The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), the parent organization of The UnPopulist, launched Executive Watch early in Trump’s second term. It has been meticulously documenting this White House’s illicit actions since then.

Below is our biweekly selection of new entries. Bookmark this page, which contains a chronological scroll of the abuses. And also this post, which sorts and lists them under our 5 “P” categories:

• Personal Grift

• Political Corruption

• Presidential Retribution

• Power Consolidation

• Policy Illegality

After reading the following entries, tell us: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?

June 4, 2026

Trump Is Trying to Discredit California’s Primary Results Without a Shred of Evidence Because Some Republicans Might Not Make it Into the General Elections
Category: Political Corruption

Donald Trump’s obsession with election conspiracy theories has found a new target: California’s primaries. In a Fox News interview and a series of deranged Truth Social posts, he has baselessly claimed that Democrats are stealing elections in various primary contests through mail-in ballot fraud. He writes: “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”

Trump’s target on this occasion was California’s primary elections—but make no mistake, he and his allies actively seek to cast doubt on any election anywhere that isn’t likely to vote for him or his chosen candidates.

ABC News reports:

President Donald Trump posted to social media late Wednesday night accusing the Democratic Party in California of trying to “steal” the California gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral primaries, offering no evidence to support the allegation.

In his posts, Trump complained about the alleged misuse of mail-in ballots and also accused the Democratic Party of delaying the tallying of votes—claims for which there is currently no supporting evidence.

The president also claimed that the votes are “under investigation” by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

No reasonable person believes, as Trump recently claimed, that he would have won in California if Jesus Christ had counted the votes (although perhaps he is still confusing himself with Jesus?).

June 3, 2026

In a Cynical Move, Trump Invokes Forced Labor Concerns as a Pretext to Revive His Tariff Regime After Courts Have Repeatedly Struck It Down
Category: Policy Illegality

Courts have struck down Donald Trump’s tariff regime on a number of occasions, including the Supreme Court itself, which ruled earlier this year that his primary tariffing authority, IEEPA, does not grant the president the power to impose tariffs. Every legal theory he has tried has been rejected. Undeterred, the president has found a new pretext: forced labor. The administration is now imposing across-the-board tariffs of 10–12.5% on countries it claims are failing to enforce anti-forced-labor provisions. Forced labor is a legitimate issue, of course, but unilateral tariffs imposed, without any global cooperation, by an imperialist authoritarian that cares not a whit about human rights doesn’t pass the laugh test. So trade experts are rightly calling out the administration’s bogus framing.

The New York Times reports:

The new tariffs will be imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law that allows the president to issue tariffs to respond to other countries’ trade practices. Legal experts said they are likely to be more durable than the initial law Mr. Trump used to enact tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Mr. Trump used Section 301 in his first term to wage a trade war with China, and the tariffs he put in place have survived multiple court challenges. No administration, however, has ever used the provision in such a sweeping way.

Trade experts have welcomed efforts to end or reduce forced labor, but some have complained that the new tariffs are primarily aimed at finding a way to block foreign products and raise revenue, not ending human rights abuses.

As the Times notes, Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations called the announcement a “transparently cynical effort” and “merely a pretext to maintain tariffs that the administration believes have been effective.” The forced labor framing may be new, but the underlying impulse to use tariffs baselessly and illicitly is not.

June 2, 2026

Trump Hands the Keys to National Intelligence to a Real Estate Loyalist With Zero Qualifications Except Digging Up Dirt on Trump’s Enemies
Category: Presidential Retribution

Donald Trump wasted no time finding a replacement to the director of national intelligence after Tulsi Gabbard resigned. As with Gabbard, Trump's criteria for the job are not any actual experience or qualifications, but slavish personal loyalty and a willingness to go after his enemies. So he picked Bill Pulte, formerly the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a man arguably even less qualified than his predecessor.

Pulte’s main claim to fame is that he feverishly rummaged through the mortgage records of Trump’s political enemies so that the administration could target them. Pulte proved himself useful in one of Trump’s most important initiatives: retaliating against critics and those who have tried to hold him accountable—people like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

NBC News reports:

As acting director of national intelligence, Pulte will be the highest-ranking intelligence official, overseeing a vast network of 18 agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency. He will also be the president’s principal adviser on intelligence issues and will manage the daily intelligence briefing for the president.

Trump announced on social media that Pulte will remain as director of the housing finance agency, as well as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises created by Congress to support the mortgage market. …

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, slammed the decision, saying in a statement that Pulte was not only unqualified, but that he was chosen “precisely because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need,” Warner said.

The job falls to Pulte to inform the most powerful person in the world what is actually true about the world. Trump has handed this role to someone whose most notable professional achievement is finding dirt in mortgage filings. The intelligence community’s animating purpose—providing the president with accurate info regardless of whether he wants to hear it—has just been placed under the supervision of a man selected precisely because he will not do that.

May 29, 2026

In its Bid to Rewrite the History of the Capitol Attack, Trump’s DOJ Erases Thousands of Pages of Jan. 6 Materials from Its Website
Category: Political Corruption

For this president, rewriting the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection has been a sustained project: pardoning the rioters, carving out billions of tax dollars to provide them reparations for participating in a coup, and framing a violent assault on the Capitol as some sort of legitimate political protest. Now his Justice Department has moved to the next phase: deleting the official record.

Lawfare, which has thankfully archived the majority of the deleted materials, explains:

Last week, the Justice Department began systematically removing material from its web sites regarding the many indictments and convictions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov.

“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”

Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield’s characterization. “Nothing ’quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

We are not erasing history quietly, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history loudly and proudly.

For Trump, it’s not enough to pardon those who engaged in political violence on his behalf, or even to reward them financially. He needs to erase the very idea that what they did was wrong from the official record. And his Department of Justice—the federal government’s top law enforcement agency—appears all too happy to comply.

May 29, 2026

Trump Is Screening Troops by Weight and Appearance to Serve as Photogenic Backdrop at His White House UFC Event
Category: Power Consolidation

The Pentagon is recruiting hundreds of uniformed servicemembers to fill seats at—please bear in mind that this is still a very weird sentence to type out—Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) June 14 event on the White House’s South Lawn to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary and Trump’s 80th birthday. A cage-fighting arena is being installed on the lawn. And because there are no limits to this administration’s performativity, it only wants in attendance those who meet Trump’s physique standards and will, according to internal guidance, “look good on camera.” Troops selected are required to pay their own travel costs.

The Washington Post reports:

The Pentagon is moving to recruit hundreds of troops to appear as spectators at President Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting event at the White House, and requiring those who attend to pay for their travel and meet height and weight requirements, according to people familiar with the matter and internal memos reviewed by The Washington Post.

The Defense Department has solicited volunteers across the services to attend the June 14 event in uniform. Officials are seeking junior enlisted personnel and junior officers specifically, according to internal messages that make clear travel costs will be “member-procured,” meaning neither the Defense Department nor the UFC intends to pay for their arrangements or accommodations.

One memo, circulated within the Air Force, stipulates that to be eligible, personnel “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO and current physical fitness standard.” Commanders were separately directed to distribute tickets to “genuine UFC fans” rather than senior officials.

The Pentagon under this president has a track record of stage-managing Trump’s appearances with troops. For example, at his earlier visit to Fort Bragg, soldiers were handpicked for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. Using the military as a prop for a combat-sports spectacle at the president’s residence, at the troops’ own expense, extends that pattern into the Twilight Zone.

May 28, 2026

Senior White House Adviser and Trump Pal Peter Navarro Pressured the Pentagon Into a $620 Million Contract With a Firm Linked to Donald Trump Jr.
Category: Personal Grift

In yet another instance of self-dealing corruption by this administration, the Pentagon has issued a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnet company that the venture capital firm of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, invested in a few months prior. Despite initial denials from the administration, the deal was pushed forward—specifically by Peter Navarro, a Trump senior adviser and friend of the family.

ProPublica has the story:

[I]nterviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

The Trump family’s self-dealing has followed a consistent pattern throughout this administration: a family member acquires a financial interest, the White House exerts pressure on the relevant agency to help produce a personal windfall, and officials scramble to comply. The Vulcan deal is merely the first in which the White House intervention has been documented with this degree of specificity.

May 27, 2026

Trump’s DOJ Opens Retaliatory Criminal Investigation Against E. Jean Carroll, Whose Civil Suits Won $88 Million in Damages Against Him
Category: Presidential Retribution

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the longtime columnist whose two civil suits resulted in an $88 million judgment against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. The probe centers on Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic donor whose nonprofit helped fund Carroll’s legal expenses. It also examines whether Carroll committed perjury in a 2022 deposition when she stated her legal costs were being covered on contingency. Notably, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who previously represented Trump in the Carroll matters—recused himself from the investigation.

CNN reports:

The investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony tied to her two civil lawsuits against the president—one alleging he sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and a second for defaming her when in 2019 he repeatedly denied the assault, said she wasn’t his type, and claimed she made it up to boost book sales. Prosecutors’ theory hinges on a 2022 deposition statement by Carroll that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees and expenses.

Senior leaders at the Justice Department referred the investigation to federal prosecutors in Chicago, according to two sources familiar with the matter. While Carroll’s deposition took place in New York, one of the individuals who helped cover some of Carroll’s legal fees, Hoffman, has a nonprofit based in Chicago. Hoffman’s support of the case caught Trump’s attorneys off guard when it came to light on the eve of trial.

A federal judge had already ruled that evidence of Hoffman’s funding had no bearing on Carroll’s allegations and barred it from being presented to jurors. That ruling didn’t stop the DOJ from opening a probe anyway. Carroll’s civil verdicts, which have survived multiple rounds of federal appeals, represent the legal system’s most direct finding against Trump for his personal conduct. The investigation—targeting his accuser, her funder, and a funding arrangement a federal judge already deemed irrelevant—appears aimed squarely at retribution.

May 27, 2026

Trump’s New DHS Secretary Threatens to Halt International Flight Processing at Blue City Airports as Punishment for Allowing Anti-ICE Protests at Detention Camps
Category: Power Consolidation

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced he is “drawing up plans” to end the processing of international flights at airports in left-leaning cities, citing protests outside an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey—protests at which Democratic Sen. Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed by officers. The threat arrives just weeks before the FIFA World Cup brings millions of international visitors to the United States.

The Hill reports:

“[T]hese sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws,” Mullin said, “then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.”

Critics said ending the processing of international flights at various airports would cause chaos at airports across the country, forcing airlines to cancel flights and disrupt travel for left- and right-leaning cities that depend on CBP processing at major hubs.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called the idea “actively insane.” “Airlines cannot divert large numbers of international flights from one city to another,” he wrote. “They’d just have to cancel flights en masse, causing enormous economic damage that splashed waaaaay beyond a few big cities that were the target.”

Halting international flight processing at major airports would inflict enormous collateral damage on ordinary travelers, businesses, and the broader economy—none of whom are responsible for the protests Mullin objects to. More fundamentally, using a core governmental service as a weapon against political dissent is precisely the kind of retaliatory executive action that the constitutional design of limited government was meant to prevent. The administration is treating airport customs processing as a bargaining chip to punish cities for harboring residents who protest its policies.

May 26, 2026

Trump’s Unprecedented Government-Wide Gag Order Is Designed to Silence Whistleblowers and Shield His Administration’s Corruption
Category: Power Consolidation

The Trump administration has proposed a government-wide nondisclosure agreement requiring every federal employee to sign a gag order. The move is unprecedented in scope, and conveniently timed to coincide with one of the most corrupt periods in modern presidential history.

The Washington Post explains:

The draft notice uses an expansive definition of privileged information, beyond typical classified and unclassified designations. Under the terms of the draft, employees would be blocked from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available.”

The draft NDA says that signing it is “voluntary,” but there’s a hefty caveat: “Failure to sign may result in removal from federal service and potential debarment for refusal to certify compliance with applicable non-disclosure obligations.” …

“Such broad gag orders would leave the public in the dark about how the government works, preventing the kind of informed debate that is critical to democratic accountability,” ACLU’s Esha Bhandari said. “The government can’t shroud itself in secrecy in a democracy.”

Federal law protects whistleblowers precisely to prevent this kind of institutional self-sealing—and this NDA, despite its nominal carve-outs, is designed to make employees too afraid to invoke those protections.

The administration’s stance is clear: let Trump do whatever outrageously corrupt and illegal things he wants, or lose your job.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI—Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”)—brought back a memory from when my synagogue reopened our religious school in September 2022. We were in the latter days of the pandemic, and I found myself standing outside the front door of the building with an angry father. He had come in mid-morning because his seventh grader had called, panicking and withdrawn, asking to go home. When his dad arrived, the class was engrossed in a lesson on the book of I Samuel, taught through a game of capture the flag. The son no longer wanted to leave. His dad was fuming.

As we stood there watching the kids playing in the parking lot, I said the first words that came to mind: “I know you are upset. But look at the children. They are all broken.”

I remember early on during the shutdown, when everything shifted to Zoom, feeling simultaneously relieved and spooked. Something amazing was happening, a global experiment. But I could also feel my own screen-fatigue and watched my high-school-aged kids retract emotionally. At Brady Bunch online “meetings,” nobody was meeting anything or anyone.

When groups began to regather in person, masked, I was even more concerned. I could see eyes and hear voices, but I also felt an acute, strange, unrequited love. We were so close to connecting, to being in fellowship, but I could not feel a hand, see the smile-creases around someone’s mouth and nose, or smell pretty much anything. We were together, but apart.

I remember wondering at the time what all this would do to our souls. What would happen to our moral and spiritual formation? What would this bring to our society? These questions have only become more urgent with the advent of AI, and Pope Leo’s recent encyclical is the most sweeping attempt yet to address them at the level they deserve.

The Face as Foundation

But there is another thinker who can also help us tackle them: Emmanuel Levinas, a theological North Star for my spirituality.

It was the work of this French-Jewish philosopher, who survived the Holocaust and participated in the great postwar debate over the metaphysical meaning of mid-century events, that triggered my dread during the pandemic.

Like other critics of modernity, he saw how the promise of moral and rational progress was so easily corrupted by evil. Progress and technological development brought the atom bomb and death camps, too. To some extent the mid-century crisis led to an expansion of liberalism under the umbrella of U.S. global hegemony. The question of the 1940s Civil Rights Movement—“How can we fight for human equality overseas and then return home to Jim Crow?”—became the philosophical underpinning for massively expanded access to the liberal project. The universal message of human dignity was on the march, literally and figuratively. It extended its reach across lines of race, religion, sex, and sexuality in ways that would have been practically unimaginable a generation before.

But even as liberalism expanded it was being undercut. In response to both the perverted turn of modernity and the creeping spread of a postmodern nihilism, traditionalism grew, and people began to give up on progress and retreat into pre-modern bubbles of ritual, isolated community, and centralized authority. Levinas, however, proposed something different. As a Jew he could not accept a postmodernism that saw humanity as hopelessly evil; nor could he adopt a traditionalism which led back to medieval Crusades, Inquisitions, or pogroms. Instead, he demanded we find a new foundation for moral authority. Civilization still needed the ingenuity and creativity of the human spirit, but it also needed a check on human corruption.

Liberalism’s core institutions—courts, legislatures, schools, civic associations, religious communities—have always depended on something they cannot produce on their own: citizens who feel genuine obligation to strangers, who experience something beyond self-interest when they look at another human being. The social contract is not self-sustaining. It rests on a moral formation that precedes and exceeds it. This is not a flaw in the liberal project; it is a feature of any civilization serious about human dignity. What Levinas gave me was a way of naming that foundation: not a rational argument, but an encounter. You do not reason your way into obligation. You see a face.

Levinas taught the power of the face. He said that the human mind naturally attempts to control its environment—to categorize, manage, and contain—leading to what he called “totality.” In contrast, he taught, the source of ethics was what exceeds that control: the encounter with something that cannot be managed or reduced. He called this “infinity.” The experience of seeing a human face completely can become a bridge between the two forces. He wrote, “In front of the face, I always demand more of myself; the more I respond to it, the more the demands grow.” The face imposed impossible obligations. To gaze at it was to see the true worth of our meager lifetimes: we are measured in how we serve one another.

This became the basis of my belief in liberalism. Human individuality is both a gift and a burden, because we do not exist alone. To be a self is already to be in relation—already to owe something to the other person standing before you.

In short, in confronting a face we learn ethics. Institutions and communities—the same structures upon which liberalism depends—are the places we find this education, relying upon the external structure of the preexisting social container to mitigate our failures while we experiment and make mistakes. But the philosophical, psychological, intellectual, and emotional experience hinges on confronting the face.

What Faces Do

In my rabbinical ministry I have seen this power hundreds if not thousands of times. One could press mute on all the sermons and scriptures and simply grapple with the Truth of God’s presence as experienced in faces for the real message. And lest I overstate the power of sightedness, the face is both a physical experience to behold, and a metaphor for the intimate and idiosyncratic humanity of the other, heard in song and laughter, felt in arms, hands and tears, smelled in food and breath, all made more palpable without sight. For me, Pope Leo’s elevation of humanity comes out of these manifestations of the face.

First, faces expose how messy and vulnerable we are. No matter how popular the teen or polished the professional, they still know the inevitability of illness, loss, confusion, error, hardship, and loneliness. (I remember hearing Jon Stewart joke that if he ever had a chance to talk to Jeff Bezos he would whisper, “Death will be victorious.”) Seeing each other we feel the empathy of fellow sufferers, and we know that when we suffer, we will find the support of others who, momentarily, might share some of their strength.

Second, faces reveal the subtle mystery Rudolf Otto called “the numinous.” Who cares about the neurotransmitters in the middle of a good joke or aria? Imagine the energy in an auditorium, then pan your mental camera left and right and observe the faces of humans delighting in the creative expressions of other humans. The same art fails when experienced alone. When we observe other faces we know something intimate and infinite.

