Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters that he’s a fighter, a fearless champion who always has their back. Such guarantees, however, apparently do not apply to people who worked for him when they’re threatened by foreign assassins. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the former Pompeo aide Brian Hook have all been targeted by Trump for political retribution. They are also being targeted by the Iranians, but the regime in Tehran has marked them all for death.

The president may be spoiling for a fight with career bureaucrats and “woke” professors, but when it comes to Iranian assassins, he is willing to walk away from men who carried out his orders. Milley, Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook all served in Trump’s first administration—he appointed them to their posts—and they were part of the Trump national-security team when the United States killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a strike in January 2020. In 2022, an Iranian national was arrested and charged with trying to arrange Bolton’s murder, and American intelligence believes that other officials—including Trump himself—have been targeted by Iran because of their involvement in killing Soleimani.

The Biden administration briefed the incoming Trump administration on these threats and on the security details it had authorized to protect Bolton and others. Last week, Trump removed the details protecting Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook; yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed the guards around Milley and announced that he would be investigating Milley for undermining the chain of command during Trump’s first term. Trump also revoked the security clearances held by all four men.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The revocation of security clearances is petty, but it harms the administration more than it does any of these men. Retaining a clearance helps former federal employees find work in the consulting world, and it is typical to hold on to them after leaving government service. (I was offered the opportunity to keep mine when I left the Naval War College.) But at more senior levels, clearances allow people in government to get advice from former leaders. Some of these people could have been of significant help to Trump’s staff during a crisis, although Trump himself is unlikely to care about that possibility.

Removing the security details, however, could have deadly consequences. The Iranians seem determined to seek revenge for the killing of Soleimani, and sooner or later, they might succeed. (“The Iranians are not good but they’re very enthusiastic,” a former Pentagon official said in October. “And of course, they’ve only got to get lucky once.”) And the Iranians aren’t the only threat out there; the Russians have no compunctions about attacking people in their home country, often using gruesome methods.

Trump takes such threats very seriously where he is concerned. When Biden officials alerted Trump to the danger from Iran, Trump asked for more security from the U.S. government, and during his campaign, according to The New York Times, he even asked that military assets be assigned to protect him, something usually provided only to sitting presidents.

Lesser mortals, however, must fend for themselves: Trump and Hegseth not only took away the security details of these former policy makers but did so with significant publicity, almost as if to broadcast to America’s enemies that anyone who wanted to settle scores with these officials would get no trouble from the current White House. (Trump also canceled protection for 84-year-old Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been the target of multiple threats from other Americans.) Trump despises critics such as Bolton and Milley, and it is unsurprising that he has no obvious issue subjecting them to physical danger. But even some Republicans —who should be used to this kind of vengefulness from the leader of their party—have been shocked, and are trying to get Trump to reverse course. They are particularly concerned about Pompeo and Hook, loyalists whose lives have been placed in jeopardy for sins that are known only to the president.

[Read: Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity]

In another time, Americans would rally to protect their own from the agents of one of their most dedicated enemies. Today, most citizens seem either unaware or unperturbed that the president of the United States is exposing his own former staff to immense risks. Nevertheless, it should be said clearly and without equivocation: President Trump will bear direct responsibility for any harm that could come to these people from foreign actors.

This is far more than Trump’s usual pettiness. He has always considered the oath of federal service to be little more than an oath of loyalty to him, and he has always been willing to threaten his opponents. (In 2018, he apparently considered handing Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, over to Moscow, a move that provoked a level of outrage that seems quaint today.) Trump’s message in this second term is that friends and subordinates are literally disposable if they cross him: He will not only humiliate and fire them, but he will also subject them to actual physical danger.

