2025-05-08 06:05:00
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Maxwell Cohen knew the tariffs were coming. President Donald Trump had openly threatened a trade war on the campaign trail, and Cohen, an entrepreneur, heeded his words. His company, Peelaways, sells disposable and waterproof fitted bed sheets made in China that are popular with at-home and family caregivers. There’s only so much price elasticity for disposable goods, so he prepared to absorb what he estimated would be roughly 15 to 30 percent tariffs, setting aside money to bring in more inventory before prices skyrocketed. It would hurt, but it would be doable. He thought he had the numbers mostly worked out. But when man plans, Trump laughs.
The latest figure for the administration’s tariffs on China sits at 145 percent. Prices are expected to keep climbing for some goods; last week, Trump closed the de minimis loophole for China and Hong Kong, which had exempted them from paying tariffs on shipments of goods worth $800 or less, and wide-ranging tariffs are still set to go into effect for many countries. For any business that can’t swallow an unanticipated and possibly huge price increase on imports, the first step is deciding if it will pass the cost to the consumer. If the answer is yes—as it often is—the next decision is how, or whether, to let the customers know.
Tariff transparency recently made headlines on the domestic front of Trump’s trade war. After Punchbowl News reported that Amazon was considering adding a line showing the cost of tariffs for each product on its site, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt held a public shaming of the company from her briefing-room podium, calling the move “a hostile and political act.” CNN reported that a “pissed” Trump called Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder. The company’s representatives soon denied ever approving the idea, adding that it was never a consideration for Amazon’s main site but rather for its spin-off store, Haul.
Although big, name-brand American companies are most likely to incur the administration’s wrath over displaying tariff surcharges, other businesses have tough choices to make on how to go about raising prices. The result is a choose-your-own-adventure exercise in managing public perception. Screenshots of the checkout page of the online clothing company Triangl went viral for the astronomical “duties” surcharge. Temu, a Chinese e-commerce giant, added import charges to certain products on its site. Luxury brands aren’t immune, either: Hermès announced price increases for American buyers to offset the tariffs, and Prada plans to raise prices by an undetermined amount later in the summer. Meanwhile, some business leaders aren’t mincing words. Jolie Skin Co, an American shower-filter brand, told The Information that a “Trump liberation tariff” line will be added to checkout pages. “Technically WE are not raising our prices,” the company’s CEO and founder, Ryan Babenzien, wrote on LinkedIn. “We think transparency is the way to go here and I am giving Trump full credit for his decision.”
Transparency is a high-wire act. Tariffs is such a politically loaded word that some companies hesitate to invoke it, out of fear of alienating their customer base—or inciting the administration’s ire. But pointing a finger at tariffs can also help shift blame. Increasing prices without any clear explanation risks appearing opportunistic, Mike Michalowicz, a small-business expert, told me. All it takes is for some businesses to get caught profiteering before “the customer becomes suspect of not just them but of everybody.”
The gaming industry is a prime example. Nintendo has a large manufacturing presence in China, and last month, it announced that the Switch 2 console would launch at the original price, but some of the accessories will cost more than previously expected. The company’s representatives attributed the update to “changes in market conditions.” If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s almost word for word the explanation Microsoft offered after announcing Xbox price hikes last week, which will run as high as $100 more for some models in America. The absence of the T-word is a glaring omission. Such muddy messaging may help insulate companies from the administration’s spite, but it invites backlash from customers who are quick to blame the good old-fashioned motive of corporate greed.
If some companies fear appearing opportunistic, others are trying to cash in while they still can. Marketing 101 teaches you to distinguish your company from your competitors, and Business 101 says to move inventory before the economy goes kaput. What better way to do both than to slash prices when everybody else is raising them? “Pre-tariff” sales are cropping up at furniture companies, fashion retailers, and carmakers. Their underlying message: Get it before you can’t afford it.
