2025-06-03 06:10:00
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For the second time in less than a month, the Trump administration has used law enforcement to directly target Congress. And for the second time in less than a month, Congress is showing that it doesn’t have the desire or ability to defend itself. Republicans are mostly unwilling to do anything to stand up to Donald Trump, and Democrats are incapable of exerting either formal or informal political power. The Constitution’s checks and balances are premised on each branch wanting to protect its powers. What happens if that’s not the case?
In an incident last week that emerged publicly only late last Friday, police from the Department of Homeland Security handcuffed an aide to Representative Jerry Nadler, one of the most prominent Democrats and Trump critics in the U.S. House. The confrontation occurred at a federal building in Manhattan that contains both an immigration court and Nadler’s office. Officers eventually released the aide without making an arrest.
The reasons for the detention are, naturally, disputed. In a video, an officer says, “You’re harboring rioters in the office.” No riot had occurred, though. In a darkly ironic statement on Saturday, DHS claimed that officers were trying to inspect the office out of concern for the safety of Nadler staffers and were obstructed by, um, a Nadler staffer. According to Nadler’s office, his staff had just witnessed federal agents detaining migrants outside the immigration courtroom. Struggling to reach deportation quotas, DHS has embraced the tactic, arresting a number of people just after cases are closed or dismissed; the strategy has drawn fierce criticism from advocates. Nadler is requesting a congressional investigation into the event.
This incident follows another from last month, when Democrats attempted to inspect a DHS facility in New Jersey. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on the scene, and though the charge was dropped—and a judge thrashed the prosecutors—interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, then used dubious evidence to charge Representative LaMonica McIver with assaulting federal agents. (McIver has denied the charges.)
Under Trump, the executive branch has pursued a multipronged attack on Congress’s independence and powers. In addition to pressure from law enforcement, the White House has sought to seize power over regulatory agencies that Congress established explicitly to have independence. Although Trump backed down from a plan to install Cabinet members without Senate confirmation, he has used acting appointments vigorously—Habba, for example, is serving in an interim capacity and is not confirmed. And Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought once again said over the weekend that he wants to use impoundment to circumvent Congress’s power of the purse.
Yet Congress has done almost nothing to push back. This moment is the culmination of years of fecklessness, which has occurred under the leadership of both parties but probably originated in an overhaul by Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. Congress has become less and less productive legislatively. It can’t pass budgets. It has often deferred to the executive branch, happy to let the president take political heat.
Because Republicans currently control both houses of Congress, the onus is on them to act. The Founders expected that rivalry between the branches would help ensure balance, not anticipating the intense partisan polarization of the moment, in which GOP affinity overrides the desire to defend congressional muscle. Where does that leave Democrats? They can try to use lawsuits; judges have been the most consistent locus of resistance to Trump’s power grab, but the courts were slow and not always helpful when Congress tried to sue during his first term. Democrats can also try to rally public opinion to oppose a president who polls show is unpopular.
If that’s the plan, it’s not going well. Yesterday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries about what had happened at Nadler’s office.
“In terms of how we will respond to what Trump and the administration has endeavored to do, we will make that decision in a time, place, and manner of our choosing,” Jeffries replied, sounding exactly like a ChatGPT version of a Democratic leader. “But the response will be continuous, and it will meet the moment that is required.”
Bash replied with the obvious question: “What exactly does that mean?”
Jeffries served up some more polysyllabic word salad. “In terms of additional things that may take place with respect to our congressional oversight, authority, and capacity, we will respond in a time, place, and manner of our choosing if this continues to happen.”
Apparently, Jeffries realized that he didn’t win much confidence in February when he threw up his hands and wondered, “What leverage do we have?” But his new rhetoric doesn’t give voters anything more to hold on to. The administration has already concluded that Jeffries is just bluffing. Before McIver’s charges, Jeffries warned the administration against punishing any members of Congress. If they crossed that “red line,” Jeffries suggested, he’d retaliate. What exactly would he do? “They’ll find out. They’ll find out.” Habba crossed the red line without hesitation—and so far without consequence.
No wonder voters are uninspired. A CNN poll released over the weekend found that Americans see a greater distinction between the vision of the two parties than in the recent past. Given Trump’s unpopularity and voters’ disapproval of his agenda, that ought to be good news for Democrats, but they are proving incapable of seizing the moment, instead continuing to relitigate the 2024 election.
The attacks on Congress aren’t a problem just for Democrats—at least not in the long run. Republicans happy to surrender powers when a president is enacting policies they like may rue the loss of those powers the next time a Democrat is in the White House. More important, though, checks and balances are designed to protect any branch or figure from becoming too powerful and running roughshod over not just the other branches but also the rights of citizens.
“The Trump administration is really using totalitarian or even authoritarian practices,” Nadler told The New York Times after the incident at his office. He added: “We have to fight them. We don’t want to be a fascist country.” Let’s hope he’s not just begging the question.
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You Don’t Know Yourself as Well as You Think You Do
By Julie Beck
Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you’ve heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo’s temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade. In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, “If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.” And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, “To thine own self be true,” presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it.
Good advice, to a point. If you know absolutely nothing about yourself or your likes, wants, values, or personality, you either are a baby or have bigger problems than a dead philosopher can address.
Yet sometimes all of modern life seems to be pushing people toward knowing themselves in more and more granular ways.
Culture Break
Watch. Reformed (on Max), the latest TV show featuring a charming rabbi, leavens existential depth with comedy, Gal Beckerman writes.
