Saturday, June 27, 2026
Friday, June 26, 2026
The Felon's Melt Down
A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.
And that was just yesterday.
For [the Felon]
President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.[A]s this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.
This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. . . . Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.
Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again.
But so far, Trump’s efforts aren’t working. And when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he lashed out against senators who have faithfully served him—and whose support he can’t afford to lose.
Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have been building for months. The president irked party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton—a move that appeared to seal Cornyn’s doom in last month’s primary runoff.
Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. (It would also, in some versions, significantly curtail voting by mail.) Republicans have never had a majority that supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump’s refusal to accept that reality has frustrated senators.
On top of all that, Trump’s efforts to force members of his own party into retirement have created what’s become known as the “YOLO Caucus” in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy, Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who announced his retirement immediately after declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose and criticize the president in ways they would not have if they faced reelection. . . . Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a success anyway.
In the face of these struggles, Trump has continued to try to create his own reality. He returned to the White House from the Hill for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump took the moment to attack some of NATO’s key members for not helping with the Iran war, and he unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a diplomatic spat that began when the president claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit last week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.
But Trump was far angrier about something closer to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. . . . rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.
He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.
Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.” He did not weigh in on the day’s breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which underscored the challenges that lay ahead in negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can’t change the subject.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
The Felon Is Desperate for a "Win" After the Iran Debacle
If there’s one big no-no in international diplomatic negotiations, it’s for one of the players to physically threaten the envoys. The negotiators are there to try to reach an agreement, so when they are threatened with death by the leader of the opposing side, it can be a bit of a poison pill. But such rules are designed for mature adults who understand how international relations work. America, unfortunately, has a leader who sees the world through the lens of gangster movies and can’t keep his mouth shut.
We saw this illustrated over the weekend when [the Felon]
PresidentDonald Trumpthreatened the Iranian envoys in Switzerland with death if the Islamic Republic closed the Strait of Hormuz again, which the country had threatened to do if Israel did not stop bombing Lebanon. The president issued the warning in his usual classy fashion: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your f**king country.”[T]he first paragraph of the memorandum of understanding he and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed reads: The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.
By failing to enlist Israel in the agreement — and by threatening the use of force against Iran — it would appear the United States violated its terms.
But then, as everyone has learned, the president tends to talk a big game; he is only willing to bluster and bomb to the point where it costs him something, and then he backs down. Case in point: Following Trump’s threat, the Iranian delegation briefly left the talks, but they returned after being reassured he wasn’t serious.
As the smoke from the agreement clears, a consensus has emerged — even among MAGA media, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye has explained — that the U.S. has suffered a profound defeat. This is largely because Trump had no strategy beyond assuming that bombing Iran and killing some members of the nation’s leadership would instantly lead to unconditional surrender and new leadership, which would then welcome Western businesses eager to build resorts on the Strait of Hormuz. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently assumed that once Trump was committed to the war, he would not back off and would instead escalate as necessary to achieve the goal of regime change.
For his part, Trump has already declared victory. He is clearly eager to move on from what is undoubtedly the worst foreign policy failure of his presidency — and one of the worst in U.S. history. But since his psyche is so fragile, he will not be able to admit that to himself. Trump will need to bag himself a “win” as soon as possible to erase his defeat in the minds of the MAGA faithful — and to quiet the voices in his head screaming that he has screwed up once again.
So, what’s next on the president’s list? Well, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be Cuba. He’s been talking about the communist nation quite a bit lately, even telling reporters in March, “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba,” and asserting “I can do anything I want” with the country. He clearly sees it as an easy victory.
He is also listening to his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose politics were fermented in that anti-communist petri dish — and who tells him that this one will be easy. One can’t help but wonder if, after the Iran mess, Trump is listening to anyone who tells him that these days. But he will likely take the country because he knows that Cuba is no Iran. It truly doesn’t have any “cards” to play, and its people are currently being starved by the siege being waged by the U.S.
And let’s talk about beachfront property: Nothing would thrill Trump more than to fulfill the Mafia dream of a gambling resort on the island 90 miles off the coast of Florida without all those pesky laws and regulations.
[I]t’s pretty clear that he’ll anoint Rubio as his successor, even over his own vice president. (Vance made the mistake of being right about Iran, which Trump will find unforgivable.) According to “Regime Change,” the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, when Trump was asked if he thought his successor would keep all the gilt trappings in the Oval Office, he replied, “Cubans like gold.” Rubio, it appears, is already on track.
