2026-06-02 06:20:53
Why is the world conspiring to spoil America’s 250th birthday, and, more important, Donald Trump’s 80th? Like a Roman emperor, Trump has busied himself with self-aggrandizing public works, such as a massive triumphal arch, and is staging gladiatorial sports in his own honor, in the form of a UFC fight on the White House lawn on June 14. A string of recent setbacks reveals that Trump is no omnipotent emperor after all, but an American president who—more and more—is forced to fold.
On Monday, Axios and The New York Times reported that the administration was dropping its plans for the Department of Justice to create an “anti-weaponization” fund, after other Republicans recoiled at its terms and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing its operation. This fund was set up as a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS (an agency he controls) over the leaking of his tax returns. Trump was suing for $10 billion in damages, but withdrew his lawsuit against himself in exchange for the creation of a slush fund of $1.776 billion (get it?) for those who felt victimized by “lawfare.” Participants in the January 6 riot, already pardoned by the president, were eagerly awaiting the chance to apply for reparations. (Though the Justice Department had helpfully clarified, “There are no partisan requirements to file a claim.”)
Trump’s apparent retreat marks the defeat not just of a harebrained scheme but of one of his signature policy innovations: the idea that federal law ought to be applied unequally, to punish his foes and dole out benefits to his friends.
Many of Trump’s other bold ideas have hit snags too. The unilateral tariffs that he imposed on the rest of the world were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in February; in May, the Court of International Trade also invalidated his stand-in measure of 10 percent tariffs. At the start of this year, Trump caught the foreign-interventionism bug and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and then, emboldened by that success, launched a war alongside Israel on Iran. This has gone less spectacularly than the Venezuelan operation: Despite the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran has refused to capitulate and has instead proved that, despite being militarily outmatched, it can inflict pain on the rest of the world by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Peace negotiations have dragged on for months, and the president is bored by it all. “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” he told CNBC today.
Perhaps these setbacks explain why the president has turned toward more immediate concerns—capital beautifications. But he has encountered disappointments there too. Congressional Republicans, who are working through a budget bill, announced that they would not allocate $1 billion to build Trump’s beloved White House ballroom project. On Friday, a judge ruled against the president’s attempts to unilaterally rechristen the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as the “Trump Kennedy Center” and ordered his name and likeness removed from its marble facade. After a string of musical artists bowed out of performing at America’s 250th-anniversary celebration, Trump suggested that he be the headline act instead.
On foreign affairs, the president is experiencing the same reality check that many of his predecessors have: The U.S. military listens to the commander in chief, but the rest of the world may not. At home, the mighty executive branch must still operate under the constraints imposed by the other two branches.
Although the judiciary has been the primary bulwark against the president’s excesses, even a Republican-run Congress can, very occasionally, assert its enormous constitutional powers. Its unwillingness to bless a slush fund for the president’s allies, an ever-so-slight display of resistance, may also reflect a political reality: The Republicans are bracing for a terrible midterm election in November, as a result of Trump’s deep unpopularity and voter anger over the high costs of everyday life. Despite Republican gerrymandering efforts, Trump’s party will probably lose control over at least one chamber of Congress and, with that, its chance at passing major legislation for the next two years.
Despite Trump’s occasional insinuations that he might run for a third term, there will clearly be a normal succession battle. Perhaps that is why the president is so consumed by his legacy. Though Trump may still act as kingmaker, his power will wane as soon as his successor is picked.
Trump’s focus has been on unilateral executive power, not legislation. As a result, he has left little imprint on American policy that cannot be undone by a successor. In Rome, emperors ruled for life; they left their names on buildings and their faces on currency to ensure their immortality. In America, presidents are not meant to be so exalted. Trump is trying his hardest to defy this fundamental fact of governing a republic. But it’s harder and harder to believe he will succeed.
2026-06-02 05:59:00
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For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.
“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.
Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.
The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.
Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.
Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.
Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the center—though, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s not clear what is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.
Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed “weaponization” of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. Now it’s facing blowback from Congress and doubts from inside the White House, and two judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into question. Axios reported this afternoon that according to two senior administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the fund entirely.
That brings us back to Iran, where few indications forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday that he promised would result in a “final determination” on Iran, but it ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with military might.
Trump can’t get his talking points straight now. This afternoon, the president told CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he didn’t care whether talks were over, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time.” Not long after, he posted that “talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Today’s hostilities could be a sign of the larger conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t want people paying too much attention—and doesn’t offer a lot of reasons for anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.
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The nation’s welcome mats have been doing a lot less welcoming lately. Although Americans have been spending much more time at home in recent years—an hour and 39 minutes more a day in 2022 than in 2003—they aren’t inviting other people in. The percentage of people who hosted or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50 percent over the past couple of decades. Socializing of any kind declined over that same period, and isolation rose. These days, it seems, home is where people go to be alone.
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2026-06-02 05:54:32
The following contains spoilers through the series finale of HBO’s Euphoria.
Euphoria’s troubled protagonist, Rue (played by Zendaya), spends much of the drama’s final season dodging one potentially violent death after another. As a drug mule turned strip-club employee turned arms dealer turned informant, she barely survives being buried up to her neck, getting dragged by a horse down a dirt path, and becoming target practice in multiple shoot-outs.
Yet when she does die, midway through the series finale, which aired last night, the scene unfolds quietly: Rue, recovering from a long day of double-crossing her employers and suffering a wound on her palm, overdoses on the fentanyl with which her painkillers have secretly been laced. The sequence stands out for its contemplative beauty. Rue, asleep, dreams of walking through her childhood home and seeing her mother, reaching for her before being embraced in return. Reality and fantasy blur. She smiles even as she gasps for air, then drifts off into endless slumber.
If only Euphoria had maintained that restraint across the rest of its bloated ending. Rue’s fate underlined how addiction can be a frustratingly misunderstood disease, but the show around her undercut that message again and again through its over-the-top storytelling. In its conclusion, Euphoria tried to provide both a serious look at the fentanyl epidemic and an extended homage to action-Western tropes about good and evil. The result was scattershot and murkily rendered, undermining the significance of its heroine’s tragic journey.
The episode’s frequent detours into lazy platitudes about faith didn’t help. Across Season 3, Rue, in turmoil, shows interest in the Bible. But after her death, the show’s characters allude to religion in ham-fisted ways. Lexi (Maude Apatow), Rue’s childhood friend, was largely indifferent toward Rue all season; in her last scene, however, Lexi delivers a monologue about how enlightening she has found the Bible in the months since Rue died, concluding that the holy book is about how, “no matter what, you have to just keep going.” Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Rue’s merciless, drug-dealing, sex-trafficking former employer, who gave her the fentanyl-laced pills, insists out of nowhere that he wants to start a family, because it’s “biblical” to do so. When the white-supremacist drug dealers he has butted heads with have their property raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, one of them raises his arms in a Christ-like pose as he surrenders—an image that’s both grossly misguided and thematically confusing, especially given Rue’s final voice-over praying for God to “bless us all.” These moments say little about the power of faith or why Rue was so drawn to Christianity. Instead, they come off as unconvincing attempts to rewrite the season’s crude indulgences as profound.
[Read: Euphoria is my favorite depression]
But that’s been the overarching problem with Euphoria this season: The show has touched on plenty of provocative topics—the unoriginality of modern Hollywood, the suffocating nature of capitalism, the online and offline trials of sex work—without saying anything substantive. That emptiness was more apparent than ever in the series finale. Ali (Colman Domingo), Rue’s levelheaded sponsor, becomes a last-minute superhero, avenging her by blowing Alamo to pieces using a sawed-off shotgun; though the always-excellent Domingo sells the character’s heel-turn, the scene overshadows the emotional devastation of Rue’s death. Absurdities such as a storyline about a minor character’s Brazilian butt lift received more screen time than Jules (Hunter Schafer), Rue’s ex-girlfriend and once the second-most-important character on Euphoria. She appears only in a brief, dialogue-less scene in which she paints a portrait of Rue. Schafer does her best to convey Jules’s grief, but the moment feels like too little, too late—and too haphazard, considering the episode’s relentless tonal whiplash.
