A quarter century ago, Vladimir Putin gathered 21 of Russia’s top oligarchs in the Kremlin to let them know that he, not they, held power in Russia. The young Russian president (not yet for life) informed them that they could keep the wealth they’d amassed if they complied with his political goals. Partnership with Putin held out the prospect of safety, and even greater riches. “We received confirmation,” an attendee named Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky said, “that the development of Russian business is one of the state’s top priorities.”

Most of the oligarchs submitted, but those who didn’t went to prison or into exile, lest they fall prey to the country’s epidemic of window-plunging deaths. (Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, putatively for fraud and tax evasion, but really for supporting independent media and opposition parties.) Since then, affinity for Putin has been a sine qua non of high-level economic success in Russia.

An eerily reminiscent scene played out late last year at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Winter Palace, where Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s loyalty enforcers, met with Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The weather was more pleasant, and presumably neither party contemplated defenestration as a settlement alternative, but many other details seemed to echo. “Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms,” The New York Times reported. Because Trump had recently warned, “We are watching [Zuckerberg] closely, and if he does anything illegal” during Trump’s second term, “he will spend the rest of his life in prison,” this opportunity must have sounded enticing. Zuckerberg indicated that he would not in any way obstruct Trump’s agenda, according to the Times, and foisted blame for any prior offenses onto subordinates.

By the time Trump assumed power, Zuckerberg was lavishing him with praise. “We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies,” he gushed of the man who had once threatened him with prison, “that prioritizes American technology winning. And that will defend our values and interests abroad.” His rehabilitation complete, Zuckerberg assumed a place of pride at Trump’s inauguration, alongside Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other titans of industry. His eyes were now on the future, and the promised Trumpian Golden Age.

The president’s public communion with the business titans who have submitted to him has been analyzed as a signal of his authoritarianism and his alliance with the rich. But it also reveals another emerging aspect of Trumpism: his rejection of the capitalist principles that ultimately generate prosperity.

Trump has never believed in the invisible hand—in leaving people alone to pursue self-interest in a free market; in letting market forces allocate capital and arbitrate any given company’s success or failure. Nor does he even believe in traditional mercantilist protection. He believes, like Putin, in political control of the economy’s commanding heights—success for those executives and companies who please him, failure for those who don’t. And he seems to be seeking that control more actively than he did in 2016.

Already, Trump’s words and actions have brought about a psychological transformation within the executive class. Presidents and business leaders have sometimes tangled, or formed partnerships, but the combination of fear and solicitousness that Trump now commands is wholly new.

After the election, The Wall Street Journal reported, businesses began looking at steps such as “buying the Trump family’s cryptocurrency token” and scrubbing their websites of Democratic-friendly language. Stanley Black & Decker took down an old post-insurrection statement saying it would “use our voice to advocate for our democracy and a peaceful transition of power,” and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. A steel executive hoping to win Trump’s approval to purchase U.S. Steel held a press conference in Butler, Pennsylvania—a holy site in the MAGA universe since the assassination attempt at a rally there in July—where he declared, “America First!”

Bezos has not renewed his financial support for the Science Based Targets initiative, which works with businesses looking to cut emissions. After Trump gave Musk, the largest donor to his campaign, a limitless portfolio to reshape federal policy, businesses began to see Musk’s commercial empire as a route to political favor too, as the Financial Times noted in February. Visa struck a payment-processing deal with Musk’s controversial social-media site, X, while Amazon boosted its planned marketing there. Musk’s former rivals hastily reconsidered their rivalries: JPMorganChase dropped a lawsuit against Tesla (the company said the timing was coincidental), and Jamie Dimon announced on CNBC that he had “hugged it out” with Musk after a long feud.

The Journal, as America’s most prominent business paper, has documented this cultural transformation in remarkably clear terms. Sentences like this began appearing regularly after the election: “Executives across the corporate sphere are working to get in the good graces of the new administration” (November). “Titans of the business world are rushing to make inroads with the president-elect, gambling that personal relationships with the next occupant of the Oval Office will help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath” (December). “Companies seeking Trump’s favor have plenty to gain” (January). The newspaper that American capitalists consult to find out how to run their businesses is informing them that they must gain Trump’s favor if they want to get ahead.

It would be naive to depict this behavior as totally novel. For decades, big companies have spent great sums on lobbying, and their executives have long made pilgrimages to Washington to advance their interests. And they’ve often gotten results.

But Trump appears to be ushering in a change not only in the degree of government favoritism, but also in kind. And the velocity of the transformation, coming as it does alongside a cascade of tumbling norms, can obscure how differently he is operating.