Ford’s latest campaign, “From America. For America,” is trying to strike an optimistic tone. As Audi pauses car imports to the United States, and automakers hem and haw over price changes, Ford has been running an ad since last month touting employee-priced vehicles and their company’s deep roots in American industry. It’s a strategic ploy—already, Ford has reported double-digit sales increases (although an analysis from CarEdge found that some of Ford’s more popular vehicles had better deals in March, before employee pricing went into effect). Other carmakers that manufacture models in America, including Mercedes and BMW, are promising to temporarily eat the cost of tariffs for some vehicles to keep prices from rising. But an expiration date for this generosity could be imminent: Last week, Ford’s CEO went on CNN and couldn’t say if prices would increase in the summertime.
With so much left uncertain in Trump’s trade war, some small businesses are down to the wire. Many of them don’t have the cash to stockpile inventory or the storage space to keep it. The owners of the American vegan-cheese company Rebel Cheese have roughly a month to decide what to do. Much of their cheese relies on fair-trade cashews imported from Vietnam, which faces the threat of 46 percent tariffs, and their inventory is dwindling. The company already went through a round of layoffs a few weeks ago; at this point, adding at least a 10 percent price increase seems inevitable, Fred Zwar, one of the co-founders, told me. They are considering breaking down the numbers for customers when they announce the change, but the sharp fluctuations of Trump’s tariffs make the timing tricky: “We can’t do a price raise today and then say, Hey, they raised it another 90 percent. We need to do another price raise tomorrow,” Zwar said.
All of this feels like déjà vu for Peelaways. Cohen dealt with Trump’s seesawing tariffs during his first term, which also coincided with COVID-19’s economic downturn. He laid off all six of his workers and restructured his business in order to stay afloat, leaving him with two C-suite executives overseas. This time around, he’s running a leaner operation and slowly raising prices $1 a week until he hits a 15 percent increase. His plan is to test different newsletters to measure his customer base’s feedback: One will include the standard fare (caregiver tips, customer reviews), and the other will acknowledge the tariffs’ effects on pricing. But even having gone through this before, Cohen can’t be sure he’ll make it out again. “We’re all just holding our breath,” he said, waiting for “whatever the next tweet brings.”
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The Real Motive Behind the Real ID–Deadline Charade
By Juliette Kayyem
Today’s deadline was largely artificial: According to the fine print of the regulations governing Real ID’s implementation, Homeland Security has until the end of 2027 to phase in the program in full. So the administration took today’s deadline to assure Americans that they could still fly, while it focused on another priority: immigration enforcement, rather than safety provision.
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Read. A book by Pat Buchanan from 2011 shows how the woke right predates the woke left, Jonathan Chait writes.
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2025-05-08 04:40:32
This article includes spoilers for the film Warfare.
Since 2012, Ray Mendoza has been building a hefty Hollywood résumé: performing stunts, choreographing gunfights, and teaching movie stars how to act like soldiers in films such as Act of Valor and Lone Survivor. He also helped design the battle sequences in last year’s Civil War, the writer-director Alex Garland’s speculative thriller imagining America as an endless combat zone.
These projects have been a particularly good fit for him. Mendoza is a former Navy SEAL; two decades ago, during the Iraq War, he was part of a platoon scouting a residential area in Ramadi. One day in November 2006, al-Qaeda forces injured two of his teammates and then exploded an IED while American soldiers attempted to extract the pair. Trapped in a single building, the group waited for a new convoy of rescue tanks that wouldn’t arrive for hours.
The events are depicted in the film Warfare, now streaming, which Mendoza wrote and directed with Garland. Over the course of a brisk 95 minutes, the viewer watches as the platoon goes from carrying out a typical surveillance exercise to trying to evacuate without harming anyone else. (The skirmish was part of the Battle of Ramadi, an eight-month conflict that left more than 1,000 soldiers, insurgents, and civilians dead.) Yet, for all the combat Warfare depicts, the film doesn’t resemble most military movies. Members of the platoon—played by an ensemble of rising stars, including Will Poulter, Charles Melton, and Reservation Dogs’ D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza—exchange little dialogue, rarely trading first names let alone backstories. Up until the al-Qaeda forces discover their hideout, the action is contained to mundane activities: confirming operations, tracking other platoons’ movements. There are no extraneous set pieces to keep the audience’s attention, no rousing speeches from world leaders, no context provided about why Ramadi was important to American interests during the Iraq War.
