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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Trump hands the world to China. New York belongs to Trump now. Intimidating Americans will not work. The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials. Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity

Evening Read

Illustration by Julia Rothman

Flaco Lives

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Hélène Blanc

Read. Haley Mlotek’s new book is a divorce memoir with no lessons, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Watch. The third season of Yellowjackets (streaming on Paramount+). The show is more playful and ridiculous than ever before, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Here’s a warning story for the patriotic Americans who have gone to work for President Donald Trump.

President Richard Nixon recruited an eminent Republican lawyer, William P. Rogers, as his secretary of state. Over the ensuing four years, Nixon humiliated Rogers again and again and again.

The worst of the humiliations involved the negotiation of peace in Vietnam. While Rogers nominally presided over U.S. diplomacy, Nixon opened secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Rogers was kept completely in the dark. His only role came at the end, when it fell to him to sign the documents that doomed South Vietnam.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

That sad history now appears to be repeating itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Saudi Arabia pretending to be in charge of negotiations between the U.S. and Russia over the fate of Ukraine. Rubio is the perfect fall guy for this assignment. Confirmed as secretary of state by a 99–0 vote, he’s won praise from all sides for his commitment to American institutions and values.

Meanwhile, the real decisions are being made elsewhere. Trump yesterday blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. From the Oval Office, he is preparing a deal to give Russia the victory over Ukraine that it failed to win on the battlefield. The contemplated Trump deal would surrender Ukrainian territory to Russia and bar Ukraine from ever joining NATO. Trump wants an early end to sanctions on Russia, another unilateral U.S. concession to Putin. Yesterday, Trump accepted the Russian position that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should have to face reelection before peace talks begin. Again, no such demand is being made of Putin.  

Trump has demanded half a trillion dollars in economic concessions from Ukraine. If Ukraine says yes, its economic recovery will be wrecked before it starts. If, more realistically, Ukraine refuses, then Trump has gained his pretext for cutting Ukraine off from future U.S. security assistance. Meanwhile, Vice President J. D. Vance has scolded America’s NATO allies for trying to police the disinformation pumped out by Trump’s largest donor and de facto co-president, Elon Musk. Both Vance and Musk are outspoken opponents of Ukraine’s fight for survival. Trump is even considering a Russian invitation to join Putin in Moscow to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Russian “Victory Day” over Nazi Germany, which will now also symbolize Putin’s own victory over Ukraine and NATO.

This morning, Trump condemned Zelensky as a “dictator” and wildly exaggerated U.S. contributions to Ukraine’s self-defense by 400 percent, while also denying and denigrating Europe’s larger contributions.

Trump is surrounded by more normal Republicans trying to ingratiate themselves into his pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine inner circle. When Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, then-Senator Rubio abruptly reversed his previous support for Ukraine aid. In February 2024, Rubio numbered among the 29 senators voting against an aid package to Ukraine and Israel—a vote he justified in Trump-style language that falsely claimed that aid to Ukraine came at the price of enforcement efforts along the U.S. southern border. Then-Representative Michael Waltz, who is now Trump’s national security adviser, turned his coat at almost exactly the same time.

Both men may have imagined that they were exercising a tactical retreat to serve a bigger cause, preserving their credibility with Trump in order to protect America and its allies from Trump’s worst instincts. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special adviser on Ukraine, may entertain a similar hope.

But the evidence of past days suggests they are all deluding themselves. Trump wants to abandon Ukraine more than he has wanted to do anything as president, except possibly protect and pardon the January 6 criminals. His aides are playing the part of William P. Rogers, even as the real action is occurring all around them.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

If that’s not how they want to be remembered, they have to act fast. They have to begin by recognizing that this president wants to destroy Ukraine—and is surrounded by enablers who want to help him.

Perhaps Trump can be corralled, but if the pro-American faction within this administration wants to make itself felt, it has to be prepared to play as tough and rough as the pro-Putin faction from the president on down.

William P. Rogers was eventually fired by Nixon for his unwillingness to say and do all that Nixon wanted to defend Nixon during the Wagergate scandal. That’s the fate hanging over all those who joined this administration hoping to make it better. Trump is determined to make it worse. He’s the president, and he’s backed in his anti-Ukraine views by the people he most cares about. The noisy resignation is the ultimate weapon of the political appointee, and people inside this administration who care about America’s good name had best be prepared to use it. Otherwise, they will be used as fools and fronts in an administration that seems to be placing Russian interests ahead of America’s own.