The change can be seen most blatantly in the media industry, which has drawn Trump’s gaze more than any other. Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, spiked endorsements of Kamala Harris, claiming they would give off the appearance of bias, but then after the election made personal statements praising Trump or his Cabinet picks, as if that somehow wouldn’t. Since then, several major companies have settled lawsuits that Trump had brought against them, and that likely would have been defeated if not laughed out of court. ABC, owned by Disney, donated $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle his complaint that George Stephanopoulos had described Trump as having been found liable for rape (he was found liable for sexual abuse). After incoming Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr warned Paramount executives that their merger bid could be at risk because of Trump’s anger at CBS, which Paramount owns, the network reportedly began talks to settle a frivolous $10 billion lawsuit complaining that 60 Minutes had edited out unflattering portions of its interview with Harris. Even after the presiding judge expressed extreme skepticism at the merits of Trump’s lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from Facebook after the January 6 insurrection—a right it clearly possessed as a private entity—Zuckerberg offered up $25 million in penance.

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Putting the screws to media owners in particular, especially early on, seems to follow the same playbook that Putin and other strongmen have used to consolidate their power. So does finding opportunities for personal enrichment along the way. (Putin, a lifelong public servant, has become one of the world’s wealthiest men.) Filing weak or groundless lawsuits and expecting his targets to settle for fear of government retribution appears to be a perfectly legal way for Trump to collect baksheesh.

Although Trump has so far devoted the most attention to media businesses, he has not ignored the broader economy. Every economic-policy decision he makes is a potential weapon to punish dissent or reward his friends, beginning with tariffs.

[David Frum: The price America will pay for Trump’s tariffs]

Trump has never described himself as a free-market purist, and his enthusiasm for levying imports is his best-known deviation from his party’s traditional economic philosophy. This impulse is often described as a protectionist instinct, aimed at helping shield key industries or American businesses generally. But in fact, Trump’s tariff strategy, if you want to call it that, hardly advances any coherent economic goal. He has threatened tariffs on countries for non-economic reasons, and levied tariffs on industrial inputs, such as aluminum and copper, that make American industries less, not more, competitive by raising their costs. Trump apparently believes that tariffs are borne by foreigners, and are therefore an untapped source of free money from overseas. He enjoys the idea of using them as levers to extract diplomatic concessions as well.

But Trump has also used tariffs to gain personal and political leverage over American businesses. During his first term, Trump levied broad tariffs and then entertained a parade of executives pleading for exemptions, which his administration doled out at its whim. The Office of the United States Trade Representative fielded more than 50,000 requests from domestic businesses for exceptions to the tariffs on Chinese goods alone, while the Commerce Department sifted through almost half a million waiver requests. Trump’s decisions were often arbitrary—Bibles got a tariff exception, on the apparent basis that their costs needed to stay low, but textbooks did not.

One study of the exceptions, published by the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, found that firms that had donated to Trump or hired staff from his administration were more likely to receive tariff exceptions. The tariffs, and the ability to hand out exceptions without any oversight or method, were “a very effective spoils system allowing the administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies,” the authors concluded.

A 2019 investigation by the Commerce Department’s inspector general reported “the appearance of improper influence in decision-making” in the waiver process. In his second term, Trump has managed to solve this problem—if you define problem as the exposure of corruption rather than its existence—by firing, to date, the inspectors general at 18 federal agencies, including Commerce.

Trump’s greatest advantage in this regard is that he has never professed adherence to any standard of fairness. When he discusses his plans to regulate businesses, or reward them with tax breaks, he does so in nakedly transactional terms. The business community understands that every decision the federal government makes, whether it involves antitrust enforcement or taxation or criminal justice, will be meted out on the basis of Trump’s political and personal whims. Trump does not even pretend otherwise, because the pretense would undermine his power.

Presidents may not be angels. But they used to follow a general presumption of leaving the task of picking winners and losers to the private sector. They likewise observed a wall between public and private interest that we can barely recognize today.

Seventy-two years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower selected Charlie Wilson, the head of General Motors, as his defense secretary. Skeptical members of Congress quizzed Wilson as to how he would put aside residual loyalty to his former company. Wilson confessed, “For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The confession scandalized the country. Although Wilson was trying to say that General Motors benefited from national prosperity, the very possibility that he might conflate the interests of his former employer with those of the country was beyond the pale.

[From the April 2018 issue: Is Big Business really that bad?]

At the moment, large swaths of government policy are being dictated by the current CEO of a car company. And yet it is unfathomable that the Trump administration would deem Elon Musk’s dual role unethical, let alone demand that he step down from Tesla and his other companies as a condition of public service. Musk, like Trump, respects no distinction between his personal financial interests, those of his political party, and those of the country. The seamless connection between political power and personal wealth tells everybody who belongs to the upper class or aspires to it that their safest path is to join the ruling claque.

