In the months leading up to February 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden warned that such an action would trigger “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed”—a threat that many European leaders echoed.

To Daleep Singh, the White House’s top international economic adviser at the time, Biden’s threat could mean only one thing: freezing Russia’s central-bank reserves. The Central Bank of Russia held more than $630 billion in assets, making it the largest sanctions target in modern history. If any entity was too big to sanction, this was it. Maintaining the bank’s teeming coffers was Putin’s attempt to “sanctions-proof” his economy, ensuring that Russia could prop up the ruble and pay for imports even under financial attack. Yet about half of the bank’s reserves were in dollars, euros, and pounds, which in practice left them vulnerable to Western sanctions. At the stroke of a pen, U.S. and European leaders could order their banks to block the accounts of Russia’s central bank, rendering much of Putin’s cash pile inaccessible.

This essay has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

“Big nations don’t bluff”: This mantra, which Biden was fond of reciting, rang in Singh’s ears the day after Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on the Central Bank of Russia, Singh believed, would put Biden’s credo into action. The option was so extreme that it had never received thorough vetting on either side of the Atlantic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was concerned that freezing the central-bank reserves would push other countries away from using the dollar as their go-to reserve currency. The dollar’s global dominance allows America to absorb economic shocks, borrow cheaply, and run large deficits. Yellen was uncomfortable risking these privileges for the sake of punishing Putin.

But in Europe, a momentous political shift was under way, with street protests against the Russian invasion drawing out hundreds of thousands of people. Singh’s European counterparts assured him that if the White House was ready to sanction Russia’s central bank, their governments would follow. Yellen was hard to convince until a phone call from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, her old colleague from his tenure as head of the European Central Bank, persuaded her to relent. Within hours, the United States was on board.

Just two days after the invasion began, the members of the G7 issued a statement committing to target Russia’s central bank. “You heard about Fortress Russia—the war chest of $630 billion of foreign reserves,” Singh told reporters in a background briefing. “This will show that Russia’s supposed sanctions-proofing of its economy is a myth.”

Three years on, the sanctions against Russia’s central bank stand as both a triumph and a warning. In narrow terms, they worked exactly as Singh hoped: They caught Putin off guard and deprived him of his deepest pool of hard currency. The frozen reserves, valued at nearly $300 billion, have also helped underwrite tens of billions in Western aid to Ukraine. As Donald Trump embarks on his much-anticipated peace negotiations, they will provide important leverage—Putin will be desperate to recover them, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will press to redirect them toward his country’s reconstruction.

[Read: The sanctions against Russia are starting to work]

But the sanctions failed in one crucial way. The fact that Moscow was blindsided by them suggests it grossly underestimated the severity of the penalties it would face. Although the U.S. and its allies had developed an extensive menu of possible sanctions before the invasion, they never reached consensus on how far they were willing to go. They left Putin to divine the meaning of “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed,” and Putin—as he so often did—read Western ambiguity as weakness.

If Biden and other world leaders had committed ahead of time to the actions they would eventually take, they might have had a much better chance of staving off Putin’s invasion. Deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act. Putin never saw the sanctions coming—and that was precisely the problem.

“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Economic warfare has always offered nations a way to advance their interests without resorting to violence.

For most of history, imposing serious economic pressure required the deployment of military forces: ships blockading ports, armies laying siege to cities. As recently as the 1990s, the United Nations embargo on Iraq relied on warships patrolling the Persian Gulf. But over the past two decades, America has pioneered a more potent and nimble style of economic warfare. In a world where finance and supply chains are deeply globalized, Washington learned to leverage economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar and advanced semiconductor technology—against rivals. Now, by merely signing documents in the Oval Office, the president can impose economic penalties far more severe than the blockades and embargoes of old.

This new age of economic warfare began innocuously enough: with Stuart Levey, a little-known lawyer who led a brand-new division of the Treasury Department from 2004 to 2011, trying to prove President George W. Bush wrong. Iran’s nuclear program was racing forward in the mid-2000s, and Bush lamented that America had “sanctioned ourselves out of influence” with the country. The only options, seemingly, were to go to war or let Iran join the ranks of nuclear-armed states. Levey set out to show there was another way.

