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In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”)

I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House:

I did post it. And I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, there’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. I had just heard about it, and I said, “How did they come up with that?” It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better.

It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus.

How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity.

On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modelled on those built by Napoleon and the Roman emperors to celebrate their military victories. At two hundred and fifty feet tall, it would be the biggest such structure in the world. Asked last fall by CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe what this modern-day arch was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.”

One might conclude from the fact that Trump quickly deleted his Jesus post on Monday morning, some thirteen hours after posting it on Orthodox Easter, that he realized he had gone too far, even for many of his most vocal followers. There’s no doubt that the online backlash was swift and laugh-out-loud funny, the worst kind of insult to a man who sees himself as endowed with otherworldly powers. I particularly loved one from Sarah Palin—an image of Jesus seemingly begging Trump to stop making such an ass of himself: “Alright. That’s enough. Give me the phone.” You literally cannot buy publicity this bad for a politician.

At such a moment, it would seem to be an extreme case of political malpractice for the President to pick a public fight about the extent of God’s imprimatur on his decision to go to war on immigrants at home and Iranians abroad with no less of an authority on God than the Pope himself. Even before the whole I-am-Jesus thing, Trump’s popularity was plummeting to historic lows as his war upended the global economy and sent prices for oil, gas, and a zillion other products skyrocketing.

But the cult lives. On Thursday morning, at a Pentagon press briefing, there was Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, comparing Trump to the Lord once again, as he likened reporters’ “incredibly unpatriotic” coverage of the President’s conflict in the Middle East to the evil Pharisees tearing down Jesus after he had performed a miracle in front of their very eyes. (That same day, it was revealed that Hegseth, during a Pentagon sermon, had quoted fake Bible verses from the movie “Pulp Fiction”—who knew that Trump 2.0 could turn “Saturday Night Live” into a reality-TV show?)

At almost exactly the same time that Hegseth was going on about the Pharisees, Pope Leo’s latest missive to his flock landed on X. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and Patriarch of the West wrote to his tens of millions of followers.

Not long after, Trump was given the opportunity to walk away from his no-win feud. But, no, responding to reporters’ questions on the White House lawn, he suggested that the Pope, in condemning war as the Scriptures demand, was in fact in favor of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon, whereas he, Trump, would not allow that to happen. “I want him to preach the Gospel, I’m all about the Gospel,” the President added. I am not much of a Bible quoter, but it seems pretty clear which side the Lord would be on in this fight between the Orange Jesus and the real one’s personal emissary on earth.

The folly of the ancient Roman emperors springs to mind here. History has not judged kindly their demand that their subjects not only build great arches in their honor but that they literally worship their rulers as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God. Those imperial cults of personality, and many of their monuments, lasted no longer than the short period of their rule. Trump may scar our beautiful capital with golden memorials to himself, but how long, really, will it last, this tacky reign of a President who styles himself a MAGA god? ♦

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Like David Lowery’s 2017 film “A Ghost Story,” his new film, “Mother Mary,” is a tale of a haunting that’s set mainly in a single location. With “A Ghost Story,” it was one house in Texas; in “Mother Mary,” it’s a fashion designer’s studio in rural England. The titular character (Anne Hathaway) is a pop star who’s been on hiatus and who, three days before her comeback concert, barges into the compound of her estranged costume designer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), and demands a new dress for the occasion. Mother Mary (which is the character’s stage name; her actual name goes unspoken) had, as it turns out, stopped working with Sam years ago and teamed up with other designers. During that interregnum, Mary endured personal calamity. Now, reuniting with Sam, she brings a volatile blend of contrition and arrogance, wheedling and insistence.

“Mother Mary” is a chamber piece of sorts. Most of the movie involves the two women’s dialogue-heavy wrangling over the terms of their relationship, present and past—what Mary wants from Sam and what Sam demands in return, what they had and how Mary broke it. The nature of their bond also lends the movie its metaphysical dimension. Avoiding spoilers, let’s say that the two women share a ghost, though Sam at first believes that it’s hers alone and considers Mary’s claim on the spirit to be yet another example of the singer’s starcissism. The script, written by Lowery, is filled with aphoristic barbs, especially from Sam. She calls the singer a “carcinogen,” “a tumor,” “a malignancy” and says that “love and hate are bound” before adding, “you deserve neither.” She asks Mary to describe her emotions, which will inform the costume designs—Sam calls her own art of fashion the “transubstantiation of feeling”—and when Mary chides her for digging deeply the designer explains, “I need to see what I’m meant to cover.” Coel endows each of these lines with balletic verbal artistry; the women may speak in equal measure, but it’s Sam’s voice that shapes and sharpens the dialectical action.

