2026-03-14 19:00:00
2026年2月25日，美国参议员马克韦恩·穆林（Markwayne Mullin）在华盛顿特区的参议院确认听证会上。穆林是来自俄克拉荷马州的共和党人，他被特朗普总统提名为国土安全部部长，以推动其“大规模驱逐”政策。此前，特朗普曾解雇了国土安全部长克里斯蒂·诺姆（Kristi Noem）。穆林的参议院确认听证会将在下周举行。
穆林曾是一名水管工，后来成为MMA职业选手，最终成为政治人物。他自诩为国会中的“政治局外人”和“MAGA坚定支持者”。特朗普选择穆林接任国土安全部长，部分原因是由于诺姆在处理美国公民亚历克斯·普雷蒂（Alex Pretti）和瑞妮·妮可尔·古德（Renee Nicole Good）被联邦特工杀害事件时受到越来越多的质疑。
在特朗普第一任期时，穆林就与他关系密切，后来因儿子在摔跤中受伤严重，几乎危及生命，而进一步加深了两人之间的联系。特朗普曾亲自探望穆林的儿子，并每周致电关心他们的状况，这使得穆林对特朗普更加忠诚。
特朗普与诺姆关系破裂的原因包括她对一项看起来像政治广告的2.2亿美元宣传活动表示支持，以及她对与顾问科里·刘易斯（Corey Lewandowski）的所谓婚外情问题避而不答，引发特朗普不满。
尽管穆林在亚历克斯·普雷蒂被边境巡逻人员枪杀事件后的表态与诺姆相似，但穆林更强调对特朗普的忠诚。他可能不会改变国土安全部对非法移民的驱逐政策，但会更加支持特朗普的立场。虽然一些国会议员对当前政府的政策有所保留，但出于政治考虑，他们不敢公开批评。
总体而言，国土安全部的政策方向可能不会有太大变化，但其执行方式可能会更加倾向于特朗普的个人偏好。
A major change is underway at the top of the Department of Homeland Security.
In the first Cabinet shakeup of his second term, President Donald Trump has tapped Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R) to take the lead on his “mass deportation” goals. The change comes after Kristi Noem was fired from her position as Homeland Security secretary. Mullin’s confirmation hearing in the Senate will be held next week.
Mullin, a plumber-turned-MMA fighter-turned-firebrand politician, has branded himself as a political outsider in Congress — and MAGA ultra-loyalist. Trump’s new Homeland Security pick comes after Noem’s leadership was increasingly scrutinized in the wake of the killings of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents.
As DHS has found itself at the center of controversies, funding battles, and public outrage, what will Mullin’s appointment bring to the agency?
“If you look at a lot of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, he doesn’t really go with the most qualified choice at times,” Reese Gorman, political reporter at NOTUS, told Today, Explained. “Trump really tends to pick people who he likes and also just who would give him loyalty. That tends to be one of the main things that Trump looks for when appointing people to the Cabinet.”
Gorman has covered Mullin’s political rise for years. He joined Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram to break down who Mullin is and what his vision might be for the future of the Department of Homeland Security.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
We have to start with his name, Markwayne. Where does that come from?
So his two uncles were named Mark and Wayne and they combined the names to Markwayne. And at some point, his parents thought that they would drop one of them, but he just kept them. And it’s just a very Oklahoma name, Markwayne Mullin.
And what’s his origin story? How’d he get into politics?
So Markwayne Mullin is is a member of the Cherokee Nation, one of the few Native American citizens in Congress. That is something that he is really proud of that he talks a lot about. He is also from Stilwell, Oklahoma, which is one of the poorest cities in the United States. He grew up there…and he never graduated college, he has an associate’s degree, he started a plumbing company.
And as someone who went to college there and worked there for a while, I would see Mullin Plumbing vans all over the state.
Huh!
It’s one of the biggest plumbing companies in the state. And he decided to run for Congress as this outsider, where his tagline [was] “Not a politician, a businessman.”
And in the Senate and in the House, he has a reputation for being something of a fighter, which comes from his reputation from being an actual fighter!
He was an actual professional MMA fighter.
Okay, but most pertinent to our conversation today is that President Trump likes this guy. President Trump has a soft spot for this hard dude from Oklahoma. How did their relationship develop?
Their relationship developed really early on. Markwayne is somebody that, to his credit, is really good at building relationships. And so in Trump’s first term, that was no different. He was really close with Trump. … The relationship really grew when Markwayne Mullin’s son had a really traumatic injury, almost life-threatening injury, from wrestling. … He had to be flown out to California to a specialty hospital to be operated on. It was a really scary moment for Mullin and his family. Trump would visit his son at one point and would routinely call weekly to check in on Mullin and his son.
And Mullin really credits that to his growing relationship with Trump.
And what was it that turned Trump against Kristi Noem?
The straw that broke the camel’s back was her answer to a hearing question last week by Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, where he asked if Trump had approved of this $220 million ad campaign which looked almost as though a political ad, and she said that Trump had signed off on it, which incensed Trump. He was adamant that he did not approve this.
When she was asked about her alleged affair with her adviser, Corey Lewandowski, and she did not say no, she just completely dodged the question, said she was appalled that it was even being asked — that was something that also infuriated Trump.
Has Mullin said how he wants to run DHS differently than, you know, Kristi Noem did?
Following the death of Alex Pretti when he was shot and killed by Border Patrol in Minnesota, Mullin’s statement was not much different from Kristi Noem’s. He didn’t go as far as to say he was a domestic terrorist, as Noem had said. I think that you won’t necessarily see a lot of change maybe in the rhetoric or the mission of deporting people who are here illegally.
But what I think you might see is more loyalty to Trump. Noem was constantly on TV getting ahead of the administration, and was really obsessed with the visuals of it all. And so I think maybe some of that might change, the visuals of it. But the actual overall mission is still going to be this mass deportation effort of people who are here illegally.
And as much as Republicans in Congress may have wanted leadership change at the Department of Homeland Security, they haven’t yet come out and said, “We want a policy change from the White House.”