This escalation of Trump’s vindictiveness should serve as a very personal warning to anyone willing to work for him in his second term. Senior officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and other organizations are routinely asked to go head-to-head with representatives of some of the most dangerous nations on the planet, and to contribute to operations against those regimes. In the past, such officials could do so knowing that their own government would do everything it could to keep them—and their family—safe from foreign agents. As one of Bolton’s former deputies, Charles Kupperman, told the Times: “Trump’s national security team must provide guidance based on their assessment of what needs to be done to protect America without regard to their personal security.”

Good luck with that. No one who works in defense or national-security affairs can assume that, when Trump orders them to cross America’s many enemies in the world, he will protect them from foreign vengeance. Trump has now made clear that he will abandon people who have taken risks in the service of the United States—even those who were following his own orders—if they happen to displease him. (Or, in the case of Pompeo and Hook, for no apparent reason at all.) Hegseth, for his part, may have no real idea what he’s done, and may merely be courting favor from a boss who has elevated him far beyond his abilities. But Trump knows better; he is himself the survivor of an assassination attempt, and no level of security was enough when he thought the Iranians were gunning for him.

People still considering whether to serve Trump can have no illusions about what awaits them. True leaders take responsibility for their team. Trump is no such leader; he will, on a whim, place other Americans in danger and then, as he famously put it in his previous term, take no responsibility at all.

The first 10 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have seen such an onslaught of executive orders and implementing actions that Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone with shit” seems apt. But that characterization is incomplete, and it obscures a more frightening truth: The Trump administration’s actions have been not just voluminous but efficient and effective. Though Trump himself may not appreciate the depth of detail that has gone into these early days, his allies do appear to understand what they are doing, and they seem to have his unquestioning consent to do whatever they like.  

And what they want is very clear: to take full control of the federal government. Not in the way that typifies every change of administration but in a more extreme way designed to eradicate opposition, disempower federal authority, and cause federal bureaucrats to cower. It is an assault on basic governance.

A great deal of thought has gone into this effort already. The executive orders and sundry administrative directives and guidance that have been issued reflect a profound understanding of the federal government and exactly where the weak spots within the bureaucracy might lie.

Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

Consider, as a first example, the order that reassigned 20 senior career lawyers within the U.S. Department of Justice. Because of their career status, they could not be unilaterally fired, but Trump’s team did the next best thing by reassigning them to a newly created “Sanctuary Cities” task force. With one administrative act, the senior leaders of public-integrity investigations, counter-intelligence investigations, and crypto-currency investigations—individuals with immense experience in criminal law—were taken off the board and assigned to a body that is, apparently, tasked with taking legal actions against cities that do not assist in Trump’s immigration crackdown. Their former offices were effectively neutered.

As my friend, the former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, put it: “These are career people. They are not political. They are people who have been in these positions often many, many years or even decades. They have developed a real expertise, and that’s a great resource for the government.” A resource that is now lost.

But this is not merely an attack on expertise. This maneuver has a further effect: to disable opposition. Career employees with this degree of expertise and experience are exactly the type who would embody institutional norms and, thus, exactly the sort who could be expected, in their own way, to form a bulwark of institutional resistance to Trumpian excess. Moreover, three of the prosecuting sections of the DOJ that have been disrupted—public integrity (an anti-corruption unit), counterintelligence (combatting foreign influence), and crypto crime—are precisely the three units whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies.

The same playbook was also used last week to hamstring environmental enforcement, by reassigning four senior environmental lawyers at the DOJ to immigration matters. The leaders of these four litigating sections are four of the most experienced environmental lawyers in the nation. Additionally, the Trump administration has frozen action on all cases handled by the Justice Department’s Environmental Enforcement Section, with substantial practical disruption. Once again, expertise has been lost and the functionality of government institutions has been significantly impaired, with the inevitable result that companies subject to environmental regulation (including Trump’s big corporate supporters) will be less policed.

One could continue with a number of other examples, whether the wholesale reassignment of 160 staffers at the National Security Council (responsible for coordinating crucial national-security matters at the White House), the reassignment of DOJ civil-rights leadership (enforcing DEI mandates), or the appointment Ed Martin (a January 6 denier) as the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. But the themes are always the same: Long-standing expertise is discarded and institutional effectiveness diminished.  

