2025-10-09 12:21:30
When Donald Trump brokered the Abraham Accords in his first term, he heralded the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states as “the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.” In truth, the Accords were a diplomatic handshake between countries that had never fought a war. They did not resolve the region’s conflicts, and were not the seismic achievement that Trump presented them to be. Last night, however, Trump finally struck his first real blow for Middle East peace—if all goes according to his plan.
“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” the president announced on Truth Social, “This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace.” The declaration capped a dramatic two weeks that included the roll-out of Trump’s own peace plan, presidential strong-arming of the parties, and feverish negotiations in Cairo. It was also careful in how it couched what had been achieved.
Thus far, the parties have only agreed to some form of exchange in which Hamas will release its remaining hostages in return for Palestinian prisoners, including many serving life sentences in Israeli jails for terrorism. Even if this release goes forward in the days ahead, that will only end the Gaza hostage crisis, not the Gaza war. That’s because this first phase of Trump’s peace plan does not resolve any of the underlying issues that continue to drive the conflict. Among other outstanding concerns: Hamas will still be standing, still be armed, and will not have been supplanted by an alternative Palestinian regime. Far-right members of Netanyahu’s government will still seek to vanquish the terror group and potentially resettle parts of Gaza. But Trump is counting on the force of his personality, the exhaustion of the parties, and the momentum created by the initial agreement to ultimately end the war entirely.
Toward that goal, the president is already teasing a visit to Israel, where he would potentially address the Israeli Knesset. By making himself the face of the deal and taking a victory lap to Israel itself, he would essentially be binding Netanyahu’s government to the agreement—lest it risk personally embarrassing the American president by undoing his great accomplishment. Moreover, Netanyahu himself has tied his political fortunes to Trump, campaigning on his close relationship with the president. With elections scheduled for next year, he cannot afford a public rift with Trump, and the president knows this. “He’s got to be fine with it,” he told a reporter on Saturday, referring to Netanyahu. “He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.”
On the Palestinian side, Trump has already used his personal relationships in the region to compel Hamas to move farther than it ever has in past negotiations. The group previously sought to hold on to its hostages for as long as possible, understanding them as its greatest leverage over Israel. But through intense pressure on Hamas patrons Qatar and Turkey—both longtime Trump allies—the president managed to get the terror group to agree to release all their hostages up front. “ALL PARTIES WILL BE TREATED FAIRLY,” he wrote on Truth Social when announcing the new agreement—a not-so-veiled indication to Hamas that he would not permit the Israeli side to resume the war even after it had obtained the hostages.
In that aspiration, Trump has another ally on his side: the Israeli people. Polls have shown for many months that most Israelis—like most Gazans—want to conclude the Gaza conflict. Netanyahu, beholden to a radical right-wing minority on this and other issues, ignored the popular preference until compelled by Trump. But once the hostages are home, and soldiers in Israel’s citizen’s army begin returning to their families, it will be very hard to justify a continuation of hostilities. Many thorny long-term issues will remain—including paths to Hamas disarmament and Palestinian self-government—but the guns will fall silent.
Ending the Gaza war was always going to require the president’s personal investment. Until recently, he seemed disinclined to give it. Trump did not intervene as the first ceasefire he helped broker in January fell apart. But in recent weeks, he seems to have latched onto the issue with renewed vigor—willing to insert himself into the negotiations, bully both Netanyahu and Hamas, and leverage his relationships with regional leaders to finally end the war. If he succeeds, that success will raise another question: How far is he willing to go to achieve his promised peace in the Middle East? The Gaza war is only an acute symptom of the region’s underlying malaise. If Trump has found a formula for imposing his will on the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why stop here?
Contrary to his claims, the president has not yet brought peace to the Middle East. But if his Gaza peace plan succeeds, he might decide he is just getting started.
2025-10-09 08:56:00
If the secret to understanding a strongman is to identify his greatest weakness, one place to start with Donald Trump is his obsession with his own eventual obituaries. Trump knows that they will mention his history-making presidencies, his ostentatious wealth, and his unusual charisma—but he also is aware that when he dies, people will remember his conviction on 34 felony counts, and that there is nothing he can do about it. Even now, White House officials have told me, Trump rages about how his guilty verdict is sure to be mentioned way up high in his obituaries.