Not at least publicly. There’s definitely members who I talk to on a daily basis [who] do express some [reservations] about the administration’s efforts right now, but they are afraid to go on the record. Being a Republican and criticizing the administration is not great for your political success. And so a lot of these members are afraid to criticize this publicly. But it is a real concern that a lot of them have, especially vulnerable members. The optics of this are really not good.
2026-03-14 06:00:00
到2040年，美国人口普查局预测，美国将首次出现65岁以上的成年人数量超过18岁以下儿童的情况。随着X世代和千禧一代逐渐步入老年，这一趋势将持续发展。然而，人们将居住在哪里？这些空间又是由谁来设计的？Vox探访了位于波士顿的The Pryde——一个经济适用的老年人住宅社区，了解Hyde Park社区的设计特点，并探讨精心设计如何改变老年人生活的体验和感受。本视频由T-Mobile: Broadband呈现。T-Mobile: Broadband不会影响我们的编辑决策，但他们使这样的视频成为可能。
By 2040, the US Census Bureau projects that, for the first time in the US, adults over the age of 65 will outnumber children under 18. The trend is set to continue as Gen X and millennials age, but where will everyone live, and who is designing those spaces?
Vox visits The Pryde, an affordable senior housing community in Boston, to see the design features of the Hyde Park community and understand how thoughtful design can transform what senior living looks and feels like.
This video is presented by T-Mobile: Broadband. T-Mobile: Broadband doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.
2026-03-14 05:50:00
2026年3月7日，特朗普总统在迈阿密特朗普国家多拉酒店举行的“美洲盾牌”峰会上听取国务卿马尔科·鲁比奥的讲话。| 萨尔·洛埃/法新社/盖蒂图片社
本文出自《Logoff》每日新闻简报，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。欢迎阅读《Logoff》：特朗普政府对古巴的压力并未减弱。发生了什么？在数月的威胁之后，古巴总统米格尔·迪亚斯-卡内尔于周五表示，他的政府正在与美国进行会谈，以寻找解决古巴日益严峻局势的“方案”。尽管尚不清楚会谈结果如何，但这标志着特朗普政府认真对待其近期言论的最新迹象。
为什么是古巴？这是一项意识形态上的项目，对国务卿马尔科·鲁比奥而言尤为重要。本周早些时候，《大西洋月刊》的维维安·萨拉玛告诉《 vox 》杂志，鲁比奥将推翻古巴共产主义政权视为其“毕生使命”。这也是所谓“唐罗道”理论的自然延伸——这是特朗普在1月美国军队成功逮捕委内瑞拉总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗后所宣称的，强调美国在该地区的霸权地位，并以军事力量为后盾。
背景如何？古巴多年来一直面临困境；2024年，古巴全国遭遇停电，其电网崩溃，此后此类问题反复出现。但自1月以来，实际上的美国封锁使情况更加恶化，切断了古巴本已陷入经济危机的能源供应。当时，特朗普在Truth Social上发帖称：“古巴将不再获得任何石油或资金——零！我强烈建议他们尽快达成协议，否则为时已晚。”
大局如何？美古会谈并不意味着更激烈的行动可能性已被排除。例如，当上个月战争爆发时，美伊仍在进行核谈判。萨拉玛还告诉《 vox 》杂志，一些支持对古巴采取军事行动的特朗普政府官员认为，这“就像撕掉创可贴一样，可以迅速完成，形成一连串的打击”。无论美国采取何种行动，古巴的局势可能意味着事件会更快达到高潮。
好了，现在是时候“下线”了……虽然冬天即将过去，但周四华盛顿特区仍有降雪，这意味着我可以分享《vox》的《难以解释》播客中的一集，讲述积雪是如何形成的及其各种有趣的特性（以及一些我们尚未解开的积雪之谜）。感谢阅读，祝您度过愉快的周末，我们周一再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration isn’t letting up the pressure on Cuba.
What’s happening? After months of threats from the Trump administration, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on Friday that his government was holding talks with the US to find “solutions” to increasingly dire conditions on the island.
It’s unclear what might come out of those talks, but it’s the latest sign the Trump administration is serious about following through on its recent rhetoric.
Why Cuba? This is an ideological project for Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Earlier this week, the Atlantic’s Vivian Salama told Vox that Rubio had made it a “lifelong mission” to topple Cuba’s Communist regime.
It’s also an unsurprising extension of the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — an assertion of US regional hegemony, backed by military force — that President Donald Trump proclaimed after US forces successfully captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.
What’s the context? Cuba has been in a difficult spot for years; in 2024, it experienced a nationwide blackout after its electrical grid collapsed — a problem that has recurred since then. But since January, a de facto US blockade has made conditions far worse, choking off all fuel to the island already suffering from economic crisis.
At the time, Trump posted on Truth Social that “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
What’s the big picture? US-Cuba talks don’t mean the possibility of more drastic action is off the table. For example, the US and Iran were still engaged in nuclear negotiations when the war began last month. Salama, of the Atlantic, also told Vox that some Trump officials backing military action believe it’s “like ripping off a Band-Aid. You get them done quickly as a one-two-three punch.”
Whatever the US does, conditions inside Cuba may mean events come to a head sooner rather than later.
Winter may be on its way out, but it still snowed in Washington, DC, on Thursday, so that means I can share this episode from Vox’s Unexplainable podcast all about how snow forms and its various cool properties (plus some snow mysteries we still don’t know the answers to).
Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!