[Read: Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity]

More to the point, however, these actions are a “deep cut” reflecting significant planning and intent. The chiefs at DOJ’s public-integrity or environmental-enforcement sections are by no means household names. Nobody outside their immediate ambit of authority would know who they are. And yet the extent of knowledge demonstrated by Trump’s team in reassigning them is extensive. Trump’s team knows which high-value targets might offer internal resistance, and it has removed them.

A second pillar of Trump’s effort to take over the government can be seen in his steps to eliminate any independent oversight of his actions.

Here, the headline is his attempted purge of at least a dozen inspectors general.  Inspectors general, as an institution, are perhaps not so little-known as the DOJ section chiefs who were dismissed, but as individuals, they are mostly anonymous. IGs serve as an internal check on waste, fraud, and abuse at federal agencies. They were created by Congress in the 1970s as a semi-independent authority intended to be insulated from presidential control. They routinely report to Congress and the public about misconduct that they identify for corrective action.

Indeed, Congress so highly values the independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship of IGs that, following Trump’s first presidency, it passed a law strengthening that independence and limiting a president’s removal authority. No doubt recognizing the threat that independent oversight might pose to his planned actions, Trump’s (possibly illegal) removal order is a frontal assault on the careful monitoring Congress has sought to build into the government

To similar effect, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. That relatively obscure office (with a budget of only $7 million and 30 staff), little noticed outside the Army, is intended to study ways of reducing civilian harm during combat. But Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, thinks that “restrictive rules of engagement” make defeating the enemy harder, but the protection of civilians is all about careful rules of engagement. Again, the Trump administration’s action reflects both a substantive desire to diminish oversight and a depth of bureaucratic knowledge that is extensive.

That depth can also be seen in Trump’s announced intention to fire three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The PCLOB is an independent bipartisan oversight board reviewing executive-branch law-enforcement and intelligence surveillance activities. Yet, despite its crucial internal importance, the PCLOB is hardly a well-known institution. Save for those, like me, who work in that field, few, if any, outside observers could likely define the board’s role or name its members.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

And still, Trump’s team knew enough to identify an ingenious way of neutering the board. As an independent, statutorily created agency, it could not be eliminated. But the board does require a quorum to operate, and by firing three of its five members this past Monday, Trump effectively eliminated its oversight. As Senator Ron Wyden put it: “By purging the Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Trump is kneecapping one of the only independent watchdogs over government surveillance who could alert Congress and the public about surveillance abuses by his administration.” And he is doing so in a highly sophisticated manner.

Along with large-scale actions to reform government, Trump’s orders included a plethora of small-bore, petty-minded actions designed to implement his personal prejudices and desire for revenge. For example, he has stripped Anthony Fauci of his federal security detail. He has also dismissed Admiral Linda Fagan of the Coast Guard, the only woman who has ever led a military branch, on a transparently inaccurate claim of ineffectiveness. Likewise, he has stripped security protection from Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (both of whom are under affirmative threat from Iran). His administration’s ban on “activist” flags at U.S. embassies would be almost comical if it did not exemplify the coldhearted efficiency at the core of Trump’s new presidency. These actions are petty, but they also reflect the comprehensive nature of his purpose and the extent of his team’s planning.

Were it not so dangerous to democratic norms, the efficiency of these early days would almost be admirable, in the same way that one might admire a well-run play by an opposing football team. But politics is not a game, and this nation’s basic security and functioning are at risk. Those who oppose Trump’s actions do not have an incompetent opponent; Trump’s team is savvy and has been planning for this for years. They came ready.

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, is a longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist. He thinks Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are leaders of a “vaccine cartel” that intentionally prolonged or even started the coronavirus pandemic in order to promote “mischievous inoculations.” Kennedy also blames immunizations for autism and obesity (among other chronic diseases) in children. In the meantime, he isn’t really sure whether HIV causes AIDS, or whether vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles are actually dangerous.