In the years that followed, Levey and his colleagues overhauled U.S. sanctions policy. They drew on their legal expertise and their understanding of the financial sector’s risk calculus to conscript multinational banks into a campaign to isolate Iran from the world economy. Prodded by Congress, they tested the limits of their new economic weapons—they even found a way to freeze more than $100 billion of Iran’s oil money in overseas escrow accounts. Over time, this economic pressure helped spur political change in Iran and opened a path to the 2015 nuclear deal. The United States had managed to put Iran’s nuclear aspirations on hold—as Barack Obama boasted, “without firing a shot.”

The Iran deal had its critics, but one thing was beyond dispute—sanctions worked. In fact, the deal’s toughest opponents argued that America had traded them away too soon: The pressure was working so well that if the U.S. had just kept it up, the Iranian regime might have permanently relinquished its entire nuclear program or, better yet, collapsed. But a key reason the sanctions were so successful—winning grudging acceptance even from the likes of China, India, and Russia—was that Obama expressly deemed them a means to an end. They were intended to pressure Iran to concede to nuclear constraints and then be lifted. This is just how things played out.  

As the Iran deal was being negotiated, Putin shocked the world by sending “little green men” into Crimea and swiftly annexing the territory. Determined to punish Russia for this flagrant imperial land grab, but unwilling to risk war with a fellow nuclear power, U.S. officials again reached into their economic arsenal. Russia was a trickier target than Iran: It was much bigger and more integral to the world economy. European countries depended on Russian oil and gas. If sanctions wreaked too much havoc on Russia, the fallout would quickly reach Europe and then the United States. As a result, the Obama administration stitched together a sanctions coalition with the European Union and the rest of the G7. This alliance imposed sanctions that, surgical though they were, quickly sent Russia’s economy spiraling. The collapse of world oil prices in the second half of 2014 supercharged their impact, and by early the following year, Putin was eager for a truce.

Up until that point, the United States had used its economic arsenal wisely. But then it made a costly error. The unexpected severity of Russia’s economic crisis frightened European leaders, who feared it would spill over into their own countries. Instead of insisting that the West press its advantage, Obama endorsed a European-brokered cease-fire to freeze the Ukraine conflict and refrained from ratcheting up pressure—even after Russia violated the cease-fire and interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin drew a lesson from this experience: Western leaders lacked the stomach to sustain real economic pressure on Russia—and even if they proved him wrong, he could just wait them out.

[Watch: ‘War and cheese’]

That assumption held up when Trump came to power. Far from strengthening sanctions on Russia, he allowed them to atrophy. Meanwhile, he ripped up the Iran deal and tried to bludgeon Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, leading Iran to restart its nuclear program. Trump’s policies on Russia and Iran gravely undermined the strategic value of American sanctions. Putin had done little to concede to U.S. demands, yet he was rewarded with a reprieve. Iran, by contrast, had complied with a deal to dismantle core parts of its nuclear program—only for the U.S. to reimpose penalties two years later. World leaders drew another troubling lesson: Even if they did exactly what Washington asked of them, they might still face the brunt of America’s economic arsenal.   

U.S. sanctions policy grew more arbitrary under Trump. With the exception of Russia, he was as sanctions-happy a president as America has ever had. He levied so many sanctions—against Iran, Venezuela, China—that countries all over the world took steps to shield themselves. The Russian central bank traded most of its dollars for euros and gold. China sought new ways to promote its own currency internationally, releasing a digital version of the renminbi and creating a homegrown financial-messaging-and-settlement platform.

U.S. officials often initiate sanctions campaigns in the heat of a crisis and scramble to react to unfolding events. The latest iteration of American economic warfare, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has been different: U.S. officials knew months ahead of time that Russia was gearing up to invade. They had the opportunity to use sanctions to deter Russian aggression rather than punish it after the fact. But following years of deploying economic weapons in an erratic and incoherent manner, the opportunity went to waste.