But in the unlikely event that things don’t go well, Trump will need to find a win somewhere else. According to the New Yorker’s Ben Taub, the United States is still engaged in what the magazine calls the “ridiculous, deadly serious plan to take over Greenland.” They may have ways of doing it without a full invasion or a literal takeover of the country, but it’s pretty clear the latter is what Trump is really after. In his January interview with the New York Times, he said that it’s “psychologically important” for the United States to actually own the island. It’s very big, you see, especially on the map.
Will he do it? Who knows. But at the recent G7 summit, Trump was caught on a hot mic, cryptically saying to European Council president António Costa, “You understand — Greenland.”
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
If You Love America, Cringe for It
My father was fond of the Spanish expression “en los pequeños detalles se ve la persona” — the person is revealed in the small details. Last week, at the summit of the Group of 7 leaders in France, two details revealed two people in two starkly different lights.
The first — who else? — is Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful man yet possibly the world’s smallest. Speaking to a journalist, the president claimed that Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, with whom he was once friendly but has since fallen out, “begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly,” before adding, “I wouldn’t have done it, but I felt sorry for her!”
Meloni’s response came swiftly. Trump’s statement, she said, was “totally invented.”
“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies,” she said in a video posted to social media. “After all, this is not the first time it has happened. I can only say that it’s upsetting that he doesn’t have the same resolve toward the enemies of the West, toward the enemies of the United States, toward leadership to which he instead proves much more indulgent.”
“There is one thing he should remember,” she concluded. “I never beg — and neither does Italy.”
No prizes here for guessing who’s telling the truth — or who, despite their very considerable difference in physical size, is the bigger and braver person. But there’s also a lesson in this relatively trivial but telling episode that it behooves Americans to learn on the eve of our semiquincentennial: If you love America, now is the time to cringe for it.
Cringing is not simply a physical reflex stemming from embarrassment or disgust. It also involves a mix of compassion and empathy. You cringe when someone’s child flubs lines in a school play. You cringe for a spouse trying to calm an abrasively drunk partner at a dinner party.
To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe — morally, aesthetically, intellectually, politically. If the administration were a play or film script, it would be neither farce nor tragedy but instead a kind of absurdist travesty, “Waiting for Godot” meets “Pulp Fiction” meets “Dumb and Dumber.”
However much we may disdain him, the president has the rest of us on the hook, as the face and voice of a country that ought to know better. . . . His gilded, meretricious redecoration of the White House? That’s us. His repeatedly avowed admiration for Vladimir Putin? That’s us. His laughable claim about having achieved regime change in Tehran? That’s us. His Mafia-like threats against NATO allies? That’s us. His indescribably vain (and pathetically fruitless) effort to affix his name to the Kennedy Center? That’s us. His venal family profiting off his presidency in ways both transparent and tacky? That’s us.
The same goes for his insult of Meloni, which may be far from the worst of his sins but is also the most emblematic for being at once so utterly unnecessary as well as dementedly self-defeating.
The same country that freed its slaves, welcomed immigrants, invented airplanes, liberated concentration camps, landed men on the moon and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down this wall now bids to be the global equivalent of the expensively dressed man soiling his pants at a cocktail party.
For 10 years, I’ve watched my former political party work overtime not to cringe; to pretend that the Vesuvius of verbal infamies erupting daily from Trump’s mouth is either unimportant, or hilarious, or calculating and shrewd. Republicans turned their tolerance for the president’s mental goo into a shot-drinking contest — the more you drank, the manlier you were supposed to be.
Here, then, is our American challenge: Let’s not be afraid to cringe. Ronald Reagan predicted, correctly, that the Soviet Union would end up on the ash heap of history; now it’s our turn to risk winding up on the ash heap of idiocy.
So let’s not look away from the parts we played in bringing America to this moment. Let’s remember who we once were, because it’s what we may yet be again — if only we feel the sting of our present shame.
The Felon's Big Mistake in Iran
When the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, their plan was simple: bomb Iran until either the Iranian public rose up and overthrew the government, or the existing government capitulated to American demands. It rapidly became apparent that neither was going to happen. The Iranian people didn’t revolt against their oppressors. The Iranian government hunkered down, closed the strait, and gambled that the U.S. would be unwilling to invade or strike at crucial infrastructure.