In addition to the poetry of Rue’s death, the show did manage a handful of poignant, gorgeously shot moments that harkened back to the thoughtful elegance of its earlier seasons, including Ali’s speech about how tired he has become after losing so many loved ones to addiction. A sequence in which Lexi’s older sister, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), haloed by the ring light she uses for her OnlyFans work and weeping alone in her mansion, looks like a figurine in a dollhouse is similarly meditative; she’s no longer the 50-foot woman towering over Los Angeles. But how are the characters reflecting on—not just responding to—the loss of a friend they watched struggle with addiction for years? What is the legacy of a young woman who escaped so much brutality only to be felled by a synthetic drug that she had no idea she was taking?
Euphoria doesn’t supply any answers—and, worse, it seems uninterested in searching for them. In its final moments, the show relied instead on the same moves it’s delivered all season: providing shock value over meaningful observation, turning previously nuanced characters into caricatures, and gesturing vaguely at the idea that everyone is addicted to something, be it opiates, sex, or success. “I’ve always been against utopian storytelling,” Euphoria’s creator, writer, and director, Sam Levinson, said in a behind-the-scenes featurette after the episode. This ending certainly wasn’t utopian. But in its misery, it did a disservice to any well-intentioned messages it attempted to convey, letting Rue down along the way.
2026-06-02 01:28:52
Ivan Antypenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty
Ukrainian farmer Oleksandr Hordiienko carries an anti-drone gun while holding “Chuyka,” a Ukrainian drone detector that helps spot Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), while his employees work on a tractor in a field in the Kherson region, Ukraine, on July 29, 2025.
Ivan Antypenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty
Anti-tank fortifications, also known as “dragon’s teeth,” stand in a sunflower field on July 24, 2025, seen in the Kherson region.
Ivan Samoilov / Frontliner / Getty
Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) inspectors of the National Police examine and remotely detonate the warhead of a downed Geran 2 attack drone, after clearing dry vegetation on a farmer’s field on September 22, 2025, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. Police warn that civilians who attempt to recover explosive fragments risk death: “There have been fatal cases, including children,” said EOD specialist Oleksii Poliakov.
Evgeniy Maloletka / AP
A wheat field burns after Russian shelling a few kilometers from the Ukrainian-Russian border in the Kharkiv region on July 29, 2022.
Pierre Crom / Getty
Viktor, an agricultural worker, stops a combine harvester near the remains of a rocket on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, on September 7, 2023.
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Victor Tsvik, an owner of a private farm, shows a fragment of a Russian drone that fell in his field in the Kyiv region, Ukraine, on August 3, 2025.
Andriy Andriyenko / AP
Soldiers of Ukraine’s National Guard 15th Brigade launch a reconnaissance drone from a wheat field to determine Russian positions, as a farmer harvests in the background, near the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, on July 29, 2024.
Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty
The shadow of a helicopter is seen on a field of sunflowers in the Kyiv region on July 14, 2022.
Viktoriia Yakymenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty
Surviving pigs are seen in front of a farm building hit by a Russian drone strike on October 3, 2025, in the Kharkiv region. A massive strike by Russian drones on the night of October 3 hit a farm in the Nova Vodolaha settlement, destroying farm buildings and killing most of its 15,000 pigs.
Wojciech Grzedzinski / Anadolu Agency / Getty
A view of a destroyed farm in Dovhenke village in the Kharkiv region, seen on June 22, 2023
Alex Babenko / AP
Sunflowers draped with fiber-optic cables left behind by passing drones are seen near Sloviansk, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on September 11, 2025.
Darya Nazarova / AFP / Getty
A worker leads a horse into a truck during the evacuation of horses from a stud farm to a safe place to protect them from possible air attacks, near Novomykolaivka, Zaporizhzhia region, on December 17, 2025.
