This year, the Trump administration gave federal firefighters a mandate: no more letting fires burn. Conventional wisdom among firefighters and public-land managers has held that allowing fires in remote areas to run their course can be beneficial. But now the administration’s new U.S. Wildland Fire Service was to pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum instructed his workforce, to avoid the possibility of dangerous spread. “Accelerate initial attack,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in her own directive to the Forest Service. “Suppress fires early and limit growth.” And when Yosemite National Park caught on fire last month, that is what firefighters did.

The hazy skies above the park filled with aircraft—planes dropping fire retardant on forested slopes; helicopters ferrying hotshot crews to the blaze. At one point, at least 17 helicopters were in rotation, along with more than 1,000 firefighters. “I’ve worked in Yosemite and with Yosemite for almost 40 years,” Tom Nichols, a former head of fire and aviation for the National Park Service (and no relation to the Atlantic writer Tom Nichols), told me. “I’ve never seen that kind of response.”

At the start, attacking the fire aggressively made sense: It had started near a popular hiking trail and was burning on a slope above Wawona, a small community in the park. It looked to be human caused. In such situations, federal policy, even before this year, called for firefighters to use “full suppression” to try to put it out as quickly as possible, former Yosemite fire officials told me.

But as it developed, the Dome Fire spread to the north and east, farther up the mountains, away from any homes or communities. The resources being poured into fighting it began to baffle some fire veterans. As a former Yosemite official put it to me, “There’s really no reason to be attacking a fire like that.” (I spoke with several sources for this story who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and hoped to avoid professional repercussions.) Such an aggressive approach can be dangerous. Five days into the effort to put it out, one of the helicopters was doing water-bucket drops from a nearby lake when it crashed. Both pilots died.

“For what?” one federal fire official told me. “There’s nothing out there. Just let nature do its thing.” Another official had to ask: “Did they die in vain?”

Under the Trump administration’s policy of full fire suppression, so far this year entrapments—when firefighters’ positions are surrounded by flames—are above the average for the previous two decades. At least 17 wildland firefighters, pilots, and contractors have been killed, surpassing the full-year average over the past decade, according to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. That number includes four firefighters in Colorado who died this summer responding to the Knowles and Gore fires as flames spread amid high winds and low visibility. After that incident, several Democratic senators called on the Interior Department to investigate whether the full-suppression policy put firefighters at undue risk.

Brian Fennessy, the Wildland Fire Service chief, doesn’t think that the new policy is putting firefighters in more danger, he told me. The two pilots’ deaths in the Dome Fire were a tragedy—one he hopes his agency can learn from—but “this was not the year to allow managed fire on the landscape,” he said. The winter was historically warm, and snowpacks were at record lows across much of the western United States. Federal authorities were not about to let fires burn unattended, even in the wild. And the administration’s policy of suppression does mean increasing the number of people and helicopters fighting a given fire, he said: “Instead of two engines and a helicopter, maybe you’ve got four engines, two helicopters, maybe an air tanker.” Given how hot and dry it’s been, had firefighters not focused on putting out fires, in Yosemite and elsewhere, many could have been worse, he said.

The question of whether to harness or extinguish fire is particularly relevant in Yosemite. This is where America’s formal debate over that policy began, after Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 to grant the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to California as a public trust. The commission to oversee the area disagreed about the question of annual burning by Native Americans, Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, told me. Fires set by the Ahwahneechees were “deliberate and purposeful, even artful,” Pyne writes in his book about Yosemite’s fire history, Pyrocene Park: “They burned to keep grasslands open and attract game animals like deer to fresh forage; to keep trees from crowding out annual-grass prairies; to help harvest acorns; to stimulate willows useful for basketry; to promote berries.” Some of the Yosemite’s first commissioners saw the value in that. Others, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, considered such fires vandalism that undermined, as he put it, “the duty of preservation.”

For more than a century afterwards, the suppressionists prevailed until, in 1974, Yosemite leaders allowed a major lightning-caused fire to burn in the Illilouette Creek basin, whose creek runs behind Half Dome, the park’s famous bald mountain. This was the first big test of its new policy to manage certain fires for ecological benefit. Since then, more than 100 fires have come through that basin, and scientists have documented its renaissance. The proportion of the basin covered by dense conifer forest fell by 20 percent, and a mosaic of meadows and grasslands emerged. Biodiversity bloomed, as bees and bats and understory plants thrived. Even streams flowed a bit more abundantly, as fewer trees competed for water and snow had more open space to accumulate, Scott Stephens, a professor of wildfire science at UC Berkeley, told me. The regular burning also makes the basin more capable of handling future fire, he said, by minimizing how much of it burns at a destructive intensity. It’s now “one of the most resilient, functioning forests in all of California.”

Set under the right conditions, prescribed fires, too, can help prevent hotter-burning conflagrations. The evidence was plain just four years ago in Yosemite, when the Washburn Fire bore down on the Mariposa Grove and its revered giant sequoias. The park had conducted more than 20 prescribed fires in that area since the 1970s. And when the Washburn Fire approached the grove, the flames moved around the treated areas as if they were boulders in a stream, sparing the sequoias that have been burning up in great numbers elsewhere in California.

But this year, at least, under the Trump administration’s leadership, the park seems to have stepped back from prescribed burns as well. Although in many recent years Yosemite has done several prescribed fires, this year the park has done none and even canceled a long-planned prescribed fire near the Mariposa Grove scheduled for May, around Memorial Day, according to two people familiar with the decision. They added that Ray McPadden, the superintendent of the park, was concerned it would affect park visitation because it required closing parts of the grove temporarily. (McPadden did not respond to a request for comment; the Wildland Fire Service said Yosemite was looking for an opportunity to complete the burn this fall.)

Over the long term, avoiding fire puts the sequoias at risk, Cicely Muldoon, who retired as Yosemite’s superintendent last year, told me. And on top of that, jettisoning controlled burns, which ultimately keep fires modest, also means that “you’re really putting people in harm’s way.” A little fire—however it starts—can help prevent future huge fires.

Under the Trump administration’s reorganization of federal firefighting resources, superintendents of national parks no longer decide how to manage fires that start within their borders. That authority now lies with the Wildland Fire Service, which is housed within the Department of the Interior. After last summer’s Dragon Bravo fire at the Grand Canyon, a lightning-caused fire that destroyed more than 100 buildings, Trump-administration officials have shunned the notion of letting fires burn for the health of the landscape.

From the beginning, people fighting the Dome Fire—including those from the National Park Service and two different California interagency incident-management teams—did all that they could to put the fire out, for weeks. Because it was burning on remote slopes, these firefighters relied heavily on helicopters to reach the flames, haul in supplies, and drop water. (The teams also sent in mule trains and firefighters hiking on foot.) Crews camped in the woods as they cut fire lines by hand. Such a response is expensive too. Fighting a 6,700-acre fire that has burned no buildings has cost at least $55 million so far, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The Wildland Fire Service said in a statement that fire managers were concerned about different assets as the fire progressed, including Yosemite West—another nearby community—and the Badger Pass ski area.  

In the field, the work was logistically complex, and its tempo was high. Six firefighters got injured or became ill, according to the Wildland Fire Service. People were reporting falls, bee stings, smoke inhalalation, one firefighter told me, and the frequency of incidents was “more than you’d expect” for what they were gaining from keeping the fire at bay, the firefighter said. “People were like, What are we doing? There’s nothing out here. We’re slamming this fire shut,” this person added. “People were questioning that.”

Congestion from so many helicopters caused safety concerns, too, including a close call on September 19 between a firefighting helicopter and skydivers near the Mariposa-Yosemite Airport, a small airfield outside the park. Although an employee from Skydive Yosemite had alerted firefighters about their plans in a morning briefing, when five people jumped from 14,000 feet later that day, they floated down as a helicopter carrying cargo hovered in the vicinity of their landing zone, Paul Wignall, the company’s owner, told me. The helicopter pilot did not appear to be monitoring radio messages from the skydiving plane, Wignall said, and one of the divers drifted close enough to make eye contact with the helicopter pilot. By the time others in the group came down, the helicopter had flown off. Wignall was particularly concerned about the powerful rush of air from the helicopter’s blade. “If he can see a parachute coming, he should get the hell out of there,” Wignall said.

During the incident, the helicopter pilot “took action in response” to the skydivers, the Wildland Fire Service said in a statement, and firefighters later met with the skydiving operator to discuss the incident. The FAA brought in a temporary control tower, and firefighters moved equipment to avoid potential problems, Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson on one of the interagency incident-management teams for the Dome Fire, told me. Authorities would later close the airport for a week. The day after the skydiving incident, another helicopter went down fighting the fire.

The circumstances of the deadly crash on September 20 remain under investigation. The firefighting community has rallied support for the families of the two pilots who died—Greg King and Ryan Cutter—and held ceremonies to honor their service. The pilots worked for Precision, a Forest Service contractor based in Oregon. After the crash, the use of aircraft on the fire paused as Fire Service managers assessed the safety risk. The losses cast a shadow over the whole enterprise.

The danger of letting a fire burn might very well have been higher than normal because of the hot, dry conditions this year, as Brian Fennessy, the federal fire chief, said. But these types of years are more common now. The next one could be hot and dry too. In Yosemite, and across America, the choice to always put the fires out carries its own risks. The kindling keeps piling up, increasing the chance that the next one will be so big that no one can control it.

In 1996, during the early years of the web, I could see that those of us who were participating online were creating an extraordinary new record of human activity—and allowing it to disappear almost as quickly as we made it.

The web was becoming the place where government officials made promises, journalists published information in the public interest, and ordinary people shared ideas and documented their lives. Yet it was fragile—equal parts consequential and ephemeral.

Many people assume that once something is published online, it will remain forever retrievable. The saying that “the internet never forgets” has produced a dangerously false sense of permanence. In reality, the internet forgets continuously. Websites are constantly revised, deleted, and abandoned altogether.

This is why, 30 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. I wanted to build a mechanism for permanence in the internet age. Soon after that, I helped build the Internet Archive’s most-used resource, the Wayback Machine, a system that would preserve webpages as they appeared at any one moment in time, allowing future readers to return to those moments. The idea was simple but urgent: If the internet was going to become humanity’s principal publishing platform, then it needed what every great publishing system that came before it had needed. It needed a library.

People all over the world use the Wayback Machine all the time. What began as an effort to preserve the web has become an essential tool for journalists, researchers, historians, and the broader public.