Last, we encounter a powerful sense of obligation in the faces of others. This is the common heroism of the one who rushes into danger to save strangers, and when interviewed by the TV reporters later looks confused and says, “I only did what anyone would do.” Peril brings that out, but so too does a good stare into a face. This is why we are tempted to look away when approached by a panhandler in the street. This is also why sitting at a hospital bedside, celebrating a wedding, or teaching children can be so spiritually nourishing. Levinas taught that to look in a face is to hold someone’s life in your hands.

These little things are sources of enormous meaning, providing a sense of life’s purpose that extends beyond the grave.

Liberalism depends upon this source of meaning. Transcendent experience gives liberalism a foundation that precedes and exceeds any purely human system—this is what resolves, for me, the problem of authority. Our human dignity is absolutely equal, but we must also live with some power differentials in some domains of our lives for society to function. The far left wishes to deny the need for such structures (see the Occupy movement), and the right wishes to harden and embolden them (see Doug Wilson).

Liberalism responds by creating systems to hash out our differences, and those systems work because they live in institutional containers where we meet faces. Proximity and encounter with the other trains us to accept the encumbrance of the face’s moral claims, and learn how to navigate the tensions between God-given equality and the need for human hierarchy.

The Aspartame of Spirituality

Watching AI unfurl across the population, I feel all this unraveling with the same dread I felt watching Zoom during the pandemic. While most discourse has focused on AI’s threat to the economy, security, or even psychology, Magnifica Humanitas strikes at something deeper: the threat AI poses to the human capacity for authentic encounter itself. Pope Leo frames the choice facing humanity in terms of the Tower of Babel—a civilization that mistakes technological achievement for genuine human community—and warns that technologically mediated interaction offers a simulacrum of presence, something that can feel like relatedness but comes without what he calls “the mystery of the person” that transforms a human encounter into a genuine meeting of souls.

The trouble is that the hermeneutic of an LLM is a function of math instead of the wisdom of a human religious tradition. All text depends upon context and subtext; religion creates a circle of readers with a constitution of meaning between them—an inherited, living tradition in which every reader is also a participant, accountable to the community and to the dead. Long before Marshall McLuhan, religions discovered that the substance of information matters less than its method of delivery. The Truth of the transcendent cannot be captured with mere words. Instead, religion impresses the awesome and ineffable through metaphor, ritual, contradiction, intimation, direct speech, and innuendo. The community, over centuries, translates. AI appears to do this, but it is fake.

What an LLM actually does is pattern-match across the entire corpus of human expression and return a probabilistic average. It has no stake in your question. It responds without responsibility, answers without the possibility of being changed by the encounter. In Levinasian terms, the face is not merely a physical surface but the place where another consciousness breaks through and makes an ethical claim. An LLM can be trained to read facial expressions, but it cannot receive that claim—because there is no one behind the interface who can suffer, be changed, or be held responsible. It can describe obligation. It cannot feel it. The danger is not that AI gives wrong answers, but that it gives right-feeling answers through a process that structurally excludes the one thing that makes answers morally formative: the vulnerability of the one speaking to you.

The theological risk of modern technology is that even as it does genuine moral good—like how Zoom enabled the continuation of so many social interactions, or how science created vaccines that saved millions of lives—it also creates spiritual fragility. The argument here is not against AI, but against the assumption that what AI offers can substitute for what only human encounter can provide. We gain a semblance of the experience of seeing the face, but our souls are left confused. When the face is truncated by a mask, flattened by Zoom, or replaced by a friendly chatbot or character.ai, we get an illusion of the fullness of human connection whose harm lies in the false promise of meaning. During the pandemic this was hard enough for adults, but for developing youth, something inside broke. Now, with the power of AI, the damage will not be limited to the kids.

We have already begun to anthropomorphize AI by giving it names, referring to our interactions as “chat,” and describing our use of the tool as a form of collaboration. As the technology improves and becomes more intelligent even than the human brain, it will improve upon the relatively basic anthropomorphic behaviors in its current programming, eventually stretching and surpassing our ability to recognize its essence as non-human. And as it becomes more useful, even essential to our economic lives, how much more of our waking minutes will we spend with this semblance of the human that lacks a face?

As a congregational rabbi I can say “Amen” to this encyclical, which Pope Leo chose to present not through the usual Vatican channels but alongside a co-founder of Anthropic (an atheist, no less!). This is not a document that fears technology—rather, it’s one that insists technology cannot replace what only human encounter provides. The danger is that it will provide a misleading taste of human meaning, sweet but potentially harmful—the aspartame of spirituality.

Pope Leo and Levinas, separated by tradition and half a century, are describing the same rupture from different angles. One speaks of the mystery of the person; the other of the face that imposes infinite obligation. What they share is the insistence that authentic moral and spiritual formation requires an encounter that cannot be simulated—because the simulation, however sophisticated, has no skin in the game. It is not vulnerable; it cannot suffer; it has no face.

In addition to the economic, psychological, and political dangers of AI, we need an AI-resistant theology. While AI can already deliver treatises on theological doctrines and descriptions of religious practice, an AI-resistant theology conveys the Truth of God’s presence as implanted in the human through embodied encounter. Such a theology would lead us to recommit, with new urgency, to the institutions and practices that put us face to face and place limits on the ability of AI to penetrate those human spaces.

Very soon, if not already, AI will be able to regurgitate centuries of theological creed in convincing ways, checking religious boxes as if encounter with God is just another algorithm. If theological leadership, from the heights of seminary scholarship to the pastor in the local pulpit, does not catechize humans to recognize the face of our humanity, AI will quickly become not an idol, but a false prophecy as described by Deuteronomy 13:1-4, which describes the one who makes factually accurate predictions, but leads the people away from God.

I recently read an op-ed about the epidemic of plastic surgery in Silicon Valley. I could not stop thinking about it: the people building tools to simulate human connection are, at extraordinary rates, smoothing and stiffening their own faces—erasing the creases that grief leaves, the asymmetries that illness carves, the sag that comes from decades of laughing and crying and aging in proximity to other people. They are, in other words, removing from their faces the very evidence of a life lived in encounter. Levinas taught that the face is the site of infinite obligation precisely because it is vulnerable, mortal, and marked by time. These are not two unrelated trends. Both are attempts to escape the vulnerability that makes a human face what it is.

The core of liberalism is based on the singular notion that every individual has moral worth and therefore rights. But experiencing that moral worth requires the kind of embodied encounter with another person that no technology can fully replicate. AI may not be stoppable but if liberal polities are to survive, they will have to make extraordinary efforts to not let this technology crowd out face-to-face encounters between living, breathing humans.

While reading, I heard my own voice from five years ago:

“Look at the children. They are all broken.”

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Donald Trump’s obsession with election conspiracy theories has found a new target: California’s primaries. In a Fox News interview and a series of deranged Truth Social posts, he has baselessly claimed that Democrats are stealing elections in various primary contests through mail-in ballot fraud. He writes: “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”

Trump’s target on this occasion was California’s primary elections—but make no mistake, he and his allies actively seek to cast doubt on any election anywhere that isn’t likely to vote for him or his chosen candidates.

ABC News reports:

President Donald Trump posted to social media late Wednesday night accusing the Democratic Party in California of trying to “steal” the California gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral primaries, offering no evidence to support the allegation.

In his posts, Trump complained about the alleged misuse of mail-in ballots and also accused the Democratic Party of delaying the tallying of votes—claims for which there is currently no supporting evidence.

The president also claimed that the votes are “under investigation” by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

No reasonable person believes, as Trump recently claimed, that he would have won in California if Jesus Christ had counted the votes (although perhaps he is still confusing himself with Jesus?).

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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My friends’ internet came back two days ago—three months after Iran cut it. That’s the Islamic Republic’s standard practice when it needs to massacre thousands of people without witnesses. When the connection returned, my phone filled with messages imploring me to share with the world what they cannot say themselves.

I am 27—I left Iran at 18. I am not a geopolitical scholar or a credentialed journalist. I am someone who grew up inside this regime’s machinery and was fed its deadly ideology in its mosques and classrooms. I rejected it, and escaped to build a free life in America. I’ve spent the nine years since watching it closely from the outside, working out how I could help my loved ones left inside. I am writing this as a three-month check-in on a war that was supposed to liberate Iran. And I want to say plainly: the people of Iran have been betrayed.

What Three Months Have Produced on the Ground

Let me tell you what my friends are describing right now.

Since the 2022 Mahsa Amini uprising, the majority of Iranians rejected the regime and its ideology. The minority that continued to support the regime was largely marginalized—ashamed, quieted, outmaneuvered—after Amini’s murder.

In January, Iranians took onto the street to demand an end to the theocracy. My friends were there in the crowd, on Jan. 8 and 9, when millions of unarmed Iranians were met with machine guns. Whether one accepts the more conservative estimates from human rights monitors or the higher figures reported by Iran International’s document review, what is not in dispute is that thousands upon thousands of unarmed Iranians—young and old, men and women—were killed with live ammunition on those two days in the deadliest crackdown on protesters in the Islamic Republic’s history. An untold number were imprisoned and tortured. My friend told me she saw decapitated bodies in the alleys where we used to spend our evenings as teenagers. Her mother was struck in the stomach with a rifle butt hard enough to rupture her kidney. (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented that security forces used beatings alongside live fire during the crackdown, including against bystanders not involved in the protests, while snipers were reported to have fired deliberately at protesters’ heads and torsos.)

A government that massacres its own citizens this efficiently is not a legitimate government but an occupying force. Iranians welcomed the war that followed. Everyone was fed up. Everyone has lost someone, or knows someone who has. As wars go, this one should have been straightforward.

What has happened since is that the war handed the small minority that still supports the regime everything they needed to come roaring back. They are now organized, paid, and armed. I’m not speaking metaphorically—everyone connected to the regime, from those who attend its mosques to those who work in its institutions, from boys in their early teens to women in their ’70s, has been armed. They flood the streets every day waving Islamic Republic and Hezbollah flags, claiming patriotism and screaming that the supreme leader’s death was the fault of women who refused to cover their hair. Some fire at the sky, while others point it at whomever they judge not sufficiently friendly to the regime.

Unlike during the January massacre, when they received orders from above, these loyalists now act entirely on their own initiative. The movement has decentralized. Killing their leaders did not stop them—it freed them. This is one of the war’s most consequential and least-discussed outcomes: the regime has successfully distributed its violence so that no single decapitation strike can contain it anymore.

Large banners have appeared across cities showing the graves of schoolchildren killed in Minab. The caption, addressed to the majority who felt hopeful that America will help free Iran, reads: “Traitors, look—your help has arrived.”

Since the bombing of Iran’s industrial infrastructure—steel mills, petrochemical plants—prices have risen three- to five-fold in weeks. That pain is felt by ordinary Iranians, not by regime supporters who continue receiving generous handouts. Much of the regime’s senior leadership has been decimated—an achievement worth celebrating. Yet the regime survives—weaker, but alive enough to continue enslaving Iranians and threatening the world.

There has never been a stronger internal appetite for regime change in Iran. But the momentum of the January uprising is gone. Those who believed Trump when he said “help is on the way” have watched the regime endure three months of war against two of the world’s strongest military powers, and emerge even more menacing and confident. The demoralization is immense.

Everyone I have talked to from Iran has asked me a variant of this question: “How is it possible that the world’s strongest military power failed to topple a decapitated regime that does not even have support from its own people?” My friend could not comprehend why America would abandon its Iranian allies again. “What is the public opinion in America?” she asked me. “Do they know we’re not with the regime?”

Whatever is driving Washington’s restraint, it cannot be concern for the people it claims to be liberating. Ordinary Iranians are the ones who have suffered most—from the bombs, the economic collapse, and the armed loyalists terrorizing their streets. And yet they are being betrayed and forgotten by Trump’s botched war in Iran.

I had no answer to offer my Iranian friends, because I couldn’t see any coherent endgame. This war seems to be driven by pure impulse, announced in social media posts, and revised every time reality refused to comply.

The Three-Month Arc of American Promises

In January, Trump posted on Truth Social urging Iranian protesters to keep going and take over their institutions—“HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He declared his support for regime change, calling it “the best thing that could happen.” He told Iranians that seizing their government was “probably your only chance for generations.” His stated military objectives were absolute: completely destroy Iran’s navy and dismantle its missile industry.

Then he announced that Iran had agreed to stop killing protesters—as if that were sufficient—and reversed course. Then came the war. Then, in late March, aboard Air Force One, he told reporters the war had already achieved regime change because enough leaders had been killed. “We’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.” Then, on April 1, with no mass uprising materializing, he declared flatly that “regime change was not our goal.” Within days he said he “didn’t care” about Iran’s remaining nuclear material, and walked back his promise to eliminate its missile capability to merely claiming launches had been “dramatically curtailed.”

And now, at the three-month mark: a draft peace deal reportedly including a $300 billion postwar fund for Iran, rebranded from “reparations” to “investment fund” to avoid political embarrassment at home, with provisions for American energy companies to enter Iranian markets once sanctions lift. The regime that just killed six American soldiers and massacred tens of thousands of innocent people is, apparently, now a business partner.

The journey from “help is on its way” to a $300 billion reconstruction gift for a surviving regime is too monstrous for me to believe. It is a betrayal of Iranians and of everyone in the free world who believes freedom is worth something.

Why Half-Measures Are Worse Than Nothing

While Trump has been stalling, the southern ports of Iran remain under a blockade.

I grew up under American sanctions. I know from the inside what sustained economic pressure actually does. It does not destroy authoritarian regimes but the populations they rule.

I had a friend in Tehran named Rana (a pseudonym to protect her identity). She was expelled from the University of Tehran for wearing her hijab “incorrectly.” She pivoted to makeup artistry, spent her life savings on equipment, and built a following on Instagram. A multinational makeup brand noticed her talent and reached out to hire her. She was ecstatic—maybe Milan Fashion Week wasn’t so impossible after all. The moment they discovered she was in Iran, they canceled, citing sanctions. That day, something inside her died, and she still hasn’t fully recovered.

That is who sanctions punish. The men who shattered my friend’s mother’s kidney have the resources to circumvent sanctions and get their ammunition imported. The people who cannot circumvent sanctions are innocent people like Rana.

The economic devastation does have one potential saving grace: if pushed far enough, it could drain the treasury to the point where the regime can no longer pay its loyal 5%. That threshold—where the spatula hits the bottom of the pot, as we say in Farsi—is what actually could threaten the regime’s survival. Every Iranian I spoke to is willing to pay that price if it ends the regime. But anything less inflicts maximum suffering on ordinary Iranians while leaving the regime’s apparatus intact.

The current path’s answer to that question is to present us with the worst of all worlds.

The Only Two Defensible Choices

The United States and Israel face a binary with no justifiable middle.

The first choice is full commitment: go hard enough, with enough sustained resolve, to actually bring this regime down and give the Iranian people the opening they have bled for—either militarily, or via giving real, material support to Iranian protesters willing to fight. This is a compelling charge for nations that present themselves as forces for good—not as imperial powers driven by expediency, but as civilizations guided by genuine humanistic values. This approach could also reflect strategic self-interest. Iranians are overwhelmingly pro-Western; they want to be friends of America and Israel. A free Iran—at the heart of the Middle East, with deep political influence across the region—could become one of the most powerful forces for dismantling Islamic extremism the world has ever seen. That could mean final and lasting peace: no more proxy wars, no more Oct. 7s—an end to the furnace that has fueled hostilities between Muslims and the West for half a century. Isn’t that far more valuable than a momentary deal?

If the West does not want to bring peace to Iran, its second choice is complete withdrawal: lift the sanctions, step aside, and let ordinary Iranians breathe while they find their own path to freedom.

What is not defensible is the current path—killing enough of the regime’s leadership to provoke it, bombing enough of its industry to starve its people, then walking away with a ceasefire that leaves the Islamic Republic intact, possibly even enriched by a reconstruction deal that rewards its survival. The Iranian people arguably had a better chance of liberating themselves from their tormentors before the war rather than after a deal. That is not pragmatism. That is not “America First.” It is a betrayal of American and Iranian lives alike—and a signal to every authoritarian government that they can get away with taunting and extorting America.

The Iranians fighting for freedom have asked the free world to see them as allies. At the three-month mark, the free world should ask itself honestly: Do we?

If this ends the way it is currently heading, the answer is no. And the Iranians who survive it will remember America as a nation that rewards its enemies and abandons its friends.

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Courts have struck down Donald Trump’s tariff regime on a number of occasions, including the Supreme Court itself, which ruled earlier this year that his primary tariffing authority, IEEPA, does not grant the president the power to impose tariffs. Every legal theory he has tried has been rejected. Undeterred, the president has found a new pretext: forced labor. The administration is now imposing across-the-board tariffs of 10–12.5% on countries it claims are failing to enforce anti-forced-labor provisions. Forced labor is a legitimate issue, of course, but unilateral tariffs imposed, without any global cooperation, by an imperialist authoritarian that cares not a whit about human rights doesn’t pass the laugh test. So trade experts are rightly calling out the administration’s bogus framing.

The New York Times reports:

The new tariffs will be imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law that allows the president to issue tariffs to respond to other countries’ trade practices. Legal experts said they are likely to be more durable than the initial law Mr. Trump used to enact tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Mr. Trump used Section 301 in his first term to wage a trade war with China, and the tariffs he put in place have survived multiple court challenges. No administration, however, has ever used the provision in such a sweeping way.

Trade experts have welcomed efforts to end or reduce forced labor, but some have complained that the new tariffs are primarily aimed at finding a way to block foreign products and raise revenue, not ending human rights abuses.