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
A farmer works to harvest a field 10 kilometers from the front line, maneuvering around a crater left by a Russian rocket, in the xDnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine, on July 4, 2022.
Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty
Ukrainian service members of the 59th brigade’s mobile-air-defense unit fire a Soviet-made ZU-23 anti-aircraft twin-barrel auto-cannon toward a Russian drone, during an air attack near Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovsk region, on July 19, 2025.
Andrii Marienko / AP
Fragments of Russian missiles and weapons lie on a field as farm work continues in the background, near the front line in the Kharkiv region, on May 22, 2026.
Ivan Antypenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty
Ukrainian farmer Serhii Mykhaltsov shows Russian first-person-view drones that fell in a field thanks to electronic-warfare systems that Ukrainian farmers used on July 29, 2025, in the Kherson region.
Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty
De-miners with the humanitarian organization HALO Trust work to clear farm land of explosives near the village of Yevgenivka, in the Mykolaiv region, Ukraine on April 9, 2023.
Andrii Marienko / AP
A sapper removes potential explosive items from an agricultural field in Balakliia, Kharkiv region, on April 30, 2026.
Francisco Richart / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty
A Ukrainian reconnaissance drone flies above a field covered by discarded fiber-optic drone fibers on the Sumy front on January 28, 2026.
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Mykola Kravchenko hangs laundry on a line attached to a fragment of a Russian rocket in the village of Maydanivka, Kyiv region, on May 30, 2024. The rocket fell on Kravchenko’s farm at the beginning of the war, in 2022.
Pierre Crom / Getty
De-mining teams from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service clear an agricultural field using a remote-controlled GCS-200 mine-clearing vehicle on September 27, 2024, in Svyatohirsk, Ukraine.
Latin America News Agency / Reuters
An unexploded bomb is removed from an agricultural field near Kupyansk, Ukraine, on August 11, 2025.
Dmytro Smolienko / Ukrinform / Future Publishing / Getty
Viktor Zinchenko takes care of a herd of 50 goats in Orikhiv, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region in southeastern Ukraine, close to the front line.
Pierre Crom / Getty
Ukrainian anti-drone units downed a Russian-launched Shahed UAV, which crashed in an agricultural field on August 10, 2025, in the Donetsk region.
Ukrinform / NurPhoto / Getty
A man walks among the ruins of a hangar granary that was destroyed by Russian shelling at one of the agricultural enterprises near Orikhiv in the Polohy district, Zaporizhzhia region, on July 8, 2025.
Wojciech Grzedzinski / Anadolu Agency / Getty
A destroyed Russian tank rusts in a field near Dovhenke village in the Kharkiv region on June 22, 2023.
Wojciech Grzedzinski / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Leonid Zolotariol walks beside a crater as he surveys his destroyed farm in Dovhenke village, Kharkiv region, on June 22, 2023.
Metin Aktas / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Part of a cluster-ammunition rocket sits embedded in a sunflower field after attacks in Izium, Kharkiv region, on September 24, 2022.
2026-06-01 20:30:00
Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.
But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.
It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?
The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.
“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”
With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer approach the 13-foot fence that rings the compound. Additional fencing went up in January around Lafayette Square, which remains under construction, and prevents access from the north. The perimeter to the south extends near Independence Avenue; the area around the Ellipse was closed last month. It’s impossible to enter from the east, through the barriers and construction where the East Wing once stood. And a battery of security vehicles, police on bikes, and Secret Service agents stand guard from the west.
[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner]
Quinn was recently delivering a graduation speech, reflecting on some of the shifts he’s seen during his time at the Secret Service. Twenty years ago, he said, the questions he’d get were about how he stayed vigilant given that agents rarely had to draw their weapons. “Well,” he said, “we don’t have to explain it to anybody anymore.”
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson built the first fence around the White House, a wooden structure that was designed to keep animals away from the gardens. As for the people, they were largely able to roam freely on a property that had little security. “Early presidents would have had, more or less, their household staff doubling as their security force,” Matthew Costello, the chief education officer of the White House Historical Association, told me.
