The attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is an attempt to reverse history, to push our nation back, way back, before the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the secession crisis that soon delivered the nation into the Civil War. Calling this action “unconstitutional” is utterly inadequate; the maneuver is the soiling of sacred text with profane lies.

Birthright citizenship is a shield of protection to anyone born in this country, as close to a national self-definition as we have; it is our legal DNA. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment should be emblazoned on small laminated cards and carried in every American’s pocket. The language is amply clear:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

That language is as fundamental to the Constitution as any other provision, perhaps even more important to the survival and growth of our pluralistic republic than the First Amendment, which protects free speech, free press, the right of assembly, and the right to petition the government. It is as inherent to constitutional function as federalism itself.

[Read: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is a Big Test for the Constitution]

The Trump administration now scoffs at this history, purporting to end this guarantee with an executive order signed on Donald Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office and tragically titled, in a fantastic act of Orwellian doublespeak, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The administration makes a phony originalist argument based on the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee extended only to the freedmen and their descendants. Quite the contrary, the amendment’s authors explicitly envisioned the immigrant population and its descendants as part of their plan. Congressman John Bingham, Section 1’s author, defended the amendment by drawing on the authority of the Constitution’s Framers, who had “invited the workers and builders whose honest toil clothes and shelters nations,” and who hailed from “every civilized nationality” to become “citizens of the Republic.” This is why, in blocking Trump’s order last week, the Federal District Court Judge John C. Coughenour said without caveat: “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Section 1’s origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion of equality among “these truths” in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred.  

Most profound, birthright citizenship is rooted in the blood of more than 700,000 Americans who died in the Civil War, a catastrophe that made possible what most historians now call the “second founding” of America. The rebirth harkened in the Fourteenth Amendment is the core of this phrase’s meaning. The Trump administration’s desire to obliterate birthright citizenship is part of a larger quest to undo most of this egalitarian tradition, to shift American history into a kind of permanent reverse gear back to an age of secure constitutional white supremacy.

[Read: The Coming Assault on Birthright Citizenship]

One cannot overstate the gravity of Trump’s proposed action, nor the historical ignorance on which it stands. The original Republicans who crafted birthright citizenship into the amendment were doing nothing less than harvesting the greatest results of the Civil War, making good on the promise of freedom for millions of any creed, color, or national origin at the time and for all time to come. Section 1 explained to the world what that war had meant. To erase any part of it now is to tarnish the legacy of William McKinley, Trump’s new favorite president, who fought in the Battle of Antietam. The Union victory there is what prompted the Emancipation Proclamation.

For Bingham, a deeply Christian abolitionist Republican from Ohio, this debate went back at least to the 1850s crises over the expansion of slavery. In 1858 he said, “Every man knows that under our free institutions, every person born of free parents within the jurisdiction of the United States … is a citizen of the United States.” Bingham, of course, overestimated such consensus, because Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford had ruled for a 7–2 majority of the Supreme Court the previous year that Black people possessed “no rights” whatsoever under American law. One of the grand purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment was to relegate the Dred Scott decision to history.

By the winter of 1866, as Congress debated the content of an amendment, it faced many overwhelming obstacles, especially bone-level, historical racism and the doctrine of federalism that fundamentally protected states’ rights. Congress had just fought an all-out war to restore the Confederate states to the Union and to end slavery with an overwhelming use of federal power.

But the Republicans, despite fierce debates, were confident. “I can hardly believe,” wrote Thaddeus Stevens, the radical floor manager for his party, “that any person can be found who will not admit that every one of these proposals is just.” They knew exactly what they intended to achieve. Bingham defended the amendment as protection of the “in-born rights of every person.” Stevens thought they had to “fix the foundations of the government on principles of eternal justice.” Senator Lyman Trumbull saw them advancing principles “which the great Author of all has implanted in every human breast.” They believed that they were enacting justice and morality, not only for freed slaves but for the country’s immigrant future, a fact they deeply understood because they had lived through the recent waves of Irish and German immigration.

[Read: The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship]

As for states’ rights, Bingham had a constant answer. For “generations to come,” he announced, he sought to “arm Congress … with the power to enforce the Bill of Rights as it stands in the Constitution … in the states.” In the states, by federal power.

In floor debates, Bingham spoke with great eloquence about the purposes of the amendment. “The day of the freedman’s deliverance has come,” he declared, “not without suffering, not without sorrow, not without martyrdom, not without broken altars and broken hearts.” But now he saw potential days of glory, not only for ex-slaves but for the immigrant. The Constitution could now “provide that no man, no matter what his color, no matter beneath what sky he may have been born, no matter in what disastrous conflict or by what tyrannical hand his liberty may have been cloven down, no matter how poor, no matter how friendless … shall be deprived of life or liberty or property without due process of law.” Above everything, “all persons born” here were forever citizens.  

