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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been busy. Over the past few weeks, he’s been rooting out programs and language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The U.S. military is dutifully following his lead: West Point no longer supports those ostensibly suspicious organizations such as the Native American Heritage Forum and the Latin Cultural Club, and the Army Recruiting Command has ended its long partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.

The new Pentagon boss also zeroed in on the pressing task of renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, though it’s not exactly a reversal; Hegseth ordered that the base now honor a World War II hero named Roland Bragg (a private first class who won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge) instead of the odious Confederate General Braxton Bragg, for whom it was named in 1918. This change is little more than a clumsy stunt, one that manages to insult a loyal PFC while resurrecting the traitorous general—almost certainly after searching for a hero named Bragg, just so people could use the old name with a wink and a chuckle.

Americans might wonder what all of this performative inanity has to do with arming, training, feeding, and housing the most powerful military in the world, or how any of this showmanship makes the United States safer and more capable of deterring its enemies and fighting for its interests. But Hegseth, like most of Donald Trump’s other nominees, knows that his job is not to administer a department but to carry out Trump’s cultural and political vendettas.

[Elliot Ackerman: Bring back the War Department]

When a government department gets an appointee like Hegseth, it must still find a way to function every day, and those many tasks then fall to the deputies and undersecretaries. Sometimes, the effect is almost imperceptible. Ben Carson, for example, was tapped in Trump’s first term to lead Housing and Urban Development; he was out of his depth and it showed, but HUD slogged on despite Carson’s inexperience. The Defense Department, however, cannot run on autopilot. Mistakes made at the Pentagon can get people killed and endanger the safety of the nation. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Trump’s current nominees to other top-tier Pentagon positions aren’t much more qualified than Hegseth. As with Trump’s nominations in other departments, the key factors appear to be loyalty, wealth, and ideological fervor, not competence.

Day-to-day operations at the Pentagon and other agencies are usually run by a deputy secretary. The previous deputy under Lloyd Austin, Kath Hicks, has a Ph.D. from MIT and years of experience in national defense, including at the Pentagon. Trump’s nominee to succeed her is the billionaire Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus Capital. He has no military or Pentagon experience. (Likewise, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a wealthy businessman and art collector who has never served in the military or any government position.)

Below the secretary, several undersecretaries serve as the senior managers of the institution, and the news here is also worrisome. In 2020, Trump tried to nominate Bradley Hansell, a special assistant to Trump in his first term, as the deputy undersecretary for intelligence (in order to replace someone whose loyalty came into question among Trump’s advisers), a nomination that was returned to Trump without action from the Senate. This time, Trump has nominated Hansell (whose background is in venture capital) for the more senior job of undersecretary, despite his lack of qualifications. Trump has also tapped Emil Michael, a tech investor and executive at Uber and Klout, as undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael is a lawyer; his predecessor in the research and engineering post in the Biden administration, Heidi Shyu, was an actual engineer, with long experience in defense production and acquisition issues.

One relatively conventional choice among the undersecretary nominees is Elbridge Colby, a well-known defense intellectual who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. (He’s the type of Washington fixture whom Trump’s people usually distrust, but Colby was careful never to get on the wrong side of the MAGA world.) His views, especially regarding nuclear weapons, are alarming: He once wrote that America should consider nuclear responses to a cyberattack. But Colby is a serious choice compared with his future colleagues.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The U.S. needs soldiers, not warriors]

After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.

The biggest risk is not that these nominees will do poorly in their jobs. They will have assistants—the same bureaucrats and experienced civil servants whom Trump and Hegseth are trying to drive from the Pentagon—who will make sure that things get done as much as possible in the midst of the chaos. The real danger will come during a crisis, when Trump needs the defense secretary and his senior staff to rise to the occasion and provide advice and options under difficult and perhaps even terrifying conditions. Although these nominees will likely serve up plenty of uninformed or irresponsibly sycophantic views at such a moment, few of them have the depth of knowledge or experience to offer steadier guidance—let alone to push back against the president when needed.

Maybe none of that matters: Trump’s first term showed that he is practically unbriefable and rarely listens to advice. Hegseth and his subordinates seem likely to spend much of their time conducting ideological warfare against their own department, with occasional breaks for tasteless public trolling. But sooner or later, Trump could face a foreign-policy crisis, and he will need better counsel than he can get from billionaire defense dilettantes and a MAGA television personality. At such a moment, Americans can only hope that someone with sober judgment and a healthy sense of patriotism—and who knows what they’re doing—emerges to do the job that Hegseth and others have left aside.

When I was living in West Philadelphia during graduate school, I noticed that my neighborhood abounded with ornately decorated Victorian-style porches, many of which featured ceilings painted in a calm shade of blue, somewhere between periwinkle and a light teal. When I asked a neighbor about what I took to be a trend, she regaled me with the history of a color she called “haint blue”—a story about the violence of indigo production in the South Carolina Low Country, and the never-ending Black quest for safety and protection.

I remembered this experience vividly as I read Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, which collects personal anecdotes, local and regional vignettes, and snippets of global Black history since the 15th century. Perry, an Atlantic contributing writer and a National Book Award–winning author, fills her latest work with accounts of ingenuity and Black resilience that are held together, loosely but intentionally, with threads of cerulean, sapphire, and azure. What might, on the surface, look like an arbitrary correlation coheres into a revelatory entry point for contemplating the Black experience.

Perry’s wide-ranging study seems to take inspiration from blues music, a genre that melds Black suffering with Black pride. And as I read the book, the origin story of haint blue kept flitting across my memory because it, too, evokes that duality. The color’s prevalence on porch ceilings can be traced back to the spiritual practices of the Gullah Geechee people—descendants of Africans trafficked to the southeastern United States in the 1700s who believed that hues resembling the ocean or the sky could confuse evil spirits and keep them away. At the time, haint blue could be made only by cultivating and processing indigo plants, which was a labor-intensive, often dangerous endeavor undertaken by enslaved workers in antebellum America. Crops had to be cut, stacked, and heated in vats that attracted vermin and were a breeding ground for viruses. The stench that arose from the putrefying indigo plants could be unbearable. Livestock and humans alike became sick.

Though the color was a product of enslavement, it was a “source of pleasure” too. As Perry writes, those who found comfort in this particular shade knew that “they were not mere chattel, and their lives would not be only joyless burden.” Even within the labor that degraded them, enslaved people found splendor and self-regard, something to admire in the products of their dehumanization.

[Read: Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.]

Wherever she looked in historical archives, Perry encountered vibrant tones of blue woven into the history of Black lives. She found indigo on the knife of the woman who trained Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first Haitian emperor, in combat. Hunters and riflewomen in the West African kingdom of Dahomey wore blue shorts and sometimes blue blouses as part of their uniforms. Nat King Cole’s cool emanated, at least in part, from the “turquoise-hued Newports” and “brilliant blue Kools” that he regularly smoked.

Though each chapter of Black in Blues locates the color somewhere in the story it tells—the pale blue of jasperware pots; the dark blue in the gums of those most “murderous” of Black people, according to both Black and white folklore; the cobalt blue of bottles hung on crepe-myrtle trees in the Deep South, also meant to ward off evil—the color itself often feels ancillary to the real subject of Perry’s book.

