In just three weeks, President Donald Trump has exploded long-standing U.S. foreign policy and sided with Russia against Ukraine and the rest of NATO. He sent American diplomats to open negotiations with Russian counterparts—without inviting Kyiv to participate. He falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and echoed the Kremlin line by calling Ukrainian President Zelensky a “dictator.” Then, in a press conference on Monday, Trump declined to say the same of Putin. “I don’t use those words lightly,” he told a reporter.

Most Republicans strongly condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and have voted on multiple occasions to send the country military aid. But with their party’s leader back in the White House, many of them have grown quiet. Are any GOP lawmakers willing to say, in plain terms, what is true?

I reached out to all 271 Republican members of the House and Senate to find out, asking each of them two straightforward questions: Did Russia invade Ukraine? And is Putin a dictator? So far, I have received 19 responses.

Some members were unambiguous: “Yes and yes,” a spokesperson for Senator Susan Collins of Maine replied in an email. “Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator,” read part of the statement from the office of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado.

Others chose to send excerpts of previous non-answer statements or links to past TV interviews rather than answer either “yes” or “no.” A spokesperson for the GOP’s House leader, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, replied only with a readout of Johnson’s praise for Trump’s deal-making prowess. A spokesperson for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas replied with a link to an interaction with ChatGPT in which the chatbot noted that Cruz had in 2022 acknowledged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and did in 2020 call Putin a dictator. (Still, no straightforward “yes” from Cruz today.)

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Representative Brian Mast of Florida, opted to stake out a position that seemed different from Trump’s: The panel posted a screenshot of our questions on X, with the caption: “ON THE RECORD: Russia invaded Ukraine & Putin is a dictator. But that doesn’t mean our European allies shouldn’t match Russian military spending & recruitment.” (Another post referred to our questions as “BS.”) The Atlantic followed up to ask whether this statement represented Mast’s personal view, but received no further response.

Others refused to answer entirely: “Does the Atlantic believe we’re here to answer gotcha questions to advance narrow opinion journalism?” Jonathan Wilcox, communications director for Representative Darrell Issa of California, said in an email.

In fact, it is clearly in the public interest to know how elected officials, particularly those who make decisions about national security, regard foreign powers that have long positioned themselves against the United States. And it is also clearly in the public interest for citizens to know if their representatives’ views have shifted on who is—or is not—a foreign adversary.

What follows is the full list of responses from every Republican member of Congress. It will be regularly updated with any additional responses.

Lawmakers Who Answered the Questions

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska: A spokesperson pointed to a statement on X from Bacon on February 19, in which he said: “Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelensky polls over 50%. Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West. I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

Representative Michael Baumgartner of Washington: “The Congressman expressed all his thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine War to the Spokane-Review on February 19. He was very clear that Russia and Vladimir Putin were the aggressors of the war in Ukraine,” a spokesman said, adding this link.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine: “As Senator Collins has said multiple times, yes and yes,” a spokesperson said.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas: A spokesperson shared this link, pointing to earlier statements the senator had made about Putin and the Ukraine war.

Senator John Curtis of Utah: A spokesperson pointed to Curtis’s bipartisan resolution supporting Ukraine and a February 25 interview on KSL NewsRadio, in which Curtis said, “Ukraine was invaded by a dictator.”

Representative Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota: “Yes, Vladimir Putin and Russia invaded Ukraine and yes, he is a dictator,” the representative told me. “This war has cost countless lives and destabilized the world. I believe President Trump has the strength and leadership to bring peace and restore stability in a way that puts America’s interests first.”

Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado: “Did Russia invade Ukraine? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked act of war. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a dictator? Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator. It is dishonorable and wrong not to stand up against the tyranny of Putin,” a spokesperson said.

Representative Young Kim of California: “Yes to both,” a spokesperson said.

Representative Brian Mast of Florida: A spokesperson for Mast sent a link to a post on X from the House Foreign Affairs Committee calling The Atlantic’s inquiry “BS” and declaring it would cancel its subscription to our magazine. “ON THE RECORD: Russia invaded Ukraine & Putin is a dictator. But that doesn’t mean our European allies shouldn’t match Russian military spending & recruitment. Europe must realize that for our alliance to be the strongest in history, America needs a Europe that can hold its own.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: A spokesperson sent a link to a statement in which the senator said that Russia launched an “unprovoked war on Ukraine.” The spokesperson added: “And yes, she does believe that Vladimir Putin is a dictator.”