This is alarming for any number of reasons. But, not least among them, it violates the key precept of any free-enterprise system: that market competition dictates which businesses succeed or fail. Through innovation and creative destruction, this kind of competition yields national prosperity.

The nature of Trump’s economic vision—populist? nationalist? traditional conservative?—has been the subject of endless debate. The reality is that he brings together the least attractive elements of capitalism and socialism, fusing heavy-handed state control with high inequality, and entrenching a set of oligarchs who serve simultaneously as the ruling party’s victims and co-conspirators. The more that political favor displaces market competition as the basis of corporate success, the worse things will get.

It may seem to Americans influenced by Trump’s well-crafted persona as a business genius or lulled by the record of his first term (when he inherited a growing economy) that he will bring some pro-business magic to his second term. Yet favoring incumbent businesses (as long as they stay on his good side) is not the same as favoring healthy free markets. Putin is in some ways a great ally of Russian business, and the country’s economic elite supports him, but Russia’s economy should be seen by intelligent advocates of capitalism as a vision of hell.

The end point of Trump’s vision for the economy would be unrecognizable to generations of innovators. It would sacrifice the openness and opportunity that make America the most enticing destination for entrepreneurs across the world, while locking into place and even celebrating excesses of wealth. If Americans think that by empowering Trump, they have traded away some of their equality, civic decency, and political freedom for prosperity, we may find one day that we have sacrificed them all.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fear Economy.”

Last week, between posting photos of himself and slashing the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk found the time to make some penis jokes. The world’s richest man briefly changed his display name on X to “Harry Bōlz,” apparently after learning that USAID had spent millions on circumcisions in developing countries. “Circumcisions at a discount, now 50% off!” he posted. “Judicial dicktatorship is wrong!" he added, the same day that a federal court ruled against the Trump administration’s chaotic federal-funding freeze.

Musk didn’t mention why USAID had paid for circumcisions: They were part of a program to reduce the spread of HIV, which, if anyone needs to be reminded, kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. Who knows how he arrived at “Harry Bōlz” specifically as a response. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) But it certainly fits a pattern. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old hired at Musk’s DOGE, has gone by the pseudonym “Big Balls” online. Coristine is reportedly now a senior adviser within the Department of Homeland Security.

Penis jokes are the kind of juvenile humor that Musk is known for. After all, this is the same billionaire entrepreneur who began his ownership of Twitter by posting a video of himself carrying a sink into the company’s headquarters with the caption, “Let that sink in.” He has named Tesla’s vehicles so that the lineup spells “S3XY,” as in “sexy.” In 2018, he posted that he would take Tesla private at $420 a share (which he maintains was not a cannabis joke). I could go on.

Still, something else is up with Musk’s trolling. His jokes, terrible as they are, are indicative of a new sensibility taking hold on the right—one that Musk himself, in his rightward shift, has played a role in shaping. Trolling in its various forms (posting about balls, trying to offend, making political opponents squirm) has gone from an occasionally used tool to a unifying touchstone of an entire political faction. Call it a coalition of the crass.

Right-wingers getting kicks out of “triggering the libs” is hardly novel. The practice has existed since at least 1947, when a 21-year-old William F. Buckley and some of his friends showed up at a rally for the left-wing presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, wearing ironic bohemian getups. Rush Limbaugh built his career on delivering a steady stream of trolling sound bites on his radio show. But trolling has become more integral to the right in the Trump years. Trump himself loves to troll—addressing posts to “haters and losers”—and the Pepe the Frog meme blew up during his first term as the go-to way for the MAGA faithful to troll the left.

As Trump has returned to power, though, another wave of trolls has risen—this time with much more power and prominence. His victory has unleashed a coalition of the crass that encompasses a growing number of Americans who are excited to be able to call things “retarded” and “gay” again, joke about deporting people, and delight in the performance of saying things that are “not PC.” Some longtime trolls on the right have grown more aggressive and offensive as their ideas have made their way closer to the party’s mainstream. These include Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who celebrated Trump’s victory by proclaiming, “Your body, my choice,” as well as Bronze Age Pervert, the popular right-wing influencer who shitposts about killing political adversaries in between lewd posts about the superiority of the male figure. Ambiguity about whether he’s joking about any of this is precisely the point. (Bronze Age Pervert, whose real name is Costin Alamariu, did not respond to a request for comment.) Among the prominent trolls is also Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser: After Trump installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center, Bannon  said that he wants the president to replace the internationally recognized opera singers and orchestras that typically perform there with a choir of January 6 rioters.