Trump’s fixation on all of this leapt to mind today when I heard that he’d called for the arrests of the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago—not just because it explains Trump’s psychology, but also because this obsession is one of the driving motivations of his revenge crusade, which is now escalating dramatically.
It bears pausing on the starkness of these facts: The president of the United States today demanded the jailing of two elected officials who belong to the opposing political party. Trump did not offer evidence that Governor J. B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson had committed a crime, nor did he even suggest what charge either man would face, though the outburst presumably stemmed from their opposition to Trump sending the National Guard to Chicago to protect ICE officers.
[Read: Portland’s ‘war zone’ is like Burning Man for the terminally online]
This, of course, is hardly the first time Trump has urged the incarceration of his political foes. (This is the man who led “Lock her up” chants at his rallies, after all.) But what makes this moment so significant is what happened a short time later, in a courtroom just outside Washington, D.C. There, former FBI Director James Comey was arraigned on charges of making false statements to Congress. Trump’s threats are no longer bluster. The guardrails of his first term are gone. He is instead surrounded by enablers, including a pliant attorney general. The federal government is taking legal action against those whom Trump wants punished. Retribution is here.
White House aides scoffed to reporters in the first months of this administration that the talk of vengeance was an overblown media creation and that Trump was instead focusing on matters such as tariffs and resolving global conflicts. They acknowledged that during a signature campaign speech, Trump had flat-out declared, “I am your retribution,” promising his supporters that he’d strike back at those in power who they believed had oppressed them or curtailed their freedoms. He would simply right some wrongs, his aides claimed, by, say, pardoning the January 6 rioters—and yes, yes, all of them, including those who’d violently attacked police officers. Even as those around him, led by his aide Stephen Miller and others using Project 2025 as a playbook, began to challenge powerful institutions—such as law firms and universities—that they believed had long worked against conservatives, the president’s aides insisted that talk of revenge was just hyperbole.
Yet after the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the revival of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, things changed, one current and two former White House officials, as well as one outside adviser, told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump couldn’t get some die-hard MAGA supporters to stop dwelling on his ties to the disgraced sex offender. The signature Republican legislation proved unpopular. The economy, whipsawed by tariffs, was displaying warning signs. Trump’s poll numbers began to slip, and the GOP was in danger of losing the midterms—which alarmed Trump and fueled some of his most extreme moves. With Republican control of Congress in danger, Trump began focusing more on retaliation.
[Read: ‘I run the country and the world’]
Trump has long ruminated about the criminal and civil charges that were brought against him after his first term in office. He now privately acknowledges that they were a political gift, believing that the charges reeked of government overreach and made him look like a martyr to his supporters, the outside adviser and one former official told me. He has told advisers that, in retrospect, every day he spent at the defense table in a Manhattan courtroom during a trial for falsifying business records was a political advertisement. The case yielded a conviction, but that was the only trial he faced before last year’s presidential election (after his win, he faced no real punishment and was able to make the other cases vanish). But in the moment, he was terrified of being convicted and still seethes at the humiliation he faced.
He has fumed for months to aides and outside allies about the injustices he believes he has faced, but often, his rants—or social-media posts—have not contained explicit instructions, leaving it up to officials to determine how, or whether, to carry out his wishes, one current and one former aide told me. But one Truth Social post late last month was shocking in its directness. In what appeared to have been intended as a private message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump directly called for the prosecution of Comey as well as of Senator Adam Schiff of California and New York Attorney General Letitia James. All three had crossed Trump: Comey had helped steer the initial steps of the Russia investigation; Schiff was among the leaders of Trump’s first impeachment; James was behind a civil case that resulted in a $500 million penalty for the president. Comey was indicted just days after Trump’s message, in a case brought by a replacement federal prosecutor after the original attorney balked and was forced out. Another prosecutor reportedly resigned rather than bring charges against James.