Trump and his allies have picked a fight over this crucial provision in the Constitution. Americans have to engage the fight, in the courts and with every mode of persuasion. Trump and his allies’ vision is an egregious abuse of real history and the new Constitution it forged in the 1860s. If they succeed, then Grant has surrendered to Lee at Appomattox.

Our fractured age’s greatest heroes are a far cry from Achilles. They fight not for glory but freedom, with weapons forged of pure moral steel. Consider the fatalistic courage of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. By the time he was poisoned in 2020 with a neurotoxin secretly applied to his underpants by Vladimir Putin’s agents, he’d suffered at least one previous chemical attack and been jailed by the regime more than 10 times. After five months of convalescence in Germany, Navalny returned to Moscow, where he was arrested at the airport and later imprisoned in a remote penal colony. He seemed undaunted by the prospect of death. “If they decide to kill me,” he said in the 2022 documentary film Navalny, “it means that we are incredibly strong.”

The supreme Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who fell afoul of the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, was Navalny’s equal in staking his life on publicly resisting ideological tyranny. Mandelstam sealed his fate in late 1933, when he composed verse that portrayed Stalin as a murderer with “cockroach whiskers” who “forges order after order like horseshoes, / hurling them at the groin, the forehead, the brow, the eye.” Brutally interrogated in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1934, he was sent into exile, was rearrested in the spring of 1938, and died in a Gulag transit facility that winter.

In her memoir of those terrible years, Hope Against Hope, his wife, Nadezhda—whose name means “hope,” and who published a sequel, Hope Abandoned—writes that Mandelstam’s “destiny was hatched from character, like a butterfly from its chrysalis.” He attacked Stalin because he “did not want to die without stating in unambiguous terms what he thought was going on around us.” Mandelstam anticipated Navalny when he observed that “poetry is power” and is “respected only in this country—people are killed for it.” Both men died in Siberian prison camps at the age of 47—86 years apart.

[Read: A dissident is built different]

The power of Mandelstam’s poetry, a bell pealing in the muffle of a pea-soup fog, arises from the harmony of his words and actions. “The dominant theme in the whole of M.’s life and work,” Nadezhda writes, “was his insistence on the poet’s dignity, his position in society and his right to make himself heard.” Mandelstam’s speech was his deed. In 1918, he saved the life of an art historian targeted by the Cheka (the secret police), ignoring a pistol-brandishing Chekist’s warning that he’d be shot if he dared to interfere in the case. He later stopped the execution of five bank officials by sending to Nikolai Bukharin a volume of poems that the Central Committee member had helped him publish, accompanied by the message that “every line here is against what you are going to do.” Bukharin returned the favor by writing to Stalin in Mandelstam’s defense after his arrest in 1934. It’s hard to say what he appreciated more: Mandelstam’s adamant integrity or his poetry. While terrified artists mouthed the alien language of the state, Mandelstam’s verse sprang inexorably from some high and sacred ground that would not fall. He captures this almost physical necessity in his very short poem “Meteorite,” which describes an “exiled line” of poetry that, having fallen “from the heavens” and woken the earth, “couldn’t be anything else.”

It’s not that Soviet leaders disliked Mandelstam’s work. Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the secret police who, along with Bukharin, was condemned to death in the last show trial of old Bolsheviks in 1938, was so fond of Mandelstam’s Stalin poem that he learned it by heart. Nor, it seems, were leaders particularly hostile to him because he was a Jew: Official anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia didn’t hit full swing until 1952, when all of the prominent Yiddish writers and eight other Jews were executed on Stalin’s orders in what came to be known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. According to Nadezhda, Mandelstam’s real crime was his defiant confidence, his “usurpation of the right to words and thoughts that the ruling powers reserved exclusively to themselves.” Equally unforgivable was his inclination to “lay down the law, as a writer is supposed to”—that is, to pass unequivocal judgment on social realities, a consequence of his inability to “be indifferent to good and evil, and … [to] say that all that exists is rational” (a Communist dogma frequently invoked to excuse terror as historical necessity).

The viciousness of the totalitarian state only strengthened the poet’s hand. For while rulers who rely on terror lack authority—power that is rooted neither in coercion nor persuasion but is spontaneously recognized as legitimate, like that of a doctor on an airplane when a passenger falls ill—Mandelstam radiated it. This was not just because he was a generous and conscientious man who couldn’t keep a second pair of trousers (there was always someone more in need), and who blamed himself for leading into temptation whatever friend betrayed him after he recited his Stalin poem to a dozen people. His authority came from what Nadezhda calls “the absolute character” of his urge to be a source of truth for his fellow men, and his inability “to curb or silence himself by ‘stepping on the throat’ of his own song.” Above all, it came from the authenticity of his “inner voice.”