After the central-bank freeze that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions were a disappointment. If Moscow didn’t foresee the one big sanction that might have deterred the invasion, it certainly did foresee the smaller ones that were coming—and had plenty of time and resources to prepare.

[Read: What makes Russia’s economy so sanctions-resistant?]

In December 2022, months after the move against the central bank, the United States and its allies made their first serious attempt to target the lifeblood of Russia’s economy: oil sales. Under the new regulations, known as the “price cap,” U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 a barrel.

The price cap was not as extreme as the central-bank freeze, but it packed a punch. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: Its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.

But as with the central-bank sanctions, America and its allies were too worried about economic blowback to act decisively. They took nearly 10 months after the start of the invasion to impose the price cap. As a result, Russia raked in a whopping $220 billion from oil exports in 2022, contributing to the highest single-year energy revenues the Kremlin has ever collected. Perversely, this was almost as much hard currency as the West had frozen when it sanctioned Russia’s central bank. To make matters worse, the West also built loopholes into the policy to avoid even the slightest possibility that it could cause an oil-supply crunch and exacerbate inflation. Russia took full advantage, amassing a “shadow fleet” of secondhand oil tankers and designing state-backed insurance schemes—and the impact of the price cap eroded. Today, with Trump back in the White House, the prospects of strengthening the policy look slim.

The United States uses sanctions a lot, and yet it has hardly perfected the art of economic warfare. Compared with the way the Pentagon prepares for conventional war—including recruiting and training professional troops, devising plans, and rehearsing them repeatedly—the U.S. agencies responsible for economic war are still playing in the minor leagues, using ad hoc processes and a rudimentary policy apparatus.

Sanctions are like antibiotics: They work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately. For some purposes, they’re simply the wrong tool; sanctions didn’t change the regimes in Iran or Venezuela, despite the best efforts of the last Trump administration, nor could they be expected to.

In other cases, sanctions have the potential to work, but only if they’re administered in strong enough doses over a long enough period to avoid resistance. This is the problem the United States has faced in confronting Russia: Washington and its allies ratcheted up sanctions incrementally, giving Russia time to adapt and build resistance along the way. As a result, Biden failed to deliver a knockout blow to Russia’s economy—and Putin, yet again, seems confident he can get a reprieve, no matter what he does in Ukraine.     

This article has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

The French president is at the White House to appeal to Trump against rushing into a deal with Russia.

Apple’s (AAPL) new $500 billion investment plan is winning over President Donald Trump — and proving that CEO Tim Cook knows how to play ball.

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Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

Sick of it. Stop and think about that phrase. Trump inserted it into a stream of falsehoods, produced over several days, many of which he must have known to be untrue. He has been lying about the origins of the war, about Zelensky’s popular support, about the levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, about the extent of European funding, about the status of previous negotiations. But sick of it—that, at least, has the ring of truth. Trump is genuinely bored of the war. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it started. He doesn’t know how to stop it. He wants to change the channel and watch something else.

Also, he has no cards: That probably reflects Trump’s true belief as well. For Donald Trump, the only real cards are big money and hard power. Players, in his world, are people whom no court can block, no journalist can question, no legislator can oppose. People whose money can buy anything, whose power cannot be checked or balanced.  

But Trump is wrong. Zelensky might not have money, and he might not be a brutal dictator like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Yet he does have other kinds of power. He leads a society that organizes itself, with local leaders who have legitimacy and a tech sector dedicated to victory—a society that has come, around the world, to symbolize bravery. He has a message that moves people to act instead of just scaring them into silence.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, stop and remember what happened on the night it began. I’d had plane tickets to Kyiv that week, but my flights were canceled, and on February 24, 2022, I stayed up and watched the war’s start on television, listening to the sounds of explosions coming from the screen. That night, everyone expected Russia to overrun its much smaller neighbor. But that capitulation never came. Six weeks later, I made it to Kyiv and heard and saw what had happened instead: the hit squads that had tried to kill Zelensky; the murders of civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb; the Ukrainian journalists who had driven around the country trying to tell the story; the civilians who had joined the army; the waitresses who had started cooking for the troops.