Representative Austin Scott of Georgia: “Russia invaded Ukraine and is the aggressor in this war,” the representative told me. “Putin is a dictator who has invaded Ukraine multiple times—this war would end today if he would pull his troops back into Russia.”

Senator Todd Young of Indiana: “Yes and yes,” a spokesperson said.

Lawmakers Who Responded But Did Not Directly Answer the Questions

Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas: A spokesman provided a link to an interview with Piers Morgan in which Crenshaw cautioned against returning to a pre-World War II order allowing “dictators to conquer other countries and take their stuff.”

Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio: A spokesperson said the representative declined to comment.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa: “Like all Americans, Ernst wants to see an end to Putin’s unjust war that has cost far too many lives,” a spokesperson said

Representative French Hill of Arkansas: A spokesperson did not address the question of whether Putin is a dictator, but sent a link to an Arkansas PBS interview in which the representative said, “this war was started by Vladimir Putin,” and that “Ukraine has to be at the table” for any peace deal

Representative Darrell Issa of California: A spokesperson said, “Does the Atlantic believe we’re here to answer gotcha questions to advance narrow opinion journalism?”

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana: A spokesperson sent over Johnson’s recent comments during this week’s GOP leadership press conference about Trump’s dealmaking skills and his desire for peace in Ukraine, but did not answer either question directly.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama: A spokesperson did not answer directly but sent a link to an interview with Newsmax, in which the senator said, “President Trump is not a Putin apologist. He just wants to get the war over with.”

Senate Republicans Who Have Not Responded

Jim Banks
John Barrasso
Marsha Blackburn
John Boozman
Katie Britt
Ted Budd
Shelley Moore Capito
Bill Cassidy
John Cornyn
Tom Cotton
Kevin Cramer
Mike Crapo
Steve Daines
Deb Fischer
Lindsay Graham
Charles Grassley
Bill Hagerty
Josh Hawley
John Hoeven
Jon Husted
Cindy Hyde-Smith
Ron Johnson
Jim Justice
John Neely Kennedy
James Lankford
Mike Lee
Cynthia Lummis
Roger Marshall
Mitch McConnell
Dave McCormick
Ashley Moody
Jerry Moran
Bernie Moreno
Markwayne Mullin
Rand Paul
Pete Ricketts
James Risch
Mike Rounds
Eric Schmitt
Rick Scott
Tim Scott
Tim Sheehy
Dan Sullivan
John Thune
Thom Tillis
Roger Wicker