So it seems U.S. planners made an obvious, if common, mistake: They assumed that a war could be won via aerial bombing alone.
Starting right after World War I, military theorists in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom rallied around the idea that airpower lessened or eliminated the need for armies and navies. Their central thesis was that wars could be won almost exclusively with bombers and bombing campaigns.
In his 1921 book, Il dominio dell’aria (“The Command of the Air”), Italian General Giulio Douhet argued that whichever nation claimed air superiority first would be able to bomb their enemies’ cities to ash, forcing capitulation. Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the so-called father of the Royal Air Force who pioneered strategic-bombing theory during World War I, thought that airpower could break an enemy’s will to fight rather than merely provide tactical support for ground troops.
When these theories of total war through bombing were put to the test in World War II and beyond, however, they failed miserably. The German Blitz on London did not induce the British public to give in. Allied bombing of Germany did not break the Nazis’ will to fight; the German collapse at the end had much more to do with the (justified) fear of being captured by the Red Army, and the opportunity to surrender to the Americans.
In the case of Japan, the combination of the naval blockade and firebombing of cities left millions of Japanese people likely to die if the war went on into 1946. However, it was not until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, that Japan sought a nearly unconditional surrender.
Strategic bombing failed in Vietnam as well. In that war, the U.S. dropped approximately 7.6 million tons of bombs, compared with the roughly 2.7 million tons dropped by the U.S. military across the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. The “Christmas bombings” of 1972 were not enough to persuade North Vietnam to offer favorable terms; rather, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were a result of U.S. exhaustion with the war.
The advent of “true” mass precision bombing in the 1990s led some analysts to conclude that the rules of war had changed, and that airpower alone was at last sufficient. But the supposed examples of victory through aerial bombing aren’t what they seem. The first Gulf War ended only after U.S. troops went into Kuwait in a 100-hour-long charge. In Serbia in 1999, Slobodan Milošević’s capitulation to a united NATO’s demands was based on fears of regime survival and the credible threat of ground invasion. The air campaign in Afghanistan succeeded because the U.S. had allies on the ground willing to fight for, take, and hold territory in the form of the Northern Alliance. In each case, there were troops on the ground, or a credible threat thereof.
A study by the RAND Corporation in 1996 on the capabilities and limitations of the psychological effects of U.S. air operations cautioned leaders that airpower alone was unlikely to coerce an enemy to offer favorable terms, unless there were other factors at play. Those external influences include the enemy’s belief that they would be defeated on the battlefield, that continued fighting would not improve their position, that damage from air attacks would likely be worse than concessions, and that there would be no hope of mounting a defense or effective counterattack.
The U.S. plan for attacking Iran was doomed from the start because it relied on airpower without the benefit of external factors that would have made an air campaign successful. There was no credible threat of mass ground invasion to overthrow the Iranian regime. It was either internal revolution or nothing.
The U.S. was also unwilling to inflict the sort of mass casualties and suffering that might have caused Iran to decide that capitulation was less damaging than continued resistance. The administration generally avoided targeting crucial infrastructure such as water and electrical plants and ground lines of communication (bridges and rail).
Unlike Serbia or Afghanistan, Iran had the ability to fight back and inflict significant pain on the United States. Iran fully grasped, from the beginning, that the outcome of the war would be determined by who could withstand the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime always had a plausible theory of victory and pursued it logically and consistently throughout the conflict.
Senior U.S. military leaders have spent decades studying warfare from every angle and must have understood the possibility of a prolonged regional conflict. In fact, General Dan Caine reportedly cautioned the Trump administration against attacking Iran.
But [the Felon] President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not appreciate the need for caution. Hegseth gained his experience at the tactical level, as a junior officer in the field. He seems to believe that technological might and physical strength, rather than carefully thought-out strategy, win wars.
The consequences of the botched war effort are nothing short of catastrophic. The U.S.’s munitions stockpiles are depleted, its military reputation is in tatters, its foreign relations are strained to the breaking, and Iranian leadership is in the best strategic position it has ever been in. It’s a hard way to relearn the old lesson that airpower alone doesn’t win wars.
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
The Felon Can’t Spin His Way Out of His Messes
[The Felon]
President Trumpspent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises. This spring, Trump for some reason became fixated on the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which had not previously been a topic of national discussion, but which he believes should vibrate with a deep Technicolor blue. The administration awarded no-bid contracts for both a color coating and a new water-purification system, with the latter going to a company tied to a Trump-campaign donor previously convicted of conspiracy to bribe. Surprising no one, both parts of the project have been a disaster.