The normal barriers between the White House and the Department of Justice were obliterated. And Trump made his motivation plain, writing in the message to Bondi: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Trump has never much cared for the principles of the criminal-justice system. In the 1980s, he added to his then-growing fame by calling for the execution of the five suspects in the Central Park jogger case before they’d even been convicted. (They were later exonerated.) In his 2016 campaign, he called for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, though she had not been charged with any crime. In his first term, Trump believed that the Department of Justice was there to serve his whims—he famously asked for his own Roy Cohn, the notoriously ruthless New York lawyer—but was stymied at times by his previous attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, and by entrenched department norms enforced by career officials. Trump’s wishes for investigations into Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama were denied.
But those obstacles are gone. Trump has insisted that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden was weaponized against him, claims goaded on by aides such as Miller and Russell Vought, who also champion efforts to expand the president’s power over all facets of the executive branch. And Bondi’s appearance before the Senate oversight committee yesterday was defined by her refusal to answer basic questions about her work—including the Comey indictment—as well as an obsequiousness to Trump that suggested that she was indeed comfortable acting as the president’s personal lawyer.
“The firewall between the political side and the DOJ has completely eroded,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told me in an email. “And there’s the very peculiar parallel that you have a former FBI director coming in to be charged with lying to Congress, yet we have the Attorney General of the United States not being truthful to Congress.”
The administration has creatively used other levers of government to punish its foes; see the way it has wielded the threat of cutting off federal funding to universities or federal business with large law firms, or the way it’s either toyed with or initiated harassment against individuals—stripping security clearances, triggering IRS audits, revoking licenses, pursuing expensive litigation. The pace has picked up since the murder of Charlie Kirk. Officials have used the assassination as a pretext to act upon plans that were already in the works, some written by Miller, to crack down on what they deem are lefty NGOs and other organizations, including those funded by George Soros.
[Read: Fear of losing the midterms is driving Trump’s decisions]
When I asked what charges Trump thought would be appropriate against Pritzker and Johnson, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded in a statement that the men “have blood on their hands,” and that “these failed leaders have stood idly by while innocent Americans fall victim to violent crime time and time again.”
Trump has aimed to expand presidential power and use it to go after his critics in ways that this country has never seen. He stripped away Kamala Harris’s security detail, the Department of Justice is investigating the former CIA director turned Trump critic John Brennan, and the Federal Communications Commission threatened Jimmy Kimmel. In some cases, he wants to inflict on others the charges he himself faced: John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, had his home raided by FBI agents as part of a classified-materials probe, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, has been accused of mortgage fraud (Trump was previously accused of mishandling classified materials and falsifying property records).
Those close to Trump no longer downplay the possibility of the retribution campaign widening further. And the president himself, following Comey’s indictment, indicated that his personal vengeance tour is only getting started.
“They weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history,” Trump said. “What they’ve done is terrible, and so I would, I hope, frankly, I hope there are others. You can’t let this happen to a country.”
2025-10-09 07:30:36
As far as government shutdowns go, this one has so far lacked the round-the-clock chaos of its predecessors. There have been no dramatic late-night clashes on the floors of Congress, no steep stock-market plunges driven by panicked investors, no prime-time presidential addresses from the Oval Office. Even the running clocks on cable-news chyrons have disappeared.
But in the reality show that has replaced a properly functioning system of democratic governance, we are fast approaching the moment when a shutdown stops being a subject of political bluster and starts hurting Americans. And as much as President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to direct the damage from what he derisively calls “the Radical Left Democrat shutdown” toward “Democrat things,” the pain will soon be felt just as acutely in MAGA country as in liberal areas.
Over the next week, a series of wires in the federal bureaucracy and broader U.S. economy will be tripped. If past shutdowns are any guide, those developments will force Congress and the White House—which so far have spent more time trading internet memes than serious proposals for a settlement—to begin seriously negotiating a way to bring this to an end.
It’s not that the government shutdown is going well; it’s just not as bad as it will soon be. The nation’s air-traffic-control system is already buckling because of staffing shortages: Airports across the country, including Chicago, Las Vegas, Newark, and Washington, D.C., are reporting delays. There’s been a “slight uptick” in air-traffic controllers—who must still report to work—calling out sick, Transportation Secretary (and Real World: Boston alum) Sean Duffy said Monday, the same day the air-traffic-control tower at Hollywood Burbank Airport was closed down because of insufficient staffing. Next week, air-traffic controllers and members of the military will miss their first paychecks. With one week left before the extended tax-filing deadline, the IRS this morning furloughed thousands of workers after exhausting prior-year funds. Government programs that have been able to stay afloat using leftover money—including funding that helps provide formula and support for low-income mothers and their babies—are quickly running out of money. President Trump recently suggested that he would move forward with mass layoffs of government workers if there’s no resolution by this weekend—and that a lot of the jobs “will never come back.” (Furloughed workers are already set to miss their first paycheck on Friday.)