House Republicans Who Have Not Responded

Robert Aderholt
Mark Alford
Rick Allen
Mark Amodei
Jodey Arrington
Brian Babin
James Baird
Troy Balderson
Andy Barr
Tom Barrett
Aaron Bean
Nick Begich
Cliff Bentz
Jack Bergman
Stephanie Bice
Andy Biggs
Sheri Biggs
Gus Bilirakis
Lauren Boebert
Mike Bost
Josh Brecheen
Rob Bresnahan
Vern Buchanan
Tim Burchett
Eric Burlison
Ken Calvert
Kat Cammack
Mike Carey
John Carter
Earl Buddy Carter
Juan Ciscomani
Ben Cline
Michael Cloud
Andrew Clyde
Tom Cole
Mike Collins
James Comer
Eli Crane
Jeff Crank
Eric Rick Crawford
Monica De La Cruz
Scott DesJarlais
Mario Diaz-Balart
Byron Donalds
Troy Downing
Neal Dunn
Beth Van Duyne
Chuck Edwards
Jake Ellzey
Tom Emmer
Ron Estes
Gabe Evans
Mike Ezell
Pat Fallon
Randy Feenstra
Brad Finstad
Michelle Fischbach
Scott Fitzgerald
Brian Fitzpatrick
Charles Chuck Fleischmann
Mike Flood
Vince Fong
Virginia Foxx
Scott Franklin
Russell Fry
Russ Fulcher
Andrew Garbarino
Brandon Gill
Carlos Gimenez
Craig Goldman
Tony Gonzales
Lance Gooden
Paul Gosar
Sam Graves
Mark Green
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Morgan Griffith
Glenn Grothman
Michael Guest
Brett Guthrie
Harriet Hageman
Abe Hamadeh
Mike Haridopolos
Pat Harrigan
Andy Harris
Mark Harris
Diana Harshbarger
Kevin Hern
Clay Higgins
Ashley Hinson
Erin Houchin
Richard Hudson
Bill Huizenga
Wesley Hunt
Brian Jack
Ronny Jackson
John James
Dusty Johnson
Jim Jordan
David Joyce
John Joyce
Thomas Kean
Mike Kelly
Trent Kelly
Mike Kennedy
Jennifer Kiggans
Kevin Kiley
Brad Knott
David Kustoff
Darin LaHood
Nick LaLota
Doug LaMalfa
Nicholas Langworthy
Robert Latta
Michael Lawler
Laurel Lee
Julia Letlow
Barry Loudermilk
Frank Lucas
Anna Paulina Luna
Morgan Luttrell
Nancy Mace
Ryan Mackenzie
Nicole Malliotakis
Celeste Maloy
Tracey Mann
Thomas Massie
Michael McCaul
Lisa McClain
Tom McClintock
Richard McCormick
Addison McDowell
John McGuire
Mark Messmer
Daniel Meuser
Carol Miller
Mary Miller
Max Miller
Mariannette Miller-Meeks
Cory Mills
John Moolenaar
Barry Moore
Blake Moore
Riley Moore
Tim Moore
Nathaniel Moran
Greg Murphy
Troy Nehls
Dan Newhouse
Ralph Norman
Zach Nunn
Jay Obernolte
Andrew Ogles
Bob Onder
Burgess Owens
Gary Palmer
Scott Perry
August Pfluger
Guy Reschenthaler
Hal Rogers
Mike Rogers
John Rose
David Rouzer
Chip Roy
Michael Rulli
John Rutherford
Maria Elvira Salazar
Steve Scalise
Derek Schmidt
David Schweikert
Keith Self
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
Michael Simpson
Adrian Smith
Christopher Smith
Jason Smith
Lloyd Smucker
Victoria Spartz
Pete Stauber
Elise Stefanik
Bryan Steil
Greg Steube
Dale Strong
Marlin Stutzman
Dave Taylor
Claudia Tenney
Glenn GT Thompson
Thomas Tiffany
William Timmons
Mike Turner
David Valadao
Jefferson Van Drew
Derrick Van Orden
Ann Wagner
Tim Walberg
Randy Weber
Daniel Webster
Bruce Westerman
Roger Williams
Joe Wilson
Tony Wied
Robert Wittman
Steve Womack
Rudy Yakym
Ryan Zinke

With additional research and reporting by Amogh Dimri, Marc Novicoff, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and Annie Joy Williams.

It is the misfortune of Jews that they so often find themselves the subject of obsessive fixation. By his own description, Pankaj Mishra is a lifelong obsessive. As a boy in India in the 1970s, the writer grew up in a Hindu-nationalist family that revered Jews, despite not knowing any. In that spirit, Mishra placed a portrait of the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Suez Crisis, on his bedroom wall.

If I had known Mishra then, I would have warned him that philo-Semitism is not a healthy condition; that, in his future, he would realize that Jews, like every cluster of humans, have their flaws; and that he shouldn’t take his disappointment personally. This moment arrived for him during a trip to the West Bank in 2008, where he witnessed the ugliness of Israeli occupation, which left him feeling a “bit foolish” and “resentful.”

Obsessions, especially when they overtake an agile mind, are destabilizing; swooning and repulsion are the alternating registers of a mind consumed. And repulsion is the animating sentiment of Mishra’s new polemic, The World After Gaza.

The title suggests the grandiosity of his ambitions. To merely denounce the war, or to call for the end of American military support for Israel, would have been small beer. Instead, he wants to make the case that Israel today is a symptom of what ails the planet, “a case study of Western-style impunity,” and a “portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world.”

The underlying problem with the West, Mishra argues, is its sanctification of the Holocaust. He blames Jewish leaders, along with their philo-Semitic supporters in the Western elite, for defining the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and insisting that the world incessantly remember the Nazi genocide, a practice he calls “atrocity hucksterism.” (Full disclosure: I think that the Holocaust was the epitome of evil.) By fetishizing the Holocaust, they diverted attention from the suffering of others and “obscured closer examination of the West’s original sin of white supremacy.” And then he asks: “When does organised remembrance become a handmaiden to brute power, and a legitimiser of violence and injustice?”