[Read: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Bannon and Musk have been at odds since Trump’s victory: Bannon detests the influence that tech billionaires have on this administration. On Tuesday, Bannon called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” But it’s not a coincidence that they both want to troll the left. They seemingly hate each other, but they hate the other side more. Trolling—whether it’s “Harry Bōlz” or a January 6 choir—has become the right’s most consistent manner of communicating. “Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite,” Bannon fantasized about his Kennedy Center idea on an episode of his podcast, Bannon’s War Room. “Culturally, you would break them.”

Writers who study the right in the age of MAGA, including Corey Robin and John Ganz, have argued that what binds the right together is a belief that politics is fundamentally a zero-sum game. To win, you must accrue power and use it to bludgeon your political adversaries and any other group that is not aligned with your own. To the right-wing troll, there is no common good, or “universal interest,” as Ganz puts it, but simply different groups attempting to dominate one another. Politics is a war with clear winners and losers.

Crass jokes are the logical base expression of that political framework. Notable people on the right don’t want to just end gay marriage; they are calling people “faggots” again. They aren’t just banning the small handful of trans athletes who compete in women’s sports; they are bringing back “tranny.” At best, trolls don’t care if they cause pain to the people targeted, and at worst they want to cause pain.

Musk, too, has belittled the marginalized: Just this week he ridiculed a blind person, and in the past has mocked a disabled X employee (which he later apologized for), and rolled back protections against anti-trans harassment on Twitter. No one is hurt because of a joke about balls, but such jokes are still a middle finger to Musk’s intended audience of liberals and government workers. The point is to laugh in their faces as he dismantles the things that they care about, in an attempt to break them. It is not enough to beat your adversaries. They must be humiliated.

President Donald Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.  

Brown has been the target of criticisms from some Republican senators as well as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, all of whom argued that he was too “woke” and too concerned with diversity in the armed forces. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth suggested that Brown, who is Black, may have risen to his position through racial preferences. “We’ll never know,” he wrote, in a classic just-asking-questions dodge.

But Trump should know. He’s the president who nominated Brown to be Air Force chief of staff in 2020. (Biden appointed Brown as chairman in 2023.) Trump gave no reason for the firing and Hegseth issued a boilerplate statement thanking Brown—who is only the second African American, after the late Colin Powell, to hold the position of chairman—for his distinguished service.

The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president—specifically so that the chairman (again, like the head of the FBI) does not become a partisan political appointment.

Obviously, Trump has no use for such conventions and believes that every senior official in the United States should be a personal appointee of the president—so long as that president is him. If U.S. military leaders are in any doubt about the necessity of absolute loyalty to Trump, they need only look to Brown’s replacement. Instead of tapping another serving four-star, Trump has reached out to a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine, whom Trump tonight said was unjustly passed over for his fourth star by “Sleepy Joe Biden” despite being “highly qualified and respected.”

Trump apparently met Caine on a trip to Iraq in 2018. The president later recalled that first meeting during remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019. He claimed that Caine—call sign “Razin” Caine—was insistent that ISIS could be defeated in a week if America committed enough force to the effort. Trump said that Caine then donned a MAGA cap, and said: “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.” Trump added that he told Caine he was not allowed to do that, “but they did it.”

If the president is telling the truth about this exchange, Caine shouldn’t be in the job. Senior officers, by law and military regulations, must avoid shows of partisan fealty, and such displays should never be the basis for promotion. The story, if true, is a strong indication of Trump’s political motives; Caine’s behavior, in any case, disqualifies him from the job. He appears to have had a fine career, and while it is not typical to pull an officer out of retirement to take the chairman post, it is not unprecedented. But Trump, who has apparently been telling this story for years, is not choosing Caine because of his background; he’s elevating Caine in position and rank because he wants a chairman who is wholly devoted to him.

The message to the rest of the military could not be clearer. Trump loathed Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley, and has floated the idea that Milley should be executed for actions he took as chairman. (This idea came to him shortly after the publication of this magazine’s profile of Milley, by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which detailed how Milley protected the Constitution from Trump.)

Trump and Hegseth have announced their intentions to fire several other senior officers—and perhaps even most ominously, including the head lawyers of each of the services. Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government. None of this has anything to do with effectiveness, or “lethality,” or promoting “warfighters,” or any other buzzwords. It is praetorianism, plain and simple.

LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”  

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

“This is really taking us back to a kind of pre-civil-rights-movement vision of America,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me in an interview last year, before Trump won the 2024 election. “A backlash is a pushback. This is really much more of a demolition effort.”