As the Times notes, Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations called the announcement a “transparently cynical effort” and “merely a pretext to maintain tariffs that the administration believes have been effective.” The forced labor framing may be new, but the underlying impulse to use tariffs baselessly and illicitly is not.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Donald Trump wasted no time finding a replacement to the director of national intelligence after Tulsi Gabbard resigned. As with Gabbard, Trump’s criteria for the job are not any actual experience or qualifications, but slavish personal loyalty and a willingness to go after his enemies. So he picked Bill Pulte, formerly the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a man arguably even less qualified than his predecessor.

Pulte’s main claim to fame is that he feverishly rummaged through the mortgage records of Trump’s political enemies so that the administration could target them. Pulte proved himself useful in one of Trump’s most important initiatives: retaliating against critics and those who have tried to hold him accountable—people like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

NBC News reports:

As acting director of national intelligence, Pulte will be the highest-ranking intelligence official, overseeing a vast network of 18 agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency. He will also be the president’s principal adviser on intelligence issues and will manage the daily intelligence briefing for the president.

Trump announced on social media that Pulte will remain as director of the housing finance agency, as well as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises created by Congress to support the mortgage market. …

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, slammed the decision, saying in a statement that Pulte was not only unqualified, but that he was chosen “precisely because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need,” Warner said.

The job falls to Pulte to inform the most powerful person in the world what is actually true about the world. Trump has handed this role to someone whose most notable professional achievement is finding dirt in mortgage filings. The intelligence community’s animating purpose—providing the president with accurate info regardless of whether he wants to hear it—has just been placed under the supervision of a man selected precisely because he will not do that.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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The Supreme Court will soon rule in a case that will decide the future of birthright citizenship. The case has become more significant than ever because some officials are now openly advocating for ethnic cleansing—mass removals of tens of millions of U.S.-born Americans based on their ancestry.

In barely a year, the right has moved from the already controversial mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants to mass deportation of Americans. The 14th Amendment, drafted in part to prevent ethnic cleansing, should stop it. Whether it will is now up to the Supreme Court.

The ‘100 Million’ Fantasy

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiated this shift in December when its social media account posted an image of a sunny beach with the caption: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world: America after 100 million deportations.” Deportations based on what? Not on legal status but on ancestry in the “third world.”

The Pew Research Center, using Census Bureau data, has estimated that there are 52 million immigrants in America, and 24 million are naturalized U.S. citizens. Only 14 million are in the country illegally.

In other words, DHS is openly advocating for the deportations of tens of millions of citizens, including almost 50 million U.S.-born citizens. This is not an aberration. Greg Bovino, the recently retired Border Patrol chief, told The New York Times in March that while leading Border Patrol’s interior operations, he drafted “a plan to deport 100 million people.”

Bovino repeatedly reiterated his call for 100 million deportations at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that month as well, and has used it almost daily on social media since then. Lest one think Bovino’s statements are no longer relevant given that he was booted out after ICE’s thuggery in Minneapolis, note that GOP political candidates at CPAC echoed him. South Carolina Senate candidate Paul Dans said: “after he heard I was committed to 100 million deportations, [Bovino] endorsed me.”

A candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner (which handles oil and gas regulation in the state) Bo French was explicit: “It’s not just the Muslims, and it’s not just illegal immigration. We have roughly 100 million people in this country that shouldn’t be here.” His comments were interrupted by applause. He won his primary shortly after.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) was just as clear: “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.” Never mind that many American Muslims wouldn’t be going “back.” They were born here. Ogles doesn’t care, saying, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”

The Court and the President

Getting rid of birthright citizenship is the first step required to carry out these fantasies. Although the solicitor general told the Supreme Court that President Trump’s order applies only prospectively, to children born after it was signed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wouldn’t let him bypass the threat so easily.

“The logic of your position, if accepted, is that this president or the next president or Congress or someone else could decide it shouldn’t be prospective,” she said. “There would be nothing limiting that, according to your theory.” She went on to ask whether the government could, under its own reasoning, move to “unnaturalize people“ who were born here—which would add up to millions of Americans—if the Supreme Court rules in his favor. The solicitor general didn’t dispute the premise.

This is not just theoretical. When Trump was asked directly if he’d change his birthright order to apply retroactively, he implausibly claimed, “Honestly, I haven’t thought of that, but … our country cannot afford to house tens of millions of people who came in through birthright citizenship.” (Tens of millions—not just millions!) Indeed, when asked last year about deporting some Americans, he said: “If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

The first ones against whom he might apply this “legal right” would be his political opponents like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, both of whose citizenship he has long questioned. Harris, in particular, would not have become a citizen at birth under his executive order that requires parents to have permanent legal status, whereas Harris’ were temporary legal residents.

Even if the Court tried to build in a grandfather clause and required that those who obtained their citizenship under the old—erroneous—understanding be able to keep it, Trump or Congress could argue that stipulation was not binding, and that the “true” constitutional interpretation is the controlling one. This is what Justice Sotomayor’s pointed line of questioning was aimed at exposing. In any case, the same potential for mass deportation of U.S.-born people would soon arise again, as many U.S.-born children were denied citizenship over the coming decades.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed the same logic from the other direction. The solicitor general had argued that the children of unauthorized migrants were outside the 14th Amendment because no such category of people existed in 1868. But as Barrett noted, there were in fact unauthorized migrants at the time: Africans trafficked into the country in violation of federal law. The solicitor general conceded, as he had to, that their U.S.-born children were citizens. The concession gives the game away.

Without birthright citizenship, our rights would depend not only on the citizenship of our parents or grandparents, but also on our ability to prove their citizenship. With “papers-please” police roaming the country to fill deportation quotas, the birth certificate has become the only foolproof defense against removal. Without it, we’d have to quickly produce evidence of our ancestors’ citizenship to avoid arrest and removal.

What the 14th Amendment Was Meant to Foreclose

The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was drafted, in part, to foreclose the possibility of ethnic cleansing. It protected the equal rights of all U.S.-born Americans. As professors Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman have shown, the only deportable immigrants in the 1860s were illegally trafficked slaves, and the clause unambiguously protected their children too.

Throughout the 19th century, however, many people believed that freed slaves should be sent to Africa. In 1866, as the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was drafted, Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders wrote to President Andrew Johnson to denounce the idea of Blacks being “cast away, driven into exile, for no other cause than having been freed from their chains.”

The one major group excluded from birthright citizenship, both before and after the 14th Amendment—the American Indians—were often driven from their homes. Although not the only justification, the denial of citizenship made it far easier to excuse the Indian Removal Act and other overt acts of ethnic cleansing until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

Mass deportation is already facing severe logistical challenges, and birthright citizenship wouldn’t be the only legal barrier. Literally reaching 100 million deportations is unimaginable. But exposing millions of Americans to the threat of deportation would have important consequences anyway. The administration is already wielding immigration enforcement as a political weapon against Democratic-run cities, and it has already shown interest in targeting political opponents, who are citizens, based on their backgrounds.

Whether you think ethnic cleansing is likely or not, it should not even be on the constitutional table. Fortunately, most justices on the Supreme Court seemed skeptical about the government’s arguments. Hopefully they put a permanent end to these absurd fantasies.

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Welcome to Zooming In. I'm Berny Belvedere, senior editor of The UnPopulist. I'm joined today by , author of A Democratic and Republican Faith, a theologically serious and hopeful book that recovers what authentic Christian faith actually demands of its adherents, at precisely the moment when so much of American Christianity has lost the plot.

On this episode, we discuss what a genuinely God-centered public theology looks like, why MAGA evangelicalism represents a profound departure from it, and what it might take to find our way back.

We hope you enjoy.

This transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Berny Belvedere: Ray, I first met you at LibCon last year. We had a wonderful chat as the liberalism and religion breakout session was getting started. And it was really cool because it was an example of how events like that help connect liberals together to more effectively advance the cause. So here we are today having a conversation about a wonderful book you just wrote, and it might not have been possible had we not met at LibCon. So that was a really cool thing. I was happy to see you there. I hope you can make it this year.

Raymond Roberts: Absolutely. LibCon last year was excellent. Every program was inspiring. It was wonderful. Good people to network with and be encouraged by. So I hope I see a lot of folks this year. I’m planning to go back.

Belvedere: I want to start with Tocqueville. He makes an early appearance in your book—as he should. Tocqueville’s a natural place to start on this topic. What Tocqueville noticed when he visited America in the early 1800s was that its democracy was succeeding in a way that European watchers found utterly bewildering. And the explanation didn’t turn out to be a purely constitutional or legal one—it crucially also involved a cultural component. The churches were doing something. They were producing a specific kind of person: someone who can exhibit republican sensibilities, someone imbued with a moral vocabulary, with a sense of civic duty, with a capacity for equality. And you cite the term Tocqueville gave for this, which is: “a democratic and republican faith.”

You do a great job of helping us see how far we’ve fallen from that ideal. Bringing it forward to our own day, you write: “Today, this heritage is at risk. Mainstream Protestant churches are in disarray. They have lost significant numbers of members, and the cultural resources they once helped replenish have eroded. Without these resources to help Americans work through their differences and lend legitimacy to republican government and civil rights, democracy teeters.”

In a second, I want you to walk me through why democracy is negatively impacted by Protestant churches being in disarray. I do want you to walk me through that—I think it’s a very important point. But first, I want you to tell me why you chose the term “disarray.” It was a deliberate choice. You considered other descriptors to capture the church’s current state of being, but you landed on disarray. Political junkies will instantly recognize that from the “Dems in Disarray” headline trope. But you’re saying “Protestants are in disarray”—or, rather, closer to your argument, “the Protestant churches are in disarray.” And you’re including Evangelicals in that category of mainstream Protestants. What are those other terms that didn’t get chosen, and why did you choose “disarray” as the most accurate description?

Roberts: One way to talk about what’s happened is through the decline of mainline Protestantism. The decline in members, in giving, in the number of churches—decline in the institutions, as they’ve lost funding and closed. So, there’s been a decline.

Another way it gets talked about is disestablishment. People in the church especially talk about: “We’re disestablished, we’re outside looking in now. We used to own the culture.”

People who talk like I do sometimes get accused of pining for the old days, but my own sense is that the Protestant church has been in a kind of disarray. It has not adapted well to changes in the culture. Some changes probably needed to happen, but we no longer have effective institutions that transmit the faith to the new generation. We’re not keeping our kids. We no longer have effective institutions for communicating our ideas to others and solidifying a conversational base.

It’s a complicated story about how we reached this point. But I think “disarray” is a more helpful way to talk about it because it suggests that we need to get our act together—and that we could get our act together. If we were more effective at forming disciples, sharing our ideas, communicating even with our own members—I think that would go a long way. It won’t bring back the days of yore, and I don’t think that’s possible or even desirable. But it might help the mainline church—which has historically been a keeper of democratic and republican values—be effective again in sharing those values in ways that bleed outside the church into the broader culture.

Belvedere: You have these Three Ds as possible explanatory diagnoses. You have decline, disestablishment, and disarray. “Disarray” captures the true state of the church in its chaotic erosion. The others don’t quite grasp the predicament the way that “disarray” does. Is that your thinking?

Roberts: Yes, and I would say that “disestablishment” really does name something about the way the church … back in the 1950s, when there were just a few radio networks and early television networks, the networks were viewed as belonging to the people, not to the networks. There was public service time that was demanded of the networks, and they gave a lot of that to mainline churches in recognition of their status in society. And then what happened, I think, is that as that recognition declined—as the sense [developed] that the airways belonged to the public [and needed to be] pulled back—the mainline church didn’t want to pay for [airtime]. And in fact, the Evangelicals who did were often caught up in financial scandals and message deterioration—saying crazy things just to get an audience. The National Council of Churches used to have an office dedicated to public media.

And, similarly, higher education. A lot of colleges were founded by churches to spread their ideas—the idea being that spreading ideas and training future leaders of society is a good way for those ideas to penetrate the culture. Over time those institutions became more secular. Some of the particularities of the faith were marginalized in light of an emphasis on freedom and tolerance and those sorts of values—which were, and I would argue are, Christian values. But then in the mid-century there was a great push by neo-Orthodox people—the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich—who, through the Federal Council of Churches and National Council of Churches, started campus ministry programs, started journals and magazines designed to show the intersection of faith and areas of human study. These things were going pretty well until about 1968, when the churches began pulling the plugs on their campus ministries because the campus ministers opposed the Vietnam War and were supporting civil rights—and the churches were not up for supporting that. It was a huge mistake, I think.

The disengagement from higher education is strategically devastating. That’s a time when people are choosing their vocation. It’s a time when they’re deciding their place in the world, figuring out what they’re called to do and to be and what they’re going to give their lives to. And for the church to just pull the plug on that stuff—it turned out exactly how you might expect. So we need to figure out how to reengage on those things.

Belvedere: So, [when looking at] the framework you’re offering for potential diagnoses of the problem: we might say that the “decline” option is the numbers narrative. Membership, money, the institutions themselves—these began hemorrhaging. “Disestablishment,” by contrast, locates the problem a little bit more externally—maybe the media and communications infrastructure no longer privileged mainline Protestantism’s voice. “Disestablishment” is a really interesting word. This is more of a “soft” disestablishment, [closer to] a “de-privileging.” [The Protestant church] was never established as the official church of the country. We don’t want to cede ground to the Christian nationalists and others who would make that affirmative claim. It’s more like: “You are no longer privileged, and that has eroded your social influence, or you haven’t been able to recover that social influence very easily.”

And then “disarray” locates the problem internally. What’s interesting about the disarray diagnosis is it’s the kind of thing where the church can get its act together and it’s under its control to do so, in a way that decline and disestablishment are largely not. We—and by “we” I mean Christians all over the country—can’t really do anything about whether membership goes down or whether media venues no longer want to carry certain messages. But what we can do is self-correct in certain important ways that would lead us out of disarray.

Roberts: Yes, I think that’s a good summary. It’s sometimes discussed as “cultural disestablishment”—it’s not formal legal establishment, but cultural. There’s probably no mainline thinker today who holds the kind of status that, say, Reinhold Niebuhr held at one point. Or Martin Marty—for years at University of Chicago he was somebody who was quoted continually. Stanley Hauerwas is probably the most recent person who has been something of a mainline spokesman, though his theology is really not mainline at all in a lot of ways. He’s very much a pacifist—a brilliant guy, contrarian, and funny as all get out. But I wouldn’t call him representative of the mainline project as historically understood. In fact, he’s critical of it. He thinks the church just sold out—that’s his take.

Belvedere: Let me stay on that theme for a second. Because there are a lot of liberals who are irreligious. There are a lot of liberals who find religion to be a problem, at least in many manifestations that we see in society and around the world. And [they] might wonder: “What’s the big problem with the church being in disarray? What really is the negative consequence there?”

I want to actually take a step back and answer that question. You have a short passage in your book that I think is really meaty and helpful. It’s short because you make it in passing, to move on to the next point, but I want to stop for a second because I think it most vividly captures what religion at its best can do for liberal society. You provided a list of the Protestant church’s achievements. And what’s striking is that when you inventory what the church has accomplished over the two centuries following Tocqueville’s visit—and I mainly have in mind civic accomplishments, not artistic or whatever else—the list is extraordinary in its breadth and ambition.

You brought up schools and colleges. Protestant denominations founded hundreds of institutions of higher ed across the country—not as a luxury or an afterthought, but as a deliberate strategy of civic formation. The idea was that training leaders for church and society was among the most effective ways to embed democratic values in the culture. They also developed publishing houses. Denominations invested heavily in producing materials—not just spiritual or devotional content, but ones that had a civic application. This was the information ecosystem of its era and mainstream Protestants were major players in it.

The abolitionist movement is another legacy. It drew on Protestant moral resources—the conviction that every human being bears the Imago Dei, the image of God, and that no political configuration can sanction the treating of another human being as mere property. Churches and church networks provided the infrastructure, the platforms, the speakers, even safe houses for some of this work. You mentioned missions to the unhoused and children’s homes for at-risk kids. Prison reform movements. Settlement houses for immigrants—as waves of immigrants arrived in America, Protestant-affiliated entities provided settlement houses that included educational components, too. Peace conferences. The Civil Rights Movement—that’s perhaps the one that least needs elaboration. We all know what it was, and we know how it’s indebted to Protestant theology—Black Protestant churches were the sites where this stuff got dreamed up.

If these are the things you have in mind that the mainstream Protestant churches in America helped deliver, and if that is no longer a significant source of reformist energy we can count on, then that is indeed a very big loss. The rest of your book grapples with that. Can you give me a big picture of what our way out of this mess looks like? How do we get religion supplying that animating impulse behind these things again?

Roberts: I think the church is going to have to be intentional about seeking to revitalize itself. It can’t just assume it will coast along. We’re going to have to invite people to take a theocentric perspective. We’re going to have to invite people to respect the dignity of other human beings in concrete ways. We just saw in New Jersey the other day people protesting the conditions under which immigrants are being kept. And the reason we should care about that is because they bear the image of God. If we believe that, we’ll have to speak up.

I keep repeating the word “invitation” because I do think there’s a chance here that we could make a course correction. In some ways the evangelicals made that course correction when they realized how disestablished they were back in the ’60s and ’70s. They built institutions for sharing their ideas. They built Liberty University. They understood that they needed to train people and that they needed to reach people.