While working on it, Perry realized that she “didn’t want to write an exegesis on blue.” Instead, the form of her project more closely resembles a blues composition; reading it calls to mind one of Ma Rainey’s songs of anguish and exuberance or Miles Davis’s mercurial trumpet solos. Blues music captures the stunning complexity of navigating a freedom forever tied to a history of enslavement. As the music critic Albert Murray once argued, “Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence.”

Perry arranges her exploration of Black history in a way that may seem formless but could be described as a meticulously arranged series of “blue notes”—those tones in blues music that are played or sung slightly below what one might expect. As Perry explains, the blue note refuses stability or cohesion: “It is a flexible relation to the scale, and the most African of interventions into Western music … A blued note is so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.” Perry suggests that the everyday improvisations of the enslaved could be described as “blue note living”: the dances that expressed bodily autonomy, the laughter that overtook immense pain, the projections of curiosity and tenderness in the face of brutality. Over the course of the book, Perry builds her case for how Black people have always functioned as blue notes—often seen as out of place or deviant but also known to wrest mellifluousness from cacophony and escape the binds that have been violently placed upon them.

Take George Washington Carver, the eccentric Black scientist who, in the early 20th century, helped popularize peanut butter and discovered many other uses for peanuts, both industrial and cosmetic. His work with the legume might be his claim to fame, but Perry chooses to pay attention to lesser-known aspects of his persona and life: his surprisingly high voice; his keen interest in the natural healing properties of various plants; the gossip he endured about his sexuality. He was also a talented craftsman who wove and embroidered intricate patterns that Perry describes as “living fractals.” He made paint from sweet-potato skins and tomato vines, and even resurrected Egyptian blue, a striking shade that had been invented in Ancient Egypt, by oxidizing Alabama clay. Born into slavery, Carver lived a simple life with global implications; he found magnificence in the ordinary.

[Read: Nikki Giovanni’s wondrous celebrations of Black life]

Black in Blues begins and ends with intimate histories of some of the people Perry admires most—her family, and those she has encountered through her academic work. One of the last chapters features a man known as Brother Blue—a performer, educator, and family friend who was a semipermanent figure in and around Harvard Square until his death in 2009. Brother Blue frequently walked the streets sharing folk wisdom with the residents of Boston and Cambridge while donning “a soft blue denim shirt and pants, a blue tam on his head, with streamers of all colors hanging off his clothes.” He pinned blue and rainbow-colored butterflies to his clothes and wore no shoes in order to be one with the earth, what he would call sacred ground.

For Perry, Brother Blue embodied “blue note living.” He served in World War II, overcame a stutter as an actor, and defended his doctoral dissertation by performing with a 25-piece jazz orchestra at a Boston prison—before being interrupted by an inmate revolt. Throughout his remarkable life, he insisted that authentic storytelling was crucial to Black life. As Perry reminisces, “He taught me that all stories are ours—meaning Black folks’—even when they came from the very people who mean to keep us down and out. What matters is the telling, meaning the integrity of our voices.”

Perry’s memory of Brother Blue’s teachings resonates with the end of Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which the poet writes that Black people must be willing to “express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” Hughes, too, saw the blues as integral to that endeavor, calling for “the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the blues” to express both the beauty and suffering of Black life. Perry’s book does just that: It is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness—and we would all do well to listen.

Woe to the American consumer. The price of groceries, gas, housing, and other goods and services jumped 0.5 percent from December to January; the cost of car insurance is up 12 percent year over year and the price of eggs is up 53 percent. “On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. That is not happening. Worse, the White House’s early policies are making it more likely that the country’s cost-of-living crisis will endure for years to come.

Voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation delivered the White House to Trump; Americans cited the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as their No. 1 economic concern, and Trump as their preferred candidate to handle it. On his first day in office, Trump ordered the government to deliver “emergency price relief” by figuring out ways to expand the housing supply, streamline the health-care system, eliminate climate rules on home appliances, and expand energy production.

Each of those policies would bring down costs, if enacted, as would Trump’s deregulatory agenda. But as a general point, the White House has fewer ways to quickly temper consumer prices than it does to, say, bolster or lower demand—a problem that bedeviled the Biden administration too. The Federal Reserve controls borrowing rates. The housing and child-care shortages are the products of decades of underinvestment, the former also heavily influenced by municipal policies that Washington has no say in. The trillions of dollars spent by billions of consumers on billions of products generated by millions of firms—the gravitational forces of supply and demand, settled on liquid international markets and affected by government policies only on the margin—are what determine how much people pay at big-box stores and the gas station.

The policies the Trump White House has enacted are likely to make the cost crisis worse. Trump has described the word tariff as “the most beautiful” one to appear in the dictionary. He insists that adding levies to the goods produced by foreign companies will boost national industry and keep American households from getting ripped off. But economists from across the political spectrum agree that tariffs are taxes paid by domestic consumers. They increase prices.

Trump has backed away from the tariffs he proposed on Mexico and Canada in his first weeks in office. Yet he has implemented new levies on Chinese goods, spurring Beijing to retaliate with levies on American natural gas, oil, and farm machinery. This week, Trump also announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, raising costs for American automakers, energy companies, construction firms, and other businesses working in heavy industry. If Trump ends up implementing trade restrictions on Canada and Mexico as originally proposed, or ones of similar scale, the effective tariff rate on American imports would increase from 3 percent to 10 percent—the highest in seven decades.

Studies of the tariffs Trump implemented in his first term demonstrate what will happen. By the end of 2018, Trump’s trade policies were costing Americans an additional $3.2 billion a month at grocery stores and malls, while also reducing the variety of goods American consumers could purchase. And those tariffs were far more limited than the ones he has promised to impose this time.

On top of making imports more expensive, Trump is raising the cost of hiring workers and doing business in the United States by cracking down on the flow of migrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has amped up its raids; Trump is also attempting to end birthright citizenship and close the borders. Fewer undocumented workers will enter the country, and fewer will remain.

Undocumented workers, and immigrants in general, are crucial to millions of American businesses, particularly farms, construction firms, child-care providers, and delivery services. If you get rid of workers, production will go down and prices will spike. One new study found that the increase in deportations during the Obama administration led each average-size county in the country to forgo “the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional residential construction”—meaning 1,994 new homes—over three years. As a result, home prices jumped 10 percent.

At the same time, Trump is silencing the country’s contagion-monitoring system during a bird-flu outbreak, meaning farmers might end up culling millions more chickens and dairy cows. (Bird flu is the reason egg prices are up so much to begin with.) He is also rattling the markets, leading companies to pull back on the kind of investments that would increase domestic production—presenting “a compelling case for taking some chips off the table,” as Tiffany Wilding and Andrew Balls of Pimco put it in a note to investors.

All in all, Trump’s policies should add 0.5 percent to consumer costs this year, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics told me, slowing GDP growth by 0.2 percent this year and 0.5 percent next year. He said he did not expect the country’s growth to be “derailed, given the economy’s strong underlying fundamentals and Trump’s willingness and ability to pivot on policy.” But it “will be meaningfully diminished.”

