Señor, señor Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor?
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box. As Mark Twain noted, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
Donald Trump’s Neo-Monroe Doctrine
Yanqui wake up
Don’t you see what you’re doing
Trying to be the Pharoah of the West bringing nothing but ruin
Better start swimming
Before you begin to drown
All those petty tyrants in your pocket gonna weigh you down
Bruce Cockburn, Yanqui Go Home (1984)
Which brings us to American journalist John Masko’s insightful analysis of Trump’s Latin American policy in a recent Unherd article. It is sharp and well-informed, particularly his framing of the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” as the ideological scaffolding for Washington’s renewed interest in its southern backyard. Yet, like most American commentators, he skips over a crucial subplot – namely, the role of the United States itself in creating the very chaos it now claims to correct. Venezuela’s “descent into shambles,” as he calls it, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. Sanctions, economic strangulation, and decades of covert interference were not incidental background noise but deliberate acts of policy – the slow throttling of a regime that refused to align with the hegemon’s economic and political script. Without that context, the narrative too easily morphs into a morality play about Latin American incompetence, when in truth, it’s an old imperial story of cause, consequence, and selective amnesia.
Masko’s central thesis – that Trump has revived the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – is persuasive. In Trump’s mind, security begins at home and radiates outward; when weak or corrupt neighbours threaten that security, they must be coerced or replaced. The author rightly traces this logic back to Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration that the US would “police” the Western Hemisphere, supposedly without territorial ambition but with the clear intent of monopolising intervention. From Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Guatemala to Chile, the Corollary became the moral fig leaf for American coups, invasions, and corporate extractions. Trump, Masko argues, sees himself as restoring that prerogative – a hemispheric sheriff cleaning up the neighbourhood after decades of liberal hand-wringing.
There is, however, a deeper irony in Masko’s framing. He presents Trump’s military buildup around Venezuela – F-35s in Puerto Rico, B-52s off the coast, CIA “covert” operations loudly proclaimed on television – as a return to historical normalcy, a reassertion of superpower swagger. But this conveniently ignores that America never really stopped intervening. From Plan Colombia to the Contra wars, from IMF leverage to trade sanctions, the methods simply evolved. The empire modernised; the mission never changed.
Masko paints Venezuela as a nation hollowed out by corruption, its military loyal only through fear and patronage, its once-mighty oil industry captured by criminal syndicates and foreign proxies. He’s not wrong — but he omits the pressure points that made reform or recovery almost impossible: the freezing of foreign assets, oil export bans, and a sanctions regime designed to collapse the economy under the banner of “democracy promotion.” The result is a country starving under siege, then blamed for its own starvation. It is the oldest of imperial tricks: break it, then call it broken.
The author is also curiously incurious about the demand side of America’s perpetual Latin drug war. He notes Trump’s pretext of “narco-trafficking” but fails to mention that the real market for those drugs lies not in Caracas or Bogotá, but in Chicago and Miami. As long as there is insatiable appetite and profit north of the Rio Grande, cartels will thrive no matter how many “suspect vessels” are blown out of the Caribbean. America’s own prohibitionary puritanism – the same logic that gave birth to Al Capone – continues to nourish the problem it claims to fight.
Masko’s analysis of Trump’s strategy does capture one key insight: the re-militarisation of hemispheric policy as a form of domestic theatre. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less about Venezuela per se and more about a symbolic restoration of dominance. It is the same playbook that guided the 1989 invasion of Panama, when Noriega — once Washington’s man in the canal zone – became inconvenient and was duly removed under the banner of anti-narcotics and democracy. The echo is unmistakable. Venezuela today serves as both scapegoat and proving ground: a chance for Trump to replay history, cast himself as the avenger of American sovereignty, and perhaps even seize a few oil fields in the process – though that, as always, is to be disavowed in polite company.
What Masko misses, perhaps by design, is the wider economic and ideological dimension. To call this merely an attempt to “seize Venezuelan oil” is too simple – Trump’s doctrine is more performative than acquisitive. It is about reasserting that the Western Hemisphere remains, in practice if not in name, America’s exclusive zone of influence, a region where Chinese investment and Russian advisors are not just economic competitors but existential affronts. In that sense, the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less a new foreign policy than a nostalgic hallucination: the dream of a hemisphere restored to its “natural order,” where Washington’s word is law and the rest are junior partners or failed states.
And yet, the danger lies precisely in that nostalgia. Venezuela’s collapse – accelerated by sanctions and corruption alike – has left it a tinderbox of criminal fiefdoms and shattered institutions. Push too hard and you get not regime change but fragmentation. The military Masko describes as Maduro’s bulwark could just as easily splinter, leaving behind a patchwork of armed enclaves and foreign proxies – a Caribbean Libya with oil rigs.
Trump, Masko concludes, is signalling not just to Caracas but to the continent: the Roosevelt Corollary is back. America will once again “help its friends and hamper its foes.” Perhaps so. But the hemisphere has changed; the hegemon’s writ is no longer automatic. China, once a distant abstraction, now bankrolls half the region’s infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are present in the margins. The Monroe Doctrine may have been written to keep Europeans out of America’s backyard, but the world has since moved into the neighbourhood.
What emerges, finally, from Masko’s piece is a portrait not of a coherent strategy but of imperial muscle memory – the reflex to intervene dressed up as rediscovered purpose. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is at once a geopolitical manoeuvre and a campaign slogan: Make Latin America Great Again, or at least make it obedient again. The tragedy, as always, is that ordinary Venezuelans – impoverished, exiled, and exhausted – will pay the price for another American morality play performed for domestic applause.
Trump is coming for Venezuela
…John Masko, Unherd 24 October
America’s foreign policy appears to have been turned upside down. In the Middle East and Far East, which have consumed most of America’s defence planning energy over the last few decades, trade wars and diplomatic negotiations have replaced shows of military power. Meanwhile, the US is stockpiling both materiel and manpower off the shores of South America to a degree unseen in many decades.
As of this week, the US had positioned 10 F-35 fighter jets in Puerto Rico, along with three MQ-9 reaper drones. More than 4,500 Marines and sailors have taken up residence at US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. Last week, President Trump publicly announced that he was authorising CIA covert operations in Venezuela, and a group of B-52 bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast. More than five suspected drug ships, some originating in Venezuela, have been interdicted and destroyed by US forces over recent weeks.
To many in the foreign policy establishment, Trump’s fixation on squeezing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been an enigma. He has justified the buildup on the grounds that Maduro’s regime harbours drug producers and distributors. But when Maduro has tried to satisfy Trump — even accepting planeloads of deported Venezuelan nationals from America — Trump has rebuffed him and redoubled US pressure. Perplexed analysts are asking: what exactly is Trump trying to achieve, if nothing Maduro can offer will please him? Where can this lead except to war or a humiliating walk-back?
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding between the Trump administration and the foreign policy establishment. Rather than focusing on the near-term risks of war in Venezuela, Trump is asking a higher-order question: What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t stop your neighbours from sneaking deadly drugs and unapproved migrants across your borders?
In Trump’s understanding, security begins at home, and then extends to the near-abroad. When weak or corrupt leaders nearby threaten the stability of the US, they must be either forced to change their behaviour, or they must be replaced. This has not been US policy for several decades, but for most of the 20th century, it was. The name of this policy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.
President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Corollary in 1904 in his Annual Address to Congress. Since the presidency of James Monroe a century earlier, it had been American policy to oppose any new colonisation or subjugation of lands in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. Monroe’s policy did not, however, provide a road map for when European countries sent ships into America’s backyard to collect debts or fight wars, as occurred during the British, Italian and German blockade of Venezuela in 1902. Determined to keep European warships out of America’s near-abroad, Roosevelt declared that US policy would be to have a monopoly over policing power in the Western seas. He further declared that it was no longer the sole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine to keep Europe out of our near-abroad; the doctrine would also now be used to protect American interests more generally. He explained: “It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation… may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance.”
During the ensuing decades, the Roosevelt Corollary was periodically called upon to reestablish order in Latin American war zones and to prevent the accession of regimes dedicated to, in Roosevelt’s words, “wronging” the US. The Corollary underlay the brief US occupation of Cuba, from 1906-1909, after the Spanish-American War, two occupations of the chronically unstable Dominican Republic, and support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It also inspired the CIA-supported overthrows of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz following his nationalisation of United Fruit Company lands, and of Chilean President Salvador Allende as he led that country’s mining-based economy into ruin. It was also behind America’s futile efforts — through an embargo, assassination attempts, and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — to topple Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
America’s failure to overthrow Castro, coupled with the relative untouchability of many Soviet-allied Latin regimes during the Cold War period, caused the Roosevelt Corollary to fall into disuse. The liberal internationalist order that followed the Cold War further discouraged the use of hard power to overthrow regimes hostile to American interests. But in 2025, the Trump Administration seems determined to bring it back.
Within the Roosevelt Corollary (or, as I’ve been told it’s referred to within the administration, “Neo-Monroe Doctrine”) framework, some of Trump’s harder-to-figure foreign policy actions begin to make more sense. One of these is the appointment of Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which was perplexing alongside Trump’s more provocative foreign policy nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. But when one considers Rubio’s knowledge of Latin America and his hawkish record on Latin American dictators in the context of the Roosevelt Corollary agenda, he fits perfectly.
Then there are Trump’s recent actions toward Argentina and Colombia, both of which would have seemed peculiarly drastic in past administrations, but represent a return to a Rooseveltian approach to doing business. For Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian friend of the US who faces a fiscal crunch at home, Trump recently structured a $40 billion loan package and floated a huge purchase of Argentine beef, much to the chagrin of American cattle ranchers. Colombian socialist President Gustavo Petro, on the other hand, faced a cutoff of all American aid (Colombia has received $14 billion in aid since 2000) due to his failure to address Colombian drug trafficking. In a Rooseveltian world, the President wields plenty of carrots and a big stick.
“What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.”
In order to understand how Trump’s Roosevelt Corollary framework applies to Venezuela, we must first consider the state of the country today. Maduro’s Venezuela is a shambles by every possible metric: aside from its ruler’s personal security. Owing to a combination of mismanagement and corruption, Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, is now an economic basket case. Its economy is projected to contract by 3% this year, and inflation is at 682%. Venezuelan oil exports — the foundation of its economy — have declined by two thirds since 2012. As living standards and safety across the country have plummeted, nearly 30% of Venezuelans have left over the last 10 years, mostly for neighbouring Colombia, but many for the US (both legally and illegally).
Even with a hostile third of the country now gone, Maduro still received fewer votes for president than opposition candidate Edmundo González in last year’s election. While international organisations urged him to accept defeat, he declared victory and began a third term in office. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose exit polling efforts demonstrated that Maduro’s reelection was rigged, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight the regime.
Yet while Maduro may be the world’s least legitimate leader, his position within Venezuela is still secure. As centuries of Latin American history have shown, military loyalty is the single most important requisite for regime security in the region. And while Maduro may have little else, he has that. As the Wall Street Journal has shown, Maduro has successfully “surrounded himself with a fortress of lieutenants whose fortunes and future are tied to his”. He has done this by imprisoning or exiling the disloyal, while encouraging the loyal to accept patronage jobs in state-run companies or payoffs from drug-traffickers to allow their shipments to pass. The result is a military that is just as fearful for the personal ramifications of regime failure as Maduro is himself. And in case Maduro’s reign of blackmail were to fail, there are Cuban counterintelligence officials and other paid spies installed in the ranks to detect any hint of insurrection. According to Edward Rodríguez, a defected former Venezuelan army colonel, snitching is richly rewarded with “jobs, money, cars and even homes” in a country where much of the population cannot consistently afford food.
With the government preoccupied by personal security and self-enrichment, it will surprise few that much of the official territory of Venezuela (precisely how much is unknown) is no longer under government control. Much of western Venezuela is controlled by Colombian drug-running and human-trafficking organisations like the National Liberation Army. And much of southern Venezuela is given over to feuding megabandas or organised crime rings — most infamously the gang Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US. The megabandashave outposts in Venezuela’s major cities, and all around the world, including in the US. One reason for Venezuela’s declining exports is that large parts of its major extractive industries — particularly mining — have been taken over by criminal enterprises whose activities occur off the books. These organisations control territory in the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela’s southeast, where many of their mines are located.