2026-03-13 19:00:00
2026年3月11日，从阿联酋的Khor Fakkan拍摄的画面中可以看到，一名男子在海岸边的岩石上行走，而霍尔木兹海峡中停泊着油轮和货轮。这则新闻最初由Grist发布，现作为Climate Desk合作的一部分重新发布。
直到2月结束，每天都有大量船只通过霍尔木兹海峡前往世界各地。作为波斯湾与全球经济之间唯一的天然海上通道，该海峡的运输量占全球石油和天然气运输的五分之一。然而，3月2日，伊朗在美以多日军事打击后，首次封锁了该海峡，并警告任何通过的船只都将遭到攻击。自此，通过该海峡的船只频繁遭遇袭击并起火，数百艘油轮被困。至少有1800人死亡，包括伊朗最高领袖阿亚图拉·阿里·哈梅内伊和其他高级政府官员。
由于霍尔木兹海峡在世界能源供应中的关键地位，战争导致油价和天然气价格飙升，许多专家警告全球可能面临能源危机。印度的餐馆因燃料短缺而缩减运营，甚至面临关闭，斯里兰卡的液化石油气价格也在上涨。此外，这场战争还可能引发另一场全球性危机，因为该地区生产的石油和天然气是制造氮肥的重要原料，而氮肥是全球粮食系统不可或缺的组成部分。全球约三分之一的氮肥贸易和近一半的硫磺（用于生产磷肥）都通过该海峡运输。因此，霍尔木兹海峡不仅是能源通道，也是粮食运输的生命线。
东南亚的棕榈油出口面临重大中断，依赖进口大米和小麦的海湾国家的粮食运输也停滞不前。科罗拉多大学博尔德分校的Better Planet实验室的数据科学家吉尼·布拉奇（Ginni Braich）指出，如此多的食品或农业投入品通过这个狭窄的通道运输，突显了全球供应链的紧密联系和脆弱性。她表示，一旦贸易中断，这种连锁反应将对全球产生巨大影响。
布拉奇补充说，当前的时机尤为糟糕，因为北半球的春季播种季节即将来临，而肥料运输的中断将导致市场出现巨大缺口。专家警告，如果战争持续，供应减少和运输保险费用及运费上涨将导致整个供应链价格上涨。与石油不同，氮肥没有战略储备，因此无法缓冲这种冲击。虽然美国生产部分氮肥，但国内生产商无法迅速替代数百万吨的供应。像印度这样的国家，更依赖中东进口肥料，将受到严重影响。中国、印度尼西亚、摩洛哥以及多个撒哈拉以南非洲国家也可能因硫磺出口受阻而受到影响。
布拉奇还警告说，长期的运输和库存成本上升最终会传导至消费者。一些国家的农民已经开始感受到这种影响，肥料价格上涨可能压缩他们的利润，导致他们减少肥料使用，从而降低产量，甚至转向种植对投入品需求较低的作物。
美国农业部长布罗克·罗林斯（Brooke Rollins）在周二的记者会上承认了这种脆弱性，并表示美国正在寻找所有可能的解决方案来应对因伊朗冲突而飙升的肥料成本。她强调，必须停止从其他国家进口肥料。
然而，问题在于，将肥料供应链本地化可能会加剧“绿色鸿沟”，即那些能够负担本地生产肥料的国家和农民与无法负担的国家之间的差距。例如，非洲许多面临严重饥荒的国家，已经支付全球最高的肥料价格，难以承受进一步的通货膨胀。
非营利组织“粮食安全领导理事会”（Food Security Leadership Council）主席卡里·福勒（Cary Fowler）指出，从霍尔木兹海峡封锁到马拉维的儿童获得食物之间，存在许多环节。他强调，这两者之间存在明确的联系。
此外，由于特朗普政府去年解散了美国国际开发署（USAID），全球粮食援助体系崩溃，许多国家在应对粮食危机时更加困难。联合国世界粮食计划署（WFP）也最近警告称，来自美国和其他主要西方捐助国的捐款创下了历史最低水平。
福勒表示，如果不投资于可持续的生产增长，我们可能会陷入需要大量人道主义援助的困境，尤其是在当前这种紧张局势下。他提出了一个选择：是提供人道主义援助，还是选择在短期内解决这个问题，或者眼睁睁看着儿童在电视上饿死。
目前尚不清楚霍尔木兹海峡封锁将持续多久。特朗普一方面表示战争可能持续到4月甚至更久，另一方面又宣称战争几乎结束。上周，他宣布美国可能会开始护航通过该海峡的油轮。他在社交媒体上写道：“无论发生什么，美国都将确保全球能源的自由流动。”随后又表示，如果伊朗继续封锁航运，美国将采取“死亡、烈火和愤怒”的行动。周日，他告诉福克斯新闻，滞留在海峡的船只应该“展示一些勇气”并强行通过。然而，他并未提及肥料或粮食问题。
本文由WABE（亚特兰大NPR电台）的拉胡尔·巴利（Rahul Bali）提供报道。
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Up until the end of February, a steady flow of ships bound for destinations across the world would pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz. A narrow channel running between Oman and Iran, the waterway serves as the only natural maritime link between the Persian Gulf and the global economy. That all changed on March 2, when, after days of military strikes led by the US and Israel, Iran effectively closed the strait for the first time in history and warned that any ships passing through would be fired upon. Ever since, vessels moving through the channel have been attacked and set ablaze, and hundreds of tankers remain stranded. At least 1,800 people have been killed in the war, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top government officials.
The Persian Gulf is a linchpin of the planet’s oil and gas production; normally, roughly one-fifth of global oil and gas flows through the strait. Now, as it remains embattled, oil and gas prices have surged, and many experts warn an energy crisis is imminent. Restaurants across India are scaling back operations and warning of closures amid fuel shortages from the maritime blockade, while cooking gas prices are spiking in Sri Lanka.
Another world crisis sparked by the war in Iran may also be in the offing. That’s because the region’s oil and gas production has made it one of the world’s leading exporters of nitrogen fertilizers, which are indispensable to the global food system. To produce the chemicals used to grow much of the planet’s crops, natural gas is broken down to extract hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen to make ammonia, and then mixed with carbon dioxide to make urea. All told, nearly a third of the global trade for nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while almost half of the world’s sulfur, essential in producing phosphate fertilizers, also travels through the corridor.
The waterway is a lifeline for food, too. Palm oil exports coming from Southeast Asia face potential major disruptions. Grain shipments headed to Gulf countries reliant on rice and wheat imports have been stalled.
“A worrying amount of food, or inputs into modern agriculture, are going through this very small channel,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist who studies food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Better Planet Laboratory. She estimates that the strait is in the top 20th percentile of all the world’s transportation corridors just based on the sheer volume of food that passes through it. The sudden and cascading effects of trade halting through the waterway, according to Braich, “really underscores how interconnected everything is, and how fragile … just any small amount of disruption can have huge aftershocks that reverberate all around the world.”