America is lucky that its underlying fundamentals are strong. The stock market is high; unemployment is low; wages are going up; businesses are generating big profits. Still, people are struggling with a dire housing shortage, bruising out-of-pocket medical costs, and a severe undersupply of early-childhood-education options—as well as expensive eggs and unaffordable car and home insurance. Trump has yet to put out a policy agenda that would tackle those problems in the long term, and is backing away from his campaign promise to make America affordable again in the near term too.

He seems to be betting that voters don’t care as much about the economy as they said they did. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump said after his inauguration. “I said, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue.” He added: “How many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

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Neko Case is best known as a lead vocalist for the Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers and a solo career that doesn’t quite fit any genre (“country noir” and “odd rock” are two labels she has suggested). Her songs feature unusual protagonists, many of whom are animals, and critics and fans have been puzzling over her lyrics for years. Recently, Case published a memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which suggests possible source material for her vivid and sometimes alarming imagination. In the memoir, she writes mostly about her experience growing up as the child of teenage parents who, in her telling, never came around to wanting a child. And about finding an alternative home in the music scenes of the American Northwest and Canada.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Case about men, music, her own sliding sense of gender, the impossibility of being a musician in the age of streaming, and most important, how not to suffer for your art. After a lifetime of thinking about her parents, she also has good advice on when not to forgive.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Just a quick note: This episode contains some cursing that you might not usually hear on this show.

Neko Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.

Neko Case is a lead vocalist of the indie-pop collective the New Pornographers, and she’s also had a long solo career. But what’s most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are often oblique. Like, a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it’s really about incomplete grief. You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

[“Star Witness,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then there are lots of times when Case seems to be writing about herself, but it’s not entirely clear.

[“Things That Scare Me,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Last month, Neko Case peeled back some of the mystery. She’s written a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.

She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child. By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes: “She couldn’t sign it quickly enough; she didn’t even have to think it over.”

And so Case hid a lot behind her music.

[Music]

Rosin: One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remembered that the beanbags were corduroy. The image was so perfect. It was such a perfect image from that era. And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to “Atomic,” by Blondie.

Neko Case: Over and over and over and over, like only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.

Rosin: Right. Right. (Laughs.) Like, just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, Okay, that’s the moment that she discovers the power of music. In a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover what music is for and what it does to you.

Case: Music was always just there. And I took it for granted, but I also leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do, because I was just a girl. And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie, or myself and the Go-Go’s. I just knew I really loved them.

Rosin: So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? You played in bands, but you didn’t really sing for a while.

Case: Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America so, you know, I wasn’t raised with a lot of self-confidence.

Rosin: So what was the point where you were like, Oh I can do this?

Case: It wasn’t so much deciding I could do it. It was just that I couldn’t help but to do it, because the desire was so intense.

Rosin: Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing? What was the desire?

Case: Even just to sit near it. Anything. Anything I could have.

Rosin: In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful. And that’s—

Case: Oh that’s not a complaint.

Rosin: It’s not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

Case: No, no, no. It’s not powerful, and it’s not pretty. Like, those are things that—you know, I wish it were powerful. I don’t care that it’s not pretty. I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty. And singing is an incredible physical feeling. It’s like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Case: It gets so physical. It is so athletic, and there’s nothing else like it.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Well, even in this just few minutes that we’ve been talking, you describe a little journey from a point where the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you, you can and can’t do things. And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, either through your voice or how you experience music, or even the way you write about institutions. Like, you write the country-music institution was limiting in some ways.

Case: Oh it’s straight up misogynist and racist and hateful. We don’t even have to sugarcoat that one. The current country-music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous. And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they’re trying, and I’m like, Don’t even bother. Let that thing die. That thing is poison. Come over here. Let’s make the other thing.

Rosin: And is the other thing, like, you inventing your own genres? You’ve given them names over the years that are—“country noir” or “odd rock,” and things like that. Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women?

Case: I think that what it is, is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don’t have a problem with evolution. But there’s something very white supremacist about how country music works. And they’re really, really dialing down on it now.

Rosin: So you don’t mean just then. You’re talking about then, and now there’s a resurgence. Because there was a great moment—

Case: I think it’s worse now. I think it’s far worse now than it has been in a long time.

Rosin: I mean, there was a good moment for women—it was a brief good moment for women in country music.

Case: There have been a couple.

Rosin: Yeah.

Case: Sometimes, people are so talented that they’re undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out.

Rosin: Well, it’s good Beyoncé made that country album then.

Case: We’re lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things. That’s all I’m saying.

Rosin: That’s true. That’s true. (Laughs.) I think reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music, and I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing. Is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? At times, I almost read it like, Oh this is a key to some lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if that was correct or not correct.

Case: I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don’t like to ruin songs for people. You know how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it’s not the lyric that you thought it was, and then you’re like, Oh. It’s not as good anymore?

If you think you know what a song’s about, and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it, and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life, you don’t want to ruin that for people.

Rosin: Yeah. But I don’t know if it’s ruin it. I think it’s just complicate it. I’ll give you an example—and maybe just indulge me, and you can walk me through the process. I’m the listener. You’re the singer. When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album—

Case: Yes.

Rosin: —The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” which has run in my head for 10 years—

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it’s hard to keep up with who’s the you and who’s the me.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then that kind of devastating line about, “My mother, she did not love me.”

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way?

Case: Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii. And I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.

Rosin: You felt helpless to protect the kid?

Case: Yeah. But the kid, also, was being very resilient, and she was entertaining herself. She was very spunky and cute. And her mom was just an asshole.

Rosin: I mean, reading your book, I did think, Oh that line resonated with Neko for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother. Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way?

Case: Well, I mean, I told the story. I just—I’ve never written a book before, and I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I wanted to write fiction, but it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, We’ll pay you to write a memoir, though. And I was like, Okay. A memoir it is. And that’s not a complaint or, you know, they didn’t hold my heels to the fire or anything. I just thought, Okay, well, it’ll just be a little challenging, because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn’t the most exciting thing ever.

You spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don’t think of myself as like, Oh people are really going to want to know this. So I mean, that’s one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes, maybe, of good things, too, because I didn’t want it to just be, Oh poor me, especially because it’s not unusual. It’s most people’s experience.

I mean, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that—those are most people’s experiences. Or growing up really poor—that is most people.

Rosin: I think your experience is actually pretty unusual.

Case: Yeah. It’s pretty damn weird.

[Music]

Rosin: “Pretty damn weird” it is.

When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn’t even realize she was sick. And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day: I don’t want you to think your mom’s a ghost, but she came home.

As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover but didn’t want Case to see her so ill. And Case—who, remember, was a little kid—believed her. She had her mom back. She was happy.

It only occurred to her later—after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother—that she might never have been sick in the first place.

Rosin: It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget. And I’m not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way.

Case: I didn’t know that until I was in my early 20s, and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death. And then they were like, That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I was like, Oh yeah. That is actually pretty weird, isn’t it? But you know kids. Kids just think what’s happening to them is what happens. So it didn’t occur to me.

Rosin: So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn’t actually how you move through the process. I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, “She did not love me.”

Because that lyric is haunting, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it. I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.

Case: It’s in me all the time. And, you know, it’s just not my fault.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Case: She didn’t love me. And it’s just the fact.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: When you work out memories and pains in song, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Does it do something for you to work it out and learn?