But what awakens that voice? For Mandelstam, poetry sprang from joy as much as from anger—and emerged in the manner that a musical phrase does.  Like the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Mandelstam composed by ear, uttering the same lines with minor variations over and over until they achieved their proper form. Watching him work must have been like listening to a songbird, one whose protective coloring couldn’t conceal its deepest feelings. Mandelstam, who called poetry the “yeast of the world,” suggests as much in his poem “The Cage”:

When the goldfinch like rising dough
suddenly moves, as a heart throbs,
anger peppers its clever cloak
and its nightcap blackens with rage.

The goldfish sings in a cage built from “a hundred bars of lies” and the plank on which he sings is “slanderous.” These are inhospitable conditions, but Nadezhda explains that he was reconciled with persecution and poverty by his “simple love of life.” For him, eternity was “tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible.” He knew, in the words of the poet Anna Akhmatova, “from what trash poetry, quite unashamed, can grow,” turning into vibrant song the colorless prose of daily existence under the crushing weight of totalitarianism. This was the “drop of good” that “the merciless grip of the age” squeezed out of him. But the evil age could not forgive him for that good, and not just him: the feeling for poetry, which Mandelstam regarded as the definitive characteristic of the true intelligentsia, “went with the qualities of the mind which in our country doomed people to death.” Foremost among them was the dynamic strength of the individual who sings his inner freedom, as Mandelstam does in a 1935 poem that ends with the triumph of the poetic voice: “you could not stop my lips from moving.”

Courageous and authoritative individual voices are as urgently necessary today as they have ever been, not just in Russia but across the West. In Soviet fashion, the proponents of cultural Marxism seek consensus through intimidation, insisting, among other things, that “oppressors” have no right to an opinion about “oppressed” groups or individuals. Primary and secondary schools have for years spoon-fed students such ideological pap, damaging their capacity to appreciate any ideas not packaged in hackneyed phrases. In universities, professors expose intellectually susceptible undergraduates to popular partisan concepts, concepts as stale, in Orwell’s words, as “tea leaves blocking a sink.” These viral variants of recombinant Marxism—having in common a peculiarly enervated voice—have now spread throughout society by multiple vectors, including ubiquitous DEI training programs, to which 52 percent of U.S. workers have now been subjected. One new study suggests that these programs “increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”

[Read: Poetry is an act of hope]

Donald Trump’s reelection, among other cultural shifts, suggests that Americans have grown tired of progressive bullying. But if anything, technology poses a more insidious threat to the development of future Mandelstams than ideology. It’s not just that people prefer new iPhones to old books. I tell undergraduates who are laboring to improve their writing that their ultimate goal is the achievement of style: a voice so distinctive that readers will immediately recognize whose work they hold in their hands. But nearly four in 10 students admit to using programs such as ChatGPT to write their papers, and the actual rate of AI plagiarism is probably much higher. As this technology advances, few will be able to resist the temptation to outsource the greatest part of their thinking to machines.

This brings to mind the poets of ideology and algorithms that Nadezhda would have called “mechanical nightingales.” When a friend told the Mandelstams about a bird he’d seen that, on its owner’s signal, hopped out of its cage, sang, and then obediently returned to confinement, his precocious son remarked: “Just like a member of the Union of Writers.”

Too many writers and artists in the West sing the same potted tunes on demand, hopping from perch to scandalous plank. But unlike songbirds, poets and readers can learn from the dead, and they can refuse to be tamed by the forces of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck. That’s the spirit we need today. Let a hundred poets whose lips are still moving, heroes living or dead, leaven our days, and let them teach their life-affirming music to our young.

In his contentious confirmation hearing, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed that his mission is “to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense.” It is a terrible idea.

The archetype of the Western warrior is Homer’s Achilles. Superbly fit, the “swift runner” Achilles is magnificent in battle. He is an individualist, with dazzling armor and a troop of admiring Myrmidons who would follow him anywhere. His prowess in combat is unsurpassable. He is brought down only by a poisoned arrow (a sneaky weapon if ever there was one) fired by the wimpy Paris, whose seduction of Helen had started the Trojan War.

He is also the man who comes close to killing his boss, Agamemnon, over a favorite concubine; sulks in his tent; and weeps when he feels dishonored until his mother (a goddess) comforts him. In a rage over the death of his friend Patroclus in a fair fight, Achilles not only kills the Trojan prince Hector but then drags his body around Troy for his horrified parents and widow to see. An intervention by the gods is all that prevents the body from being ripped apart by this treatment, although Achilles’s initial hope (snarled at the dying Hector) was that dog packs and birds would rend the corpse of the man who fought to defend his city from the horrors of a sacking.

Achilles is a warrior, not a soldier. History has had plenty of warrior types, including some (think Geronimo) whom we celebrate even after vanquishing them. But let us remember that the brave (and yes, they are brave) ghazi fighters of the Islamic State and the mercenary killers of the Wagner Group had and have warrior cultures. Warriors are people who exult in killing, who prize individual courage and daring, who obsess about honor (often in self-destructive ways), who frequently take trophies from the bodies of their enemies, and whose behavior on and off the battlefield often veers into atrocity.