Few Americans have a comprehensive understanding of the “gazillion things that the government does that will start to really bite,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told me. Nor do people understand how quickly a shutdown can set off a catastrophic chain reaction. “When things you can’t even imagine start to break, damage starts to occur. And then, at that point, global investors say, ‘Oh, maybe this is something very different than what I’ve seen in the past.’”
Democrats and Republicans in Congress—who are still getting paid—have made little effort to broker an agreement to reopen the government. House lawmakers have largely stayed out of Washington since passing a seven-week funding bill last month. The Senate has repeatedly held failed votes on the House bill, each time falling well short of the 60 votes needed to send it to Trump’s desk. Trump has vacillated between calling the lapse in funding “an unprecedented opportunity” to slash the federal workforce—a threat he has so far not carried out—and, more recently, suggesting that he is willing to cut a deal with Democrats over soon-expiring health-care subsidies at the heart of the stalemate.
[Read: Trump’s grand plan for a government shutdown]
Democratic lawmakers have told me their constituents are pushing them to hold the line, convinced that they must use this rare opportunity to stand up to Trump’s norm-defying presidency and fight to keep health-insurance premiums from soaring next year. Republicans, who have repeatedly said that any negotiations must take place only after Democrats vote to fund the government, appear similarly convinced of the righteousness of their position. A White House official, speaking anonymously to discuss internal strategy, told me the president is willing to have a policy debate with Democrats, but only after the government is open—which, as anyone who has read The Art of the Deal could tell you, is not typically how negotiating works.
All of this underscores just how bizarre the current shutdown is. In 2013, when the government closed for 16 days, lawmakers believed that voters would punish those seen as complicit in it. Republicans back then eventually caved when it became clear that the public did not support either their tactics (threatening a shutdown) or their mission (repealing the Affordable Care Act). “Obviously, it’s a very different Washington right now,” Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who worked in House leadership at the time, told me. Today, nobody fears political fallout, he said.
But today, as millions of Americans face the impending squeeze of the shutdown, that calculation may change. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, acknowledged yesterday that if Congress does not pass a bill to fund the government by Monday, there will not be enough time to process October 15 paychecks for active military troops. But the House, which has not held a vote since September 19, is not scheduled to return until Monday. Johnson also noted that the shutdown is already “resulting in crippling economic losses,” he told reporters yesterday, citing a White House report that found a $15 billion decline in gross domestic product for each week the government remains closed.
The federal food-aid program, known as WIC, entered the government shutdown with only enough funding to last for the first seven to 10 days, Georgia Machell, the president and CEO of the National WIC Association, told me. Anything beyond that point “is really going to start putting babies and young children and pregnant women at risk,” she said, meaning that sometime this weekend, about 6 million people could start losing benefits. WIC programs on military bases have already closed down, Machell told me. Yesterday, the White House announced that Trump would be repurposing dollars from tariff revenue to extend WIC funding for the foreseeable future.
The move indicates that Trump is aware of the fact that, as president, he will bear much of the responsibility for how the shutdown hurts Americans, even as his administration puts banners on government websites blaming the Democrats for the crisis. When I reached out to the White House to ask about all of this, the spokesperson Abigail Jackson sent me a statement that emphasized “Democrats’ radical demands.”
Meanwhile, additional knock-on effects of the shutdown will become highly visible in the coming days. The Smithsonian Institution was able to remain open for the first week of the shutdown, using funding from prior years, but is now scheduled to close its museums, its research centers, and the National Zoo on Sunday. Most IRS “operations are closed,” the agency posted on its website. The Treasury Department provided furloughed workers with a form letter to give to their creditors, suggesting that financial institutions offer “workout arrangements” for borrowers who might have trouble paying their bills. “At present, we cannot predict when pay may resume for furloughed employees,” the letter said.