Since Trump’s pressure campaign, Maduro has pumped out propaganda to recruit a citizen militia that can bolster the country’s depleted military. According to the Wall Street Journal, “on state television, radio and social media, announcers are telling Venezuelans that the U.S. is a rapacious Nazi-like state that wants to dig its claws into the country’s oil wealth but that the Venezuelan military, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, are positioning to repel any invasion”. Maduro’s army currently numbers about 125,000 — a combination of military regulars and new recruits, so many of whom are above typical military age that they have been dubbed a “Dad’s Army” in the British press. According to recent reporting, the army is underfed, under-resourced, and has suffered from a significant brain-drain due to Maduro’s loyalty tests. Maduro reportedly also plans, in the event of invasion, on having the support of Colombia’s National Liberation Army — the least it can do for Caracas’ salutary neglect of its drug and human smuggling (whether before or after he delivers to Trump his proof that there’s no drug trafficking in Venezuela, one can only guess).
For the US, this all adds up to a puzzle: the Maduro regime’s continued existence directly hurts American interests, but the regime has hollowed out Venezuelan society and institutions to such a degree that regime change will probably result in further chaos, and very possibly a civil war — outcomes that also hurt American interests.
Trump has likely still concluded that regime change would help the US, but that to be effective, the muscle behind it will need to come from inside Venezuela itself. His military buildup is therefore an effort to pressure fence-sitters inside Venezuela’s military and underground political opposition (a group that still includes Machado herself) to provide that muscle. Perhaps if military brass begins to see that the Maduro regime’s days are numbered, their calculus on how best to preserve their own lives and careers will shift. There is also an outside chance that a skirmish with US forces, and a glimpse of the untenability of his position, might convince Maduro to resign or flee.
For the time being, direct covert action against Maduro’s person seems to be off the table. Ironically, we know this because of Trump’s highly irregular decision to broadcast his authorisation of CIA covert action to the world — meaning it would no longer be, well, covert. Trump’s threat of covert action, rather, functions as a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare, ensuring that every night for the foreseeable future, Maduro dreams of exploding cigars. Far more likely is covert action that assists in forming and resourcing opposition parties or militias, as the US has done in past Latin American revolutions. Conventional military strikes on Venezuela are possible but would need to be provoked. Conventional forces could also be deployed in ungoverned spaces against drug-traffickers, further underlining the impotence of the Maduro regime.
Where the Trump-Maduro standoff goes from here is hard to know. But the reasoning behind the buildup is abundantly clear, and it goes far beyond Venezuela’s drug distribution or human trafficking. It is a signal to the world, and to Latin America in particular, that American policy toward the Americas has changed. More precisely, it’s changed back from a policy of salutary neglect to an active posture in which American interests are stridently defended. As in the days of the Roosevelt Corollary, America will help its friends and hamper its foes. If a Latin American regime harms American interests, and regime change will improve the situation, America will not hesitate to affect its overthrow.
Venezuela resonates particularly with the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preclude European incursion into American waters. Venezuela is a long-term strategic partner of China, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil and offers economic and political support to Venezuela internationally. Even as Venezuela has descended into ruin over the last few years, it has continued to serve as a beachhead for Chinese influence in America’s backyard. Just as President Monroe’s original doctrine intended to keep hostile foreign interference far away from American waters, President Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine can do the same for America’s 21st-century threats.
Trump is likely gambling on the fact that Maduro’s fall would be universally popular. The rest of the world has watched in horror over the last several decades as Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez plunged their country into poverty and chaos. This means that if US pressure results in Maduro’s overthrow, Trump’s new Roosevelt Corollary will start out in the win column in the court of international public opinion. Whether the US stays in that column as it addresses challenges in Colombia, Peru and Argentina, only time will tell.
John Masko is a journalist based in Boston, specialising in business and international politics.
Danger angel
Comes screaming through the clouds
She’s coming for your soul, child
She’s gonna take you down
Larkin Poe
Once in a while, In That Howling Infinite is attracted to “out there” larger than life identities, and, like mainstream and social media, gives them much more oxygen than they deserve. MAGA activist and provocateur Laura Loomer is one of those. Avatar and avenging angel, she is both symptom and symbol – the female face of Donald Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by entitlement, envy, and zeal. shes turned grievance into influence, outrage into profession, loyalty into performance art. Some see her as comic relief; others, as proof that moral panic now pays. Either way, she’s the perfect child of her time – restless, theatrical, and forever online. Equal parts scandal, spectacle, and self-made legend, she’s the Right’s answer to the Left’s cancel culture: a one-woman inquisition armed with a smartphone and an inexhaustible sense of grievance.
We republish below Unherd editor and reporter James Billot’s article tracing the rise of this “hit woman” of MAGA politics, the scalps she has lifted, and the theatre of fear and fandom she inhabits. It’s an entertaining but nonetheless disturbing portrait of ambition, vanity, and the politics of outrage. Billot paints her as a digital Torquemada: part gossip columnist, part bounty hunter, part true believer.
As for the title of this piece, there is indeed a Ballad of Laura Loomer. It follows the précis.
Précis: A hit job on a ‘hit woman’
Danger angel Won’t listen to your prayers She’ll drink your holy water Slip into your nightmares There’s nothing you can give her That she hasn’t already got While you might think you’ve caught her You’ve blown your only shot, look out Danger Angel!
Loomer has made herself indispensable to Donald Trump not through proximity or power, but through her peculiar genius for weaponised outrage – the art of turning suspicion into spectacle. Her method is almost monastic in its discipline. For 16 hours a day, she trawls social media for ideological impurity – anyone in government who displays insufficient loyalty to the Great Leader. The sins are various: vaccine sympathy, a whiff of neoconservatism, a stray Black Lives Matter post. The punishment is swift. She “Loomers” them – posting their misdeeds to her 1.8 million followers, tipping off the White House, and waiting for the axe to fall. According to her, dozens have been purged at her prompting: an FDA vaccine chief, an NSA lawyer, a West Point academic, defence and security staffers, and even senior Trump appointees who thought they were untouchable. It’s research as blood sport.
Billot’s portrait is gleefully surgical: the self-declared “most banned woman in the world” living in a Florida rental with four rescue dogs and a livestream habit, railing against the “Big Tech” cabal that simultaneously victimises and enriches her. She’s banned by Uber, Lyft, Twitter (then reinstated by Musk), PayPal, GoFundMe, Facebook, Venmo, and Clubhouse. Each ban becomes a badge of honour, another stripe on her martyr’s uniform. She wears persecution like perfume — and sells the bottle for $29.99 on her website.
Loomer’s life is powered by thwarted ambition. She missed out on Dartmouth, lost two congressional races, and has been repeatedly blocked from a White House role. Yet each rejection feeds her legend. Her career began in the Project Veritas circus — dressing in a burqa to “expose” voter fraud — and evolved into a full-blown performance art of paranoia. She disrupted a Trump-themed Julius Caesar production in 2017, screamed about “violence against Donald Trump”, and became a Fox News darling overnight. She has accused Casey DeSantis of faking cancer, called Islam a “cancer on humanity”, and suggested that Parkland and 9/11 were staged. Apology, for Loomer, is treason.
She calls herself an “investigative journalist”, but the investigations are really moral witch trials – improvised, viral, and frighteningly effective. She boasts that cabinet secretaries call her in panic to explain themselves before her next blast. Even those who despise her respect her reach. Her Rumble show – part soapbox, part sermon brings in $15,000 a month and features the MAGA trinity of sponsors: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. It is populism as home shopping channel.
What emerges from Billot’s piece is a grotesque yet compelling portrait: a woman who believes fear is the measure of respect; who seeks validation from a man who will never truly give it; who builds empires of influence on foundations of resentment. She is both symptom and symbol — the female face of Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by a cocktail of entitlement, envy, and zeal.
The article is, yes, a hit piece – but on a hit woman who has built her fame on delivering them. It is difficult not to admire, in a perverse way, her ferocious will, her talent for narrative manipulation, her intuitive understanding of the algorithmic age: how outrage, once properly branded, can become a career. And yet, one senses that when the spotlight shifts, she will be alone again — another pawn discarded once her usefulness fades. Like all propagandists, she lives by the flame she feeds, and it will consume her soon enough.
Step outside Billot’s irony and the picture of Laura becomes at once less cartoonish and more troubling.Academic analyses of the post-2016 MAGA media sphere – by researchers at George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Pew Research Centre – suggest that Loomer is neither a fringe eccentric nor an isolated provocateur but a structural feature of the ecosystem itself: an entrepreneur of grievance, feeding and fed by a self-sustaining outrage economy.Her claim to be “the most banned woman in the world” is the cornerstone of what political scientists call the martyrdom loop- censorship begets notoriety, notoriety begets income, income sustains further provocation.Studies by the Knight Foundation and NewGuard show that de-platforming frequently increases engagement among core followers; the sense of persecution becomes the product.She is thus less an aberration than a prototype: the logical child of a system that monetises moral panic.
Her success, such as it is, also mirrors the logic of the platforms themselves.Engagement-based algorithms on X, Rumble, and Truth Social reward moral extremity; the next post must out-outrage the last.Her “hits” against officials accused of ideological impurity exemplify what information-ethics researchers call punitive virality – online denunciation with real-world consequences.When civil-service careers collapse under these pile-ons, activism becomes indistinguishable from intimidation.Even conservative outlets such as the Washington Examiner have begun to note the irony: this is cancel culture re-engineered by its own supposed opponents, a revolution now devouring itself.
Sociologically, Loomer’s self-reinvention – cosmetic transformation, performative devotion to Trump, ritual declarations of loyalty – fits a broader pattern noted by scholars of the American right: women in hyper-masculinist movements often claim power by policing the boundaries of belief more fiercely than their male counterparts.She embodies that paradox of agency and subjugation, the inquisitor disguised as devotee.Feminist media critics see in her a parody of empowerment—the female enforcer of patriarchal purity tests, punishing deviation with theatrical zeal.
Factually, her record is less about fabrication than inflation.Independent checks by Reuters, AP Fact Check, and the ADL show consistent distortion and exaggeration, but rarely outright invention.Yet every correction, every ban, every supposed silencing, only reinforces her narrative of persecution.Communication theorists have observed this since the early Trump years: to her audience, refutation is proof that she must be right.Counter-speech becomes confirmation bias, feeding the myth of suppressed truth.
Politically, she operates in the zone that historian Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism, a political strategy where leaders inflict pain on their followers to maintain power, combining sadism (pleasure from inflicting pain) and populism (claiming to represent the common people) in a way that manipulates and controls the populace through fear, anxiety, and division – there is always an “other” to look down on and pillory. In this way ,Snyder argues in his video (see below), America can be governed without policy and with pain.
Economically, she exemplifies the gigification of politics: a freelance inquisitor in the attention marketplace, thriving precisely because trust in institutions has collapsed. Psychologically, she is a practitioner of narcissistic moralism – the conviction that outrage itself is virtue. To dismiss her as a comic sideshow, as Billot half-invites us to do, is to miss the larger point: Loomer is not exceptional but emblematic. She is the distilled essence of a system that confuses virality with validity, noise with news, emotion with evidence. She is dangerous not for what she believes but for how effectively she has turned belief into business.Remove her and another will appear, promising to keep everyone on their toes – another entrepreneur in the endless market of grievance that now passes for public life.
The above commentary was composed in collaboration with ChatGPT
Laura Loomer – American activist and provocateur – rose from the fringes of the internet to become MAGA’s self-appointed scourge, a zealot in the age of algorithms.Armed with outrage, she turned “opposition research” into ritual sacrifice, serving her King with names from the digital pyre.But every court has its fool, every prophet her reflection; and when the storm subsides, only the glow of the screen remains.This ballad is her mirror – half elegy, half exorcism, part lampoon, part lament, a hymn for the saint of spite.