Read. Melissa Febos’s new book, The Dry Season, recounts Febos’s year of celibacy and the freedom it gave her to reconnect with the world.
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
2025-06-03 04:25:03
Relying on its own resources, Ukraine has just carried out what might be the most complex, elaborately planned, and cost-effective military operation of its current war with Russia. Yesterday, the Ukrainians used drones to attack, almost simultaneously, at least four Russian airfields separated by thousands of miles. Among them were two airfields just inside Russia, but the targets also included Olenya air base, above the Arctic Circle, and, remarkably, Belaya air base, in Siberia, which lies just over the border from Mongolia.
The attack showed how much audacity, ingenuity, and effectiveness the Ukrainians can bring to their own defense when Western leaders aren’t pressuring them to hold back. It also revealed the vulnerability of the large, expensive planes and other hardware treasured by major powers around the world.
Images circulating immediately after the attacks appeared to show that Russian aircraft had been hit with remarkable accuracy at some of their most vulnerable points. The Ukrainians seem to have placed relatively small drone swarms in cavities built into the top of trailer trucks. Then, when the trucks were close to the targets, the trailer roofs opened up, and the swarms of drones flew out, surprising and overwhelming Russian defenses. Even how the drones themselves were operated represents something notable. In many cases, they seem to have been flying courses preprogrammed via the open-source software ArduPilot, which has proved effective in navigating unmanned aerial vehicles for hundreds of miles and precisely reaching targets.
Although details remain limited, the operation testifies to how rapidly drone technology is evolving. Human operators might well have been observing some of yesterday’s flights and been in a position to take control if necessary, but some of the vehicles may have operated outside of human authority, flying preprogrammed courses. Ukrainian officials have said that some of the drones were basically AI-trained to recognize the most vulnerable parts of Russian aircraft and automatically home in on those areas.
[Read: Ukraine’s new way of war]
The Ukrainians have claimed that more than 40 advanced Russian aircraft were hit and that at least 13 were destroyed. How much of the damage is reparable is not yet clear. Kyiv boasted of destroying more than a third of Russia’s large Tu-95 bombers, which have been a primary launch system for the large volleys of missiles that regularly strike Ukrainian cities. The Tu-95s are literally irreplaceable: Russia has no production facilities making more of these aircraft, and it has not yet designed a successor to the model. Yesterday’s attack also appears to have damaged a large number of Tu-22 M3 bombers and probably one A-50 command aircraft, the Russian equivalent of a U.S.-made airborne warning and control aircraft. The total cost of Russian losses likely runs into several billion dollars.
In contrast, the cost of one of the Ukrainian drones used in yesterday’s attack has been estimated at about $1,200—so that even if the airfields were attacked with 100 drones each (a seemingly high estimate), the total cost of the drones used would have been less than $1 million. I struggle to think of a recent military operation where one side suffered so much damage at so little cost to the other.
In one sense, the Ukrainian attack represents a culmination of what we have seen happen since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022: Seemingly outmatched by Russia’s much larger military, Ukraine has used drones and other improvised equipment to destroy tanks, large warships, bombers, and other large legacy systems. Military planners and many outside commentators have been too slow to acknowledge the significance of Ukraine’s defensive tactics, but the most recent attacks plainly show the need for major changes in how all militaries are constructed and trained.
For the United States and other major Western militaries, Ukraine’s use of trucks parked outside secure areas near military sites will pose uncomfortable questions. How closely do they—or can they—monitor all the truck traffic that streams past their bases? Do they know what happens in every nearby property from which an adversary could hide drone swarms and then launch them with no warning? For many years now, for instance, Chinese interests have been buying large amounts of farmland right next to important U.S. military bases. They could be growing soybeans, but they could also be staging grounds for drone swarms that would make the Ukrainian attacks look minuscule.
Meanwhile, in Europe, military bases have in the past few years been regularly overflown by a large number of unknown drones, which are presumably gathering intelligence. Whichever power is responsible obviously has the ability to deploy a larger number of drones in kinetic attacks. The Ukrainians are showing U.S. and European militaries that better security against drone flights is long overdue.
For Ukraine’s doubters, these attacks should lead to a period of quiet reflection. President Donald Trump has insisted that Ukraine has “no cards.” The New York Times editorial board recently implied that Ukraine is unlikely to produce a military breakthrough that can change the basic course of the war. But pessimism about Ukraine’s capabilities is ahistorical and wrongheaded.
[Thomas Wright: Trump’s basic misunderstanding about the war in Ukraine]
For three years, the Biden administration simultaneously supported Ukraine and discouraged major attacks on Russian soil, for fear of provoking Vladimir Putin too much. That constraint no longer exists, now that Trump has written off Ukraine and appears eager to end the war on Putin’s terms.
Until now, Ukraine has had only a limited ability to launch attacks as ambitious as the one it just executed. If Ukraine’s remaining allies help arm it properly to undertake similar operations at scale, it can still win the war.
2025-06-03 04:02:00
Terrorism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It depends on the oxygen of rhetoric for sustenance and encouragement. Nearly two years after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the cumulative effect of calls to “Globalize the intifada” and “End Zionists” perhaps inevitably led to the horrific attack yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, where a man yelled “Free Palestine” as he threw an incendiary device at a Jewish gathering in support of the hostages.
Words matter. The protester at Columbia University in 2024 holding a sign labeling Jewish demonstrators who were waving Israeli flags as Al-Qasam’s next targets was dismissed as being hyperbolic. So were the By Any Means Necessary banners carried at demonstrations and the red inverted triangles, similar to those Hamas uses to mark Israeli targets, spray-painted on university buildings, a national monument, and even the apartment building of a museum director. When demonstrators wave the flags of terrorist organizations, wear headbands celebrating those same groups, and publicly commemorate the martyrdom of terrorist leaders such as Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, they’re not throwing the bomb, but their message can light the fuse.