Three years later, against all obstacles and all predictions, the civilians, journalists, soldiers, and waitresses are still working together. Ukraine’s million-man army, the largest in Europe, is still fighting. Ukraine’s civil society is still volunteering, still raising money for the troops. Ukraine’s defense industry has transformed itself. In 2022, I saw tiny workshops that made drones out of what looked like cardboard and glue. In 2024, Ukrainian factories produced 1.5 million drones, and this year they will make many more. Teams of people in underground control centers now use bespoke software to hit thousands of targets every month. Their work explains why Russia has taken territory only slowly, despite being on the offensive for most of the past year. At the current rate of advance, the Institute for the Study of War estimates, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine.

Russia doesn’t have the resources to fight indefinitely against that kind of organization and determination. Putin’s military production is cannibalizing his country’s civilian economy. Inflation has skyrocketed. The only way Putin wins now—the only way he finally succeeds in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty—is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war.

He wins by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine, because Zelensky has no cards, and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either. That’s why Putin’s money bought American influencers in Tennessee and probably many other places, too, and it’s why his propaganda supported the pro-Russian far right in Germany’s elections yesterday, along with other pro-Russian parties across the continent. Putin can’t win on the ground, but he can win in his enemies’ heads—if we let him.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Europeans and Americans, Democrats and Republicans, can resist the temptations of boredom and distraction. We can refuse to give in to the cynicism, nihilism, and lies of Russian propaganda, even when they are repeated by the president of the United States. And we can refuse to believe that Ukraine has no cards, that we have no cards, and that the democratic world has no sources of power other than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Three years into this war, the stakes are the same as they were on the night it began. Putin, who yesterday launched one of the largest attacks of the entire war, still seeks to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty, civil society, democracy, and freedom. He still wants to show the world that the era of American power is over, that America will not defend allies in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. He still wants to nullify the rules and laws that kept Europe peaceful for eight decades, to create instability and fear, not only in the countries that border Russia but across the continent and even around the world.   

The war will only end, truly end, when Putin gives up these goals. Don’t accept any peace deal that allows him to keep them.

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.”

European leaders are in Kyiv for the anniversary of the Ukraine war while Starmer and Macron prepare to visit the US.

The PM suggests Trump has "created an opportunity" to end the war, ahead of a trip the the US.

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.

The Trump administration is enmeshed in a long and rapidly growing list of legal challenges to the novel powers it has claimed for itself. But to try to understand the situation in terms of the individual cases, and the legal questions they implicate, is to miss the forest for the trees. The larger picture is that Donald Trump refuses, or is simply unable, to grasp any distinction between the law and his own whims.

That conflation was on display once again today at a meeting of governors at the White House. As Trump lectured the audience on his executive order banning transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, he paused to single out Maine Governor Janet Mills.

“Are you not going to comply with it?” he demanded of her. “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she replied. To this, Trump shot back, “We are the federal law.”

It is entirely possible that, if the state of Maine challenges the executive order, Trump will prevail legally. But what is important about this exchange is not whose interpretation of Title IX and the Administrative Procedure Act has a better chance to win five votes on the Supreme Court. It is that Trump is treating the law as coterminous with his own desires.

Trump then threatened Mills with the prospect of stripping away federal funding for her state: “You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.” Legally, it is possible for the federal government to deny states certain funding streams under certain conditions. But Trump cannot simply cut Maine off financially because the state chooses to challenge a federal policy. Distinctions like this, however, seem totally lost on the president, who sees himself as national king—note his use of the royal we—and every other American, including each of the 50 states, as one of his quavering subjects.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

Trump has grown ever more brazen about his belief that his activities are by definition legal, and activities he opposes by definition criminal. That belief is implied by a long, long list of statements and actions, stretching from his career in business, when he routinely treated laws (forbidding him from discriminating against Black tenants or committing tax fraud) as suggestions; to the final days of his presidency, when he attempted to overturn his election defeat; to his post-presidency, when he flagrantly disregarded requirements that he turn over classified documents. It is also implied by his habit of describing a long list of political opponents as criminals.