She was born again in the wild news feed Where the truth and thunder rhyme With a restless greed and an aching need To be trending one more time
“Fear’s the only faith I keep” she said “And respect is just for the weak” So she chased down the treasons fathoms deep In the wastelands of the Woke
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
She courted the King with her venomous tongue Fed him names from her digital pyre He smiled and winked and the faithful sung And the fearful fled her fire
But kingdoms built on shifting sands Fade away like snow in June She mistook his fickle favour For promises carved in runes
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
Her dogs keep guard in the Florida rain Her livestream hums in a world of blame Each post is a rosary bead of pain And each follower whispers her name
“I’m cancelled for telling the truth” she said Though that truth was over blown It rests with the ghosts of the posts that she made And the crown she thought she’d owned
So raise a glass to the saints of spite Who confuse the glare for grace For they’re the children of the night And are locked its wild embrace
Trump’s muckraker-in-chief wants to be feared
James Billot, Unherd, 11 October 2026
The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan: Spectacle, Strategy, and the Limits of Diplomacy
In late September 2025, US President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping 20‑point peace plan for Gaza, accompanied by the familiar trappings of performance: the East Room of the White House, cameras flashing, a florid declaration of “eternal peace in the Middle East,” and a newly anointed “Board of Peace” with Trump as chair and Tony Blair as his deputy. On paper, the plan promises ceasefire, reconstruction, hostage releases, demilitarization, a staged Israeli withdrawal, and a technocratic administration in Gaza overseen by an international board. In practice, it reads as equal parts showmanship, improvisation, and coercive diplomacy, an audacious gambit with enormous potential benefits and equally enormous pitfalls.
For the Trump administration, the plan is a chance to rewrite the narrative: to isolate Hamas, reassert US influence in the Gulf, forestall further annexation of the West Bank, and offer Netanyahu a politically palatable off‑ramp from the brutal two‑year campaign in Gaza. For the international community — including the Arab Gulf states, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, and Indonesia — it presents an opportunity to participate in a stabilizing initiative and to demonstrate relevance after years of watching humanitarian crises unfold from the sidelines. Yet beneath the pageantry lie structural asymmetries, enormous trust deficits, and profound omissions, particularly the conspicuous absence of the Palestinians themselves from meaningful negotiation.
In That Howling Infinite reserves its opinion in these early days. It’s the only show in town right now and it is generating interest and potential commitment by all those parties who would have to make it happen. There are already dissenting voices on all sides – the pro-Palestinian “progressive” left have been predictably dismissive of what is indeed an imposed solution to an intractable problem – although it would appear that there are many cooks in the kitchen other than Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu. Some have even condemned it for its demand that Hamas, the instigator of the war, to surrender unconditionally. But at the end of the day, they have little to offer except more war and vitriol. You don’t use gasoline to put out a fire. The reality is that the parties that can make this happen, including providing the proposed security forces and the resources to rebuild the devastated enclave and rehouse and rehabilitate its homeless and harrowed people, appear at this stage to have signed on. Early days, but, to borrow from J Lennon, “all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
[The following analysis is the outcome of a conversation and collaboration between In That Howling Infinite and ChatGPT.
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Mechanics of the Plan
The plan’s framework is deceptively simple:
Immediate Ceasefire and Hostage Exchange: Hamas must release all remaining Israeli hostages, alive or dead, within 72 hours. In return, Israel promises a staged withdrawal to a security perimeter.
Prisoner Release and Amnesty: Israel would release approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including those detained after the October 2023 attacks. Hamas fighters willing to renounce violence could gain amnesty; those choosing exile would receive safe passage.
Board of Peace and Reconstruction: A transitional authority, the so-called Board of Peace, would oversee governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Blair as deputy. Aid delivery, infrastructure rebuilding, and the restoration of hospitals, water, electricity, and sewage would be managed under this international technocratic oversight.
International Stabilization Force (ISF): Western and Arab troops would replace Israeli forces in Gaza, ensuring security during reconstruction and the reestablishment of governance. The exact composition and mandate remain undefined, a critical gap given the operational risks.
Pathway to Palestinian Statehood: A vague promise of “conditions for self-determination” exists, contingent on PA reform, reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank, and adherence to technocratic administration under international oversight.
On paper, it is a plan that offers incentives to every major party: Hamas faces conditional amnesty; Israel gains hostages, de-escalation, and security assurances; the Gulf states gain influence; and the PA is positioned to regain a governance role in Gaza. It is, in principle, a diplomatic masterstroke — if it can be implemented.
Gaps, Omissions, and Absurdities
Yet the devil — and much of the comedy — lies in the details not addressed:
Hamas Exclusion: The central conflict party, Hamas, was neither consulted nor invited. Trump openly admitted, “I have not dealt with them,” and proposed outsourcing the group’s compliance to Arab and Muslim mediators. The result is a coercive ultimatum dressed as a peace initiative: accept the terms or face complete annihilation with US backing.
Palestinian Agency Ignored: The two million Gazans whose lives are at stake had no seat at the table. Aid, reconstruction, and governance are treated as top-down deliverables, with no credible mechanism for local input. Gaza becomes a theatre set, not a living society.
Unclear Implementation: The ISF, Board of Peace, and PA reform mechanisms are vaguely defined. Who will command the stabilization troops? How will the PA be reformed to earn legitimacy in Gaza? What safeguards prevent reconstruction materials from being diverted to military purposes? These questions are unanswered, leaving enormous operational and political gaps.
West Bank Neglected: Despite daily settler-Palestinian clashes, the plan offers almost no operational framework for the West Bank. New settlements, such as the E1 project, threaten to fracture any contiguous Palestinian state. The plan’s silence on this is a glaring omission.
Asymmetry and Risk: The plan favors Israel far more than Hamas. The militant group is asked to surrender hostages and arms simultaneously, a leap of faith in a context of zero trust. The amnesty offer is conditional and uncertain; refusal triggers an existential threat. Israel, by contrast, faces comparatively modest obligations, particularly given the indefinite “security perimeter” it maintains.
Domestic Israeli Politics: Netanyahu’s right-wing cabinet, notably Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, remain uncompromisingly hawkish. Trump’s backing gives Netanyahu room to sell the plan domestically, but hardliners could sabotage implementation, and prior experience demonstrates Netanyahu’s readiness to resume military operations when politically expedient.
Performance Over Policy: The East Room spectacle was classic Trump: a reality-TV cadence applied to diplomacy. Grandiose claims of “eternal peace,” self-anointment, photo ops with global leaders, and theatrical references to “the ocean” Israel ceded in 2005 illustrate a plan heavy on optics and light on enforceable substance.
International Reception
The plan has drawn broad, if cautious, support:
Arab and Muslim States: Qatar, Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Turkey issued a joint endorsement emphasizing aid delivery, hostages, non-displacement, and the integration of Gaza with the West Bank under a Palestinian state framework.
Europe: Macron and Starmer endorsed the effort to secure hostages and reduce conflict.
Australia: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed the initiative as a constructive step, while opposition figures criticized Canberra’s earlier symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood as performative and irrelevant.
Yet these endorsements are conditional and aspirational, recognizing the plan’s promise without committing to enforcement.
Perspectives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Activists
Israeli Public: Polls indicate two-thirds of Israelis want the war to end. The hostage release and cessation of bombardment offer tangible relief. Hardline right-wing factions, however, may resist compromises that limit continued Israeli military prerogatives. Indeed, the far-right, whose ethnic cleansing designs are explicit and who have driven so much of Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war appear to hate Trump’s plan: “a tragedy of leadership” and “an act of wilful blindness” in the phrase of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Palestinians: Exhausted by years of blockade and bombardment, Gazans desire immediate relief. But the lack of agency and the conditional, externally imposed nature of governance and reconstruction make the plan potentially resented as foreign administration rather than liberation.
Progressives and Activists: Pro-Palestinian advocates will likely view the plan skeptically. While it promises aid and reconstruction, it circumvents local agency, substitutes technocratic administration for democratic governance, and leaves Palestinian sovereignty largely aspirational. International human rights groups will monitor for coercion, displacement, and military overreach.
Political Theatre
The plan is an exercise in spectacle: Trump as self-styled savior, Netanyahu as pliant yet menacing partner, Palestinians and Hamas as props off-stage. The terminology — “Board of Peace,” “International Stabilisation Force,” “demilitarization” — evokes bureaucracy rather than genuine power-sharing. It is as much a political theatre as a policy framework, designed to satisfy domestic and international optics. In that sense, it is both brilliant and cynical: brilliant in its choreography of alliances and threats; cynical in its disregard for the lived realities of Gaza’s population.
Promise and Peril
Trump’s plan is audacious. It isolates Hamas, engages Gulf wealth, nudges Netanyahu toward tactical concessions, and offers a narrow window for reconstruction and peace. Yet structural asymmetries, zero trust, vague operational mechanisms, potential sabotage from hardliners, and the absence of Palestinian agency render it precarious.
If Hamas accepts, the plan could relieve immediate humanitarian crises, return hostages, and establish a technocratic administration capable of rebuilding Gaza — a diplomatic triumph in a region long starved of them. If it fails, it will cement perceptions of American theatre in place of effective policy, leaving Gaza’s suffering unresolved and occupation repackaged as transition.
And if Hamas actually accepts, and the plan moves ahead, what would happen if, having received the hostages, Israel simply decided to remain in Gaza, or refused to return Palestinian prisoners. Given how Netanyahu’s political survival depends on his far-right coalition partners, and given how clearly those partners want the war to continue and Israel to remain in Gaza, this is not remotely a fanciful scenario. And if it transpired, who aside from Trump could do anything about it? Netanyahu highlighted this feature of the plan for a reason: almost certainly as a signal to those far-right allies that they needn’t fear.
The plan is shot through with such difficulties. Netanyahu notes that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza will be gradual and “linked to the extent of disarmament and demilitarisation” of Hamas. What happens if Israel decides progress on this is too slow and resumes bombing?
The deal envisages a technocratic Palestinian committee to provide day-to-day services, until the Palestinian Authority is adequately reformed. Who would be the arbiter of whether this has been satisfied? And more specifically, what would happen if Israel simply declared it hasn’t? Given this is the precursor to the possibility of the Palestinian state Netanyahu has always opposed, it’s again a perfectly likely scenario. Will some independent body resolve this?
All of this is a reflection of the fact that this is not a deal in any sense. No Arab nation was present at that press conference. The plan was developed with no discernible Palestinian involvement at all. Trump has declared there’s “not much” room for Hamas to negotiate terms, and that it had days to accept or “pay in hell”. The Arab and Muslim nations that welcomed this, and whose involvement will be crucial in it working, have set out conditions Netanyahu explicitly rejects and which the Trump plan doesn’t allow for, including that Israel withdraw fully from Gaza and commit to a pathway for a Palestinian state. Moreover, they want the Palestinian Authority to invite them to provide troops to stabilise Gaza so they aren’t seen as yet another occupying force. Trump’s plan provides for none of that.
The lesson is stark: diplomacy without inclusion, even when performed at the highest theatrical scale, is fragile. For now, the Board of Peace is more a symbol of hope than a guarantor of change — a test of whether spectacle can ever substitute for governance, and whether exhausted populations, international actors, and political opportunists will allow vision to overcome reality.
It is all down to will. The will of Hamas to accept its dismantling, when this has always been non-negotiable for it. The will of Netanyahu to end a war he has shown every interest in prolonging. The will of Trump to force Israel to abide faithfully by the plan, even where it’s politically inconvenient. The worry isn’t just that this seems unlikely on all fronts. That’s inevitable in such an intractable tragedy.
In short, the plan may well work; or it may simply provide another act in a two-decade-long tragedy, with Trump and Netanyahu as performers and Gaza as the stage.
US President Donald Trump’s twenty-point comprehensive peace plan for Gaza, published in full below, is a fascinating document – part fever dream of a “deal of the century,” part boardroom restructuring plan, part realpolitik ceasefire blueprint. And for Trump, yes – the dangling Nobel, the glittering carrot at the end of the labyrinth.