In “A Ghost Story,” Lowery relied on the cliché of a white sheet with black eyeholes to incarnate, with bittersweet wit, the presence of a disembodied spirit. The ghost in “Mother Mary” is similarly fabricated, pun intended: it takes the form of a piece of lavish, blood-red chiffon that spirals and contorts in the air. Among the few scenes that take place outside of the studio are flashbacks involving the ghost. One involves a séance for Mary held by a mysterious interloper named Imogen (FKA Twigs), whose revelations send the singer into self-harming conniptions. Unfortunately, these supernatural tales drop into the story as conveniences rather than as spiritual experiences. (There’s no sense whatsoever that the religious implications of the singer’s stage name connect with her offstage life.) The scenes of ghostly encounters symbolize the longtime collaborators’ deep bond and difficult separation—Sam’s pained effort to detach herself from the friend who’d spurned her, Mary’s agonized isolation from the friend she’d spurned—but they end up replacing any substantive discussion that the two women might have had about their breakup. The script’s blank spots and evasions leave the drama feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfying. At one point, Sam asks Mary outright why she went to another designer. Mary responds, “I told you I needed a change,” but she has just about nothing to say about her costumes, her performance, her way of life. She describes a new song with the cringey boast that it “might be the best song ever written in the history of songs.”

Another set of flashbacks, showing Mother Mary performing onstage, doesn’t help from a dramatic perspective, and it does the character no favors. Hathaway is among the more rational and self-aware of current actors, with a manner that suggests both the ability to see a step ahead and the prudence not to flaunt it. (She reminds me, in this regard, of the classic-Hollywood actress Myrna Loy.) Thoughtful discipline may avert reckless performances, but it can also make the portrayal of heedless characters seem effortful. What takes place onstage in “Mother Mary” often comes across as mechanical, methodical, learned rather than lived-in, not solely because of the character’s stage manner or the actor’s temperament but because of the gaps in Lowery’s script. The actual work, the passion and the tension, of being a pop star—the writing of songs, the rehearsals, the fittings, the stagings, the workouts, the tie-ins, the choreography, the contracts, the lawyers, the money—are nowhere to be found. The behind-the-scenes passion is missing, too. The scenes of live performance show that Mother Mary is a star but don’t show why she’s a star, because Lowery, who is often among the most expressively compositional of filmmakers, films them generically, as if averaging visual tropes from concert films. Even the most active scene at the studio—of Mary dancing for Sam as she’ll do in concert—is oddly chopped up. Unlike the graceful ghost and the haunted humans in “A Ghost Story,” Hathaway is given little time or space to move.

“Mother Mary” is exemplary of troubling trends in the current cinema. As a so-called two-hander that’s also mainly a one-setter, it’s essentially a filmed play—and not one teeming with a well-meshed ensemble but a sharply delimited one, akin to such other recent small-scale films as “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Send Help,” “Daddio,” “His Three Daughters,” “Malcolm & Marie,” and even Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” among his many films of the past decade to take a localized approach. The prevalence of this format reflects a fundamental crisis in realistic, character-driven cinema, as filmmakers try to navigate two conflicting commercial demands: to cast celebrities and to keep budgets low. A big chunk of the production money in such movies may go to paying the stars and providing their customary working conditions, leaving much less for the filmmaking itself; this forces directors to rely on a narrow scope of sets and locations, few (if any) supporting actors, and relatively spare action. The challenge then becomes how to evoke a wide world on a small scale.

It can be done. Ira Sachs’s “Peter Hujar’s Day,” starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, is based on a real-life document—a recorded discussion, from 1974, between the acclaimed photographer Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, that was later published as a book. Sachs stages the characters’ dialogue mainly inside an apartment, but the subjects they broach and the stories that emerge conjure the characters’ experiences in the outside world with a visually evocative force more powerful than actual flashbacks. By contrast, most other recent two-hand-one-setters suggest a resigned effort to make whatever film is possible in a commercially narrowed environment.

This sense of constraint reverberates through “Mother Mary,” and “A Ghost Story” again provides a revealing point of comparison. The 2017 film also had a starry cast (Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, who were also friends of Lowery’s). It was made for a little more than a hundred thousand dollars, put up by Lowery himself and three friends. As Lowery put it, “No one got paid.” However unsustainable as a business model, those conditions gave rise to passionate work, and the collective fervor of cast and crew is reflected in the film’s thrillingly intense images. “Mother Mary,” by contrast, seems to want it both ways: it’s a small-scale movie of a manufactured sumptuousness, flaunting Hollywood-standard production values on its few sets. The film was shot in Germany, with a big crew, and even just the cost of transportation and lodging for the team must have been more than the whole budget of “A Ghost Story.” But the result feels like a Hollywood production done on the cheap, with strenuous efforts to mask its small scale. The handful of concert scenes are more a matter of showy display than dramatic import, and the many images of the two protagonists talking appear to strive not even for expression but for mere visual variety. That sense of strain makes the movie come off as a cry for help on behalf of the entire independent filmmaking community as it faces contradictory commercial demands.