The result is a war movie that’s mostly a war movie in name only—which is how Mendoza told me he wanted it. In real life, one of the wounded SEALs, Elliott Miller (played by Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis), never recovered his memory after getting caught in the IED blast. Miller’s inability to recall the day’s events inspired Mendoza to reconstruct them meticulously. When Mendoza and Garland began developing Warfare, they interviewed as many members of the platoon as they could, corroborating details until they had a version of the experience that they hoped would feel authentic to the people involved. The film makes clear that, to the co-directors, war is a hell made of never-ending protocols, of compartmentalized emotions, of intense bonds built among people taught to move as one indistinguishable unit. As Mendoza put it to me, “I just wanted to do an accurate representation of what combat was.” And, he added, “I wanted to re-create it because my friend doesn’t remember it.”
After the IED explodes, Elliott isn’t the only one horrifically injured. Sam (played by Joseph Quinn) wakes to find himself on fire, his legs mangled. For what feels like hours on end to the viewer, Sam howls in pain as his teammates drag him to safety. Warfare is largely devoid of the hallmarks of a Hollywood film—there’s no musical score, for instance—and Sam’s cries highlight the film’s naturalism; they are screams that the movie suggests were as nerve-shredding for Sam’s teammates to hear in real life as they are for audience members to hear at home.
But Joe Hildebrand, the SEAL on whom Sam is based, told me that he was unaffected by Quinn’s performance when he watched it during a visit to the set. “Everybody kept asking me, ‘You okay?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m fine.’ I know the outcome. I know how it’s gonna turn out.”
Hildebrand found the set itself, which was built on a former World War II airfield turned film studio outside London, more visceral. Warfare’s crew had meticulously reconstructed the house in which the SEALs hid; looking around, Hildebrand explained, brought back “little memories”—a conversation he had here, the way a teammate stood there. Together with the real Elliott, who had also stopped by the set, Hildebrand described experiencing a surprising mix of emotions as they exited the house. “The feeling of going out that gate again, into the street—the last time we did, it did not turn out well at all,” he said. “It was an odd feeling, but it was a glorious feeling at the same time, because you knew nothing was going to happen on the other side.”
[Read: A film that throws out the war-movie playbook]
As such, despite its intensity, Warfare offers some semblance of satisfaction—and not just for the SEALs whose memories have been rendered on-screen. Many movies, Mendoza said, have contributed to perpetuating distressing stereotypes about veterans—that they’re all suffering from PTSD, too tortured and traumatized to function. He wanted Warfare to push back against generalizations by keeping the audience at an emotional remove. The movie’s portrayal of the front lines stays focused on the action. “Is it disturbing? Yeah,” Mendoza told me of the film’s observational nature. “But it’s truthful.”
For Hildebrand, being able to revisit the incident and talk with Mendoza about it was therapeutic. After everyone returned home, he told me, their platoon “kind of just coexisted. Everybody was still friends, but we didn’t have parties and get-togethers and even just time to sit down and talk and get those stories out.” Hildebrand said that Warfare enabled him to corroborate his memories with the other men who were there. (He made it clear that he couldn’t speak for everyone; some of the SEALs couldn’t be reached, and the names of 14 of the 20 men involved have been changed in the film to protect their identity.) For Mendoza, the process of talking about the incident with other members of the platoon, and with Garland, meant having someone “explaining it back to you probably even in a better way than you described it to them in the first place. And then you feel heard, you feel understood. You’re like, Okay, finally I think I’m able to let this go.”
Still, Mendoza said, “Just because the movie’s done doesn’t mean we’re healed.” Every blunder seems to have lingered in their minds: In one scene, Lieutenant Macdonald (Michael Gandolfini) accidentally injects morphine into his own hand while trying to ease Elliott’s pain. In another, Erik (Poulter), a captain who had largely ensured that everyone remained calm, suddenly chokes while instructing the platoon on what to do. Some men even kick Sam’s legs as they pass by him, a misguided display of bravado that fails to raise spirits and only injures him further.
[Read: A civil-war movie with no one worth cheering]
Warfare opens with a scene set the night before the incident; in it, the platoon members hype themselves up by watching the notoriously racy music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me,” swaying together as one big, sweaty, testosterone-fueled mass. The movie ends on a shot of the silent Ramadi street after the gunfire has faded. In between, the film, like Civil War, never delves into the politics of the conflict; it neither commends nor condemns the fighting. It just leaves the audience with the sense that the hours the group spent trapped irrevocably changed them.