Mishra has a habit of couching incendiary accusations in rhetorical questions, but his answer to this one is unambiguous. From the first page, Mishra seems intent on demonstrating that Israelis are, in fact, the new Nazis. His book opens with a long description of the Warsaw Ghetto, quoting at length from the poet Czesław Miłosz’s description of the screams of Jews he heard drifting over its walls. Mishra then abruptly juxtaposes a scene from Gaza, flush with heavy-handed language that bludgeons home his comparison. He calls Israel’s war an “industrial-scale slaughter” and a “livestreamed liquidation.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Hamas’s theater of the macabre]

Although any decent human should mourn the deaths of Palestinian civilians, Mishra races past the specious underpinnings of his analogy. To cite the obvious: Unlike Hamas, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto never launched an armed invasion of Nazi Germany. They didn’t rape or murder or kidnap Germans, let alone German babies, or in any way engage in violent activity that might morally justify a military response. The Jews of Warsaw never used human shields. They never published a charter calling for German genocide. Mishra mentions Hamas’s attack in passing, but he never wastes his breath chastising the group.

Later in the book, Mishra concedes that anti-Israel protesters justifiably wield such comparisons in the service of trolling. He writes, “Since the Shoah was coded as the greatest evil, incomparable and unprecedented, those describing Zionism as a genocidal ideology aim to defuse the symbolism of the Shoah and represent the destruction of Gaza as the true evil of our times.” It shouldn’t require minimizing the senseless loss of life to acknowledge that the death of more than 46,000 Gazans, some number of whom were Hamas combatants, isn’t the same as the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews. But by hyperbolically analogizing, Mishra seems to be intentionally salting Jewish wounds. This is hardly the stuff of the more ethical world that Mishra claims to desire.

Even on his own terms, this rhetorical turn is gratuitous, because imagining a more measured version of Mishra’s argument is so easy. It would go something like this: Benjamin Netanyahu has exploited memories of the Holocaust to justify brutal tactics in Gaza. Although Mishra agrees with that more restrained claim, it doesn’t suit his inflated goals.

His attempt to blame the plight of the wretched of the Earth on the Shoah’s central place in Western culture is unmoored from evidence. He writes about the “deepening links between Israeli governments, pro-Israel Jewish outfits and white supremacists in the United States and Europe.” But American white supremacists traffic in anti-Semitism and tend to blame Jews for the migration crisis. (In 2023, Elon Musk circulated a version of that claim.) And although American Jews have shifted slightly rightward in recent years, polling suggests that they remain a reliable constituency of the Democratic Party, far more liberal than other white voters. Mishra loves to mine the writings of postwar Jewish intellectuals for a damning quote—a racist protagonist in a Saul Bellow novel is one of his primary data points—but he can’t be bothered to cite the present-day leaders of Jewish organizations.

(Mishra does quote The Atlantic, as evidence of “a strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah” that “diminishes” American journalism about Israel; and he also attacks The New Republic, which I once edited, for becoming a “purveyor of racism and Islamophobia” in the 1980s.)

[Read: The problem with moral purity]

As he depicts Jews parochially clinging to their victimhood, Mishra skirts some pretty important countervailing pieces of evidence. It was Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, who in the 1940s coined the term genocide, which he helped to enshrine in international law, in a quest to prevent other ethnic minorties from suffering the fate of the Jews. Mishra flays Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize—quoting Alfred Kazin, who called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust”—while neglecting to mention Wiesel’s opposition to South African apartheid and his record of advocating for interventions to prevent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. (He also popularized the slogan “No human being is illegal.”’) And I wonder if Mishra has ever set foot in a synagogue aligned with Reform or conservative Judaism, the two largest denominations in the United States. After the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, they festooned their buildings with banners in support of Black Lives Matter, in the name of Tikkun Olam, healing the world.

Mishra inadvertently proves the thesis of Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews. He writes with loving care about the Holocaust, referring to it by its Hebrew name, the Shoah, and he exudes nothing but sympathy for interwar writers such as Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth. But as he describes the Jewry that emerged from the ashes, he mostly finds unredeeming qualities. Mishra keeps reaching for his shelf to pull the books in which he’s underlined passages from intellectuals, many of them Jewish, denouncing Jews. Among the accusations he recycles: Jewish intellectuals in the U.S. became “too comfortably conforming to the American ruling class”: They “clung to the Holocaust and Zionism for a sense of identity and purpose”; “the Jew profits from his status in America.” Citing the unpleasant Holocaust survivors portrayed in an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, he notes, “Oppression doesn’t improve moral character.” There are many more such accusations. Each might be justifiable in context. But sewn together, they resemble nothing better than a grotesque effigy.

