, not federal, courts. And the presidential-pardon power does not reach state prisons, which means that some ghouls will go back to their cleft rocks if they go out looking for revenge.

Newtonian physics also has it that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Precisely so. Pardon every criminal who clubbed a police officer, and police unions will be unamused. Impose high tariffs, and working-class voters will encounter higher prices and possibly unemployment. Blow up the national debt to cut taxes, and sooner or later the markets will react. Give way to vaccine skepticism, and epidemics will break out. Turn the intelligence community and military upside down by purging women and other undesirables, and you will produce not only big, embarrassing, consequential failures but also pushback from those large populations, their families, and those politicians who still care about national defense.

And then there is retribution. Political physics runs along the lines of the lyrics composed by Johnny Cash: “That old wheel / Is gonna roll around once more / When it does / It will even up the score.” Or, as Shakespeare has Shylock put it rather more pointedly: “The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

The reckless, violence-feeding mass pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists were evidence of Trumpian lawlessness. The orders to end the security clearances of scores of former senior intelligence officials who criticized Trump, and the stunning decision to remove security protection from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook—three former senior officials of the first Trump administration—were pure personal meanness. Suspending clearances was intended as a humiliation and a blow at pocketbooks (many of those targeted serve on corporate boards where clearances are a prerequisite), and cutting security protection against Iranian death threats was even worse.

But Trump’s appointees, who will carry out this and other acts of payback, should consider that before very long they, too, will be out of government. They, too, will want to keep their clearances. And they, too, may incur the wrath of state and non-state enemies who want to kill them. They will wish to consider just how exposed they will inevitably be, once their triumph, like all others, passes into memory. If decency and respect for norms do not motivate them in the right direction, fear may have to serve its place.

Biology also will have its say. Inebriation—with power and success, in this case—invariably leads to hangovers, no matter what family remedies or magical cures one imbibes. That usually hits at the midterms, as the Obama and George W. Bush administrations found out the hard way. More to the point, certain biological realities, including age and its accompanying physical and mental decline, will operate during Trump’s 80s. The flunkies and toadies who surround the president will seek to deny this elemental reality—the Biden team was egregious in this regard—but sooner or later it will take hold too.

Primatology, in this case, offers a useful guide. In most troops of baboons, an alpha male dominates all the others, who exhibit submissive behavior if they know what is good for them. The dominance may be so pronounced that all the alpha male has to do is bare his fangs and snarl to get the behavior he wants. But baboons age, and although he may not notice, the alpha male’s muscles will atrophy, his fangs will fall out. He may continue to snarl, but the younger male baboons will notice and begin to sense the possibility of a succession crisis. And then they pounce.

So, too, here. Donald Trump is already a lame duck. He is, by any measure, old, which is one of many reasons that comparisons with Hitler or younger contemporary European authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán are misplaced. He will be an even lamer duck in two years, at which point the troop of Republican politicians will begin to struggle for the succession. Former friends—Donald Trump Jr. and J. D. Vance, for example—may fall out, and the coalition of differing subclans may fight more openly. Republican unity in several years is highly unlikely.

It’s a bad time in American politics, to be sure. But we need to remember that natural laws still apply, and things could get better if even just one piece of fantasy biology were to hold true: a large class of political invertebrates were to grow spines.

Iranian foreign minister meets Taliban officials in first Kabul visit in eight years

On Monday, in one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump defrocked 50 high priests of U.S. national security. Now deprived of their clearances, if they want to know what’s happening in the world, they are reduced, like the rest of us, to reading the newspaper, and waiting for the president to blurt out nuclear codes over brunch at Mar-a-Lago. Once out of government, these former officials usually keep their clearances so they can return to government, or to civilian contracting work that involves government secrets, without friction, and so they can learn secrets and give advice informally. Removing these clearances is petty and personal. But it is Trump’s decision to make, and in a week of wacky and unexpected executive orders, it is one of the easier to defend.

The order singled out former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton for special dishonor. Trump accused Bolton of making money by publishing a memoir “for monetary gain” before the intelligence community could scrub his text of classified material. In a separate and remarkably spiteful action, Trump rescinded Secret Service protection for Bolton, former Trump State department official Brian Hook, and former Secretary of State and CIA director, Michael Pompeo. The FBI has accused Iran of trying to kill all three men. Trump often expresses his distaste for those who tried to give direction and discipline to his first term. It is nonetheless shocking to see him come to power and, as one of his first acts, ensure that if Iranian assassins wish to take out his former advisers, they’ll soon have a cleaner shot. Americans who work in national security assume that the government will protect them against vengeance from terrorists, no matter what. They now have reason to believe that this protection is a conditional perk, like a nice parking space, that can be taken away for talking smack on CNN.