Elon Musk and his team of software engineers at the Department of Government Efficiency are rampaging through the government in search of fraud, waste, and abuse. The government, they claim, is misusing taxpayer money. They are willing to shut down entire agencies to prove their point. By treating the civil service as a business, as well as importing Musk’s ruthless managerial style into public agencies, the Silicon Valley disrupters believe that the country can produce a leaner and more efficient government.

Put aside for now the fact that these actions are likely illegal and unconstitutional. The central problem is the false assumption of this approach: that problems of inefficiency in federal agencies stem exclusively from the public administration. Much of the waste, inefficiency, and indeed fraud result from the government’s overreliance on private-sector organizations to conduct its work. This byzantine system of outsourcing to nonprofit and for-profit organizations adds costs and creates waste because each nongovernmental contractor exacts fees or imposes a profit margin. In addition, government officials have in recent years exposed multiple cases of embezzlement by USAID contractors, leading to millions of dollars in fines paid out by major companies and their executives.

If the country is serious about improving government efficiency, the emphasis should be on curtailing contracting and making the civil service more accountable—to American voters and to their elected representatives, not to freelance tech bros.

[Peter Wehner: The cruel attack on USAID]

The contracting swamp we have today emerged through previous attempts to streamline government by cutting the federal workforce. All such efforts ended the same way: a modest number of layoffs among public workers combined with a dramatic expansion of private-sector contracting. In fact, our postwar history shows that federal spending has ballooned while the size of the federal workforce has remained almost static: In 1946, the government employed about 2.5 million workers and ran a budget of $628 billion (in today’s dollars); in 2023, it had only half a million more workers, but its budget stood at $4.6 trillion.

How does the government disburse this colossal budget? Through contracting. A 2017 tally estimated that more than 5.2 million contract and grant employees worked for the federal government. On the largely unexamined assumption that the private sector is more efficient, past administrations of both parties have eagerly embraced contracting to make up for limited administrative capacity.

President after president has sought to cut the federal workforce—without reducing the responsibilities and demands on government agencies. That has meant ever greater reliance on contracting. President Ronald Reagan—who famously asserted that government was the problem, not the solution, to the country’s ills—oversaw shrinking the federal civil service by more than 130,000 employees in his first two years in office. Meanwhile, an equivalent number of civil servants was working solely on contract and grant administration. And over Reagan’s first term, spending on contract consultants increased from $1.1 billion to more than $1.5 billion. The Clinton administration echoed Reagan’s rhetoric and sought to win favor for the Democrats with a “reinventing government” program that cut the federal workforce by nearly 400,000 direct hires—even as it expanded the shadow government of contractor workers by nearly 300,000.

USAID, the foreign-aid agency that Musk has been busy feeding “into the wood chipper,” offers a prime example of how extensively privatized so much government work already is. The federal government first made overseas economic development a significant feature of U.S. foreign policy in the years following World War II. From foreign aid’s inception, the government contracted out much of this activity, largely because, after wartime state involvement in industry, a strident anti-statism took hold in Congress. As Cold War anti-Soviet sentiment rose, conservative politicians inveighed against the New Deal federal bureaucracy as evidence of a collectivist power grab. Congress responded by capping the growth of the civil service, but that did not limit the government’s scope or aspirations; foreign aid became a particular Cold War priority as an exercise of soft power. Expansive government aims instead swelled the number of private-sector contractors.

“The entire effort that the government agency carries out here is really carried out through private organizations,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson said in 1952, referring to the forerunner of USAID. “We do not have in the Government sufficient people to staff these operations, sufficient people to give us all the ideas, to give us all the working groups which are necessary.” So private actors would be drafted in to do the work.

Subsequent changes to foreign aid reinforced contracting as the core of U.S. foreign policy, including in the legislative text that originally established USAID in 1961, and in amendments a year later that mandated USAID to “utilize wherever practicable the services of United States private enterprise,” such as “the services of experts and consultants.” As early as 1964, USAID had committed more than $400 million through some 1,200 contracts for technical assistance from universities, for-profit firms, and nonprofits.

This contracting meant that most foreign-aid money went straight to domestic organizations. William Gaud, who led USAID during the Johnson administration, was blunt about this. “The biggest simple misconception about the foreign-aid program is that we send money abroad,” he said in a 1968 speech. “We don’t.” At the time, about 95 percent of the agency’s $1 billion–plus budget was spent directly in the United States.

USAID continued to be an important tool of U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, overseeing many of the “shock therapy” programs designed to help the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries transition to Western-style capitalism. But, as an early experiment in Bill Clinton’s “reinvention laboratory,” the agency suffered from the growing reliance on outsourcing. A 1993 Government Accountability Office report noted that expanding USAID work into newly independent countries “further burdened its operating expense budget, resulting in greater dependence on contractors and a greater potential that programs will be vulnerable to fraud, waste, or abuse for lack of adequate oversight.”