For a long time, the mainline church has thought: “If we speak truth to power, we have done the work.” And that’s not enough. We have to speak truth to people in a way that they find compelling. It’s in that formation of a thick theological vision—lived out in concrete ways, like the abolition movement, like the Progressive movement of the turn of the century, like the Social Gospel movement—I don’t think most Protestants know the history that we have here. And it wasn’t just Protestants. Catholics also—Rerum Novarum, they have a Catholic social tradition as well. The work that the mainline church did around the Just and Durable Peace conferences in the 1930s, because they could see the world was headed to war and they wanted to figure out how to make it better—that was critical for the reconstruction after World War II. And we’re seeing today that those institutions are fraying and falling apart. That order is gone.

The church has to be theologically intentional. This is where I think Stanley Hauerwas is right—the church has taken for granted its own identity. It has almost assumed that to be a faithful person is to be a good American. In some ways I affirm that in the book. But I think that’s not going to be enough. You don’t need to go to church, you don’t need to listen to sermons, you don’t need to study the Bible, you don’t need to enter into conversation with people you disagree with in a Sunday school class and hash things out, if all you need to do is be a good American. There’s something more that we’re called to be. For Christians, it’s being called to be people of faith, followers of Christ. And we have to be way more intentional about that than we have been.

What I saw when I was a pastor in New Jersey is that a lot of folks think—when their kids are in high school—I want my kids to be good kids. That’s why they’re involved in sports on Sunday morning. And it was hard for the church to compete with that, because the sense of identity had been so merged with the culture. The church needs to once again claim that, “Yes, we have a distinct vision.” Our vision—this is where natural law comes in in my book—doesn’t mean that everybody else is wrong, or that we can’t learn from anybody else, or that like the Christian nationalists we have to control everything. It means that we can work with others. But we’ve got to recover that theological sense of who we are. It’s a generous sense, I think. Historically, the best of it has been generous.

Belvedere: You introduce a really helpful distinction that I want to briefly lay out—one that I think helps us find a way out of this, or at least understand what the church must at minimum be in order to retain its strong presence without eroding or becoming a shell of itself or becoming absorbed into the larger culture. That distinction is the one Michael Walzer makes when he distinguishes between thick and thin moral reasoning. I’ll come to that in a second.

But I just want to stay with Tocqueville for one more question. You quote John Adams in the book—he’s got this famous, or infamous, statement: “Our constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” One of Tocqueville’s insights, though, was that religion isn’t always democratically beneficial. In France, he saw religion and the free society almost always pushing against each other. Tocqueville did like what he saw in early 19th-century America. But if you were to run his analysis today, what would he conclude about the forms of religious expression present in American Christianity today?

Roberts: That’s a very good question. He made a distinction between democratic and republican religion and undemocratic religion. In France he saw that the priests were allied with the aristocracy and were not in tune with the movement towards freedom. In the South, he was critical of slave owners. And throughout history we see forces of illiberal religion at work. It’s never simply that religion is good or bad. You’ve got to look at religion as always held by particular people at particular times—and it’s what they believed and what they did with it in the times they lived. And they sometimes were chafing against each other.

The abolition movement had other people who argued against abolition. The Social Gospel had folks who claimed that those people wanting to install sewer systems and other improvements, labor laws and such, had forsaken the gospel, which is only about saving people from hell. And when the church was supportive of eliminating official formal prayer from public schools, they were always accused by illiberal religious voices of forsaking the gospel.

I think what we have seen, maybe for the first time in a while, is that illiberal forms of religion are ascendant in our culture. They are recognized by, say, the Secretary of Defense in ways—he brings a person to speak to a group, and that person is someone who wants to get rid of women’s right to vote. We haven’t seen that for a while. The Christian nationalists have gotten a hearing, and things that used to be rather fringe have moved to the mainstream. And I think we have to be able to speak out about that.

Belvedere: There’s nuance here that we need to make sure we get across, as you do in the book. You mentioned the “Social Gospel”—you invoked it earlier in that list of achievements that the church has been able to help propel. And it remains controversial among Christians of a more conservative or evangelical bent. I think on this one, both sides [have a] problem.

There are formulations of the Social Gospel I personally find wrongheaded. But the idea, in its good form, is straightforward. The gospel—with no “social” qualifier before it—the euangelion, or good news, is the central teaching of Christianity: Christ died for our sins, freely offers redemption to anyone who wants it, and that’s the path forward to reconciling with God. Our sin puts us at alienation from God; he’s bridged that gap through a sacrifice; we claim it by simply believing in him. When the “social” descriptor comes in, however, it can reconceive Christianity as first and foremost an instrument for positive social change. And of course there’s nothing wrong with positive social change—in fact there’s everything right with it—but the Christian faith at its core is a revealed religion. It makes grand metaphysical claims. It has doctrines, propositional content that is foundational to its reform efforts. It’s not incidental to those reform efforts.

That’s the thing that I think you’re doing a good job in the book of pointing out: you can have all these reform goals and ideas, but if they’re not powered by a genuine theological core, it’s going to eventually wither into, “Why don’t I just keep the helping-out-society bit without going to all these meetings on Sundays and having all these extra obligations, if it’s just the same sort of output?” There has to be something different to it. It has to be powered by a different set of beliefs. So I’d say that the “Social Gospel” fails as an alternative to the gospel proper, because it’s never meant to replace it properly—or it shouldn’t. But it is supposed to be the natural outgrowth of someone genuinely impacted by the traditional gospel. As the book of James puts it, faith without works is dead. And as a Christian, if you’re not wanting the church to positively impact society—if the achievements we’ve been documenting don’t seem to you to be an important impact the Christian church can have—then you might be falling afoul of James’ diagnosis.

I think a lot of churches today are. And I think that’s a good way to show why it’s not enough just to have a moral vision for society, or at least an interest in certain reform efforts. For the church to retain its distinct character, it has to be backfilled by theological tenets that do that inspiring work for those reform efforts.

Roberts: I would add to that that the Social Gospel people—like Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and others—were writing in a time where they could assume a lot of things. Like that Christianity was more central to our culture, and that people were familiar with the Bible (everyone had one; everyone read one). And then the people who were heirs of that tradition kind of continued to operate in that mode without really understanding that the thick religious and spiritual practices that make a faith compelling—sensing the glory of God, the beauty of God, a sense of awe and a sense of gratitude—that thick piece of it is all part of the gospel, inspired by the sense of this overwhelming love that’s been made manifest to us. Without those pieces, it becomes what you might call “do-goodism.” It becomes partisan. And sometimes when I’m with some folks who are more progressive Christians who don’t want to talk about the theology part, it comes across as do-goodism.

Belvedere: Right—or, at best, it just becomes like any other kind of reform effort where the Christianity layer of it becomes epiphenomenal. “I’m just getting together and feeding the unhoused with other people—why do I need this other thing?” It needs to have a distinctive theological core, and to emphasize it and not hide from it but to embrace it—in a way that’s consistent with the biblical record and the tradition, and with what it means to be a contributing member of society, but that doesn’t obscure its propositional theological content, that is anchored in that content. I think that’s the answer. A lot of theorists have said it can’t help but be that, or you get a watered-down church that won’t end up lasting. It simply cannot last as a kind of add-on that you don’t really need, because you sense that and then you dispense with it and just do the reform efforts without it.

You introduced a set of theological principles that I want to get to. You think these can do the work of civic renewal that Tocqueville’s “democratic and republican faith” would ask of us—or that once did. You have nine of them. I’m going to list them, but I don’t want to go deep on all of them. You have: Theocentrism, Creation, Imago Dei, Natural Law, Sin, Hope, Vocation, Covenant, and Ecclesiology. These are categories you might find in a systematic theology book—theologically weighty stuff. Tell me: how can these realize the Tocquevillean vision today?

Roberts: That’s a great question. I should back up and say that Max Stackhouse—a professor of Christian ethics at Princeton—wrote a book called Public Theology and Political Economy and lists 10 theological themes or principles. When I read it, I always wished he’d said a lot more about them. When I came up with my own list of nine, the purpose was to try to flesh out in a deeper way for lay people in particular: here are some theological principles and their practical implications.

Different traditions sometimes talk about these principles differently. If I talk about natural law, a Roman Catholic would probably jump right to Aquinas. It might be more assumed there than in Protestant circles, especially after late-20th-century theology kind of dumped natural law. But the idea of natural law is there at the founding of the country and carried forward by all the Puritans. James Wilson, the founder of University of Pennsylvania Law School, was inspired by what I would call reformed Puritan natural law ideas in his lectures on law, which happened very early in the Republic, and reflect that.

Belvedere: These principles—you were asking how they can help us realize that Tocquevillean vision of a democratic and republican faith, a Christianity that is robust enough to continue existing and continuing to be influential, but also very liberal-friendly, activating the best parts of the scriptures and the tradition when it comes to how we view each other, how we interact with each other, how we live with each other, how we treat each other.

Roberts: These principles float in our culture. Even the one I think is maybe most lost—the idea of covenant—it’s still a part of our language.

Belvedere: How would you contrast covenant with contract, for example?

Roberts: Contracts are transactional. “I will do this, you will do that.” You enter contracts for what you get out of them. Covenants are a recognition of the binding of our lives together. Think of a couple getting married, or citizens taking a naturalization oath—your lives are bound together for good and for ill, is the idea. “We’re in this together now.” In a contract, if you don’t perform, the contract’s over. With covenants, there’s a recognition that your life is bound to this other person. That’s why the church has been reluctant sometimes to recognize divorce—and probably should be more affirming that in bad relationships, you may still be bound together, but you’re not really living out the inner heart of the relationship, which is love.

Belvedere: When I read your treatment of “theocentrism”—the principle that you signal as really important—I keep coming back to Tim Keller, the author and Presbyterian pastor who recently passed away. Keller, drawing on John Calvin’s observation in the Institutes of the Christian Religion—one of the most famous works of theology in Protestant history—that the human heart is relentlessly idolatrous. It’s essentially an idol factory. And Keller spent much of his ministry making the pastoral or spiritual version of that case: that idolatry isn’t only about literal statues. At its core, it’s about taking any good thing and making it an ultimate thing. Whether that’s career, family, romance, success—whatever you want to fill in that slot.

Many irreligious liberals will disagree with the diagnosis here, and understandably so. But Keller’s argument was that when you take a good thing and make it the ultimate thing, the good thing can become a destructive thing if it isn’t God, because it can’t bear the weight you’ve placed on it. It can’t fill the role you’ve designated it. I think your framework is extremely complementary to that, but on a more civic wavelength than a pastoral one.

So, for example, MAGA Christianity on this, let’s call it the Keller-Roberts reading, isn’t just a political phenomenon. It’s a kind of collective or national idolatry. But in this case it’s not work or vocation or family or whatever else—it’s nation, leader, even the idea of MAGA, the cultural restoration piece of it. That has been placed by some of these MAGA Christians where God belongs in their lives. And what follows is exactly what both you and Keller predict: moral blindness, a ferocity toward outsiders, a willingness to excuse anything done in the service of the cause because this is a political phenomenon now. Does that framing resonate with how you’re thinking about theocentrism? And does it apply with equal force across the ideological divide, or is there something distinctive about the particular idolatries of this particular moment?

Roberts: I think there are two things you can say about idolatry. One is that it has practical, ethical implications. When we put other things, other centers of value, before God, the way we value other things in our value field changes. The New Orleans Saints had this bounty system where if they injured a player on the field, they’d receive a bounty. Well, if your center of value is winning and your team, other people become expendable. You can sacrifice them.

What’s tricky about idolatry is when it picks up religious symbols—as in Christian nationalism right now. Then it becomes harder for people to sort out what’s going on.

And inevitably, every human values things. That’s part of what I tried to deal with in every chapter—each of these doctrines addresses some aspect of human being, whether it’s valuing, or forming relationships, or discerning right from wrong. There’s some fundamental human question that these doctrines answer. They get answered in different ways by different traditions, but everyone has to struggle with this, even non-religious people. They have to figure out how to value things. And idolatry is a way of talking about what we value, how we value it, and asking whether we’re valuing it correctly.

Belvedere: Let me ask about one of those doctrines. I found your treatment of sin really worthwhile. And I want to make sure listeners understand what I mean, because sin is one of those words that can sound like it’s only about personal morality or individual failing.

Your argument is that a robust doctrine of sin is actually one of democracy’s best friends. If you genuinely believe that human beings are chronically prone to self-deception, self-interest, and the abuse of power, then checks and balances aren’t mere suggestions. They’re not even just inconveniences. They’re absolute moral necessities. The Founders understood this intuitively, and they designed a Constitution that assumed the worst about human beings and human nature, even while hoping for the best. All the liberal valuing of limited government and constitutional checks on power flows from it. But one of the most striking features of the current authoritarian moment is a kind of demand for trust—trust the leader, trust the movement, trust that power won’t be abused if it’s in the right hands. A serious doctrine of sin is a direct theological rebuttal to that demand. Do you think that’s a case that can land with people who don’t share our theological vocabulary? Does sin play in a non-theological context too?

Roberts: I hope so. I mean, you’ve got people like Thomas Paine, who wrote Common Sense and was not an orthodox believer by any stretch of the imagination. But he notes that republics are less likely to go to war than monarchies. I do think that our conception of sin has eroded, even in the church. I don’t think we have a strong, robust understanding of sin. For a while, sin became identified with peccadillos rather than seeing it as the chronic human failure that happens over and over and whose results are always bad. And it’s not just about individuals—it’s also about groups.

There’s a reason the Founders said that the legislative branch—which is more accountable to the people—should determine how to raise revenue, how to spend, and that they should declare war. Not the executive branch. It seems to me that we need to recover an understanding of the chronic human fault. Because if we can’t, I don’t see how we move back to a place where the Republic is on firmer ground.

We need to be able to say: “We’ve made a wrong turn here.” We’re now seeing the consequences of what happens when one person makes a decision about war and the wisdom of the group is not allowed to weigh in. If the wisdom of the group had been consulted—if a case had been made to the people—it doesn’t mean we’ll always get it right. Groups also make mistakes and are prone to sin. But there’s a greater possibility that a better path will be found.

Belvedere: In the book, you distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. All of us distinguish between the two in our most clear-eyed moments, but I wondered if you could unpack that distinction a bit in terms of how you understand the two.

Roberts: I think of knowledge as the things we know about the world—it’s not unrelated to wisdom. But wisdom is knowing [the true value of things]. Knowledge is knowing the price of everything; wisdom is knowing its true value. Wisdom is knowing that you depend upon others and that others depend upon you—you see yourself in relationship with others. Wisdom is that deeper level of perspective on oneself and on others.

Wisdom is knowing that it’s not a smart idea to give one person too much power. That’s wisdom, because people are prone to corruption.

Belvedere: Given that many Protestant churches, denominations, and affiliated organizations are among the most depleted or defeated—where do they draw the resources for institutional regeneration and renewal? Is it purely a leaning into our scriptural tradition? Is it more a pragmatic sense of what works as effective forms of communication, and we jostle against other groups for attention? What is going to propel these Protestant denominations and churches to be able to play a bigger role in society once again, for the benefit of all—as the argument goes?

Roberts: I think there’s a great deal of discouragement in the mainline and mainstream Protestant churches right now. It’s hard work. We don’t have institutions to spread our ideas that are very effective. There are some, but they don’t have broad or deep reach into the culture. And so what happens is that a lot of people come to church on Sunday and then they go and watch Fox or MSNBC during the week. Who gets to form the people? It might not be the one hour in the pew on Sunday.

But I think the source of encouragement has to be God. The idea that God is truly the glory that lasts. Maybe this republic has reached the end of its rope—I hope not, I don’t think it has. But no republic lasts forever.

I’m giving a paper this weekend on the Founders and the principles that guided them. One of the principles I’m not going to be talking about, because I wish I had more time, is the idea of providence. They had a sense of providence. Things didn’t always go well in the war, but that’s kind of what carried them through. Providence was how they talked about a sense of hope—that even in the midst of discouragement, there is a sense of hope. And in every movement that has moved forward in this country, whether it’s the abolitionists or the civil rights movement, it has been inspired by a theological sense that I may not see it, I may not get to the mountaintop with you, but we will see it. We will.

Belvedere: And that authentic form of Christian hope—as opposed to its fake alternatives—is one that can take on that work without collapsing or falling back into a siege mentality. That’s the key thing. You can have a belief that things aren’t right and that things need to be put right, and you can have hope, without it leading to all the pathologies we’ve seen. Authentic Christian hope is inviting and hospitable and kind in the face of harm, and decent, and doesn’t violate its principles and stands true to what it believes and treats people with dignity and honor. That’s authentic Christian hope.

Roberts: Yeah, and that chapter on hope was the one that took me the longest to put together. It was originally going to be called “Liberation,” and in talking with my dissertation advisor, he said: “Why are you calling it that?” Well, I called it that because that’s what Max Stackhouse called his section on that. But then I thought, maybe it’s “Redemption.” In a way I’m talking about redemption. But then it occurred to me that every other chapter had been rooted in a fundamental human question. And finally it occurred to me the fundamental human question is about hope. Everybody has some way of putting together an attitude towards the possibilities of history.

That took me longer to put together than any other chapter, because the question is: What is the fundamental human question? And: Must things always be this way? Can there be change? And the answer to that question, especially for believers, is yes. For Christians, things can be different. Are you going to have the kingdom tomorrow? No. But God is still at work as a redeeming presence. And in the end it’s God’s glory, and that’s enough to get us to tomorrow.

Belvedere: Raymond Roberts, thank you so much for joining me today.

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For the first time earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized sales of e-cigarettes in flavors other than tobacco and menthol. Marty Makary, President Trump’s FDA commissioner, opposed the move and tendered his resignation. Health and Human Services spokesperson Rich Danker followed Makary out the door. Pressure to authorize the products reportedly came directly from the White House—with both President Trump and the HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressing support for vaping.

For advocates of tobacco harm reduction, this controversial policy is actually a baby step in the right direction. But because the administration went about it in a high-handed way and for corrupt reasons, it may end up doing serious reputational damage to the worthy goal of liberalizing vaping laws.