Franklin Pierce was the first president to have a full-time bodyguard. Abraham Lincoln posted guards outside, but inside they were dressed in civilian clothes and hid their firearms. In 1893, the grounds were closed to try to protect Grover Cleveland’s young daughter after tourists tried to cut off some of her hair. In the early 1900s, after the assassination of William McKinley, the Secret Service was tasked with presidential protection and two men were assigned to a full-time detail for Theodore Roosevelt. “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906, reflecting the centuries-long struggle between presidential protection and public accessibility.
During World War I, the White House grounds were closed. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, security was enhanced once more: Bulletproof glass was added to the Oval Office windows and air-raid shelters were installed belowground. (Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected proposals from the Secret Service to line the property with 15-foot-high piles of sandbags and to repaint the White House in camouflage.) After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that goes by the White House was closed to vehicles. At the time, it seemed like a significant infringement on traditional American freedoms.
“Pennsylvania Avenue has been routinely open to traffic for the entire history of our Republic,” Bill Clinton said in his weekly radio address announcing the decision. “Through four Presidential assassinations and eight unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Presidents, it’s been open. Through a civil war, two world wars, and the Gulf war, it was open. But now it must be closed.”
After the September 11 attacks, the perimeter was widened again; vehicular traffic was shut down along E Street, on the south side. Airspace was more tightly restricted. To push the security perimeter any farther, the government would need to take over the Hay-Adams hotel or occupy the coffee shops (Peet’s, Starbucks, Swing’s) that sit on the blocks nearest the West Wing entrance and help fuel the staffers who enter it. Without the ability to go farther out, the security barriers must go higher up.
Former Secret Service agent Keith Wojcieszek told me that during his 16 years on the job, people routinely climbed over the 6-foot-6-inch perimeter fence. In one particularly embarrassing incident for the agency, a man not only jumped the fence but got to the front door of the White House and entered before being apprehended. Seven years ago, work began on a new fence—long requested by the Secret Service—of nearly double the height. But it is still not impenetrable: At least twice, toddlers have slipped through the fence, only to be retrieved by agents and returned to their parents.
Now, under protocols implemented this year, neither toddlers nor anyone else can get that close. Meanwhile, the park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Lafayette Square, is closed for renovations that the National Park Service told me it wants to complete before July 4. After the park reopens, the Secret Service wants to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The area in and around the park was for many years the scene of protests, demonstrators’ chants echoing within the halls of the White House. But not now. Among the protests was an anti-war vigil that had been continuously operating since 1981. It was partially dismantled earlier this year, after Donald Trump deemed it an eyesore.
In wartime Baghdad and Kabul, 30-foot-high blast walls shielded sensitive government sites. The White House still has a modicum of openness. But that’s possible only because of all the security protections that a visiting tourist can’t necessarily see.
Beyond the perimeter, plainclothes and uniformed officers roam the streets. Snipers patrol the roof. Drones hover nearby. K9 attack dogs are ready to pounce. The system operates in layers, with different agents monitoring different distances and threat levels. “It’s the Secret Service’s protective methodology,” the former agent Donald Mihalek, who retired in 2019 after 21 years, told me. “If you don’t catch it in the outer ring, you catch it in the inner ring. You want those overlapping rings of protection.”
The weaponry has been upgraded over time, to rifles that can easily cover the 290 yards from the White House to the fence line on the southern side. The White House snipers on the roof can see 1,000 yards in every direction. “It really is not just 360 degrees of a linear circle,” the retired Secret Service agent Jeffrey James, who served 22 years, told me. “It’s almost a sphere around them by the time you add the people on the ground, the assets above us.”
One of the trickiest parts for the Secret Service is trying to anticipate the lone wolf who might suddenly show up at an event, or approach the White House gates. Cole Tomas Allen was a 31-year-old mechanical engineer from Torrance, California, who traveled to Washington, wrote a manifesto, and bolted through security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Michael Marx was a 45-year-old from Midland, Texas, who allegedly shot at Secret Service agents as they approached him near the Washington Monument around the time that Vice President Vance’s motorcade was passing nearby. Nasire Best was a 21-year-old from Dundalk, Maryland, who had previously been arrested for claiming that he was Jesus Christ and trying to gain access to the White House; he was fatally shot last weekend after firing at a security checkpoint.