The private sector has good reason to be spooked, too. In a letter to congressional leaders last month, the U.S. Travel Association said the lapse in government funding could cost the economy $1 billion each week.
Some Republicans have blanched at the amount of waste involved in a government shutdown. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 750,000 federal workers had been furloughed, and noted that a 2019 law ensured that they will receive back pay once the government reopens. The cost of paying employees who are not working amounts to about $400 million a day. The Office of Management and Budget this week floated the idea of not restoring pay for furloughed workers, Axios reported Tuesday, though congressional leaders have largely dismissed the White House’s attempts at a legal justification for such a move. “There’s no better symbol of Washington’s wasteful spending than paying non-essential bureaucrats $400 million a day not to work,” Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, wrote in an October 3 letter to Russell Vought, the OMB director and Project 2025 enforcer.
Private companies may soon pressure Congress to act. In 2013, the last time the Pentagon was involved in a shutdown, it took less than a week for Lockheed Martin to announce that it was furloughing 3,000 workers, stating that “the number of employees affected is expected to increase weekly in the event of a prolonged shutdown.” This time around, the company has been less clear about its intentions, though a spokesperson did not rule out the potential for furloughs when I asked if any were being planned. “We are working with our U.S. government customers to assess the impact on our employees, programs, suppliers, and business, while supporting essential, mission-critical programs and mitigating the impact to our operations,” the spokesperson Cailin Schmeer told me in an email.
More than 40,000 private-sector employees could be put out of work if the shutdown lasts for a month, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a report released last week. Although many economists say that the United States will rebound from any hits to its gross domestic product once the government reopens, some private businesses will likely “never recover all of the income they lost,” Phillip L. Swagel, the Congressional Budget Office director, wrote last week in a letter to Ernst.
Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill in Washington is one such company. Speaking from a mostly empty restaurant at lunchtime earlier this week, owner Gum Tong told me that business has fallen about 80 percent since the shutdown began. She has tried to avoid laying off employees, many of whom have been with the restaurant for years. “Our bills don’t stop when the government stops working,” she told me. “I hope this shutdown doesn’t last long. Hopefully they can let everybody go back to work, and get on with their own life soon.”
2025-10-09 06:43:00
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The winter of early 1981 was a simpler time, a gentler time. Like so many college students, I was watching Saturday Night Live in the living room of my small dorm when the SNL cast member Charles Rocket dropped an f-bomb on live television. I looked around at my fellow students. Did we just hear that? The show was already struggling with ratings, and within a few weeks, Rocket and the producer—and eventually, most of the cast—were fired.
Oh, to be so young again, and so easily shocked at someone dropping the Mother of All Obscenities on live television.
Actually, the Mother of All Obscenities might be the one that includes mother, and if you haven’t heard it lately, former Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris would be happy to refresh your memory. Addressing a gathering in Los Angeles a few days ago, Harris delivered her verdict on the current Trump administration: “These motherfuckers are crazy.”
Harris might have gone for the thermonuclear option, but plenty of other politicians are rooting around in the verbal dumpster. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, recently posted a video about the government shutdown in which he tried to sound like Robert De Niro, vowing that the Democratic position on cutting health-care funding was “No. Fucking. Way.” (Sorry, senator. You’ve got the New York accent, but you’re no Bobby D.) And Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on Monday that she’s changing her mind on health care because she wasn’t in Congress “when all this Obamacare, ‘Affordable Care Act’ bullshit started.”
Elected officials cursing is a spreading epidemic, and it has to stop. I say this as someone who loves to swear. I was raised by a father who claimed to be offended by profanity, but my dad was just like the Old Man in A Christmas Story: When he was angry—especially at inanimate objects—he would invent swears like a German lexicographer trying to come up with new compound nouns.
I went off to college and graduate school and became a man of letters: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. But I never let go of other letters that I love, especially F and all of the delightful things that could be appended to it. I find hauling off with various Anglo-Saxonisms cathartic on those occasions when I bang my elbow on the edge of my chair or have to reboot a balky router for the 19th time. I know it’s crude, but I console myself with the conclusions of a 2015 study that suggested that swearing may actually be a sign of intelligence. People who are “good at language,” Timothy Jay, one of the study’s authors, said to CNN, “are good at generating a swearing vocabulary.” You bet your ass we are.