Democratic politicians haven’t covered themselves in glory either. They leapt at the opportunity to disparage the decision. “Tanning beds and fruit-flavored vapes somehow fit into this regime’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda, but vaccines, Tylenol, and anti-depressants are the problem?” Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii offered on Bluesky. “The ‘MAHA’ party just ensured a new generation of kids gets addicted to nicotine,” added Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The press office account for California Gov. Gavin Newsom was even more colorful: “Nothing says ‘Make America Healthy Again’ like marketing cotton-candy flavored nicotine to middle schoolers. When he’s not busy cutting off penises from dead animals, RFK Jr. is busy being a total MAHA fraud!”

A lot of this is just partisan point-scoring, but as discourse about a matter vital to public health, it leaves much to be desired. Youth vaping is, in fact, way down from its peak in 2019. Meanwhile, more than 400,000 Americans still die prematurely every year due to smoking conventional cigarettes—roughly 1,200 people a day. That’s more than the total deaths from every homicide, car accident, and drug overdose combined. Legalizing safer nicotine products that can displace consumption of cigarettes, whether by helping smokers quit or by preventing them from ever taking up the habit in the first place, is an idea that at least merits serious consideration.

You wouldn’t know it from listening to Democratic politicians, but unlike other items on the MAHA agenda, tobacco harm reduction has a robust academic case behind it. For example, one study modeling 360 different scenarios concluded that vaping led to positive outcomes in 99% of them, ranging from 143,000 to 65 million life-years saved in the United States through the end of the century.

In 2021, 15 past presidents of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco urged greater support for tobacco harm reduction, noting that “the singular focus of U.S. policies on decreasing youth vaping may well have reduced vaping’s potential contribution to reducing adult smoking.” Forbidding the sale of flavored vapes is an example of such policies. Other research examining the effects of local bans concludes that they have a mixed impact. They do appear to reduce vaping, but at the price of increasing use of far more dangerous cigarettes, potentially offsetting intended gains in health.

None of this is to say that experts are united behind tobacco harm reduction. The field of tobacco control is bitterly divided, with plenty of academics arguing for a more prohibitionist approach. But this is a genuine debate that, unlike politicians scoring points on Bluesky, takes real-world trade-offs seriously.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that, for now, the FDA’s changes are quite modest. After the authorization of blueberry and mango flavors from e-cigarette maker Glas, the number of e-cigarette models legally sold in the United States reaches a grand total of 45. The Glas products implement a new age-gating technology that requires users to verify their age with government ID and pair the devices with a smartphone to make the e-cigarettes operable. One can imagine minors finding ways around these safeguards, but it’s more likely they would simply use any of the thousands of other unregulated vapes that the FDA has proven ineffectual at keeping off the market.

Of potentially greater significance is a new policy formalizing discretionary enforcement to allow many flavored e-cigarettes to remain on the market while the FDA reviews their applications. While this is a notable change in policy, in practice it’s an admission that the illicit market for flavored vapes is thriving while the agency drags its feet on processing millions of applications. Nearly all of the flavored e-cigarettes sold in the United States are technically illegal, but you would have no problem finding them. As with many other drugs, enforcing prohibition of nicotine products is easier said than done.

Legalizing two flavored e-cigarettes is thus an important symbolic change, but vaping advocates may come to regret the way it came about. In public perception, this aspect of tobacco harm reduction is now indelibly tied to the second Trump administration’s slapdash, conspiratorial, and corrupt approach to public health.

Reporting from The New York Times reveals that the tobacco company Reynolds American made a $5 million contribution to Trump’s super PAC Maga, Inc., at the end of April. Trump himself had lunch with nicotine industry lobbyists and executives at one of his Florida golf clubs, during which he reportedly called Kennedy to complain about the FDA’s regulation of e-cigarettes. Less than a week later, the agency announced its decision to keep flavored vapes on the market, blindsiding officials at the agency and prompting Makary’s resignation in protest. Whatever the merits of the FDA’s new approach, this is certainly no way to make credible health policy.

It’s a drastic step down even from the first Trump administration when the FDA was led by Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a respected technocrat described by Vox as “the one Trump official everybody seems to like.” Gottlieb also delayed enforcement of regulations against e-cigarettes and expressed support for their role in tobacco harm reduction, but he did so as part of a larger plan to discourage smoking and provide an off-ramp to safer products. While not everyone was won over by the plan, it was coherent, explicable, and reasonably evidence-based.

The current administration offers none of those strengths: no coherent framework, no career staff buy-in, and no credible public rationale beyond donor access and the preferences of a president who views vaping primarily as a voting issue. Kennedy, for his part, is most notorious for his opposition to vaccines, but also for his suggestions that: Tylenol causes autism; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; COVID may have been engineered to target specific ethnic groups, among other fringe positions. Early in his tenure he made a televised appearance at a Steak ’n Shake to tout the benefits of French fries cooked in beef tallow. Advocates who have been working for years to make a credible case for tobacco harm reduction should not be thrilled that Kennedy has now become a vocal defender of e-cigarettes.

Kennedy’s public defenses of vaping offer, unsurprisingly, a mixed bag of plausibility. He has correctly noted that vaping is substantially preferable to smoking. Less coherently, he has testified that the FDA is “doing everything we can now to approve American vapes” so that they can crack down more aggressively on e-cigarettes from China. He has also cited research suggesting that nicotine may have health benefits like preventing dementia, at best an extremely speculative rationale for encouraging their use.

Trump himself shows few signs of understanding the case for tobacco harm reduction, viewing it as a transaction to win votes from vapers. Pressuring the FDA from the top down to authorize flavored e-cigarettes and foisting unexpected policy changes on the agency, spurring the resignation of officials in protest, is sure to undermine the public’s trust in the decision. Likewise, Trump’s boundless capacity for corruption inevitably prompted suspicion right off the bat that his palms were greased, speculation since confirmed by the Times’s reporting.

As someone who has long advocated for tobacco harm reduction, I view even this month’s supposedly good news with a tragic cast. The legitimate case for safer nicotine products is being undermined by what termed the “crank realignment” in American politics, in which Democrats have become more aligned with educated professionals while the GOP became “much more accepting of cranks and know-nothings.” (Trump and Kennedy are notably both former Democrats who attained political power by becoming Republicans.)

What ultimately makes this an epistemic disaster for everyone is the fact that, as Yglesias points out, even when Republicans “hit on something that works, they don’t dare talk about it or build compelling narratives around it.”

Liberalizing the FDA’s approach to flavored e-cigarettes is a perfect example. It’s a good idea that could be capably defended by credible experts, but such people have been exiled from the administration in favor of wildly unreliable charlatans like RFK.

The millions of Americans who die from smoking cigarettes deserve better advocates than the Democrats who unthinkingly denigrate safer alternatives. They also deserve much better than the likes of Trump, whose tendency to poison everything he touches extends even to the rare issue he gets half right.

On a recent evening in Portland, a progressive chatting with me casually equated legalizing flavored e-cigarettes with opposition to vaccines. She was wrong on the merits, but I understood where she was coming from. Making a public case for vaping requires that the people in power be viewed as trustworthy, smart, and guided by real evidence. Instead, we got Trump and RFK.

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The Pentagon is recruiting hundreds of uniformed servicemembers to fill seats at—please bear in mind that this is still a very weird sentence to type out—Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) June 14 event on the White House’s South Lawn to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary and Trump’s 80th birthday. A cage-fighting arena is being installed on the lawn. And because there are no limits to this administration’s performativity, it only wants in attendance those who meet Trump’s physique standards and will, according to internal guidance, “look good on camera.” Troops selected are required to pay their own travel costs.

The Washington Post reports:

The Pentagon is moving to recruit hundreds of troops to appear as spectators at President Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting event at the White House, and requiring those who attend to pay for their travel and meet height and weight requirements, according to people familiar with the matter and internal memos reviewed by The Washington Post.

The Defense Department has solicited volunteers across the services to attend the June 14 event in uniform. Officials are seeking junior enlisted personnel and junior officers specifically, according to internal messages that make clear travel costs will be “member-procured,” meaning neither the Defense Department nor the UFC intends to pay for their arrangements or accommodations.

One memo, circulated within the Air Force, stipulates that to be eligible, personnel “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO and current physical fitness standard.” Commanders were separately directed to distribute tickets to “genuine UFC fans” rather than senior officials.

The Pentagon under this president has a track record of stage-managing Trump’s appearances with troops. For example, at his earlier visit to Fort Bragg, soldiers were handpicked for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. Using the military as a prop for a combat-sports spectacle at the president’s residence, at the troops’ own expense, extends that pattern into the Twilight Zone.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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For this president, rewriting the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection has been a sustained project: pardoning the rioters, carving out billions of tax dollars to provide them reparations for participating in a coup, and framing a violent assault on the Capitol as some sort of legitimate political protest. Now his Justice Department has moved to the next phase: deleting the official record.

Lawfare, which has thankfully archived the majority of the deleted materials, explains:

Last week, the Justice Department began systematically removing material from its web sites regarding the many indictments and convictions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov.

“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”

Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield’s characterization. “Nothing ’quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

We are not erasing history quietly, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history loudly and proudly.

For Trump, it’s not enough to pardon those who engaged in political violence on his behalf, or even to reward them financially. He needs to erase the very idea that what they did was wrong from the official record. And his Department of Justice—the federal government’s top law enforcement agency—appears all too happy to comply.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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On April 22, Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) died in office at the age of 80. He was the fifth member of the 119th Congress to die since it convened in January 2025, following Reps. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas, 70), Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz., 77), Gerry Connolly (D-Va., 75), and Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif., 65). In this Congress and the preceding one, that is since 2023, nine members have died in office, all from natural causes. Of them, eight were Democrats. Two were in their 60s and the others were all in their 70s or older. The eldest, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), was 90.

The House version of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by just one vote shortly after Connolly’s death. Two Republicans missed the vote, but even if they had been there, the three Democratic vacancies from deaths, as it stood at the time, would have been enough to defeat the bill on a tied vote. Eventually, the Senate returned an amended version, which the House passed 218 to 214. But the effort likely would have collapsed if the House had failed to pass its initial version. It wasn’t the first time this year Speaker Johnson’s (and thus Donald Trump’s) agenda has gotten a boost from the grim reaper.

Of course, Congress isn’t the only example. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House has been occupied by record-breaking elderly presidents for the past decade. Nobody needs a reminder of what happened to Biden’s reelection bid, and by the end of this term Trump will be older than Biden was when he left office.

Understandably, we don’t much like talking about death, and have an even stronger cultural distaste for criticizing the recently departed, or senior citizens for their declining health. But sometimes there are more pressing practical problems we have to confront. Many of us have been there at some point with our own aging relatives, and know how difficult it can be to take the necessary steps. But sometimes, it simply is necessary, and we are not doing anybody any favors by looking the other way.

America’s political gerontocracy is a genuine problem. It fuels dysfunction, distrust, and concrete negative policy consequences. We can’t sweep it under the rug any longer: too many of our high officeholders, including a disproportionate number of Democrats, are simply too old. It’s not unacceptable ageism to say so; it’s the cold, hard reality. And it’s time to confront it head on: we need a mandatory retirement age for politicians.

The Incumbency Racket

America’s electoral system is broken in ways that disproportionately benefit aging incumbents. Our uniquely absolute two-party system guarantees most congressional seats remain safely in the hands of the same party year after year, with little more than token opposition in the general election. Primary elections rarely pose a threat to individual incumbents, either, with entire party apparatuses dedicated to protecting sitting members above all else. For most people who manage to snag one of the rare open opportunities to become a member of Congress, the job is effectively theirs for as long as they want it. And the attitude of perpetual, personal entitlement shows.

One of the foundational principles of civic republicanism is that no man is indispensable. George Washington went out of his way to make the point, first in surrendering his military command at the end of the Revolution, and again in limiting himself to two terms as president. In this, as with many of the Founders, he was consciously emulating the classical virtues of the Roman republic. Suffice it to say, Washington had a much better claim to being an essential figure for the nation than any of today’s politicians, most of whom would not be recognized on the street by their own constituents. And yet egotism and hubris, fueled by a chronic lack of accountability, has allowed many to convince themselves that they are simply too good to retire in their 70s, or their 80s, or in some cases into their 90s. Thus our highest offices and most consequential decisions have come to hinge on the declining health and faculties of individuals clinging to office into unreasonably old age.

One example played out in the District of Columbia last year, while it is being subjected to a Trump takeover verging on military occupation. D.C.’s non-voting member of the House, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, was effectively incommunicado. Her brief public appearances have been painfully awkward, and her staff repeatedly had to “clarify” her insistence that she planned to run for another term before she finally conceded to reality.

At 88 years old, it is excruciatingly obvious Norton is debilitated precisely when her constituents need her most. Before that episode, Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) was revealed, after having been absent from Capitol Hill for several months, to be living in a facility for dementia patients at the age of 81. Sen. Feinstein had been publicly incoherent for some time until she died in office in 2023, age 90. The president pro tempore of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is currently third in line for the presidency at the age of 92. And these are just a few of the litany of examples.

Nor is this problem solely about an increased risk of legislators passing away before they finish their terms. As Feinstein, Norton, and Granger all make clear, sometimes there are members who are still alive but manifestly unable to do the job. For all intents and purposes, their voters are also going unrepresented for months and sometimes years at a time. As staffers and confidantes try to prop them up and cover up the reality, the situation often devolves into grotesque cases of outright elder abuse.

The practical impacts of this gerontocracy become starkly clear when viewed through the lens of razor-thin congressional majorities. In recent elections, control of the House and Senate has frequently hinged upon a mere handful of seats. When a member resigns or dies, seats in the House go vacant for months as they can only be filled by special elections.

The untimely death or serious incapacitation of even a single member of Congress can dramatically shift political power and alter policy outcomes nationwide. Fewer than 10,000 votes shifted across just three districts in 2024—the kind of margin so narrow it could have been flipped by the weather on election day—would have produced a Democratic House majority, one which would have since flipped from its own members dying in office. However understandably human it might be, this is unacceptable. Our ostensible servants are gambling with the public interest for nothing more than their own personal desires. It is shameful, and they should be shamed for it. But experience has shown electoral pushback and public dissatisfaction is not enough. As with so many other professions, from airline pilots to senior military officers, a hard and fast rule is the only workable solution.

Survey Says …

Public support for setting maximum age limits on members of Congress is overwhelming—a staggering 79% according to one Pew survey. Despite this, no current member has been willing to break the ice and say what more than three-in-four Americans are thinking. Republicans cower in fear of their own soon-to-be octogenarian president, and so are hardly in a position to make the point. Congressional Democrats similarly shy away from confronting their influential older members, and relatedly, any rehashing of Biden’s age-induced implosion (the recent Democratic National Committee autopsy of the last election pointedly avoided the issue). And many, perhaps most, have the direct personal conflict of interest that they also plan to hold office for the rest of their lives. Thus, even the modest gesture of proposing a popular constitutional amendment, one with bipartisan support across the spectrum, and which would have a reasonable chance of securing ratification by the states, goes unheard on Capitol Hill.

This disconnect highlights a broader democratic deficit. Politicians’ refusal to address age limits, as either a formal rule or even a normative expectation, exemplifies their prioritization of internal party dynamics and individual selfishness over responsive and responsible governance. It is absurd that a position supported by nearly four-in-five Americans can’t even get a hearing in Congress.

When directly confronted, too many aging politicians display shockingly selfish attitudes. Just a few months before his death last year, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) resisted fiercely, and successfully, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) challenged him for the role of Ranking Member on the House Oversight Committee. “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” declared Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), himself 86 years old.

Even more glaring was the petulance of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) on the subject when asked about it in May 2025. At 84, and having served in the House for more than three decades, Clyburn complained publicly, “Nancy left her seat. Steny left his seat. I left my seat. What the hell am I supposed to do now? What do you want—me to give up my life?” The sheer narcissism of this statement is astounding. None of these legislators have actually given up their seat in Congress; they merely passed caucus leadership positions to younger (as in firmly middle-aged) colleagues. Yet Clyburn reacted as if he has been unfairly relegated to obscurity, despite remaining among the country’s most influential politicians and a respected elder statesman in his party.

Such statements reveal an ugly truth: too many politicians view public office as a lifelong entitlement, divorced from the principle of service. They cling to power, prioritizing personal desires over public responsibility, displaying a staggering disregard for the democratic process and the constituents they supposedly represent. And there’s no reason to expect the situation will change unless there is a simple, objective limit which can’t be evaded by special pleading.

Public Office Is a Public Trust

It is understandable that elected politicians like Clyburn hesitate to relinquish their positions. For many, their political career represents decades of meaningful work, fighting for causes they deeply believe in. But these offices do not exist to satisfy personal ambitions or comfort. They exist solely to represent constituents and serve the public interest. When members of the House die in office, hundreds of thousands of citizens lose fundamental civic rights—representation, advocacy, and legislative input—for months at a time. Senate vacancies can be filled more quickly, but there is always the possibility that the governor with the power to appoint an interim senator will be from the opposite party, which undermines their democratic legitimacy—or that the special election itself could flip a seat, as happened in 2010 following the death of Ted Kennedy, with substantial consequences for the Affordable Care Act.

The harm inflicted by legislators refusing timely retirement is concrete, tangible, and fundamentally undemocratic. The same observation can be made of the Supreme Court, most notoriously in the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who refused to retire when there was the opportunity for an ideologically aligned replacement. But she wasn’t the first. Before her, Thurgood Marshall made the same miscalculation, resulting in his replacement with Clarence Thomas.