[Read: The era of normie extremism is here]
About a year ago, the Secret Service launched what it calls the Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, which is designed to stop threats before someone shows up at an event or at the White House. “We don’t want to have a shootout on 15th Street,” Quinn told me. “If we know of a known-threat case and they’re on a record with us, we want to be able to intercept them, say, at Key Bridge or on 395 and not at the White House.” Quinn and others told me it's difficult to pinpoint any one cause for the rise in threats, but they named a few factors, including the proliferation of social media, a polarized political climate, and global unrest.
The president is not the only one who’s been targeted with violence. Governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and municipal judges have all been victims—or intended victims—of attacks. The U.S. Capitol Police, which protects members of Congress and their families and staff, investigated nearly 15,000 threats and actions in 2025, an increase of almost 60 percent over the previous year. Josh Shapiro’s family was asleep in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion last year when the house was set ablaze by an arsonist, and Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, who led the House Democratic caucus, was shot and killed in her home. At least a half dozen members of Trump’s Cabinet and White House staff have moved into military housing, spaces that help shield them from political violence, as well as protest.
One of the criticisms of the Green Zone in Iraq was that it created a false sense of tranquility. The Americans, protected by their security—not to mention the air-conditioned facilities, swimming pools, and buffet-style dining—were detached from the realities of war taking place on the other side of the gate. The zone was derisively nicknamed “the Bubble.”
The White House has long risked being its own kind of bubble. Harry Truman called it the “great white jail.” Joe Biden described it as a “gilded cage” and spent many of his weekends in Wilmington, Delaware. Barack Obama made a habit of reading 10 letters selected from the thousands sent to the White House each day. Trump uses his phone to reach those beyond his bubble, but his response to growing threats has been to try to further fortify the White House; at the same time, he’s cut back on travel, except to his golf clubs. Although his aides insist that he can maintain a connection with ordinary Americans, he has dismissed the economic hardships that many are facing as prices have risen since the start of the Iran war. Rather than talk about bringing down costs, he often focuses on his pet projects: the large cage going up on the White House lawn for a UFC fight that will be staged on his 80th birthday, for instance, or the ballroom he is determined to build.
[Read: Trump might already be a lame duck]
When in mid-May he invited a group of reporters to tour the construction site where the East Wing once stood, he spoke of the ballroom in militaristic terms. The roof, he said, will not only have a “barrier” and a “shield” so strong that “if a drone hits it, it bounces off,” but it will also contain a drone base of sorts. (He’s described it as a “drone empire,” a “drone gallery,” and a “drone port” that will house “unlimited drones” to protect all of Washington.) The side walls will contain “impenetrable steel” and the windows will be “four inches thick.” He bragged about the previously installed fencing surrounding the complex—made of titanium (“the strongest of all the metals”)—and said it goes deep into the ground and can’t be toppled by a tractor or a bulldozer.
His response in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assasination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was to call for the ballroom construction to go ahead. The day after the shooting at the White House gates last weekend, his lawyers submitted a new filing in the lawsuit that has blocked him from continuing. “When completed, this highly knitted, integrated, and unified Project, which is a singular and vital National Security facility, will provide a ‘SAFE HAVEN’ from attackers such as the one last night, and on April 25th,” it read.
Inside the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, Trump was asked about the Saturday-night incident, when he was at the White House working as shots rang out nearby. Trump said he pushes such thoughts from his mind. “If I thought about it a lot, you know, I wouldn’t be a very good president. I wouldn’t be here, probably. I’d be up in some room with a locked door,” he said. Outside, the ceaseless roar of jackhammering and bulldozing went on as the ballroom, challenged by lawsuits and protected by that titanium fencing, took shape.