The timing, Braich said, could not be worse, as spring planting in the northern hemisphere — crop farmers’ biggest season — is approaching. “So, basically, vessels that were leaving the Middle East today would be arriving in mid-April,” she said. “Now, the fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”
If the war persists, experts warn that the drop in supply and the increase of cargo insurance premiums and freight rates could raise prices for everyone along the supply chain. Unlike with oil, there is no meaningful strategic reserve for nitrogen-based fertilizer, so there’s no equivalent stockpile to help buffer the shocks. While the US does produce some of its own fertilizer, domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of fertilizer supplies. Other countries more reliant on fertilizer imports from the Middle East, such as India, will be hit hard by the cessation of traffic on the strait. China, Indonesia, Morocco, and several sub-Saharan African nations are also expected to be affected by the global gridlock of sulfur exports flowing from the Gulf.
Moreover, Braich warned, any prolonged increase in shipping and inventory costs “is going to be felt by the consumer.”
For some, the impact is already here. Prices for key fertilizer products are up because of the war and are expected to squeeze growers’ profit margins — which could lead farmers to ration fertilizer use, reducing yields, or even to shift from planting input-intensive crops. US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday that the Trump administration was “looking at every possible option” to address “skyrocketing” fertilizer costs for US farmers “based on actions on the other side of the world.”
About 4 billion people on the planet eat food grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Roughly half of the global population, in other words, is alive because of these chemicals converted into nutrients for plants, said Lorenzo Rosa, who researches sustainable energy, water, and food systems at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.
Of course, the fact that natural gas is the key to mass-producing synthetic fertilizers carries its own terrible climate implications. Together, manufacturing and applying synthetic fertilizers to fields and farms accounts for over 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — just about equal to the CO2 emissions from global aviation. There are low-emissions alternatives to this process, Rosa argued: Nitrogen could be recycled from waste, and natural gas plants could be powered by local or renewable energy sources and built closer to the farms that require fertilizer.
Normally, the fossil fuel-based, centralized — and, thus, fragile — supply chain for fertilizer and food is far cheaper than its alternative. But major shocks like the US-Israel war against Iran expose the dangerous vulnerability of that system, as efficient and financially sound as it may be. “At some point, a country will have to decide: ‘Do I want the cheap fertilizer, importing it from the Strait of Hormuz or another country? Or do I prefer to pay a green premium and have my own domestic production and energy and food security?’” said Rosa.
Rollins acknowledged this vulnerability in Tuesday’s press conference. “We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world, and that has to stop,” she said.
The catch, however, is that decentralizing this supply chain could inadvertently create a green divide — splitting the world between the nations and farmers who can afford domestically produced fertilizer and those who can’t. Many countries confronting widespread famine in Africa, for instance, already pay the highest fertilizer prices in the world and are unable to withstand further inflation.
“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed,” said Cary Fowler, president of the nonprofit Food Security Leadership Council and former US special envoy for global food security in the Biden administration. “The clear thing is that those two things are connected.”
The same countries that stand to face the most harmful food security effects because of the conflict in Iran are also the ones struggling to feed their citizens following the collapse of global food aid after President Donald Trump dissolved the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, last year. Emergencies like these are where the international community’s response becomes increasingly important, Fowler said.
Besides the dissolution of USAID, which halted international research efforts and initiatives to improve farming practices in lower-income nations, the UN’s World Food Programme has in recent months sounded the alarm over historically low donations from the US and other major Western donors.
“If we don’t invest in that sustainable productivity growth, then we put ourselves in a situation where we’re going to need a lot more humanitarian aid, particularly when there’s flare-ups like we’re experiencing now,” said Fowler. “And that gives us another choice — whether to provide that humanitarian aid or not. And that’s a choice of whether we want to, at least in the short term, solve the problem. Or do we want to watch children starve to death on TV?”
It’s not clear how long the strait will remain closed, although Trump has swung between stating the war with Iran could stretch on through April, if not longer, and declaring it nearly done. Last week, the president announced that the US might begin to escort oil tankers through the embattled channel. “No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media, before later declaring “death, fire, and fury” if Iran continues its shipping blockade. On Sunday, he told Fox News that ships holding there should “show some guts” and push through the strait.
The president made no mention of fertilizer — or food.
Rahul Bali of WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station and a Grist partner, contributed reporting.