Yet the future of this tool has become extremely vulnerable. The New York Times is now blocking the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve its articles. The Guardian has restricted our access to its published articles and removed articles from some of the Wayback Machine’s interfaces. USA Today and a growing number of other news organizations have also placed barriers in the path of web archivists (even, yes, The Atlantic). As of May 2026, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab had identified more than 340 local-news sites that were limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve their journalism.

The publishers taking these steps have all pointed to one reason: the unauthorized use of their work by AI companies to train large language models. They complain that our library serves as a back door around paywalls, licensing negotiations, and technical restrictions. The Times has said that it is blocking us because the Wayback Machine allegedly provides “unfettered access” to its work. But this fear-based approach does not take into account that the Internet Archive is taking steps to prevent AI companies from scraping the materials we preserve.

I understand why publishers are angry. Journalism is expensive. Reporting requires skilled people, time, courage, legal support, and institutions willing to withstand pressure. Journalists have watched advertising revenue disappear and subscription growth slow while technology companies build enormously profitable products using material created by others. Publishers have every right to challenge commercial businesses that they believe are inappropriately exploiting their work.

But blocking a nonprofit library is the wrong response to this problem. Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data. It will certainly not restore the advertising-based business model that supported newspapers in the 20th century, a business model that has long since collapsed. What it will do is prevent historians, researchers, courts, ordinary readers—and, most ironic, journalists themselves—from consulting an accurate record of what once appeared on the web. It is difficult to quantify the scale of what we stand to lose. A continuous record of web activity is an enormously powerful accountability tool, especially at a time when seeking the truth and reporting it has become ever more complicated and the informational environment is growing only more complex.

Joe Mullin, who is a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has offered a fitting analogy: Imagine a newspaper announcing that physical libraries will no longer be permitted to preserve copies of its past issues. That is effectively what is happening now. For the past three decades, the Wayback Machine has served as a library for the public web. The destruction of that library is creating holes in the historical record.

A crucial fact in this debate is one that publishers themselves know better than anyone: Journalists rely on the Wayback Machine. They use it to recover deleted tweets, verify past public statements by powerful individuals who wish to avoid scrutiny, examine earlier versions of government documents, and establish what a person or institution said about a subject before some controversy or scandal prompted them to change course. Journalists use the Wayback Machine to see defunct websites and the archives of closed newsrooms. They use it when the primary evidence for a story has vanished from the web.

A news organization that blocks the Wayback Machine may believe it is acting in the best interest of its journalists. But instead it is dismantling one of journalism’s most important investigative instruments.

My argument is simple: The public record needs an independent steward. A society that cannot inspect its past is easier to deceive. In 2017, Katie Hafner and Griffin Palmer, writing for The New York Times, relied on the Wayback Machine to report that private-equity investment was reshaping dermatology practices—expanding the use of physician assistants, increasing the volume of biopsies and procedures, enacting ever more aggressive screening and treatment protocols, and exposing elderly patients to treatments whose benefits were doubtful.

The Wayback Machine gave Hafner and Palmer an empirical record that proved crucial for their story: evidence of change over time. The current website of Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery (one of the companies they were looking into) showed a sprawling operation with more than 180 locations and 124 physician assistants. But earlier versions of the site showed that the number of physician assistants listed by the company had increased by 400 percent since 2008, amid a debate over whether physician assistants are qualified to properly make diagnoses. When I spoke with Hafner about the story, she told me she could not have made her point as powerfully as she did without the Wayback Machine. The records she retrieved from our archive enabled her to demonstrate the scale, speed, and direction of a corporate transformation, including the rapid growth of a business model that placed many more lesser-trained practitioners in clinics serving vulnerable patients.

Hafner and Palmer are among thousands of reporters whose use of the Wayback Machine has contributed to extraordinary journalism. A politics reporter may find that an agency quietly removed a document, or even a single sentence, in the face of criticism. A city-hall reporter may need an earlier version of a municipal page containing budget figures, meeting records, and public-health guidance. A technology reporter may need to compare successive versions of a platform’s terms of service. An investigative journalist examining allegations against a public figure may need to scour a decade-old webpage that has since been deleted.

Government agencies routinely scrub important information from their sites, and the Wayback Machine is a faster and more practical method of discovery than a Freedom of Information Act request. These are not hypothetical benefits. Over and over and over again, the Wayback Machine has confirmed facts that would be irretrievable without an independent archive.

Our own monitoring finds that more than 100 news articles in a typical month cite or rely on material preserved by the Wayback Machine. We can reasonably assume that there are tens of thousands of additional visits to the Wayback Machine every month, when an archived page might help illuminate the truth.

Mark Graham, who directs the Wayback Machine, recently described having visited The New York Times to meet with data journalists and reporters—and being approached by a senior researcher who thanked him profusely. The researcher said Times staffers used the Wayback Machine constantly and had even found material there that they could not find anywhere else. Consider what that means. Even one of the best-resourced news organizations in the world does not possess a complete, easily usable record of the material it needs.

Plenty of journalists—including at The Atlantic—have championed and defended the importance of the Wayback Machine. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow has called the Internet Archive a national treasure and said she uses it daily. She and hundreds of other journalists have signed a statement calling for web preservation.

These journalists understand that their work is cumulative. A story links to documents, earlier articles, public statements, data sets, and numerous other verifiable facts in the public record. Future stories return to (and build upon) that evidence. When underlying links die, one of the chains of verification breaks along with it.

In 2024, the Pew Research Center announced the findings of a study that tracked 1 million webpages over a 10-year period. At the end of the study, one-quarter of those pages were no longer accessible. Among pages that existed in 2013, the first year of the study, the loss rate was 38 percent. Even among pages collected as recently as 2021, roughly one in five had disappeared within two years.

This is not the timescale of ancient history. But it is often the timescale of someone’s political career, a long-running lawsuit, or a company’s rise and fall.

Elements of the web disappear for all kinds of reasons, nefarious and mundane. Perhaps a page is deleted during a redesign. Maybe a publication changes ownership, or a content-management system is replaced.

After the Pew study came out, the Internet Archive took a closer look at its data set to determine how much of the lost material had been preserved by the Wayback Machine. The analysis found that 16 percent of the vanished URLs are accessible via the Wayback Machine.

Consider the Rocky Mountain News. Colorado’s oldest newspaper published for nearly 150 years and earned a reputation for forceful accountability journalism that exposed corruption, misspent public money, and institutions that were failing the people they were meant to serve. In its final decade, the paper won four—I repeat, four —Pulitzer Prizes: for photographic coverage of the Columbine school shooting, for its images of Colorado’s devastating wildfires, and for the writing and photography of “Final Salute,” a deeply reported account of Marines killed in Iraq. In 2015, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance reported the story of how one of the paper’s Pulitzer finalists successfully resuscitated an investigative series of his that had vanished from the web when the paper did. Her story concluded with a link to the series that he’d saved. Even that link is now dead. (Though you can still find the series here.)

No institution, however prestigious, is immortal. The Wayback Machine holds the work of publications that no longer exist, such as the Rocky Mountain News. It preserves the archive of MTV News and BET.com, including decades of cultural reporting removed from the web without warning. It preserves a robust record of early-2000s web culture from Gawker Media. It provides access to work produced by Apple Daily and Stand News, Hong Kong–based news outlets that were forced to shut down in 2021 as part of a government crackdown, as well as independent Russian-language journalism, some of it produced in exile. It holds the only copy of USA Today from September 11, 2001, because the paper’s website was overwhelmed and its online editors continuously updated stories by hand without preserving the changes made along the way.

The Internet Archive is not an AI company. A commercial AI laboratory, a search engine, a research project, and a nonprofit library may all use automated systems to retrieve publicly available webpages. From a server’s perspective, each may appear to be a bot. But not all bots are bad bots. They do not have the same mission, business model, or conduct.

Publishers’ concerns about abusive scraping are merited. I know this acutely because the Internet Archive has itself been subjected to extreme machine traffic. In one incident, an AI startup sent tens of thousands of requests per second and overloaded our systems. We blocked the offending hosts, contacted the company, and worked to stop the behavior.

When a company attempts to extract material at scale, it burdens our nonprofit infrastructure and interferes with access by ordinary users. We understand why publishers object to how AI companies have used their work. But recognizing a problem does not justify attacking the wrong institution and disregarding the public interest. In short, the Wayback Machine has become collateral damage in a fight between publishers and AI companies. Blocking the Internet Archive will not stop AI. Commercial AI companies have crawled the live web, licensed large data sets, purchased access from platforms, obtained third-party collections, and built their own retrieval systems. Publishers can sue those companies, negotiate with them, or build technical controls specifically directed at them. We have already built such controls to protect the material on our site—including the material we preserve from news organizations.

Web archiving belongs to a well-established legal tradition. Courts have repeatedly recognized that copying material for indexing and search can be a transformative fair use. A searchable system cannot function without making technical copies of the material it indexes. In the now-famous Google Books litigation, in which authors sued Google over the digitization of millions of books, courts held that scanning books to create a searchable research tool served a different purpose from selling or reading the original books, and was fair use under U.S. copyright law.

Defending preservation does not require ignoring publishers’ legitimate concerns. The Internet Archive has adapted repeatedly as the web has changed. We use rate limits, filtering, monitoring, and network-security systems to respond to abusive access. We have restricted bulk functionality in particular contexts and optimized important parts of the Wayback Machine for human use.

Those efforts can and should continue. Publishers and archives can distinguish ordinary human consultation from sustained bulk extraction. We can develop better methods for identifying abusive traffic, create responsible-access arrangements, improve communication during high-volume incidents, and discuss access to application programming interfaces separately from the preservation of publicly available pages. Most important, we can preserve records while applying reasonable protections against mass downloading.

The press cannot have it both ways. Journalists describe their work as the first draft of history—but a draft of history must survive if it is to be revised, improved upon, and understood.

“Isn’t that illegal?”

That’s a question I get asked a lot as a former federal prosecutor. Donald Trump, his family, and members of his administration are most often the inspiration. Last year, the Qataris gave the U.S. Defense Department a $400 million luxury jumbo jet for the president’s use, which he plans to take with him to his presidential library when he leaves office. Then Trump gave Qatar NATO-like security guarantees. Does that sound like a bribe? Exactly four days before Trump was inaugurated for the second time, the Emiratis invested $500 million in the Trump-family crypto business. Four months later, Trump green-lighted selling them advanced AI chips, which the Biden administration had blocked out of fear that they would fall into the hands of the Chinese. Same question. But even though I hear “Isn’t that illegal?” a lot more than I used to, it isn’t a new question. Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, a Democrat and a Republican, both took lavish gifts from individuals and entities seeking their help and made national news when they were prosecuted for it. Surely that was illegal?