Case: Only in a super-nerdy, kind of neurodivergent-slash-Virgo way where I’m like, Oh! I’m taking all the things, and I’m organizing them in this box. And so now I can put this box over here like a hard drive, so my brain has more room in it. And it’s all color-coded, and I know where it is. That’s, like, Virgo organization.

Rosin: Interesting.

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, Oh from family trauma and a mother who didn’t love you comes immense creativity. How wonderful! What’s wrong or right about that interpretation?

Case: Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things, in general, is not true.

Rosin: You mean they don’t need to suffer? Because it feels like, reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things.

Case: No. If I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along. You don’t need that.

Rosin: So to you, it just feels like pure baggage. It’s, like, a thing you’ve had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way.

Case: Oh it’s an absolute trunk of shit.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Case: The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. You know, like, I still am a trusting person. I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn’t. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, No. You still want to believe people are good. And I think that’s a more important quality than whether or not you’re wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away—you know what I mean?

Rosin: Yeah, I was more thinking, like, you had this life, and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere, and you had a huge, strong motivation to do that, and so you found music.

Case: Yes.

Rosin: But that’s just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.

Case: No. Music is the only thing that never let me down. But trauma did not make me a great musician. I am a journeyman, at best, and, you know, I’m broke. I don’t know—I think great musicians do other things.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wait. Did you just say you were broke?

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Case: Financially broke.

Rosin: Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.

Case: The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming—those three things together.

Rosin: Wow.

Case: And I cannot catch up.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back—more with Neko Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with a friend’s death that she said felt like getting on the spaceship to go to the moon.

Case:  I felt absolutely unafraid. And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life, and I couldn’t believe it.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanted to ask you about gender, because the way you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now. And I’m curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender, like in your lyrics to “Man”—

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —you don’t mean that literally. What do you mean by “I’m a man”?

Case: I do mean it literally.

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Case: I mean, I am of the species. I am a man. Like, whatever’s going on downstairs doesn’t matter. I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and they’re still a lion. I’m a man in that same way.

And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are. That has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy. I’m more of a gender-fluid person.

Rosin: And when you say it’s taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians. And then there’s a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that.

So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? How do you think about yourself?

Case: As neither. I am neither. I still call myself she/her. I’m used to it. It doesn’t bother me. And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won’t. But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that, either.

Rosin: So you see the world as making some cultural progress and how we think of what’s a man and what’s a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.

Case: Politically, we are fucked. Socially, I don’t think what the president and his people represent, represents the American people. I don’t believe that Americans, in general, have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants. I just don’t think they do.

Rosin: To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Case: Well, I mean, a human being’s right to be is—I mean, that’s just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just—they just aren’t separate, not that I want to talk about politics, specifically. Because I just refuse to be afraid.

Rosin: Do you feel like that’s something you found at this age? Because you’ve said there are times in your life where you haven’t had self-confidence, you’ve been depressed, or you’ve kind of lost your mind, even, in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Case: Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And a lot of people who menstruate who don’t anymore have said the same things about, you know, the hormone shift. Like, you don’t care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die. And sitting with her body for four days as—you know, she was an organ donor, and she had a massive aneurysm. And her partner just heroically did CPR, and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her, despite the fact that she had no brain activity.

And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital. Like, it’s very, very specific. And then you have to wait for all the tests. There are barrages of tests that happened to make sure that you’re healthy and that your organs can really save someone else’s life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was. And we joked a lot about how she was going to work, even in death. She was all about service.

And then the day came. Right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an “honor walk.” And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors. And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone’s saluting them, and it seems so important. And I think I actually saw that in real life.

And I just thought, All those things that I worry about and the injustices—we are so right to fight for them. And I was there watching this incredible thing happen, and these beautiful people from all over the world—many of the doctors are immigrants—and it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Case: Loud-ass, exuberant joy.

Rosin: I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It’s related to this. I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness, but then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the “trust your contempt” paragraph. Do you remember that? You don’t have the book in front of you, right?

Case: I don’t. But I do talk about this, occasionally.

Rosin: Yeah. Dissect it if you can. If something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, then there’s a reason. Don’t canonize your contempt, but don’t ignore it.

This is the part that I love. It’s so good: “Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.”

Where would you say you are—you know, you have a lifetime of songs; you have this memoir; it sounds like you have friends—on this path? Is it different for different people? Like, forgiving members of your family, people who have hurt you in the past?

Case: Oh yeah. I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not.

Rosin: So you would say you’re at different places with different people?

Case: Oh yeah.

Rosin: What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shadow role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful—maybe—is the right way to read that.

Case: I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely. And he had to be an adult man and head of the family and all these things, and he was just a kid inside. And he didn’t know how to handle it. He maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.

And the kind of pain from that—he didn’t use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. His forward path was genuine. He wasn’t doing a great job, but he was also a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn’t want me, but he ended up with me.

Rosin: Yeah. And ended up raising you.

Case: Not really.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.

Case: Sometimes.

Rosin: Sometimes. Yeah, there was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car. You speak car talk with each other—

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: —which is very familiar to me. I come from a family of mechanics and car people. And so I found that very peaceful. It was a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Case: Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things, because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever, and it would have been nice to have been included. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn’t want any kid.

Rosin: You know, I’ve just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you and sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums. And I wonder, from you: What’s the song you wrote when you were happiest? Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy. Like, it just makes you feel good.

Case: Probably “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself. And I make good decisions in it.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: So it’s, like, a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma—like you can handle it.

Case: Partially. It’s a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn’t mean the moment’s going to last.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Case: I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies, and I have such a loving relationship with them. And it’s always made me feel good to play it. And my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple of years ago, way too young. And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it’s a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Thanks again to my guest, Neko Case.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

America’s health secretaries, almost as a rule, have résumés manicured to a point of frictionlessness. Once in a while one will attract scandal in their tenure; see Tom Price’s reported fondness for chartered jets. But anyone who has garnered enough cachet to be nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services tends to arrive in front of the Senate with such impeccable credentials that finding anything that might disqualify them from the position is difficult.

Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed today as America’s newest health secretary, was specifically intended to break that mold. Kennedy positioned himself as a truth teller determined to uproot the “corporate capture” and “tyrannical insensate bureaucracies” that had taken hold of the nation’s public-health agencies. Even so, it’s remarkable just how unimaginable his confirmation would have been in any political moment other than today’s, when an online reactionary has been given a high-level position in the Justice Department and a teenager known as “Big Balls” is advising the State Department. Kennedy holds broadly appealing views on combatting corruption and helping Americans overcome chronic disease. But he is also, to an almost cartoonish degree, not impeccably credentialed. He has trafficked in innumerable unproven and dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, AIDS, anthrax, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, COVID-19, sunlight, gender dysphoria, and 5G. He has potential financial conflicts of interest. He has spoken about a worm eating part of his brain and about dumping a dead bear in Central Park. He has been accused of sexual assault. (In his confirmation hearing, Kennedy denied the allegation and said it was “debunked.”)