[Iddo Gefen: What ‘intifada revolution’ looks like]
In the past six weeks, that fuse has produced a succession of terrorist acts that have threatened the safety and security of America’s Jewish community. That two of the incidents also occurred on Jewish holidays—the arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover and yesterday’s incident in Boulder on the eve of Shavuot—show that Jews in America are not only in some danger, but even more likely to be targeted on specific dates marking religious ritual and observance.
And they won’t be just singled out, but subjected to especially heinous acts of violence. The attacker in Boulder used a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, resulting in eight people being hospitalized with burns and other injuries. Tragically, among the eight victims, who ranged in age from 52 to 88, the eldest was reportedly a Holocaust survivor.
Yet another example of an especially egregious act of violence was the shooting deaths last month of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim on the street outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. One bullet from a powerful 9-mm handgun is often sufficient to kill. But police found 21 shell casings scattered around the two bodies. The murderer allegedly stalked Milgrim as she attempted to crawl away, shooting her repeatedly. This was an execution.
For years, American Jews watched with horror the attacks on their European co-religionists. A young man kidnapped and tortured to death, an elderly lady beaten and thrown out the window of her home, and a teacher and three children murdered outside a Jewish day school are among a long list of violent anti-Semitic incidents in France alone—the country with the world’s third-largest population of Jews after Israel and the United States.
“What history had taught him was Amazement,” Lion Feuchtwanger writes of the conclusion reached by one of the characters in his deeply prescient 1933 novel about Nazi Germany, The Oppermanns. “A tremendous amazement that each time those in jeopardy had been so slow in thinking about their safety.” Despite the sharp increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. recorded over the past decade by the Anti-Defamation League, American Jews also once believed that the violence against Jews in France, Britain, Germany, and other European countries couldn’t happen here. Many told themselves that this threat was unique to European Jewry, given the internal frictions within their own countries, which had absorbed large immigrant populations from former colonial possessions. But yesterday’s attack, coming on the heels of the firebombing of Shapiro’s residence and the D.C. murders, has proved otherwise. As Ian Fleming, the former spy and novelist who created James Bond, reportedly observed, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Arguably the system was already blinking red after the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, where a gunman killed 11 people, and the near tragedy averted four years later, when an armed man took hostage the rabbi and worshippers at a Colleyville, Texas, synagogue. The October 7 attacks heightened that awareness and led Jews to emulate the security measures standard at synagogues, day schools, community centers, and senior residences in Europe. Private companies were hired to provide guards at the entrances to synagogues and schools. Volunteers were solicited, trained, and deployed by community-based security organizations. The positioning of at least one local police car and patrol officer in front of synagogues became commonplace.
But in today’s threat environment, the question for Jews everywhere is inevitably: How much security is enough?
Shapiro’s residence was not unprotected. Additional armed guards were deployed at the entrance to the Jewish museum for the event that Lischinsky and Milgrim attended. Jewish institutions, organizations, and agencies, moreover, are already burdened with rising security costs. A study of expenditures at Jewish day schools in four states found that the average cost for security had nearly doubled in 2024–25—to $339,000—compared with 2022–23. After the past six weeks, further increases can be expected. The same is true on university campuses across America, where Jewish- or Israeli-studies departments and centers, as well as similarly oriented student organizations and Jewish ministries, are themselves responsible for paying for the security now standard for all of their events.
And there will be challenges in what can be done to prevent such tragedies in the future. For instance, although security was increased at the entrance to and inside the D.C. Jewish museum, Lischinsky and Milgrim were gunned down outside, on a street corner. Will security measures now require that a secure perimeter be established, or even concentric circles of security in front of every venue and surrounding any event? Will a phalanx of local police or community volunteers be required to box in and protect participants at any and every Jewish event? After yesterday’s attack in Boulder, the answer, most likely, is yes.
[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]
Security provisions are often likened to the proverbial length of a ball of string. In the case of American Jewry, however long that once was, it now needs to be lengthened. Whatever upgrades and increases have been implemented in the past will necessitate reassessment, further modification, and enhancements. More resources will need to be dedicated to ensure the protection of Jewish places of worship, clerics, and congregations. The same is true for other Jewish and Israel-related activities at schools, community centers, offices, and senior homes. The same goes for marches, parades, demonstrations, vigils, and other inherently public events. Strengthened physical, personal, and digital security measures will likely follow—especially during religious holidays and festivals. Even greater cooperation, coordination, and information sharing between law enforcement and Jewish institutions than already exists will be needed.
Ultimately, however, physical security alone will not protect American Jewry. The prejudice and calumny directed against that community that have now become commonplace and have often been treated with indifference must change as well. And with this must come the recognition that violence threatens not just American Jews but all Americans. The Council on American-Islamic Relations cites record numbers of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents; CatholicVote finds hundreds of instances of vandalism as well as more serious attacks on Catholic churches in the U.S. since 2020; and the Hindu American Foundation had to issue a “Temple Safety & Security Guide” to its worshippers.
Violence against all faiths is rising. To stop it, our society must take more seriously not just bomb throwing, but the messages that light the fuse.