Now Trump says water will likely have to be removed from the pool to do “necessary repairs”—in other words, $16.4 million in taxpayer money will go down the drain. . . . . He also blamed vandals for the issues, though the White House has offered no evidence to suggest that’s true. Visitors who approached the pool this weekend were shooed away by National Guard members, and at least one who touched the pool’s broken liner was arrested . . .
Meanwhile, Trump nearly upended peace negotiations between Vice President Vance and Iranian leaders in Switzerland. Over the weekend, Iran claimed it had once more blocked the Strait of Hormuz because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which appears to violate the fragile cease-fire in place. Whether the strait is actually closed is not entirely clear . . . On Truth Social, he said that if Iran didn’t rein in Hezbollah, he would “hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Threatening to kill interlocutors in the middle of a peace negotiation is generally seen as uncouth, in addition to counterproductive. Today, Vance was left to tell the Iranians that, in essence, they should just write off his threats as bluster: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us Millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”
Like Trump’s repeated blaming of vandals for damaging the pool, Trump is talking, but no one’s really paying much attention. Iran seems to have already concluded that it doesn’t need to take Trump seriously, which is a mixed blessing: good because it meant the Iranians didn’t quit the negotiations, but bad for the prospects of the U.S. reaching a favorable deal.
The Iran war and the Reflecting Pool, though very different in scale and importance, share some illuminating parallels. In both cases, Trump embarked on a project while blaming the Obama administration, his persistent bugbear, for an alleged problem: Iranian aggression or an insufficiently azure pool. In both cases, he charged forward without a fleshed-out plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants, and ignored the experts who warned of exactly the problems that resulted—algal blooms, a blocked strait.
What sets Iran and the Reflecting Pool apart from some previous cases is that he has been unable to deny reality. In the past, Trump has spun setbacks as victories, lying prodigiously to do so. In the case of his bogus claim of a stolen 2020 election, for example, he has relied on generalized public distrust of institutions, robust conservative media, and the arcana of election procedure to help create at least some doubt.
But no one can deny that the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, currently green. Nor can Trump spin the war in Iran—not when Americans spent weeks filling up their cars with gas that spiked well above $4 a gallon, and not when ships are visibly bottled up in the strait. These failures are plain in a way that exceeds even Trump’s capacity to get his supporters to believe him over their own eyes.
Now Trump’s only recourse is trying again, almost certainly with worse results. Vance is celebrating a tentative agreement to merely restore nuclear inspections—a safeguard present in Obama’s hated deal with Iran—even as the U.S. makes concessions such as allowing Iran to sell more oil. Trump badly wants the Reflecting Pool fixed by July 4, but it’s unclear if that is possible; if it is, doing so will almost certainly cost millions more in taxpayer money. The president chose two unnecessary battles and lost them both, and the American people will pay.
Monday, June 22, 2026
Parallels: Brexit and MAGA
Ten years ago this week, Britain threw away its geopolitical compass and voted to quit the club of European nations it had been a part of for more than 40 years.
Leaving the European Union was supposed to allow Britain to “take back control” of its destiny. The word that really mattered in that campaign slogan was “back” — the trick was to look backward to reimagine the future. (Not for nothing has Donald Trump’s promise of the past decade been to “Make America Great Again.”)
Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union came to be known, was supposed to be the vessel in which Britain could return to the decades after World War II, when Winston Churchill could pretend, just about, that Britain still counted as a global power.
Boris Johnson, the most prominent face of the campaign to leave and later the prime minister who would negotiate the terms of Brexit, declared that breaking with Brussels would once more open the door to a dynamic, cosmopolitan and global Britain. All Britain had to do was walk through it.
A decade later, the cost of that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty — is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The “sunlit meadows” were a mirage.
For a moment in the summer of 2016, the Brexiteers persuaded a small majority — the vote was 52 percent to 48 percent — that Britain could throw out the austerity that had followed the 2008 global financial crash, reverse the hollowing out of well-paid manufacturing jobs and trade freely and profitably on international markets. Immigrants who had flocked to Britain from Eastern and Central Europe would be sent home. Europe merely held Britain back, and to choose to leave was to believe, as Britons had before, that the nation was meant for more.