In the end, none of it mattered. While Senate Democrats unanimously opposed Kennedy’s confirmation, he sailed through the Senate’s vote this morning after losing just one Republican vote, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor who appears to have taken issue with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. Kennedy did, however, earn the support of Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who until last week seemed to be the Republican lawmaker most concerned about the potential damage of elevating an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist to the nation’s highest perch in public health. Kennedy’s confirmation is a victory for Trump, and a clear message that Senate Republicans are willing to embrace pseudoscience in their unwavering deference to him. Americans’ health is in Kennedy’s hands.

So what happens next? Spokespeople for Kennedy did not respond to my request to talk with him about his agenda. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s first weeks in office will likely be hectic ones, adding to the chaos of Trump’s nonstop executive orders and Elon Musk’s crackdowns on numerous federal agencies. As HHS head, Kennedy will oversee 13 different agencies, including the CDC, FDA, and National Institutes of Health. Prior to being appointed, Kennedy said he believed that 600 employees would need to be fired at the NIH and replaced with employees more aligned with Trump’s views. (The NIH employs roughly 20,000 people, so such a cut at least would be minor compared with the Department of Government Efficiency’s more sweeping moves.) He has also implied that everyone at the FDA’s food center could be handed pink slips. More generally, he has said he will “remove the financial conflicts of interest in our agencies,” but he hasn’t spelled out exactly who he believes is so conflicted that they should be out of a job.

At NIH in particular, any sudden moves by Kennedy would compound changes already unfolding under the auspices of DOGE. Musk’s crew has attempted to dramatically cut the amount of administrative funding typically doled out by the agency to universities in support of scientific research. Planned meetings about those funds were also abruptly canceled last month. (The funding cuts have been temporarily halted by a federal judge, and funding meetings appear to have resumed.) It’s easy to assume that Kennedy would support these efforts, given his aspirations to fire federal bureaucrats. But the DOGE effort may in fact undermine his larger goals, setting up some potential tension between Kennedy and Musk. Research funding is essential to Kennedy’s pursuit of unraveling the causes of America’s chronic-disease crisis; he has suggested devoting more of the NIH’s resources to investigating “preventive, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.”

On the policy front, in both the immediate and long term, chronic diseases will likely occupy Kennedy’s attention the most. He has called that issue an existential threat to the United States, and it is the clearest part of Kennedy’s agenda that has bipartisan support. However, exactly what he can do on this issue is uncertain. Many of the policies he’s advocated for, such as removing junk food from school lunches, actually fall to a different agency: the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The only food-related policy he’s regularly touted that he has the power to enact is banning certain chemical additives in the food supply. Even so, banning a food additive is typically a laboriously slow legal process.

His public statements provide other, vaguer hints about issues that he will likely contend with during his term. On abortion, he has said that he will direct the FDA and NIH to closely scrutinize the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone. (Trump has previously suggested that his administration would protect access to abortion pills, though the president’s position is murky at best.) On the price of drugs, Kennedy has said that he wants to crack down on the middlemen who negotiate them for insurance companies. But by and large Kennedy has said little about how he will tackle the complex regulatory issues that are traditionally the focus of the health secretary. He might simply not have that much to say. Kennedy has implied that he cares far less about those topics than about diet and chronic disease. During his confirmation hearing, he told senators that focusing on issues such as insurance payments without lowering the rate of chronic illness would be akin to “moving deck chairs around on the Titanic."

The biggest and most consequential question mark is how Kennedy will approach vaccines. If he were to chip away at Americans’ access to shots, or even simply at Americans’ readiness to receive them, he could degrade the nation’s protections against an array of diseases and, ultimately, be the cause of people’s deaths. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy was the subject of some of the most intense scrutiny during his confirmation hearings. “If you come out unequivocally, ‘Vaccines are safe; it does not cause autism,’ that would have an incredible impact. That’s your power. So what’s it going to be?” Cassidy asked. Kennedy pledged that he would not deprioritize or delay approval of new vaccines, and not muck up the government’s vaccine-approval standards. Throughout the process, he attempted to distance himself from his past vaccine positions, which include an assertion that the federal officials supporting the U.S. childhood-vaccine program were akin to leaders in the Catholic Church covering up pedophilia among priests. But his answers to senators’ questions about his past remarks and whether vaccines cause autism were consistently evasive. And some of his plans play into the anti-vaccine camp’s hands. He has promised, for example, to push for government-funded studies to be released with their full raw data—a move that likely would please transparency advocates, though also would act as an olive branch to anti-vaccine activists who have had to sue federal agencies in recent years for certain vaccine data.

Last week, after Cassidy cast a decisive committee vote that allowed Kennedy’s nomination to advance to full Senate consideration, he said in a speech on the Senate floor that he had pressure-tested Kennedy enough to feel confident that he could rebuild trust in public health. (Cassidy did not mention that advancing Kennedy was also in his political interest. A spokesperson for Cassidy declined my requests for an interview.) Kennedy holds an almost biblical status among his supporters, and a significant portion of those people distrust federal health agencies. Cassidy’s professed belief in Kennedy’s leadership offers a soothing vision: Imagine Americans whose views on the public-health establishment have been deeply eroded over time, all with their faith restored in one of the world’s most rigorous scientific institutions thanks to a radical outsider.

But consider the logic here. By voting to confirm Kennedy, the U.S. Senate is wagering the future of our public-health system on a prayer that a conspiracy theorist can build back up the agencies that he and his supporters have spent years breaking down. A more realistic outcome may be that Kennedy leaves public health more broken than ever before. Although many Americans are skeptical of the government’s scientific institutions, polls show that relatively few have the sort of deep-seated contempt for public-health agencies that Kennedy has espoused. By pandering to that fraction of voters, Kennedy risks alienating the much larger portion of Americans who might not agree with everything the CDC has done in recent years, but also don’t think that the agency’s vaccine program is comparable to a Nazi death camp, as Kennedy has claimed.

If Kennedy did go so far as to disavow any connection between autism and vaccines, that itself might lead to trouble. Jennifer Reich, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who has studied vaccine skepticism, told me that the autism issue is just one part of a larger, much more diffuse set of concerns shared by parents who question vaccinating their children. For RFK to disavow all of his vaccine antagonism, he would essentially have to abandon his prima facie skepticism toward science more generally. Such an apology would likely do more to turn some of his most ardent supporters against him than change their views, argues Alison Buttenheim, an expert on vaccine skepticism at the University of Pennsylvania. “People will do amazing leaps and cartwheels to not have their beliefs and their behaviors in conflict,” she told me.

If Kennedy genuinely wants to restore faith in public health, he’ll have to win over his fellow conspiracists while maintaining the trust of the many people who already thought the agencies were doing a fine job before he arrived. Perhaps he’ll try. But proclaiming, as he did in October, that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end” is not a great way to start.

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A baffling problem in the Trump era is separating its sinister aspects from its pathetic self-embarrassments. On Tuesday, the White House turned away an Associated Press reporter from an Oval Office event. The reporter had done nothing wrong. The refusal was intended to punish the AP collectively for disobeying President Donald Trump’s edict to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”

The decree and its enforcement were indeed sinister—an effort to bend reality to one man’s whim. But they were also pathetic, a revelation of inner weakness, not national strength.