In a sense, Mother Mary goes to Sam as Lowery went to his friends to make “A Ghost Story,” not with an arm’s-length business deal but on the basis of friendship. The fraught bond at the center of “Mother Mary” suggests that Lowery keenly discerns the personal conflicts of professional relationships, the dependence and independence that artmaking entails, the need and the pressure of collaboration, the breakups and the reunions, the behind-the-scenes clashes from which movies emerge. Lowery, as director, asks people to work for him on a project that he signs as auteur; at the same time, he’s also, in effect, dressing his stars, doing whatever he can to help them shine in the spotlight. (He has excelled at this in the past, as in “The Old Man & the Gun,” his 2018 film, in which Robert Redford is glorious in a starring role which turned out to be his last.) But there’s little in “Mother Mary” to suggest anything of the experience of stardom or, for that matter, of directing. As for the experience of dealing with stars, “Mother Mary” offers little but the sense of their great neediness and self-centeredness, as if that were news. The very casting of its stars comes across as the film’s main story instead of the one onscreen.

The most frustrating moment in the movie arrives when Sam, in her studio, helps relieve Mary of the ghost by way of a homemade exorcism, complete with chalk circle, candles, and a pentagram. A stickpin is also involved, and Mary pricks her finger with it. To continue the rite, Sam then takes the same pin and pricks her own finger. This is not the mutual intermingling ritual of blood-sisters; only Sam introduces Mary’s blood into her own. As a metaphor for assistantship and subordination, the image is strong. But it also has racialized implications that the movie leaves entirely unexplored—an omission that’s all the more glaring given that the character of Imogen, the séance-holder, is yet another Black assistant for Mary. The failure to acknowledge that a Black woman taking in a white woman’s blood would have any dramatic significance, not least to the characters themselves, suggests just how little of his own film Lowery seems to see. ♦

On March 1st, a day after Israel, guided by American intelligence, killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a series of air strikes, the little-known hard-line speaker of Iran’s parliament vowed revenge. “You have crossed our red line and must pay the price,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared on state media. “We will deal you such terrifying blows.” He wore funereal black. His face glowered. He called President Donald Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “filthy criminals.”

Six weeks later, after continued strikes by the United States and Israel killed dozens of Iranian government leaders, the sixty-four-year-old Ghalibaf has emerged as one of the regime’s most powerful figures. And, over the weekend, he made history. In Pakistan, he led an Iranian delegation in marathon peace talks with the U.S., marking the highest-level meeting between the two countries since Iran’s Islamic Revolution, in 1979. Ultimately, the twenty-one hours of negotiations ended in a deadlock, with the main sticking point being the extent to which Iran’s nuclear activity will be allowed to continue. The disagreement prompted Trump to announce a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, to pressure Iran into accepting a deal by cutting off its ability to export oil. Still, Ghalibaf has made an impression on the U.S. delegation. On Sunday, in a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that his negotiators, including Vice-President J. D. Vance, the Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, became “very friendly and respectful” toward Iran’s representatives. The foreign-affairs columnist David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post that “after long hours of discussion, Ghalibaf had impressed the American team as a refined and professional bargainer—and potential leader of a new Iran.”

Since Khamenei’s death, Trump has openly expressed interest in an outcome similar to what the U.S. was able to accomplish in Venezuela, viewing it as a blueprint for the current war. After U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuela’s authoritarian ruler, Nicolás Maduro, in an overnight raid, the White House quickly made a deal with Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, to run the country in accordance with U.S. aims. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told the Times in March. Later that month, he told reporters at a Cabinet meeting that taking control of Iran’s oil was an “option,” noting that the United States had made “billions of billions of dollars” in its deal with the Rodríguez government to access Venezuela’s oil reserves. And, on Sunday, he posted an article on Truth Social that compared his strategy for the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to American tactics in Venezuela. There, U.S. forces had seized tankers and attacked boats allegedly used by drug traffickers before capturing Maduro. Trump, the article gushed, “brought the Venezuelan economy to its knees with a naval blockade that strangled the nation’s oil revenues.” The talks in Pakistan illustrated this aim. After leaving Islamabad, Vance said on Fox News that there had been “some good conversations” with Iran over the weekend and that progress had been made. And on Tuesday, at an event held by the conservative group Turning Point USA, Vance said that “the person who is effectively running the country in Iran” sat across from him in the talks, referring to Ghalibaf, adding that he thought the Iranian delegation “wanted to make a deal.” Trump also declared Iran’s new leadership as “less radical and much more reasonable,” and insisted that regime change has already occurred “because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime—we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.”