As a doctor, I have spent years following—and fighting—anti-vaccine falsehoods. Along the way, I’ve learned an important lesson: Despite RFK Jr.’s fringe beliefs, he often seems to make sense. Kennedy’s defenders celebrate his fondness for, and facility with, evidence. His real talent, though, is for the clever manipulation of facts. Kennedy is not just a conspiracy theorist; he’s a very good conspiracy theorist. When his confirmation hearing starts on Wednesday, we can expect that he will do what he’s always done, which is to apply a veneer of erudition to nonsense. He may even come off as almost … reasonable.

To witness how this works, read the letter he sent to the prime minister of Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense in November 2019, during that country’s deadly measles outbreak. Kennedy offers his condolences for the tragic deaths of “precious Samoan children,” and then suggests the need to study the outbreak carefully, so as to “thoroughly understand its etiology.” What might have caused thousands of Samoans to get sick? The letter poses two possibilities: “It is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.”

At first glance, and for nonexperts, this letter may appear well reasoned and well sourced. It weaves in historical elements and biomedical data, and includes a list of peer-reviewed references at the end. The letter’s main request—that Samoan officials do nothing more than perform genetic testing on the circulating virus—sounds prudent. Prior research has indicated that vaccinated individuals may shed the virus and infect others, the letter says. Wouldn’t it be good to know if that produced the outbreak?

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

In reality, of course, the epidemic was caused not by the vaccines but by the lack of them. (A vaccine-administration accident the year before had produced a scare that led vaccination rates to decline dramatically.) Although the letter’s implication that vaccines were to blame seemed wrong on its face, only when I dived into the cited scientific articles could I see the problems with its details. Kennedy incorrectly claims that genetic sequencing of a large measles outbreak in California from about four years prior found that at least one-third of the cases were due to the vaccine. “Alarmed CDC officials documented this emerging phenomenon,” he wrote. The referenced articles show this to be a fundamental misrepresentation. Although they do describe how the vaccine may, in rare cases, produce a dangerous case of measles, they specifically note that there is no risk of its being transmitted to another person. The genetic testing that Kennedy referenced is used, in part, to distinguish among people who have experienced mild vaccine reactions such as rash and fever from those who have true measles infections. This is important during active epidemics when public-health officials are widely immunizing people, while at the same time trying to isolate infectious individuals. (Kennedy’s press team did not respond to emailed questions about his letter to Samoa, or about other issues with his credibility that are raised in this article.)

A complete refutation of the Samoa letter would run many pages. That may be the point. With his ample, erroneous allusions to scholarship and appeals to authority, Kennedy has perfected the art of the Gish Gallop: a debate strategy in which the speaker simply overwhelms the listener with information, not all of it true. Kennedy’s skill at flooding his audiences with specious claims that sound logical or highbrow was on full display during his 2023 interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan. Over the course of three hours, Kennedy regaled the host with stories about vaccine safety, Albert Camus, Wi-Fi radiation, and the sexual health of frogs, among other subjects. He offered up a bounty of scientific arguments: The words study and studies came up 70 times during the conversation. And, as he has done elsewhere, he encouraged the audience to fact-check everything he said. “Nobody should trust my word on this,” he declared. “You know, what I say is irrelevant. What is relevant is the science.”

[Read: The new Rasputins]

Most of Rogan’s listeners—like most U.S. senators—aren’t likely to have the scientific expertise to assess each of his claims, and certainly not in real time. I caught some errors in the Rogan interview only by virtue of my medical training. For example, Kennedy criticized the inclusion of the hepatitis B shot in the childhood vaccine schedule. The virus is primarily a problem for intravenous-drug users, prostitutes, and homosexuals, he suggested. “Why would you give it to a one-day-old baby, you know, or a three-hour-old baby, and then four more times when that baby is not going to be even subject to it for 16 years?” he asked Rogan. Kennedy’s story sounds informed: He is facile with epidemiology and vaccine regulations; he can describe historical machinations that supposedly took place between Merck and the CDC. But the truth is that most chronic hepatitis B infections are contracted during early childhood, or through mother-to-child transmission. That’s why the World Health Organization recommends immunizing babies, and it’s why nearly every country has chosen to do so.