Common sense notwithstanding, however, the answer is no. Neither Espy nor McDonnell was held accountable, and even Trump’s seemingly egregious misbehavior likely can’t be prosecuted. That’s because starting in the 1980s, the Supreme Court has interpreted anti-corruption laws in ways so narrow as to effectively legalize flat-out corruption. These decisions put whole categories of politicians’ conduct beyond a prosecutor’s reach. It’s an absurd result. But we live in the Court’s world.

For 20 years, I prosecuted white-collar crime at the U.S. Department of Justice. My first criminal trial was Enron. My last was Hunter Biden. In between, I prosecuted on corruption charges the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the mayor of Baltimore; the Baltimore police commissioner; the Baltimore City state’s attorney; and dozens of other politicians, government employees, police officers, and prison guards. I served in leadership positions at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill focused on corruption. I finished my DOJ career in the department’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, the specialized unit that prosecuted public corruption around the country—until February 2025, when it was effectively shut down. I was one of the prosecutors asked to dismiss the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Like nearly all my colleagues in Public Integrity, I declined to do so and left the department that year.

In all that time, I experienced how the Supreme Court restrained prosecutors in cases involving public officials. Even before the start of my career, the justices had begun to chip away at federal anti-corruption statutes, and this project accelerated during my tenure. When FBI agents brought me evidence of misconduct, I often had to turn the cases away, knowing I’d never be able to make charges stick. The longer I served, the harder my job became.  

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s politicized prosecutions may hit a roadblock]

The first of these Supreme Court rulings was McNally v. United States, decided in 1987. In that case, a member of the Kentucky governor’s Cabinet, a local businessman, and a former chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party received hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from an insurance company that did business with the state. Prosecutors charged them with depriving the public of its right to their “honest services,” a crime under the federal mail- and wire-fraud statutes. The Court reversed their convictions and declared that the public enjoyed no such right. Although federal courts had upheld similar convictions for more than 40 years, the Supreme Court ruled that all those courts had gotten it wrong: It declared that the mail-fraud—and, by implication, the wire-fraud—statute was limited to protecting money and property, not intangible rights such as citizens’ right to good government. Congress reacted swiftly. One year later, a broad bipartisan majority in Congress passed legislation effectively reversing the Court’s decision. But McNally is an outlier in that regard.

In 1999, in United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of an agricultural trade association that gave gifts—tickets to the U.S. Open, expensive luggage, even a crystal bowl—to the U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. The Supreme Court held that giving a politician lavish gifts because of his official position was not illegal. Rather than focusing on the conduct at hand, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a unanimous Court, spun out a ridiculous hypothetical—that the government’s interpretation of the statute would allow the president to be prosecuted for accepting “replica jerseys given by championship sports teams.” What that claim ignored was the reality that no Justice Department would ever authorize such a prosecution.

In Skilling v. United States, decided in 2010, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Jeffrey Skilling, a former CEO of Enron Corporation, for conspiring to commit honest-services fraud. I had been one of the prosecutors in Skilling’s trial. Although Skilling was the president of a publicly traded company, not a politician, he was charged with conspiracy to commit honest-services wire fraud for undisclosed self-dealing. Self-dealing is a problem whether the perpetrator is a corporate executive hiding a conflict of interest from shareholders or an elected official hiding one from voters. Except the Supreme Court held that it wasn’t illegal. Confronted with the fact that lower courts had for years upheld honest-services-fraud convictions for undisclosed self-dealing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion noted the “infrequency” of those decisions and how they were not “models of clarity.” That, of course, didn’t mean those decisions were wrong. Remarkably, Ginsburg didn’t even say they were. Instead, she claimed that because bribery and kickbacks were the “basis of most honest-services prosecutions,” that’s what the statute’s application would be limited to. In place of legal analysis, the Court resorted to a game of numbers, and the practical effect was to restrict the number of corruption cases prosecutors could bring under this statute.   

In perhaps its grossest pro-corruption decision, the Supreme Court in 2016 reversed Robert McDonnell’s conviction. A jury had convicted the former governor on bribery charges for accepting $175,000 in loans and gifts from the CEO of a nutritional-supplement company that wanted Virginia’s public universities to run clinical trials on his product. The Court held that what McDonnell did for the CEO—setting up meetings, hosting events, talking to other elected officials, all to benefit his company—did not qualify as “official acts,” for which McDonnell could be bribed. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous Court, adopted the most restrictive of definitions of official acts, things such as voting in the Senate or in an official committee. The decision leads directly to the question Why would a CEO give a governor that much money if these weren’t official acts? The Supreme Court didn’t offer an answer.

Then, in 2024, in Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of the mayor of Portage, Indiana, for accepting $13,000 from a company that got more than $1 million in city contracts. Prosecutors charged him with violating a statute Congress had enacted to protect federal money administered by the states, called “666,” after its numbering in the United States Code. The indictment had charged these payments to the mayor as illegal gratuities, which is what the law calls “illegal gifts.” In reversing his conviction, the Court held that 666 covered only bribery, not gratuities. In that year alone, approximately $1 trillion in federal funds flowed to the states. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his majority opinion, as many as 19 million state and local officials administer this money. But according to the Supreme Court, there’s nothing wrong with giving them a little something extra for the effort.

That same year, the Court decided Trump v. United States, announcing a sweeping and previously unrecognized doctrine of official-acts immunity for former presidents. Whereas the decisions discussed above left prosecutors room to pursue certain kinds of corruption, the Trump ruling means that presidents, alone among elected officials, can likely never be prosecuted for corruption. That’s because the Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority, held that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions within their “core” constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for all other official acts. And worse, unlike the earlier decisions that interpreted statutes and that therefore Congress can reverse by passing new legislation, the Court claimed that presidential immunity was required by the Constitution itself. So only a future Supreme Court that decided to reverse the Trump decision, or an amendment to the Constitution, could cancel the get-out-of-jail-free card the Court gave presidents.

[David Frum: The Trump presidency’s world-historical heist]

All but the last two decisions, Snyder and Trump, spanned the Court’s conservative-liberal divide. Sun-Diamond and McDonnell were even unanimous. This isn’t partisan politics; it’s political elites protecting political elites. The facts in these cases were egregious, but the Court purported to be saving hapless bureaucrats from overzealous prosecutors in the future. In any event, they haven’t. Instead they’ve told juries of ordinary Americans that what they concluded to be corruption was not. Perhaps to try to obscure what it was doing, the Court used technical rather than normative language, something the Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout explored more broadly in her paper “Demoralizing Elite Fraud,” in The Yale Law Journal. But that technical language can’t obscure the underlying badness of the conduct that the Court blessed.          

Congress can undo much of what the Supreme Court has done: address Sun-Diamond by making it illegal to give a politician gifts because of his position; address Skilling by designating undisclosed conflicts of interest as honest-services fraud; address McDonnell by expanding the definition of official acts in the bribery statute to cover what politicians actually do all day; and address Snyder by amending 666 to cover gratuities. As noted above, Congress already reversed the Court’s decision in McNally, and prosecutors have brought hundreds of honest-services prosecutions ever since, albeit with the limitations the Skilling decision imposed. Addressing Trump v. United States is tougher, but options still exist: Congress could close off the avenues a president can use to enrich himself and try to build his legacy by, for example, prohibiting the U.S. government from accepting gifts such as the Qatari plane, or disqualifying companies that invest in a president’s businesses or donate to his library from bidding on government contracts. That would be a good first step, but more ambitious approaches are needed, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act. Unfortunately, Congress, like the Supreme Court, has so far chosen to protect political elites—in Congress’s case, by doing nothing.

This behavior should be illegal because corruption is poison to democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent in Snyder, “Greed makes governments—at every level—less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.” And Americans know it. Results of a Gallup survey announced last month show that Americans’ perceptions of government corruption are at their highest in 20 years: 89 percent of adults say it is widespread. That is a 10-percentage-point increase since 2025 and includes strong majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. Although the Court has placed politicians beyond the law’s reach, at least for now, the public gets it. Hopefully, a new Congress will too.  

In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination. According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.

To see how that judgment is holding up, just look at the kinds of titles that political theorists are producing these days: How Liberalism Failed, A World After Liberalism, Liberalism Against Itself. Even Fukuyama wrote a book titled Liberalism and Its Discontents. Across the West, the far right and the far left are on the rise, and the one thing they agree on is their contempt for liberalism. To MAGA and its European cousins, such as France’s National Rally and the United Kingdom’s Reform Party, liberals are rootless elitists who look down on their fellow citizens while coddling immigrants and criminals. To progressives and democratic socialists, liberalism—often qualified with the prefix neo—means ruthless globalized capitalism, prettied up with rhetoric about meritocracy and human rights. Appeals to liberal principles and defenses of the liberal world order have shown little power to rally the public, or even much of the political establishment.

Now that the liberal triumphalism of the post–Cold War era is dying, what can replace it? The answer may lie in another important essay written in 1989—one that received much less attention than Fukuyama’s, but enjoys a cult reputation among keepers of the liberal flame. “The Liberalism of Fear,” by Judith Shklar, has just been published for the first time as a book—a small book, because the essay is only about 8,000 words long, but a timely one. In fact, as the political scientist Mark Lilla says in his introduction, it’s “far more timely today than it was upon its publication.” In 1989, Shklar’s minimalist definition of liberalism as a bulwark against government terror—what she calls, simply, a politics of “damage control”—might have sounded unambitious or uninspiring. In an America where ICE agents shoot protesters and grab people off the street, it sounds prescient.

Shklar’s argument involves history and philosophy, but like all political ideas, it begins with an intuition, a feeling. Communism, one might say, begins in indignation: a refusal to accept a world where some people exploit and others are exploited. Nationalism begins in loyalty: a sense of connection and obligation to one’s own people. There is nothing wrong with these emotions; they are even praiseworthy. But when one political feeling crowds out all others—when everyone and everything is subordinated to the pursuit of social justice or national pride—good can justify the worst evils.