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Caldwell’s assessment has grown in popularity among prominent conservatives. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has described the Civil Rights Act as having “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” and he has attacked Martin Luther King Jr., Wired reported, as part of a “broader strategy to discredit” King and “the Civil Rights Act.” On his social network, X, the South African–born Musk, who is playing a key role in the Trump administration, regularly promotes scientific racism, the pseudoscientific ideology that holds that race determines individual potential. Some of the staffers Musk has hired to dismantle the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws seem to share those ideological predilections. One DOGE staffer resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he maintained a pro-eugenics social media account where “he appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers.” He was reinstated after receiving public support from Trump and Vance.  The problem conservatives trying to undermine anti-discrimination law seem to have with an “official hierarchy of races” is not that one exists but that, in their warped conception, white people are not on top, as they should be.

This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.  

Even so, the Great Resegregation seeks not a return to the explicit racial separation of Jim Crow, but rather an embrace of ostensibly “color-blind” policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting. The numbers of Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, showrunners, and generals would no longer rise. And there would be no more Black presidents. The real but fragile advancement of the Black poor into the Black middle class would be stalled or reversed. Most Black people would be confined to, as Trump memorably put it, the menial “Black jobs” they were meant for, save for those willing to sustain the self-serving fiction that they are among the good ones.

The demolition of multiracial democracy began a dozen years ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back voting-rights protections adopted in the 1960s to enforce the rights enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Those protections made America, for the first time, a democracy for all its citizens. They diversified Congress, and led to the election of the first Black president. The Roberts Court has steadily eroded those protections, insisting that they are no longer necessary, even as racist ideas once considered beyond the pale return to the mainstream. These changes have had the predictable outcome of increasing racial disparities in voting.

The Roberts Court has treated policies meant to rectify racial discrimination as themselves racist. The Court shut down what remained of public-school integration efforts. It overturned affirmative action in higher education. These decisions have eroded diversity in the classroom. But they’re just the beginning for the resegregators, who intend to ensure that America’s traditional racial hierarchies are persistent and stable.

One clear example comes in the world of higher education. Because giving all Americans equal access to elite higher education is a step toward broader societal integration, such efforts must be shut down. To this end, conservative groups are suing colleges even in states such as California, where affirmative action in public universities has long been banned, claiming that the fact that their incoming classes have become more diverse rather than less is evidence of reverse discrimination. At least two conservative justices have objected to color-blind, class-based affirmative-action programs. This approach suggests a topsy-turvy understanding of racial discrimination, in which a diverse classroom is one in which white men have been discriminated against, based on the conviction that white men are by definition the most competent possible candidates.

[Read: Donald Trump is very busy]

When Trump officials speak of a society that is color-blind and merit-based, they do not appear to mean meritocracy or color-blindness in the traditional sense. Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified. And by withholding federal funding from places that engage in scientific inquiry on social inequalities or offer historical instruction that could be seen as portraying America as “fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory,” the Trump administration can make the causes of those inequalities illegible.

What the proponents of the Great Resegregation seek is a counterrevolution not merely in law, but also in culture. The civil-rights revolution of the 1960s changed hearts and minds as well as laws, and one of those changes was that racially exclusive institutions became morally suspect. Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions.

“My view is that the diversity ethos has really sunk deep roots,” the Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy told me. “There are a lot of people across a wide variety of ideological positions who would not like a racially homogeneous, all-white outfit. Even people who say they’re against affirmative action, they would feel somewhat nervous or somewhat embarrassed or somewhat guilty about that.” Trumpists seek to not just repeal protections against discrimination, but reverse the “diversity ethos” that has enabled America’s tenuous strides toward equality.

And that progress is not only fragile but remarkably incomplete. Neither schools nor workplaces have ever been particularly integrated. Public-school integration stalled long ago. Even prior to the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions, enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite universities had stalled at percentages far below their share of the student-age population. Occupational segregation has remained stagnant since the ’90s. Black workers with or without college degrees are concentrated in professions that pay less than those of their white counterparts, despite a rise in Black people obtaining college degrees. Corporate DEI efforts never made much progress on integration to begin with, in part because many of these efforts were more about branding and limiting liability than equal opportunity, and now the federal government will be dead set on reversing whatever headway was made.

“The segregation we see in the labor market right now is three to five times worse than we would expect if race wasn’t a core factor,” Justin Heck of Opportunity@Work, an organization that advocates for workers without college degrees, told me. “We’ve seen it go down a little bit in the years leading up to 1990. But the current world looks the same as it did in 1990. It’s been stagnant or worse, or slightly worse today.” Heck is one of the authors of a 2023 study on occupational segregation published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are perhaps two exceptions. One is the federal government, where until now, anti-discrimination laws have been strictly enforced. Trump’s cronies have tried to discredit the federal workforce precisely because it is often more meritocratic, and therefore more integrated than the private sector. “It’s harder in a federal-government job to get a position simply through an informal network,” the political scientist Ashley Jardina, who also worked on the NBER study, told me. “Whereas in the private sector, especially in building trades, for example, a lot of people are getting their jobs through their social networks, which are incredibly segregated.”

