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In the past week, Donald Trump has threatened war with the ayatollahs in Iran, with the U.S.’s NATO allies in Denmark, and with Americans protesting his policies in the state of Minnesota. Of these, the target he seems the most serious about is the last one.

On Tuesday, in a statement whose full import you might have missed amid all the other Trump-generated crises, the President warned Minnesota: “THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION & RECKONING IS COMING!” Yes, our revenge-obsessed leader seems to have put an entire state in his crosshairs. By Thursday morning, as protests continued to escalate in reaction to the increasingly violent presence of armed federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump issued an ultimatum: either the “professional agitators and insurrectionists” stand down from “attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.,” or he would finally follow through and invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the U.S. military.

Deploying active-duty soldiers to put down a domestic disturbance has been one of Trump’s long-running preoccupations: he’s got this big, bad military—why can’t he use it to show blue America who’s boss? In the summer of 2020, as largely nonviolent Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country, it was only the combined objections of Trump’s Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs that stopped him from doing so. But Trump has continued to crave militarized displays of force against fellow-Americans. During his second term, he’s repeatedly mobilized the National Guard over the objections of local elected officials, on the thinnest of pretexts, whether it’s protests against his heavy-handed immigration forces in Los Angeles or a nonexistent crime emergency in the District of Columbia. “It’s a war from within,” Trump told a gathering of generals last fall, explaining that they should, from now on, view U.S. cities as “training grounds.”

The goal all along, it appears, was something like what’s happening today in Minnesota: a street-theatre carnival of violence, mostly instigated by the federal government itself, in an effort to create a genuine security crisis that Trump can then step in to resolve. And so we have begun 2026 bombarded with upsetting, awful images—of a masked man dressed in army green shooting a mom in a maroon Honda S.U.V. as agents screamed conflicting instructions at her, of Americans walking down the icy streets of their own city being stopped and interrogated about their citizenship for no reason except the color of their skin. How does one not shudder at the video of the woman who was dragged out of her car the other day, as she screamed that she was a disabled U.S. citizen on the way to an appointment with her doctor? Trump has sent more federal agents to Minneapolis—several thousand of them—than there are police officers in the city. It’s a fight he wants, and it’s a fight he’s got.

Notably, the fight is now about much more than immigration enforcement. Trump has escalated, as he invariably does. On the campaign trail, he told supporters that they were voting for “mass deportations now” to get rid of evil criminal aliens who did not belong in America. How quickly he’s gone from that to cheering as the federal government harasses people with “citizenship checks,” blockades neighborhood streets, responds to the taunts of teen-agers with beatings, and tear-gasses reporters while they are broadcasting live from the disruption.

The President and his advisers have called those opposing them in Minnesota radical lunatics, domestic terrorists, and outright insurrectionists. Do they expect us to have already forgotten that, on Trump’s first day back in the White House, he pardoned more than a thousand actual insurrectionists who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf, in a vain effort to block his 2020 electoral defeat? On Tuesday, barely an hour after urging demonstrators in Tehran to “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!,” Trump issued a call for retribution against the “anarchists and professional agitators” protesting him in Minnesota. By Wednesday, he’d walked back his pledge of assistance to the protesters in Iran. “Help is on its way,” he’d said. But it wasn’t. The violent confrontation that Trump craves most is the war at home, against the enemy within.

It’s not his only goal, though. Trump himself has told us another: “RETRIBUTION.” I know it doesn’t make any sense; it’s hard to see why the President would bear a grudge against an entire state. But grievances drive Trump, and he has one against Minnesota. “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times,” he said last week. “I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state—a corrupt voting state.” The fact that these claims are ridiculous—Trump never even won as much as a full forty-seven per cent of the vote there, in any of the three Presidential elections in which he ran—does not make this any less of a grave threat. Is the President capable of exacting revenge over a lie? Of course he is.