2025-06-03 03:37:00
Yesterday’s violent attack in Boulder, Colorado, at a weekly Jewish-community gathering to support the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, left eight people hospitalized. One of the victims is a Holocaust survivor, according to a local rabbi. Jewish leaders nationwide are demanding greater government action to protect the community, which is still reeling just two weeks after the killing in Washington, D.C., of two young staff of the Israeli embassy, gunned down outside an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
The anti-Semitic motivation of these attacks is clear. Such homicidal hate crimes have no justification; indeed, their collateral damage is to destroy the space for any reasonable debate about how Israel has conducted its war in Gaza. The two attacks are linked not only by their motivation, but by their horrific, performative intimacy. Terrorism always aims to shock with the gruesomeness of bloody murder—one thinks of the Islamic State decapitation videos. Yet terrorism typically wields the threat of random violence, the notion that any innocent might be caught in its vortex of cruelty. These attacks are different because they were directed very specifically at people the attacker took to be Jewish. Their intimacy was precisely intended to inflict horror on a particular community and imply that no Jew could be innocent.
In Boulder, the suspect in police custody has been charged with a federal hate crime. He has been named as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, and used a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to burn his victims. He reportedly yelled “Free Palestine!” during the attack. The attacker’s method had an improvised yet theatrical quality; even if its symbolism was not consciously intended, the effort to incinerate Jews has a hideous historical echo.
In the case of the D.C. attack, the suspect, Elias Rodriguez, drove from Chicago to the Capital Jewish Museum. There, he allegedly found and killed two Israeli embassy staff—according to reports, shooting his victims multiple times like a mob executioner. Authorities say the suspect also chanted “Free, free Palestine” when he was detained, adding, “I did it for Gaza.”
Pervasive anti-Semitism is what enables attackers to believe that they are striking back at Israel by trying to kill any Jew, anywhere. This hateful mindset assigns responsibility for specific Israeli policies to Jewish people all over the world. Jews thus stand condemned purely for being Jewish. This is a sure tell of anti-Semitic unreason—given that neither American Jews, nor Israelis themselves, are of one mind on anything, let alone the Netanyahu government’s Gaza policy.
The Colorado victims were meeting in support of hostages taken by Hamas. The D.C. victims were working to advance their embassy’s diplomatic mission. Both sets of people belonged to the best traditions of dialogue and peaceful advocacy, the absolute opposite of irrational hate. The personal, proximate violence that these attackers used was designed to create a spectacle that makes all Jewish Americans feel vulnerable.
Both alleged perpetrators pointedly had no intention of trying to escape from the scene of these crimes. The attacker in D.C., after all, concluded his attack by going into the Capital Jewish Museum, where people aided him, thinking that he was seeking refuge from the violence outside; he was detained only after he identified himself as the assailant and yelled pro-Palestinian slogans. The Boulder suspect was easily detained after witnesses identified him to arriving authorities. The premise of these attackers’ grotesque performance is that killing Jews, any Jews, is justified and good. Terrorism usually seeks to cloak its hate in a higher cause. But these recent attacks dispense with the pretense. “Free Palestine,” in the mouth of these attackers, is a threat of extermination, the expression of an eliminationist project. With the horrible intimacy of their point-blank shooting or flamethrower immolation, the perpetrators appear to think they have begun that project. Although a graphic description of these attacks—a fleeing victim hunted down or burned alive—may risk the crimes’ glorification or mimicry, their qualitative horror should not be glossed over.
As far as we know, these assailants are not part of a larger terrorist scheme. The “lone wolf” phenomenon makes preventing this kind of violence more difficult; with no organizational footprint for intelligence services to track, nothing in the profile of either suspect raises any obvious flag that would have provided a possible warning of such an attack. Buttressing support and protections for the Jewish community is important, but will be imperfect. The solution is simply to delegitimize, constantly and forcefully, these acts—without qualification or broader discussion. Public discourse must maintain a strong distinction between what Israel does and who Jews are. To do otherwise is to side with this terror.
2025-06-03 01:12:00
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Just before Election Day, a disturbing piece of information made its way to Donald Trump. Whenever he takes or makes calls on his personal cellphone, Trump learned, Chinese hackers could be listening and gathering intelligence.
Iranians had already hacked into his campaign’s email system—which was not a problem for Trump personally, because he has never liked putting things in writing—and the Chinese had breached the emails of the Republican National Committee. But now the hackers had compromised the backbone of U.S. telecommunications networks, according to federal officials who publicly described the intrusion on October 25, which allowed them to eavesdrop on calls involving Trump; his running mate, J. D. Vance; and other political figures.
Some in the campaign took immediate action, abandoning longtime numbers, experimenting with burner phones, or switching to end-to-end encrypted applications, such as Signal, for voice calls so they would not route through central switching hubs.
But Trump appeared unperturbed by the news, two people familiar with the episode told us, on the condition of anonymity so they could speak frankly. For more than a decade, the once and future president had been warned of the enormous risks he took—as perhaps the top global target of foreign intelligence services—by using a personal iPhone with a broadly circulated number to keep in touch with dozens of friends and colleagues. His phone was a lifeline, though. He wasn’t going to give it up.
Days later, when he won the presidency for the second time, his phone lit up, just as it had eight years earlier on Election Night 2016. “You won’t believe it,” Trump marveled in early-morning phone calls after the race was decided last year, according to an adviser. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
[From the June 2025 Issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]
A little more than four months into his second term, the president’s personal cellphone has become, in many ways, the most pivotal technological device in the federal government, directly linking Trump to the outside world. Lawmakers, friends, family members, corporate titans, celebrities, world leaders, and journalists regularly call it, knowing that, unminded by aides, Trump remains open to picking up the phone, even when he does not recognize the number.