Consider how the Gulf of Mexico got its name in the first place. It was not from the Mexicans themselves. The ancient Aztecs knew the oceans to their west and east as “Sky Water.” They did not invent geographically specific names for the seas around them, because they did not need them.

The Gulf of Mexico instead got its name from 16th-century Spanish mapmakers. In the age of discovery and conquest, European mariners often named bodies of water after the destination territory on the other side of that water. The Gulf of Mexico is so called because when a Spaniard sailed toward Mexico, the Gulf was the sea that the Spaniard crossed.

Once you understand this practice, you see it everywhere. The Bight of Benin was not called that by the people of the Benin kingdom. It was named by the Europeans who sailed across the bight (an old word for bay) toward Benin.

The Indian Ocean. The Java Sea. These were not labels chosen by the Indians or Javanese, but by European seafarers en route to India and Java.

Even European home waters were named by sailors after their destination. The Irish Sea was the route from England to Ireland; the Gulf of Finland was the way taken by non-Finns on the south shore traveling to trade with the Finnish people on the north shore.

An apparent exception, the English Channel, is no exception at all.

The Romans bestowed the name “Britannic Ocean” upon the water between their continental empire and their British colony. The medieval English knew the sea by the ancient Latin name. They sometimes more loosely referred to the waters around them as “the German Ocean”—because they offered the way to the rich markets of the Rhine Valley and the German coast. But in the 1600s, the supreme naval power of northwestern Europe was the Dutch Netherlands. For the Dutch, the significance of the channel was that it guided them to England and then onward into the Atlantic. It was the Dutch who spread the term English Channel. Because the English relied on superior Dutch charts for a long time, the Dutch name stuck—despite the efforts of some English geographers to replace the name with the more romantic and less objectifying “Narrow Seas.”

Bodies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side. To rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped.

Maybe, in that very specific sense, the attempted renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is a fitting memorial to the Trump era. Trump’s act of imperial boastfulness unwittingly reveals a disquieting self-awareness of imperial decline. As so often, Trump claims to be a winner while acting like a loser.

“After a long illness, the world as we know it has passed away,” a European friend recently said. A slightly premature obituary, perhaps, but not by much. The world has changed in fundamental ways, of which the Trump administration is both symptom and cause. There is no greater evidence than its emerging policy of imposing a cease-fire, which it incorrectly believes will bring peace, on Ukraine.

To a degree surprising for those who think of the Trump administration as a mere composite of malice, nihilism, and chaos, its Ukraine policy seems orchestrated, with three big pieces dropping yesterday alone.

The first was a speech from Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth at the 50-nation meeting of the Ukraine-defense-support group. Uncharacteristically, perhaps, his words deserve careful parsing, particularly because they have caused spasms of despair—some justified, most not—among supporters of Ukraine.

[Read: The day the Ukraine War ended]

He began by uttering the uncomfortable truth that it is unrealistic to expect a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders. That is unfortunate but ineluctable, given the balance on the battlefield and the unwillingness of both the Biden administration and the current one to pour in the military resources that would give Ukraine a chance of defeating Russia. Unfair, tragically unnecessary, but true.

Hegseth ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a negotiated settlement—also unfair, but also inevitable. Ascension to NATO membership is a long process, and in any case, Russia’s surrogates in NATO—Hungary and now Slovakia—would almost certainly block Ukraine. Hegseth’s statement matters less than many suppose, however, because a new administration could just as easily reverse this policy.

The peace deal—which he insisted would be brokered by the United States but not, apparently, with Europeans as part of the negotiation—would have to be guaranteed by “European and non-European” military forces in Ukraine; U.S. forces, he emphasized, would not be stationed there. Left unsaid was whether, say, American combat aircraft and missiles might be permanently based in neighboring countries.

In one of the more interesting sections, he said:

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

To European ears, it was probably blotted out by what came soon after:

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this, Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

Not unreasonable, although, in fact, Europe has provided almost as much military aid to Ukraine as has the United States, and more humanitarian aid.

This was not a speech about abandoning Europe or, for that matter, Ukraine. Rather, Hegseth insisted that the United States has to focus on securing its own border and meeting the challenge posed by “Communist China”:

Our transatlantic alliance has endured for decades. And we fully expect that it will be sustained for generations to come. But this won’t just happen.

It will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent.

The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.

The bottom line is that the administration will broker, and possibly coerce, a deal that is bad for Ukraine: a cease-fire along current lines, the deployment of European and other forces, and no chance of NATO membership in the near future. There was, however, talk of economic pressure on Russia, of security arrangements for Ukraine, and of an American interest in seeing the war end permanently. What was not mentioned, however, is also important. There was no talk of regime change in Ukraine or of limiting Ukraine’s armed forces and their development. There was no talk of abandoning or fundamentally restructuring NATO and the European security system. All of these contradict Vladimir Putin’s stated war aims.

None of this will assuage the fears of those who believe that Donald Trump is eager to sell Ukraine to Russia, bend to Putin’s every whim, and destroy NATO. But that view disregards some important evidence.

[Charles A. Kupchan: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over]

The second big piece of the Trump peace initiative was the president’s statement—a blurt rather than a formal release—on Truth Social declaring that he had had a long conversation with Putin and that they would at some point meet with each other. Reading it, one is reminded, once again, that Trump is a politician who is cunning but semiliterate and ignorant. The statement, unfortunately, assumes a commonality of interests and experiences that simply does not exist between Russia and the United States.

In a meeting, one has to expect that Putin, a former KGB case officer, will be far better at manipulating the vain and erratic Trump than the other way around. Moreover, when Trump said that he was just about to call Volodymyr Zelensky to brief him on the conversation, he revealed that he had already violated what should be a cardinal principle: no attempt to make a deal on Ukraine without Ukraine. His mistake is dangerous, possibly disastrously so. That said, however, it is clear from other statements (including Hegseth’s) that Trump believes that he is the one with economic leverage (true), that the war is stupid (true), and that Russia is in substantial difficulty (true).

The third initiative—curiously missed by much of the American press—was the first visit of a Cabinet-level official to Kyiv. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented a deal, the outlines of which are unclear, to give the United States access to Ukrainian minerals, and the Ukrainian government, unsurprisingly, responded positively. Crass and unworthy, no doubt, but a good thing. The United States has strong interests in securing a supply of rare earths from a friendly, aligned country rather than from China. If a deal goes ahead, the U.S. will have large security as well as economic interests in an independent Ukraine. And the mood music was good: “By increasing our economic commitment through a partnership with the government and people of Ukraine, that will provide—once this conflict is over—it will provide a long-term security shield for all Ukrainians,” Bessent said.

There were always two possible Trump Ukraine policies: the bad and the catastrophic. At the moment, this seems bad—but not yet catastrophic. A peace deal that leaves Ukraine with 80 percent of its territory and its independence, economic stability, and military potential unimpaired, and that stations European troops inside its territory while giving the U.S. a large economic interest in its future, is an acceptable if unfortunate and avoidable outcome.

Responsibility for this war arriving at a bad outcome rests with the Trump administration, which is nakedly transactional and, worse, either does not understand or does not care that this war is about a Russian bid to restore its imperial status. But others are to blame as well.