Likewise, it is hard to deny that American politics would be in a better position than its current sorry state if Joe Biden (elected at 77) and Donald Trump (elected for the second time at 78) had been off the list of eligible presidential contenders. It is not unreasonable to insist the most powerful office on the planet should not repeatedly see occupants celebrating their 80th birthdays.

One common retort is that a mandatory retirement age for members of Congress would be undemocratic. After all, shouldn’t the voters have their choice, even if it’s an elderly longtime incumbent? But it is not reasonable or realistic to expect voters to judge the declining faculties of individual elected officials case by case. Voters aren’t interacting with them personally on a day-to-day basis. And as we have seen, staffers will often go to extraordinary lengths to hide the truth, carefully managing appearances and issuing dishonest denials.

Add to this the immense advantages of incumbency, including national parties determined to defend their incumbents by default, and how the vast majority of districts are uncompetitive in general elections, and it becomes plain “just vote them out” isn’t a workable solution.

Many states already impose mandatory retirement ages on judges, and we do likewise for a range of jobs where it’s a concrete practical necessity, for reasons of both physical condition and mental acuity. Federal elected offices already have minimum age requirements written into the Constitution—25 for the House, 30 for the Senate, 35 for president—which are far less justified than sensible maximums would be. Adopting a mandatory retirement age somewhere in the early-to-mid-70s would provide clarity, stability, and essential generational renewal.

Growing public frustration with gerontocracy is real, palpable, and justified. Politicians who continue disregarding this frustration risk eroding public trust further and deepening democratic dysfunction.

Ultimately, confronting America’s political gerontocracy means reaffirming that public offices exist to serve the nation and its people, not the personal ambitions of its politicians. It is also one of the few constitutional amendments which enjoys widespread supermajority support and thus a reasonable chance of ratification. And if the principle of the matter isn’t enough, it’s worth reminding our legislators that there is an immense political opportunity to claim credit for something voters overwhelmingly think is a good and necessary idea.

A previous version of this essay was first published at Liberal Currents, before the additional death of Rep. David Scott.

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In yet another instance of self-dealing corruption by this administration, the Pentagon has issued a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnet company that the venture capital firm of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, invested in a few months prior. Despite initial denials from the administration, the deal was pushed forward—specifically by Peter Navarro, a Trump senior adviser and friend of the family.

ProPublica has the story:

[I]nterviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

The Trump family’s self-dealing has followed a consistent pattern throughout this administration: a family member acquires a financial interest, the White House exerts pressure on the relevant agency to help produce a personal windfall, and officials scramble to comply. The Vulcan deal is merely the first in which the White House intervention has been documented with this degree of specificity.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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This past weekend, I attended a conference at Duke University—“Higher Education at a Crossroads: Reckoning With the Rise of Illiberalism”—organized jointly by the university’s Kenan Institute for Ethics and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. The conference brought together scholars, practitioners, and institutional leaders to examine the illiberal forces threatening the independence of higher education in America.

It was an excellent event. Politically diverse speakers and participants from the United States and abroad discussed the state of academic freedom on American campuses, how American universities are faring compared to their peers elsewhere, and how they ought to respond to the pressures bearing down on them.

Higher education used to be one of my beats in my previous life as a full-time policy commentator. I have been writing about it less in recent years, drawn away by what I see as the larger existential threat that the entire liberal edifice faces from populist authoritarianism and other illiberal forces. Immersing myself once again in the issues facing the sector—and getting a first-hand glimpse of the internal conversations taking place within universities—was therefore enormously valuable.

My charge was to comment on the Yale report, which was published on April 15, 2026 by Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education, a 10-member faculty committee convened by President Maurie McInnis. The report is a 58-page self-examination of elite higher education’s failures.

Below is a lightly edited version of the remarks I delivered, along with a postscript where I respond to pushback I received.

Shikha Dalmia
Editor-in-Chief

I felt a great deal of cognitive dissonance reading this report. I found myself wishing that I had eight hands, like the Indian goddess Durga, so that I could go, “on the one hand, and on the other” with every page.

But let me start with my bottom line: this was the right statement—more or less—at a very wrong time. It was more notable for what it didn’t say than what it did. The laundry list of reforms it identified were fine as far as they went—but they didn’t go far enough. Taken à la carte, there was much I agreed with. On the whole, though, the report was underwhelming.

Why was this a bad time to be issuing this report—and to so much fanfare? This administration has declared a holy war on universities. The vice president has branded them the enemy. Trump has asserted that “our colleges are dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” In populist regimes, such hyper-inflated rhetoric against institutions or groups is a prelude to draconian crackdowns. Its whole purpose is to soften up public opinion so that when the strongman’s onslaught comes, it is seen as deserved and justified. And it didn’t take long for Trump to back his words with deeds.

The administration has used federal funding as a political weapon to force ideological submission across more than 600 universities, deploying a coordinated arsenal of tools—funding freezes, civil rights investigations, visa revocations, accreditation threats, and endowment taxes—against universities accused of harboring antisemitism, promoting DEI, teaching “gender ideology,” conducting climate research, and tolerating pro-Palestinian protest. The unifying theme is the punishment of any institution whose values conflict with the administration’s cultural agenda. Columbia lost $400 million and capitulated; Harvard had $2.2 billion frozen, its ability to enroll 6,000 international students revoked, and its tax-exempt status threatened after refusing to surrender control of its governance and hiring; Cornell had $1 billion frozen; Northwestern had $750 million frozen; Penn had $175 million frozen for allowing a transgender swimmer to compete three years earlier. Much of this axe fell not on the allegedly offending disciplines but on STEM fields and medical research.

The administration then offered a so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence” to nine elite universities—a nine-page document demanding a biological definition of sex enforced in bathrooms and sports, a cap of 15% on foreign students, elimination of race and gender from admissions and hiring, abolition of units deemed hostile to conservative ideas, and annual DOJ oversight—all backed by the barely veiled threat that institutions that refused were free to “forego federal benefits.” Seven of the nine rejected it. The New York Times called it “extortion.” Libertarian Cato Institute scholar called it a “push-button guillotine” inserted into the neck of every institution that signed.

I have been a longstanding critic of elite universities—their business model, their admissions policies, their ideological conformity. I would laugh heartily at the quip that the opposite of diversity is university.

But nothing they have done deserves this kind of attack, whose purpose is not to build on what is good in them but to destroy their integrity by making them regime-compliant.

So right now, despite my many criticisms, I want to stick up for American universities—something Yale conspicuously failed to do. Allow me to append a defense of the accused and counsel Yale to go easy on the self-flagellation.

American universities are still the best in the world and there are few—if any—equals to America’s top-tier ones. They are exciting places where students encounter big ideas and cutting-edge thinking. Although I agree with the Yale report that the balance between teaching and research is horribly out of whack and the incentives to restore the salience of teaching need to be restored, the fact that top-tier universities are both research and educational facilities means that new ideas drift into classrooms quickly.

America also has the strongest tradition of liberal arts education in the world—notwithstanding the (valid) concern that this education is losing out to career-oriented majors. David Brooks reported in The Atlantic recently that humanistic education is experiencing a revival across American campuses. Meanwhile, in most European countries, and in India, a liberal arts education as something worthwhile is not even on the table. In Germany, children are sorted at age 10 into vocational, technical, or academic tracks—a life-defining decision made about a 10-year-old. In England and many Nordic countries, the sorting happens by age 16. By contrast, in America, you don’t have to declare your major until you are a junior. This architecture gives young people the widest possible room for intellectual exploration. They can change their minds, switch fields, study multiple disciplines. If they stumble, there are second chances.

For all the slams against the elitism of top-grade universities, America’s egalitarian culture shapes the classroom in them as on other campuses. Students and professors are collaborators in learning—thinking through ideas together rather than receiving wisdom from on high. In India, students address professors as “sir” and “madam,” formalizing a hierarchy that builds in deference to authority and quietly discourages questioning. Foreign students find a genuine liberation on American campuses, and the exhilaration of learning alongside some of the brightest peers in the world is real.

The Yale report mentions none of this. What it also barely mentions is that elite universities are facing an unprecedented assault by their own government. After decades of relentless right-wing critiques of higher ed—some justified, some not—it seems to have lost all moral confidence to make a case against its detractors, who have no self doubt. It’s as if it accepts that it deserves the punishment.

It whispers something about postdoctoral fellows and international students hesitating to speak, even about their own research, for fear of retaliation—and then moves swiftly on to the mea culpa that constitutes the bulk of the report. Imagine if Ukraine, confronted with a Russian invasion, convened an emergency session of parliament not to condemn Putin but to deliberate about the imperfections of its liberal democracy.

I exaggerate, of course. But the lengths to which the report goes to avoid naming the elephant in the room are astonishing. Yale has been in the right’s crosshairs since Bill Buckley’s 1951 broadside, God and Man at Yale. But somehow, despite its reputation as Woke Central, it has escaped the administration’s wrath—and this report reads like a calculated effort to keep it that way by preemptively falling on the sword. For all of Yale’s insistence that its proposed reforms are meant to rebuild broken public trust, it appears to have an audience of one.

In normal times, this kind of singular self-examination would have been not just fine, but most welcome. In fact, Yale’s elite sister universities did just that. The University of Michigan issued a 131-page report in September 2024 reaching strikingly similar conclusions—that the university had work to do on free speech, viewpoint diversity, and institutional neutrality. But Michigan’s quieter, hype-free release signaled a sincerity that Yale’s fanfare undercut.

If Yale was going to choose this moment for a mea culpa, it should have at least prefaced it by acknowledging that for all their flaws, America’s elite universities remain the envy of the world—and that the reason is academic freedom. Without it, they would long since have become politicized and succumbed to state pressure, and research, scholarship, and teaching would have suffered. Yale could have noted that like all human institutions, American higher education is imperfect and susceptible to decay—sclerotic, ossified, captured by special interests, just like Congress, the courts, and, lord knows, the presidency. And then its self-examination would have landed with moral authority instead of the thud of a hostage statement.

That said, the problems Yale identifies are real. Opacity in admissions, obscene tuition costs, grade inflation, ideological uniformity, the devaluation of the classroom—these are genuine pathologies. (I would add the credential fetish to that list that makes it very difficult for even the most thoughtful and highly accomplished scholars and intellectuals to be hired as professors if they don’t have the right degrees or research papers in approved journals.) The report summarizes them with concision and precision and in very readable prose—perhaps a first for a document written by professional academics.

But its proposed fixes are timid—designed, I would argue, to protect privilege while performing concern about it. Two examples:

Admissions. Yale acknowledges that what it calls “special classes of applicants” including legacy preferences, faculty children, and athletic admissions dilute its meritocratic standard and extend unfair advantage to the rich. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ban on racial preferences, such carve-outs make the system less—not more—fair because they open minority spots for wealthy, privileged applicants but not vice versa. But Yale doesn’t recommend scrapping these preferences—merely reducing them.

Tenure. One reason universities have such a lopsided ratio of liberal to conservative faculty is tenure itself. Because tenure means a lifetime colleague who is nearly impossible to remove, the incentive is to tenure only those who resemble you and will generate the least friction. A system designed to guarantee intellectual freedom ends up producing intellectual uniformity. You cannot fix that problem without confronting tenure. But the report puts it off limits from the very start, noting it may seem “outdated, but it exists for a reason.”

Since we don’t believe in grade inflation, I’ll give Yale’s report a C-minus: well-written, on the right track—but ultimately, disappointing.

Postscript: Some faculty members in the audience commented that I was underestimating the significance of the report. They pointed out that the document was authored by distinguished Yale faculty from across the political spectrum and was quickly endorsed by the university president. This was intended to signal to the rest of the faculty that change was coming.

That makes some sense to me and I might have overstated when I said the report seemed to have “an audience of one.” But for a whole host of reasons, I remain dubious that the report’s primary purpose was overcoming internal resistance against its proposed reforms (instead of appeasing this administration and right-wing critics):

1. If selling it internally was its true purpose, the university leadership would have helped itself by signaling its determination to stand up to the administration’s assaults on academic freedom and offer assurances that, unlike some of the other elite universities, it was not planning to capitulate. I understand that the university would have put a target on itself by making such a statement, hence my contention that the timing of this report was extremely bad because it was not possible to honestly grapple with the far bigger threat to campus freedom that this administration poses. (Also, incidentally, if its purpose was to get the administration to go easy on Yale, it didn’t work. On May 16, about a month after the report’s release, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ, accused the university of subverting the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing race-conscious admissions policies by relying on “proxies” to determine the ethnicity of its applicants.)

2. If the report was merely or mostly meant for internal consumption, it should have been released a little more quietly, like the University of Michigan report. But Yale mounted a full-blown media campaign and the report instantly landed on the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others. By contrast, Michigan’s report received nowhere near the same publicity. Its coverage was mostly limited to the campus paper and higher ed trade publications. Neither did its president loudly proclaim that it intended for the report to launch a national conversation, as the Yale president did.

3. Mission statements such as these, to be sure, are helpful not only in setting the direction of an institution but also establishing internal incentives to stay the course: What kinds of activities and behaviors will be rewarded? What are the performance metrics that’ll be used to measure success? However, internal incentives have to be aligned with the external material incentives to really stick and deliver. And the report’s silence on tackling the broader structure ultimately signals its lack of seriousness. As I noted in my remarks, elite universities will not get ideological diversity without eradicating tenure. Nor will they get a fair-and-just admissions system that is truly merit based without eliminating all “special applicants.” Nor still will they get their obscene tuition costs under control so long as they can put in place accreditation rules that allow them to behave like a cartel and erect insurmountable barriers to new entrants that can challenge their dominance, as I wrote in a long article in Reason magazine in 2008, “Legacies of Injustice.” But the report does not even begin to tackle any of this. If anything, it doubles down on the status quo. Hence, I expect the Yale report to produce only cosmetic changes. Its real purpose is managing the optics in the face of regime hostility.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced he is “drawing up plans” to end the processing of international flights at airports in left-leaning cities, citing protests outside an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey—protests at which Democratic Sen. Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed by officers. The threat arrives just weeks before the FIFA World Cup brings millions of international visitors to the United States.

The Hill reports:

“[T]hese sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws,” Mullin said, “then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.”

Critics said ending the processing of international flights at various airports would cause chaos at airports across the country, forcing airlines to cancel flights and disrupt travel for left- and right-leaning cities that depend on CBP processing at major hubs.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called the idea “actively insane.” “Airlines cannot divert large numbers of international flights from one city to another,” he wrote. “They’d just have to cancel flights en masse, causing enormous economic damage that splashed waaaaay beyond a few big cities that were the target.”

Halting international flight processing at major airports would inflict enormous collateral damage on ordinary travelers, businesses, and the broader economy—none of whom are responsible for the protests Mullin objects to. More fundamentally, using a core governmental service as a weapon against political dissent is precisely the kind of retaliatory executive action that the constitutional design of limited government was meant to prevent. The administration is treating airport customs processing as a bargaining chip to punish cities for harboring residents who protest its policies.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the longtime columnist whose two civil suits resulted in an $88 million judgment against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. The probe centers on Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic donor whose nonprofit helped fund Carroll’s legal expenses. It also examines whether Carroll committed perjury in a 2022 deposition when she stated her legal costs were being covered on contingency. Notably, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who previously represented Trump in the Carroll matters—recused himself from the investigation.

CNN reports:

The investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony tied to her two civil lawsuits against the president—one alleging he sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and a second for defaming her when in 2019 he repeatedly denied the assault, said she wasn’t his type, and claimed she made it up to boost book sales. Prosecutors’ theory hinges on a 2022 deposition statement by Carroll that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees and expenses.

Senior leaders at the Justice Department referred the investigation to federal prosecutors in Chicago, according to two sources familiar with the matter. While Carroll’s deposition took place in New York, one of the individuals who helped cover some of Carroll’s legal fees, Hoffman, has a nonprofit based in Chicago. Hoffman’s support of the case caught Trump’s attorneys off guard when it came to light on the eve of trial.

A federal judge had already ruled that evidence of Hoffman’s funding had no bearing on Carroll’s allegations and barred it from being presented to jurors. That ruling didn’t stop the DOJ from opening a probe anyway. Carroll’s civil verdicts, which have survived multiple rounds of federal appeals, represent the legal system’s most direct finding against Trump for his personal conduct. The investigation—targeting his accuser, her funder, and a funding arrangement a federal judge already deemed irrelevant—appears aimed squarely at retribution.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.

The Trump administration has proposed a government-wide nondisclosure agreement requiring every federal employee to sign a gag order. The move is unprecedented in scope, and conveniently timed to coincide with one of the most corrupt periods in modern presidential history.

The Washington Post explains:

The draft notice uses an expansive definition of privileged information, beyond typical classified and unclassified designations. Under the terms of the draft, employees would be blocked from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available.”

The draft NDA says that signing it is “voluntary,” but there’s a hefty caveat: “Failure to sign may result in removal from federal service and potential debarment for refusal to certify compliance with applicable non-disclosure obligations.” …

“Such broad gag orders would leave the public in the dark about how the government works, preventing the kind of informed debate that is critical to democratic accountability,” ACLU’s Esha Bhandari said. “The government can’t shroud itself in secrecy in a democracy.”

Federal law protects whistleblowers precisely to prevent this kind of institutional self-sealing—and this NDA, despite its nominal carve-outs, is designed to make employees too afraid to invoke those protections.

The administration’s stance is clear: let Trump do whatever outrageously corrupt and illegal things he wants, or lose your job.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Dear Readers:

Last Memorial Day, we published an essay by —a veteran of the Army National Guard (including a deployment to Iraq) and the founder of The Chamberlain Network, a pro-democracy advocacy organization for vets. In that essay, Purdy made the case for fiercely guarding the military’s independence from partisan politics. After Trump addressed West Point graduates in a MAGA hat as though it were a campaign rally, Purdy emphasized that a military drawn into partisan politics cannot serve as the guardian of the republic. Once the armed forces become an appendage of the party in power, they become a threat to the very liberties they were built to defend.