For Mendoza, the explosion that incapacitated his teammates “rewired” his brain; he told me he’s been dreaming about what happened for 20 years. Some of his dreams echo reality. Others, including one in which Elliott gets back up after the explosion and is completely unharmed, are so fantastical and disorienting that Mendoza wishes he won’t ever wake up. Working on the film has helped him dissipate some of that confusion. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real sometimes,” he said. But making Warfare “helped organize those memories and cancel out which ones weren’t real,” he told me. “It just kind of keeps these memories in line.”
2025-05-08 04:20:32
Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on May 7, 2025
When judges act as partisan hacks, it is important to condemn their conduct. Last month, four Republican justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court blessed the antidemocratic attempt by the fellow Republican judge Jefferson Griffin to subvert the outcome of the November 2024 election for a seat on that same court by throwing out ballots of some North Carolina voters who had followed all the rules. But just as important is lauding the Republican judges who stand up against election subversion, including the Trump-appointed federal district-court judge Richard E. Myers, who ruled earlier this week that Griffin’s gambit violated the U.S. Constitution. Today, just two days after that decision, Griffin conceded defeat to Justice Allison Riggs. If the United States is going to resist attacks on free and fair elections, principled judges on the right remain indispensable.
Conservative and liberal judges regularly divide on many issues related to elections and democracy, such as the constitutionality of various provisions of the Voting Rights Act, partisan gerrymandering, and the permissibility of regulating campaign money. As I recently explained in The Yale Law Journal, there is no realistic hope that federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, now dominated by Republican appointees, are going to expand voting rights. But even so, a mostly bipartisan judicial consensus has long existed to protect the basic elements of free and fair elections: that elections should be conducted in accordance with the rules set forth before the election, that all eligible voters should be able to cast a vote that will be fairly counted, and that the winners of elections will be able to take office.
Americans saw this consensus on display in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when Donald Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Trump based upon factually unsupported claims of election irregularities and dubious legal theories. In a decision that rejected Trump’s legal efforts in Pennsylvania, the prominent conservative (and Trump-appointed) federal appeals-court judge Stephanos Bibas wrote: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
[From the October 2022 issue: John Roberts’s long game]
A similar thing happened in Wisconsin, where the conservative state-supreme-court Justice Brian Hagedorn joined with his liberal colleagues to reject a Trump claim to throw out ballots that voters had cast in that state using drop boxes during the pandemic, something that was allowed by the rules as set by election officials before voting began. If Trump had a problem with using drop boxes, Justice Hagedorn reasoned, Trump had to challenge this before the election rather than sit tight until after the election with the risk of disenfranchising voters.
Judge Myers’s ruling this week in the North Carolina case follows in this tradition of conservative judges standing up for the rule of law and against election subversion. As Mark Joseph Stern notes at Slate, “Myers is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative—not just a Federalist Society stalwart and Trump appointee, but also a longtime member of gun clubs, including the NRA, and the evangelical Christian Legal Society.”
Yet Judge Myers did not side with Griffin, a fellow conservative, in his attempt to overturn the election results. Griffin argued for throwing out ballots from certain Democratic-leaning counties for military and overseas voters who did not provide photo identification while voting, something that state law did not require. He tried to get some other ballots thrown out as well, all from voters who followed the rules as set forth and implemented by state election officials for years. The state court of appeals had allowed Griffin to challenge up to 60,000 ballots, and the North Carolina Supreme Court narrowed that universe but still allowed some of Griffin’s challenges to go forward. This ruling came over the dissent of two state justices, including Republican Justice Richard Dietz, who said the ruling had disproved his belief that “our state courts surely would embrace the universally accepted principle that courts cannot change election outcomes by retroactively rewriting the law.”
When the case landed in federal court, Judge Myers at first said that the state could start the process of figuring out which ballots to throw out but not yet certify the winner of the election. At the time, I criticized that order because it could have sown confusion about who really won the election, and a Fourth Circuit panel including a leading conservative judge Paul Niemeyer on that court agreed, reversing Myers on that point late last month.