2026-03-13 18:30:00
美国马里兰州贝塞斯达的国家卫生研究院（NIH）。| Mark Wilson/Newsmakers via Getty Images
想想你最担心的疾病——可能是家族中常见的疾病，比如癌症、阿尔茨海默病、糖尿病或抑郁症。无论哪种疾病，美国政府很可能一直在资助相关治疗研究。这些研究带来了许多突破，例如使致命性血液癌症变得可治愈、将艾滋病从死亡判决变为可控疾病，以及几乎能预防宫颈癌的疫苗。但去年，美国政府大幅减少了对可能带来类似突破的医学研究的资助。本周，NIH发布的新数据显示了这些削减对研究的影响。各项数据都令人震惊：阿尔茨海默病和衰老研究的新资助项目减少了50%，从2024年的369项降至2025年的177项，而美国人口正迅速老龄化。心理健康研究资助下降了47%，癌症研究资助下降了23%，尽管癌症在千禧一代和X世代美国人中迅速上升。总体来看，NIH在2024年资助了大约5000项新研究，而在2025年仅资助了约3900项。
“这是我见过最糟糕的一年，可能从上世纪80年代以来从未有过如此情况，”前国家一般医学科学研究所（NIGMS）负责人杰里米·伯格（Jeremy Berg）表示。NIH的资助系统本就处于紧张状态——研究人员太多，而资金却太少。这导致最具野心和创新性的研究项目难以获得资助。但特朗普政府的政策决定使这一问题在短短一年内急剧恶化。
NIH通过联邦资助计划来支持研究。全国的科学家提交研究提案，由外部专家小组进行评分和排名，然后每个NIH研究所（专注于医学的不同领域）根据其预算资助尽可能多的高分提案。通常情况下，每年大约有5000项新资助项目。但去年，一项政策变化对这一数字产生了比以往任何事情更大的影响。2025年7月，白宫管理和预算办公室（OMB）要求NIH必须在批准资助时一次性支付全部费用，而不是像过去那样逐年支付。从理论上讲，提前支付资助可以减少未来预算削减的风险。但问题在于：NIH资助的研究项目通常持续3到5年，这意味着每年大约有80%的预算已经被用于支付之前承诺的资助。剩下的20%才用于资助新的研究。当NIH必须一次性支付所有多年资助项目的全部费用时，每个新资助项目的成本就变得比以前高得多。前NIH资助负责人迈克尔·劳勒（Michael Lauer）简单地指出：“以前你可以资助五项研究，现在只能资助一项，其余四项就无法获得资助。”
伯格估计，这一政策变化导致大约1000项新研究无法获得资助。但这并不是唯一的问题。特朗普政府在过去一年中还终止了数千项现有研究项目——劳勒表示，他任职18年期间只见过两次这种情况。这些被终止项目的资金流入了美国财政部，而不是回到NIH。伯格估计，大约有5亿美元资金因此流失。此外，2025年的研究申请数量比2024年增加了约12%，而可分配的资金却在减少。
特朗普政府公开表示希望缩小NIH的规模，它曾提议将NIH的2026年预算削减40%，但国会尚未通过这一削减。同时，白宫还推动了一些政策变化，声称是为了恢复NIH的问责制，但这些变化实际上削弱了NIH的能力。前NIH高级官员卡里·沃尔因茨（Carrie Wolinetz）告诉STAT新闻：“人们很容易开始怀疑这两者之间是否存在某种联系。”
NIH没有就研究所层面的下降情况或终止资助项目所流失的资金作出具体回应。
当资助项目减少时，你可能会认为系统变得更加严格——只资助最优秀的想法，而放弃其他。但实际上并非如此。诺贝尔奖得主经济学家菲利普·阿吉翁（Philippe Aghion）发现，当竞争超过一定限度时，反而会抑制创新，而不是促进创新。当NIH只能资助提案的前5%或6%时，所支持的研究往往是稳健但保守的——已有实验室继续进行已知的研究。伯格表示：“你失去的是新的想法。”
英国研究人员最近发现，接种带状疱疹疫苗的人在七年后患痴呆症的风险降低了约20%。这一发现来自威尔士的一项自然实验：在某个日期之前出生的人没有资格接种疫苗，而之后出生的人则可以接种，接种疫苗的人痴呆症发病率较低。了解带状疱疹疫苗为何能预防痴呆症，以及它是否能为预防痴呆症带来新的方法，正是这种探索性研究，而现在这类研究更难获得资助。
在2023年因新冠疫苗的mRNA技术获得诺贝尔医学奖的卡塔林·卡里科（Katalin Karikó）在特朗普削减资助之前，其研究项目就多次被拒绝。对于非常规想法的窗口本就狭窄，现在更是进一步缩小。而且，很多损失可能是永久性的。当资金枯竭时，研究人员会离开——去其他国家、进入私营部门，或者彻底转向其他职业。
“那些离开研究领域或国家的人，很可能不会再回来，”马里兰大学的教授乔舒亚·维茨（Joshua Weitz）表示，他跟踪科学研究资金的流动情况。
目前已有迹象表明，2026年医学研究的形势可能会更加严峻。白宫预算办公室已经延迟了NIH对2026年资金的使用，即使国会已经批准了资金。此外，NIH今年到目前为止仅发放了大约三分之一的通常数量的新资助项目。
伯格指出，最难衡量的是那些从未有机会开始的研究。“这就像我们计划出海探索未知，但航行被取消了。也许那里有一个美丽的岛屿，拥有极其重要的发现，但我们永远无法知道。”
Think about the disease that worries you most — the one that runs in your family. Or maybe someone you love is living with it. Whether that’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or depression, odds are the US government has been funding the research to treat it.
That research is a big reason we have drugs that made fatal blood cancers survivable, treatments that turned HIV from a death sentence into something people live full lives with, and a vaccine that all but prevents cervical cancer.
But last year, the US funded dramatically fewer grants to do medical research that can lead to breakthroughs like those. New data released by the NIH this week shows how the damage from those cuts broke down.
The numbers are striking across the board.
New grants for Alzheimer’s and aging research were cut in half — from 369 in 2024 to 177, all while the US population is rapidly aging. Mental health research grants fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent — even as cancer rates are rising sharply among Gen X and millennial Americans. Across all areas, the NIH went from funding roughly 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025.
“This is the worst year I’ve ever seen, probably going back to the 1980s,” said Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of NIH’s largest institutes, from 2003 to 2011.
The NIH’s funding system was already under strain — too many researchers were chasing too few research dollars. That has always meant that the most ambitious and most unconventional ideas struggle to get funded.
But the Trump administration’s policy decisions have made that problem dramatically worse in just a single year.
The NIH funds research through federal grants. Scientists across the country submit their proposals, a panel of outside experts scores and ranks them, and then each NIH institute — each focused on a different area of medicine — funds as many top-scoring proposals as its budget allows. In a normal year, about 5,000 new grants get funded.
Last year, one policy change did more to shrink that number than almost anything else.
In July 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget required NIH to start paying the full cost of approved grants upfront — all at once, instead of paying year by year, as it has for a very long time. In principle, funding grants upfront makes them less vulnerable to future budget cuts.
But here’s the problem: When NIH funds a research project, it’s typically a commitment that stretches three to five years. That means in any given year, about 80 percent of the agency’s budget is already spoken for — paying for grants it promised in previous years. Only the remaining 20 percent of the budget is available to fund new research.
When the agency has to pay the full cost of every multiyear grant up front, that means each new grant costs several times more than it used to. Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH’s grant-making for nearly a decade before leaving the agency in early 2025, put it simply: “Instead of funding five grants, you now only fund one, and that means four other grants that would’ve been funded don’t get funded.”
Berg, the former NIH institute director, estimates this single change wiped out roughly 1,000 new grants.
But it wasn’t the only factor. The Trump administration also terminated thousands of existing grants over the past year — something Lauer said he had seen happen only twice in his entire 18-year tenure at the agency. The leftover money from those terminations went to the US Treasury, not back to NIH. Berg estimates that roughly $500 million left the system this way.
On top of that, about 12 percent more grant applications were submitted in 2025 than in 2024, all competing for the shrinking pool of funds.