Like so many other intellectuals who have taken up the banner of Palestine, Mishra is unclear about what he really wants. He describes the two-state solution as a “pretence,” without offering a viable alternative. After reading his book, I had no clue how downgrading the historical import of the Holocaust would enhance the struggle against racism. In the final paragraphs of the book, he applauds the campus protesters for their defiance, even though he admits “they risk permanently embittering their lives with failure.” To howl into the wind without any plausible vision of a better world isn’t heroic or ethical; it’s a gesture of nihilism, and so, too, is this book.

The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s blessing to accelerate their plans.

Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as Musk’s ventures—which include SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—all depend to some degree on federal dollars, permits, and regulatory support. The president could influence whether OpenAI or xAI produces the next major AI breakthrough, whether Musk can succeed in sending a human to Mars, and whether Altman’s big bet on nuclear energy, and fusion reactors in particular, pans out.

Understanding the competition between these two men helps illuminate Trump’s particular style of governing—one defined by patronage and dealmaking. And the rivalry highlights the tech giants’ broader capitulation to the new administration. Executives who have sold a vision of the future defined by ultra-intelligent computer programs, interplanetary travel, and boundless clean energy have bowed to a commander in chief who has already stifled free expression, scientific research, and the mere mention of climate change in government work. Why? Simply because doing so will advance their interests. (And, in some cases, because tech leaders are true believers—ideological adherents to the MAGA worldview.)

Altman’s MAGA turn is best understood as a search for a lifeline. In 2017, as Trump’s first term was just beginning, Altman tweeted, “I think Trump is terrible and few things would make me happier than him not being president.” This time around: “I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” In the months before the election, Altman and OpenAI leaned on connections to Trump allies to curry favor, according to The New York Times. In June, two of the start-up’s executives met with Trump in Las Vegas, showcasing their technology and emphasizing its land and energy needs. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s technological lead over xAI, Google, Anthropic, and other firms has dwindled.

The company’s relationship with its main financial backer, Microsoft, has also frayed so much that OpenAI is actively courting other corporate partners. (Microsoft, despite approving OpenAI’s ability to find other data-center partners, maintains that it will remain a key partner going forward.) Over the past year, a number of senior researchers have departed, and the start-up faces several lawsuits and investigations. A new and friendly administration, then, could provide Altman with a much-needed boost to maintain his firm’s shrinking edge in the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

And Musk, for all his criticism of federal bloat, is plenty dependent on the government. Over the past decade, his companies have been awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA for its rocket business and as of Monday is reportedly testing its Starlink technology to improve the Federal Aviation Administration’s national airspace system, despite an existing $2 billion contract that the FAA has with Verizon. Tesla, with shrinking sales and a relatively stagnant lineup of models, could benefit mightily from friendly regulation of self-driving cars. Musk also appears jealous of Altman’s it-boy reputation in Silicon Valley and beyond: He started xAI within months of ChatGPT’s launch, has taken to calling his rival “Scam Altman,” and recently led an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI (which the start-up’s board refused). “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman told Bloomberg Television the next day. “I feel for the guy.”

Anything that OpenAI might gain from Trump, xAI could reap as well. Altman and Musk both hope to build data centers that use a tremendous amount of electricity—each one potentially requiring as much as would be provided by a large nuclear reactor or even several, a demand equal to millions of American homes. The government can open federal lands to data-center and power-plant construction, and it can expedite the construction of natural-gas or nuclear plants (or the now-less-likely renewable-energy sources). Trump could attempt to cut down the sometimes interminable permitting process for the transmission lines that carry that electricity to data centers. He might intervene in or make it difficult to enforce the outcomes of AI copyright litigation, and generally make the regulatory environment as friendly as possible for the industry and its investors.

[Read: For now, there’s only one good way to power AI]

Musk, of course, has cemented his place in the president’s inner circle, acting as a Trump surrogate during the campaign and now leading his efforts to remake the civil service. He has fused his political ideology—reactionary, authoritarian, nativist—with Trump’s. But Altman, too, has quietly gained the president’s confidence, albeit with a much narrower appeal to American-AI dominance. His company has ramped up its public messaging and lobbying about the importance of America’s AI leadership over China—a goal that Trump has repeatedly emphasized as a priority.