There was a reluctance to admit that Britain was becoming a regional rather than global power. As a Conservative foreign secretary in the early 1950s, Anthony Eden had spoken for the political establishment when he said that “Britain’s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe.” Europe was simply too small an arena for British engagement.
The 21st century’s Brexiteers were every bit as insouciant in their rhetorical disregard of Britain’s relative decline. Nearly four years after the vote to leave, Mr. Johnson, by then prime minister, chose the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, once a hub of the British Empire’s maritime power, to mark the conclusion of negotiations on the terms of Brexit. That 2020 speech, “Unleashing Britain’s Potential,” sought to again conjure an earlier age of swashbuckling adventurism. . . . . Britain was on the threshold of a new golden age.
It was, of course, a fantasy. Mr. Johnson got Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert. The economy has stalled and trade has shrunk. Britain is poorer than it might have been. Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent — but could be as much as 8 percent — lower, according to independent calculations, while business investment is more than 10 percent lower. It added new frictions to the lives of Britons: new border checks when traveling to E.U. countries, stricter residency rules for living in Europe, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad.
There have been other costs, one of them a weakening of the glue between the nations of the United Kingdom itself. The referendum result was more a statement of English than of British nationalism — majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.
Rather than a newly independent Britain cutting a swath on the international stage, economic realities forced cuts in spending on foreign aid and diplomacy. The hopes among Brexiteers for a new Anglosphere, adding the English-speaking Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand to Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, turned to dust, and Britain’s privileged place in Washington was lost to Mr. Trump’s disdain for traditional alliances.
John Major, who as a Conservative prime minister in the 1990s fought off his party’s anti-Europeans, has been blunt in his conclusion. Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and locked out of the richest free trade market in history. “The U.K. once reveled in being a leading member of an E.U. with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States — the world’s most eminent superpower,” Mr. Major said in a speech last year. “Today, we know we are neither — and so does the world.”
When President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was a salutary reminder of the lesson of several centuries of European history. An island Britain may be, but it cannot escape the facts of its geography. Its security is inextricably bound to that of its neighbors.
Since becoming prime minister in 2024, Mr. Starmer has scrambled to rebuild bridges with Britain’s erstwhile European Union partners. He has made some progress. . . . Together with European partners, Mr. Starmer has also acted as a brake on the White House’s attempts to insist on a peace deal that would, in effect, hand Mr. Putin victory.
On the economic front, the prime minister is negotiating with Brussels to strip away some of the more nonsensical obstacles thrown up by Brexit to free trade, student exchanges and energy cooperation. He is also seeking to participate in the E.U.’s burgeoning program for collective defense procurement.
There is an irony here. Many in the Brexit camp saw Britain’s close relationship with the United States as an alternative to its European connections. But Mr. Trump has turned away from all of his trans-Atlantic partners, Britain included.
In any case, there is no certainty of an easy route back in. Opinion polls point to a majority of Britons believing Brexit was a mistake but do not yet point to a public clamor to overturn the result. Leaving the European Union took four years of intense, often acrimonious, negotiation. Rejoining could well take longer — particularly since, after the unwanted upheaval of Brexit, Britain’s former partners would have their own conditions for resuming the relationship.
The Brexiteers found an opportunity in 2016 in significant part because of the failure of successive governments to address the fundamental economic and social issues that lay at the heart of popular discontent or to tell the hard truths about the inevitable, and difficult, political trade-offs that would be necessary to restore a vibrant economy and begin the rebuilding of decaying public services.
Those who said leaving the European Union was the answer were peddling a nostalgic delusion, but for those who considered themselves left behind, it was an attractive one. A reversal would force the profound psychological shift that Britain has tried so resolutely to avoid since the dissolution of its empire: that Britain can still count itself a great nation, but it is no longer a great power.
History’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation.
A few months after the Brexit referendum, when the United States selected Mr. Trump as its president and read the rites over Pax Americana, America chose exceptionalism, too.
As different as the circumstances and characters on either side of the Atlantic were, there was a shared story in these epochal statements of national independence. Both were populist revolts against ruling elites. Stop the world, voters declared, we want to get off.
Sunday, June 21, 2026
The GOP Plan to Kill Off Medicare and Social Security
One of the least remarked-upon chapters in the Republicans’ ghastly Project 2025 document dealt with their plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, ostensibly to fix the impending trust fund shortfall and eliminate the national deficit all at once. The reason hardly anyone talked about it is that if there’s one thing we know about Republicans, from the so-called moderates to the most extreme MAGA true believers, it’s that they want to do away with those commie pinko programs once and for all.