Sorry, sorry. Habit.
But even though swearing has its honored place in my life, I don’t want to hear it from my elected officials. One of the delights of swearing is that it’s unusual, a release from normal decorum that comes only from extraordinary circumstances. (For a great example of how unexpected cursing can be funny and perfectly timed, watch this clip from the 1987 film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which has almost no profanity until Steve Martin’s character is finally pushed over the brink by a rental company that rented him a nonexistent car.)
If you swear all the time or in every circumstance, however, it’s not swearing—it’s just the way you talk. Russians, in my experience, are the leaders in casual cursing, and after a while, you don’t hear it anymore; you just think that obscene words are regular particles of Russian speech. Frequent cursing can become tiring instead of funny. As the swearing-study author Jay notes, the strategic use of obscenity “is a social cognitive skill like picking the right clothes for the right occasion. That’s a pretty sophisticated social tool.”
If only American politicians could be that sophisticated. Instead, politics in the United States is plagued by middle-aged people swearing just to seem cool.
They are not cool.
The Democrats have some true public-swearing champs, but President Donald Trump and the wannabe tough guys who surround him are no slouches in the profanity competition. Presidents historically have shown more decorum than the common folk in Congress—especially that rabble in the House, of course—but not Trump. He loves the word bullshit, which he has used while speaking publicly in the White House, and he’s not above tippling the harder stuff: Iran and Israel, he said to a press spray some months ago, have been fighting so long that “they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
The president is the most effortlessly vulgar of the bunch when he swears, because when he talks about almost anything, he already sounds like a low-level Mafia guy complaining about what he has to kick upstairs to the bosses. Yesterday, when asked about who would be given back pay after the government shutdown ends, he said that “for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
That’s a statement that actually would have sounded even more naturally mookish if it had some profanity in it.
Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of Facial Grooming Pete Hegseth have also both apparently decided that public cursing is edgy. “We’re done with that shit,” Hegseth told a conference of generals and admirals last week, with “that shit” meaning all that “woke” stuff I don’t like. I’ve worked with a lot of senior officers, and I know the military is a swearing culture, but men and women with stars on their shoulders have all mastered some basic rules of public deportment, and Hegseth’s naughtiness landed in front of that audience with a quiet thud.
Vance, whose White House portfolio now seems to consist of trolling on social media, is perhaps the most artificial and wince-inducing swearer in the administration. When an interlocutor on X suggested last month that blowing up speedboats on the high seas is a war crime, Vance summoned his years of legal training at Yale and responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
Did you get a little shiver from the icy manliness of that statement? Vance also called the podcaster Jon Favreau a “dipshit” online, which produces somewhat less of a frisson. (California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has taken to trolling the administration, later used the same word to refer to Vance.)
Here, I must admit that I have been part of the problem. In 2021, in this magazine, I called Vance an “asshole.” But I had a serious discussion with my editors about using that one word, just once. I haven’t done it since, and with the exception of a few podcasts here and there, I try not to swear in public.
I accept that American culture has become, shall we say, more tolerant. We’ve come a long way since Norman Mailer’s publisher made the silly demand that he replace the classic f-bomb with “fug” in his 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead, which supposedly prompted the actor Tallulah Bankhead to say, upon meeting Mailer, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” I don’t really wish for a return to the days when network censors deliberated over the acceptability of hell and damn on TV shows. (Watch the stilted result here of when actors on House, M.D. had to call House an “ass” a million times, when they clearly meant to add a second syllable.) The advent of cable has freed a lot of entertainment from these artificial constraints.
Politics, however, is not entertainment. Some voters may want political life to sound like a reality show, but politicians shouldn’t give them one. I expect politicians to model the behavior they’d like to see in the electorate instead of attempting to feign authenticity by being crude. And yes, I still think politics should be a noble calling, and I would like political leaders to set standards for our kids—and everyone else—in public. I know this is a fantasy. For more than 30 years, from the time of the Clintons to the Trumps, our political culture has become more vulgarized, with no one more lacking in taste and class than our current president. But everyone else in public life can do better, instead of acting like a bunch of foul-mouthed sh—
Well, you know.