That is why Trumpists are so focused on “ending DEI” in the federal workforce. They see anti-discrimination and inclusion as a ladder of upward mobility for people they do not believe should have one. Under Trump, a workplace or college that is perceived as too diverse might come under legal scrutiny, effectively enforcing racial quotas. For example, Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, is suing the coffee chain Starbucks on the basis that after adopting DEI programs its workforce has become “more female and less white.”

The second place where America has grown more integrated is media and entertainment, arenas highly visible to the public. This has depreciated the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of white racial identity—making those who once held an unquestioned hegemony over American culture feel like something has been stolen from them. And this shift helped fuel the nationwide backlash to diversity efforts that Trump rode to office.

[W. E. B. Du Bois: Strivings of the Negro people]

The slight but substantive integration of characters in film, television, and other forms of entertainment has itself led to a visible backlash, subjecting actors, writers, and other creative workers of color to harassment whenever they participate in a high-profile project, especially in the genres of science fiction or fantasy. An integrated cast, writers’ room, or development team is deemed “woke,” by which critics simply mean integrated, and therefore suspect. A woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color in a leading role is deemed unqualified, or worthy of rejection just because of who they are. What may seem like silly internet controversies are in fact demands for a resegregation of creative workplaces.

“I think probably part of why we observe more integration in some spaces and others also just has a lot to do with the demands that capitalism places on having a market,” Jardina told me. “It earns money for media organizations and studios to diversify their shows and their casts, because there’s a market for that, in the same way that there isn’t in a lot of industries.”

In other words, the exceptions to America’s persistent segregation have taken place in America’s most public-facing professions, among those assigned to interpret the world around them. What people consuming American media see, for the most part, is a mirage of a more integrated America that has yet to come into being. In virtually every other arena—the private-sector workplace, housing, schooling—America remains profoundly segregated, with opportunities limited by class and race.

This is why Trump’s funding freeze has targeted DEI despite no evidence that the government has lowered its standards on behalf of women and minorities. Asked to provide a real example of lowered standards in the military during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was unable to. The U.S. military has long led the way in demonstrating how a diverse workforce yields American excellence—one reason some conservatives are fixated on its relative egalitarianism, which they deride as “wokeness.” Hegseth recently said he believed that “the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength." The Nazis and Confederates learned otherwise.

Of course he himself is an illustration of lowered standards—Hegseth has no demonstrable expertise for the job he was given—but because he is a white man, his qualifications for the job are assumed, as a result of the Trumpist concept of racial meritocracy. This is why the funding freeze is targeting research on inequality. It is why private companies are threatened with government lawsuits and prosecutions if they seek a broader pool of applicants. It is why the Trump administration’s deportations do not target merely undocumented criminals but also immigrants on Temporary Protective Status. It is why Trump’s loyalists are dismantling any and all government programs that might conceivably even the playing field between those born with plenty and those born with little.

For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.

The sacking of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force on Friday night was completely legal—and appalling.

The consequences of this Friday-night massacre will be long-lasting and damaging. The JAGs embody the deep respect that the United States military has had for the rule of law. Although they merely advise and do not command, their role is a crucial one. The decapitation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy, and the firing of the second-most-senior Air Force officer was bad enough.

The replacement of General C. Q. Brown, a highly decorated and cerebral officer, as chairman by a retired lieutenant general was bizarre and unprecedented. By law the role of chair should be filled, unless the president deems an extraordinary exception necessary, by a four star who has led a service or a combatant command. Lieutenant General Dan Caine was relatively junior, and he spent 2009 to 2016 as a reservist. The skills he acquired as a special operator, moreover, are the antithesis of what the most senior military officer in the country needs. The United States armed forces, composed of millions of men and women on active and reserve duty, operates fleets and divisions and air wings. Its leaders need the ability to handle military movements and the political skills to deal with coalition partners in large-scale operations, skills that are acquired on the conventional side of the house, not in shadow warfare.

Caine, in other words, is not qualified for the job. If he indeed told President Donald Trump that ISIS could be wiped out in a week or four if only the military were unleashed—as Trump has claimed—he has, moreover, exceptionally poor military judgment. If the Israel Defense Forces, deploying substantial air power and five divisions of mechanized infantry, could not wipe out Hamas in a year-long campaign in the tiny area the group controlled, the United States Air Force could not, and cannot, do the same thing to a wily jihadist military organization spread over several large Middle Eastern countries in less than a month.