Bolton bemoans the removal of his protection detail. Because he is not a dummy or a hypocrite, however, he has not questioned Trump’s ability to take away his clearance. A clearance, unlike the ability to live without fear of assassination, really is the president’s to grant or withdraw at will. The first conversation I ever had with Bolton (whom I profiled for this magazine in 2019) was 18 years ago, about the awesome power of the president to classify, declassify, and determine who can read classified material. This power is almost without limit, Bolton said. (The president cannot declassify certain information about nuclear weapons. Other than that, the power is his.) The president then was George W. Bush, and Bolton, fresh from service as Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, vigorously defended the expansiveness of his old boss’s powers.

[Read: John Bolton will hold this grudge]

Trump is miffed at Bolton for going on cable news to call Trump an idiot. The suggestion that Bolton’s memoir is, as Trump claims, “rife with sensitive information” is both hypocritical, given Trump’s own irresponsible information-security practices, and hard to believe, given the fact that in the four years since it was published, no one has suggested that any specific revelations have compromised national security. The real victim was Trump’s ego. Bolton did, however, publish before getting permission to do so, and anyone who has had a security clearance knows that dodging the review is a violation not just of the letter of one’s clearance conditions but also of the norms and instincts inculcated by the culture of national security. If Bolton expected to keep his clearance after that, then maybe he is a dummy after all.

The other 49 laicized national-security officials had signed an open letter (always a bad idea) that declared in 2020, right before the presidential election, that the now mostly confirmed story of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” A computer technician in Delaware said that Hunter had dropped off the laptop for repair at his computer shop in 2019. Hunter never retrieved it. It contained images of him in states of undress, apparently doped up, and in acts of sexual congress. The contents were so sleazy that even if the laptop were a Russian hoax, which it was not, the hard drives should have been power-washed, submerged in isopropyl alcohol, and thrown into an active volcano purely as a sanitary measure. The former president’s son also appeared in emails to be seeking to profit off his father’s office. The evidence for corruption never amounted to enough for a charge to stick. But because no one could figure out any other reason a Ukrainian oil company would want Hunter on their board, the suggestion of influence peddling seemed plausible.

The intelligence professionals who signed the letter (which was drafted by former CIA Acting Director Michael Morrell) warned readers that they did not know whether the laptop’s contents were “genuine or not,” and said they had no “evidence of Russian involvement,” only suspicions. The signatories included former directors of the NSA, CIA, and the Office of National Intelligence, and many others with long and distinguished service to the United States. These figures provided intelligence and analysis to presidents, generals, congressmen, and others. The core of their job—the reason anyone listens to them—is devotion to an almost priestly ethos of analytical rigor. They speak only after marshaling all available resources to find all the facts that can be known; they deliver briefings based on everything they know—not just the facts they like—and without political tilt or opinion. The public never gets classified briefings. Those who have clearance to get them are meant to be confident that when the briefers speak, they speak with authority, clarity, and dispassion. The experience should be like listening to a great trial lawyer. You should wonder why anyone would bother disagreeing.

[Read: Why Hunter Biden’s laptop will never go away]

Why these titans of intelligence were willing to risk their hard-won credibility on the possibility that Hunter Biden might not be a slimeball is deeply mysterious. Even considering their caveats, somehow they signed and published their letter without due diligence and without the slightest consideration that Hunter was, in fact, prone to shady behavior. No doubt they felt that the laptop story was urgent, because it could affect the election in a few weeks. But their job was to seek facts and judge them with restraint. In this case, minimal fact-seeking would entail asking the Bidens if the sordid laptop was real, and restraint would entail not venturing wild accusations. The letter does not suggest that the authors asked the Bidens—although they certainly could have, since (according to a 2023 House Intelligence report) the letter originated with a call to them from Antony Blinken, then a Biden-campaign official and later secretary of state. Did the Biden team lie about the laptop, or claim Hunter had no memory of it? Or did the authors never even bother to inquire if it belonged to Hunter? In either case, the letter exhibited extremely shoddy analytic craftsmanship. Some signers of the letter had access to classified briefings, and could have asked their old colleagues in the intelligence community whether the laptop was a Russian hoax. In 2023, House investigators asked James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence and one of the drafters of the letter, why he did not ask for a briefing. “Because I didn’t want to be tainted by access to classified information,” he told them.

That won’t be a problem anymore. Because they were excessively generous to one candidate over the other, the letter signers left the impression that they were on the Democratic team—and, moreover, that they would lower their standards in order to influence an American election. Connoisseurs of irony will note that the CIA has, historically, had few scruples about influencing foreign elections, and will ask why they would hesitate to influence an American one. But to influence even a foreign election takes approval from the White House, and to influence a domestic one is flagrantly illegal. Like Bolton, these signers should have known that they were violating a deeply ingrained taboo. If they did not know that Trump, a man too petty and unrestrained to realize that vindictiveness is a sign of weakness, would punish them as soon as he could, then they too are not as intelligent as I thought.

The attacker reportedly used a handgun to shoot both judges, before killing himself.

Assailant kills himself after shooting senior justices in the centre of the Iranian capital.