Soldiers are different. They are servants of the state. In well-governed countries, they are bound by discipline, the rule of law, and commitment to comrades and organizations—not to self-glorification. Their virtues are obedience, stoicism, perseverance, and competence. They serve a common good, and duty, not glory, is their prime motivation.

The distinction matters. If Europe and the United States overran large parts of the planet, it was because they deployed disciplined soldiers against, in many instances, more numerous warriors. Even well-organized warriors—think of Shaka’s Zulus, or the Iroquois confederacy—could rarely defeat well-drilled infantry. The British General C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars, a manual on imperial warfare, explains the outcomes of those and many other fights far better than Homer’s Iliad.

To be sure, these are ideal types, and in reality they may coexist, although with one set of qualities predominating. Arguably, for example, the armies of the Confederacy were more like warriors (the rebel yell, J. E. B. Stuart’s plumed hat, Pickett’s death-defying charge), and the Union more like soldiers (repeating rifles, rumpled Ulysses S. Grant, an ever-tightening naval blockade). We know how that turned out. It is no coincidence that one book that tries to explain the Confederacy’s exceptionally high losses, particularly among general officers, bears the title Attack and Die. Southern warriors liked to charge with the bayonet. And atrocities such as the Fort Pillow massacre of African American troops and the cruelty and mismanagement of Andersonville Prison had a lot to do with nonsoldierly behavior.

The infatuation with warrior culture—the strut and swagger, the desire to battle mano a mano—is not atypical of a certain kind of junior officer, which is what Hegseth was in the National Guard. It is a world apart from how the armed forces operate at scale, and from the extraordinarily complex business of the Department of Defense.

You don’t want Achilles in a nuclear submarine, you don’t need El Cid maintaining your stealth bomber, and you surely do not want Crazy Horse presiding over the urgent problem of renovating the American defense industrial base.

I have known some great soldiers (using the term to include sailors, airmen, and Marines), and by and large they are wary of warrior culture. They know that violence on the battlefield can easily spin out of control; they know that a very large part of their duty is the orchestration of large and intricate organizations and complex technologies. They prefer steadiness to impulse, calculation to intuition, and, above all, thoughtfulness about their profession to raging glorification of bloodshed. Jim Mattis and David Petraeus (to mention just two) are readers (and writers) of books; the special operators Stan McChrystal and William McRaven are anything but yellers and screamers.

And those are just the military people. Secretaries of defense are civilians, or should be. The appointment of Mattis in the first Trump administration could be supported on the grounds that an erratic new president needed someone in that position who would temper his wilder instincts. Typical for Trump though, he was disappointed to learn that Mattis was not, in fact, known as “Mad Dog” and hated the president’s use of the nickname. The appointment by President Joe Biden of another retired general, Lloyd Austin, was but one of a number of unforced errors that made his administration in many respects a failure.

The civilian secretary of defense should be tough and highly experienced—Bob Gates or, earlier, Melvin Laird—as well as a capable organizer, a respected counselor, a shrewd politician, and a forceful leader from outside military culture. The defense secretary’s job is often to represent civilian values to the military (think racial integration and acceptance of homosexuals in military service) and military values to the civilian world. They must administer a sprawling department with millions of civilian and military members, set an enormous range of policies, and, most important, exercise the consistent civilian oversight of military operations, which a president cannot. They are not in the warrior business. Indeed, some of the most effective secretaries have had negligible military experience, or none whatsoever.

Hegseth, quite apart from his turbulent personal life, has no qualifications for this position. The organizations he ran failed or lost considerable sums of money; his testimony (before an admittedly less-than-exacting set of interrogators) revealed broad areas of ignorance about defense. He seems to have gotten the nod because of his servility to Trump, and the tough-guy bluster of a resentful junior officer raging against higher-ups—an altogether common type throughout history, a trope rather than a qualification.

And this warrior-culture rhetoric is potentially dangerous. In his first term, President Trump reversed a number of decisions that the military made to enforce discipline—restoring rank and the coveted SEAL trident pin to Eddie Gallagher, and pardoning other officers convicted of or headed to trial for war crimes. Trump could do much worse with a secretary of defense who thinks his job is to free up the tough guys to do tough-guy things. Hegseth’s sneers at judge advocate general officers—military lawyers—were not merely juvenile but dangerous.

The real peril here is not a plot to destroy American liberties but fecklessness and ignorance about what it takes to build, strengthen, and direct a military that is powerful but not, in relative terms, as dominant as it once was. Half a century ago, the great student of management, Peter Drucker, said that running the Department of Defense might well be impossible. Perhaps, but it is most certainly impossible in the hands of someone whose idea of leadership of that organization is a jutting jaw, bravado, and war paint.