The Trump administration has been open about wanting a smaller NIH; it proposed cutting the agency’s budget for 2026 by 40 percent, though Congress has not enacted that cut. At the same time, the White House has pushed policy changes it says are aimed at restoring accountability at NIH — but the effect of those changes has been to shrink the agency.
“I think it’s pretty easy to start to wonder if there is some connection between those two things,” Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior NIH official, told STAT News.
The NIH did not respond to specific questions about the institute-level declines, or what happened to the money from terminated grants.
With fewer grants to go around, you might think the system is just getting more selective — funding just the best ideas and cutting the rest. But that’s actually not how it works.
Philippe Aghion, the economist who shared last year’s Nobel Prize, found that past a certain point, more competition actually stifles innovation rather than spurs it. When NIH can only fund the top 5 or 6 percent of proposals, what survives is good but conservative science — established labs extending well-established research.
“The main thing you’re giving up there is new ideas,” Berg said.
Researchers in the UK recently discovered that people vaccinated against shingles had a roughly 20 percent lower risk of developing dementia seven years later. That finding came from a natural experiment in Wales, where people born before a certain date weren’t eligible for the vaccine and those born after were — and the group that got the vaccine had lower rates of dementia.
Understanding why a shingles vaccine works against dementia, and whether it could lead to new ways to prevent dementia, is the kind of exploratory research that would now struggle to get funded.
Katalin Karikó, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for the mRNA work behind the Covid vaccines, had her grants repeatedly rejected long before the Trump cuts. The window for unconventional ideas was already narrow. Now it’s narrowing even further.
And much of the damage could prove permanent. When funding dries up, researchers leave — for other countries, for the private sector, for careers outside science altogether. “Researchers who leave the field or the country to work elsewhere are unlikely to return,” said Joshua Weitz, a University of Maryland professor who tracks science funding.
There are early signs that 2026 could get even worse for medical research. The White House budget office has delayed NIH from spending its 2026 funding, even after Congress approved it, and the NIH has made roughly a third as many new awards as it typically would by this point in the year.
The hardest thing to measure, Berg said, is the research that never got a chance to begin. “It’s much more like we set out across the ocean to see what we could discover and the voyage was canceled. There might be some beautiful island out there of incredibly important stuff, but we’re never going to know about it.”
2026-03-13 18:00:00
2026年3月5日，国防部长彼得·海格塞思在佛罗里达州多拉的美国南方司令部总部出席了首届美洲反毒会议。| Joe Raedle/Getty Images
周三，纽约时报发布了美国对最近袭击伊朗城市门阿布的沙贾拉·泰耶贝小学的初步调查结果。调查显示，美国的战斧导弹摧毁了这所小学，造成约175人死亡（根据伊朗估计，其中大多数是儿童）。在文章发布的同时，时报还贴出了一段经核实的视频，记录了袭击后学校的情况。视频中，可以看到建筑物外墙上有一幅淡蓝色的壁画，描绘了一个孩子与蝴蝶玩耍的场景。同时，视频的音频中也包含了某人失去亲人后发出的非人般的哭喊。在这一令人震惊的报道发布后的第二天，白宫发布了一段将伊朗战争比作任天堂游戏的视频。视频配以欢快的儿童音乐，将美国描绘成参与各种Wii运动游戏的玩家，例如网球、高尔夫和保龄球等。当玩家打出完美一杆或打出全垒打时，画面就切换成美国轰炸伊朗目标的真实影像。“完美一杆！”任天堂解说员喊道，而我们却看到人类生命被无情地抹去。这种明显幼稚的图像在任何时刻都令人不安，而在沙贾拉·泰耶贝事件之后，它更像是一种道德上的恐怖。然而，这正是特朗普政府在战争期间一贯发布的这种轻浮宣传所造成的。多个官方推特账号发布了将伊朗实际轰炸与更暴力的电子游戏、战争电影如《勇敢的心》、体育精彩片段以及国防部长彼得·海格塞思的演讲配以电影预告片式音乐的混剪视频。对白宫而言，战争并非地狱，而是一场游戏。> 美国式正义。🇺🇸🔥 图片。推特。com/0502N6a3rL > — 白宫（@WhiteHouse）2026年3月6日
在某种程度上，这并不令人意外。特朗普政府从上到下都由热衷于制造话题的人组成。他们把一切事情——从结束外援到驱逐移民——都变成了网络迷因。为什么战争要有所不同？然而，战争，特别是对学校的袭击，揭示了这种治理方式的有害性。在线生活成为道德轻视的工具，政策的真正后果变得次要，而人们更关注的是点赞和转发。他们是在为了聊天而进行战争。在这个内容为王的世界里，轰炸的含义不再是失去的生命或战略上的胜利，而是如何将其包装成一段展示“光环战士”（Master Chief）的精彩片段。数十名死于此次袭击的女童对白宫而言，不如海格塞思说“致命性”时的声音重要。这种缺乏明确现实依据的网络战争，创造了自己的理由。它将暴行变成次要的考虑：不是带着清白的良心去杀人，而是毫无意识地杀人。
从历史来看，美国的战争宣传通常遵循一个相对可预测的模式。总统会刻意构建一个论点，即战争是可怕的但必要的：某些重大的美国利益或高尚的道德目标需要流血牺牲。一旦战争开始，官方政府宣传通常较为克制；那些更具攻击性的内容，如二战期间对日本的种族主义描绘，往往是在一些重大事件引发公众对敌人的愤怒之后才出现的（如珍珠港事件）。即使如此，最极端的内容通常还是由媒体和流行文化来传播。南加州大学安纳伯格传播学院的传播学学者尼克·库尔（Nick Cull）认为，当前的伊朗战争打破了这一模式。特朗普政府不仅未能说服公众战争是必要的，甚至几乎没有尝试。战争开始后，政府几乎立即发布了各种“轰炸效果”的视频。库尔指出，以往的政府会“谨慎且充满悔意地谈论军事行动”，而特朗普政府则将美国军事行动简化为“高中橄榄球比赛的加油声”。库尔认为，这种做法源于政府对媒体形象的过度关注，这种关注早在35年前就有人提出过理论。1991年，哲学家让·鲍德里亚（Jean Baudrillard）曾写过一篇著名的文章，认为海湾战争本质上是一种媒体虚构。鲍德里亚并不是否认美国轰炸伊拉克，而是指出，随着24小时有线电视新闻网络的兴起，战争的视觉效果构建了一个与实际战争相差甚远的公众叙事。他写道：“那些自诩为普遍良知的记者，那些自诩为战略家的节目主持人，却用大量无用的图像淹没我们。”在这一合成现实中，战争被想象成一场高科技武器在夜视镜头下的烟花表演，而不是那些在战场上堆积的尸体。尽管当时鲍德里亚的批评显得有些夸张甚至偏执，但他在当时对媒体传播的真相能力持悲观态度，认为“我们没有手段”去辨别真相。然而，他仍然强调，人们不应被战争的“虚拟性”所欺骗。在当时，这种观点似乎过于激烈，甚至有些偏执。尽管海湾战争的报道并不完美，但像CNN这样的媒体有强烈的职业动机去避免脱离现实的报道。然而，到了2003年第二次伊拉克战争时期，随着911事件后恐惧情绪和爱国主义的高涨，媒体变得更加公开地支持民族主义，鲍德里亚对有线电视的批评也显得更加尖锐。而在当今社交媒体环境中，负责任的媒体把关人已被取代，我们的信息流是一连串未经验证的图像和缺乏上下文的短视频，注意力成为一种不考虑真实准确性的货币。因此，鲍德里亚的批评如今显得令人不安地现实。