When he later turned to the merits this week, Judge Myers held that the remedy sought by Griffin and blessed by the state courts violated both the due-process rights of voters, by changing the rules retroactively, and equal-protection rights, by treating similarly situated voters differently. As Judge Myers wrote: “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done.” He added, quoting some earlier cases, that this case “concerns an attempt to change the rules of the game after it had been played. The court cannot countenance that strategy, which implicates the very integrity of the election and offends the law’s basic interest in finality. Permitting parties to upend the set rule of an election after the election has taken place can only produce confusion and turmoil (which) threatens to undermine public confidence in the federal courts, state agencies, and the elections themselves.”
That Griffin conceded after Judge Myers’s incontrovertible opinion is good—it’s more than Donald Trump ever did in 2020 or since. But it should not have come to this. Griffin should never have attempted election subversion, and the North Carolina courts never should have blessed his attempt. This kind of retroactive effort to rejigger the rules with judicial blessing may yet open a new front in the voting wars. But if principled judges like Judge Myers on the right, and their colleagues on the left, continue to stand up for the rule of law, America can still survive the ongoing attacks on its democracy.
2025-05-08 04:20:00
When you think of food poisoning, perhaps what first comes to mind is undercooked chicken, spoiled milk, or oysters. Personally, I remember the time I devoured a sushi boat as a high-school senior and found myself calling for my mommy in the early hours of the morning.
But don’t overlook your vegetable crisper. In terms of foodborne illness, leafy greens stand alone. In 2022, they were identified as the cause of five separate multistate foodborne-illness outbreaks, more than any other food. Romaine lettuce has a particularly bad reputation, and for good reason. In 2018, tainted romaine killed five people and induced kidney failure in another 27. Last year, an E. coli outbreak tied to—you guessed it—romaine sent 36 people to the hospital across 15 states. Perhaps ironically, the bags of shredded lettuce that promise to be pre-washed and ready to eat are riskier than whole heads of romaine.
Eating romaine lettuce is especially a gamble right now. Although America’s system for tracking and responding to foodborne illnesses has been woefully neglected for decades, it has recently been further undermined. The Biden administration cut funding for food inspections, and the Trump White House’s attempts to ruthlessly thin the federal workforce has made the future of food safety even murkier. The system faces so many stressors, food-safety experts told me, that regulators may miss cases of foodborne illness, giving Americans a false sense of security. If there’s one thing you can do right now to help protect yourself, it’s this: swearing off bagged, prechopped lettuce.
Americans aren’t suddenly falling sick en masse from romaine lettuce, or anything else. “There’s just millions of these bags that go out with no problem,” David Acheson, a former FDA food-safety official who now advises food companies (including lettuce producers), told me. But what’s most disturbing of late is the government’s lackadaisical approach to alerting the public of potential threats. Consider the romaine-lettuce outbreak last year. Americans became aware of the outbreak only last month, when NBC News obtained an internal report from the FDA. The agency reportedly did not publicize the outbreak or release the names of the companies that produced the lettuce because the threat was over by the time the FDA determined the cause. The rationale almost seems reasonable—until you realize that Americans can’t determine what foods are, or aren’t, safe without knowing just how often they make people sick. (A spokesperson for the FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
In that information void, forgoing bagged lettuce is a bit like wearing a seat belt. In the same way that you likely don’t entirely avoid riding in a car because of the risk of an accident, it’s unnecessary to swear off all romaine because it could one day make you sick. Lettuce and other leafy greens are full of nutrients, and abandoning them is not a win for your health. That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t practice harm reduction. Buying whole heads of lettuce might just be the life hack that keeps you from hacking up your Caesar salad.
Bagged lettuce ups the odds of getting a tainted product. When you buy a single head of lettuce, you’re making a bet that that exact crop hasn’t been infected. But the process of making prechopped lettuce essentially entails putting whole heads through a wood chipper. Once a single infected head enters that machine, the pieces of the infected lettuce stick around, and it’s likely that subsequent heads will become infected. “Buying a head of romaine lettuce is like taking a bath with your significant other; buying a bag of romaine lettuce is like swimming in a swimming pool in Las Vegas,” Bill Marler, a food-safety lawyer, told me.