The Biden administration warned of the war but botched the provision of aid to Ukraine. It held back the quality and quantity of weapons needed for victory, decided to have no strategy for success other than “standing by Ukraine,” and inexcusably failed to explain to the American people why this war was, and is, central to American security interests. The Biden administration set the conditions for the current situation.

[From the March 2025 issue: Europe’s Elon Musk problem]

The other players responsible for this situation are America’s European allies. Not all of them, to be sure—the Nordic and Baltic states and Poland have stepped up, as Hegseth openly acknowledged. For more than a generation now, American leaders have insisted to Europe as a whole that Americans will not indefinitely bear the burden of Europe’s security. By and large, their European counterparts have smiled politely and ignored them. No wonder then, that the secretary of defense said:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense—nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

Pete Hegseth? No, Robert Gates—who served as secretary of defense more than 14 years ago in the Obama administration—diagnosing the illness that has brought about this crisis. The good news, such as it is, is that the patient needed, and may yet respond to, the blunt truths about its condition that Secretary Hegseth expressed. Sometimes shock therapy, however inexpertly administered, can be part of the cure.

The extraordinary evolution of American leadership over the past decade can be grasped from just two moments. In 2016, Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lectured Donald Trump, then an upstart presidential candidate, on the Middle East. “The Palestinians are not a real-estate deal, Donald,” Rubio quipped during a primary debate on CNN. “With your thinking,” Trump retorted, “you will never bring peace.” Turning to the audience, Rubio got in a last word: “Donald might be able to build condos in the Palestinian areas, but this is not a real-estate deal.”

On Wednesday, President Trump sat alongside the king of Jordan and reiterated his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza from its inhabitants and rebuild the area. “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it,” he said. “It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic-development job.” Sitting on Trump’s left was Rubio, the secretary of state tasked with carrying out the plan he’d once publicly derided. In the span of 10 years, U.S. foreign policy had transformed from the domain of expert-brokered consensus to the province of personality-driven populism.

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

In his first term, Trump could be dismissed as an accident of the Electoral College, someone to be humored domestically and internationally before the resumption of traditional elite-managed American governance. Today, with Trump returned to office and a host of like-minded leaders ascendant around the globe, he looks less like an aberration from the old international order and more like the apotheosis of a new one. But what will that new order look like? The past few weeks, during which Trump has hosted multiple leaders from the Middle East, rattled sabers with traditional American allies, and proposed his radical plan for Gaza, provide some early clues.

A new era of American empire

While Trump was out of office, a mythology arose that cast him as not simply a dissenter from military misadventures abroad, but a fundamentally anti-war figure dedicated to American restraint. Promulgated by prominent commentators such as the right-wing pugilist Tucker Carlson and the libertarian gadfly Glenn Greenwald, this narrative helped Trump present himself as the “peace candidate” to a war-weary electorate. “Why do they hate Trump so much?” asked the John Jay College professor Christian Parenti in an influential essay. “To the frustration of those who benefit from it, Trump worked to unwind the American empire. Indeed, he has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”

In reality, Trump supported the Iraq War before he turned against it, failed to pull out of Afghanistan during his first term, and escalated American arms sales and drone strikes in the Middle East while in power. Since returning to the White House, he has governed not as a neo-isolationist, but almost as a neo-imperialist, calling for the United States to “get Greenland,” musing about making Canada the 51st state, and demanding that America take over Gaza. He has also fast-tracked arms sales to Israel and likely soon to other states in the Middle East, while his border czar recently threatened military action in Mexico. Trump’s team has signaled its desire to wind down the war in Ukraine, in accordance with the preferences of most Republican voters. But otherwise, “Donald the Dove,” as the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once dubbed him, has once again failed to report for duty.

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

On balance, Trump’s personnel choices align with this aggressive posture. The small but capable neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party and its leftist sympathizers can fairly point to Vice President J. D. Vance and several notable hires in the Pentagon as fellow travelers. But those calling the shots at the top are far more hawkish—Trump, Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—and the administration’s policy to date has largely reflected their inclinations.

A Middle East policy that includes the Palestinians, but not the Palestinian national cause

Trump’s first administration famously brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf Arab states without including the Palestinians in the process. The success of this endeavor disproved decades of conventional wisdom that Israeli normalization in the region would not happen without a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians. For a time, the momentum of the Abraham Accords looked as though it would carry all the way through to an Israeli agreement with Saudi Arabia, leaving the Palestinians in the cold.

After October 7 and the ensuing brutal war in Gaza, however, the Palestinians can no longer be sidelined from the discussion. Trump has responded to this new reality by attempting to include them in his diplomacy while sidelining their aspirations for statehood. He has downplayed the prospect of a two-state solution and, with his Gaz-a-Lago proposal, called for millions of Palestinians to leave the decimated Strip in favor of “beautiful communities” in third-party countries “away from … all the danger.” Speaking to Fox News, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made the logic behind this thinking explicit. “Peace in the region means a better life for the Palestinians,” he said. “A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today. A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family. That doesn’t occur because you get to pitch a tent in the Gaza Strip and you’re surrounded by 30,000 munitions that could go off at any moment.”

Trump is not wrong that Gaza is a “demolition site” and that its people desperately need something better than the decades of war they’ve experienced while caught between Hamas and Israel. And contrary to the claims of many activists, the preferences of the Palestinian people are not always congruent with the demands of Palestinian nationalism. If given the chance, many Gazans would jump at the opportunity to escape the trap they find themselves in, even if it means moving abroad. But to address Palestinian material needs without regard to their historical and national ones is to bracket a core component of Palestinian identity and ignore what makes their conflict with Israel so intractable. Perhaps Trump’s gambit will once again confound the experts with its outcome. But for now, his policy seems more like an answer provided by someone who failed to read the entire question.

The eclipse of the rules-based international order

For decades, American foreign policy has been guided by the assumption that the United States is the benevolent shepherd of a global system, underwriting international security and trade through positive-sum alliances and international institutions. “We’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” President Joe Biden declared in his 2020 inaugural address. “We’ll be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Arguably no concept was invoked more frequently by his foreign-policy team than the “rules-based international order,” the notion that there ought to be evenly applied standards for all state actors. Like most ideals, this one was often observed in the breach, with critics regularly pointing to perceived American hypocrisy, most recently in Gaza.

But the postwar order has been under severe strain for some time. Russia, a revisionist power, flouted it with an expansionist assault against neighboring Georgia back in 2008, resulting in little pushback and ultimately leading to the war on Ukraine. China, a rising power, subverted Hong Kong, menaced Taiwan, and sterilized Uyghur Muslims in camps, all while the liberal international order effectively shrugged and made its next purchase from Temu. Even those who purported to venerate the rules-based order regularly made a mockery of it. The United Nations, the avatar of internationalism, stood by haplessly as all of these events unfolded—that is, when it wasn’t actively abetting them, as when the members of its human-rights council rejected debate over China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. South Africa took Israel to The Hague over the war in Gaza, while simultaneously backing Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Trump, by contrast, has never felt constrained by such ideals in the first place, having long preferred power over pieties. He has expressed admiration for dictators, used American muscle to extract concessions even from allies, and dismissed the protests against his approach from bureaucrats, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions as the grumblings of the “deep state.” With Trump’s return to Washington, critics of the flawed U.S.-led rules-based order are discovering what a world without it looks like.