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In the spring of 2006, when The Hills—a reality-TV show about the lives of privileged young adults living in Los Angeles—premiered on MTV, Spencer Pratt wasn’t part of the cast. Instead, he was sitting at home, watching with his mom and her best friend. His first impression? “The Hills was aggressively boring,” he writes in his aptly titled memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate. “Like watching paint dry, except the paint was really pretty and had perfect lighting.”
Pratt, who was then in his early 20s, was no stranger to reality TV. He had previously appeared on The Princes of Malibu, a short-lived Fox show about Brody and Brandon Jenner—the handsome, wavy-haired sons of the Olympic athlete Caitlyn Jenner and the songwriter Linda Thompson. After watching The Hills, Pratt soon realized that the two shows shared an executive producer, Sean Travis. As Pratt tells it, he called Travis up, asking—or, more precisely, demanding—that he and Brody be cast on the next season. When they were rebuffed, the duo started showing up at the Hollywood nightclubs where the Hills cast was filming, over and over again. Pratt eventually got on the show when he started dating Heidi Montag, the party-loving roommate of Lauren Conrad, the central character whose unmistakable Californian drawl narrated the series. He immediately cemented himself as an agitator who was always willing to stir up drama by fighting with the other cast members and even with his own family, disrupting the show’s low-key vibe and turning it into addictive viewing.
Twenty years on, Pratt is once again a figure who can’t be ignored: an insurgent challenger to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s reelection bid. Pratt, a registered Republican, has positioned himself as an anti-establishment voice prepared to take a tough approach on homelessness, drug “zombies,” and crime, and he is currently polling a strong second in L.A.’s nonpartisan mayoral-primary election. His campaign, which was inspired by the experience of losing his Palisades home in the 2025 California wildfires, is infused with the same shamelessness and media savvy that made him a TV star. He’s new to politics, but he’s been playing this game for years.
In 2007, when Pratt first infiltrated The Hills as Montag’s love interest, he had a specific goal. “I want to be the most hated person in the world,” he said, according to Brody Jenner. By this point, reality-TV viewers had already become acquainted with villains such as Richard Hatch, who won the first season of Survivor by playing a devious, Machiavellian game, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, whose ruthless takedowns of other contestants on The Apprentice earned her an equal amount of fans and haters. But although The Hills wasn’t a game show, Pratt understood that the cast members were competing for airtime and column inches in a world where traditional “talent” was no longer a prerequisite for fame.
Pratt’s outrageous on-screen antics placed him at the center of many feuds. He often spoke aggressively with Montag’s family—especially her mother, Darlene, and her sister, Holly, who disapproved of their relationship. He severed ties with his own sister, Stephanie, whom he called a “crazy bitch” at a barbecue. (In February, she said that voting for him in the mayoral race would be a “vote for stupidity,” though she signaled her support in a recent Vanity Fair article.) Some of his most disturbing fights were with Montag, and fans accused him of being controlling, like when he pressured his now-wife to elope without her family present. (Pratt has since said that many of their fights, and instances when he exhibited controlling behavior, were faked “to make producers happy.”)
Yet his most intense beef was with Conrad, the show’s biggest star. When Pratt first started dating Montag, Conrad was a protective friend unimpressed with his antics, such as partying with other girls. But ahead of the show’s third season, their feud went nuclear when reports of a sex tape between Conrad and her former boyfriend Jason Wahler began to circulate online. Conrad, who has always denied the existence of a tape, blamed Pratt for leaking the story. (Pratt initially denied this, then admitted to it, then denied it again—then, eventually, admitted to it again.) The feud continued to play out for years after The Hills ended; in 2015, Pratt branded Conrad “a cold-hearted killer” who will “cut you in your sleep.”