There’s also some evidence that chopping romaine makes the lettuce more susceptible to pathogens. One study that tested the growth of E. coli on purposefully infected romaine found that within four hours of cutting the lettuce into large chunks, the amount of E. coli on the plant increased more than twice as much as on the uncut lettuce. Shredding the lettuce was even worse; the E. coli on that plant increased elevenfold over the same time period. The theory for why this occurs is similar to the reason cuts make people more susceptible to infection; essentially, cutting romaine breaks the outer protective layer of the lettuce, making it easier for bacteria to proliferate. (This experiment was done in relatively hot temperatures, so your chopped lettuce is likely safer if you keep it refrigerated. But the convenience of pre-shredded lettuce still comes with yet another additional risk.)
[Read: The dilemma at the center of McDonald’s E. Coli outbreak]
And no, washing your bagged lettuce rigorously is not the answer. If it’s infected, only a thorough cooking is going to kill the bacteria and protect you from getting sick. Rinsing your vegetables is “a mitigation step that’s reducing risk, but it is not a guarantee,” Benjamin Chapman, a food-safety expert at North Carolina State University, told me. Buying whole heads of lettuce is an imperfect solution to a major problem, but it’s the best thing consumers can do as regulators have continued to drop the ball on food safety. A lot of lettuce is contaminated by irrigation water that comes from nearby feedlots, and yet it has taken the FDA a decade to enforce water-quality standards for most crops. The FDA has also continually fallen behind on its own inspection goals. A January report from the Government Accountability Office, the government’s internal watchdog, found that the FDA has consistently missed its targets for conducting routine food inspections since 2018.
Politicians of both parties have seemed content to make cuts to an already overstressed system. Late last year, the Biden administration announced that it was cutting $34 million in funding to states to carry out routine inspections of farms and factories on behalf of the FDA, reportedly because the agency’s budget needed to make up for inflation. And under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the FDA is now making steep funding and staff cuts. Although the Trump administration has claimed that no actual food inspectors will be laid off as a result of government downsizing, there’s already evidence that the moves will, in fact, make it harder for the government to respond when illnesses strike. Spending freezes and cuts to administrative staff have reportedly made it more difficult for FDA inspectors to travel to farms, and for them to purchase sample products in grocery stores for testing. A committee tasked with exploring a range of food-safety questions, including probing what strains of E. coli cause bloody diarrhea and kidney failure, has been shut down, and a key food-safety lab in San Francisco has been hit with wide-scale layoffs, according to The New York Times. (Employees at the San Francisco lab told me that they are now being hired back.)
Skipping prechopped bagged lettuce might sound like neurotic advice, but a leafy-green outbreak is almost guaranteed to occur in the coming months. One seems to happen every fall, and it’ll be up to RFK Jr. to respond. Although Kennedy has promised to foster a culture of radical transparency at the federal health agencies, his first months on the job haven’t been reassuring. The staff at the FDA’s main communications department—employees typically tasked with briefing national news outlets during outbreaks—have been fired. So have staff at public-record offices. Government updates on the ongoing bird-flu outbreak have virtually stopped. It’s reasonable to assume that the Trump administration will take a similar “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to foods that can make us sick.
“I’m really worried that we are going to see the number of outbreaks, and the number of illnesses, go down—and it has nothing to do with the safety of the food supply,” Barbara Kowalcyk, the director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, told me. “It just means if you don’t look for something, you don’t find it.” With so much uncertainty about food safety, busting out a knife and chopping some lettuce beats a trip to the hospital, or a night hugging the toilet.
2025-05-08 02:15:00
Of the innumerable insults directed at Donald Trump and his supporters, the one that seems to get under their skin the most is “woke right.” The epithet describes the Trump movement’s tendency to counter left-wing illiberalism with a mirror-image replica. “The woke right,” my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams explained earlier this year, “places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought.” Right-wing wokeness appropriates techniques of the illiberal left-wing variety—language policing, historical revisionism, expansive claims of ethnic oppression—but deploys them in the service of the MAGA coalition, above all white Christian males, rather than racial and sexual minorities.