Kennedy does, at times, say true things about vaccines. He was not wrong, for example, when he told the podcaster Lex Fridman that early batches of the polio vaccine were contaminated with a virus called SV40. But he magnifies and distorts such flaws to the point of absurdity. SV40-containing vaccines did not cause an “explosion” of cancers, as he has argued. Kennedy is also right to say the MMR vaccine doesn’t always provide lifelong immunity to the mumps virus. However, his more extreme assertions—that the shot is causing mumps outbreaks in the military or that the disease is harmless in children—are wrong. (Before vaccination, service members routinely suffered from infections, and kids were at a heightened risk of developing brain inflammation and hearing loss.) Kennedy relies on scraps of truth to construct an alternative reality in which vaccines don’t work, their harms outweigh their benefits, and the diseases themselves aren’t so bad.

At his confirmation hearing, senators will ask him to defend that dangerous, alternative reality. He is likely to do so with impressive-sounding falsehoods, delivered with aplomb. Heed his own advice. No one should trust his word on this.

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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.

Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.

Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some important people on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.

Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?

Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.

But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.

The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.

Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?

Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.

Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.

These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.

Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?

Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.

Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.

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Please Don’t Make Me Say My Boyfriend’s Name

By Shayla Love

Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable … “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia.

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Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney and immunologist Anthony Fauci among those offered protection.

Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message.

Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying.

The venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for example, could not be more of an establishment figure: He was an early investor in Facebook, is now a mentor of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance, and has strong links to the U.S. defense industry through his company Palantir. But in a recent opinion column in the ultra-establishment Financial Times, Thiel sounds like The X-Files’ Fox Mulder after a long night in the Bigfoot forums. “The future demands fresh and strange ideas,” he writes.

[Read: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Thiel implies, we might finally know the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whether the coronavirus was a bioweapon. Thiel notes that the internet also has questions about the death of the well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis”—that is, a revealing—“of the ancien regime’s secrets,” he adds. (Two pretentious expressions in one sentence? Monsieur, watch out for hubris.) Thiel wants large-scale declassifications and a truth-and-reconciliation commission, in the model of South Africa’s reckoning with apartheid. “The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619,” Thiel writes, referring to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, “but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”

Thiel portrays Trump’s resurgence as a defeat for the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex,” or DISC—his friend and employee Eric Weinstein’s term for legacy media outlets and nongovernmental organizations that supposedly prevent politically inconvenient truths from reaching the public. Thanks to the internet, information can no longer be suppressed.

Like most classic conspiracism, Thiel’s arguments contain grains of truth. As Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger wisely notes, “The line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.” Thiel is right that some liberal commentators and mainstream outlets were too quick to dismiss the question of whether COVID-19 originated anywhere other than a Wuhan meat market. At one point, a New York Times reporter suggested on Twitter that racism underlay any suspicions that the virus had escaped from a research lab. None of this shows, however, that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, or that Anthony Fauci deserves to be prosecuted. (For that matter, the Times has run multiple articles that are open-minded about the origins of the virus.) In any case, who was president in 2020, when the COVID-origins debate was emerging? If any classified evidence existed that would have cleared up the controversy, Donald Trump had the power to disclose it.