On paper it sounds almost seductively tidy: IDF withdrawal, Hamas stand-down, aid flowing, hostages returned in return for prisoners released, multinational security force, guns decommissioned, technocrats taking over, reformed PA, while a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump (and perhaps Tony Blair in a cameo) ushers in a gleaming new Gaza.
In That Howling Infinite reserves its opinion in these early days. It’s the only show in town right now and it is generating interest and potential commitment by all those parties who would have to make it happen. There’ll be dissenting voices on all sides, but at the end of the day, they have little to offer except more war and vitriol. You don’t use gasoline to put out a fire. To borrow from J Lennon, all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
But, nevertheless, the gap between the paper and the ground is immense.
Here are some early observations:
Ambition vs. feasibility. The plan imagines simultaneous hostage exchanges, mass prisoner releases, Hamas disarmament, and international deployment – all within days or weeks. Each step is individually fraught; stacked together, the sequencing is almost fantastical.
Actors and trust. It assumes that Hamas will voluntarily surrender weapons and that Israel will trust an international stabilization force enough to withdraw, all while regional guarantors enforce compliance. None of these actors currently exhibit the trust or cohesion needed.
Power dynamics. The “Board of Peace” with Trump as chair feels less like neutral governance and more like a branding exercise. Palestinians, already wary of external control, would likely see it as another foreign trusteeship.
Statehood dangling. The plan holds out a “credible pathway” to Palestinian self-determination but keeps it conditional on reforms and compliance – carrot and stick politics that might prolong, rather than resolve, the status question.
Optics of ownership. The redevelopment language (special economic zones, “miracle cities”) reads like a Gulf mega-project transplanted onto a traumatised strip of land, risking the perception of Gaza as a real-estate venture rather than a society with its own political agency.
So, on paper, it is clever and comprehensive, giving something to everybody, and promising an imminent end to the destruction and carnage of the past two years. But in reality, it is almost impossible to realise without a fundamental shift in regional politics and in the balance of trust. It reads less as a near-term peace plan than as a campaign manifesto – designed to signal vision and dominance, to offer every constituency a glimmer of what they want, and to position Trump as indispensable even if none of it materialises.
What will the warring parties and outsiders take the plan?
This will depend less on the fine print than on who authored it, and on the political imaginaries each camp carries into the debate. A few likely responses:
1. Israel & Netanyahu
Netanyahu, ever the tactician, would welcome the optics: Trump is both his old ally and a political shield. “Deradicalised Gaza,” hostages back, no forced concessions on West Bank settlements—what’s not to like?
The Israeli right could live with it, because it leaves the question of Palestinian statehood indefinitely conditional.
Centrists and security hawks might applaud the ISF mechanism and U.S. guarantees, though the idea of foreign troops patrolling Gaza would make many nervous.
2. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank
Gaza:
Immediate Relief vs. Distrust. Ordinary Gazans, exhausted by war and blockade, might welcome the promise of aid, reconstruction, and an end to bombardment. Rubble removed, water flowing, bakeries open—that is tangible.
But many will see it as conditional relief: they must surrender political agency, accept foreign trusteeship (“Trump’s Board of Peace”), and live under an imposed technocracy. To them, this may feel like a wardship, not a liberation.
Trauma & Pragmatism. After such devastation, some Gazans might pragmatically say, “we’ll take the deal, anything is better than this,” but the resentment toward outside control will simmer.
West Bank:
Deep Cynicism. Palestinians in the West Bank already regard the PA as corrupt and ineffectual, and many see U.S.-brokered plans as cover for Israeli expansion. The plan doesn’t address settlements, land seizures, checkpoints, or settler violence—all daily realities.
Result: West Bank Palestinians are likely to dismiss it as another charade – aid and optics in Gaza while the core occupation issue festers on their side of the Green Line.
3. Hamas and Its Supporters/Enablers
Hamas in Gaza:
Existential Threat. The plan effectively demands Hamas disarm, disband, or exile itself. For Hamas leadership, this is unconditional defeat in all but name.
Pragmatists vs. Hardliners. Some Hamas figures might toy with amnesty or safe passage, but for the movement’s core (military wing, ideological diehards), surrendering weapons = suicide.
Hamas Supporters in the West Bank:
They will frame the plan as capitulation and collaboration with occupiers. It hands Hamas a propaganda card: “see, the Americans and Israelis want to erase us.”
This could deepen West Bank radicalisation and further delegitimize the PA if it tries to administer such a deal.
Iran & Hezbollah: Will reject outright – it neuters their “Axis of Resistance”. They will continue funding and arming whatever underground or splinter groups emerge.
Qatar & Turkey: May hedge. They might support parts of the plan if it relieves humanitarian disaster, but not if it sidelines Hamas entirely.
Diaspora Palestinians & Pro-Hamas Sympathisers:
Many in exile view Hamas (however critically) as a symbol of armed resistance. For them, a Trump-blessed disarmament deal is betrayal dressed as peace.
Expect mass rejection from diaspora activists, especially in Europe and the Americas, where “Free Palestine” remains the rallying cry.
Net Effect
For Gazans: temporary relief but long-term discontent.
For West Bank Palestinians: scorn and dismissal.
For Hamas: existential rejection.
For Hamas’s backers: rejection, with potential escalation elsewhere (Lebanon, Syria, Red Sea) to keep the “resistance flame” alive.
In short, the plan may stop the bombs, but it does not resolve the politics. Gazans might sigh with relief; West Bankers will sneer; Hamas will fight on; its allies will sabotage; and the diaspora will rage.
3. Arab League & Regional States
Publicly, Arab governments (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE) would almost certainly bless the plan, because it ends the bloodletting, brings in money, and doesn’t force them to grapple with Hamas. Privately, they’d be wary: nobody relishes underwriting Gaza’s reconstruction while taking the blame for failed implementation. But in a rules-based, donor-heavy framework, they could sell it as Arab pragmatism.
4. Western Powers
Washington under Trump (and perhaps a Republican-leaning Congress) would present this as a masterstroke—“the deal no one else could deliver.” Europe would likely sigh in relief: anything that halts the war is better than nothing, and the technocratic language about governance and reform plays to EU ears. But the suspicion will linger: is this peace-building, or is it Trump building another gilded tower on scorched earth?
5. UN & International Institutions
UN agencies would leap at guaranteed humanitarian access, even under Trump’s “Board of Peace.” The problem: the UN is accustomed to being scapegoated, and here it would once again be implementing someone else’s design, while absorbing the failures if and when they come.
6. Progressives & Global Pro-Palestinian Activists
For many, this is a non-starter. It doesn’t dismantle the occupation, doesn’t guarantee sovereignty, doesn’t address the Nakba legacy – it freezes the conflict in a Trump-branded frame. They will dismiss it as paternalism dressed as pragmatism: Gazans are told to behave, hand over weapons, accept foreign trusteeship, and maybe, one day, statehood might be considered. For many progressives, and their Arab collaborators, the plan will probably not be enough. Though they’ve clamoured all along for a ceasefire, it’s not the one they wanted – a Free Palestine, and for some a Juden Frei Palestine “from the river to the sea”. Add the Trump factor: for progressives, he is the antithesis of credibility, and they abhor all he stands for. Even if the plan included a sovereign Palestinian state tomorrow, they’d likely distrust it as a Trojan horse.
7. The Subtext
The stark divide is this:
For state actors (Israel, Arab governments, Western powers), this looks like a workable ceasefire mechanism dressed up as reconstruction.
For non-state voices (Palestinian street, global solidarity movements), it looks like an elaborate cage, perhaps cleaner and better lit, but still a cage.
Netanyahu and the Arab League could sell it; the UN and EU could implement it; the U.S. could campaign on it; but progressives and much of Palestinian civil society will continue to shout: it’s not liberation, it’s management. And “management,” in the political imagination of the dispossessed, is simply another word for betrayal.
How will Donald Trump “sell” his “deal of the century “?
Trump’s political “genius” (and danger) is that he doesn’t need buy-in from the ground; he needs headlines at home and optics abroad. Here’s how the calculus lines up:
1. In the U.S. Domestic Arena
“The Deal Nobody Else Could Do.” Trump frames himself as the only leader who could stop the war, get hostages released, and bring aid trucks rolling in. The fact that Gazans or the diaspora are furious is immaterial – he’s selling to voters in Michigan, not in Khan Younis.
Optics of Strength. He casts the plan as disciplining Hamas (“they lay down arms or leave”) while also delivering humanitarian relief. That duality – tough but generous – is powerful on the campaign trail.
Nobel Peace Prize Theater. He doesn’t need to win it; he just needs to say he deserves it. The claim itself becomes part of his narrative of grievance and triumph.
2. Internationally
Israel: Netanyahu nods, Israeli centrists sigh in relief – Trump can present himself as Israel’s indispensable friend who also delivers quiet.
Arab League: Even tepid Arab League approval lets Trump boast: “I got the Arabs and Israelis on the same page.” That plays huge in diplomatic theater.
Europe: Brussels won’t love him, but the EU will be glad the bombs stopped. That’s enough for Trump to say, “they all lined up behind me.”
3. Against His Rivals
Against Biden/Democrats: He can taunt: “Biden let it burn, I brought peace.” Never mind the plan’s contradictions; soundbites are what matter.
Against Progressives: Their rejection of his plan – because it’s not liberation, because it has his name on it – becomes his foil. He’ll say: “They wanted chaos, I delivered peace, and they’re still angry.” That reframes them as radical spoilers.
4. The Spin Strategy
Even if Gazans accept aid but curse Trump, West Bank Palestinians reject it outright, Hamas refuses and Iran sneers, Trump still wins in the court of perception. He’ll point to convoys of aid, hostages walking free, and international press conferences flanked by Arab and Israeli leaders
For Trump, that’s success: not solving the conflict, but owning the narrative. He thrives on appearances of deal-making mastery, regardless of whether the underlying conflict is frozen, festering, or flaring again.
In other words: he doesn’t need the plan to work on the ground; he needs it to look like it worked just long enough. If later it unravels—well, that just proves others failed to sustain his deal.
A New Gaza governed by a New Palestinian Authority?
Trump’s plan waves vaguely toward a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) as the eventual sovereign custodian of Gaza, but the devil lives in the details. The PA’s own house is famously messy.
Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are deeply unpopular among Palestinians because they are seen as stale, corrupt, and complicit. Abbas has overstayed his democratic mandate – his presidential term expired in 2009, yet he still rules by decree. Elections have been repeatedly postponed, hollowing out legitimacy. The PA is plagued by corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency, with patronage networks benefiting a small elite while everyday life in the West Bank deteriorates under occupation.
Worse, many Palestinians view the PA’s security coordination with Israel as collaboration – protecting Israel from attacks but delivering little political gain in return. Add to that the lack of progress toward statehood, the failure to heal the Fatah–Hamas split, and an aging leadership out of touch with a restless younger generation. The result: a widespread sense that the PA is more interested in preserving its own survival than advancing Palestinian freedom.
So what are the prospects for cleaning out these Augean Stables?
Every credible roadmap to Palestinian self-rule (whether in US “peace plans”, Arab League proposals, or European policy papers) circles back to roughly the same cluster of reforms:
Governance & Legitimacy
Elections: The PA has not held national elections since 2006. Regular, transparent presidential and legislative elections – monitored by international observers – are the baseline for legitimacy.
Leadership Renewal: President Mahmoud Abbas is in his late eighties and is highly unpopular. A clear succession process and generational turnover are essential to avoid a post-Abbas vacuum.
Rule of Law: Independent judiciary, due process in security courts, and an end to arbitrary detentions.
Security Sector Reform
Professionalisation of Forces: Unifying and depoliticising security services, with recruitment based on merit rather than factional loyalty.
Accountability Mechanisms: Civilian oversight, parliamentary scrutiny, and credible disciplinary systems to curb corruption and abuses.
Monopoly of Force: Ending the proliferation of armed factions and militias under semi-official umbrellas.
Anti-Corruption & Financial Transparency
Audit & Oversight: Strengthening the Palestinian Anti-Corruption Commission and ensuring regular public audits of ministries and security budgets.