“Who’s calling?” Trump asked when he answered our call one morning in late March from the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. (It was a fair question; it could have been almost anyone.)
The draw of the phone is simple: Trump likes to call people. He likes to be called. Unknown numbers come with a thrill akin to putting a coin in a gumball machine and waiting to see which flavor rolls out. Surrendering the phone would be inconvenient, limiting, and so he keeps it. As for any efforts to control him and his cellphone use, “I think people gave up on that years ago,” one adviser told us, adding that “probably a ton” of people have Trump’s personal number. A second ally estimated the number to be “well over 100.”
Several aides told us Trump has two different devices, and at least one aide said they have seen him with three. (One of the phones, some aides suggested, is mainly devoted to his social-media use.) The lock screen of one, captured by a Reuters photographer Friday night, shows an image of Trump’s own face, stern and commanding, with a finger pointing directly at the camera.
Trump has, at times, changed numbers; at least one number that he regularly answered as a presidential candidate in 2016 stopped working sometime during his first term. And another aide told us that Trump’s phone had been given additional security features, though it is not clear what defense these would have offered against the Chinese hack, which targeted the back-end systems of telecom providers. “He is not walking around with a run-of-the-mill iPhone off the shelf,” an adviser told us. The White House declined to explain more. “We will not discuss or disclose security measures regarding the President, especially to The Atlantic,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us in an emailed statement. Trump’s obsession with keeping his personal phone is merely evidence that he is easy to reach and therefore “the most transparent and accessible President in American history,” Cheung added.
[Read: Trump’s cosplay cabinet]
Still, Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s former speechwriter and deputy national security adviser, told us that “it’s an obvious massive risk—especially given what we know about Chinese penetration of phones in recent years.” Hacking is hardly the only concern. Joel Brenner, a senior research fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies and former head of U.S. counterintelligence, pointed us to a recent Wall Street Journal scoop by Josh Dawsey that authorities are investigating an unknown individual impersonating White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in calls and texts. Security protocols—at times cumbersome—exist for a reason, he said, and Trump taking a call from a foreign leader without the proper preparation or staff present poses real dangers. “We run the risk of interception, we run the risk of impersonation, and we run the risk of being unprepared,” Brenner told us.
What the president is doing is “terribly dangerous,” he said, citing the possibility of Trump making major deals or concessions with other world leaders that his staff may be unaware of, leaving them to scramble.
But Trump treats his direct line to the world as an enhancement of—not a risk to—his presidency. “I’ve been on the phone with him before, and he’s just said, ‘I’ve got to go. I have someone from another country calling,’” an outside adviser told us. “He doesn’t even know which country. He just sees the number and thinks, This might be a foreign leader I want to talk to.”
The first time Trump’s team truly understood he would have a different relationship with his cellphone than did presidents past was Election Night 2016, the eve of his improbable victory. “He was answering every phone call,” the outside adviser marveled to us, nearly a decade later, noting that none of the numbers was in Trump’s contacts. “He just answers the phone. He doesn’t want to miss phone calls.”
Presidents have long loved their phones. Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to install a telephone at the White House, in 1877, and Herbert Hoover was the first to put a line in the Oval Office, in 1929. But Obama stands out in recent memory as the president most obstinate about wanting to bring a personal smartphone into the White House. Obama, famously addicted to his BlackBerry, argued to keep his after his 2008 victory and ultimately prevailed, albeit in a hard-fought compromise that involved limiting his contacts.
Only a small group of Obama’s friends and top staff received his BlackBerry email address, and only after undergoing a briefing from the White House counsel’s office on security concerns. His device, which included security enhancements and was approved by national-security officials, was also configured so that emails from the president could not be forwarded. Rhodes told us that Obama’s BlackBerry did not have a phone number attached for incoming calls—which instead had to go through the White House switchboard to a landline.
[Read: Nobody’s cellphone is really that secure]
For Trump, the first presidential candidate to personally harness the power of social media, his cellphone has long been his megaphone. It is as much a part of his curated image as his oversize red ties.
Trump is the ultimate Phone Guy. He wheeled and dealed in New York for decades from the landline in his Fifth Avenue office, even going so far as to impersonate a fictional spokesperson, John Barron, on the phone with reporters. Many advisers and friends told us they think the phone is Trump’s best medium, the president at his most persuasive. In a different world, he’s just “Don from Queens,” calling in to talk radio to shoot the breeze and run through his gripes, about China ripping the country off and immigrants running amok.
During his first term, Trump often used the White House switchboard to make calls and screen incoming ones, but he just as frequently did not, in part because he assumed that nearly everyone in government was part of the “deep state,” career bureaucrats working against him, and he worried that they would somehow listen in on his calls. To be fair, his concern was not without merit; transcripts and details from several of his official calls with world leaders leaked to the press, and one such call, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment, after an intelligence analyst became alarmed by details of the exchange.
“His perspective was, ‘I can’t trust anyone on the White House staff, so I have to use my cellphone,’” a former Trump adviser told us.
Advisers tried to break his habit. John Kelly, the retired U.S. Marine Corps general who became Trump’s second chief of staff in 2017, was particularly strict about operational security, several advisers, current and former, told us. Kelly repeatedly warned Trump about how vulnerable cellphones are—to hacking by the Russians and the Chinese, and also to the phones themselves being turned into listening devices by foreign or other bad actors. He and his deputies would regularly remove Trump’s cellphone from the Oval Office, storing it in a padded box outside.