Late last year, Reuters documented at least four hundred and seventy targets of retribution whom Trump has singled out since returning to office. Nearly a hundred prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been fired or forced out for working on cases against Trump or his allies, or because they were alleged to be too woke. Roughly fifty people, businesses, or other entities have been threatened with investigations or penalties for opposing Trump. The White House itself has directly issued at least thirty-six orders, decrees, and directives targeting at least a hundred specific individuals and entities with punitive actions. More than a hundred security clearances have been revoked from those on his enemies list. And all that was only by the end of November.

A year ago, there were still those who believed—or at least hoped—that Trump’s explicitly stated vow of a second-term Presidency focussed on revenge and retribution was just more bluster. How wrong they were.

In a speech on Wednesday night, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, argued that what is happening in his state right now is “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.” The state has sued to stop it, but a federal judge has not yet granted an injunction, and legal experts are skeptical that the case will succeed. In the meantime, Walz described a situation that is both dystopian and almost without modern precedent:

Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live. They’re pulling over people indiscriminately, including U.S. citizens, and demanding to see their papers. And at grocery stores, at bus stops, even at schools, they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process.

Listening to this tragic accounting, I found it hard not to think of all the dark fantasies about America that Trump has trafficked in over the years. Next Tuesday will mark one year since he returned to office. Trump may have started out by trash-talking America; now he is simply trashing it. Minnesota is his legacy. It is American carnage made real. ♦

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In 2019, it seemed possible that the next big country star would be a Navy aviation ordnanceman from Oklahoma named Zach Bryan, who recorded scruffy videos of himself hollering fervent lyrics about nights that lasted forever and relationships that didn’t. “I put as much thought as I could into, like, writing the songs,” he told the country critic Grady Smith, in a YouTube interview that summer. “And no thought into how I was going to put it out there.” Listeners found him anyway—helped, no doubt, by social-media algorithms that can spot a new viral hit long before human gatekeepers catch on. “Heading South,” one of Bryan’s first songs to draw a large audience, had a refrain that served as a declaration of regional pride. “Don’t stop headin’, headin’ south / ’Cause they will understand the words that are pouring from your mouth,” he sang, sounding like a young man who had finally found his place in the world. The polemical music site Saving Country Music suggested that Bryan could stand to “refine his guitar playing and delivery,” but it also made a prediction: “Zach Bryan will have a strong career in country music if he so chooses.”

The prediction turned out to be about halfway accurate. In the past six years, Bryan, now twenty-nine, has built not merely a strong career but a singular one, and he has done it without much changing his no-frills approach. He ranked No. 8 on Spotify’s 2025 list of the most popular musicians in America, and in September he drew more than a hundred and twelve thousand fans to a concert at the University of Michigan football stadium; according to the industry site Pollstar, it was the biggest concert in U.S. history, excluding festivals and free shows. And yet Bryan wears his “country” identity lightly, when he wears it at all. He has generally ignored country radio, and been ignored by it in turn. Neither his voice nor his arrangements are particularly twangy, and the bars he sings about tend to be not honky-tonks but, rather, places like McGlinchey’s, a Philadelphia dive that he mentioned in an appealingly ragged tune called “28.” That song appeared on Bryan’s 2024 album, “The Great American Bar Scene,” which included, in a sign of his growing stature and not-quite-country identity, a pair of high-profile guests: John Mayer and Bruce Springsteen.

Since Bryan’s début, words haven’t stopped pouring from his mouth. His songs are propelled by idiomatic lyrics that sound as if they have been set to music only begrudgingly; many of his albums begin with a poem, as if to confirm that he has more verses than melodies to put them to. Last year, for the first time since 2021, there was no new Zach Bryan album, though fans still got a half-dozen new songs, along with a series of updates about his life. He carried on a public dispute with his ex-girlfriend Brianna LaPaglia, a podcaster, who had previously accused him of “narcissistic emotional abuse”; in the summer, footage emerged of him scaling a barbed-wire-topped fence in an apparent attempt to fight the country singer Gavin Adcock, who had accused him of phoniness; about two months after the incident, he announced, on Instagram, that he hadn’t had a drink in nearly two months, and suggested that he had been using alcohol to cope with “earth-shattering panic attacks”; on New Year’s Eve, in Spain, he got married, for the second time, and shared a video of himself singing Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” at the reception.