Well, here we are one year later and … things are actually worse. Over the past year, National Guard troops have been deployed into American cities for domestic law enforcement purposes, with federal courts ruling multiple deployments illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act, as we’ve extensively covered at The UnPopulist.

Two days ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered this year’s West Point commencement address and—surprise!—he opted to turn that occasion into a culture-war broadside. He mocked “foolish and feckless” leaders who he claimed tried to turn the academy into “woke Princeton,” declaring “our diversity is our strength” to be “the single dumbest phrase in military history,” and promising graduates their “hands are untied.” In the same speech, Hegseth was somehow able to say with a straight face that West Point is “above politics.” This from a man who, just days ago, traveled to Kentucky to campaign against Rep. Thomas Massie—a Republican—on behalf of a Trump-backed primary challenger, in what critics said raised Hatch Act concerns.

The ideal Purdy articulated last year is in even greater danger this year. We’re republishing his essay as the country approaches its 250th anniversary—and with it, an occasion to rededicate ourselves to the principles that made it worth founding in the first place.

Berny Belvedere

Senior Editor

Many worried that President Donald Trump would use the U.S. military for domestic immigration enforcement—blurring the line between national defense and internal policing. They were right. Trump is making the military an active element of federal enforcement.

In Texas, members of the National Guard have been federally deputized to investigate, arrest, and transport migrants for civil immigration violations. Many military installations are being prepared to hold tens of thousands of detainees and others, such as the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, have already been repurposed.

But even more concerning is what comes next. Public statements and policy signals suggest that the administration is considering deploying the military against states unwilling to participate in its enforcement efforts. Some in administration circlesare flirting with treating a state’s refusal to support federal immigration operations not as a political disagreement, but as a breakdown in civil order—potentially justifying stronger executive action by invoking the rarely-used Insurrection Act.

Trump’s Private Army

This Act does grant the president authority to deploy the military domestically in cases of violent unrest or obstruction of federal law. But, to date, it has been used only in moments of extreme crisis—insurrections, riots, and refusals to comply with court orders—not to settle intergovernmental policy disputes.

Consider the contrasts: Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy invoked the Act and dispatched federal troops to Arkansas and Mississippi, respectively, after these states defied court orders barring segregated schools. President George H. W. Bush used it during the 1992 Los Angeles riots after the California governor requested assistance following days of violence that overwhelmed local law enforcement. In each case, the Act was used to restore order or uphold existing legal mandates—not to compel states to enforce a sitting administration’s highly controversial policy.

Applying it to immigration enforcement would mark a profound break from tradition. A state’s disagreement with federal priorities is not rebellion. It is a feature of our federal system. Redefining legitimate dissent as disorder akin to rebellion opens the door to military force being used as a standard tool for the implementation of an executive’s domestic policy agenda.

Trump’s defenders might argue that “past presidents used the military to enforce civil rights—why not now for border security?” But the difference is critical: past uses of the Insurrection Act enforced legal rights under the Constitution after they had been affirmed by courts. This administration is considering doing so to suppress political resistance to its agenda—in the absence of violence or judicial defiance.

There is no precedent in modern American history for the use of active-duty military forces—or federally directed National Guard units—to conduct immigration arrests in non-cooperating states. Even during past periods of crisis, such as the 1992 L.A. riots or the desegregation standoffs of the 1960s, the Insurrection Act was used only after courts had ruled or violence had erupted, and local governments had failed to act. But using military force as a first resort in a political dispute between the federal government and the states would be unprecedented.

Weaponizing the Military Toward Immigration Enforcement

Even more worrying is how few checks remain to thwart Trump.

Congress has largely ceded its role in conducting meaningful oversight of this administration. In the face of increasingly aggressive executive actions—from sweeping immigration orders to violations of longstanding legal norms—legislative resistance has been minimal. Trump, meanwhile, is treating court rulings as temporary obstacles rather than binding decisions. Witness his refusal to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the Salvadoran gulag where he was wrongfully deported—despite being ordered to do so by the Supreme Court.

And the public, already fatigued by years of political volatility, may not fully grasp how extraordinary the sight of soldiers arresting civilians and dispatching them to military bases would be.

Even though the administration is framing these steps as necessary and temporary, history teaches us that once such powers are seized, they are rarely surrendered. For example, the surveillance and other powers the federal government amassed in the Patriot Act after 9/11 have yet to be relinquished.

The normalization of military for domestic enforcement could also happen through smaller, less dramatic means besides invoking the Insurrection Act. Under Title 32 of the United States Code, National Guard troops can be federally funded while remaining under nominal state control. This means the federal government could shovel more funding to friendly governors for using their state’s National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement while withholding it from non-cooperating ones. Such a move would fall in a legal gray zone that would not trigger full Insurrection Act judicial scrutiny.

Misusing the National Guard is not the only loophole in the law that the administration could exploit to involve the military in immigration enforcement. Few noticed, but in April, President Trump designatedthe Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide strip of land along the U.S.-Mexico border, as a “National Defense Area” and transferred it from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense. This will allow U.S. troops to not only participate in the construction of border barriers, including the installment of detection equipment to monitor the border, but also detain migrants in the zone, even if they are merely trying to come to seek asylum.

This Is Not What the Armed Forces Are For

Using military personnel for domestic enforcement—especially in politically charged areas like immigration—creates a dangerous feedback loop. It militarizes policy and politicizes the military. Over time, it teaches the public to accept force instead of debate or compromise to settled disagreements.

There are also operational consequences. Soldiers are not trained to perform community policing. They are equipped for defense and deterrence—not checking documents or following civilian detention protocols. Police and law enforcement agencies already face challenges with oversight and public accountability. Bringing in military forces, which operate under a separate and less transparent legal system, would further complicate any meaningful checks on abusive power. Service members would be thrust into scenarios they are not trained to navigate, increasing the risk of escalation, legal missteps, civil rights violations, and long-term damage to both civil-military relations and public trust.

Moreover, preparing the military for domestic deployment would require an enormous diversion of time, personnel, and resources that would diminish readiness for actual battle. Mobilizing units for non-combat missions requires months of dedicated training. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when the military blended combat operations with nation-building and peacekeeping, National Guard units often spent six months or more in training. At a time when, regardless of spending increases the House may approve, the Department of Defense is actively seeking to reduce the size of the force, it shouldn’t have to face the added responsibility of carrying out large-scale domestic missions targeting migrants inside the United States.

This risks not only straining the military from the inside but also eroding public trust from the outside. Every time the military is used to carry out politically charged domestic missions, it becomes harder to maintain the trust that holds the institution together. Morale declines. Recruitment suffers. The next generation of Americans begins to see military service not as a commitment to the Constitution, but as a weapon of politics. That does not strengthen the military but compromises it because the military’s legitimacy isn’t just built on strength, it’s built on the widespread consensus among the American people that it is doing the right thing.

Finally, deploying the military for immigration enforcement inevitably raises the question of what kind of democracy we want to live in. If the military is routinely turned against the people it serves, we risk becoming a nation where political disputes are settled at the end of a bayonet.

When the commander-in-chief turns the military inward—toward political opposition, toward communities that dissent, toward the institutions that keep power in check—he isn’t defending the country; he’s reshaping it. And the question becomes, “Where will he stop? Will there be any lines?”

Veterans understand what’s at stake. Those of us who served did so under the assumption that the military’s role was to defend the nation, not to enforce policy at home. We swore an oath to the Constitution, not to a president or a political movement. That oath doesn’t expire when we take off the uniform. It obligates us to speak up when we see the lines between civil and military life starting to blur.

The military’s legitimacy in American life rests on its apolitical role and its restraint from involvement in civilian governance. Using it to compel compliance in political disputes will erode trust and undermine this vital institution.

We need to rededicate ourselves to America’s bedrock commitment to a non-partisan military that is dedicated to defending the country abroad, not fighting political battles at home.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.

The Institute for the Study for Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA), the parent organization of The UnPopulist, launched Executive Watch early in Trump’s second term. It has been meticulously documenting this White House’s illicit actions since then.

Below is our biweekly selection of new entries. Bookmark this page, which contains a chronological scroll of the abuses. And also this post, which sorts and lists them under our 5 “P” categories:

• Personal Grift

• Political Corruption

• Presidential Retribution

• Power Consolidation

• Policy Illegality

After reading the following entries, tell us: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?

May 22, 2026

Trump’s Election-Security Czar Is Reupping Debunked Conspiracy Theories to Ban Dominion Voting Machines in an Effort to Subvert Elections
Category: Power Consolidation

Kurt Olsen, Trump’s election-security czar, tried to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states—relying on the same debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems that Trump has peddled since 2020.

Reuters explains via U.S. News & World Report:

White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states. Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots—a demand election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system. The plan got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it.

A main focus of Olsen’s efforts: the debunked theory that Dominion machines were infected with code controlled by Venezuelans to steal the 2020 election from Trump. Repeated investigations and lawsuits since 2020 have produced no evidence Dominion machines were hacked. In 2023, Fox News paid Dominion $787 million in a defamation case over false election-rigging claims. Olsen aimed to invalidate the machines before the midterms. …

The episode is part of a far-reaching Trump administration push to encroach on state and local governments’ authority to run elections—which is granted to them in the U.S. Constitution to prevent the executive branch from seizing power.

This fits within a broader pattern of Trump efforts to interfere in elections, including executive orders threatening states, working to push through the SAVE Act, and trying to seize election records.

As has argued for The UnPopulist, America’s election system is robust enough to withstand a fair amount of meddling. But even if it is relatively unlikely that Trump will fully succeed in his efforts to subvert American elections, his dangerous intentions are clear enough.

May 21, 2026

DHS Issues a Nationwide Alert Against a Comedian for Making a Parody ICE Snitch Site
Category: Power Consolidation

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a “Be on the Lookout” (BOLO) alert—normally reserved for major suspects and threats—to law enforcement agencies across the country. The alert target is Ben Palmer, a comedian from Nashville who created a parody website mocking ICE’s tip submission system, which is a glorified snitch line.

The Guardian has the details:

The Bolo was issued by the DHS’s Nashville field office in February, about a week before the Washington Post profiled Palmer. While Palmer’s site uses language such as “official report form,” the comedian doesn’t claim to work for ICE and the privacy policy contains a disclaimer that the site is “for parody.” … In an email, a DHS spokesperson said: “There is no ‘investigation’ into this individual—this document is an internal memo shared for awareness purposes only.” …

Darius Reeves, a retired ICE field office director, said Bolos more commonly include terms such as “‘considered armed and dangerous,’ ‘approach with caution’ or ‘do not approach at all.’” He said a Bolo being issued for a comedian was “unusual.” …

Palmer isn’t the first comedian targeted by the DHS under the Trump administration for satirizing immigration enforcement. Earlier this year, federal officers took down and detained Rob Potylo while he was wearing a giraffe costume and demonstrating against ICE in Minneapolis. In 2018, DHS agents showed up at the Brooklyn home of comedian Jake Flores after he posted satirical tweets about ICE.

The First Amendment provides satirists and prank artists with significant protections, making a nationwide federal law enforcement alert an extraordinary response to what is likely constitutionally allowed political speech. (Our correspondent, , who protested ICE as an inflatable dachshund has, so far at least, avoided provoking a BOLO of his own!)

The government has a legitimate interest in ensuring the integrity of its reporting systems—and Palmer’s site did fool many callers who genuinely believed they were tipping off ICE. But being fooled while trying to report your neighbor to immigration authorities is a different kind of harm than the disruption of a federal law enforcement process, and DHS’s own alert acknowledged no investigation was underway. That makes the widely circulated bulletin look less like a public safety measure and more like an attempt to track a vocal critic.

May 21, 2026

Trump Threatens New Military Action, This Time Against Cuba
Category: Policy Illegality

Despite his war of choice in Iran going none too well, Trump is shifting his sights to another military conquest, this time closer to home: Cuba. His administration has indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro and imposed an oil blockade. Now Trump is saying he may have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

CNN provides the details:

The Cuba gambit is the latest test of the administration’s strategy of ratcheting up economic duress by imposing a blockade while raising the prospect of the use of force to get enemies to capitulate. This worked in Venezuela—but Venezuelans are yet to see their hopes for democracy made good. A similar approach has been such a failure in Iran that Trump may have no option but to restart the war. Meanwhile, UN experts warned that the US oil blockade was threatening “fuel indispensable for electricity generation, water and sanitation systems, hospitals, public transportation, and food production.”

We’ve heard this story before: in Venezuela, where the Trump administration merely replaced one corrupt leader with another—Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president—and in Iran, where Trump falsely promised to bring freedom to Iranians protesting their regime. Trump cares nothing for the people of other countries and is not interested in helping them. What he does want is to start illegal wars to reinforce his image and try to bolster his flagging popularity. As Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego put it: “The American people are not asking for another war. They want us focused on building housing in Arizona—not bombing housing in Havana.”

May 21, 2026

Trump Demands Republicans Fire the Senate Parliamentarian After She Blocked His Ballroom and Also Scrap the Filibuster
Category: Power Consolidation

Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate Parliamentarian, ruled on May 16 that the Senate reconciliation bill cannot, as currently written, be used to fund Trump’s ballroom. In response, Trump issued a deranged Truth Social post calling on Senate Republicans to fire the Parliamentarian (and eliminate the filibuster) or else find themselves “looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible.”

Time has the story:

“Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of ’Parliamentarian’ in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an iron fist,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced? … Get smart and tough Republicans, or you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!” …

MacDonough over the weekend ruled security funding for Trump’s new White House ballroom did not meet the strict guidelines governing what Republicans can include in the budget reconciliation package they are trying to pass. The proposal to allocate $1 billion in security additions for the White House and ballroom violated the Byrd Rule, she determined, as it was too broad to be included in the bill, which cannot be filibustered.

As with many of his tantrums, Trump is once again taking aim at the very idea of procedural checks on his authority and the bedrock principle that the other branches of government don’t simply exist to rubberstamp his pet projects but to check his unhinged designs. (This is the same ballroom that MAGA world tried to make happen by exploiting a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, with a seemingly coordinated campaign of influencers and lawmakers insisting the attack proved the ballroom was a national security necessity.)

May 20, 2026

Trump Settles His Own Lawsuit Against His Own IRS by Creating a $1.776 Billion Slush Fund for Political Allies and Blanket Immunity for Himself and His Family
Category: Personal Grift

Earlier this year, Donald Trump sued the IRS and Treasury Department over the actions of a former IRS contractor, who illegally disclosed Trump’s tax returns that, unlike previous presidents, he refused to release voluntarily. Despite serious weaknesses in the case—including the fact that it was filed after the statute of limitations, and similarly situated plaintiffs received only a formal apology, not money—the Justice Department settled with Trump on behalf of the government by creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could be used to compensate Jan. 6 defendants prosecuted under the Biden administration. It purports to grant Trump and his family broad immunity from a wide range of government actions against them.

As if that were not bad enough, the fund will have no independent oversight and no disclosure requirements. Lawfare reports:

The fund—drawn entirely from the federal Judgment Fund, a permanent congressional appropriation used to pay court settlements against the United States—will be used to dispense taxpayer money to people who suffered from purported Democratic “weaponization” and “lawfare.” While Trump is not expected to receive compensation from the fund himself, money will be doled out by a five-member board he effectively controls, operating under procedures that need not be disclosed, with the identities of recipients potentially kept secret. …

By waiving any matter that “could be pending” before any agency or department, the agreement purports to give the Trump family blanket immunity from the government for everything they have done. The parenthetical “(including tax returns filed before the Effective Date)” is at once logically unnecessary, possibly illegal, and clarifying. According to a 2024 New York Times report, an ongoing IRS audit might cost Trump over $100 million. It stands to reason that this is what the language was designed to address.

This self-dealing scheme exploited loopholes in the legal system in such a manner that it’ll be hard to use the law to stop it, although some police officers who were injured on Jan. 6 have sued.

Judge Kathleen Williams, who was handling Trump’s lawsuit, was seeking external advice on whether Trump could sue his own government. She was scheduled to be briefed on May 20, but the Justice Department hastily settled with Trump two days prior. Since the settlement is outside her jurisdiction, she cannot rule on the legality of the slush fund. Even by this administration’s standards, this is brazen. Check out Walter Olson’s piece for The UnPopulist on the new low that this administration has set.

May 20, 2026

A Panel Packed With Trump Loyalists Rubberstamps His Plans to Build ‘Arc de Trump’ Without Congressional Approval
Category: Power Consolidation

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—packed with the president’s allies after Trump fired all of the previous members—has approved plans for a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch opposite the Arlington Memorial Bridge, in Washington, D.C. Survey teams are already on the site even though Congress has yet to approve Trump’s latest vanity project. The administration bizarrely claims it does not need this approval.

The Washington Post explains:

[A]dministration officials have cited a 1924 report by a federal commission charged with designing the Arlington Memorial Bridge. That report called for building a pair of 166-foot-tall columns, surmounted by statues, on Columbia Island that would frame the nearby Lincoln Memorial. Congress formally ratified the commission’s report in 1925, and the Memorial Bridge was soon built. However, the columns were not constructed, and Trump officials today argue that in building the arch they would be carrying out past lawmakers’ wishes. …

“The notion Congress a century ago authorized construction of this 250-foot arch in Memorial Circle is absurd,” said Wendy Liu, a lawyer at Public Citizen Litigation Group. “This is their playbook,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California). “The fact that they’re trotting out this tortured argument that a 100-year-old authorization for something totally different satisfies a law today is laughable, but consistent with their pattern of ignoring Congress.”