[From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order]

What makes liberalism different from these political ideologies is that, as Shklar writes, it “does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives.” Liberalism doesn’t offer a vision of a perfect world—one where injustice is abolished, or where a particular nation reigns supreme. Instead, it is rooted in a justified fear of the real world, where people with power often use it to oppress, torture, and kill. “Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil.” The classic liberal principles outlined by thinkers such as Locke and Mill, the ideas that guided the American and French Revolutions, follow from this basic fear of cruelty. Freedom of religion means that you won’t be burned at the stake for holding the wrong beliefs. Freedom of speech means that you won’t be locked up for saying what you think. The rule of law means that you can be punished only for committing a crime, not because a powerful person is out to get you.

Not coincidentally, these liberal freedoms are framed as limits on the power of the state. “Public cruelty,” Shklar writes, “is made possible by differences in public power,” and the government is always more powerful than any citizen. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; we want the government to have the power to punish crime or defend against invasion. But liberalism believes that there must be strict and effective limits on how that power is used. “The governments of this world, with their overwhelming power to kill, maim, indoctrinate, and make war are not to be trusted unconditionally,” Shklar writes. What the liberalism of fear wants to prevent above all are “habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime.”

This might have seemed like an odd concern for an American political philosopher in 1989. Police states were disappearing in Eastern Europe; democracy activists were bravely standing up to tanks in Tiananmen Square; Nelson Mandela left his jail cell on his way to becoming president of South Africa. America under George H. W. Bush had its problems, but no one would have put paramilitary violence and police torture high on the list. At a time when Fukuyama was celebrating the end of history, why was Shklar contemplating these specters at the feast?

The most obvious answer is that, unlike most Americans, she had seen them firsthand. Born to a Jewish family in Latvia in 1928, Judith Nisse grew up in the shadow of approaching war and the Holocaust. In an autobiographical lecture, she recalled that as a child, she was traumatized by reading Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus, which is full of murder, cannibalism, and severed heads: “To this day I can still feel the fear and horror it inspired.” Her sister tried to comfort her by saying that “these things did not really happen,” but it didn’t help, because “both she and I knew that far worse was going on all around us.” As Jews in Latvia, Shklar recalled, “everyone around us wanted us to be somewhere else at best, or to kill us at worst.” The Nisse family managed to escape at the last possible moment and took an epic journey in 1940 across Russia and the Pacific to Canada. The next year, the Nazis invaded Latvia and the 40,000 Jews of Riga were murdered, most of them shot by German troops and local auxiliaries in a nearby forest.

When Shklar arrived at Harvard’s department of government as a graduate student in 1951, she was struck by how completely her American colleagues ignored the central political experience of their own time: “I knew what had happened in Europe between 1940 and 1945, and I assumed that most people at Harvard also were aware of the physical, political, and moral calamity that had occurred, but it was never to be discussed.” This “isolating” experience “had a lot to do with my later writings,” Shklar noted. At first, she didn’t intend to stay in the academy: “I would have liked to be a literary editor of The Atlantic or some such publication.” But she remained at Harvard for her entire career as a professor, writing about subjects directly or indirectly connected with the European catastrophe: the failure of the Enlightenment tradition, the concept of law in the Nuremberg trials, the nature of cruelty and injustice.

“The Liberalism of Fear” was published three years before Shklar’s death in 1992, and though it wasn’t one of her major works, the title has become a kind of shorthand for her worldview. As Lilla writes in his introduction, for Shklar, “fear of being in another’s arbitrary power is the ur-human experience that modern liberalism was developed to stave off.” In the essay, she discusses the tools that modern liberal societies use for this purpose. Some of these tools are legal: “Without well-defined procedures, honest judges, opportunities for counsel and for appeals, no one has a chance.” Others are political and economic, such as security for private property: “Nothing gives a person greater social resources than legally guaranteed proprietorship.”

[Read: This is the way a world order ends]

But Shklar is most concerned with the ideas and habits of mind that sustain liberal societies. And it is here that her message for today becomes most urgent. The “perfect liberal,” she writes, “respects other people without condescension, arrogance, humility, or fear. He or she does not insult others with lies or cruelty, both of which mar one’s own character no less than they injure one’s victims.” These aren’t the heroic virtues needed to win wars or found empires; they are minimal requirements for a society free from fear. Until recently, they were expected of anyone who hoped to play a role in American public life, regardless of their political views.

Only since Donald Trump got to the White House have Americans realized how much they took for granted the sobriety and politeness of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Trumpism’s assault on liberal democracy isn’t only a matter of laws and policies. From the beginning, it has been about legitimizing cruelty. When Trump mockingly imitated a disabled reporter, or said police officers shouldn’t be “too nice” when putting suspects into police cars, or pardoned an American soldier convicted by a court martial of murdering civilians, he was sending the message that he approves of cruelty, and will support those who commit it.

The federal government and the Republican Party resisted that message in his first term; in his second, they have mostly stopped resisting. We are still a long way from the Europe of Shklar’s childhood. America has been a liberal democracy for a long time, and the majority of Americans are not ready to embrace a politics of cruelty. But that prospect feels a lot less theoretical than it did when “The Liberalism of Fear” was written. In the essay, Shklar says that government terror and cruelty weren’t things of the past, but could be seen in “the foreign news in the New York Times.” Now it’s not just the foreign news that reminds us how much we have to be afraid of—and how much we need the values and institutions of liberalism, no matter how unfashionable they’ve become.

How’s this for a job offer? In the span of no more than 10 years, you’re to have seven babies for C-suite women at a major tech firm. You’ll be on a strict diet and exercise regime, your vitals constantly monitored. You can’t have sex. Or a C-section (lest you forgo the “natural birth bonus”). Nor can you tell your loved ones what your actual job is (as far as they’re concerned, you’re in “consulting”). You’ll get just six months of downtime between pregnancies. And, as the test case for this “groundbreaking pilot program” to make The Company “the world’s most equitable workplace,” you’ll earn more than a million dollars.

In Natalie, the narrator of Sarah Anderson’s very funny debut novel, Fallow, The Company finds a taker—one who isn’t, readers soon discover, quite the sucker she may seem to be. She’s a recent college graduate, wryly aware that she is not the typical striver. Motherhood versus career is not a dilemma that haunts her, which gives her an unusually deadpan perspective on angst about work-life balance. Anderson does more than skewer corporate posturing; she shows Natalie stumbling into unexpected insights about freedom and entrapment.

At 23, Natalie is employed in a soulless call center, fielding complaints on a hotline for disgruntled employees in many spheres, but when her family expresses concern about her future, she says, “I don’t need a path. I have a path. I just need money.” Her job has enough upsides—flexible hours, livable pay, and her friend Libby, who “regularly dosed the communal break-room coffee with CBD oil”—that she might have languished in it forever. But then her wisdom teeth start wreaking havoc and she’s forced to find work that comes with dental insurance. That’s when she happens on the position at The Company.

Natalie, of all people, should be wary of the offer, with its unorthodox contract and its demand for real body-morphing labor. After all, at the call center she’s had to listen to endless complaints about work life (from “disputes between coworkers over fridge real-estate” to “accidents caused by coked-out managers operating heavy machinery”). And, as one of 11 sisters, she’s seen firsthand what multiple pregnancies can do to a woman. Throughout Natalie’s childhood, her mother was “tired and round and looking for a bathroom, body waxing and waning like the moon.”

But she is broke and her jaw is aching, so Natalie convinces herself that a job at The Company isn’t so bad. Seven is four fewer kids than her mom carried for free, plus, she thinks, “I didn’t even have to do the hardest part; I didn’t have to keep the babies.” Staring at the contract’s $700,000 completion bonus, she begins to see the role as a way to earn enough money to opt out for good: “a basic Would You Rather—­one decade of my body to win back the rest of my life.” (This being the 2020s, she’s also swayed by the $60,000 cosmetic-surgery bonus. She pictures herself, postpartum, a decade hence: “Thighs slender and firm, colt-like, a gap between them through which light could shine upon every person who stood before me.”)

In prose that is sharp and entertaining, Anderson refreshingly takes on several familiar themes at once: the hidden tolls that working women still face, the stranglehold of Big Tech, the Orwellian nature of corporate-speak, the relentless self-monitoring of wellness culture. Her unifying conceit is that the ideal of “having it all” is not just impossible to neatly pull off, but impossible to simply escape.

If you’re thinking, Wait, we’ve been here recently, perhaps you’ve read Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, a debut that sold more than 1 million copies within a few months of its release last spring. Burke’s narrator, also named Natalie, is a young Christian tradwife influencer whose lifestyle, as shown on Instagram, is a carefully curated middle finger to the having-it-all quest. Yet as both her influencer business and her family boom, she finds herself caught in a twisted version of just that ideal: the resentful mother of many kids and the secret, stressed-out breadwinner.

[Read: What happens when the tradwife dream goes wrong?]

From the start, Yesteryear’s narrator seems like little more than her author’s puppet, a caricature devised to puncture the tradwife fervor of the past few years. This kind of formulaic flatness could easily have befallen the people employed by The Company—an Amazon-esque behemoth that “did everything, everywhere, their logo as familiar as your own name.” Instead, Anderson gives revealing cameos to quirky figures, including Shane, the conniving but guileless SVP of People Experience who toggles between HR euphemisms and saying the quiet part out loud. In a presentation about the company’s mission to enhance gender equity through surrogacy, he itemizes how taxing pregnancy can be for a woman and her colleagues alike. “Nausea, exhaustion, bathroom breaks, brain fog—it’s hard on everyone,” he laments. The long-term goal (drastically cutting parental leave) goes unstated at first, but he lets slip that the short-term aim isn’t exactly altruistic, either: An executive named Valerie is “the perfect candidate for the launch,” he tells Natalie, because she was “frankly a nightmare to be around” during her first pregnancy.

Then there’s Astrid, Natalie’s “minder,” a 20-something Scandinavian woman who adds a passive-aggressive energy to Natalie’s mandated workouts, “slowly edging her treadmill speed and incline just past mine, always doing an extra crunch.” Meanwhile, Astrid’s massages feel “80 percent vindictive, 20 percent transformative”—the corporate lean-in ethos (quite literally) operating even among the lowly ranked.

Anderson’s greatest feat of character construction is Natalie herself, particularly her voice. She tosses off clever metaphors for her situation. Pregnancy, for example, becomes a housing issue. Weeks after her first delivery, her body is a “slightly looser, wetter version of itself, a room with non-catastrophic water damage.” Summing up the deal she’s struck—constant surveillance and social isolation in exchange for money and a luxury condo with minimalist decor—she remarks, “I myself was a fetus, in a particularly tasteful womb.”