The Capitol One Arena is rather dreary. The 27-year-old venue was considered so outdated—and the neighborhood around it so drab—that last year the owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards threatened to move the teams to Virginia.

But today, the arena will be the unlikely venue where Donald Trump’s political powers and showman’s instincts will be placed on full display.

A tiny desk, affixed with the presidential seal and bathed in red, white, and blue lights, has been placed on a stage built in the center of the arena where—in lieu of a traditional inaugural parade—Trump will hold a rally this afternoon. That is where he is expected to sit and sign a slew of executive orders. His efforts to reshape national policy and presidential power will come not in a quiet Oval Office but in front of a raucous crowd of supporters.

Trump officially completed his stunning comeback by taking the oath of office just after noon today in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. But his second term, in many ways, will truly begin a few hours later in that packed arena about a mile away. An executive producer at heart, Trump has always leaned on the power of imagery in cultivating political force. And in his inaugural address, he was stage-managing his sequel, a presidential spectacle that offered a preview of his plans for his second act.

There were few notes of unity.

“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said, “and all these many betrayals that have taken place, and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

The frigid temperatures gave Trump an excuse to move the inauguration inside, much as Ronald Reagan did in 1985, and they provided him with further control of the pageantry. By not braving the cold—and, to be clear, several inaugurations have been colder—Trump also dispensed with any focus on the size of his crowd, something that upset him deeply eight years ago.

Moreover, he was able to mark his return to power in the very space where a violent mob of his supporters tried to overturn an election to keep him in power. Four years ago, a crowd radicalized by lies of a stolen election stormed the U.S. Capitol and desecrated its Rotunda, committing acts of violence in Trump’s name. Today, official Washington used that same historic hall to welcome him back to power.

If Trump had delivered his speech in its customary outdoor location on the Capitol’s west front, the cheers from the crowd down on the mall below would have been distant. But the indoor setting invoked a State of the Union address, held annually just down the hall in the House of Representatives chamber. And Trump furthered that feeling with a partisan speech, pushing a litany of policy proposals. Reactions split along party lines, with Republicans repeatedly leaping to their feet to applaud and Democrats, including outgoing President Joe Biden, sitting silently.

Trump leaned into the visual messaging of the Capitol ceremony. For most people, seating charts are mundane, tiresome organizational tools. But they are prized in Washington for clues as to who’s up and who’s down, offering a literal map of proximity to power. The signals sent by Trump were clear: GOP donors and friends such as Miriam Adelson and Dana White were seated right behind the row for former presidents. His new tech-billionaire friends—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—got prime seats inside the Rotunda, in front of the incoming Cabinet, while a number of Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and Brian Kemp of Georgia, were shoved to the overflow room.

Inauguration Day was designed to showcase democracy’s strength. Instead, the events of the day showed its inherent fragility. Biden provided Trump what Trump did not give him—a peaceful transfer of power with all the niceties of ceremony—but the outgoing president was so concerned about his successor exacting revenge that he issued extraordinary preemptive pardons to some government officials and members of his own family, which cut sharply against his pledge to restore democratic norms.

As his motorcade wound its way through Washington, Trump was surrounded by his own image. Many of those thronging the nation’s capital—even those shut out of the events by the weather-related scheduling changes—sported shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with Trump’s mugshot taken at Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, when he was charged in August 2023 with racketeering. At the time, that case in Georgia was just one of four criminal cases that imperiled Trump, though it was the only one that produced a booking photo quickly disseminated around the globe.

Many Democrats hoped it would doom Trump’s chances, undermining a campaign that was about retribution, yes, but also about keeping the candidate out of prison. But three of the cases fell by the wayside, derailed by stalling tactics, prosecutorial blunders, and a helpful Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. And the one case that did move forward—the hush-money trial in New York—ended with a conviction that will be recorded in the history books but meant little else.

Trump has mused that the legal proceedings created images that reinforced his claim to be a victim of a government overreach, the subject of a witch hunt, a martyr taking arrows for his supporters. Throughout the race, he used those visuals to recast political vulnerabilities as visceral symbols of toughness and power. Day after day, the Republicans flocked to the courthouse—sometimes in matching red ties—to demonstrate their fealty. And many in the GOP saw his mugshot not as a sign of wrongdoing or guilt, but as an image of strength and defiance. He used it for countless fundraising appeals and merchandising opportunities.

That wasn’t an accident. In the weeks before Trump’s own arraignment, he saw the case’s other defendants pose for unflattering booking photos that looked washed-out and weak. So Trump practiced various facial expressions, one of his advisers told me on condition of anonymity to discuss private moments. He eventually settled on a scowl, matching his first instinct. And then in the booking room, Trump told confidants later, he saw where the light was coming from and positioned his face, frowning and leaning forward, half in the shadows and half in the full glare.