The way the contracting system favored U.S. firms was all too apparent. In the shock-therapy programs, U.S. aid was “composed for the most part of financial intangibles and technical assistance,” one U.S. diplomat complained. “The result is that very few Russians have seen anything at all of the vaunted billions … most simply do not believe the money ever existed.” Rather, money flowed from the U.S. government directly to “domestic contractors,” the diplomat added. For obvious reasons, this undermined U.S. foreign-policy goals, generating more frustration and cynicism than gratitude.

By 2001, more than 80 percent of USAID contracts went to domestic for-profit and nonprofit companies. Although Musk has singled out nonprofits that receive grants for projects he finds risible, in practice USAID has long given its most lucrative and important contracts to American corporations. By 1996, consulting and accounting firms such as Abt Associates, Booz Allen Hamilton, KPMG, and Chemonics International all held tens of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts. For such companies, this government spending was virtually their entire business: When Chemonics, for example, reported $85 million in revenue in the last nine months of 1999, 90 percent of its business came from USAID contracts. In 2009, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat, lamented that the agency had been reduced to a “check-writing agency.”

At least government-transparency mechanisms made the problems of over-relying on private-sector partners visible and public. But even that degree of accountability is disappearing in Musk’s bonfire of the agencies. USAID’s database of past research projects, for instance, provided scholars like me with valuable insights into foreign aid—and its flaws. Now that resource has been yanked offline. Likewise, inspectors general and the GAO produced reports that highlighted wasteful spending and outright fraud. Recent federal investigations have turned up staggering cases of graft and corruption. Contractors were indicted for a range of fraudulent charges while doing reconstruction and humanitarian work in Iraq and Afghanistan, including classic bribery and wire-fraud cases and engagement in illegal activities to help other contractors secure contracts. As recently as 2023, Booz Allen Hamilton agreed to pay $377 million—one of the largest procurement-fraud settlements in the country’s history—because the for-profit company was caught overbilling the government to cover its private-sector losses.

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

Silicon Valley tech moguls were not necessary to root out waste; the government was already doing that. But last month, the Trump administration took a hammer to such oversight when the president fired more than a dozen agency watchdogs. Congress could certainly do a better job of oversight, with a greater emphasis on exposing corruption and conflicts of interest. It could also empower inspectors general as its enforcers against graft and waste. One obstacle to smarter reform is that the person charged with overhauling the government has himself been a huge beneficiary of its largesse. Musk’s companies have enjoyed more than $15 billion in contracts over the past decade (including some from USAID), a spigot that continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into his pocket every year.  

The contracting model has bloated government costs while hindering public accountability and insulating policy making from citizens. Rather than inviting billionaires to demonize the civil service, the true solution to government inefficiency is to reverse outsourcing. Severing private contractors and hiring more public servants would allow the state to cut time spent managing contractors and devote more resources to the actual work of government. Relaxing hiring regulations could help agencies hire bright and enthusiastic talent, as could raising pay for federal employees. Instead of dismantling the federal workforce, we should put the contracting system in the wood chipper.

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During his most recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “put unelected bureaucrats back in their place.” Apparently, that place is in the federal government, doing what they want with little accountability.

The most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the United States today—and perhaps ever—is Elon Musk. The social-media troll and tech mogul is currently a “special government employee” leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency, though it is neither a department nor, as far as can be ascertained, all that interested in improving efficiency. DOGE’s clearest goal seems to be getting rid of as many civil servants as possible, by whatever means possible—including cajoling, buyouts, and firings, some of which have drawn reproach from courts.

The assault on government workers has been a long time coming. In 2017, during his first term, Trump began referring to federal employees as the “deep state,” and he often accused them of undermining him or slow-walking his ideas. It didn’t help that he often asked for impossible or illegal things, though the most prominent examples of defiance came from Cabinet-level, Senate-confirmed officials whom Trump himself had appointed. While campaigning as a quasi-populist, Trump railed against unelected officials who he argued treated ordinary citizens with disdain, assuming they knew best, or who were deeply enmeshed in conflicts of interest and lining their own pockets. Trump and his allies repeatedly suggested that Joe Biden’s aides were running the government because the president was too checked out to manage.