When Shane suddenly announces that she’s required to be in the office three days a week, Natalie reports to work to pursue her pregnancy regimens in view of her “colleagues,” becoming a working mother in an unfamiliar sense: maternity operating according to a calibrated plan. Natalie’s office door is marked Development Manager, and the children she bears fall under “Deliverables” in her performance reviews—biology blurring into corporate strategy, life reduced to a measurable output from the very beginning. (Anderson’s vision is at once outlandish and recognizable: More than a few companies have been known to offer parents perks, including breast-milk delivery for moms on business trips, with the ulterior motive of maximizing productivity.)    

Fascinated and repelled by the way the spheres of work and life converge, Anderson gives Natalie a chance to push back—and to discover the difficulty of doing so. Natalie lives for the “fallow periods” between pregnancies, when she’s left to her own devices and structure falls away. Astrid is gone, and so are the Pyrex dishes of healthy food in her company-provided fridge. She gets drunk and high, has sex, and eats mountains of junk. Each time, she’s surprised by the darker feelings that bubble up: “the sadness of excess, a feeling in my brain of bottoming out.” The realization slowly dawns on her that she’s losing touch with her sole friend, Libby, and the one sister she’s close to (the rest are a blur).

Still, Natalie considers these rebellious bursts “sacred,” exhilarated by the sensation that she’s “moving the plot”—even as we watch her cyclical existence get subsumed into the company agenda, which calls for her to be the “best possible vessel.” After her benders, she “atone[s]” with yoga, acupuncture, and spa treatments—her pampering a kind of penance as she dutifully prepares her body for the next baby. Her paychecks, which at first gave her a thrill, leave her feeling hollow. She turns to Wirecutter and Reddit for inspiration about how to fill the void. There, she considers “the type of person I could become. A person with a toaster that had a screen. A person interested in the quality of leather.” Seemingly unable to see beyond being a pregnant person, she buys a comfy couch and calls it a day.

The dark joke of Fallow’s first act is that, without her even realizing it, Natalie’s entire 20s have essentially become one prolonged fallow period in her own development. Anderson captures the way our tech-driven world pulls us into an absurd social experiment that cuts us off not only from others, but also from ourselves. And she’s not done. In the book’s final act, Anderson drops Natalie into a very different petri dish: a feminist commune where dozens of women live off the land and mostly off the grid. As a connection-starved Natalie settles into her new, shared life—making some close friends and embracing her animal-tending duties—Anderson suggests that her drawn-out fallow period might have laid the groundwork for something better.

If this all sounds a little too tidy or corny, rest assured that you’re in good hands. Anderson isn’t out to offer a utopian release from the conundrum of work-life balance; she’s reminding us that the demands of nurture and structure are inevitably muddled. The commune may be a flailing farm with a woo-woo bent, but here, too, much to Natalie’s chagrin, designated labor hours, set mealtimes, and surveillance (via a granola version of Astrid) are part of the deal. What is different is Natalie, who now appreciates that money is a lousy substitute for a path—but that sisterly bonding has real value, even if it comes in bigger doses than she bargained for.

Ever since Zohran Mamdani exhilarated the left with his out-of-nowhere mayoral campaign, mainstream Democrats have been dejectedly searching for an inspirational figure of their own. Where is the Democratic executive who has the media savvy to inspire his own cultlike following while making pragmatic governing decisions and ignoring the incessant demands of progressive activists?

At last, the moderates have found such a Democrat. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s election, which created the theoretical prospect of 8.5 million Americans living under “the warmth of collectivism,” as he once put it, was met with understandable shock. The reality, however, has been far more mundane.

Mamdani’s campaign platform already contained several gestures to moderates. He said he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is, to put it plainly, a billionaire Zionist cop, three things never in favor with the hard left. He also pledged to liberalize permitting to encourage more housing construction by private developers. When The New York Times asked him during the campaign, “What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?” Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction.”

Most important, Mamdani emphasized the importance of efficiency in city services. This might sound like an ideologically neutral goal, and it has been embraced at times by the leaders of left-wing governments—including Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” during the early to mid-20th century. But efficiency creates tension with progressive interest groups, which generally care less about maximizing taxpayers’ bang for the buck than maintaining secure jobs and high wages for public employees.

[Joseph Heath: The populist revolt against cognitive elites]

Once elected, Mamdani retreated from some of his progressive ambitions. Among his splashiest campaign promises was “fast, free” bus service. Skeptics had questioned the wisdom of forgoing the revenue from bus fares, especially given the possibility that free buses would become mobile homeless shelters inhospitable to other New Yorkers. Mamdani still says he wants free buses, but in his initial proposal, released in concert with Governor Kathy Hochul, he quietly adopted the position of his critics, dropping the plan to eliminate fares and focusing instead on speed and reliability. He shrank another of his most ambitious proposals, universal child care for 2-year-olds, into a more gradual expansion, beginning with a modest increase of 2,000 new seats this fall and a goal of adding more in subsequent years.

During the campaign, Mamdani promised to establish an “Office of Community Safety,” which would cost $1 billion a year and task civilian workers instead of police officers with responding to mental-health emergencies. This notion was itself a compromise. As a state-assembly candidate, he’d endorsed defunding the police. As a mayoral candidate, he suggested shifting responsibilities. But as mayor, Mamdani wound up providing just over $40 million a year for this service, or 4 percent of the promised amount.

As a candidate, Mamdani said he would relinquish mayoral control of schools—a key demand of teachers’ unions, which understand that putting schools under the direction of school-board officials elected in low-turnout races gives the unions enormous leverage over education policy. He reversed that position even before he took office. Perhaps he realized that voters would hold him accountable for school performance, and that his goals would not be served by ceding authority to an interest group whose incentive is to maximize teacher pay and job security rather than to produce good outcomes for students. He has also put off a promise to reduce class sizes, which teachers’ unions care about but which is not an especially cost-effective way to promote learning gains.

Mamdani did follow through on his promise to freeze rent for about 40 percent of the city’s apartments, even though nearly any economist would say that the freeze makes housing less affordable in the long run. But this move merely followed decades of ineffective precedent. Mamdani’s most novel position on housing has been to push for a streamlined approval process to unlock more private home construction.

He has pushed Albany to raise taxes dramatically on wealthy New Yorkers, although so far he has settled for a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And he has continued to pursue his goofy notion of opening city-run grocery stores that he believes would hold down food prices. It is difficult to see how this project could succeed, because public employees have little expertise in the complex supermarket business, and subsidizing public stores to undercut their competitors on price would both threaten small businesses and encourage black-market reselling. But Mamdani met these and other objections to his plan by scaling the public stores back to the size of a small demonstration project.

At the same time, he has made many overtures to moderates. He unveiled an initiative to combat anti-Semitism, which some pro-Palestinian activists have denounced for funding Jewish organizations that are Zionist. He also maintained the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which has policed terrorist threats and aggressive protest tactics by activist organizations. The DSA has called this group “specialized units used to suppress dissent” and demanded that Mamdani abolish it. Leftists have denounced all of these moves, which prioritize security for the targets of protesters at the expense of the freedom of protesters to harass their targets.

[From the August 2026 issue: The ‘consumer socialism’ trap]

More recently, he has infuriated the left by refusing to fire Tisch after ICE agents shot a New Yorker earlier this month. Instead, Mamdani praised Tisch—one of the best police commissioners in recent memory—for fighting corruption and bringing the murder rate to its lowest level in years.

Mamdani has not abandoned his antagonism toward Israel, which is the issue that animated his early career in politics and has helped endear him to the left. In his statement commemorating the October 7 massacre of Israelis, he devoted most of his attention to Palestinian victims of Israel’s counterattack. But if not everybody loves the balance he has struck, he is at least attempting to strike one. Mamdani has grasped the value, or at least the necessity, of reassuring Jewish New Yorkers of their safety, even if they disagree with him on the Middle East. This commitment has placed him at odds with the most radical elements of the Free Palestine movement, which have sought to make Zionists uncomfortable, if not outright frightened. When anti-Israel activists booed Mamdani and accused him of perpetrating genocide last week, they were responding to the fact that he is acting as a mayor for the city’s entire population, not the most fanatical elements of his base.

It’s possible that, in his heart, Mamdani would rather be leading a genuine socialist revolution than making hype videos of city workers filling potholes. But enacting socialism is notoriously harder than calling for it at a rally. It’s especially tricky to pull off in a city that faces severe fiscal constraints, whose rich denizens can easily move to nearby jurisdictions to protect their wealth, and that relies heavily on cooperation from the state legislature and the governor. A similar mismatch between ambition and authority applies to Mamdani’s vision of a post-Zionist Middle East, which lies well beyond the purview of his municipal powers.

To his credit, Mamdani has confronted quickly the hard realities that other socialist leaders have learned more painfully, trading his Marxist dream of revolutionary transformation for patient gradualism. Mamdani has adapted quickly to the limits of his office. His political talent (and core of allied social-media influencers) has enabled him to maintain his base of adoring fans even as he confines his work to humdrum municipal governance. Mamdani has discovered that socialism can succeed in New York through one simple trick: abandoning socialism.

Suddenly, Canada is in the middle of a defense boom. Like other NATO countries that have skimped on their armed forces for decades, Canada is trying to quickly build up its military in the face of both rising international-security threats and a White House that regularly treats friends like foes. In the absence of trustworthy American leadership, many allies are working to become more self-reliant. But this is easier said than done, especially for Canada, which has enmeshed its own self-defense with the U.S. military more than any other American ally.

Since 1957, when Canada and the United States established the North American Aerospace Defense Command to jointly defend the continent during the Cold War, the Canadian military has grown closer to America’s. The otherwise small and underfunded Canadian Armed Forces is structured to deploy alongside its U.S. counterparts and to interoperate seamlessly with them. This has allowed Canada to make valuable military contributions in both countries’ interest at relatively low cost.

Until Donald Trump’s return to the White House, few in Canada were worried about how deeply intertwined the two militaries had become. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had contracted for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made military capabilities, including new surveillance planes, the combat system on Canada’s new warships, and 88 F-35 fighter aircraft. These investments have spared Canada the cost of developing cutting-edge equipment and allowed Canadian forces to operate interchangeably with the U.S. military. As long as the United States remained a benign ally, Canada was getting a great deal.

[Vivian Salama: America’s allies are no longer waiting for Trump to leave]

Trump has shaken Canadian thinking. His repeated talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state and his jokes about “Governor Trudeau” went from weird to worrisome, and his unprovoked trade war has hurt Canadian businesses and consumers. Early last year, in one of his final speeches as prime minister, Trudeau warned that Trump wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” Canada’s longtime military and economic partner had suddenly become a threat.