But several Iran experts told me that it was highly unlikely there would be anyone similar to a Delcy Rodríguez-like figure in the Iranian leadership. The newly elevated leaders, including Ghalibaf, owe their power to the same authoritarian theocracy that sustained the Ayatollah’s regime. They were inculcated in the belief that America is the “Great Satan”—and that mentality hasn’t changed. The structure of the Iranian government is also not similar to that of Venezuela, which was highly centralized and relied partly on a cult of personality revolving around Maduro, and Hugo Chávez before him. Although the Ayatollah certainly operated as a figurehead, Iran’s power structure is largely decentralized, with several overlapping spheres of influence including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the judiciary, and a specialized, all-powerful council that dictates national-security policy. This structure has allowed the Iranian regime to survive decapitation strikes, and to regroup and fight back. Since the Ayatollah was killed, Iran has gained leverage over the United States and Israel by blockading the Strait of Hormuz and torpedoing the global economy. “The Iranians don’t feel the need for a Delcy,” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution who has advised both Democratic and Republican Presidents on Iran policy, told me. “They believe they won the war, and they believe they still hold the trump card of control over the strait,” adding that the blockade “will continue to have massive economic implications for the entire world. As long as they can control that, they don’t see the need to present a more amenable or compliant face to the Americans.” Iranians, Maloney said, are “a very proud and determined people,” and unless they faced “a full-fledged defeat,” it’s unlikely that someone from the existing system “would be prepared to abase themselves in the way that Delcy Rodríguez has.”

An unexpected consequence of the U.S. and Israeli decision to strike Iran is that the country’s new leaders appear to be, in fact, more hard-line, more militaristic, and more reckless than their predecessors. In addition to Ghalibaf, General Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who now leads the Supreme National Security Council, and Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, the new commander of the I.R.G.C., are currently in charge of the Iranian government’s day-to-day operations. And, despite Ghalibaf’s appearance at the negotiations in Pakistan, Vahidi and Zolghadr are widely seen as far more influential than him behind the scenes. Ghalibaf “is a senior figure, but he’s not the one who truly holds power in Iran,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli defense-intelligence officer with expertise in Iran, posted on X, shortly after Vance spoke at the Turning Point USA event. “At most, he would have come to any engagement with clearly defined limits set in Tehran. He is neither empowered nor inclined to compromise on core strategic issues.”

Ghalibaf, Zolghadr, and Vahidi all rose to prominence during the Iran-Iraq War of the nineteen-eighties, as part of a class of experienced I.R.G.C. commanders, and they maintain close ties to the hawkish wing of the paramilitary group, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. In January, before the war, Trump called upon Iranians to keep demonstrating in the streets as the regime viciously cracked down on protesters, killing thousands. He declared on Truth Social that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” This crackdown was largely conducted by the I.R.G.C. and the Basij, an ideological militia it controls and deploys to suppress domestic dissent. So, the leaders that the Trump Administration has dubbed “less radical” are among Iran’s worst abusers of human rights. “You now have power shifting from the office of the Supreme Leader to the Revolutionary Guards, and a group of Revolutionary Guards leaders who have a very dim view of the outside world, of the U.S. in particular, and also have a long track record in domestic repression,” Ali Vaez, the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group, told me.

In January, Ghalibaf branded the nationwide protests as “sedition,” declaring them instigated by the United States and Israel. He praised the police and the Basij, for their brutal crackdown. Ghalibaf has long been involved in brutal attacks against protesters. Early in his career, in July, 1999, when he was the I.R.G.C. Air Force commander, Ghalibaf signed a letter alongside other I.R.G.C. leaders warning Mohammad Khatami, a President who had campaigned on a reformist platform, that they would remove him from power if he didn’t suppress ongoing student protests triggered by the censorship of newspapers that advocated for more liberalization. He has also admitted to going out into those protests on a motorcycle and beating people in the crowd with a wooden stick. In 2003, as Iran’s national police chief, Ghalibaf played a central role in the violent clampdown on student demonstrations. He reportedly boasted about ordering police to fire live rounds at demonstrators. Later, from 2005 to 2017, Ghalibaf served as mayor of Tehran , where he was credited with building bridges and highways, and improving public transportation. He unsuccessfully ran for President several times. He has also long been dogged by accusations of corruption; in 2022, he took heat after his family reportedly went on a lavish shopping spree and purchased luxury apartments in Istanbul. Ghalibaf has denied the allegations. At the same time, he has shown a chameleonlike ability to change his image. In 2008, while serving as Tehran’s mayor, he visited Davos, Switzerland, where he was the subject of a profile in the Times. The paper described Ghalibaf as an “authoritarian modernizer” who had “earned a reputation as someone who gets things done.” He told the paper that he favored a more open Iran to attract foreign investment. Iran, he said, didn’t want to build nuclear weapons, and that dialogue with Washington was possible if it treated Iran as a partner, not as a renegade.