But Trump either didn’t understand or didn’t care. “He’d just reject it and say, ‘It’s not true,’” one of the former advisers told us. “He’d say, ‘My phone is the best on the market.’”
In Trump’s second term, his advisers have given up trying to restrict his phone use, though they privately admit displeasure at his practice of taking calls from journalists and others without their knowledge. “He calls people nonstop,” Trump’s campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said in an interview with Politico during the Republican National Convention last year. “I don’t worry about it, because what are you going to do? Take his phone? Change his phone number? Tell him he can’t make phone calls?”
[Jeffrey Goldberg: Read The Atlantic’s interview with Donald Trump]
But just because Trump’s aides have given up caring doesn’t mean there aren’t still major risks. Foreign adversaries could still gain access to Trump’s private conversations—inside the Oval Office, on the golf course, in the residence. During his first term, advisers said they “certainly assumed he was always being listened to.” The FBI described the 2024 Chinese attack on at least nine telecommunications companies as a “broad and significant cyber espionage campaign” that included eavesdropping on “a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity.” In addition to Trump and Vance, senior members of Kamala Harris’s campaign were also informed that they were being targeted.
Joe Biden’s national-security team later explained that the Chinese hack had given foreign spies the ability to “geolocate millions of individuals, to record phone calls at will,” while as many as 100 targeted phones had likely had their texts and phone calls collected.
Although there have been efforts to excise Chinese hackers from the telecommunications infrastructure and harden the systems, there is still a risk of future attacks. Before leaving office, Biden’s team asked the Federal Communications Commission to begin a rule-making process to require telecommunications companies to upgrade their network security, because the voluntary industry guidelines issued by the government had failed to protect the country. Trade groups representing the wireless, telecom, and broadband industries oppose new security mandates, arguing that they would impose “onerous network-wide duties.”
“It is likely that the systems may be compromised again,” one cybersecurity expert who was part of the Biden review told us. This person said the vulnerability of the telecom foundation means that even White House landline phone calls could be compromised. “The White House systems use American phone lines. If the core is compromised, it doesn’t matter who is on the end” of a call, this person said.
In a video posted on X in late May, the Dilbert creator Scott Adams described seeing a call from a Florida number he didn’t recognize and sending it to voicemail. When he listened to the message, he heard Trump’s voice: “This is your favorite president.”
“I thought to myself, No, did I just send the most important person in the world to voicemail?” Adams recounted, laughing and leaning back in his chair. “And it turns out that I had. It was Trump, and he was just calling to check in.” Before the call, Adams had recently shared publicly that he has “the same cancer that Joe Biden has,” and that he expects to die in the coming months.
In his video, Adams explained that Trump left “a semi-lengthy little voicemail,” saying that Adams could call him back on this number. “Now obviously I don’t call him back, right, because that would just be ridiculous,” Adams continued.
Trump’s habit of leaving lengthy voicemails is by design—not just because he’s a phone guy but because he relishes giving people something they can play for friends and family. “Who doesn’t like to get a voicemail message from the president of the United States?” one adviser said. When Trump finally gets ahold of someone after having left a voicemail, he will sometimes ask recipients whether they have played his voicemail for others, the person said.
[Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]
Hours after Adams missed his call from Trump, his phone rang again, and once again a Florida number blinked onto the screen. This time, the cartoonist knew enough to answer. “No fucking way,” Adams remembered thinking. “There’s no way he’s calling me again. And I answer it, and it’s Trump. And apparently he had heard my situation, and he had lots of questions.” The call ended with Trump telling Adams to just ask if he needed anything, and he would make it happen.
As accessible as Trump is, even some who have his number are reticent about using it—or are at least strategic about it. One of the advisers we talked with told us they always try to find the best moment to call. “If I call him, nine times out of 10, I’ve talked to somebody there and said, ‘Tell me when to call,’ and they’ve said, ‘He just left dinner and just walked into the residence,’” this person told us. “And I know multiple people who do the same thing, who game-plan it out and talk to the people around him and say, ‘Tell me when it’s a good time.’”
The outside ally told us they are careful about how frequently they call Trump. “I rarely call unless I’m asked to call. He’s the president of the United States.” This person added that they’ve witnessed Trump pick up his phone and scroll through the list of chief executives and wealthy supplicants who have called, poking fun at their eagerness. “That’s why I’m really reluctant to call,” the ally explained. “You don’t want to be the guy who’s the butt of the joke, who he’s laughing at: ‘Can you believe this guy is calling?’”
Others give little thought to the timing of their calls. Trump’s phone could be heard ringing during a recent press conference in which he discussed a proposed 50 percent tariff on Apple. The familiar sound of the default “Reflection” ringtone—you know the one, the synthesized waterfall of xylophone tones—was a reminder that the tariffs targeted the company that makes his beloved device.
Before the press entered the Oval Office, the president had placed the phone on the Resolute desk, next to his two secure White House landline phones. “It’s a phone call, do you mind?” he joked when the ringing started, before looking at the screen and telling reporters, “It’s only a congressman.” Seconds later, the phone rang again. “It’s a different congressman,” he joked, as he struggled to silence his portal to the wider world.
Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Mannie Garcia / Bloomberg / Getty; Sipa / AP / Getty; Alex Brandon / AP; Evan Vucci / AP; Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire / AP; Matt Rourke / AP.
2025-06-02 21:26:58
Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET on June 2, 2025
An 88-mile rail line in a remote Utah desert was at the center of the Supreme Court’s bracing decision last Thursday in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. The legal battle over that tiny project has now led to a decision from the Court’s conservative majority that will shrink the role of environmental litigation across the country.