Now an unelected aide, beset with conflicts of interest, seems to be effectively running the government. He’s barreling through carefully constructed guardrails, acting as though he knows better than anyone else how the government ought to run, while a passive president looks on. No one’s pretending that Trump is particularly interested in the software systems of the government, and he’s made clear that he’s pretty detached from it all. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go,” he said of Musk’s role recently. In short, Trump has set a broad direction and tasked Musk with executing the details. That’s what bureaucrats do.

Because this is exactly what Trump campaigned against, justifying it is challenging, though apologists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk are game to try. “The American people quite literally voted for Elon Musk and DOGE when they elected Donald Trump with a historic mandate,” Kirk posted on X. But that’s absurd. Trump said on the trail that Musk would help him, but he didn’t outline this. The DOGE idea wasn’t formally announced until after the election, and Trump didn’t run on dismantling USAID or selling off half the government’s real-estate portfolio. Musk wasn’t elected, hasn’t been vetted or confirmed by the Senate, and didn’t even have to go through the standard hiring process. This is probably just as well; his admitted use of controlled substances might pose some challenges. He will reportedly not release a financial disclosure, and the White House says he’ll police his own conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, he has a long track record of questionable ethical decisions.

Democrats, otherwise reeling in the first weeks of the Trump administration, have picked up on the fact that Musk may be a useful target. Although most Democratic attacks on Trump’s populist persona have fallen short, this one seems more promising. Firing thousands of federal workers for nothing more than doing their job, while clinging to a self-described racist and a teenager nicknamed “Big Balls,” may not go over well with voters who just wanted inflation fixed. Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a red district in Maine, reported that he was getting a flood of constituent calls about Musk.

Focusing on Musk’s outrageous abuse of power may not be as effective as Democrats hope. Musk obviously hates many of the same people whom Trump’s fans hate, and that’s a powerful bonding force. What sinks Musk may ultimately be not populist resentment but court rulings against him, Trump’s need to remain the center of attention, or backlash when the cuts he’s pursuing start affecting voters’ lives directly.

“An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. “Congress must take action to restore the rule of law.” (If only Schumer knew anyone in Congress!) Musk quickly replied: “This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.”

The most striking thing about this response—other than the world’s richest man adopting Leninist rhetoric about “the revolution of the people”—is its reversal of reality. Schumer won an election; Musk is just a bureaucrat.

Related:

Elon Musk is president. Elon Musk’s bureaucratic coup is under way.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Is this what cancel culture achieved? Trump says the corrupt part out loud. DOGE is failing on its own terms. What happens when bird flu gets worse?

Today’s News

Trump hosted Jordanian King Abdullah II at the White House, where they discussed the president’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Gaza cease-fire would end if Hamas did not go through with the hostage release scheduled for Saturday. The Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors yesterday to withdraw the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

What an ‘America First’ Diet Would Really Look Like

By Yasmin Tayag

Trump’s stance on agriculture is the same as his stance on everything else: “America First.”

The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system would promote eating seasonally and locally, supporting more small farmers in the process. But that is not how most people eat now.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cruel attack on USAID Good on Paper: The great political sort is happening at the office. Blame Gerald Ford for Trump’s unaccountability. It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans.

Culture Break

Illustration by Panayiotis Terzis

Read. Mood Machine will make you marvel at how much effort Spotify puts into recommending a song that sounds like a different song you liked three months ago, Brad Shoup writes.

Ponder. “Should I leave my American partner?” one reader asks James Parker in the latest edition of “Dear James.” “I love him, but I don’t know if I can live in the U.S. forever.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

To me, Kendrick Lamar’s use of American-flag and Uncle Sam imagery at Sunday’s Super Bowl was fairly clearly political—and subversive. What it was not, however, was blunt. Perhaps the overly literal protest gestures of the first Trump administration have somewhat numbed viewers to anything more subtle. Regardless, I was amused and perplexed to see some commentators taking the flag’s presence as a signal of alignment with the president. “When backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political,” wrote The Free Press’s River Page, as though patriotism can ever be apolitical.

All of this reminded me of George Will’s review of a 1984 Bruce Springsteen show. “For the initiated, which included most of the 20,000 the night I experienced him, the lyrics, believe it or not, are most important,” Will observed. But apparently the famously erudite columnist’s insights failed him, as he badly misunderstood one of the sharpest critiques (and critics) of the Reagan era. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” So close, and yet so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Can Jewish space lasers protect America? At first glance, President Donald Trump seems to think so. The 2024 Republican Party platform had just 20 planks, consisting of only 277 words. Twelve of those words were: “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY.” Since taking office, Trump has moved to make good on that pledge. On January 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised swift action on the subject. That night, Trump signed an executive order titled “The Iron Dome for America,” turning the plan into policy.