But there’s a problem: Nearly all Americans depend on those commie pinko programs to some extent, including many Republican voters. So the ideologues are always forced to couch their desire to slash federal spending to the bone in some version of “We have to kill the programs in order to save them.” Nobody buys it, and the world moves on.
Indeed, in all three of his presidential campaigns Donald Trump ran on promises to protect those programs, and under his leadership, other Republicans have mostly kept their plans on the down low. . . . .when Project 2025 was unveiled, it was all there. Among other things, they proposed to raise the retirement age to 69 or 70, alter the benefit schedule and cut disability payments. They wanted to move toward privatizing Medicare entirely by making its already-privatized side program, Medicare Advantage, the default choice for everybody so insurance companies can more easily deny care and reap even bigger profits.
But that was just the latest attack in a long history. The Heritage Foundation has been putting out these policy blueprints for decades, and every single one of them features some harebrained scheme to degrade or eliminate the retirement programs.
Never once, oddly enough, have they suggested raising the cap on the maximum earnings subject to Social Security taxes. Asking wealthier people to pay payroll taxes on wages above $185,000 would fund the system long into the future. But of course, that’s the last thing Republicans want. The whole point of their years of endeavor is to end it once and for all.
We might have thought that Trump’s promises would at least have kept the jackals at bay until he’s off the stage. But it’s pretty clear that our president has checked out and only cares about revenge, monuments, prizes and grift at this point. If the extremists around him can get him to believe that he’s building his legacy as the greatest president in history by “saving” the programs with some new privatization scheme akin to his “Trump baby bonds,” he’ll do it in a heartbeat. . . . So the GOP is overdue for another run at this.
Well, it looks like they’re gearing up for it. House Speaker Mike Johnson said this to a conservative radio host this week: The largest spending items, the reason we’re in trouble, are because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot — mandatory spending, that is, your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security — they have to be adjusted and fixed.
Maybe we could think about reversing some of those tax cuts for billionaires Johnson and Trump love so much. Or we could put a stop to Trump’s foreign adventures, which are costing the taxpayers untold billions. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to approve Trump’s $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget last week, and Congress has appropriated $518 billion over the last year for the Department of Homeland Security to deport working people who are paying into Social Security with no prospect of ever collecting benefits. Maybe they could think about dialing back some of this reckless spending on wars and police actions that nobody wants and are making everyone poorer and less secure.
If the times are desperate, Mr. Speaker, it’s because the country is being run by people like you and Donald Trump, who seem determined to ruin it.
One might suspect Johnson knows that he’s not likely to be speaker next year, so there will be no legislation aimed at cutting the safety net programs. Their plan at this point is to maximally demagogue around the latest Social Security report, which says an impending shortfall of the Social Security “trust fund” — which is an accounting gimmick — will hit in 2032 or 2034.
That would effectively trigger a political crisis that endangers the program’s solvency, because that “trust fund” is what allows the government to pay out Social Security benefits every year without a specific appropriation from Congress. If there’s a shortfall, as now predicted, Congress will have to make up the money. What are the odds Democrats will be able to do that, whether or not they hold a majority, without the draconian cuts Republicans are certain to demand? Imagine the government-shutdown scenarios that include older people not getting their checks. Given the extremist majority that now dominates the GOP, that’s a real possibility.
Economist Paul Krugman explains in his newsletter that the shortfall is actually quite modest and easily accounted for — if the government exercises some common sense. This problem is actually temporary because members of the the massive baby boom generation are now largely retired, and their numbers will gradually diminish in the years ahead. As mentioned above, we could rethink this crusade to deport many the workers who’ve been propping up the system for years, we could tax rich people on more of their income, and we could decide to do something about America’s outrageous income inequality, which is distorting everything.
Maybe we’ll do all of that this time around. But I’m not betting on it.
There’s a certain “boy who cried wolf” quality to the perennial alarms about the GOP’s lust to get rid of these big federal programs that go back to FDR’s New Deal (Social Security) and LBJ’s Great Society (Medicare). But make no mistake: The minute they actually get the chance to take them down, they will. There is no article of faith more fundamental to the American conservative creed than the premise that Social Security and Medicare are socialist programs that must be privatized or eliminated altogether. Even the fact that these are universal government programs, available to every American, goes against everything they believe in.
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