Trudeau’s successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, has responded in part by trying to appease Trump. He has addressed long-standing American complaints about Canada’s limited defense spending and has emphasized the importance of continued military cooperation. Carney has increased Canada’s military expenditures to 2 percent of the country’s GDP and agreed to Trump’s demand that NATO countries spend at least 5 percent of their GDP on defense by 2035. Carney has also said that his government is in talks about taking part in Trump’s plans for a Golden Dome missile-defense system. Even amid the tariff fight, Carney has been trying to win the president over by pitching a vision of deeper economic integration with the U.S.—a so-called Fortress North America—to help push back against China’s economic influence. Carney’s defense minister reportedly told the U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Canada is “moving in lockstep” with the U.S. on continental defense.

Yet Carney is also trying to reduce Canada’s dependence on the U.S. military. He announced last year that “new security threats” necessitated “the biggest investments in our military in generations.” Instead of spending more than 70 percent of the country’s military-capital budget on American equipment, his government plans to route 70 percent of Canada’s defense contracts to Canadian firms within a decade. His government has also been diversifying Canada’s industrial partnerships by negotiating new agreements with European and Pacific allies. This has included selecting a Swedish airborne-surveillance early-warning aircraft instead of an American one, and rethinking that fleet of F-35s—perhaps buying some Swedish Saab Gripen fighters instead.

Most Canadians applaud these efforts, according to polls. And domestic firms are poised to benefit; core defense spending is projected to grow from about $64 billion in 2025 to $160 billion by 2035. But there are good reasons to question whether these ambitions will become a reality. The spending that Carney has pledged would normally be unthinkable during peacetime, and the country will struggle to meet these promises without new taxes, cuts to social programs, or serious debt. Carney has not said how his government will finance these plans through 2035, and the public has not had to make any sacrifices so far.

Another problem is that Canada’s defense industry is neither large nor self-sufficient. Canadian firms will need time to expand their production to deliver Canadian-made capabilities. Those capital costs require access to long-term contracts, not grand political pronouncements.

Even if Carney figures out how to pay for this domestic military buildup, Canada’s dependence on the U.S. military runs so deep, and has been entrenched over so many decades, that pivoting away will involve more than just a few years of strategic spending. Canada cannot mount a major military operation overseas without American support and, like most NATO allies, is utterly reliant on the United States for core capabilities in communications, command and control networks, intelligence, and other areas. Developing non-American alternatives will require unprecedented levels of investment and cooperation among Canada and European NATO allies.

Mounting threats from China and Russia make the challenges of disentangling from the U.S. military only more profound. Despite simmering tensions with the U.S., the defense of North America will always be a joint endeavor, with Washington in the lead.

The Trump administration has already shown that it is willing to use the continental-defense relationship to rebuke its northern neighbor. In May, the U.S. suspended its participation in a joint board for continental defense that dates back to World War II, partly in response to Carney’s widely praised speech at Davos in which he warned that “the rules-based order is fading.” This was troubling for Canada, which is ostensibly on equal footing with the U.S. in well-established continental-defense institutions. If the larger, more powerful U.S. demands that the continent’s defense requires the exclusive use of American equipment, such as the F-35 or U.S.-made surveillance planes, Canada’s options may be limited.

[Chrystia Freeland: The art of dealing with Trump]

Notwithstanding escalating political and economic tensions between the two neighbors, Canada has been quietly keeping its relationship with the U.S. military steady. Intelligence sharing, military exchanges, and North American air-defense cooperation are operating as normal. Most of the Canadian military leaders I’ve spoken with assume that the relationship between the two countries will largely recover when Trump is no longer in office. Defense planners in both countries recognize the importance of continued cooperation, regardless of tariffs or hostile rhetoric.

Trump may not single-handedly undo decades of close military cooperation between Canada and the U.S., but his presidency has certainly forced America’s northern neighbor to be less trusting and complacent. Canada may not be able to fully divest itself from the U.S. military, but relying too heavily on American defense cooperation and goodwill no longer seems wise. Fixing this problem will require more time and money than Canadians are typically willing to spend, but Canadians appear at least willing to pay this price if it will deliver better security for themselves.

Senator Susan Collins desperately needed to change the subject. As she stepped around cow manure at the annual Fryeburg Fair, a reporter was asking her about President Trump’s musing that he might campaign in Maine during the closing weeks of the election—an invitation that Collins, trying once again to save her seat, almost certainly had not extended to a man with an approval rating of 32 percent in the state. A campaign staffer tried to cut off the questioning, but the nearly 74-year-old Collins has not won five Senate elections through luck alone, and she quickly found a way out of the tricky Trump talk. “I do have some important news today,” she declared to the assembled scribblers.

Collins went on to announce that she had persuaded the Trump administration to speed up the release of $38 million in home heating assistance for Maine. Nevermind that her office had already publicized the news earlier that day, or that none of the journalists with Collins reported for local publications. This was either Collins at her senatorial savviest, or a stodgy politician reaching for a tattered playbook.

As temperatures plunge, the cost of heating oil is as potent a political issue in Maine as the price of gas is everywhere else. Collins has built her reelection campaign on the idea that she alone, as the chair of the Senate’s powerful appropriations committee and the lone Republican elected to Congress in all of New England, can deliver for Maine. She has boasted of bringing home billions for her sparsely populated state over the years. At a debate this month, Collins crowed that she had secured an exemption for road salt—another crucial supply during Maine’s perennial winter freeze—from the tariffs that Trump has slapped on Canadian goods. (“We can’t eat road salt,” her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, retorted.)

This strategy has worked for Collins before. In 2020, she defied polls forecasting her defeat and won reelection by nearly nine points over a well-funded Democratic opponent even as Joe Biden carried Maine that year by a similar margin. The contours of that campaign were largely the same as the one Collins is currently waging: Democrats tried to tie her to an unpopular Trump, denounced her claims to be independent, and assailed her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a potential death knell for Roe v. Wade. Collins prevailed by leaning on her bipartisan record and the federal aid she had secured for her state.

Six years later, Democrats have reason to believe that a message that fell short in 2020 will resonate more deeply now. Both Collins and Trump have lower approval ratings in the state than they did then, and the decisive vote Collins gave to Kavanaugh proved consequential when he sided with a majority on the Supreme Court in overturning Roe. (Collins, who supports abortion rights, has said she relied on Kavanaugh’s statements that he considered the 1973 ruling to be settled legal precedent. Earlier this year, however, she told reporters that she did not regret her vote.) Democrats have added ammunition against Collins following a ProPublica report that, in late 2024, the FBI was on the verge of launching a bribery investigation into federal contracts she had helped land for her campaign donors (one of whom had pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions). The probe ended after Trump took office and the Department of Justice slashed its public-corruption units. Collins has denied wrongdoing.

On paper, Maine should be the easiest state for Democrats to flip during a year in which, polls suggest, voters are intent on punishing the GOP. It is the only state that Kamala Harris carried in 2024—she won by seven points—where a Republican incumbent senator is on the ballot. Yet Democrats have not been able to put Collins away. Polls show a close race; Jackson is leading narrowly in some surveys, and Collins is ahead in others. She is faring no worse—and in some cases better—than Republican incumbents running in more conservative states such as Ohio, Alaska, and Kansas.

Collins is benefiting, too, from a Democratic campaign that has at times verged on the shambolic. Party leaders initially tried to recruit Governor Janet Mills to challenge Collins, despite the fact that Mills would have been, if elected, a 79-year-old Senate freshman. Mills entered the race but withdrew when polls showed her getting crushed in the primary by Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer. Platner shot quickly to national stardom, surviving the revelation that he had a tattoo resembling an infamous Nazi emblem, but he was forced to withdraw following allegations of sexual assault (which he denied).

[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats ]

Democrats then nominated Jackson, another Bernie Sanders acolyte who had finished third in the party primary for governor earlier this year. Jackson and Collins hail from the same rural county in northern Maine, and he still sounds like he grew up a few miles from the Canadian border. Jackson followed his father into logging before entering politics; he’s served in the state legislature for most of the past two decades, rising to become the leader of the Maine Senate. He lacks both Platner’s strengths and weaknesses—less obviously flawed but also less polished and charismatic. “Troy does not have the energy or the engagement that Graham did,” Wendy Frayer, a 53-year-old social worker from Auburn, Maine, told me at a Jackson rally. “He probably lost some votes.”

Whether Jackson can reassemble, and possibly expand, Platner’s coalition is a key question in the closing weeks. But when I spoke with both Democrats and Republicans in Maine recently, they each argued that the race will turn less on voters’ views about Jackson than on their opinions of Collins. “Troy Jackson is a nonfactor,” one Democrat who’s not working on the campaign told me after being granted anonymity to speak bluntly about the party’s candidate. “The question is: Will the trends catch up with her this year?”

Collins is, at this point in her career, a pretty sporadic campaigner. She does not regularly hold large rallies or town halls, and during a six-day stretch in mid-October that I spent in Maine, her staff notified reporters of only a single public appearance aside from a televised debate with Jackson. (The rivals held four debates over two weeks, so voters have gotten to hear plenty from both candidates.)

The Fryeburg Fair, however, is always a fun stop for Collins, as well as an ideal place for her campaign to demonstrate that her connection to Maine’s voters remains strong. The annual festival is the state’s biggest, drawing upwards of 20,000 people a day and transforming a small town near the New Hampshire border into “Maine’s second-largest city,” according to a fair official who served as Collins’s guide for the day. Fryeburg sits in a rural county that voted overwhelmingly for Collins in 2020, and during a two-hour stroll through the fairgrounds, people flocked to her. “Please win,” one man told Collins as he introduced her to his family. (She offered campaign stickers to the kids.) “I’m doing my best,” the senator replied with a smile. Collins gamely posed for photos with all who sought them, including a pair of teenage boys wearing shirts that read I ❤️ Boobies, which they had purchased from a nearby T-shirt vendor. (One of them did remove his hat for the photo out of respect.) Collins also tolerated the reporters who were trailing her, although as she made her way through a fragrant, high-traffic stretch near the livestock barn, she chided one of them: “Don’t make me walk in shit.”