[From the October 2023 issue: From feminist to right-wing conspiracist]

As for Epstein, his death, in 2019, was certainly very convenient for anyone who might have been embarrassed by what he knew. Nevertheless, the so-called mainstream media are not covering up the lingering questions; definitive answers simply aren’t available, and may never be. (CBS broadcast an episode of 60 Minutes with graphic photos of Epstein’s autopsy all the way back in January 2020.) Besides, if anyone is hiding the truth about Epstein, it’s probably not the left-wing blob. Who would benefit from killing a man who hung out with Trump, Prince Andrew, and various tech billionaires? Probably not blue-haired vegans from Portland, Oregon; racial-justice campaigners; or humanities academics. Meanwhile, the idea that anyone stifled doubts about the official explanation of the Kennedy assassination before social media is laughable. The subject has captivated Americans for more than six decades. Oliver Stone’s JFK, which highlighted florid conspiracy theories about the former president’s death, came out in 1991. The film starred Kevin Costner and won two Oscars.

Thiel’s quest for closure about the pandemic is noteworthy. Something happened during that period to drive influential, apparently rational people toward beliefs that were once associated with crackpots. Others suddenly lost trust in institutions and expertise. The podcaster Bryan Johnson—a successful tech entrepreneur who is now pursuing literal immortality—went from boasting about receiving the Moderna vaccine in 2021, because he had invested in one of the companies involved in its development, to complaining that “vaccines are a holy war” and that he regretted getting a COVID shot because not enough data supported its use. This is a man who pops enough pills that if you shook him, he’d rattle.

[Read: I went to a rave with a 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager]

High-profile figures across the political right have revealed their penchant for woo-woo. Skepticism of conventional medicine has become a staple of heterodox podcasts that simultaneously promote unproven, unregulated dietary supplements. My colleague Anne Applebaum has described this trend toward mysticism, fringe religious beliefs, and pseudo-spirituality as the New Obscurantism.

Until recently, I had assumed that the anti-establishment sentiments promoted by Thiel and others were merely opportunistic, a way for elites to stoke a form of anti-elitism that somehow excluded themselves as targets of popular rage. Thiel has always made a point of entertaining provocative heterodox opinions, but he has also demonstrated himself to be eloquent, analytical, and capable of going whole paragraphs without saying something unhinged. But reading his Financial Times column, I thought: My God, he actually believes this stuff. The entire tone is reminiscent of a stranger sitting down next to you on public transit and whispering that the FBI is following him.

The correct response to uncertainty is humility, not conspiracy. But conspiracy is exactly what many of those who are influential in Trump’s orbit have succumbed to—everything must be a product of the DISC, or the deep state, or the World Economic Forum, or other sinister and hidden controlling hands. The cynical Tucker Carlson of the Dominion era has given way to a more crankish version since his firing from Fox. When Carlson first went independent, he seemed to be hosting kooks for clicks. On his live tour, for example, he looked faintly embarrassed as Roseanne Barr told him that Democrats “love the taste of human flesh and they drink human blood.” And maybe he didn’t really believe the former crack user who claimed to have had a gay affair with Barack Obama, or the historian who asserts that Winston Churchill—not Adolf Hitler—was the “chief villain” in the Second World War. But at a certain point, I started to take Carlson at his word. Recently, he claimed that he’d woken up with scars and claw marks after being attacked by a demon in his bedroom. A few days before this, he said that America needed a “vigorous spanking” from Daddy Trump, and a few days after, Carlson revealed that he thought demons had invented the atom bomb. He’s clearly working through some stuff.

What can we learn from this kind of credulity? First, that maintaining an appropriate level of skepticism is the intellectual discipline needed to navigate the rest of the 2020s. Yes, the legacy media will get things wrong. But that doesn’t mean you should believe every seductive narrative floating around online, particularly when it’s peddled by those who are trying to sell you something.

The second lesson is that, no matter how smart a person might be in their business dealings, humans are all prone to the same lizard-brain preference for narratives over facts. That makes choosing your information sources carefully even more important. If you spend all day listening to people who think that every inexplicable event has a malevolent hand behind it, you will start to believe that too. The fact that this paranoia has eaten up America’s most influential men is an apokálypsis of its own.