The maneuvering is already starting to pay off. The day after the inauguration, Altman stood beside Trump in the White House as the president announced Stargate, a new company planning to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure, and in which OpenAI is a principal investor. According to the Times, Altman had struggled to raise money for Stargate for months—potential investors worried that government approval for the necessary, extensive construction would be too slow—until Trump’s victory, when sentiment flipped. During the press conference, Trump said the government’s job would be “to make it as easy as it can be” to build. Altman was sure to signal gratitude, saying that “with a different president, [Stargate] might not have been possible.”

Within hours of the announcement, Musk, not to be excluded or outdone, chimed in on X. “They don’t actually have the money,” he wrote, suggesting that Stargate’s main investors could not fund the project. Altman denied this, writing on X, “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

For Musk to break ranks with his newfound presidential ally suggests that the world’s richest man is still focused on an old grudge and affront to his ego. After being one of OpenAI’s initial investors, Musk left its board in 2018, at the time citing potential conflicts of interest with future AI projects at Tesla. Four years later, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and kicked off the generative-AI boom, Musk was caught off guard—not just behind in the race, but not even an entrant. Within weeks, he was suggesting that the chatbot was too “woke.” Soon after, Musk formed his own AI start-up, xAI, and last year, he sued OpenAI for betraying its original nonprofit mission. In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI released old emails from Musk suggesting he had departed because he thought that without merging with Tesla or otherwise securing substantially more funding, OpenAI’s chance of “being relevant” was “0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.” (Oops.)

Ever since he left, Musk has been playing catch-up. The first and second iterations of xAI’s model, Grok, lagged behind the most powerful versions of ChatGPT. Musk’s latest, Grok 3, appears to be in the same ballpark as OpenAI’s new, state-of-the-art “reasoning” models—but xAI accomplished this months later and likely with far more computing resources. Despite, or perhaps because of, repeatedly coming up short, Musk has evinced a willingness to use any tactic to maintain his own relevance, or at least slow down his competitors. In late March 2023, Musk signed a widely circulated letter calling for at least six months’ pause on training AI models more powerful than OpenAI’s then-just-released GPT-4—even though he had incorporated xAI weeks earlier and was actively recruiting staff. Musk’s lawsuit denounces OpenAI as profit-hungry and secretive, and he has dubbed the start-up “ClosedAI,” but the code and training data underlying Grok 3 are as opaque as that of ChatGPT. And despite Musk’s claims that Grok 3 is the “smartest AI on Earth,” OpenAI researchers have accused his start-up of misrepresenting the chatbot’s performance to make it appear on par with their own top model, o3-mini (a sort of manipulation common in the generative-AI industry, and one that OpenAI itself has been accused of as well). Still, he is now closer than ever to catching Altman, and his position at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency and his perch on Trump’s shoulder could push him over the edge.

The president, for now, seems content to keep both relationships open; certainly, his association with two tech executives considered visionaries has its perks. Altman, with his tunnel vision on AI, seems unlikely to affect or sour Trump and Musk’s ideological bond and attempt to reshape the federal government. Perhaps the greater risk to xAI is that Musk overstays his MAGA welcome and attracts the president’s ire. And Musk does not appear to have turned Trump against OpenAI. When asked about Musk’s criticism of Stargate, the president shrugged it off: “He hates one of the people,” Trump told reporters. “But I have certain hatreds of people, too.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has managed to hold his nation together through three years of Russian barbarism, but apparently, he could do better by being a tad less shirty with the American president who has now taken Moscow’s side. Or so says the Kyiv bureau chief of The New York Times, Andrew Kramer, in a recent news analysis that amounted to a wince-inducing scolding of Zelensky.

“Fair or Not,” the headline announced, “Zelensky Is Angering Trump.” Now, headlines can be misleading; some are placed by an editor rather than the writer above a story. But this headline—unfortunately—captured the spirit of the article. The Times has provided the world with excellent reporting about Russia’s war in Ukraine, and to his credit, Kramer takes care to note that “Zelensky has mostly played weak hands wisely” in the face of the Russian onslaught.

But then Kramer suggests that Zelensky’s approach has been engendering “not empathy but hostility from the American president,” including a request to meet with Donald Trump that became “the latest example of a dramatic personal style that was once integral to his nation’s struggle but now looks more like a monkey wrench in dealing with the Trump administration.”