I was struck by how many people not only recognized Collins but seemed to be familiar with her accomplishments—an indication of both her standing and the imprint of millions of dollars that she and her allies are spending on TV ads. Multiple Collins supporters brought up, unprompted, the record-setting 10,000th consecutive Senate vote without an absence that she cast in June. “Character is huge, and Susan Collins has a great character record,” Chet Charette, the deputy fire chief in Fryeburg, told me. Charette is backing Collins even though he wants to see term limits for members of Congress, which she opposes. (During her first campaign, in 1996, Collins pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate.) “She’s a lot more cognizant than a lot of them are,” Charette said.

By virtue of her lonely position in the middle of a polarized political climate, Collins must also rely on votes from people whom she frequently disappoints. Outside the Portland TV studio that hosted one of her debates, a boisterous crowd of Collins supporters cheered her arrival. When I asked Marc Fournier, a 55-year-old from nearby Westbrook, why he was backing Collins, he began with a disclaimer: “Susan Collins is not my favorite person.” He explained that he was displeased Collins had opposed some key Trump priorities. “She’s giving votes away,” Fournier complained. But he added: “Just because I disagree with her doesn’t mean I’m not going to vote for her.”

As Collins was concluding her visit to the Fryeburg Fair, a man who gave his name as Jim greeted her with a notably less friendly message. He told Collins he had supported her for years, but she had lost his vote when she backed Kavanaugh and helped Trump “stack” the Supreme Court. “You don’t stand up when it’s important,” Jim said. “I do,” Collins protested.

[Read: The guard that won’t be changing]

A key explanation for Collins’s political resilience is that in deep-blue New England, plenty of Democratic voters pride themselves on rewarding GOP moderation. In 2024, Vermonters elected Phil Scott, a Republican, to a fifth term as governor by a 50-point margin even as they backed Kamala Harris for president and Sanders’s return to the Senate. New Hampshire has elected Republican governors for the past decade.

Yet that tendency among some Democrats in the region to vote for the “good Republican” extends less and less to federal officeholders in the Trump era, and the force of political gravity that Collins must overcome is stronger this year than ever before. When it was my turn for a question in Fryeburg, I asked Collins what she would say to Mainers who are unhappy with the direction of the country and who might use this election to vote for change. “Well, first of all, I contest the premise of your question,” Collins replied, pointing to her “enormously favorable” reception among the fairgoers. At that moment, a man started loudly heckling her. “You can’t eat road salt, can ya?!” he shouted. “There are always a few exceptions,” Collins observed with a tight smile, before going on with a lengthy defense of her record delivering for Maine. She did not seem especially concerned that her critics have grown significantly in number over the years or that, in a few weeks’ time, they could marshal the votes to end her long career.

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A new boogeyman arrived in Democratic campaign ads this year with such force that it was possible to forget it had ever been absent. Slotted between clichés about “rising costs,” the “rigged economy,” and the elusive “fair shot” for the middle class, the familiar villains of billionaires, insurance companies, and “MAGA extremists” were joined by a friend turned foe.

“Big Tech’s invading Ohio, driving up our electric rates, damaging our environment, destroying our farmland,” Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio warned in one ad. Roy Cooper, who is running in North Carolina for Senate, said in another: “My plan stops grocery stores from using AI to overcharge you.” A 30-second spot in Wisconsin features Rebecca Cooke, a congressional candidate, promising voters seated around a kitchen table: “I don’t want to be beholden to any of these Big Tech companies.” And the House Majority PAC, a group closely aligned with Democratic leaders that has been attacking Republicans for their proximity to the new baddie on the block, released an ad labeling the incumbent Republican in Wisconsin’s Third District “Data Center Derrick Van Orden”—and suggesting that he was designed by artificial intelligence to serve its interests.

The sudden Democratic revulsion toward Big Tech and all its offspring—data centers, artificial intelligence, tech oligarchs—has defined this midterm election and will likely continue through the early innings of the 2028 presidential campaign. For most of the past few decades, Democrats cast themselves as a futurist party heralding a digital utopia, a posture founded by Al Gore and solidified when Barack Obama traveled to Google’s headquarters in 2007 to announce his presidential campaign’s commitment to “use technology to reach ever-expanding horizons.” Republicans were the ones warning about censorship and centralized power, as corporate executives clumsily adjusted the levers of permissible speech on social media.

But partisan passions on tech have been realigning from the moment President Trump delivered his second inaugural address in 2025, with Silicon Valley’s centibillionaires as background props. The president’s hostility toward attempts to rein in AI has solidified the shift. Democratic politicians and strategists now enter the final weeks of a midterm season convinced that they have uncovered a way to persuade Trump’s voters to at least hesitate before voting for Republicans. “Trump and his anti-AI-regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Rob Flaherty, one of Joe Biden’s top digital strategists, told me. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”

Republican campaign advisers, including those in Trump’s circle, admit the new vulnerability—and are taking tentative steps to address it. The president laid out a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, aiming to assure voters that new AI server farms would not increase their utility bill. The Republican-led House voted in September to request that state regulators require those standards, legislation that was then championed by Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, who is in a tight race with his Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown. “The data center brand is the anchor,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote in an August memo, describing a drag on Husted’s reelection efforts that was first reported by The New York Times. Republican strategists were also alarmed by how much voters responded to the issue: “This messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

But the memo declaring “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” had little influence over Trump’s own rhetoric, and the president spent much of September insisting that concerns of an AI-induced apocalypse were a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy.” While his Cabinet went on television to defend data centers as a great American boon, Trump gathered the leaders of the nation’s technology companies at the White House so that he could praise them and they could praise him. Democrats have been delighted. When the progressive data firm Catalist asked in a poll which party Americans trust when it comes to “responding to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and society,” they favored Democrats by eight percentage points in July and August. The lead grew to 12 points in September, just as the explosion of television advertising started hitting screens. “Donald Trump decided to convene executives from Big Tech and then lecture the American people that their concerns about data centers are unfounded,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me in a recent gaggle with reporters. “This is extraordinary stuff.”

The anti–Big Tech ads have saturated swing districts around the country. Reset Tech—a left-leaning group focused on the intersection of AI, media, and democracy that supports more technology regulation—recently used advertising data collected by the tracking firm AdImpact to quantify the messaging shift. From 2020 to 2024, a period that includes three congressional and two presidential cycles, Republican candidates and their allies spent more than $7.3 million on 26 ads that name-checked Big Tech, while Democrats spent just $512,000 on two ads. This cycle the polarities have reversed. Democrats have spent $14 million on 86 ads that mention Big Tech, compared with almost $6.3 million by Republican interests on 37 ads. The contrast in this cycle regarding spots critical of the data-center boom is even more profound: Democratic candidates and groups have run 286 critical ads, compared with 121 ads by Republican interests.

Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, told me that the investments Democrats have made over the past three months to “seed this issue” are now helping produce changes in polling. “This will play a meaningful factor in the outcome of the 2026 midterms,” Bharwani said, “and put Democrats on a strong footing going into the presidential election cycle.”

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

Democratic strategists began tracking the opportunity earlier this year, when polling from House districts showed surprising concern about AI. In one batch of Democratic polls from March, which I obtained, unfavorable views of AI stood at an average of 63 percent across Maine’s Second District, California’s Twenty-Second District, and Colorado’s Eighth District—all battlegrounds.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was an early tech critic, and her 2025 campaign focused on online safety for children. She told me that she became interested when, during her time in Congress, Republican leaders in the House refused to call a vote for the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which had passed the Senate with 91 votes. Since then, she has signed multiple bills in New Jersey that regulate social-media access for children and clamp down on the use of algorithms to set grocery prices and rent. “Trump is the Republican Party in Washington,” she said. “Democrats have to step into this, and they have to lead here, and I think you see it in these campaigns.” Just this week, two candidates from opposite ends of the party’s ideological spectrum—Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan, and David Crowley, the candidate for governor in Wisconsin—released plans for technology regulation.

Flaherty and Bharwani argue that the potency of this issue will only grow as AI’s disruption persists. Polls this cycle continue to show that AI barely ranks as a priority for voters. But Democrats believe that they can tie it to the cost of living and economic insecurity—issues that are at the top of the list. A Democratic-aligned super PAC called Tomorrow Together, which Flaherty co-founded, recently began testing the theory with a $4 million ad buy in four House districts. The ads connect concern over Big Tech with the populist frustration over diminished economic opportunity. One of the taglines: “Lining their pockets, emptying yours.”

Bharwani said that the Democrats’ new stance is a recognition that Obama’s vision of a virtuous cycle of tech-driven innovation never came to pass. “What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire, and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing,” he told me. “These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.” That argument is now being served up to prospective 2028 presidential contenders, who will be shaping the next vision for Democratic governance in a nation where technological change continues to accelerate.

President Trump’s inexplicable decision to waive some sanctions on Russia, announced late Friday, essentially gives a pass to the forces of evil in the Kremlin. The move effectively nullifies legislation that was named after the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, passed by huge bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate, and signed by the president. This decision is the latest in a long series that this administration has taken to appease or accommodate the Russians in misguided attempts to get them to negotiate. Russian President Vladimir Putin pockets these naive offerings and still refuses to talk.

Surveys show that most Americans stand with Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia, view Putin as a dangerous threat who shouldn’t be trusted, and want to see the United States offer more assistance to Ukraine.  

Few wars in recent history have been so black-and-white: Russia is the guilty party that invaded Ukraine for no good reason. Ukraine is, for its part, defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.  

And yet there is much misinformation and disinformation circulating that blurs the picture. To address the problem of phony narratives, it is useful to contrast Russia and Putin with Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Putin came to power in August 1999, when his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, designated him prime minister and his preferred successor; Yeltsin resigned from office at the end of that year and named Putin acting president, three months before the next presidential election. Putin had used his time as prime minister to deploy brutal force against the Chechens in 1999. Zelensky became the leader of Ukraine in 2019, when he won by a landslide in a free and fair election certified by domestic and international observers. Putin hasn’t won a legitimate election throughout his two-plus decades in power.  

Putin is a murderous dictator who kills his own citizens as well as those of his neighbors. He treats his troops as cannon fodder. Zelensky is a democratically elected leader whose term has been extended because Ukraine cannot credibly conduct elections under martial law, which was declared after Russia invaded on a full scale in 2022.  

Under Putin, Russian forces deliberately target civilian areas, including hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools. They also seek to destroy energy facilities and water supplies to freeze out Ukrainians and force them into submission. Zelensky and Ukrainian forces focus on Russian energy facilities that provide Putin with funding for his war campaign, but generally seek to minimize civilian casualties.

Putin first started the war against Ukraine in 2014, when he illegally annexed Crimea and then moved into Ukraine’s Donbas region. Zelensky wasn’t even in politics that year, so he can’t be blamed for starting the war.