The marriage may have pleased Zach Bryan fans who want him to chill out and settle down, but his new album, which he released earlier this month, is more likely to please the other ones, who may well constitute the majority. It is called “With Heaven on Top,” and it is a shaggy record composed of twenty-four songs (and one poem) about chasing peace of mind around the world. There are no high-profile guests, unless you count the horn players who arrive at the beginning of the third track, “Appetite,” serving not to add polish but to subtract it. Much of the playing on the album is cheerfully imprecise; Bryan has said it was recorded in a handful of houses in Oklahoma, but the recordings, which include sing-alongs and stray noises, evoke the blurry conviviality of a bar band at the moment between last call and lights on. “Slicked Back,” about romantic bliss, seems to have been written under the influence of Tom Petty—when Bryan sings, “You’re so cool,” he could almost be Petty, drawling, “Yer so bad.” And on “River and Creeks,” a frisky ballad about fickle lovers, he tries out both a yipping falsetto and an Elvis-ish baritone.

Unlike many country-inspired singer-songwriters, though, Bryan doesn’t seem intent on re-creating an earlier musical era. His music, with its simple strumming and its unmediated lyrics, is generally too plain to be retro. Some of the early reactions to the album concerned not the music but the lyrics. “Bad News,” which Bryan previewed in October, features a reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE is gonna come bust down your door”); this alarmed some of his fans and excited others. But the song turns out to be less a protest than a nonpartisan lament: “Got some bad news / Fading of our red, white, and blue.” And “Skin,” a breakup song about an ex-lover with tattoos, has been widely interpreted as a new chapter in his ongoing exchange with LaPaglia, who has plenty of tattoos, and who has said that Bryan got a tattoo of her early in their relationship. “I’m taking a blade to my own skin,” he sings, or, rather, sneers. “And I ain’t never touching yours again.”

Bryan’s startling success—no one knew an ornery troubadour could be this popular, in this era—has helped build an audience for a cohort of like-minded singer-songwriters: Sam Barber, from Missouri, specializes in desolate ballads; Waylon Wyatt, from Arkansas, sings country breakup songs with a quaver and a hint of a yodel. Last year, Bryan uploaded a video of himself singing and strumming with an emerging singer-songwriter named Joshua Slone. Slone has a much softer and more plaintive voice and, judging from his finely wrought songs, a tendency to contend with heartbreak not by going out and raging but by staying in and ruminating. Especially compared with a singer like Slone, Bryan is an uncommonly stubborn performer: to enjoy his songs, you have to enjoy his halfway hoarse voice and his tendency to stray from the tune, not to mention his willingness to return time and again to familiar themes and familiar bars, like McGlinchey’s, which makes a return appearance on “With Heaven on Top.”

Bryan surely knows this, though he doesn’t always know what to do about it; one of the new songs, “Miles,” evokes the trudging repetition of the touring life a bit too faithfully, with Bryan repeating the titular word forty-two times. But “Plastic Cigarette,” an early fan favorite, is gentler and more effective, distilling a bygone love into a simple image: “I saw you on the river’s edge / Draggin’ on a plastic cigarette / With your swim top still wet.” After twenty-four tracks comes the title song: a benediction, sweetened with pedal steel, that is beautiful in a way much of Bryan’s music is defiantly not. This is the end of the album—but not, as it happens, the end of the story. Just as “With Heaven on Top” was being released, Bryan posted a note on Instagram that seemed surprisingly crotchety, coming from a guy with a new bride and a new record. “I’m assuming this record is just like all the other ones and there’s gonna be a billion people saying it’s over produced and shitty so I sat down in a room by myself and recorded all the songs acoustically so I didn’t have to hear everyone whine about more stuff,” he wrote. And so, a few days after the album arrived, he issued “With Heaven on Top (Acoustic),” which contains almost nothing but an acoustic guitar and Bryan’s voice, demonstrating how little adornment his best songs need. The acoustic version sounds nearly exactly like the old Zach Bryan, and it is hard to tell whether this means he is stuck or just sticking to what he does best. ♦