Trump recently summarized this belief by writing on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (The possibly apocryphal quote is commonly attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, famously, a dictator.) His statement to Mills is utterly consistent with this belief: Since Trump cannot violate the law, it follows that the law means whatever he says. He has progressed from demonstrating his disregard for the law to stating it as a doctrine.

Trump’s supporters have followed his lead. When the White House announced a spending freeze last month, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of Trump’s budget office, wrote, “Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities.” Of course, the Constitution does not say that the will of the people is expressed exclusively through the president. It divides legitimate authority between three branches of government, resting the spending authority in the hands of Congress.

Paula White, the newly appointed White House faith adviser, has gone further, once stating, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.” Far from reassuring the American people that they continue to live in a democratic republic, Trump and the White House have lately leaned into the divine-right theme with a series of social-media posts depicting Trump as a king for overruling New York City’s congestion-pricing system.

[David A. Graham: The world’s most powerful unelected bureaucrat]

Last week, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has occasionally scolded Trump for his naughtiness, dismissed fears that the country is entering a constitutional crisis as “overwrought.” Trump, the editors insisted, was merely testing the bounds of his executive authority, in this case by destroying a series of federal programs and agencies authorized by Congress. It is true, as the Journal argues, that previous presidents have tested the boundaries of their authority. But there is a point at which the executive branch moves so far and so fast that the eventual promise of legal redress means little. If you fire all the employees of a department and cancel its contractors, they’ll go broke waiting for the Supreme Court to rule in their favor. Imagine a Democratic administration setting out to replace every white Evangelical church in America with EV-charging stations—even if they agreed to abide by the courts in the event of an adverse ruling, this wouldn’t offer much comfort.

But the larger dynamic is that Trump isn’t merely pushing to redefine the boundaries of the law or even the Constitution. He is rejecting the principle that the law constrains him at all. The existence of a constitutional crisis cannot be understood solely in terms of the discrete claims of the executive branch vis-à-vis the other two. A president who maintains that the law means whatever he wants it to mean is a constitutional crisis.

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Grasping the scale of President Donald Trump’s assault on American governance is no small matter. The administration is challenging laws, claiming the right to reinterpret the Constitution, questioning judges’ powers, and arrogating new powers to itself. Seeking to convey the gravity of the situation, many commentators have labeled what’s happening a “constitutional crisis.”

That’s a mistake—not because what’s happening is not serious, but because it is so serious. This week, the Trump administration came the closest it has thus far to outright refusing to follow a judge’s order, after days of comments from Vice President J. D. Vance, Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk, and others questioning whether a president must follow court rulings. That’s a threat to the very basic question of whether a president is subject to the law or not—especially when so many things that Trump has done appear plainly illegal.

But the abstraction of constitutional crisis obscures the immediate danger, making what’s happening seem like an issue more for legal experts and policy wonks than for the everyday Americans who stand to lose not only essential government services but also fundamental rights. “A president refusing to abide by the law or the Constitution and ignoring court orders to stop his illegitimate actions would be a constitutional crisis like a bank robbery is a cash flow crisis,” Joseph Ura, a political scientist at Clemson University, told me via email.

A recent New York Times article reported that many legal scholars believe that the country is in a constitutional crisis, but it began by acknowledging, “There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis.” The law, for all its careful parsing of language, has a weakness for this sort of I-know-it-when-I-see-it formulation, but if even the professors can’t define it, how can the general public? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor, warns that “we've got our toes right on the edge of a constitutional crisis,” which also raises interesting questions about the topography of a crisis.

At one time, appeals to the sanctity of the Constitution might have swayed more people, but one reason Trump has been able to dominate U.S. politics for so long is that voters are not feeling protective of their institutions. About six in 10 people in a 2022 New York Times poll said the constitutional order needs major reforms. In 2023, Pew found that just 4 percent of Americans think the political system is working very well. And in 2024, voters selected a guy who’d tried to overturn the previous election. Regardless of what law professors think, the populace has already decided that the Constitution is in crisis.