The seventy-two-year-old Zolghadr spent much of his career climbing the ranks of the I.R.G.C., eventually becoming its deputy commander. He has also taken on a number of high-level political, judicial, and security roles in the regime. Zolghadr played a central role in the regime’s strategies for cracking down on anti-government demonstrations, including in the 2009 Green Movement protests. In 2007, the U.N. Security Council sanctioned him for his role in advancing Iran’s missile programs, and in 2023, the U.K. sanctioned him for involvement in “nuclear activity.” In his current role, he succeeded Ali Larijani, who was killed in an Israeli air strike. Larijani oversaw the bloody repression of protesters in January but was widely seen as a pragmatist, and more moderate than Zolghadr. His appointment is “more proof of hardline military aka IRGC consolidation,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in a post on X, adding that there can be no doubt “that the war expedited and accelerated the ongoing trend of increasing IRGC control of the country.”

Vahidi, who is sixty-seven, is the newly appointed head of the I.R.G.C. Both of Vahidi’s predecessors were killed by Israeli air strikes—the first was killed last summer, the second in the latest fighting—and he took over the role in early March. A former commander of the Quds Force, the special-forces unit of the I.R.G.C., Vahidi played a foundational role in building up Iran’s asymmetric warfare and intelligence operations after the Iran-Iraq War. Vahidi has also served as Iran’s defense minister and interior minister. An arrest warrant was issued for him in Argentina, for his alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed eighty-five people. Iran has denied involvement. Vahidi was sanctioned by the United States and the European Union for human-rights violations for his role overseeing security forces that violently suppressed nationwide protests, killing hundreds, following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. (Amini, a twenty-two-year-old student, was arrested for not wearing a hijab, or head scarf, properly, and she died in police custody.) Mohammad Ali Shabani, the editor of Amwaj, a U.K.-based news outlet covering the Middle East, wrote in a post on X that Vahidi’s predecessors as head of the I.R.G.C. were “schoolteachers compared to this guy. The man is brutal. Hardliners wasting no time filling vacancies thanks to Israel.”

Other influential hard-liners include Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i and the national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan. Both were instrumental in the deadly suppression of protesters in December and January, and they have continued to order arrests, executions, and large deployments of the Basij forces to intimidate Iranians and prevent dissent. “For the foreseeable future, Iran is going to remain a very repressive state and probably become even more dangerous to its own people than it has been for the preceding decades,” Maloney told me.

Then there is Mojtaba Khamenei, the fifty-six-year-old son of Ali Khamenei, and his successor as Ayatollah. Under normal circumstances, Mojtaba’s position as Ayatollah would make him Iran’s most powerful religious, political, and military leader. But the younger Khamenei hasn’t been seen in public or photographed since the war began. He reportedly suffered severe injuries in the Israeli air strike that killed his father. What’s clear is that Mojtaba has strong ties to the I.R.G.C. As a teen-ager, during the Iran-Iraq War, he served in the group’s Habib Battalion, and he has maintained close links to its leaders since, including as a part of the “Habib Circle,” an alumni group comprised of influential I.R.G.C. hard-liners. Before this year, Mojtaba was relatively unknown, working in the shadows of his father’s office. He had never held public office or given religious or political speeches. Few photos or videos of him exist. Yet he wielded influence. In the late two-thousands, American diplomatic cables, published by WikiLeaks, described him as “the power behind the robes” and someone who was a “capable and forceful” personality inside the regime. He’s considered more ideologically extreme than his father. He has backed regime hard-liners over reformists and reportedly approved the crackdowns on the Green Movement protests. A 2008 cable reported that he “has long maintained a close relationship” with the then Tehran mayor Ghalibaf, adding that “Mojtaba is close to and well briefed by IRGC senior leaders,” in particular Zolghadr. His father, though, was opposed to hereditary succession and rejected the idea of Mojtaba as his replacement. But I.R.G.C. generals have elevated Mojtaba to become Ayatollah anyway, despite his limited religious credentials, forcing out more moderate candidates and leaving him in their debt. “It is a theocracy now only in name. In practice, it is a military system. At the end of the day, power really is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards,” Vaez told me. “When Trump says, ‘I’ve changed the regime,’ he hasn’t really changed the regime, but he has transformed it, in the sense that the power dynamic between the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards has changed. They were subservient to him. Now he is subservient to them.”

The new leaders of Iran have swiftly moved away from the late Khamenei’s blueprint for protecting the nation, stamping their own, more extreme approach on Iran’s third Islamic Republic. The killing of the frail, eighty-six-year-old Ayatollah has helped speed up aggressive tactics and strategies that Iran’s hawkish diehards within the I.R.G.C. have for years wanted to use against the United States and Israel. They had been unable to pursue direct conflict out of deference to their Supreme Leader, who had sought to protect the Islamic Republic’s survival by avoiding long, debilitating full-scale wars that could play out on Iranian soil. They chafed as Khamenei did little to help Iran’s proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza—in their conflicts with Israel, and to prevent Syrian rebels from ousting the Bashar al-Assad regime. They were incensed when Khamenei didn’t forcefully retaliate after an American air strike in 2020 that killed Qassem Suleimani, the powerful and much-revered I.R.G.C. officer and Quds Force commander. That anger was only heightened when, last April, Khamenei chose to enter negotiations with the Trump Administration over Iran’s nuclear program. One former I.R.G.C. commander, Saeed Ghasemi, accused the regime of trampling “on the blood of the general” by negotiating with “Soleimani’s killer.” As the talks broke down, Iran was attacked by Israel and the U.S., with American warplanes bombing three Iranian nuclear facilities, during what became known as the Twelve-Day War. Even then, Iran opted for a tempered response, symbolically retaliating by firing missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar while giving advance notice to limit American casualties.