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The Myth of Mad King George
By Rick Atkinson
As the British monarch during the American Revolution, [King George III] has, for two and a half centuries, symbolized haughty intransigence and been portrayed as a reactionary dolt incapable of grasping the fervor for liberty that animated his American subjects. On Broadway, he minces through Hamilton as a foppish, sinister clown, singing to the estranged rebels, “You’ll be back” and adding, “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”
In truth, the public opening by the British Crown of George III’s papers in the past decade reveals him to be a far more complex, accomplished, and even estimable figure than the prevailing caricature.
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2025-10-09 04:10:00
Updated with new questions at 4:10 p.m. ET on October 8, 2025.
Welcome back for another week of The Atlantic’s un-trivial trivia, drawn from recently published stories. Without a trifle in the bunch, maybe what we’re really dealing with here is—hmm—“significa”? “Consequentia”?
Whatever butchered bit of Latin you prefer, read on for today’s questions. (Last week’s questions can be found here.)
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From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Tom Nichols:
And by the way, did you know that despite what ABBA sings, Napoleon actually delayed his official surrender for another month after Waterloo? Perhaps if it had been recording today, the Swedish supergroup would have hewn closer to the facts; Napoleon’s futile delay is a pretty perfect metaphor for one of modern love’s most ubiquitous problems: the dead-end situationship.
Until tomorrow!
Answers:
How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, read below for previous ones, or click here for last week’s. And if you think up a great question after reading an Atlantic story—or simply want to share a stimulating fact—send it my way at [email protected].
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Tom Nichols:
And by the way, did you know that Stockholm syndrome was originally known within Sweden as Norrmalmstorgssyndromet? That’s for Norrmalmstorg square, which was the site of the bank where in 1973 four employees who ended up being unusually amiable about the situation were taken hostage.
I love the specificity—an admirable attempt to keep the rest of Stockholm out of the psychodrama. Perhaps Paris syndrome, the underwhelming sensation that many tourists feel upon a first visit, paints with too broad a brush; “overcrowded–Mona Lisa-room syndrome” should do the trick.
Answers:
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Will Gottsegen:
And by the way, did you know that a single town on an island in Sweden gives its name to four elements of the periodic table? From Ytterby in the Stockholm archipelago come yttrium, terbium, erbium, and ytterbium. (Holmium, scandium, thulium, tantalum, and gadolinium were also discovered there, but to be fair, you can only do so much with Y’s, T’s, and a B.)
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2025-10-09 02:30:00
Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, has pledged to uphold the network’s traditional ideals of objectivity and rigor. Perhaps she will. Yet the evidence suggests a more discouraging future for one of the great pillars of American broadcast journalism.
Weiss casts herself as an independent thinker. She has described herself at various times as a left-leaning centrist, a moderate liberal, “politically homeless,” a “radical centrist,” and a conservative. She has defined her ideology as a visceral hatred of bullies. A hatred of bullying may have plausibly explained her decision in 2020 to quit the New York Times opinion section, where her criticism of left-wing pieties made her deeply unpopular and the subject of relentless attacks from colleagues. Perhaps it also propelled her decision to co-found The Free Press, a scrappy media company, the following year.
Unlike Weiss’s legion of enemies, I believe that The Free Press filled an important niche. When Weiss left the Times, many established media outlets were at least contemplating abandoning their traditional standards of objectivity in favor of a crusading progressive spirit. Such ideological hegemony inspired a flourishing of independent journalism from the center and center-left on Substack (see Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and others) and in podcasts (Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, and others). The Free Press joined this rebellion from a more conservative perspective, and regularly featured important stories that discomfited the left and that the mainstream media often ignored or dismissed.
[Caitlin Flanagan: Don’t bet against Bari Weiss]
The trouble is that the cultural conditions under which Weiss founded her publication have changed radically. The era of progressive institutions firing or silencing staffers who step out of line peaked five years ago and is now over. What looms over American culture at the moment is an authoritarian presidency that threatens to crush the very values of free speech and open discourse that Weiss pledged to uphold. While Yglesias, Sullivan, and others have passionately condemned Donald Trump’s illiberalism, Weiss’s Free Press continues to cover America as if it’s still the summer of 2020. Instead of continuing its campaign against bullies, The Free Press these days seems to be contorting itself to defend the bullies of the moment as misunderstood people who sometimes act out, but just because they, too, have been mistreated.