[Franklin Foer: A man who actually stands up to Trump]

Kramer seems to believe that Trump is capable of empathy, but the president’s public life suggests that he extends such emotions rarely, if ever, to anyone, and certainly not to the leader of a nation he blames for so many things (including his first bout of impeachment troubles). Trump likely couldn't care less about the fate of Ukraine beyond the war’s impact on his own fortunes, but even so, Kramer criticizes Zelensky for provoking the American president by making the apparently unreasonable demand that America should treat Ukraine as a real country:

Rather than once laying out Ukraine’s position, Mr. Zelensky reiterated at a security conference in Munich, a news conference in Turkey’s capital and two news conferences in Kyiv that he would reject Mr. Trump’s negotiations if they exclude Ukraine.

In other words, a wartime president repeatedly emphasized the single most important point of his government’s foreign policy—that his nation’s fate must not be decided without him—and Kramer is concerned that this position displeases the scornful American president. Kramer notes that “the constant public insistence on Ukrainian involvement has irritated Mr. Trump,” as if Zelensky was making a trivial demand, instead of refusing to have his country bargained over and partitioned by two leaders who are both now openly hostile to his nation and his government.

The reality is that everything about Zelensky irritates Trump, and Zelensky can’t do anything to mitigate that. Even if he bent the knee in the Oval Office and took Trump’s hand while vowing eternal loyalty, Trump long ago signaled that nothing would stop him from abandoning Ukraine to Vladimir Putin if given the chance. Kramer, however, argues that Zelensky should play ball with Trump, as though that could somehow work.

Kramer, for example, claims that cooperation is how Zelensky managed to pry loose Javelin anti-tank weapons from the Trump administration in 2019. This is a remarkably ahistorical explanation that ignores how Trump first attempted to use the Javelins and other military aid to strong-arm Zelensky into helping him discredit Joe Biden—a scheme for which Trump was impeached only a few months after releasing the weapons. It’s possible that Trump allowed the deal out of gratitude for some Ukrainian concessions (such as letting the Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort off the hook for some legal troubles in Kyiv), but it’s more likely that Trump was trying to cover his tracks with a complicated agreement to send the weapons, once the demand to investigate Biden fell through.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s three years of humiliation]

Kramer twice refers to Zelensky’s “showmanship,” an odd word to use about the behavior of a man at the helm of a nation at war. Brave and uncompromising public acts could also be called “leadership,” especially if they are meant to buck up a population in arms, signal resolve to the enemy, and spur allies to provide assistance. If such things are “showmanship,” Zelensky is not the first to engage in it. (After all, who did Winston Churchill think he was, flashing his famous V (for victory) signs, demanding help from the rest of the world, and even swanning about in a military uniform in his late 60s during World War II?)

“It is hotly debated in Ukraine,” Kramer adds, “whether Mr. Zelensky erred in his messaging by responding to insults from Mr. Trump with a few snipes of his own, rather than diplomatically navigating the U.S. president’s attacks.” The lack of context here is stunning: Trump, as Kramer himself notes, did not merely issue a few insults or zingers, but instead called Zelensky a dictator and literally blamed him for starting the war. Zelensky responded to these and other lies by claiming that Trump is caught in a Kremlin-created “web of disinformation,” which is quite a charitable explanation for Trump’s support for Putin.

Kramer ends by noting, rightly, that for many Ukrainians, Zelensky’s demand to be included in determining Ukraine’s future “is not just a sign of a stubborn character but a broadly endorsed position in the country.” An entire analysis, however, that amounts to a barely implicit warning to Zelensky that he should stop annoying the president of the United States with his patriotism and steadfastness is a terrible message, not only to the Ukrainians, but to American readers. The truth is that nothing Zelensky can do is ever going to sway Trump from a choice he made long ago, to stand with the only world leader he both fears and respects: Vladimir Putin.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around.

Only they didn’t. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother’s. “It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,” one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May.

As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard?

The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren’t searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. “I don’t want to say this kind of thing has never happened,” Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. “But I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.” Call it the Big Freeze.

[Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy]

The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself.  

The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. “It’s hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,” Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. “No one wanted to go through anything like it again.” Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones.

Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America’s economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees.

Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. “The most common thing I hear from employers is ‘We can’t move forward if we don’t know where the world is going to be in six months,’” Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. “Survive Until ’25” became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country.

By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged.

Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The “professional and business services” sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.)

[David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war]

A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn’t change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest.

For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers’ confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling “stuck” in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market—the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions.

This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. “This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,” Pollak told me. “A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.”

According to economists and executives, the labor market won’t thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place.