When confronted with civilian superiors behaving outrageously, the response of the American soldier, sailor, air fighter, or Marine is to stiffen, look rigidly ahead, and follow lawful orders. But they reflect. And what they are assuredly thinking today is that the Trump administration is determined to purge the military’s leadership; that it has no respect for the rule of law, including the law of armed conflict; and that it is willing to put them under the command of political generals of doubtful caliber. To say that they will find this demoralizing is an understatement.

Worse yet, a minority will applaud this. I have spent my entire career in the company of soldiers, including senior officers, and I have never encountered a group of more honorable men and women. There are, however, in all ranks, as in the rest of humanity, a certain proportion of toadies, opportunists, zealots, and fools. These will now be encouraged to curry favor with political authority, and if there is one thing that the Trump administration has shown itself desirous of, it is brownnosing. That will, in turn, undermine military performance. Promote the bootlickers, sow distrust among the decent ones, and military disaster awaits.

This episode tells us a great deal, none of it too surprising, about the secretary of defense, beginning with the firing itself, conducted on a Friday night and without the courtesy of personal meetings. Pete Hegseth may think of himself as a warrior type, but that was the corporate behavior of a coward. He did not publish his reasons for the firings other than mouthing a platitude or two about the public service of his victims. It was the behavior of a leader who is desperately weak.

He may not yet understand the damage that he has done to himself. It will escape no one’s notice that his two most prominent victims were a Black man and a woman, and that he has raged against women in the military. His unwillingness to explain himself means that the worst construction will be put on his actions. Whereas in a normal administration one should give some benefit of the doubt to leaders making hard calls, he deserves, and will receive, none.

That goes for his tattoos too. On one bicep is Deus Vult, “God wills it,” a motto embraced by some white-nationalist groups (which is why he was removed from duty after January 6). His defense is that it is merely a celebration of the Christian-warrior ethic, a slogan attributed to the Crusaders by contemporary chroniclers.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they spent two days killing the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Thomas Asbridge writes in his history of the Crusades that the city was “awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned.” Six months later, Jerusalem still stank of death.

If celebration of that kind of thing is not what he means, he should make that clear, but of course he will not. A man as petty, thoughtless, and cruel as his boss, he will both feel aggrieved by reactions to his cruelties and ignorant of their likely consequences.

The firings coincided with other assaults both on the American government—the announced firing of more than 50,000 probationary workers in the Pentagon—and on Ukraine, where the United States leaned on Kyiv to withdraw a motion in the UN that would denounce Russia in favor of one, introduced by the United States, that would make no mention of invasion, atrocities, or aggression. In both cases, there was tremendous self-harm, to the civil service on the one hand and to American foreign policy on the other, as Russia gets consequential gifts without paying for them.

What is to be done? To some extent, the administration is setting up the conditions for its own failures as it causes chaos, alienates constituencies, and cripples essential governmental functions. Some of these actions will be illegal and must be confronted in the courts and beyond; others, like Hegseth’s, will be lawful but still enormously destructive, to which other responses are warranted.

At the very least, the public deserves to know the names of the members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose staffers have cut a swath through governmental departments but hide their identities from view. A sense of accountability in courts of opinion as well as law—and if not now, then in the future, when, inevitably, the wheel turns and they are no longer in positions of power—may help temper some of their worst excesses.

Unlike Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or J. D. Vance, I have had children serve in uniform in wartime. The parent of a service member looks with a particularly keen eye at who is in command. C. Q. Brown is the kind of general I would have been proud to have leading them, confident in his professional abilities and his moral compass. To understand the fury that many of us who know him feel at this moment, look at the video of his message following George Floyd’s murder. At a time of racial tension unlike anything since the civil-rights movement, he spoke with dignity, restraint, and the deepest kind of patriotism—the patriotism of a Martin Luther King Jr. or, more to the point, a General Dan “Chappie” James Jr., the first Black four-star general, one of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen.

The worst of the MAGA movement are the neo-Confederates, ignoramuses (to be charitable) about this country’s history—hence their outrage at the renaming of forts called after traitor generals from the Civil War—and in many cases, tapping into deep veins of bigotry. With this move, Pete Hegseth will henceforth labor under the presumption that he is among their number, a man unfit to lead anybody, much less the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that this country produced C. Q. Brown—and that there are many more like him out there.

The scene in Kyiv earlier this month recalled the darkest days of oligarchic rule. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slipped a piece of paper across the table to Volodmyr Zelensky. “You really need to sign this,” Bessent told the Ukrainian president, according to The Wall Street Journal. The document was a deal to give the United States the rights to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Ukraine’s minerals. When Zelensky said that he needed time to consider the proposal, Bessent pushed the paper closer to him and warned that “people back in Washington” would be very upset.