Putin refuses to end the war, enter serious negotiations, or even entertain a cease-fire. Zelensky and Ukraine have shown tremendous willingness to negotiate, freeze the fighting at its current stage, and sort out the status of Russian-occupied land through diplomacy, without conferring recognition of Russian control.  

Putin has ignored Trump’s repeated efforts to end the war, including the recent energy-cease-fire announcement, by continuing to strike Ukrainian energy targets. Zelensky had suspended retaliatory strikes against Russian refineries for three days but lifted that pause after Russia kept bombing Ukraine.  

Putin sought to topple the Zelensky government through his full-scale invasion, in 2022, to take over massive amounts of Ukrainian territory and to subjugate the country under Russian rule. Zelensky and the people of Ukraine simply have sought to live in peace and exercise their right to determine their independent future.  

Putin wishes to challenge and undermine democratic nations and the institutions that bring them together, such as NATO and the European Union. Ukraine seeks to join these institutions and assume its rightful place as a full member of the Euro-Atlantic community.

Putin supports Iran against the United States, providing both intelligence aimed to target and kill Americans as well as weapons systems to help that cause. Zelensky and Ukraine offered the United States and its allies in the Middle East anti-drone capabilities and insights on how to fight the Iranian Shahed drones, which have been used against Ukraine.

Putin relies on North Koreans and others who have been trafficked into Russia’s side of the war. Casualties are merely a statistic for him and for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Zelensky has never asked the West to send its troops to fight on Ukraine’s side, but he does seek Western assistance to defend against the much larger Russian military.   

Putin depends on China’s purchases of Russian energy and provision of dual-use technology to back his war. Ukraine looks to the West for its support.

Putin and Russia are key parts of CRINK, the grouping of the authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that seek to weaken and threaten the West. Ukraine is the bulwark against a major part of this dangerous alignment.  

Putin and Russian forces have launched provocations against Europe and the United States, almost daring war with the West. These have included major violations of NATO airspace; drone attacks and interference with European airports and flights; assassinations and attempted killings on Western soil; cyberattacks; and election interference. Ukraine stands between Russia and Europe, fighting for its freedom as well as the safety and security of the continent.  

Putin oversees one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. He has obliterated rule of law and sanctity of contracts, making Russia a highly inhospitable place to do business, including in the energy sector. Ukraine, while experiencing its own problem of corruption, actively seeks to confront that problem while encouraging and desperately needing Western investment. Russia ranks 157th out of 182 nations in Transparency International’s corruption index, while Ukraine ranks 104th. Putin has destroyed Russian civil society; Ukrainian civil society is vibrant and calls out corruption on a regular basis.

What does all of this mean for the United States and Europe? For starters, they should stand unequivocally with Ukraine against Russia. History will reflect poorly on the West if it concludes that our policy and position were wishy-washy at best in a war so clearly black-and-white.

They should provide the military assistance that Ukraine needs to defend itself, save lives from Russian bombardment, regain territory that Russia illegally occupies, and win the war. The war has been an unmitigated disaster for Russia; more than 1.5 million have been killed or wounded, and the conflict has caused severe economic strain. At some point, Russia might reach a breaking point; the West should help accelerate that process, because that may be the only way to get Putin to end the war he started.

Europe should support Ukraine financially to help offset the costs of Ukraine’s forced increased military spending and reconstruction. To do this, Europe should finally move from freezing to seizing the roughly $300 billion in Russian assets that are in Western financial institutions, mostly in Belgium’s Euroclear. These funds, which Russia should never recover after what it has done to Ukraine, would provide a major financial assist to Ukraine and allay the potential burden on the West.

Pressure to end the war should be applied and increased on Putin and Russia, the ones who started it—not Ukraine. This means a serious tightening of sanctions implementation, including stronger enforcement against Russia’s shadow fleet that generates energy-export income, and no business deals with Russia that ease the sanctions pressure and provide financing for its war effort. It means ending loopholes that allow Western-made parts essential for Russian weapons to slip through the sanctions.  

The United States should also raise the costs on countries—especially China and India—that import Russian energy. And the West should not sign energy or any other deals with Putin and Russia, as the Trump administration announced on October 9 regarding diesel. Such efforts are read in Moscow as weakness and reinforce Putin’s thinking that he is winning and can outlast the West’s support for Ukraine.  

The West should stop inviting Putin to various meetings, such as the G20 gathering hosted this year by the United States. He has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine (specifically the abduction of Ukrainian children, though he is guilty of much more). He is responsible for the worst security crisis on the European continent since World War II. He needs to be isolated and treated as the pariah and threat that he is, not welcomed with red-carpet treatment.

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In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.

Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.

Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world.  

The president’s aides are scrambling to explain why this capitulation to Russia isn’t exactly what it looks like. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when pressed by a reporter, said that the administration would “assess” the impact of the Graham Act after a 60-day period. This was nonsense: The executive order includes no such timeline, and no one seriously believes that the administration is running numbers to decide whether sanctions are a good idea.

Rubio was joined in his excuse making by a handful of desperate Republicans who tried to cast Trump’s decision as some sort of tough-love patriotism. When asked on Sunday whether he agreed with Trump on lifting sanctions, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said, “He is choosing the American people first, is what he’s doing.” But few even on the American right seem willing to buy it. Trump loyalist Senator Ted Cruz called Trump’s move  “a mistake,” and Senator Darline Graham, who now holds her brother’s seat, broke with Trump as well.

Some conservative commentators, including Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, expressed considerably more rage. McCarthy wrote on Saturday that Putin is on a “quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” and that “President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.” As a lawyer, McCarthy surely did not choose those words at random. Aid and comfort are part of the criteria in Article III of the Constitution of the United States that define treason. McCarthy called for “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

Trump’s decision has nothing to do with American national security. His de facto alliance with Russia is a sordid arrangement rooted in his own fears and hatreds.

First, Trump knows that Republicans are almost certainly facing a beating in the midterm elections, in part over the price of gas—a spike caused by the kind of war in Iran that he promised during his 2024 campaign to never start. He is desperate to do anything he can to lower the price of gas, and because he does not seem to understand how the international economy works, he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)

As Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, put it this weekend: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive; as a President of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities. We all know his actual reasons for this are a grubby attempt to win a few more votes in the midterms by trying to get oil prices down.” The result, Rifkind rightly added, is that Trump will now be “directly responsible” for the deaths of Ukrainians who will die while Putin uses the Russian alliance with America to continue the fighting.

But even if the American economy were in better shape, Trump’s history with Putin suggests that he was never going to allow the sanctions in the Graham Act to be enforced. Trump’s suspension of the law is a signal to Ukraine, to Russia, to Europe, and to America’s NATO allies that the Trump White House and Putin’s Kremlin are now on the same side.

Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail. His attachment is so obvious that for years it has sparked various complicated theories about its origins, but Occam’s razor suggests a more direct explanation: Trump is a weak man who is intimidated by stronger and smarter men. His humiliating relationship with Putin is different only in degree from the way he interacts with other authoritarian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (a dangerous totalitarian with whom Trump claimed to have fallen in love).

As if to prove the point, this afternoon Trump posted a whiny screed on his Truth Social site in which he pleaded with the public to understand how overmatched he is against Putin. Trump tried to explain that he is accommodating the Russian leader because he doesn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” In a deeply pathetic admission, he warned that angering Putin could have consequences in Iran: “Perhaps more importantly, Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.” He then said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has gotten so much money from the Biden administration and from Europe that “he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran. Nothing better illustrates just how weak a supplicant Trump has become in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.

Trump engages in this kind of personalized diplomacy in part because he believes himself to be—against all evidence—a master dealmaker. But the greater irony, considering how much he rails against globalism, is that he also behaves this way because he is in fact a globalist himself. He does not view the world as a collection of sovereign nations; he sees it instead as territories run by mob bosses. The weaker ones, especially America’s allies, can be abused and threatened at will. The stronger godfathers, including America’s dedicated enemies, are peers and thus treated with respect. The interests of the innocent millions in those countries are of no consequence. What matters is what’s good for Trump, his underbosses, and his family.

Trump also seems to be motivated by his open loathing of Zelensky, a hostility that can be traced back to Trump’s first term, when the unwillingness of Ukrainian authorities to be part of a scheme to investigate Joe Biden led to Trump’s first impeachment. But Trump’s antipathy toward Zelensky is more than score-settling: To him, it seems, Zelensky is a loser, a nobody who is causing needless trouble for his friend Vladimir. The American president cannot understand why Zelensky and his people do not simply accept their situation and lie down under Russia’s tank treads.

Earlier this month, Trump called for Zelensky’s removal. Now he seems determined to let Putin, rather than the people of Ukraine, fulfill that demand.

In the words of another famous Russian named Vladimir, What is to be done? The answers are not comforting.

Congress, when it reconvenes, can try to pass new legislation, but a bill amending the Graham Act would require a veto-proof majority to become law. Republicans have shown no interest in taking the power to tariff out of Trump’s hands, and they are equally unlikely to strip him of the power to lift the sanctions they just tried to impose. The courts are also unlikely to challenge the president when he invokes national security, which he does for almost everything he wants.

An additional problem is that both Trump’s secretary of defense and his vice president are likely to support a policy aimed at securing a Russian victory. Vance joined Trump in an attempt to bully Zelensky during their infamous meeting in the White House in early 2025, and he is unlikely to ask Trump to reconsider helping Putin. Pete Hegseth, for his part, appears willing to say and do whatever keeps him in the Pentagon. America’s senior military officers may be sympathetic to Ukraine—as are most American citizens—but the idea that the adolescent, self-styled “secretary of war” is going to suddenly deliver a mature and stoic defense of democracy against Russian imperialism is laughable.

For the foreseeable future, Ukraine’s fate depends on aid from Europe. Perhaps Europe will continue to step up, and a new Congress might try to demand more support from the White House. But everyone will have to hurry: Winter is coming.

Zelensky, sadly, knows that a Russian victory looks to be exactly what Trump wants. If “the United States will support Putin,” he said on Sunday, “it’s unbelievable. It’s a tragedy.” He added: “Of course, if these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail. And we will not be able to stand.”

A world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was, until now, the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies, dark tales that Americans told themselves, like ghost stories around a campfire. But this alliance now exists. If Stalin and his Cold War successors could see what Trump and Putin have created, and how the mighty United States has been humbled and humiliated, they might think that their evil hopes were not wrong, but only that they dreamed them too early.