The case can only be described as a walloping loss for environmental groups that depend on litigation to thwart projects and extract concessions. Much less clear, however, is whether the decision is a blow to the environment. There’s much to like in a decision that will reduce the dysfunction arising from the judiciary’s disastrous efforts to police compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. In the courts’ hands, a law that was meant to be a mild corrective has become a major impediment to desperately needed infrastructure development.
But there’s room for concern, too. The Court’s deference to the government in Seven County doesn’t seem to extend to cases where the government seeks to rein in environmental harms. That mismatch suggests that the Court’s approach to NEPA grows out of its skepticism toward environmental regulation generally, and not from an evenhanded legal theory that would apply to all government decisions equally.
When it was signed into law on January 1, 1970, NEPA wasn’t meant to be all that powerful. In the fast-building decades after the Second World War, some federal agencies—especially the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Atomic Energy Commission—refused to consider the environment when they made decisions. That wasn’t their job, they said.
Congress grew tired of hearing that. As the modern environmental movement took shape, NEPA declared a national policy that environmental concerns ought to factor into any big decisions that government agencies made. The task wasn’t supposed to be onerous. Agencies just had to offer a “detailed statement” about the environmental consequences of “major” actions, as well as explore alternatives. The courts weren’t mentioned at all.
But it was the fate of this five-page law to be adopted at the very moment when the courts were transforming the field of law that governs executive-branch agencies. Federal judges, like many Americans, had become disenchanted with a government that rammed highways through urban neighborhoods, sent tens of thousands to die in Vietnam, and allowed smog to choke its cities. Much of the public came to think that it was under the thumb of Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government, as the environmental and legal historian Paul Sabin describes in his book Public Citizens.
For judges hunting for ways to more closely supervise the work of government, and who were taken with the promise of the nascent environmental movement, NEPA supplied a perfect tool. In a seminal 1971 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rebuked federal officials for not taking the environment seriously enough in approving a nuclear plant in Calvert Cliffs, Maryland. “These cases are only the beginning of what promises to become a flood of new litigation—litigation seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment,” the court wrote.
The flood came quickly. Within a couple of years, judges blocked construction of a huge oil pipeline in Alaska; delayed highway construction in Arlington, Virginia; and stopped a new dam in Arkansas. Orders halting projects such as nuclear-power plants and forest-timber sales soon became routine.
[Jerusalem Demsas: The great defenders of the status quo]
Agencies got the message. They hired environmental scientists, wildlife biologists, and hydrologists. They stitched environmental review into their planning, sought more feedback on their projects, and issued longer and more detailed environmental reviews. To a point, this was healthy. NEPA made bureaucracies think about things that they hadn’t thought much about before.
Within just a few years, however, close observers were warning that agencies faced “severe difficulties” in their efforts to satisfy the courts. The chief problem wasn’t that agencies were deliberately shirking their responsibilities under NEPA. It was that there were so many different ways to lose. Maybe the agency thought a decision wasn’t “major” enough to trigger NEPA, but a judge disagreed. Or maybe the agency ignored an alternative that the court thought should have been studied. Or maybe the environmental review was deemed to be too thin. Combine that with crusading judges and litigious environmental groups, and agencies found themselves on their back heels.
The problem has only grown worse over the decades. Because big projects are complicated and delicate, agencies today work extremely hard to hedge against bad outcomes in court. That means they don’t investigate just the reasonable alternatives. They investigate stupid ones, too, in case a judge later says that the agency really ought to have looked into one of them. They’re constantly on the defensive, and they waste loads of time, money, and energy bulletproofing environmental reviews instead of doing the work that is at the core of their mission.
By 2020, the average NEPA environmental-impact statement (EIS) was 661 pages long and took four and a half years to complete. Some take as long as a decade. These “detailed statements” were supposed to help educate the public. They are now so long, turgid, and technical that they’re basically unreadable.
From time to time over the years, the Supreme Court has intervened to push back on maximalist interpretations of NEPA. But not all the lower courts have gotten the message. The Seven County litigation is a case in point. The D.C. Circuit held that the Surface Transportation Board’s EIS—a 3,600-page door stopper—was inadequate. Why?
The 88-mile railroad was meant to connect the rich oil fields in the Uinta Basin to the interstate rail network. Its boosters hoped that a ready connection to Gulf Coast refineries would spur new drilling in the basin. The Surface Transportation Board, which has authority to approve new railroad lines, observed that the additional drilling and refining would have environmental consequences. But the agency didn’t study them fully. It thought its job under NEPA was to evaluate environmental impacts of building the railroad, not activities that the railroad might enable.
Environmental groups sued, as they do over just about any project that will lead to more greenhouse-gas emissions. The D.C. Circuit sided with them, ruling that the agency should have considered the upstream and downstream consequences of the oil drilling that the railroad would lead to. That teed up the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the environmentalists. The justices all agreed, even the liberal ones, that the Surface Transportation Board was not legally allowed to consider environmental harms that might arise from third-party use of the railroad. If the agency couldn’t take those harms into account, what purpose would be served by forcing it to study them?
If that’s all the case said, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But that’s not all it said.
In an opinion for the Court written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, five of the conservative justices chastised judges for going overboard with NEPA. “Some courts have strayed and not applied NEPA with the level of deference demanded by the statutory text and this Court’s cases. Those decisions have instead engaged in overly intrusive (and unpredictable) review in NEPA cases. Those rulings have slowed down or blocked many projects and, in turn, caused litigation-averse agencies to take ever more time and to prepare ever longer EIS for future projects.”