正如鲍德里亚的文章所暗示的，美国政府多年来一直被指责向其公民展示战争的电子游戏版本。这次的不同之处在于，政府似乎将这种批评当作一种赞美：没错，战争就是一场电子游戏。来加入我们，一起玩吧！他们之所以这样做，并非仅仅是出于有意识的操控。相关政策制定者本身也是这种类型宣传的热衷消费者，他们既是生产者，也是消费者。总统曾是真人秀主持人，沉迷于社交媒体。国防部长是前福克斯新闻人物，至少还有20名高级雇员也是。副总统是网络迷因制造者，FBI局长则是播客主持人。当然，政府最重要的私人部门盟友是埃隆·马斯克——一位身家接近万亿美元的亿万富翁，他拥有美国右翼主流社交媒体平台。在这样一群人的领导下，政府倾向于将网络世界视为政治冲突的主要战场，甚至比现实世界更加真实。谎言、混乱和表演之间的界限变得模糊，几乎无法区分。重要的是，美国军队是否真的在击败伊朗，但更重要的是他们能否说服自己和他们的网络支持者，他们正在这样做。这些战争宣传视频并不旨在说服中立的观众，而是专门针对那些已经支持政府的人。它们的主要作用是削弱人们的思考能力，用集体的迷因狂欢取代对后果的严肃考虑。一位受欢迎的右翼推特账号曾写道：“如果你不想让美国介入伊朗，但潜艇杀戮视频却令人作呕。”下面附有一张模棱两可的拉里·大卫（Larry David）的GIF图。因此，这不仅是政府和其网络支持者之间的集体自我欺骗，更是一种集体开脱。在门阿布的暴行，以及任何其他地方的暴行，与那些令人作呕的“击杀”相比，都显得微不足道。
On Wednesday, the New York Times published the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the recent airstrike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, an elementary school for girls in the Iranian city of Minab. The investigation confirmed what all public evidence had pointed to: that an American Tomahawk missile destroyed the school, killing roughly 175 people per Iranian estimates — most of whom were children.
Alongside the article, the Times posted a verified video from the school in the hours following the bombing. You can see, on the remains of the building’s outer wall, a light blue mural depicting a child playing with a butterfly. You can hear, in the video’s audio, the inhuman wails of someone who had just lost a child dear to them.
The day after this damning news report, the White House released a video depicting the Iran war as a Nintendo game.
The video, set to jaunty childlike music, depicts the United States as a player in various Wii Sports games — tennis, golf, bowling, etc. When the player character hits a hole in one, or bowls a strike, it cuts to real-life footage of a US bomb hitting an Iranian target. “Hole in one!” the Nintendo announcer declares, as we watch human lives being erased.
The video’s overtly childish imagery would be appalling at any point. In the wake of the news about Sharajah Tayyebeh, it approximates a form of moral horror. Yet it is what we have come to expect from the Trump administration, which has been releasing this sort of trivializing propaganda throughout the war.
Various official X accounts have posted videos intercutting real bombings in Iran with clips from more violent video games, war films like Braveheart, sports highlights, and speeches from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth set to movie-trailer-style epic music.
War is not hell, for this White House — it is fun.
In some ways, this is not a surprise. The Trump administration is staffed, from top to bottom, by inveterate posters. They have turned everything — from the end of foreign aid to ICE raids — into memes. Why treat war any differently?
But war, and the school attack in particular, illustrate the pernicious function of this method of governance. Living online becomes a vehicle of moral trivialization, where tangible consequences of stakes of policy become secondary to the more immediately accessible world of likes and reposts. They are doing war for the chat.
In this world of Content, the meaning of a bombing raid is not the lives lost or strategic gains won but how good it looks when repackaged into a sizzle reel featuring Master Chief from Halo. Dozens of dead girls matter less to the White House than how Hegseth sounds when he says “lethality.”
This online war, lacking in any clear real-world justification, creates its own. And in doing so, it turns atrocity into afterthought: killing not with a clean conscience, but with no consciousness at all.
Historically, American wartime propaganda follows a fairly predictable script.
The president deliberately builds a case that war is a terrible necessary: that some grave American interest, or noble moral cause, requires the spilling of blood. Once the war begins, official government propaganda remains relatively restrained; the vicious stuff, like the racist depictions of Japanese during World War II, tends to come after some major event inciting the public against the enemy (like Pearl Harbor). And even then, the most lurid content gets outsourced to the press and or popular culture.
Nick Cull, a scholar of propaganda at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication, sees the current Iran war as a break with this pattern. The Trump administration not only failed to convince the public that the war is necessary, but it scarcely even tried. Once the war began, the administration almost immediately began publishing death and destruction fancams.
Previous administrations used “to talk carefully and regretfully about military actions,” Cull says. Under Trump the US “reduces American military activity to team talk — high school football cheering.”