Perhaps I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I don’t think that means they want an unaccountable leader who is not beholden to laws, courts, or Congress. Already, Trump’s approval rating is down, and his disapproval rating is up. I noted last week that some of his supporters are regretting their choice. Many of the effects of sloppy cost cutting are going to be even more unpopular once voters feel them. But appeals to a system they’ve come to distrust are not the way to rally them.

A “constitutional crisis” certainly sounds bad, even if you can’t say what it is. But whatever fresh shock the term might have provided has been dulled by years of use. Google Trends tells a story of desensitization. Going back to 2004, there are sporadic spikes of interest in the term, such as during the 2008 financial crisis and around government shutdowns during the Barack Obama presidency. Then the line starts bouncing around like a flea when Trump takes office the first time. It calms again during the Biden administration but takes off on a dizzy, vertical ascent when Trump returns to office in 2025.

Commentators who labeled previous moments “constitutional crises” may not have been crying wolf, exactly, though in retrospect perhaps the term could have been reserved for the worst moments—January 6, for example—for maximum clarity. Regardless, you can’t hear about a problem on and off for years without it becoming less urgent. Trump isn’t just destroying norms; he’s established a state of crisis as the new norm.

And insofar as people do think of this as a “crisis,” that might only further empower Trump—who’s responsible for it in the first place. That’s because, in times of crisis, Americans usually look to the president to act quickly and decisively. That can be good in a bona fide external crisis, like an attack by a foreign country or a pandemic, but that’s not what’s happening now. “To the extent we’re in a crisis, it’s a crisis of too much executive energy,” Ura told me.

The better alternative is to describe exactly what’s happening: The president is taking actions he doesn’t have the power to take, disrespecting the rule of law, and attempting to revoke long-established rights. He is portraying himself as a king. Soon, he may openly defy an order from a duly appointed and confirmed federal judge. That would be a step closer to the end of American democracy than anything since January 6. Call that a catastrophe, call it lawlessness, call it a threat—just don’t call it a constitutional crisis.

Related:

Trump says the corrupt part out loud. Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises. Donald Trump says, “We are the federal law.” Why is everyone talking about getting “oneshotted”? Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing.

Today’s News

Federal Judge Dale E. Ho delayed a ruling on the Justice Department’s request to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and appointed an external lawyer to present arguments challenging the department’s request.

Caleb Vitello, ICE’S acting director, was reassigned to another role in the agency. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass removed Fire Chief Kristin Crowley for her handling of last month’s wildfires.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Haley Mlotek’s new memoir and history of divorce finds a fresh way to talk about the dissolution of a marriage, Boris Kachka writes. Atlantic Intelligence: “No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns,” Matteo Wong writes.

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When Robert Frost Was Bad

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Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, drift and coil and tangle with one another eternally. Robert Frost, who turned 20 in 1894, uncertain of his gift, bouncing among stray gigs (actor’s manager, repairer of lights at a wool mill) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had written a poem called “My Butterfly.” It begins like this: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …” It is what it is, a bad poem. A random-feeling extrusion of lyrical matter, like something that might come out of the tube when you pull the lever marked Poetry.

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P.S.

Whatever term you use, our domestic drama has made it easy for many Americans to overlook just how angry our neighbors to the north are about Trump’s rhetoric around Canada, whether it’s tariff threats or talk of annexation. Last night, Canadians got a chance to strike back in the final of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off, and they took it, defeating the United States in overtime despite a pregame pep talk from Trump. To understand the stakes, I checked in with Nat Frum, an avid Canadian American hockey fan and the son of my colleague David Frum. “This was just a hockey game in a made-up, brand-new tournament created to replace an increasingly irrelevant all-star game—but it felt so much more than that,” Frum wrote in an email. “This felt like the only way Canada could fight back against these past two months of Trumpism and man, did it feel good to see that maple leaf raised on American soil.” It turns out American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to miracles on ice.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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