Revenue Management: Transparent tax collection and spending, including reforms to the “clearance revenue” system Israel currently controls.
Private-Sector Safeguards: Modern procurement laws and independent regulators to reduce crony capitalism.
Institutional Consolidation
West Bank–Gaza Integration: Building unified administrative structures so that a future Gaza administration is not a parallel mini-state.
Service Delivery: Reliable health, education, and municipal services that reduce dependence on patronage networks.
Civil Society Engagement: Empowering NGOs and trade unions to act as watchdogs.
How Could This Be Realised?
External Leverage
Conditional Aid: The EU, U.S., and Gulf donors can tie financial support to measurable governance benchmarks (audits, election timelines, security milestones).
Arab Sponsorship: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE can provide both funding and political cover, helping broker intra-Palestinian reconciliation and mediating with Israel.
Internal Dynamics
Generational Change: A younger cohort of Fatah leaders and technocrats—already impatient with the old guard—must be empowered through credible elections.
Reconciliation with Hamas: Without some power-sharing or security arrangement, reform in the West Bank alone will not translate into legitimate rule in Gaza.
Israeli Role
Movement & Access: Reforms are impossible if Israel continues to restrict travel, tax revenue, and trade. Donors will demand at least tacit Israeli cooperation.
Security Coordination: A reformed PA security force must convince Israel that it can prevent attacks without being perceived domestically as a subcontractor for occupation.
Sustainability
Economic Viability: Reforms will collapse without a functioning economy—investment, trade corridors, and reliable tax revenue are oxygen.
Public Buy-In: Palestinians must see tangible improvements (jobs, mobility, basic freedoms) or reforms will be dismissed as foreign diktats.
Political Horizon: Even the best technocracy cannot survive perpetual occupation. A credible path to sovereignty—however distant—must accompany reforms to give them meaning.
In short, the PA must become a transparent, accountable proto-state while operating under occupation and facing a rival government in Gaza. It is a Sisyphean task, but not impossible if external actors (Israel included) provide real incentives, if donors enforce conditionality with patience, and if a younger Palestinian leadership can seize the moment. Without those three legs – international pressure, internal renewal, and a political horizon – the reform talk remains another Nobel-baiting paragraph in a White House press release.
[The above commentary and hypothetical is a the outcome of a conversation and collaboration between In That Howling Infinite and ChatGPT. The following list is the real deal]
Screenshot
Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza:
Deradicalisation & Security – Gaza will be a deradicalised, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.
Redevelopment for Gazans – Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.
Immediate Ceasefire & Withdrawal – If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end. Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed-upon line to prepare for a hostage release. During this time, all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.
Hostage Return – Within 72 hours of Israel publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.
Prisoner Exchange – Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life-sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7th, 2023 (including all women and children detained in that context). For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.
Hamas Amnesty & Exit – Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommissioning their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.
Immediate Humanitarian Aid – Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip, at minimum matching the quantities specified in the January 19, 2025 agreement, including infrastructure rehabilitation (water, electricity, sewage), hospital and bakery repairs, and equipment to remove rubble and open roads.
Uninterrupted Aid Channels – Entry and distribution of aid in Gaza will proceed without interference from either party through the United Nations, the Red Crescent, and other neutral international institutions. Opening the Rafah crossing in both directions will follow the same mechanism as in the January 19, 2025 agreement.
Transitional Governance – Gaza will be governed by a temporary technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee responsible for daily public services, supervised by a new international transitional body, the Board of Peace, chaired by President Donald J. Trump with other members and heads of state (including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) to be announced. This body will manage funding and redevelopment until the Palestinian Authority completes its reform program and can securely take control.
Trump Economic Development Plan – A Trump-led economic development plan will convene experts who have helped build thriving Middle Eastern cities, synthesizing security and governance frameworks to attract investment and create jobs, opportunity, and hope in Gaza.
Special Economic Zone – A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.
Freedom of Movement – No one will be forced to leave Gaza. Those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. People will be encouraged to stay and build a better Gaza.
Demilitarization & Monitoring – Hamas and other factions will have no role in Gaza’s governance. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure—including tunnels and weapons production—will be destroyed and not rebuilt. An independent, internationally funded buy-back and reintegration program will oversee the permanent decommissioning of weapons, verified by independent monitors.
Regional Security Guarantee – Regional partners will provide guarantees to ensure that Hamas and other factions comply with their obligations and that “New Gaza” poses no threat to its neighbors or its own people.
International Stabilization Force (ISF) – The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary ISF to immediately deploy in Gaza. The ISF will train and support vetted Palestinian police, consult with Jordan and Egypt, help secure border areas, prevent munitions smuggling, and facilitate the rapid and secure flow of goods to rebuild Gaza. A deconfliction mechanism will be agreed upon.
Israeli Withdrawal – Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israeli military will withdraw based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization, progressively handing over Gaza to the ISF and transitional authority until complete withdrawal (except for a temporary security perimeter).
Partial Implementation if Hamas Refuses – If Hamas delays or rejects the proposal, the plan—including scaled-up aid—will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the Israeli military to the ISF.
Interfaith Dialogue – An interfaith dialogue process will be established to promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence, aiming to change mindsets and narratives among Palestinians and Israelis by highlighting the benefits of peace.
Path to Palestinian Statehood – While Gaza’s redevelopment advances and Palestinian Authority reforms are implemented, conditions may emerge for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, recognized as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.
U.S.-Brokered Political Horizon – The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
“All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”
“History stretches out into the future as well as the past”
“All wars may end in negotiations, but not all negotiations end wars”
The indefatigable British journalist, author, and longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk Robert Fisk died of a stroke in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on October 30, 2020. He was 75. Fearless and inquisitive, often iconoclastic and controversial, “Mister Robert,” as he was known from Algeria to Afghanistan, was one of the finest journalists of his generation—the greatest reporter on the modern Middle East. There is probably no better body of work for understanding the region. Respected and reviled in equal measure by left and right alike, Fisk spoke truth to power for more than half a century.
He was obsessive, he was angry, and – having read many of his books – I believe he suffered from undiagnosed PTSD throughout his career in the Middle East. His lifelong obsessions were the arrogance and misuse of power, the lies and impunity of the rulers: presidents and prime ministers, kings and emirs, dictators and theocrats, torturers and murderers. And always the countless innocents who endured and suffered, dying in their tens – and tens – of thousands on the altar of power and greed.
The Night of Power
His last book, The Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, published posthumously in 2023, takes up where his monumental The Great War for Civilisation (2005) ended—with the contrived U.S.-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. The Great War for Civilisation was a tombstone of a book, literally and figuratively, as was its predecessor Pity the Nation (1990), his definitive history of the Lebanese civil war.
The Night of Power is no less harrowing, covering the occupation of Iraq, the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war, the Arab Spring, the rise of Egypt’s new pharaoh Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the lonely death of Mohammed Morsi, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and seize of Gaza, and the Syrian civil war. It ranges widely – but its coherence lies in Fisk’s unrelenting theme: the cycle of war, the corruption of power, and the persistence of memory. To read it is to feel Fisk’s own cynicism, sadness and anger.
The title is deeply symbolic. In Islamic tradition, Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, is the night the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months … Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn” (Qur’an 97). It is a night of blessing beyond measure, greater than a lifetime of devotion. The title is bitterly ironic: the “night of power” he recounts is one of betrayal, cruelty, and endless war.
It is both a summation of his life’s work and a testament to his method. Over four decades, Fisk was a witness to almost every major conflict in the Middle East — Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt — and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. His dispatches carried both forensic detail and moral outrage. This last work, published in the year of his death, is less a memoir than a vast chronicle of empire, war, betrayal, and resistance.
Fisk had long insisted that reporters must “be on the side of those who suffer.” He was no neutral stenographer of official sources. He distrusted governments – Western and Arab alike – and prized first hand testimony, walking the ruins, speaking to survivors, writing down the words of the powerless. The Night of Power continues in this vein, but with a sharpened sense of history. Fisk threads together centuries of conquest and resistance, showing how imperial arrogance, local despotism, and religious zealotry have conspired to devastate the region.
The last two paragraphs Robert Fisk wrote before his death, closing The Night of Power, cut like a blade through the pieties of Western journalism:
“Failure to distinguish between absolute evil, semi-evil, corruption, cynicism and hubris produced strange mirages. Regimes which we favoured always possessed ‘crack’ army divisions, ‘elite’ security units, and were sustained by fatherly and much revered ruling families. Regimes we wished to destroy were equipped with third-rate troops, mutineers, defectors, corrupt cops, and blinded by ruling families. Egypt with its political prisoners, its police torture and fake elections, was a tourist paradise. Syria with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections, would like to be. Iran, with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections was not — and did not wish to — be a tourist paradise.” (p. 533)
In the end, according to those closest to him, including his wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, an award-winning Afghan-Canadian author, journalist and filmmaker, who edited the book and wrote its final chapter, Fisk despaired. He feared that nothing he had written over four decades had made any difference – that things had, in fact, grown worse. As Kent says to the blinded King Lear, “All is cheerless, dark, and deadly”.
And yet the worst was arguably still to come: the chaotic retreat of America and its allies from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s reimposition of rule, including the literal silencing of women’s voices; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its murderous war of attrition that has now passed its thousandth day; Hamas’s atrocity of October 7, 2023, Israel’s biblical-scale revenge, and the utter destruction of Gaza; and the latest Israel–Lebanon war that saw the decapitation and emasculation of Hezbollah.
The Legacy of a Fearless Reporter
The Night of Power stands as a testament to Robert Fisk’s fearless journalism and his relentless moral compass. Across decades of war reporting, Fisk bore witness to suffering few dared to confront. He was unflinching in exposing the hypocrisies of Western powers, the brutality of dictators, and the costs of occupation, war, and empire. Yet he also captured the human dimension: the courage, endurance, and resilience of those who suffered, whether in Iraq, Gaza, Egypt, or Syria.
This final work synthesizes Fisk’s signature qualities: exhaustive research, direct engagement with the people whose lives were upended, and an ethical rigor that held both oppressors and complicit outsiders accountable. The Night of Power is not merely a chronicle of events; it is a meditation on power, betrayal, and history itself.
Fisk’s prose, vivid and often lyrical, reminds readers that journalism can be a form of witness — bearing truth against overwhelming odds. Even in despair, he recognized the persistence of human agency, the cycles of history, and the moral imperative to see, to name, and to remember. His death in 2020 marked the end of a career unparalleled in courage and conscience, but his work, particularly this last book, endures as both a warning and a guide for understanding the Middle East and the forces that shape our world.
In reading The Night of Power, one cannot avoid Fisk’s central lesson: history may restart at the end of every war, but the witness to injustice is what shapes the moral memory of humanity. The quotations at the head of this review, indeed, the final words of the book, weary yet resolute, are a fitting epitaph. Fisk saw the world as it was, not as we wished it to be: corrupt, cruel, but always turning, always restarting.
All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts
Robert Fisk, The Night of Power
Postscript
The final chapter of The Night of Power was written by Fisk’s wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, She was based in Beirut for fifteen years working alongside her late husband and reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and Syria. The following podcast by American war correspondent Chris Hedges, with Fisk’s first wife Lara Marlowe is a worthy tribute .
The following briefly summarizes the main themes of The Night of Power drawing largely upon his own words
Robert Fisk’s Catalogue of Carnage
Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon
Iraq: Catastrophe Foretold
Fisk argued that Iraq’s occupation was fraudulent from the start, brutal in execution, and ferocious in its response to insurgency. The Americans tolerated the inhuman behaviour of their own soldiers, relied on mercenaries and “greedy adventurers,” and mixed Christian religious extremism with an absurd political goal of “remaking the Middle East.” It was “tangled up in a web of political naivety and Christian muscularity”.It was bound, he wrote, to end in catastrophe.
“We were pulling at the threads of the society with no sense of responsibility as occupiers just as we had no serious plans for state reconstruction. Washington never wanted Iraq’s land. Of course the countries resources were a different matter, but its tactics did fit neatly into the prairies of the old West. The tribes could be divided and occupiers would pay less in blood. as long as they chose to stay. One set of tribes were bought off with guns and firewater the other with guns and dollar bills. Serious resistance, however, would invoke “the flaming imperial anger” of all occupation armies.