Trump loved the result. And when it came time to pose for photos for the official inaugural program, he re-created it, his adviser told me. Vice President J. D. Vance’s portrait looks like most official portraits: a pleasant closed-mouth smile, plenty of light illuminating his face. Trump instead asked for an extreme close-up, like his booking photo, with his face somewhat in shadow, glaring at the audience. The photo shaved years off his 78-year-old face and projected a strongman’s toughness.

The other image that defined the 2024 campaign was captured moments after an assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a campaign stop in Butler County, Pennsylvania. With blood from his wounded ear streaking across his face, Trump had the showman’s presence of mind to stop the Secret Service agents trying to hustle him to safety. He stood tall, pumped his fist at the roaring crowd, and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” It was moment of inspiration—captured in a series of instantly famous photographs—and, for Trump loyalists, perfectly showcased a political survivor.

John F. Kennedy was considered the originator of modern presidential iconography, while Reagan enhanced it. But even more than his glamorous predecessors, Trump knows that the pictures matter far more than the substance. His whole political career has been built around imagery. It was launched on the back of The Apprentice, the highly stylized version of his business career that exaggerated his success and made him America’s CEO.

After he was elected, I saw his skill at stagecraft firsthand while covering his White House. Some images he created were meant for the history books, such as when he left those of us in the press pool behind to step over the border at the DMZ and into North Korea, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in the hermit-like nation. Others were more mundane: During an Oval Office interview ahead of the 2018 midterms, Trump stopped the questions to make sure the photographer had the most flattering lighting. He held up his hand, and issued instructions.

“Let’s make sure this looks the way it should,” Trump said, unsmiling, while directing the angle and illumination of the photos.

That same attention to the power of political imagery was on display again in Washington today, from the Capitol Rotunda to the Capitol One Arena. Moments after completing his inaugural address, Trump spoke to the overflow room and began by praising the stagecraft of the ceremony.

“It was so beautiful in there today that maybe we should do it every four years,” said Trump, who added that the Rotunda featured “the best acoustics I’ve ever heard in a room.”

He smiled at the camera.

Democrats spent more than $20 million last year to end then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional career. Now, however, the Republican they worked so hard to defeat is their favorite nominee for President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary came as a pleasant surprise to many Democrats and union leaders, who expected him to follow past Republican presidents and name a conservative hostile to organized labor. But Chavez-DeRemer endeared herself to unions during her two years in Congress. A former mayor of an Oregon suburb who narrowly won her seat in 2022, she was one of just three House Republicans to co-sponsor the labor movement’s top legislative priority: a bill known as the PRO Act, which would make unionizing easier and expand labor protections for union members.

After Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination was announced, two senior Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Patty Murray of Washington State, issued cautiously optimistic statements about her—a rare sentiment for Democrats to express about any Trump nominee. In addition, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president who spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention and whose union stayed neutral in the presidential race after repeatedly backing Democratic nominees, has championed Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination. And it has given more progressive union leaders hope that, after winning the largest vote share from union households of any Republican in 40 years, Trump might change how his party treats the labor movement.

[Annie Lowrey: The rise of the union right]

“It’s a positive move for those of us who represent workers and who want workers to have a better life,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a close ally of Democratic Party leaders, told me. She noted that Chavez-DeRemer bucked her party not only by supporting the PRO Act but also by voting against private-school vouchers and cuts to public-education funding.

Trump courted union members throughout his campaign, seeing them as a key part of a blue-collar base that helped him flip states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won in 2020. In September, his running mate, J. D. Vance, told reporters that the drop in private-sector union membership in recent decades was “a tragedy”—a statement sharply at odds with the GOP’s long-running advocacy of laws that would make unionizing harder, including in Vance’s home state of Ohio. O’Brien and congressional Republicans reportedly pushed for Trump to pick Chavez-DeRemer after the election. The decision may have been a reward for the Teamsters’ snub of Kamala Harris.

Yet until his selection of Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s support for unions had stopped at rhetoric. He’s surrounded himself with conservative billionaires and generally sided with business interests by opposing minimum-wage increases, enhanced overtime pay, and other policies backed by organized labor. With that record in mind, Democrats have added qualifiers to their embrace of Chavez-DeRemer. “If Chavez-DeRemer commits as labor secretary to strengthen labor unions and promote worker power,” Warren said in her statement, “she’s a strong candidate for the job.”

That remains a big if. A spokesperson for the Trump transition, Aly Beley, told me that Chavez-DeRemer no longer supports the PRO Act—a major shift that will disappoint Democrats but might help her secure the GOP support she needs to win confirmation. “President Trump and his intended nominee for secretary of labor agree that the PRO Act is unworkable,” Beley said.

For the same reasons that Democrats like Chavez-DeRemer, conservatives are concerned and have pushed her to renounce her pro-union stances before Republicans agree to vote for her. “This is the one that stands out like a sore thumb,” Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, told me of her nomination. Her support for the PRO Act, Norquist said, reflected “very bad judgment.” An anti-union group, the National Right to Work Committee, wrote in a letter to Trump before he announced Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination that she “should have no place” in his administration: “She would not be out of place in the Biden-Harris Department of Labor, which completely sold out to Big Labor from the start.”