There is no law too old or obscure that our Dear Leader won’t dig out and torture to satisfy his vanity.

May 18, 2026

Pete Hegseth Campaigns Against Sitting Republican Congressman in Possible Hatch Act Violation
Category: Power Consolidation

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, personally campaigned against sitting congressman Thomas Massie in the Kentucky Republican primary—an unprecedented deviation from past Pentagon norms. (Massie, who became that rare thing in the Trump era, a Republican who is at least sometimes willing to oppose the president on principle, has since been defeated.)

Hegseth’s appearance raised immediate questions about a potential Hatch Act violation, the law that prohibits executive branch officials from using their official positions to influence elections. The defense secretary’s team preemptively tried to deflect these questions by insisting he would be there “in his personal capacity.”

The Hill gives us the story:

Hegseth will … be in Kentucky on Monday as part of official duties to award Purple Heart medals to 101st Airborne Division soldiers and to administer the oath of enlistment to 190 re-enlistees at Fort Campbell. He will then attend a rally for Gallrein put on by conservative advocacy organization America First Works. … “I can’t remember a secretary of defense coming to a political event like this,” said Tres Watson, a former spokesperson for the Republican Party of Kentucky, adding that he had “significant questions about the legality or appropriateness.” Watson said it was “fairly certain” to be a Hatch Act violation. …

“I’m proud here to stand with Ed Gallrein,” Hegseth said at the event. “President Trump does not need more people in Washington who are trying to make a point, especially from his own party. He needs people trying to help him win, to vote with him when it matters most.”

The Hatch Act exists precisely to prevent the executive branch from using official power and resources to influence elections. The claim that Hegseth was there “in his personal capacity” does not withstand scrutiny: he arrived on official Pentagon travel, in his capacity as a Cabinet secretary, before attending a transparently partisan rally the same day. The message to every Republican member of Congress was unmistakable: if you cross this administration, the full apparatus of the executive branch, including its senior-most military leadership, will be deployed against you, laws and norms banning such abuse of the state machinery be damned.

May 14, 2026

Trump Routinely Buys Stock in Companies Days Before His Administration Approves Lucrative Decisions for Them
Category: Personal Grift

Donald Trump purchased stock in Nvidia and AMD just days before his own administration approved lucrative chip deals that sent both companies’ valuations soaring. The purchases are among 3,642 securities transactions—roughly 58 trades per trading day—that Trump disclosed in a 113-page filing covering January through March 2026, representing between $220 million and $750 million in total activity.

NOTUS reports:

Trump purchased $500,000 to $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on Jan. 6, a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China. … Trump purchased $1 million to $5 million dollars worth of Nvidia stock on Feb. 10, only a week before Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with AI and social media giant Meta. …

AMD, another AI semiconductor company, was also authorized by the Department of Commerce to sell their chips to Chinese customers on Jan. 13. Trump purchased $50,000 to $100,000 worth of AMD stock on Jan. 6. …

Trump purchased at least $260,000 worth of Palantir stock during the first three months of 2026. … In February, Palantir struck a billion-dollar agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to use the company’s software in the president’s deportation surge. …

On Feb. 10, Trump also purchased $1 million to $5 million in shares of Axon, the company that makes Tasers. … Immigration and Customs Enforcement outlined its plan to spend $220 million on Tasers over five years on Feb. 24 … in what would be a major boon for Axon.

The White House says Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children with no input from him, and that “there are no conflicts of interest.” The disclosure forms do not specify who placed the trades. What the forms do establish is that the president of the United States holds between $1 million and $5 million in Nvidia stock while his Commerce Department shapes the regulatory environment that determines Nvidia’s access to the Chinese market.

The disclosure was also filed late—a handwritten notation on the cover confirms Trump paid late-filing fees. A president trading at this volume, in companies his administration regulates, while missing his own disclosure deadlines, shows total contempt for the ethical rules meant to constrain exactly this kind of behavior.

At his own State of the Union, Trump called on Congress to ensure members “cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.” Democratic Rep. Mark Takano shouted back: “How about you first?”

May 14, 2026

DOJ Drops Federal Fraud Charges Against Indian Billionaire After He Hires Trump’s Lawyer and Pledges $10 Billion Investment
Category: Political Corruption

Gautam Adani, one of the world’s wealthiest men, was indicted by federal prosecutors for orchestrating a massive $265 million bribery scheme to secure solar energy contracts, hiding the corruption from U.S. investors to raise capital. Following aggressive backchanneling after Trump’s return to office, the Justice Department moved to permanently dismiss the criminal indictment—with prejudice—just weeks after Adani’s legal team formally offered a $10 billion U.S. investment deal during private negotiations.

The New York Times has the details:

The reversal came after the Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, hired a new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., one of President Trump’s personal lawyers and the co-chairman of the prominent firm Sullivan & Cromwell. ... Mr. Giuffra ticked through about 100 slides outlining why prosecutors lacked basic evidence, as well as the jurisdiction even to bring the case, one of the people said. Another slide also made an unusual offer: If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs. ...

The proposal—which Mr. Trump could have held up as a political and economic win—underscores the highly transactional approach to justice in Mr. Trump’s second term. Over the past year, he has awarded pardons to his donors and even a business partner, while prosecutors in his Justice Department have dropped charges and investigations against other political allies. Those results, a striking break from prosecutorial norms, have fueled the perception that freedom is up for sale in Mr. Trump’s Washington, emboldening defendants to offer economic settlement terms that were once unthinkable.

The transaction is about as naked as pay-to-play corruption gets, but the operational mechanics elevate it to a historic level of audacity. Robert Giuffra simultaneously serves as both Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer and Adani’s representative. In other words, the president’s own attorney used a slide presentation to pitch an economic quid pro quo to the president’s own Justice Department: a promise of corporate investment in exchange for permanently scrapping criminal fraud charges against a foreign billionaire.

May 13, 2026

Trump Guts the DOJ Unit That Investigates Public Corruption From 40 Attorneys to Just Two
Category: Power Consolidation

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section has operated for 50 years under both parties, investigating corruption by public officials at every level of government without regard to political affiliation. Under Trump, it has been reduced from 40 full-time attorneys to two.

NPR reports:

Legal experts say the pardons are but one way the Trump administration has undermined the fight against public corruption. ... Another piece is the dismantling of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which was created after Watergate to investigate and prosecute public corruption and election crimes.

Under this administration, the section has been decimated. It had around 40 full-time staff when Trump returned to office in January 2025. That number has dropped to just two full-time attorneys today, according to current and former officials. It was handling around 175-200 open matters ... when Trump returned to office. That number has plummeted to around 20 today, those officials say.

The gutting of the Public Integrity Section began with the Eric Adams episode; DOJ’s career attorneys resigned to protest the corrupt quid pro quo in which corruption charges were dropped against the former New York City mayor in exchange for his cooperation on immigration enforcement. The administration then suspended the requirement that corruption cases be reviewed by the Public Integrity Section at all, removing even the procedural check on partisan prosecution.

The result is an administration that has simultaneously eliminated the unit designed to hold it accountable while signaling to every public official in the country that corruption carries no consequence—provided you are on the right side.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Liberals are in the middle of a bitter debate over whether the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker—who has claimed that “America deserved 9/11,” celebrated the Soviet Union, defended Hamas, and made clear in interviews that he considers liberalism itself passé, if not the enemy—belongs in their political coalition.

This is healthy; movements have a responsibility to police, or at the very least facilitate an ongoing negotiation of, their own ideological boundaries. In that spirit, consider the case of Candace Owens. Her rise captures the trajectory of the right over the past decade—specifically, how insurgent conspiracists trampled over whatever reasonable guardrails existed within conservatism’s information superstructure.

The point here is not that Piker is Owens. It is that the conditions that produced Owens—mainstream credentialing, establishment complicity, an attention economy that rewards escalation over everything else—do not belong to the right alone. Owens is among the most popular political podcasters in the United States, and her story shows exactly how that happens.

Merging the Establishment and the Fringe

Owens spent many years as a darling of the conservative mainstream in the Trump era. From 2017 to 2019, she was communications director for Charlie Kirk’s right-wing activist organization, Turning Point USA. She was a fixture on Fox News for years and became one of the stars of Ben Shapiro’s right-wing digital media empire, The Daily Wire—headlining her own show from 2021 to 2024.

Like the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, Owens used her mainstream platform as a springboard to build a massive independent brand. Both have found the alternative media space far more accommodating than the mainstream—but they needed mainstream approval to jumpstart their solo careers.

What did Owens claim to be? A truth-telling Black conservative with the courage to say what others wouldn’t; a dissident within elite institutions shot through with identity politics and liberal orthodoxy. She was effective at getting credulous mainstream voices to accept this carefully crafted image. As far back as 2018, Bari Weiss described her in The New York Times as a “sharp, young, black conservative” and a “telegenic speaker with killer instincts.” The British conservative intellectual Douglas Murray described her as a “seriously smart and sassy young American conservative whose campus and media appearances have seen her begin to gain the audience she deserves.”

But none could claim ignorance of the warning signs. As far back as 2018, Owens called for journalists and political opponents to be thrown in prison. She claimed that Democrats wanted to “exterminate blacks via Planned Parenthood.” At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was a superspreader of absurd conspiracy theories—like the idea that tech billionaire Bill Gates knew about the pandemic in advance and wanted to mandate a “Vaccine ID chip for all humans.” After all this, Shapiro still gave her a high-profile job and one of the most visible platforms in conservative media to launder her increasingly unhinged commentary.

Consider some of her lowlights:

• In 2018, at a right-wing event in London, Owens said: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany.”

• On her YouTube show, Owens told her audience: “Your quarrel is not with white men … Jewish people were the ones that were trading us. Jewish people were in control of the slave trade.” (She was subsequently named “Antisemite of the Year” by StopAntisemitism—which she publicly construed as an honor.)

• When the rapper Ye announced he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” Owens appeared alongside him in a “White Lives Matter” shirt and became his most prominent defender. “If you are an honest person,” she said of his remarks, “you did not find this tweet antisemitic.”

It Just Keeps Getting Worse

Now that she has shed the constraints that came with working in traditional media, Owens regularly publishes content that would never survive a production meeting, fact check, or legal review at a mainstream institution.

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination last summer, Owens has advanced a series of insane conspiracies about his death. She has suggested that Kirk was killed by Israeli agents because he was questioning the United States’ support for Israel (Owens had previously claimed that Israeli agents were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—an accusation with no basis in any credible historical account). She claimed that Kirk was “betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA.” She has a perverse obsession with the idea that Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, had her husband killed. In an eight-hour video series titled Bride of Charlie, Owens lays out the case for this crackpot theory. In the first episode, she shows a picture of Erika as a child in a bee costume “accidentally throwing up some Freemason hand-signs”—to give you some sense for the strength of the “evidence” she brings to bear for Erika’s alleged involvement in sinister and shadowy globalist plots.

While slandering and harassing Kirk’s widow, Owens has placed herself at the center of the story. She recently declared that the French government has “executed upon and paid for my assassination” (one of her favorite conspiracy theories is that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a man—a claim the Macrons are currently suing her over in a French court). In the same post, she claimed, “Charlie Kirk’s assassin trained with the French legion 13th brigade with multi-state involvement.” She alleged that one of those states was, of course, Israel. After sharing a post accusing Israel of instigating the protests in Iran earlier this year, she claimed, “Charlie Kirk tried to save Trump from this!” and concluded: “You can never trust a Zionist.”

As Owens published one deranged conspiracy theory after another about Kirk—all the while promoting herself as a central figure in the drama—her massive audience (six million YouTube subscribers) continued to grow. Unsurprisingly, Carlson said he believed her claims were credible. Other MAGA podcasters scrambled to keep Owens onside because they know how much clout she has within their movement. Megyn Kelly, who is on her own journey to far-right crackpottery, organized a meeting between Erika Kirk and Owens. Owens emerged from it more fixated than ever. “I now hold the position that it is utterly immoral to defend Erika Kirk,” she said in March.

This is what happens when the establishment is compromised by insurgent voices who pursue clicks at all costs. Owens’s descent into paranoia, self-obsession, cruelty, and dishonesty is the logical terminus for commentators whose influence rests on shock and scandal. They can never be fired and they answer only to their audience. Once their platform is large enough, they can say whatever they want and get away with it.

The Enablers

Kelly’s role in the episode deserves particular scrutiny. Rather than condemning Owens’s harassment campaign, she framed her nearly-five-hour sitdown between Owens and Erika Kirk as an effort toward “reconciliation”—as if mercilessly slandering a grieving widow were an unfortunate misunderstanding rather than a sustained campaign of cruelty and shameless opportunism. Shapiro, Owens’s former employer, was unsparing: “You won’t even protect Charlie Kirk’s widow from the monster accusing her of murdering Charlie.” Kelly’s response was to insist that Owens was right to raise “questions about whether Charlie, before he was killed, was growing more skeptical of Israel (HE WAS).”

During a speech at a Turning Point USA conference in December, Shapiro condemned the “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He attacked Carlson, Owens, and Kelly directly. He also acknowledged his role in advancing Owens’s career: “If we hire awful people, we’re responsible for that. I have some experience there, as you might suspect.”

He certainly does. He hired Owens when it should have been obvious that she was a demagogue and grifter who would say anything for attention. After signing on with The Daily Wire, Owens constantly defended Ye. In 2024, Weiss described Owens as “truly batshit” and observed: “That it took the Daily Wire this long to sever ties with Candace Owens is alarming.” Weiss is right to ask why Owens remained on the payroll for years afterward. But Shapiro shouldn’t just ask himself why he hired Owens and took so long to fire her—he should ask why the paranoid fringe of American conservatism has been so warmly welcomed by the mainstream.

Carlson recently hosted America’s most notorious neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, on his show for two hours of polite conversation. He handed Fuentes the mic on one of the country’s most popular political podcasts, who proceeded to tell millions of listeners that “Zionist Jews” are “controlling the media apparatus,” argue that Jews are “unassimilable,” and complain about the power of “organized Jewry in America.” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts announced that Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” And after Shapiro challenged his movement to disown figures like Carlson and Owens, Vice President JD Vance took the stage and declared: “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or deplatform.”

Vance refuses to condemn extremists in his movement because he wants access to their audiences, and those extremists can maintain a veneer of legitimacy by sustaining their ties with the establishment. This is how the MAGA embrace of demagogues and conspiracists accelerated the mainstream right’s descent into illiberalism and authoritarianism.

What This Means for Democrats

None of this is to suggest that left- and right-wing listenerships are mirror images of each other. That said, the left is not immune to this dynamic. Yes, the right-wing media ecosystem has drifted into conspiracism and anti-establishment crankery on a scale that nothing in the left-of-center information space comes close to matching. But the problem is that those structural forces—algorithms that reward outrage, influencer economics that punish moderation of views, platform dynamics that have no interest in the ideological character of the content they amplify—operate across the political spectrum. The left-of-center information environment is susceptible to them, too.

This brings us back to Piker. On one side of the current debate are those who believe we’re in a political emergency that requires the construction of the largest possible political tent to oppose Trump. Others argue that embracing someone like Piker—an outspoken critic of liberalism who has a long record of despicable remarks—is morally obscene and politically counterproductive. The debate is genuine and the stakes are real. But the terms of the debate should be honest about what Piker actually represents.

In a recent New York Times column, Ezra Klein argued against what he called “cancellation as a political tactic,” urging liberals to engage hostile audiences rather than retreat to a “shrinking, sanitized corner of the public sphere.” It is good advice, but it doesn’t resolve the harder question: What do you do when the figure in question holds positions deeply at odds with a liberal sensibility, and builds a platform on saying the most inflammatory version of those views, every time, without moderation?

Piker’s claim that “America deserved 9/11” wasn’t a slip of the tongue—it was an expression of his deeply held belief that the United States is a brutal, marauding imperial power and American liberalism is a sham, and that therefore the slaughter of innocent Americans is defensible. His celebration of the Soviet Union, his defenses of the CCP, his violent rhetoric, and his insistence in interviews that “liberalism is demonstrably failing” aren’t gaffes or the occupational hazard of a streamer logging eight hours a day on camera. They are genuine expressions of his worldview, core to his political appeal, and integral to his business model.

His recent Pod Save America appearance—the same one in which he said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time”—offers a case in point. Pressed on his views, Piker offered a confident account of Albert Einstein’s relationship to Zionism that, as The Atlantic subsequently documented, misrepresented Einstein’s decades-long support for the Zionist cause—getting the history wrong in service of the argument. During the same appearance, asked about reports of mass sexual violence on Oct. 7, Piker said it “doesn’t matter if rapes happened.” That is not a politically contrarian position—it is a moral disqualification, and it resulted in no apparent cost to his standing. Piker’s mission differs from that of right-wing influencers in content but shares the same underlying logic: outrage is the product, the worldview is the brand, and the business model depends on never moderating either. He is, by his own account, someone who considers liberalism a failed project and says so without apology.

The attention economy incentivizes conspiracism, sensationalism, and spirals of increasingly outrageous rhetoric. Media personalities known for their radicalism and willingness to shatter taboos don’t typically become more measured and civil over time—they ratchet up the outrage, offer wilder theories, keep eyeballs glued to the screen. Owens is the proof of concept. While it would be unfair to compare Piker to Owens in terms of their substance, the same set of bad incentives that lead him to regularly make egregious comments will continue to exert their pressure. He is not in Owens’s league of noxiousness, but absent any resistance from more responsible outside forces, he may get there.

Liberals don’t need to run their coalition through purity tests, but they do need to reckon with what the twisted incentives of modern mass media can produce. The goal is a discourse that looks less like Candace Owens’s, not more.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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