Freed from the need to justify his actions in traditional terms, the president has enacted policies no predecessor would have countenanced while moving to purge any internal dissenters. He has dismantled USAID, putting desperately needed American assistance around the world in jeopardy, including George W. Bush’s anti–HIV/AIDS program, PEPFAR; proposed relocating Gazans from their land, feeding far-right dreams of ethnic cleansing; and sanctioned the International Criminal Court.

[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]

Whether one considered the rules-based order a faulty but essential engine of collective prosperity or a sclerotic hypocritical holdover from another era, it now appears to be in decline. Trump is transitioning the old order to a new regime remade in his image—one where statecraft is entirely transactional and the strong, not international lawyers, write the rules. After all, how many divisions does the United Nations command?

Yesterday, during Trump’s meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, he was asked “under what authority” he was permitted to take the “sovereign territory” of Gaza. The president responded: “U.S. authority.” In the Trump World Order, no more explanation was required.

If President Donald Trump defies the courts by refusing to comply with their rulings, what will stop him? This question has suddenly become central to U.S. democracy, as federal judges have temporarily barred numerous administration actions, including ending birthright citizenship and granting Elon Musk’s team access to a Treasury Department payment system. Troublingly, Vice President J. D. Vance has repeatedly suggested that the executive should disobey the courts in certain cases, writing last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Conventional wisdom, dating back to Alexander Hamilton, is that independent courts should protect democracy; the judiciary, Hamilton argued, is an “excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions” of elected politicians. Yet Hamilton also observed that “from the natural feebleness of the judiciary, it is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its coordinate branches,” meaning the executive and Congress. Hamilton’s paradox is that courts are designed to restrain a powerful executive but lack a clear basis for their own power. When and how, then, do courts prevail over an executive who threatens to flout their rulings?

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

As a political scientist, I have researched this question by interviewing high-ranking judges and lawyers in backsliding democracies, collecting original data in Turkey, Israel, and Brazil. The answer: When courts confront a powerful, noncompliant executive, three paths enable the judiciary to stop an executive power grab. Each path musters support for the courts from a distinct outside source: intrastate actors such as state governors and Congress, societal mobilization, or the armed forces. The first path is most effective; the second is costly and challenging to organize; the last is itself dangerous to democracy.

To ensure that powerful leaders obey legal limits, the first and most reliable path is to mobilize intrastate allies—that is, actors within the federal, state, and local governments who can implement the court’s decision over political resistance from the executive. Take the example of Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro. After Bolsonaro was elected, he clashed repeatedly with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal. Bolsonaro even threatened to close the court, impeach its justices, and refuse to comply with a judge’s rulings. But at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Bolsonaro “systematically sabotaged” pandemic control measures, the high court successfully constrained an antagonistic president.

Why? Brazil’s high court ruled that Bolsonaro could not override state and local public-health measures, and that decision mobilized governors and mayors as intrastate allies. These subnational government officials put muscle behind the court’s decision by acting to implement their own public-health policies against Bolsonaro’s wishes. What is more, the court benefited from support in Brazil’s Congress, which swiftly passed legislation to recognize the pandemic as an emergency.  

[Read: What the rioters in Brazil learned from Americans]

The federal system in the United States provides some opportunities for state and local actors to push for compliance with the courts. For instance, to override a court ruling to protect birthright citizenship, the Trump administration would need cooperation from officials nationwide, who could choose to side with the judiciary. But concerningly, many court decisions require active compliance from the Trump administration itself, on issues such as limiting the powers of Elon Musk’s team or placing thousands of federal employees on leave. The governors of California or Texas cannot easily use their state governments to restore the U.S. Agency for International Development. On many policy issues that the administration could lose on in court, a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to intervene.

When intrastate allies are absent, the second, more costly path to protecting judicial power becomes the next-best option: societal mobilization. This was apparent in Israel in 2023, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proposed a package of changes to curb the judiciary’s power. The effort to block this judicial overhaul mobilized support from the streets, economic power brokers, and state officials.

At the street level, every Saturday night, Israelis protested by the thousands to oppose the judicial overhaul. To apply economic pressure, trade unions, business leaders, and top Israeli economists spoke out about the economic damage of curbing judicial independence. Among state officials, military reservists threatened to refuse to serve, and Netanyahu’s own defense minister opposed the judicial changes. Ultimately, this mass societal mobilization forced Netanyahu to suspend the overhaul—and empowered the high court to strike down a law limiting the judiciary’s powers.

Mass societal mobilization, however, was costly for Israel’s economy and arguably its national security. The protests closed banks, shops, ports, and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. The contentious fight over the judicial overhaul reduced annual GDP by an estimated 2.8 percent. Societal divisions may also embolden geopolitical adversaries. In a survey after the attack of October 7, 2023, 70 percent of Israelis believed that the domestic discord over the judicial overhaul affected Hamas’s decision to attack.

Mass societal mobilization is also difficult to coordinate and sustain. In Israel today, many citizens are psychologically exhausted, and anti-government protests, although still significant, have become smaller. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue, illiberal leaders can also use state power to inhibit opposition, as individuals and organizations come to fear that publicly opposing the executive will cause repercussions such as tax audits and lawsuits.

The third and final path to upholding judicial power is a dangerous one: military involvement in politics. In Turkey during the 2000s, after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party rose to power, the military served as the backstop for a powerful judiciary. Turkey’s generals and judges shared a militantly secular ideology, and the armed forces publicly backed judicial efforts to constrain Erdoğan’s religious conservative party. Because Turkey’s military had repeatedly ousted elected governments in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the threat of military intervention put pressure on Erdoğan and his party to accept court decisions, rather than risk a constitutional crisis. Paradoxically, legal constraints on the executive—a hallmark of democracy—came from a deeply antidemocratic source, the threat of a coup.

Yet relying on men with guns to empower the judiciary was unsustainable, precisely because the military’s threat of coercion was democratically illegitimate. The military’s involvement enabled opponents of the judiciary to sell court reform to Turkish voters as democratic. Erdoğan argued persuasively that the military and judiciary were obstructing the “sovereignty of national will”—and won sweeping popular support for a constitutional referendum in 2010 that expanded the elected government’s influence over the courts. Key international players, including the European Union and President Barack Obama, praised the constitutional referendum as a step toward democracy. The referendum did improve a genuinely antidemocratic status quo, but it also created opportunities for Erdoğan to take control of the courts. In effect, the judiciary’s close relationship with the military enabled Turkey’s executive to cast himself as democratic when overhauling the courts—which severely eroded Turkish democracy.

[Read: Erdoğan is getting desperate]

Today, America’s judges face a dilemma that has more commonly confronted their peers in other embattled democracies: how to enforce their rulings against a president who is poised to challenge legal constraints on his power. Though Hamilton feared that “the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,” courts elsewhere have sometimes proved surprisingly resilient. Judges can prevail over disobedient executives with support from a range of outside allies, but these methods of preserving the judiciary’s power are not created equal. For the future of U.S. democracy, it is not only whether but how the courts derive their power that will matter.