In the Senate, Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is not moving nearly as quickly as those of other Trump picks. The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), which oversees the Labor Department, has not scheduled her confirmation hearing. (Republicans have prioritized hearings for Trump’s national-security nominees.) And she hasn’t met with the committee’s chair, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who issued a noncommittal statement after her nomination was announced. “I will need to get a better understanding of her support for Democrat legislation in Congress that would strip Louisiana’s ability to be a right to work state, and if that will be her position going forward,” Cassidy posted on X. Rand Paul, who also serves on the committee and is the leading sponsor of major anti-union legislation, has said little publicly about Chavez-DeRemer—and didn’t respond to a request for comment—but his chief strategist replied to the post, urging Cassidy to “stop her.” (Cassidy has been similarly lukewarm about another nominee within the committee’s jurisdiction: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary.)

Chavez-DeRemer added her name to the PRO Act only a few months before last year’s election. Norquist speculated that she did so to appease unions in her district in the hopes of keeping her seat. If that was her strategy, it failed: Chavez-DeRemer lost to Democrat Janelle Bynum after one of the most expensive campaigns in the country.

Other Republicans see Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor stances as sincere, not strategic. A former colleague of hers, Representative Cliff Bentz of Oregon, praised her nomination and said that Trump had picked her for the Labor Department not in spite of her close ties to unions but because of them. “The fact that President-Elect Trump reached out to labor shows that he understands the need to create a better relationship between labor on the one hand and Republican folks on the other,” he told me. “And he saw in Lori exactly what he is trying to do.” Bentz said he would be surprised if Chavez-DeRemer “walks much of anything back.”

But Chavez-DeRemer wouldn’t be the first Trump Cabinet nominee to disavow a past position in order to win over Republican skeptics in the Senate. Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for director of national intelligence, reversed her opposition to a key surveillance tool known as FISA Section 702, which was enacted after the September 11 terrorist attacks. And Kennedy is reportedly softening his long-standing attacks on vaccines in meetings with GOP senators.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

If Chavez-DeRemer turns against the PRO Act, Democrats and unions will surely cool on her, but they won’t be shocked. Union leaders told me that they were under no illusions that Republicans would completely retract their hostility toward the labor movement, even if her nomination represented a move in that direction. “We have seen Project 2025,” Jody Calemine, the director of advocacy for the AFL-CIO, said. “That agenda is anti-worker to its very core.”

How much influence Chavez-DeRemer would have in an administration populated by corporate leaders is unclear. The PRO Act, for example, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress even with a supportive labor secretary, and Norquist expects that the White House will exert tight control over policies enacted by Cabinet leaders, as it has during recent administrations of both parties.

To progressives, Chavez-DeRemer is clearly preferable to some of the other names Trump reportedly considered for labor secretary. Most notably, these include Andrew Puzder, the fast-food CEO whose nomination in 2017 collapsed amid ethical conflicts, revelations that he employed an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, and reports of labor-law violations at his company’s restaurants. She is also seen as friendlier to unions than either of Trump’s labor secretaries during his first term, Alexander Acosta and Eugene Scalia.

Chavez-DeRemer might be the best nominee Democrats can get under Trump. But labor leaders such as Weingarten will be watching closely to see how she squares her recent support for union-friendly legislation with an administration that is, in other key positions, empowering business leaders and billionaires. “This is where the rubber hits the road about whether the parties stay in their own preexisting camps” with regard to labor, Weingarten told me. She said she would lobby Democratic senators to support Chavez-DeRemer if the nominee sticks by her pro-union positions. But if she renounces them, Weingarten said, “then all bets are off.”

Donald Trump has had a remarkably vocal pre-presidency, particularly on foreign policy. Against the background of a no less astonishing silence from President Joe Biden, Trump has threatened to unleash hell on Hamas unless it cuts a deal with Israel before he is sworn in, mused about seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, and advocated the annexation of Canada—not to mention that he has promised to end the war in Ukraine and inflict tariffs on friend and foe alike.

That Trump observes none of the foreign-policy decorum that presidents, let alone presidents-elect, are supposed to maintain should come as no surprise. We have long known that he has no filters; that he makes outlandish, boorish, menacing, ridiculous promises and threats.

It does not help, however, when the foreign-policy commentariat responds by shrieking in justifiable but futile outrage. It only gratifies Trump and that portion of his followers, who—like J. K. Rowling’s Crabbe and Goyle, the followers of the malicious Draco Malfoy—derive an oafish satisfaction when their bullying leader upsets the good kids. Why give them the pleasure of getting visibly riled?