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We now know that many storylines on The Hills were heavily embellished by producers or the stars themselves. Many scenes were reshot and, toward the end, some central plot points were totally invented. But by all accounts, the feud between Pratt and Conrad was real, and it’s where Pratt honed what he describes as his default conflict style: “If you want to throw missiles, I’m throwing a nuke.” Fans of The Hills might get déjà vu, watching the way he has conducted himself in the mayoral race. Pratt has relentlessly positioned Bass at the center of his doomsday-like vision of L.A. as a lawless and unsafe place. Not long after he kicked off his campaign, he gave her the nickname Karen “Basura,” the Spanish word for “trash,” and predicted that she’ll end up in jail.
Defeating an opponent, whether in politics or on reality TV, is largely about narrative control. It’s become common for reality stars and politicians alike to use many channels—social media, podcasts, press coverage—to influence how they’re perceived. In the pre-Instagram era, Pratt and Montag were known for constantly leaking stories to the tabloids, setting up paparazzi pictures, and surprising producers by showing up where they weren’t expected. The couple embraced new-media figures such as the notorious blogger Perez Hilton, who reported the story about Conrad’s alleged sex tape, and who was later a guest of honor at Pratt and Montag’s 2009 wedding. Since Pratt entered the mayoral race, his campaign has been disseminating bizarre spoof videos and AI-generated ads. He’s even running a “clipping campaign,” paying content creators to promote his videos.
Before the election of Donald Trump, reality stardom would have been a political hindrance—but no more. And Pratt’s experience might even have given him an edge, in ways beyond the obvious: On The Hills, he and his co-stars were likely encouraged by producers to distill their points into concise, easy-to-edit sound bites. Viewers could see hints of this at the May 6 mayoral debate, when Pratt was more inclined than his opponents to give simple “yes” or “no” answers to questions—a trait that was immediately amplified by Fox News. Reality stardom has also given Pratt something that most career politicians would kill for: name recognition. Even if a lot of people hated him on The Hills, they still may feel like they know him and therefore have an incentive to stop scrolling and listen to what he’s saying.
Pratt’s TV background also allows him to position himself as an outsider, even if that isn’t totally true. Certainly, he has no shortage of high-level connections. In May, the musician David Foster and his wife, Katharine McPhee Foster, held a fundraiser for Pratt, hosting wealthy donors, influencers, and Hollywood figures at their home. Foster has known Pratt ever since The Princes of Malibu. In fact, Pratt has said that it was Foster who encouraged him to be the “Simon Cowell of The Hills” way back when, as in someone who tells it like it is. At the time, this quality made him a villain. Now he has cast himself as the only candidate prepared to deliver hard truths on behalf of the silent majority.
Looking ahead to the June 2 primary, I wonder how much of Pratt’s rise is driven by a rose-tinted nostalgia among Angelenos for the era in which he became famous. As he promises to make L.A. “camera-ready” again, he may unconsciously remind people of the simpler time when The Hills started airing, before the first iPhone and the financial crash. In 2006, The Hills felt genuinely novel. Like its predecessor, Laguna Beach, it was shot and edited to look and feel like a scripted show, except the people and events were (supposedly) real. Young fans like me weren’t put off by the scenes that seemed obviously fake—in fact, part of the appeal was watching and making up your own mind about whether or not it was scripted.
There’s a symmetry between Pratt’s campaign and the broader moment, in which the media landscape looks more and more like reality TV. Every day, keeping up with the news means trying to decipher whether information is based in fact or not—and whether a politician, influencer, or public figure really believes what they’re saying, or is just trying to go viral. Does Pratt really want to be mayor of L.A.? Or is he using his campaign to reignite his fading stardom and promote his memoir? Is Pratt actually living in a trailer, as he has claimed, or is he staying in a luxury hotel? As on The Hills, audiences are once again being asked to decide what is real.
Not so long ago, Pratt seemed down-and-out and was selling crystals to make a living. Now he’s within the margin of error for taking an outright lead in the race. In his memoir, he reflects on how he found his footing on The Hills. “Once I see an opportunity, I’m like a shark in the water, a dog with a bone,” he writes. “I see what I want. I take it.” The key difference is how much the stakes have risen. Two decades ago, Pratt’s unnerving talent for getting as much attention as possible secured him a spot on a TV show. Today, the reward might be city hall.