The Trump administration was operating in the old spirit of the kleptocrats who built fortunes in Ukraine and Russia at the dawn of the post-Communist era, wielding veiled threats to bully the nation’s leader into hastily handing over precious resources in a shady deal.

To Zelensky’s credit, he did his best to resist Bessent’s pressure. “I can’t sell our state,” he explained. It was as if he had actually internalized the message that American diplomats from the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations had attempted to drum into Ukraine’s collective psyche: Ukraine’s democracy depends on it resisting powerful business interests that seek to plunder its wealth on terms highly unfavorable to the Ukrainian public. Zelensky’s willingness to stand up to President Donald Trump, holding true to American values in the face of American intimidation, was a perverse trading of places.

[Anne Applebaum: The end of the postwar world]

The moment recalls another episode in Ukraine’s recent past. Three years ago today, Russian troops streamed across the nation’s borders, assassins descended on the capital in search of its president, citizens decamped to the subways in search of shelter. Western intelligence agencies predicted Ukraine’s imminent demise. And in that moment of despair, Zelensky strode out into the empty streets of Kyiv, in the dark of night, to record a video reassuring the world, “We are still here.”

In those early days of the war, Zelensky began to pose as a defender of liberalism, fighting on behalf of global democracy. Whether he actually meant it wasn’t clear. Before the war, his record of curbing corruption was spotty at best. With his political inexperience, and his strange unwillingness to prepare his country against the looming Russian threat, the former comic actor hardly had the makings of a sturdy bulwark against autocracy.

But he became one in the face of an unrelenting assault. Having preserved his nation’s independence, however, he’s now facing not one but two of the world’s most powerful illiberal leaders, conspiring in tandem. For reasons both petty and pecuniary, Trump seems intent on fulfilling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian sovereignty. The American president is pressing for Russia’s favored resolution to the war, without even allowing Zelensky a seat at the negotiating table. And the resource deal he’s pursuing amounts to World War I–style reparations, but extracted from the victim of aggression. It would force the Ukrainians to hand over the wealth beneath their ground, without any guarantee of their security in exchange. The extortion that Trump proposes would deny Ukraine any possibility of recovering economically, and consign its people to a state of servitude.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA has found a new model]

In this new moment of crisis, Zelensky is reverting to the role he played in the war’s earliest days. Confronted with blunt force, he’s bravely resisting. Squaring up to the bully, he accused Trump of swimming in disinformation. Despite all the pressure the United States has applied on him to accede to the mineral deal, he’s refused. On Sunday, he said, “I am not signing something that ten generations of Ukrainians will have to repay.” Knowing that Trump will never set aside her personal animosity toward him, he offered to resign in exchange for a Western security guarantee.

He has resisted the administration’s demands despite the fact that has no leverage in his dealings with the U.S., other than moral suasion and a limited ability to get in Trump’s way. Ukraine’s military is entirely dependent on American arms, and its European allies can do almost nothing, at this late date, to fill the void. In the end, given Ukraine’s tenuous existence, Zelensky might have little choice but to accept whatever Trump imposes, but at least he’s shown that there’s a course other than immediate surrender.

[Quico Toro: Brazil stood up for its democracy. Why didn’t the United States?]

Once upon a time, the United States poured diplomatic resources and military aid into Ukraine so that it wouldn’t descend into Russian-style autocracy. Now it’s the United States that’s headed in that direction. In the form of Elon Musk, an oligarch has captured the power of the American government, through which he can invisibly advance his own interests. The president is attempting to intimidate (and sue) the media into complying with the administration’s agenda. The norms of the administrative state have been shattered so that Trump can reward cronies and punish enemies. And in the most literal sense, the United States is collaborating with Russian autocracy so that the foreign policies of the two regimes are more closely aligned.

American institutions have largely faltered amid Trump’s assault, and European allies have aimlessly panicked. But Zelensky’s very presence reprimands the West for its futile opposition; his resoluteness shames Republicans, who once admired him as a latter-day Winston Churchill, for their own abject capitulation. Although he arguably has more to lose from a Trump administration than anyone on the planet, he’s kept pushing back, with resourcefulness that recalls Ukraine’s guerrilla tactics in the earliest days of the Russian invasion. When the history of the era is written, Zelensky will be seen as the global leader of the anti-authoritarian resistance, who refused to accept the terms that the powerful sought to impose on his nation. He clarified the terms of the struggle with his heroic example. He reminds despairing liberals, “We are still here.”