Some embittered critics of wokeness have depicted this movement as an in-kind backlash, a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” response to a decade of illiberalism. In fact, the woke right predates the woke left. I happened to find a textual source, perfectly preserved in time.
In 2011, Pat Buchanan published Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (Checking in from the year 2025, I can report that the answer is a tentative yes.) Revisiting the book today is illuminating for two reasons. One is that Buchanan, as many analysts have noted, invented Trump’s shtick. The right-wing populist ran two unsuccessful campaigns for the Republican nomination, followed by another as an independent candidate, on proto-Trumpian themes of protectionism, isolationism, and nativism—themes that are elaborated at length in Suicide of a Superpower. (Buchanan announced his retirement from political commentary last year.)
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]
The other is that Buchanan’s manifesto precedes the emergence of the pejorative left-wing sense of wokeness, which began in about 2014. And so it shows very clearly that the woke right, while drawing strength from the backlash to wokeism, does not require the woke left’s existence as a rationale.
If you’re looking for identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving, Buchanan has 400 pages of it. His core argument is that white people should band together to hold off the rising tide of nonwhite people who threaten to outnumber them and use their voting power to redistribute resources downward. This belief inspires both Buchanan’s model of international relations and domestic politics. Globally, Buchanan argues for a rapprochement with Russia, which he praises for having “implored the white nations to unite.”
Domestically, he castigates George W. Bush–era Republicans for “pandering to liberal minorities,” whom he sees as incapable of social or economic equality with the white majority. Buchanan urges the party to use nativist themes and other conservative messages to draw in more white voters, a strategy Trump later employed.
In some ways, Suicide of a Superpower strikes notes similar to those found in generations of conservative screeds: fretting about the pace of social change, expressing affection for the good old days—“in 1952, a Coke cost a nickel as did a candy bar,” Buchanan recalls nostalgically—and worrying that the country might not survive. But the specific elements of Buchanan’s complaints reveal the nearly unrecognizable context in which he was writing, which preceded a decade and a half of dizzying cultural change.
“Woke” ideas about race and gender emerged at the end of the Obama era, partly in opposition to Barack Obama’s relatively staid liberal values. In 2011, when Buchanan was writing, the concepts that would come to be referred to as wokeism were still confined to the fringes of academia and left-wing activism, and they were so politically marginal that Suicide of a Superpower does not reference them.
Instead, Buchanan denounces Obama-era liberalism, with its emphasis on social equality and individual rights. He rails against gay marriage, along with “individualistic hedonism,” the “Playboy philosophy,” and “MTV morality.” Tellingly, he does not even pretend to cast himself as a defender of free speech. To the contrary, he expresses indignation that liberals are permitted to insult traditional values, including Christianity, while conservative critiques of Islam and homosexuality are deemed taboo. Buchanan cites a 2009 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David accidentally urinates on a painting of Jesus, setting off a wacky chain of events where a Catholic woman mistakes the urine for tears, as an example of intolerably offensive content. Without putting it quite this way, Buchanan implies that hate speech (against groups he identifies with) is not free speech.
“Another hallmark of wokeness,” writes Williams, “is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates.” That, too, describes Suicide of a Superpower. Buchanan pours derision on the Obama-era historiography that depicted American history as an imperfect, stop-start march toward a more perfect union that would finally live up to its founding ideals.
The left dissented from Obama’s optimistic analysis, seeing American history as a long and bloody reprise of racism and exploitation with no clearly defined trajectory. Buchanan adopts a similar analysis, except that he presents the qualities derided by the left as necessary, even praiseworthy. America is “the product of ethnonationalism,” he asserts without judgment. “No American war was fought for egalitarian ends, postwar propaganda notwithstanding.” Likewise, “no one would suggest the Indian wars were about equality. They were about racism and subjugation.” Lincoln, he reminds the reader, was a white supremacist. As a descriptive account, Buchanan’s history hardly differs from what you’d encounter in a text such as the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, only with the moral valence of the events flipped.