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

But it does make sense to figure out where these statements come from, and, more important, what consequences they may have. They are, on their face, absurd. There is nothing more that the United States can do to Hamas that the Israelis are not already doing—American troops would not help, and plenty of American bombs have been supplied to people who know the targets much better than the U.S. Air Force. Does Trump really plan to expose American soldiers to Latin American guerrillas, and the Panama Canal to almost certain sabotage, in an occupation? Would he really give Europe an opening to align against the United States in defense of what is, after all, a part of Denmark? As for Canada, we have been there before. In 1775, the rebellious colonies launched an invasion, declaring that the inhabitants would be “conquered into liberty,” an infelicitous phrase if ever there was one, and during the War of 1812, we had another go. We got thoroughly whipped twice. Canadians are not as wimpy as we think, nor as peace-loving as they believe.

As Trump’s former national security adviser H. R. McMaster has pointed out, during his first term, he hesitated to use force. So why does he say these belligerent things? For the pleasure of trolling the eminently trollable elites that he despises, no doubt, but there is more to it than that.

Part of Trump’s modus operandi is throwing those around him off balance. He plays his own people off each other, he keeps friends and allies guessing to the end whether he will support them or not, and he wants possible opponents not to know what he will do next. The tactic is not uncommon, nor is it ineffective. It is also a way (in his mind) of setting up negotiations. In his business life as in his political life, Trump has never negotiated in good faith, does not believe in sticking to a deal (as his creditors know), and has always believed that the only defense is an unremitting offense.

That is a bad way to transact the nation’s affairs internationally, because diplomacy relies more than many people realize on good faith and predictability—but then again, Trump does not understand that. He also does not care about the details of the deals he cuts, so long as they look big and beautiful.

Each of Trump’s foreign-policy eruptions also contains a very small kernel of something real, which his whisperers may have shared with him. The United States has not, until now, loudly insisted that Hamas release the hostages, take safe passage for some of their leaders, and surrender. The rest of the world most certainly has not. Although the Biden administration periodically mentions the fact that some of those hostages are Americans, it has not made a big deal of it: Trump intends to.

It is a commonplace that our view of the world tends to form in our 20s. That, for Trump, would have been in the late 1960s, a time closer to the construction of the Panama Canal than to the present. Even during the ’70s, the decision to hand the canal over to Panama met fierce opposition. And although Trump may be interested in getting deals for American shippers, it is reasonable to be anxious about the nature of Chinese infrastructure investments in the Canal Zone, given that the line between Chinese business and the Chinese government is blurry.

As for Greenland, a vast and important territory because of its strategic position and potential mineral wealth, its inhabitants have periodically made noises about independence from Denmark. There are only 57,000 Greenlanders, and the Chinese have been clever and aggressive in penetrating and corrupting the governments of islands with much larger populations than that. The United States tried to buy Greenland in 1867 and again in 1946 and considered it on other occasions as well. It is not a completely insane idea.

And Americans have periodically indulged in dreams of absorbing Canada. In addition to the two botched invasions, the United States and Great Britain came close to blows over American support for Canadian armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, and the Fenian raids by Americans (including veterans of the Union army) in 1866 and 1870. William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, wanted Canada, and so have many others. The charming fortifications that tourists can enjoy on the Canadian side of the border in Ontario and Quebec were, let us remember, built to defend them from us, and they were still being built five years after the Civil War.

In short, these are all ridiculous proposals, but not 100 percent unhinged from reality. (Although, if today’s Republican Party loathes wokery in all of its forms, why does it believe the United States would benefit from making adherents of the more toxic Canadian variant of wokeness into citizens?)

[Robinson Meyer: Trump is thinking of buying a giant socialist island]

There are, however, two real dangers in Trump’s foreign-policy blither. The first is that sooner or later, he will need to be taken seriously, particularly because the world is a far more unstable and dangerous place than it was in his first term. It is already clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not take anything he says seriously—and indeed, Putin has had his television channels stick in the knife by showing nude pictures of the once and future first lady. Trump’s lack of credibility could be dangerous.

The other may follow from what a German civil servant in 1934 referred to as “working towards the Führer”—doing not what the leader has ordered, so much as what you believe he would like done. It has become a cliché that Trump’s opponents take him literally but not seriously, and his supporters take him seriously but not literally. There will be those among the compromised individuals he will recruit into government, or MAGA-inspired officials and soldiers already there, who do both. And they may be inclined to do dangerous things.

The way to deal with the foreign-policy bombast is not so much through outrage as by turning it against a leader who is inconstant and leads a movement that is actually deeply divided. The Republican Party now has a more or less isolationist wing now, and it would not hurt to call this promiscuous lack of restraint to its attention. Which is why, one hopes, Senator Rand Paul, among many others, will have to field persistent questions about just how much he supports the program of violent Trumpian foreign-policy twaddle.

Union Berlin appeal decision to award match to Bochum after their keeper was struck by a lighter in December.