Many within the I.R.G.C. believed that the absence of a strong reciprocal attack on U.S. targets showed weakness and opened Iran to more strikes. This war has proved them right. “It’s a leadership, particularly in the Guards, who didn’t believe that Khamenei’s restraint, and the restraints of the previous generation of guard leaders that Israel eliminated, actually protected Iran,” Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “They don’t want war, but the new leadership thinks that, strategically, Khamenei was wrong, and that his stance invited the current aggression that they are facing. They’re more willing to take risks. They’re willing to do things that, previously, wouldn’t have been done.”

When Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas fields, the country’s largest source of energy, on March 18th, Iran retaliated by striking a massive liquefied-natural-gas hub in Qatar, causing major damage and threatening billions of dollars in lost revenue. The attack demonstrated that the new Iranian regime has little to no concern about damaging their relationship with Qatar. Under the elder Khamenei, it’s unlikely Iran would have attacked Qatar in such a manner, Nasr explained. Iran’s new leaders are basically saying, “You escalate, we escalate, or we escalate even more.” They also appear to care more about preserving Iran’s proxy forces, making a ceasefire between the Israeli military and Hezbollah in Lebanon part of a broader deal to end the war.

Despite their hard-line approach, Iran’s new leadership also seems more responsive to U.S. negotiations than Iran has been in the past. “You could say it’s more dangerous, but at the same time we’re seeing they’re not averse to talking,” Nasr continued. “And maybe even more willing to talk than Khamenei was, because he had a strategy of no talking and no war. These guys are basically saying, We’re not afraid of war, but we’re also not afraid of talking.” Memories of the Iran-Iraq War may be weighing on their minds. The conflict built the careers of figures like Ghalibaf, Zolghadr, and Vahidi, transforming them into national heroes and demonstrating how Iran can resist attacks from superior militaries—lessons that have been integral to Iran’s ability to survive thousands of U.S. and Israeli air strikes. But the Iran-Iraq conflict also showed what happens if they overplay their hand. At multiple points, Iran had an opportunity to reach a deal to end the war. But the young theocracy chose to keep fighting, determined to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; after Iran finally agreed to sign a U.N.-brokered ceasefire eight years later, in 1988, its economy and military lay shattered, and as many as six hundred thousand Iranians were dead. Iran’s new leaders “had some tremendous successes, but they also experienced the absolute horrors of war and then a very unsettled outcome,” Maloney said. “To some extent, they have an appreciation for the costs of war and the difficulty of achieving a conclusive victory.”

During that war, Iran’s new leaders gained a high threshold for pain. And that threshold is what the current war hinges on, especially if the U.S. Navy successfully blockades the Strait of Hormuz: Can Iran handle more economic pain than its foes? If the U.S. blockade succeeds, it could cost the regime as much as four hundred and thirty-five million dollars a day in lost export and import revenues, according to Miad Maleki, a former U.S. Treasury official and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And Iran needs these funds to rebuild hundreds of cities and towns, critical infrastructure, and industrial capacity that have been destroyed by air strikes. Economic implosion, the regime knows, could threaten its very survival. After the marathon day of negotiations over the weekend failed to secure a deal, Ghalibaf didn’t immediately revert to his bellicose rhetoric. On Sunday, he wrote in a post on X that the United States “ultimately failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation,” but he left the door open for future talks, which now seem focussed on three issues: Iran’s nuclear enrichment, control over the strait, and a ceasefire in Lebanon. “America has understood our logic and principles, and now it’s time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not,” Ghalibaf wrote. On Tuesday, as Americans grapple with rising gas prices, Trump said that talks could resume by the end of the week.

Even if a deal is reached, there’s another big hurdle: selling it to the hard-liners in the I.R.G.C. Many commanders in the younger generation, who cut their teeth in Iran’s proxy wars around the Middle East, are more extreme, including some who believe that acquiring a nuclear weapon is the only deterrent against future attacks by the U.S. and Israel. “There is a greater degree of radicalism among the younger generation of the Guard,” Maloney explained, adding that “they have not been schooled by the terror and frustrations that occurred during the Iran-Iraq War.” Some hard-liners have openly criticized the regime for agreeing to a ceasefire, saying that the United States cannot be trusted. Ebrahim Rezaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, urged Iranian officials to “cancel negotiations with the defeated devil so they know that we are not in a position of weakness.”