[Jonathan Chait: A loophole that would swallow the Constitution]
Buchanan’s interest in world events runs far deeper than Trump’s. It is difficult to imagine the sitting president ever having developed strong opinions on such subjects as, say, Austria’s cession of South Tyrol to Italy in 1918. (Buchanan remains angry about it.) And yet the general thrust of Buchanan’s belief system is strikingly familiar. He insists that all nations care only for their self-interest; international cooperation is a facade; America’s allies are parasites; and the one country with whom we should be seeking closer ties is Russia.
His domestic worldview is similarly Trumpian. The threat Buchanan discerns is not censorship or radical anti-Americanism. It is the notion that America is or can be a place in which anybody who isn’t straight, white, and Christian has an equal claim to citizenship. He does not pose as a defender of liberalism or equality but as a proud champion of hierarchy.
Trump promised to restore free speech and “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.” Instead, he has attacked free speech, pressured Harvard to create quotas for MAGA fans, and built the most non-meritocratic administration since the invention of the civil service, if not before. Some Trump supporters may find themselves surprised at this right-wing version of wokeness. But in the precursors to Trumpism, it was there all along.
2025-05-08 02:10:00
Today, nearly 20 years after Congress passed legislation mandating a nationwide program known as Real ID, was the deadline for travelers to show the new identification for domestic flights. And yet nothing has happened. Although about 20 percent of the traveling public is still not compliant, because people have not obtained the required document (generally, a revised form of driver’s license issued by U.S. states and territories), Homeland Security has done little more than issue a leaflet that people really, really, really should have the correct ID next time.
The Trump administration may try to take credit for a smooth rollout—smooth because it wasn’t a rollout at all. Today’s deadline was largely artificial: According to the fine print of the regulations governing Real ID’s implementation, Homeland Security has until the end of 2027 to phase in the program in full. So the administration took today’s deadline to assure Americans that they could still fly, while it focused on another priority: immigration enforcement, rather than safety provision.
Enacted in response to the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and following recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Real ID required authorities to add passport-style features such as facial-recognition technology and anti-counterfeit markings to state-issued driver’s licenses, as a significant enhancement of passenger screening for U.S. flights. The program was originally set to take effect in 2008, but states either opposed it or failed to comply, and time kept passing. As today’s deadline approached, Homeland Security pushed for compliance and warned of delays and additional burdens on airport security, but the government offered little specific information about what would happen—let alone any insight into whether cuts at the Transportation Security Administration by Elon Musk’s efficiency brigade would add to any adverse effect of Real ID enforcement.
Part of the mystery is now solved. After stern but vague admonitions, the TSA is merely advising travelers that they will need a Real ID–compliant driver’s license or another accepted form of identification, such as a passport, “for your next flight or you may expect delays.” So delays maybe tomorrow, but no delays today.
The rest of the mystery lies in what the plain lack of enforcement tells us about what the administration’s real interest was. The performatively menacing noises in the buildup to this deadline were a threat to those who may not qualify for Real ID because of their immigration status. (In about half of states, undocumented migrants are not eligible for driver’s licenses.) In effect, the administration was trying to use a scare about Real ID as a stick to match the carrot of the president’s offer of $1,000 for undocumented immigrants to self-deport. Instead of a serious effort to move people to Real ID, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could be heard saying, “Illegal aliens should not be allowed to fly in the U.S. unless self-deporting.”
The focus on “illegal aliens” and immigration enforcement rather than on national security and counterterrorism seems a very unhelpful way to get Americans to comply with Real ID. The design of Real ID–compliant licenses had already aroused opposition from civil libertarians on both the left and the right, including some conservatives who worry about Big Brother–like state powers. Such concerns about privacy and federal intrusion led to a number of states dragging their feet on issuing Real ID–compliant documents.
Now, as the Trump administration shifts the emphasis of Real ID from counterterrorism to immigration control, many Americans may be at best confused about whether they need the beefed-up licenses; at worst, they may feel that the fears of federal overreach and police-state measures are well warranted.
The Trump administration’s enforcement effort today is hardly likely to get people in line with the new requirement: No worries, Homeland Security seems to be saying, Americans have a pass. In that case, why should U.S. citizens take any future deadline seriously?
The trouble is, no rules exist if none are properly enforced. A serious effort to implement Real ID would have concluded a generational program to make America’s traveling public safer from its foreign enemies. The “show us your papers” immigration hawks in the administration just squandered that opportunity.