The rhetoric echoed the 19th century missionary zeal of empire. Western fascination with the Biblical lands was used to justify conquest: as Lieutenant General Stanley Maude told the people of Baghdad in 1917, the Allies wished them to “prosper even as in the past when your ancestors gave to the world Literature, Science, and Art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world” (p. 92).
The modern occupation, Fisk observed, was nothing but “the rape of Iraq”. Oil wealth was divided up in a scandal of corruption involving US contractors and Iraqi officials. “The costs were inevitably as dishonest as the lies that created the war … I knew corruption was the cancer of the Arab world but I did not conceive of how occupying Power supposedly delivering Iraqi their long sort freedom could into a mafia and at such breathtaking speed”.
Security became a malignant industry; by 2006 mercenaries accounted for half of Western forces, sucking money out of the country. The food system, 10,000 years old, was destroyed by Paul Bremer’s infamous Order 81, which forbade farmers from saving their own seed. Iraq became a “giant live laboratory for GMO wheat,” its people “the human guinea pigs of the experiment”.
And through it all, a campaign of suicide bombings – unprecedented in scale – turned Iraq into the crucible of modern terror. Editors never tried to count them. The figures, Fisk noted, were historically unparalleled.
The trial of Saddam Hussein
The US ambassador to Iraq once claimed she had been “unable to convince Saddam that we would carry through what we warned we would.” Fisk dismissed this as absurd. Saddam, he argued, was well aware of Western threats, but the framing of his trial was designed to obscure deeper truths.
If Saddam had been charged with the chemical massacre at Halabja, defence lawyers could have pointed out that every US administration from 1980 to 1992 was complicit in his crimes. Instead, he was tried for the judicial murder of 148 men from Dujail — heinous, but “trifling in comparison” (p. 92). The great crimes of the Baathist regime — the 1980 invasion of Iran, the suppression of Shia and Kurdish revolts in 1991 — were deemed unworthy of the court’s attention.
Pakistan: Fragile State, Useful Pawn
Fisk’s lens widened to Pakistan, where he recorded with scorn the ISI’s admission that the reality of the state was defined not by American might but by “corrupt and low-grade governance”. A US intelligence officer boasted: “You’re so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner.”
This, Fisk suggested, was not just Pakistan but almost every Arab or Muslim state in thrall to Washington: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the Gulf states under their dictators and kings, even Turkey. He wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s choice to hide in Pakistan embodied a weird symmetry: the man who dreamed of a frontierless caliphate sought refuge in the very sort of corrupt, Western-backed dictatorship he despised.
Rendition: Complicity in Torture
The “war on terror” extended beyond borders. CIA, MI5 and MI6 operatives were deeply involved in rendition. Prisoners were knowingly dispatched to states where torture was inevitable, even fatal. Fisk insisted on repeating this uncomfortable truth: Western democracies had integrated torture into their security architecture.
Israel and Palestine: The Last Colonial War
Fisk was unsparing in his treatment of Israel’s expansion. He rejected any obfuscation: Israel seized the opportunity to consolidate its control with a land grab for the most prominent hilltops and the most fertile property in the West Bank for settlements constructed on land legally owned for generations by Arabs, destroying any chance the Palestinian Arabs could have a viable state let alone a secure one.”). These settlements, he wrote, “would become the focus of the world’s last colonial war.”
He surmised: “Will the Jews of what was Palestine annex the West Bank and turn its inhabitants into voteless guest workers and all of mandate Palestine into an apartheid state? There was a mantra all repeat that only other way to resolve Israeli rule in the West Bank would be a transfer of the Palestinians across the Jordan into the Hashemite kingdom on the other side of the river. In other words, expulsion”
The Wall
Fisk’s Fisk’s description of the Separation Wall is dramatic and unforgettable: an “immense fortress wall” which snakes “firstly around Jerusalem but then north and south of the city as far as 12 miles deep into Palestine territory, cutting and escarping its way over the landscape to embrace most of the Jewish colonies … It did deter suicide bombers, but it was also gobbled up more Arab land. In places it is 26 feet or twice the height of the Berlin wall. Ditches, barbed wire, patrol roads and reinforced concrete watchtowers completed this grim travesty of peace. But as the wall grew to 440 miles in length, journalists clung to the language of ‘normalcy’ a ‘barrier’ after all surely is just a pole across the road, at most a police checkpoint, while a ‘fence’ something we might find between gardens or neighbouring fields. So why would we be surprised when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlisconi, traveling through the massive obstruction outside Bethlehem in February 2010 said that he did not notice it. But visitors to Jerusalem are struck by the wall’s surpassing gray ugliness. Its immensity dwarfed the landscape of low hills and Palestinian villages and crudely humiliated beauty of the original Ottoman walls Churches mosques and synagogues .. Ultimately the wall was found to have put nearly 15% of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupted the lives of a third of the Palestine population. It would, the UN discovered, entrap 274,000 Palestinians in enclaves and cut off another 400,000 from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals. The UN concluded that many would “choose to move out.” Was that the true purpose?“.
Leftwing Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who lives in the West Bank, takes Fisk on a tour of the wall: “Towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, coiling and snaking between the apartment blocks and skulking in wadis and turning back on itself until you have two walls, one after the other. You shake your head a moment – when suddenly through some miscalculation surely – there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the splash of red, sloping rooves and pools and trees of the colonies and yes, more walks and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then, once more the beast itself, guardian of Israel’s colonies: the Wall”.
Although Oslo’s creators fantasied that it would become part of the Palestinian state, Gaza’s destiny was isolation. It has been a junkyard of history variously ruled by Christians and Muslims, ruined and rebuilt under the Ottomans, and fought for by the British and Turks in the First World War, and now reduced to a prison state.,
Egypt: A Revolution Betrayed
Mohammed Morsi embodied both hope and tragedy. “An intelligent, honourable, obtuse, arrogant and naïve man”. No visionary, he was “was shambolic, inspiring, occasionally brutal and very arrogant”. He set off down the road to Egyptian democracy with no constitution no parliament and no right to command his own countries army …set off down the road to democracy “with no constitution, no parliament and no right to command his own country’s army”. And when the end came, as come it must, he could not smell trouble; he did not see what was coming.
In a coup that was not a coup, which former British prime minister Tony Blair called “an awesome manifestation of power”, “the democratically elected president was suspended, the constitution annulled, tekevion stations closed, the usual suspects arrested … Yet President Obama could not bring himself to admit this. He asked the Egyptian military “to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government… Through an inclusive and transparent process” without explaining which particular elected civil civilian government he had in mind”.
This was just the beginning. In the six years that followed, Egypt’s executioners and jailers were kept busy. “They hung 179 men, many of them tortured before confessing to murder, bomb attacks or other acts of terrorism”. It was claimed that Al Sisi had returned the country to a Mubarak style dictatorship in the seven years of his own war against the brotherhood between 1990 and 1997. Mubarak’s hangman had executed only 68 Islamists and locked up 15,000. By 2019 Al Sisi had 60,000 political prisoners
To Fisk, this was a sign of fear as much as it was evidence of determination to stamp out terror. Al Sisi had three separate conflict on his hands: his suppression of the brotherhood on the ground that they were themselves violent terrorists, the campaign by Islam extreme groups against Egypt’s minority Christian cops, and most frightening of all the very real al Qaeda and ISIS war against Al Sisi’s own regime. “The prisons of the Middle East, Fisk concluded, were “universities for future jihadi”.
The misogyny if the counterrevolution was stark. Fisk wrote: “… if the senior officers wished to prune the branches of the revolution the participation of women was something that could not be tolerated. Why did there suddenly occur without apparent reason a spate of sexual attacks by soldiers that were clearly intended to frighten young women off the street, revealing a side to the Egyptian military that none of us had recognised. The misogynistic and shocking display of brutality towards women that could not have been the work of a few indisciplined units”. With sexual assaults on women protesters, virginity tests and public humiliation, “heroes of the 1973 war had become molesters”.
The lonesome death of Muhammad Morsi
Morsi would struggle on for years before a series of mass trials would entrap him and his brotherhood colleagues and quite literally exhaust him to death. Morsi’s slow death in solitary confinement was, Fisk insisted, “utterly predictable, truly outrageous and arguably a case of murder”. He was denied treatment, denied family visits, denied a funeral. “To die in a dictator’s prison, or at the hands of a dictator’s security services”, Fisk wrote, “is to be murdered.”
It did not matter, he continued “if it was the solitary confinement, the lack of medical treatment or the isolation, or if Morsi had been broken by the lack of human contact for those whom he loved. “The evidence suggested that Morsi’s death must’ve been much sought after by his jailers, his judges, and the one man in Egypt who could not be contradicted. You don’t have to be tortured with electricity to be murdered”.
Fisk’s description of Morsi’s death is a sad one. “Symbolism becomes all”, he wrote. “The first and last elected president of a country dies in front of his own judges and is denied even a public funeral. The 67-year-old diabetic was speaking to the judges, on trial this time for espionage, when he fainted to the floor. Imagine the response of the judges when he collapsed. To be prepared to sentence a man to the gallows and to witness him meeting his maker earlier than planned must’ve provoked a unique concentration of judicial minds. could they have been surprised groups had complained of Morsi’s treatment for the world media and the world had largely ignored the denunciations. What might have been surprising to his judges was that he managed to talk for five minutes before he departed the jurisdiction forever?”
Regarding Russia’s critical intervention in the Syrian civil war, Fisk wrote:
“We Westerners have a habit of always looking at the Middle East through our own pious cartography, but tip the map 90° and you appreciate how close Syria is to Russia and its Chechen Muslim irredentists. No wonder Moscow watched the rebellion in Syria with the gravest of concern. Quoting Napoleon, who said “if everyone wants to understand the behaviour of a country, one has to look at a map”, my Israeli friend (the late) Uri Avnery wrote that “geography is more important than ideology, however fanatical. Ideology changed with time”.
The Soviet Union, he continued was most ideological country in the 20th century. “It abhorred it predecessor, Tsarist Russia. It would have abhorred its successor, Putin‘s Russia. But Lo and behold – the Tsars, Stalin and Putin conduct more or less the same foreign policy. I wrote that Russia is back in the Middle East. Iran is securing its political semicircle of Tehran, Baghdad Damascus, and Beirut. And if the Arabs – or the Americans – want to involve themselves, they can chat to Putin”.
Yarmouk camp, Damascus. Once the thriving home of Syria’s Palestinian refugees, September 2025
Author’s note
Laylatu al Qadri
لَْيلَُةاْلَقْدِر َخْيٌر ِّمْنأَْل ِف َشْھٍر. َسَلاٌم ِھَي َحَّتى َمْطلَِعاْلَفْجِر
Laylatu alqadri khayrun min alfi shahriin.Salamun hiya hatta matla’i alfajrii
The night of power is better than one thousand months.
(That night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn.
Al Qur’an al Karīm, Surat Al Qadr 97
I first learned about the Quran and The Night of Power in Cairo when I was staying at the home of Haji Abd al Sami al Mahrous a devout Muslim doctor who had cared for me when I had fallen ill. There was a particular beauty and magic about the idea of a night that surpassed all other nights in sacredness. The fascination stayed with me, and when I returned to London and was learning Arabic and studying Middle East politic at SOAS, it inspired a song.
Shape without form, a voice without sound,
He moves in an unseen way;
A night of power, eternal hour,
Peace until the break of day;
The doubter’s dart, the traveller’s chart,
An arrow piercing even to the coldest heart,
A hand surpassing every earthly art,
And shows everyone his own way
Paul Hemphill, Embryo
When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass
In an earlier post in In That Howling Infinite, I wrote:
My song When Freedom Comesis a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War for Civilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).
The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Paris and Chicago in 1968 or Kristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.
The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.