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Someone looking to understand America might do well to study the nation’s embrace of football. N.F.L. games regularly outperform anything else on television, and, in 2025, some hundred and twenty-seven million viewers tuned in to the Super Bowl—more than ever before. As this year’s championship approaches, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz are joined by their fellow New Yorker writer Louisa Thomas to unpack the sport’s allure, which has persisted despite increasingly dire evidence of the danger it poses to players’ health. Together, they discuss football’s origins as a “war game,” how fictional depictions have contributed to its mythos, and the state of play today. “A very compelling reason for football’s popularity is that it's not only a simulation of war,” Thomas says. “It’s a simulation of community.”

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It’s easy to put off saving for retirement, to tell yourself that you’ll deal with it later. After all, you have so many expenses right now. But, the younger you are when you start saving, the more compound interest can help you reach your goals. And research shows that you need five hundred million-plus dollars to retire comfortably if the final thirty to sixty years of your life become an unrelenting series of disasters, each more horrible than the last.

If your company offers 401(k) matching, the bare minimum you should do is set aside the percentage of your paycheck that they’ll match, and put it into a retirement account. That’s free money! So if your employer will match three per cent, find a way to invest that three per cent. As a retiree, you’ll be on a fixed income. That puts you at the mercy of rising costs, and even in the best of economies you should expect some inflation. Furthermore, you’ll want to prepare for when you’re fired fifteen years before you’d planned to retire and, after spending two years on a job search, futilely applying for a thousand positions, lowering your standards until you’re willing to work for almost nothing, in a field that you hate, you realize that you’ll never work again. Around that point, you’ll be glad you kicked in what you could to your retirement fund when you were younger. In fact, let’s make your minimum contribution four per cent.

Being permanently excluded from the workforce for reasons that are not provably age discrimination may be dispiriting, but, as long as you’ve set aside four per cent of your seven-figure salary, you may think you’ll still be able to retire in style. Indeed, it might seem that way until, just after you come to terms with your unemployability, your house is carried away by a large drone with claws, like in one of those arcade games at the bowling alley. Buying a new house is going to set you back, and that’s why we recommend putting an additional twenty per cent of your income during your working years into a Roth IRA. Presuming your salary is high, that twenty per cent is mid-six-figures or more. If your account yields good interest, that should set you up to make a down payment on a new, smaller house that’s bolted to its foundation so a drone can’t steal it.

Unemployed and exhausted, you may feel a sense of relief as you cross the threshold of your new house. This is why you put aside a big nest egg. But another common concern for retirees is what happens when cockroaches develop superintelligence and, enraged by the way humans have historically treated them, overrun their homes—including the pathetic little replacement shack you spent most of your remaining money on. No ordinary exterminator can vanquish these genius roaches, who are not only brilliant but also full of a white-hot thirst for revenge that can never be sated.

The team of researchers you hire to work around the clock to hatch a system for defeating the bugs will fall short. If they get close to a solution, they’ll be hired away by the roaches, who have an unparalleled knack for manipulation, and saved a lot in their youth. If you want the roaches to go away, you will need to buy them off. And freedom from the roaches does not come cheap. We’re talking eight-figure payments every month until you croak or they do. This is why you need assets that grow in value constantly, like original paintings by legendary artists, or houses that haven’t been carried away by drones or invaded by mastermind insects.

Saving for retirement can be intimidating, but it’s well worth the effort to set aside five hundred million dollars now for when you’ll need it later. Let that be your motivation for restraint the next time you’re tempted to splurge on a latte. ♦