That’s legalese for, “We keep telling you and you keep not listening. Knock it off!”
The watchword for the courts, the justices insisted, was deference. Deference to the government’s choice about how detailed its environmental review should be. Deference on which environmental impacts to study. Deference on which alternatives to investigate. To make sure the lower courts got it, the justices repeated the word a dozen times. “The bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.”
Equally striking was the Court’s description of why deference was so important. “NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement,” the Court wrote, “into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents (who may not always be entirely motivated by concern for the environment) to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects.” It is long past time, the Court insisted, for a course correction.
There are at least two ways to understand the Supreme Court’s decision. The first is optimistic and eco-friendly. The second is somewhat grimmer.
The optimistic take is that the decision reflects a healthy regard for how the world has changed over the past 50 years. Back then, we were building much too recklessly. Today, we aren’t building enough, and overzealous NEPA litigation is a big reason for that. As the Supreme Court explained, the threat of litigation:
has led to more agency analysis of separate projects, more consideration of attenuated effects, more exploration of alternatives to proposed agency action, more speculation and consultation and estimation and litigation. Delay upon delay, so much so that the process sometimes seems to “borde[r] on the Kafkaesque.” Fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line. Those that survive often end up costing much more than is anticipated or necessary, both for the agency preparing the EIS and for the builder of the project. And that in turn means fewer and more expensive railroads, airports, wind turbines, transmission lines, dams, housing developments, highways, bridges, subways, stadiums, arenas, data centers, and the like. And that also means fewer jobs, as new projects become difficult to finance and build in a timely fashion.
Here, the Supreme Court sounds like it’s taking a page from Abundance, the best-selling book by Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. Klein and Thompson also see overzealous legalism, and NEPA in particular, as a root cause of why America has become so bad at building things.
[Jerusalem Demsas: Liberals can’t blame Trump for California]
That inability to build is not just a problem for roads and subways and trains. It’s a problem for the green transition too, which is subject to a disproportionate number of recent lawsuits under NEPA. As the environmental-law professors J. B. Ruhl and James Salzmann have written, building enough solar and wind facilities to drive our carbon emissions to zero will demand “the most ambitious infrastructure project in our nation’s history. To succeed, it must start now, go nationwide, and progress rapidly. Based on past experience with opposition to deploying renewable infrastructure—good luck with that.”
But if courts pull back on NEPA, will agencies become too heedless of the environment? Not as much as one may think. Even under the Supreme Court’s decision, agencies still must consider the immediate environmental consequences of their actions. Ignoring them is still going to be a basis for reversal. Agencies must also comply with all the substantive environmental laws on the books—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund law, and more. All the Seven County case says is that agencies don’t have to go hog wild with their environmental reviews. The added value of that extra year or the additional hundred pages is often very small.
Nor is it true that environmental litigation always advances environmental protection. Many local chapters of the Sierra Club, for example, are quick to ally with NIMBY homeowners to stop renewable projects. And they routinely exploit NEPA to challenge new solar facilities and wind farms. Another favorite target of environmental groups is the Forest Service, which aims to suppress wildfires out West by doing controlled burns and mechanical timber thinning. But the Forest Service’s fuel-reduction efforts keep getting snarled in NEPA litigation—so much so that it has become common for forests to burn down while the Forest Service studies how to protect them.
The optimistic take, then, is that the Supreme Court has cleared away legalistic sludge to needed development, at little or no cost to the environment. The groups may complain bitterly over losing a main source of leverage and fundraising appeals. But let them complain. They do not speak for the trees, much less for the American public.
There’s a less rosy way to tell the story. The Supreme Court’s paean to agency deference is oddly selective. At the end of the last term, for example, the Court invalidated the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to adopt a rule that would have prevented upwind states from polluting the air of downwind states. “The EPA’s sin,” as I explained for this magazine at the time, “was failing to adequately respond to a single oblique comment that it received.”
That’s the opposite of deference. It’s intensive, even hyperactive, scrutiny of the EPA’s decision to protect the environment. Instead of deferring to the agency’s lengthy, technical defense of the rule, the Supreme Court flyspecked it—just as the D.C. Circuit flyspecked the agency decision approving the 88-mile railroad in the Uinta Basin. That’s exactly the kind of “overly intrusive (and unpredictable) review” that the Supreme Court criticized the lower courts for.
It sure looks like the conservative majority is adjusting the intensity of judicial scrutiny to suit its policy preferences. When agencies downplay environmental harms, Seven County says they should get a free pass. When agencies move to protect the environment, the courts will tie them into knots.
[Zoë Schlanger: American environmentalism just got shoved into legal purgatory]
That’s not the way administrative law is supposed to work. If deference is the touchstone in NEPA cases, it ought to be the touchstone across the board. If the Supreme Court means it when it says that “the political process, and not NEPA, provides the appropriate forum in which to air policy disagreements,” that same line of thinking should extend to other government decisions that aren’t about NEPA.
But it doesn’t seem to. That’s why I fear that the Supreme Court in Seven County may not have been motivated by a principled desire to pare back counterproductive judicial scrutiny in order to improve government performance. It may instead reflect a frankly partisan belief that efforts to protect the environment are intrinsically suspect.
Which is why it’s reasonable, even for NEPA skeptics, to have misgivings about Seven County. Judicial review under NEPA really has gone too far, and I am not sad to see it taken down a peg. But environmental protection remains a worthy goal, and the Court’s apparent doubt about its value is disquieting.
This article originally misstated the number of conservative justices who signed the Seven County opinion. Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself.