In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:
Theregoes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Paul Hemphill, When Freedom Comes
I reference this melancholy state of affairs in man of my songs:
High stand the stars and moon, And meanwhile, down below, Towers fall and tyrants fade Like footprints in the snow. The bane of bad geography, The burden of topography. The lines where they’re not meant to be Are letters carved in stone. They’re hollowed of all empathy, And petrified through history, A medieval atrophy Defends a feeble throne. So order goes, and chaos flows Across the borderlines, For nature hates a vacuum, And in these shifting tides, Bombs and babies, girls and guns, Dollars, drugs, and more besides, Wash like waves on strangers’ shores, Damnation takes no sides.
Paul Hemphill, E Lucevan Le Stelle
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W H Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant (1939)
The English poet W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the early 1930s – the last years of the Weimar Republic prior to the Nazi ascendency –Some commentators suggest that Auden actually wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant in Berlin. But It was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out – and Auden had departed the city before the end of Weimar in 1933. But he was full aware of where the world was heading – during the mid-thirties, he’d briefly journeyed to Republican Spain in the midst of the Civil War and to Kuomintang China during its war with Japan – see In That Howling Infinite’s Journey to a war – Wystan and Christopher’s excellent adventure.
The poem has been interpreted as a very brief study in tyranny, but few could doubt whom Auden had in mind. In this very short poem, Auden turns a familiar phrase from the New Testament in upon itself evoking and then evicting ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). There is nothing Christlike about this tyrant: he will not suffer the little children to come unto him. The little children, instead, will be the ones to suffer. he also inverts a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’
I recalled the poem, one of the very first of Auden’s poems I encountered nearly sixty years ago, as I was reading the essay republished below written by the most erudite economist and academic Henry Ergas on the occasion of the centenary of the publication on 16 August 1925, of Mein Kampf (lit. ‘My Struggle‘), Nazi Party founder and leader Adolf Hitler‘s combined autobiographical reflections and political manifesto, encompassing an uncompromising ideological programme of antisemitism, racial supremacy, and expansionist ambitions.
A century later, the impact of Mein Kampf on the world remains both undeniable and deeply troubling. Initially dismissed by some as the ramblings of a failed revolutionary, the book became the ideological blueprint for the Nazi regime, legitimising policies that culminated in the Holocaust and a world war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Beyond the destruction of the mid-twentieth century, Mein Kampf has endured as a symbol of hate literature, resurfacing periodically in extremist movements, political propaganda, and debates over free speech and censorship. Its centenary compels reflection not only on the book’s historical role in shaping one of the darkest chapters of human history, but also on the persistence of the prejudices and authoritarian impulses it so virulently expressed.
Mein Kampf‘s bitter harvest
The Second World War began on 2nd September 1939 with Germany’s sudden and unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ,forever known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.
Japan formally entered the war on September 22, 1940 with the invasion of French Indochina, having been at war with China since 1931, and officially formed an alliance with Germany and Italy five days later. The United Kingdom declared war on the Empire of Japan on 8 December 1941, following the Japanese attacks on British Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong on the previous day, as well as in response to the bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7. The United States to enter World War II the following day.
World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, with Germany’s unconditional surrender, known as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). The war in the Asia Pacific concluded on September 2, 1945, with Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri, designated Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day). This followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan
The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.
The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.
Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust
Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …
A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images
When Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published exactly 100 years ago, the reviews were scathing. The reader, proclaimed the Frankfurter Zeitung, could draw from the book one conclusion and one conclusion only: that Hitler was finished. The influential Neue Zurcher Zeitung was no kinder, lambasting “the sterile rumination of an agitator who is incapable of rational thought and has lost his grip on reality”. As for Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist and critic, he famously dismissed it, quipping: “When I think of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.”
But while the book that would become known as “the Nazi bible” was hardly an immediate bestseller, it was far from being a dismal flop. By the end of 1925, nearly 10,000 copies had been sold, necessitating a second print run, and monthly sales seemed to be trending up. Even more consequentially, Mein Kampf, with its comprehensive elaboration of the Nazi world view, proved instrumental in consolidating Hitler’s until then tenuous position as the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) or NSDAP. Both Hitler and Max Amann, who ran the Nazis’ publishing house, had good reason to be pleased.
After all, the initial circumstances of the book’s production were scarcely promising. When Hitler arrived at Landsberg prison in November 1923, following the failure of a farcically mismanaged putsch, he was assessed by the staff psychologist as “hysterical” and suicidal. However, having determined to end it all by embarking on a hunger strike, he sat down to write his valedictory statement – and with the full support of the prison’s director, a Nazi sympathiser who was happy to accommodate his every need, the project soon expanded, until the writing came to consume Hitler’s days.
Once Emil Georg, a director of the powerful Deutsche Bank and generous funder of the NSDAP, provided the aspiring writer with a top-of-the-line Remington typewriter, a writing table and all the stationery he required, Hitler’s new career as an author – the profession he proudly declared on his 1925 tax return – was well and truly under way.
The difficulty, however, was that Hitler wrote very much as he spoke. Page after page required substantial editing, if not complete revision. Some of it was undertaken by Rudolf Hess, who had a university degree, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American Harvard graduate. But many of the most difficult sections were eventually worked over by the unlikely duo of a music critic, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Bernhard Stempfle, a priest.
The greatest tensions arose in settling the title. Hitler, with his habitual grandiloquence, had called it Four and a Half Years of Battling Lies, Stupidity and Betrayal. Convinced that title would doom it to failure, Amann adamantly insisted on, and seems to have devised, a shorter alternative. Thus was Mein Kampf, the name that would go down in history, born.
Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved to
be a strength.
Viewed superficially, the text, despite its editors’ best efforts, seems inchoate, veering across a bewildering range of grievances, pseudo-historical accounts and exhortations. Yet its singular lack of focus proved to be a strength. It meant there was something in it for each of the social groups the Nazis were attempting to mobilise, with every one of those groups finding the real or imagined harms that afflicted it covered in its pages. And whenever they were discussed, each group’s darkest nightmares were portrayed in striking, often lurid terms.
Hitler himself explained his approach in the book’s discussion of propaganda.
“Most people,” Hitler said, “are neither professors nor university graduates. They find abstract ideas hard to understand. As a result, any successful propaganda must limit itself to a very few points and to stereotypical formulations that appeal to instincts and feelings, making those abstract ideas vividly comprehensible.”
That is exactly what Mein Kampf set out to do – and it did so by hammering three basic themes: that the Germans were victims; that the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews; and that only a fight to the death against “world Jewry” could bring Germany’s redemption and return it to the pre-eminence that was its birthright and historic destiny.
What gave the book its resonance was that each of those themes was well and truly in the air. Nowhere was that clearer than in respect of victimhood.
Thus, the end of World War I had not been viewed in Germany as a military defeat. Rather, the widespread perception, vigorously propagated by General Erich Ludendorff, was that had the German army, which retained undisputed mastery over its home soil, not been “sabotaged” by liberals, freemasons, social democrats and communists, it would have held out, forcing the Allies to a settlement.
Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.
The capitulation was, in other words, the result of a “stab in the back” that treacherously delivered the nation to the harsh, grotesquely unjust, treatment eventually meted out at Versailles by the war’s victors.
Closely associated with the resulting sense of unfairness, and of an undeserved defeat, was the smouldering resentment felt by returning soldiers.
World War I had ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in countries such as France, Britain and Australia by the erection of national memorials for the Unknown Soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: sanctified by the nation, the Unknown Soldier also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and too quickly forgotten.
That was the case almost everywhere – but not in the newly established Weimar Republic. Unlike its counterparts, the republic erected no national monument, created no worthy memorial: the ghosts of the dead were left unburied.
Moreover, unable to deal with the trauma of the war, the republic accorded veterans no special status: even when their wounds made them entirely disabled, they were entitled only to the paltry benefits accorded to others suffering from similar levels of disability.
With the country’s new leaders abandoning those who had borne so many risks and so much pain on Germany’s behalf, an unbridgeable cleavage opened up between “those who had been there” – with all of their rage and frustration, fury and disillusionment – and those who had not. It is therefore no accident that both for innumerable forgotten soldiers and for the families who had lost their sons and fathers, Hitler, who had lived through the carnage, came to symbolise the unknown soldier of World War I.
Nor is it an accident that during World War II he always donned a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, thereby highlighting his unshakeable affinity with the “grunts” on the line.
Hitler, chancellor of Germany in 1933, is welcomed by supporters at Nuremberg. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The last, but perhaps most broadly felt, source of the sense of victimhood was the devastation wreaked by the “great inflation”.
The immediate effect of the price hikes, which began in 1921, accelerated in late 1922 and became a hyperinflation (that is, one involving monthly price increases of more than 50 per cent) in 1923 was to obliterate the savings of skilled workers, pensioners and the middle class. No less important, however, it also shattered those groups’ social standing which, in a society still geared to honour and respectability, relied on the ability to conspicuously maintain a dignified lifestyle appropriate for one’s status. Instead, for the first time in their lives, previously comfortable professionals, foremen and highly trained workers were reduced to a struggle of all against all, as they vainly attempted to sell once prized, often hard-earned assets that had suddenly – and mysteriously – become utterly valueless.
And as well as leaving a legacy of trauma, that experience created an enduring sense of unpredictability, casting the new republic as incapable of maintaining intact even the elementary foundations of daily life.
Stefan Zweig was therefore not exaggerating when he wrote, in his The World of Yesterday, that “nothing ever embittered the German people so much, nothing made them so furious with hate as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory. And, being an incurably militaristic nation, Germany felt lifted in her pride by her temporary victories. But the inflation served only to make it feel soiled, cheated, and humiliated. A whole, scarred, generation could never forget or forgive.”
But where there are victims there must be victimisers – and Hitler delivered those too. Towering among them were the Jews.
Mein Kampf’s obsession with Jews is readily demonstrated: including cognate terms, such as Jewry, the 466 references to Jews in the book outnumber those to every other substantive term, including race (mentioned 323 times), Germany (306), war (305) and Marxism, which gets a paltry 194 – still ahead of national socialism and national socialists which, taken together, are referenced only 65 times.
It is certainly true that there is, in those obsessive references, virtually nothing original. Hitler’s tirades largely reassemble the anti-Semitic tropes that had emerged in the late 19th century and that were widely disseminated in a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But Hitler’s formulation, while substantively irrational, was arguably more logical than most in the way it combined and superimposed elements from conventional anti-Semitism, pseudo-biology and social Darwinism.
Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial … from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.
Thus, relying on a loose biological metaphor, it defined Jews as a parasite – but as one that had deliberate agency and that consciously (and collectively) sought to infect its victims, notably the “purer”, more advanced “races”.
Second, it asserted that the resulting infection was not only fatal to its victims but ultimately to their entire “race”.
Third, it projected on to that account the image of a Darwinian struggle that had been fought across recorded history’s entire course, between Jews on the one hand and the superior races on the other: a struggle that could end only with the extinction of the Jews or their adversaries.
And finally, it argued that, unless anti-Semites learnt to display the same degree of ruthlessness, the same insistence on ethnic loyalty, the same stealth and the same forms of manipulation of media and the public sphere, the Jews stood every chance of triumphing because they entirely lacked ethical standards, were exceptionally cunning, ambitious, aggressive and vindictive and – last but not least – had a natural bond to each other, combined with a murderous hatred of others.
The resulting portrayal of Jews was as terrifying as it was bizarre. Jews, it seemed, were chameleons, who were both subhuman yet extraordinarily capable, both fanatical Bolsheviks and natural capitalists, both physically repulsive yet immensely able to seduce and “infect” innocent Aryan maidens.
Moreover, they could shift effortlessly and surreptitiously from any one of those myriad shapes into any another, choosing whatever form was most likely to succeed in destroying their opponent.
As the great German philosopher Ernst Cassirer later recalled, he and his other Jewish friends found those claims “so absurd, so ridiculous, and so crazy, that we had trouble taking them seriously”. But others did not have any difficulty in doing so.
Many forces were at work. Some resulted from the war years. For example, the terrible food shortages caused by the British blockade (which was lifted only two years after the war ended) had resulted in spiralling prices for basics on the black market – with the finger being readily, although entirely incorrectly, pointed at alleged hoarding by Jews.