This open dissent demonstrates the problem facing the Trump Administration as it works with Ghalibaf, potentially envisioning him as an America-friendly partner who could lead Iran. “Ghalibaf himself does fit the Delcy Rodríguez profile,” Vaez, of the International Crisis Group, told me. “The problem with him, and in general, is that nobody can play that role and survive politically. This has to be a consensual decision because Iran has never been a one-man show.” ♦

Minutes into Second Stage’s scorching, spectacular revival of Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw” (at the Hayes), an audience member groaned loudly, in pleasure and shock. Ten minutes later, someone else muttered, “Oh, my God.” There were waves of guffaws and, also, supportive finger-snapping. Comedy is about chemistry, but it felt like something more cathartic was in the air, in response to Gionfriddo’s savage corkscrew of a sex farce, which spirals around a blind date gone very, very wrong. First staged in 2008, it’s evolved into a hot-pepper challenge, a way to steel-man your illusions about love.

The play opens in a pitch-dark, three-star-hotel room, a step down for a bereaved family that has lost its patriarch and, as important, its promised inheritance. Suzanna (Lauren Patten), a moody, black-clad psychology grad student with a “Gashlycrumb Tinies” cuteness, is curled on the bed, watching a true-crime show. “It soothes me and I need it. Don’t judge me,” she tells Max (Alden Ehrenreich), the brusque finance guy who has paid for both her room and her mother’s room. Max turns out to be Suzanna’s brother, kind of—his position in the family is unstable and gets only unstabler. What is clear is their intense bond, the brash intimacy of people addicted to repartee and raised by liars. Max offers Suzanna some tough-love advice, and, by the end of the scene, the stakes, as they say in TV, have been raised.

The story speeds up from there: suddenly, Suzanna is married to Andrew (Patrick Ball), a nice guy who cries at pornography, with whom she lives in a two-star apartment in Providence, Rhode Island. When the newlyweds decide to set Max up with Andrew’s co-worker Becky (Madeline Brewer, all pinwheel eyes and fawn legs), she turns up overdressed and clearly nervous. “Wow, you look like a birthday cake,” Max says. Rattled, she asks for guidance from Suzanna. “Inasmuch as you can, don’t show him any weakness,” Suzanna tells her.

Gionfriddo is something of an expert on true crime, having taken the playwright’s path to survival—a steady gig writing for “Law & Order.” But in her stage plays, including “Rapture, Blister, Burn” and “Can You Forgive Her?,” she’s established herself as an authority on the more covert violence of feminine perversity, with a refreshing frankness about how easily weakness and strength can masquerade as each other. Her dialogue, which is dense with bleak, Wildean zingers, has, on the surface, a LaBute-ian, Mamet-y sting, the exfoliating bite of a Jacobean satire of social hypocrisy; a few dynamics reminded me of some of the more romantic scenes on the HBO show “Succession.” “Love is a happy by-product of use,” Max insists. Suzanna’s mother, Susan (Linda Emond), decrees, “No one respects a woman who forgives infidelity.” There are rolling debates about the nature of morality: “Does pornography make you cry?” Max asks, skeptically. “No, but it should and I wish it did,” Suzanna shoots back.

Still, what distinguishes Gionfriddo is not her ear for cruelty but her ability to see beyond it, and to shift the prism of audience sympathy, in tiny increments. This tension is intensified by Trip Cullman’s precise staging, which is smartly paced, down to the indie-sleaze anthems, such as “Zero,” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that mark each set change. The costumes, by Kaye Voyce, are almost alarmingly on target, from Becky’s try-hard dress to Andrew’s fuzzy orange cardigan. Once in a while, black flats compress the space, framing a single character’s face, bathed in a bleaching white light, as if their vulnerabilities were being scanned by an MRI. Even David Zinn’s set includes a punch line: the cramped quarters feel minimalist, but they pay off in the second act, with a sudden revelation about the way some people get to live.

The cast is terrific, particularly Brewer, whose Becky, an ancestor of Thackeray’s social climber, reminded me of the Ben Folds song “Fragile,” about an emotional terrorist full of excuses: “It’s, like, ‘Crash, boom, oops . . . did I break that, too?’ ” Emond, as Suzanna’s hypercritical mother, puts an Olympic-level spin on her withering observations. Ball, that hot doctor on “The Pitt,” nails the way decency can conceal secret trapdoors; Patten, as Suzanna, captures the flop sweat of a woman falling, bit by bit, below her own moral standards.

But the engine driving the production is Ehrenreich’s magnetic performance as Max, the sort of character who, in many other stories and lots of nineteen-eighties sex comedies, would be the villain. With his subdued growl, rat-a-tat standup-comic delivery, and air of couched melancholy, Ehrenreich lends a peculiar moral weight to Max, a master puppeteer tangled up in his own strings. He’s a caustic know-it-all, but, the more we learn about him, the more defensible, and even ethical, his Realpolitik becomes. However callous his words are, he radiates turbulent emotion: whenever someone steps close to him, a Geiger counter starts crackling, as if intimacy itself had a half-life.