This is, Cull theorizes, a function of the administration’s preoccupation with media imagery — for reasons that had been theorized about 35 years prior.
In 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a famous essay series arguing that the Gulf War was, in essence, a kind of media fiction. Baudrillard was not denying that the United States was dropping bombs on Iraq, but rather that the visual spectacle of the war created on then-novel 24-hour cable news networks had constructed a public narrative that bore only questionable resemblance to the war actually being waged.
“All those journalists who set themselves up as bearers of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images,” Baudrillard wrote.
In this synthetic reality, war was imagined as a fireworks show of high-tech precision weapons over night-vision skies, and not the bodies piled up where they landed. While he was pessimistic about observers’ ability to establish the truth behind the broadcast — “we do not have the means,” he wrote — Baudrillard believed it was nonetheless important to “not be duped” by the “virtuality” of the war.
Much of this seemed overheated at the time — even paranoid. Coverage of the Gulf War was hardly perfect, but responsible journalists at outlets like CNN had strong professional incentives to avoid brazenly detaching their broadcasts from reality.
But by the time the second Iraq War rolled around, a moment when post-9/11 fear and jingoism pushed media in a more openly chauvinistic direction, Baudrillard’s critique of cable news stung harder. And in today’s social media environment — where responsible gatekeepers have been dethroned, our feeds are a continuous tide of unverified images and contextless short videos, and attention is a currency that spends regardless of underlying accuracy — it feels uncomfortably prescient.
As Baudrillard’s essay suggests, the US has been accused for decades of presenting its citizens a videogame version of war. What’s perhaps most different this time is the degree to which the government takes this criticism as a compliment: You’re damn right it’s a video game. Come over and let’s play!
Their motives for doing so are not as simple as conscious manipulation. The relevant policymakers are enthusiastic consumers of this type of propaganda just as much as they are producers.
The president is a former reality TV host and social media addict. The defense secretary is a former Fox News personality, as were at least 20 other high-level hires. The vice president is a poster, the FBI director a podcaster. The administration’s most influential private sector ally is, of course, Elon Musk — a near-trillionaire who owns the right’s leading social media outlet.
With this class of person calling the shots, there is a persistent tendency to treat the online as the real zone of political conflict — almost more real than actual reality. The line between lying, confusion, and performance becomes blurred, almost indistinguishable. What matters is not only whether the American military is truly beating Iran, but the extent to which they can convince themselves and their online supporters that they are.
The wartime sizzle reels fail as actual propaganda: No one who doesn’t already support the administration will be impressed by grainy bombing footage paired with a clip of Walter White growling, “I am the danger.” Yet if the audience is understood to be the right’s very online cadres, which now include the top policymakers in American government, it makes perfect sense: They believe they can meme the war they want into existence.
This reduction of real-world issues of life and death into a quest for likes has infected the White House at every turn. And the further away from people’s daily lives and experience the damage, the more thoughtless and triumphant the memes.
Consider roughly a year ago, back when Musk was in charge of DOGE. His signature accomplishment during that time was not making government more efficient or even reducing spending, which has since gone up. Rather, he and his team succeeded in one key objective: destroying USAID, the agency dedicated to providing lifesaving aid to the world’s poorest people.
The real human stakes of this decision were absolutely enormous: One estimate suggests that roughly 800,000 people may have already died as a result of Musk’s actions. Yet he destroyed USAID not based on any kind of serious evaluation of its policy, but rather on his social media obsessions.
DOGE agents first began scrutinizing the agency not because of its budget, which was tiny, but in order to find examples of “viral waste” they could easily mock on social media. In the hours before the agency’s destruction, Musk was chatting with right-wing influencers on X about how USAID was a “criminal organization” that needed to “die” based on a web of conspiracy theories shared back and forth between them. And after his precipitous decision to cut off its funds, which caused medicine and food supplies to literally rot in warehouses, he joked about the whole thing being an imposition on his social calendar.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties [sic]. Did that instead,” he wrote on X.
That post got 21,000 reposts and 159,000 likes. And there is no doubt that Musk experienced each and every one of those accolades as more meaningful than the life of every child who died from preventable cases of malaria or AIDS. The online world is more immediate to him, the polluted water in which he swims, what happens there shapes his actions and sense of self more than the ultimate consequences of his behavior.
The Trump administration’s communication strategy seems designed to cultivate this incuriosity among themselves as much as anyone else. The real-world pain of ICE deportations, communities upended and families ripped apart, is replaced with stylized footage of teched-out federal agents and AI-generated Miyazaki memes of crying migrants. The officials involved bathe in the online accolades from their supporters, immersing them in a cocoon where they do not truly have to consider what they have done.
And now, we are seeing what it looks like to run a war on these principles.
The mass murder at the Minab girls’ was, it appears, a targeting accident: Years ago, the school used to be part of a nearby Iranian navy facility. Yet this accident may well have been preventable; the Pentagon used to have dedicated offices designed to assess intelligence and targeting decisions that might lead to undue civilian casualties. Hegseth spent the past year demolishing them, describing military lawyers as “jagoffs” who got in the way of the “lethality” of America’s “warfighters.”
There is, in short, a plausible straight line between Hegseth’s bluster and atrocity. Yet the bluster will continue, with no self-reflection: A thoroughly mediated creation, Hegseth is nothing but his persona. He will not give it up.
Nor will Trump make him. The president has responded to the news in Minab with a mix of disinterest and risible lies — at one point, claiming that an Iranian Tomahawk missile blew the school (Iran does not have these American made-weapons). The actuality of events has not penetrated his bubble; he is dancing to YMCA as oil tankers burn and bodies cool.
The wartime sizzle reels are another manifestation of this ethos. Built not to persuade a neutral audience, but rather to appeal to those already-bought in, their primary service is thought-deadening: replacing any serious consideration of consequences with collective reveling in memes. “When you didn’t want the US involved with Iran but the submarine kill videos are sick,” one popular right-wing X account tweeted, with a GIF of an ambivalent Larry David posted below the text.
It thus is not just collective self-deception at work for the administration and its very online supporters: It is collective exculpation. The crimes at Minab, and anywhere else, pale in comparison to sick kills.