The Free Press has devoted only glancing attention to the administration’s Peronist economic ambitions, its historic self-dealing, its devastation of scientific research, and its legislative agenda that has engineered the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history. This odd silence may simply reflect Weiss’s own coverage priorities, which run toward foreign policy, especially Israel, and domestic culture wars. Yet this neglect deflects attention from issues that threaten to split Trump’s coalition, and lavishes it on the social issues where Trump has expanded his following.
Even within Weiss’s free-speech wheelhouse, The Free Press has failed to convey the administration’s deep-rooted authoritarianism. This is not to say that The Free Press has completely ignored Trump’s clampdown on civil liberties and the media. When ABC bowed to pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and took Jimmy Kimmel off the air last month, an editorial declared that this “should alarm anyone who cares about free speech.” But the paper has generally applied a different standard to such incidents than it has to violations of free speech from the left. Often, it frames Trump’s most thuggish moves as thorny questions. After Trump ordered up charges on James Comey, ousted the prosecutor who’d told him there was no case, and then appointed an unqualified lackey to do his bidding, Jed Rubenfeld, a constitutional-law professor at Yale, sagely took to The Free Press to muse, “This is a very difficult problem—morally, legally, and politically.”
One go-to Free Press move is to cover Trump’s most indefensible actions by holding a debate. After Republicans used Charlie Kirk’s murder to set off a national wave of cancellations, firing once-anonymous workers for saying anything negative about Kirk’s legacy, The Free Press treated its audience to a symposium weighing the pros and cons. Arguing for the pro side were the Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson (“Fire Them All”) and Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute, who characterized this wave of social-media mobbings and hasty terminations as “a healthy culture asserting moral clarity, not canceling dissenters and freethinkers.”
When universities, newspapers, or other institutions throw somebody out for violating progressive orthodoxy, nobody at The Free Press endorses this as an assertion of moral clarity. Instead, leftists who engage in illiberalism are following the dictates of their ideological fanaticism. A 2023 article blamed the rise of university cancel culture on the Marxist philosophizing of Herbert Marcuse, whose scholarship allowed leftists to “justify using any tools necessary to shut down their opponents and serve their political ends.” Another in 2024 described “anti-Israel activism” among students as merely the latest radical fad in education: “Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology.”
But when Trump cracks down on dissent and liberates violent supporters, he’s just being a bad boy again. After Trump pardoned every January 6 insurrectionist, The Free Press scolded, “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally, as he did not measure up on that day four years ago.” Trump can do something bad, but he cannot be something bad.
Weiss’s announcement of her new role at CBS was revealing. “We now face a different form of illiberalism emanating from our fringes,” she wrote. “On the one hand, an America-loathing far left. On the other, a history-erasing far right. These extremes do not represent the majority of the country, but they have increasing power in our politics, our culture, and our media ecosystem.”
The illiberal tendencies on the far left and right that trouble Weiss apparently lurk well beyond the corridors of power. The president of the United States may throw people in foreign prisons without due process and declare that laws do not constrain him, but Weiss seems more concerned with what’s “emanating from our fringes” than she does with what’s coming down from the White House.
[Read: The MAGA media takeover]
Ominous hints of what this means for CBS can be found in Trump’s own social-media feed. After years of tweets denigrating traditional broadcast networks, the president began to conspicuously omit CBS from his regular stream of agitprop over the summer. “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES,” he wrote in August.
The timing is no coincidence, given the concessions the president exacted in exchange for approving the merger between Paramount (which owns CBS) and Skydance in July. Paramount Skydance’s prompt acquisition of the Trump-friendly Free Press and appointment of Weiss as the head of CBS News has every appearance of being a sop to the president and his politicized FCC. Trump may be misreading or overinterpreting the signals, but his social-media posts seem to indicate that he believes that CBS is now in his pocket.
Weiss is an intelligent and talented editor. If the maneuvering that led to her installation atop CBS News fails to fulfill Trump’s expectations of deferential coverage, it will not be the first time his schemes went awry. But on the surface, this looks like a trade of journalistic integrity for regulatory favors. It is now up to Weiss to prove that her defense of liberal values is not so easily bargained away.