There’s a wonderful moment early in the play when Ehrenreich is left alone onstage, with a look of such ragged disorientation and abandonment, of little-boy distress, that it lingers, later, even when Max is at his most cutting, when he seems to be doing “American Psycho” cosplay. It’s the quality that distinguishes Gionfriddo’s play from a brittle farce—its willingness to recognize failed love as something bigger than a player losing a game, an oceanic force roiling beneath the script’s surface nastiness. After laughing my head off all evening, there was a moment, just before the night ended, when my eyes teared up. That, too, felt like the real thing.

Across the street from “Becky Shaw,” there’s another audience going crazy with joy, at “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” (at the Broadhurst), a delirious revival grounded in what may be the greatest dramaturgical insight in musical-comedy history. The material its creators are messing with is, of course, “Cats,” the much mocked British mega-musical that dominated Broadway from 1982 through the turn of the century, infuriating haters of Andrew Lloyd Webber, theatrical bombast, and narrative incoherence. Based, pretty bizarrely, on some light verse by T. S. Eliot, the original production, with its treacly pop-rock score, was set inside a junk yard full of touchy-feely showoffs in kitten ears, competing to reach the Heaviside Layer, a celestial MacGuffin. It made tons of money and no sense.

Two decades later, in 2019, the I.P. flared back up again, like shingles. That January, the show sparked a pair of rude TV satires, first, on the musical-mad series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” where vagina metaphors alternate with wisecracks about “Cats” ruining Broadway, and then, two weeks later, on the sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” with a hilarious plot in which the thirsty actor Titus Andromedon crashes the production as the made-up cat Frumbumbly. Backstage, he realizes that he’s cracked the show’s secret code: the entire thing is and always has been pure, improvised nonsense—and anyone who can babble convincingly enough can join the ensemble. That December, a hideous movie adaptation seemed to confirm that view of “Cats,” by congealing any lingering charm beneath layers of “digital fur technology.”

And then, in a miraculous turn, “Cats” scored one more life, downtown. The 2024 revival at PAC NYC, ​​which was co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, was grounded in a genius, faintly psychedelic insight: that Eliot’s 1939 doggerel was much more logically set in the modern-day Black-ballroom scene, the fragile, shimmering world of queer outsiders captured in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” The reframe worked like a set of corrective lenses, sharpening sentimental mush into something with meaning and claws. “Cats” was, after all, a story about flamboyant street creatures who adopt new names and alter egos, shape-shifters whose hyperbolic personae at once reflected and satirized the straight world. Queering “Cats” was the inverse of appropriation: the camp version was the authentic one.

Moving this delicate variant to Broadway posed a risk. In midtown, the show’s exuberance could have dimmed, as it did for “Titaníque,” the Céline Dion pastiche, a charming goof that feels too slight for its new venue, right across Forty-fourth Street, at the St. James. “Jellicle Ball,” in contrast, confidently fills its space, starting with its lovely, simple opening image, of a d.j. pulling a Diana Ross album out of a plastic crate—a memento mori of the eighties—and holding it up to the knowing crowd. Everything old feels new again, down to the iconic yellow-eyed logo, displayed up on a catwalk lined with TV screens, in which the static cat-eye pupils first wriggle, then reveal themselves as slinky, silhouetted dancers.

From then on, the show never stops moving, with dizzy, propulsive choreography by Omari Wiles, of the House of NiNa Oricci, and Arturo Lyons, of the House of Miyake-Mugler, and epic, decade-spanning couture by Qween Jean. On a runway, dancers duckwalk and spin, stick their hands in the air and wiggle their fingers, then drop into splits and shoot their legs into the air like exclamation marks. Every body and every gender gets a turn, from the silky-haired, pipe-cleaner-limbed, jaw-droppingly limber Robert (Silk) Mason, as Magical Mister Mistoffelees, to Nora Schell, as the strutting, bodacious Bustopher Jones, to a magisterial eighty-year-old André De Shields, as Old Deuteronomy. Not every number landed—that old warhorse (warcat?) “Memory” lacked the requisite grit and sorrow—but perfection felt beside the point, in a performance that was designed to celebrate resilience, against all odds.

TV shows such as “Pose” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” had clearly primed the crowd to read the room, and to hush, with respect, during the lovely homage to ballroom and queer icons that opens the second act. They roared, later on, offering up the wildest cheers for the ballroom legend Junior LaBeija, who had been observing the proceedings from the proscenium, skeptically, through neon-green eyeshadow and thick, spidery lashes. When LaBeija, as Gus the Theatre Cat, finally strolled onstage to revisit his glory days, waggling his long, polished claws, a younger Gus (Jonathan Burke) appeared, like a mirror dancing toward him. It was a beautiful suggestion of the show’s open-armed sensibility, a way of lovingly glorifying both the past and the present, and, fingers crossed, the future . . . now and forever. ♦