In actuality, what Trump is proposing looks very little like Israel’s Iron Dome. His executive order calls for a space-based interception system to counter “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles.” Iron Dome is a land-based array that mostly targets unsophisticated short-range rockets and mortars fired by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel supplements this system with several other layers of missile defense, including David’s Sling and Arrow 3, which did most of the work repelling Iran’s aerial assaults on the country last April and October. Later this year, Israel is also expected to roll out Iron Beam, a laser-based system that can down projectiles for a fraction of the cost of Iron Dome’s interceptors—provided that it isn’t raining.

Many of these systems were developed with American partnership, and some could perhaps be adapted for deployment in the United States—although, as a land mass surrounded by oceans, the U.S. homeland has very different defense needs than the tiny Israeli state. But the point of Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” is not its feasibility. The system doesn’t have to work—or even exist—for it to serve the president’s interests.

[Read: The costly success of Israel’s iron dome]

A singular self-promoter, Trump excels at cutting through the cacophony of American politics with bold, blunt, and often cinematic images—such as “Iron Dome for America.” At a time when civil discourse is scattered across innumerable media platforms, attention is arguably a public figure’s most important resource, and Trump knows how to monopolize it. As when the president promised draconian tariffs against Mexico during his first weeks in office only to fold before they went into effect, he has figured out what our sclerotic political system actually rewards—brash bombast, not results—and governs accordingly, performing toughness rather than achieving outcomes.

This talent for theatricality is actually a big part of how Trump became president in the first place. In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas launched his own presidential bid as a harsh critic of illegal immigration, promising in a detailed 4,700-word policy platform to “secure the border once and for all.” Yet Cruz failed to gain traction, because he was bigfooted by a political outsider who had no policy experience but unmatched show business savvy. Trump promised to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” and rode that mantra to the presidency—after which the wall was never completed and Mexico did not pay for it.

Given Trump’s exceptional instinct for indelible images, that he landed on the Iron Dome as his latest gimmick is no surprise. For both Israel’s supporters and its detractors, the country’s missile-defense system emblemizes the technological frontier of warfare, thanks to countless photos and videos of its dramatic mid-air interceptions of enemy projectiles. As someone who made his name in real estate and television by manipulating people’s perceptions, Trump intuitively grasped the power of the Iron Dome in the popular imagination, and crudely co-opted it. Whether the system’s details make sense for America is not particularly important. For his purposes, the symbolism supercedes the substance.

Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor, also understood that a grand missile-defense project would appeal to the public consciousness. Critics derided Reagan’s plan as “Star Wars,” but its futuristic feel was precisely what made it so captivating, which is why the project consistently polled well, despite never coming to fruition.

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was a fanciful eccentricity in an otherwise robust governing agenda. But for Trump, flashy contrivances such as Iron Dome for America are the agenda. Unlike Reagan, who developed a broad political philosophy over his years in public life, Trump has few real principles and little interest in the nitty-gritty of legislation. He cares less about long-term outcomes than about being seen to be driving events. This is why he prefers to rule through grand pronouncements and executive actions, even though these are often ephemeral and can easily be tied up in litigation or overturned by a successor.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Such indifference to end results might seem like a recipe for disappointing one’s supporters. But Trump is betting that in today’s chaotic information and political environment, appearing to care about issues that voters care about will be more important than actually delivering on them. And he has reason to be optimistic: Trump’s electoral coalition depends on people who don’t closely follow politics; many of them are less aware of the policies a politician implements than the image he projects. Trump, ever the performer, has mastered the art of marketing himself to the masses, and has used this skill to transform American politics.

In 2016, Cruz had a punctilious 25-point plan to curb illegal immigration; Trump had a sensational slogan about making Mexico pay for it—and trounced him. President Joe Biden’s economic policies delivered major gains for low-wage workers; Trump’s proposed tariffs are essentially a tax on those workers, but they voted for him over Biden, because Trump appeared to be vigorously fighting for them. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is a basket case run by people with little government experience, and is less likely than a commission staffed by experts to effectively curb federal spending without ugly unintended consequences. But DOGE is also a far more visible endeavor, fronted by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. The Abraham Accords were mostly a symbolic handshake between Middle Eastern countries that had never fought a war against one another, but Trump’s branding and ceremony made the agreements into something more.

Again and again, Trump has managed to transmute political performance into the appearance of political achievement. Whether it’s promising a border wall or an Iron Dome, he may not be America’s most competent president, but he is its greatest showman, and in our broken political system, that might be enough to maintain his dominance over our collective attention and affairs of state.