And more indirectly, but no less potently, the horrific second wave of the 1919 influenza pandemic, in which 400,000 Germans died, had given enormous prominence to notions of infection and contagion. As careful statistical studies subsequently showed, that prominence had enduring effects, as the Nazis secured significantly greater electoral support in the worst affected areas than in those where the death toll was lower.
But by far the greatest factor was the profound disruption of the post-war years, when everything Germans had taken as solid melted into thin air, leaving a pervasive feeling of bewilderment.
For all of its myriad flaws, the Kaiserreich, as the German Empire was known, had exuded a stability that made the future predictable. Now, with one seemingly incomprehensible event piling up on top of another, the desperate search to make sense of the world triggered an equally desperate search for someone to blame.
That was precisely what Hitler’s vast Jewish conspiracy offered. Mein Kampf, Heinrich Himmler pithily noted, was “a book that explains everything”. If it was so effective, Hannah Arendt later reflected, it was because its playing on tropes and stereotypes that were relatively familiar could, at least superficially, “fulfil this longing for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense”. All of a sudden, things fell into place – with consequences for Europe’s Jews that would forever sully Germany’s name.
Sign erected by British forces at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Picture: Imperial War Museum
Bodies being flung into a mass grave at Belsen. Picture from the book Children’s House of Belsen, by camp survivor Hetty Verolme
If those horrendous consequences eventuated, it was because Mein Kampf did not only identify an alleged disease; it also set out a path to national redemption. In that respect, too, its main points were entirely unoriginal.
However, what was relatively new, and especially important, was the unadulterated celebration of death and violence in which they were couched.
Whether Hitler called for Jews to be massacred is a matter of interpretation. What is beyond any doubt is that he came as close to it as one possibly could. The Jews, he claimed, would “accentuate the struggle to the point of the hated adversary’s bloody extermination”. As that happened, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat them “without spilling their blood”. And when it came to that, their opponents, locked “in a titanic struggle”, would have to “send to Lucifer” – that is, to hell – “those who had mounted an assault on the skies”: that is, the Jews.
There would be, in the process, countless victims; but the Aryans who perished would be martyrs, “acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”, and like Hitler himself “fighting for the work of the Lord”.
As with so much of Mein Kampf, the sheer violence of those calls, and of the text more generally, fell on fertile ground, again especially among veterans.
If those veterans had one thing in common it was the experience of “total war”, characterised by the ever-growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction.
Once they got to the front, it did not take long for ordinary soldiers to discard the fantasies of splendid bayonet charges across fields of flowers. Instead, burrowed underground in trenches filled with slime and excrement, rats and rotting body parts, what many learnt was that life was war, and war was life.
And at least for some, the sacrifice and devotion of their comrades also taught that violence brought out the best qualities in man.
Winifred Williams, a Welsh woman who became a friend and supporter, provided the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.
Rendering that habituation to violence even more extreme was the experience of the 5 per cent or so of German soldiers who volunteered for Freikorps (Free Corps) units that fought, from 1918 to 1923, against the wave of revolutionary movements throughout central and eastern Europe.
Particularly in the Baltic states, those struggles were brutally uncompromising, with mass executions not only of adversaries but also of entire villages of helpless Jews. It was in those struggles that many ingredients of Nazism were forged – its symbols, like the death’s head and the swastika; its core staff, who later largely comprised the leading personnel first of the Nazi’s paramilitary units and then of the SS; and the unbridled anti-Semitic savagery of its killing squads. To all those who lived through those struggles, Mein Kampf seemed to perfectly capture their world view.
But Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial, too. Yes, Germany experienced the aftermath of World War I as an unmitigated disaster. Yet, from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. When the war finally ended, the survivors could not but feel an urge to endow it with meaning – with the hope that the countless deaths would be redeemed by creating a better future, not only for themselves but also for the nation, a future shorn of the causes of everything that had gone wrong.
And no one, in the chaos and misery of post-World War I Germany, painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler.
Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s ja
Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s jail ensured that the 20th century’s fields of glory would be sown with the corpses of innocent victims and the distorted fragments of shattered ideals.
Between those dates, the book’s fortunes closely tracked those of its author. After the crash of 1929, and the onset of the Depression, sales boomed; and once the Nazi regime was in place it became ubiquitous. A second volume had appeared in December 1926; it was added to the 400 pages of the first in 1930.
To cope with the length, the combined book was printed on extremely fine paper, exactly like a bible. Soon after that, an ever-wider range of formats – going from cheap paperback versions to extremely luxurious versions bound in leather – was offered to readers.
The regime recommended that municipalities give a good quality copy to newly married couples as they stepped out of the wedding ceremony; estimates vary but it seems two million couples benefited (if that is the right word). The book also became the standard prize in schools, workplaces and party organisations, bestowed on recipients with all the pomp the Fuhrer’s great work demanded. Altogether, by the “Zero Hour”, 12.5 million copies had found their way into the hands of potential readers – yielding Hitler copyright payments, partly deposited in a Swiss bank account, that made him an extremely wealthy man.
How many Germans actually read it is hard to say; the answers given to immediate post-war surveys were understandably evasive. What seems likely, however, is that its influence came less from the scrupulous consumption of the “Nazi bible” than from short excerpts, read out at meetings and over the radio or printed near the mastheads of major papers, as well as from the million or so copies of “reader’s digest”-like variants sold during the Reich’s golden years.
In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler
But its greatest impact was almost certainly indirect. Regardless of what ordinary Germans may or may not have done, abundant evidence shows it was carefully studied and frequently consulted by the Nazi leadership. The regime’s core principle, the so-called Fuhrerprinzip, specified that “what the Fuhrer says is law”: but what the Fuhrer had actually said, and even more so, what he wanted, was almost always hopelessly unclear – yet entire careers depended on guessing it accurately.
As a result, the everyday life of the Nazi hierarchy’s upper echelons was consumed in a competition to “work towards the Fuhrer”, as Hitler’s great biographer, Ian Kershaw, called it: that is, in trying to anticipate the Fuhrer’s will and show that no one could be more ruthless or determined in putting it into effect. It was in that process that Mein Kampf was absolutely fundamental, invariably referred to and systematically used.
And it was through that process that Hitler’s words made depravity the highest form of morality, atrocity the surest sign of heroism, and genocide the key to redemption.
Outside Germany, very few grasped that those horrors would unfold. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and David Ben-Gurion were among those few, carefully annotating early versions and gasping at the book’s implications.
But their warnings were ignored because Mein Kampf was plainly the work of a madman. As the British Labour Party’s leading intellectual, Harold Laski, said, when he was asked why he dismissed it, rational men and women “could not bring themselves to contemplate such a world”, much less believe that “any child of the twentieth century” would regard it as a realistic possibility.
But the Nazi art of politics, as Joseph Goebbels concisely defined it, consisted precisely in making the impossible possible and the absolutely inconceivable a practical reality. That art did not disappear with Nazism’s demise, nor did the murderous anti-Semitism whose seeds Hitler sowed a century ago.
As we mark Mein Kampf’s grim anniversary, we must, this time, take them seriously.
… Robeson’s extraordinary career intersects with some of modernity’s worst traumas: slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, Fascism. Stalinism. These are wounds covered over and forgotten, but never fully healed. Not surprisingly, the paths Robeson walked remain full of ghosts, whose whispers we can hear if we stop to listen. They talk to the past, but they also speak to the future.
Jeff Sparrow, No Way But This. In Search of Paul Robeson (2017)
I read Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography of the celebrated American singer and political activist Paul Robeson several years ago. I was reminded of it very recently with the publication of a book about Robeson’s visit to Australia in November 1960, a twenty-concert tour in nine cities. I have republished a review below, together with an article by Sparrow about his book, and a review of the book by commentator and literary critic Peter Craven. the featured picture is of Robeson singing for the workers constructing the Sydney Opera House.
I have always loved Paul Robeson’s songs and admired his courage and resilience in the face of prejudice and adversity. Duriung his colourful and controversial career (see the articles below), he travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand and also, Britain. He visited England many times – it was there that my mother met him. She was working in a maternity hospital in Birmingham when he visited and sang for the doctors, nurses, helpers and patients. My mother was pregnant at the time – and, such was his charisma, that is why my name is Paul.
Paul Robeson was a 20th-century icon. He was the most famous African American of his time, and in his time, was called the most famous American in the world. His is a story of political ardour, heritage, and trauma.
The son of a former slave, he found worldwide fame as a singer and an actor, travelling from Hollywood in the USA to the West End of London, to Europe and also Communist Russia. In the sixties, he visited Australia and is long remembered for the occasion he sang the song Old Man River for the workers building the famous Sydney Opera House.
He became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism as an educated and articulate black man in a white man’s racist world.
Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was a star athlete in his youth. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism.
A respected performer, he was also a champion of social justice and equality. But he would go on to lose everything for the sake of his principles.
In the United States he became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era when American politics were dominated by a wave of hatred, suspicion and racism that was very much like we see today,
Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, was a gifted linguist. He studied and spoke six languages, and sang songs from all over the world in their original language.
But his most famous song was from an American musical show from 1927 – Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein – called Old Man River. The song contrasted the struggles and hardships of African Americans during and after the years of slavery, with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show.
It is a paradox that a song written by Jewish Americans from the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the targets of prejudice and pogrom, should voice the cries of America’s down-trodden people.
When the song was first heard, America was a divided country and people of colour were segregated, abused and murdered. The plot of the musical was indeed about race, although it pulled its punches with the romantic message that love is colour-blind
It reflected America’s split personality – the land of the free, but the home of the heartless. Robeson sung the words as they were written, but later in his career, as he became more and more famous, he changed them to suit his own opinions, feelings, sentiments, and politics. So, when he sang to the workers in Sydney, Australia, his song was not one of slavery but one of resistance.
The Big Voice of the Left … Paul Robeson Resounds to this Day
Mahir Ali The Australian November 9, 2010
FIFTY years ago today, more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated, the Sydney Opera House hosted its first performance by an internationally renowned entertainer when Paul Robeson, in the midst of what turned out to be his final concert tour, sang to the construction workers during their lunch break.
Alfred Rankin, who was at the construction site on November 9, 1960, recalls this “giant of a man” enthralling the workers with his a cappella renditions of two of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River and Joe Hill.
“After he finished singing, the men climbed down from the scaffolding, gathered around him and presented him with a hard hat bearing his name,” Paul Robeson Jr writes in his biography of his father, The Undiscovered Robeson. “One of the men took off a work glove and asked Paul to sign it. The idea caught on and the men lined up. Paul stayed until he had signed a glove for each one of them.”
Workers had the best seats when Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House, 9 November 1960
The visit, Rankin tells The Australian, was organised by the Building Workers Industrial Union of Australia and the Australian Peace Council’s Bill Morrow, a former Labor senator from Tasmania.
In a chapter on Robeson’s visit in the book Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, which will be launched in Sydney tomorrow, Ann Curthoys quotes the performer as saying on the day after his visit to the Opera House site: “I could see, you know, we had some differences here and there. But we hummed some songs together, and they all came up afterwards and just wanted to shake my hand and they had me sign gloves. These were tough guys and it was a very moving experience.”
In 1998, on the centenary of Robeson’s birth, former NSW minister John Aquilina told state parliament his father had been working as a carpenter at the Opera House site on November 9, 1960: “Dad told us that all the workers – carpenters, concreters and labourers – sang along and that the huge, burly men on the working site were reduced to tears by his presence and his inspiration.”
Curthoys, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, who plans to write a book about the Robeson visit, also cites a contemporary report in The Daily Telegraph as saying that the American performer “talked to more than 250 workmen in their lunch hour, telling them they were working on a project they would be proud of one day”. [Curthoy’s book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, was published at last in 2025]
According to biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the offer of a tour of Australia and New Zealand from music entrepreneur D. D. O’Connor, but the idea of earning $US100,000 for a series of 20 concerts, plus extra fees for television appearances and the like, proved irresistible.
Robeson had once been one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, but from 1950 onwards he effectively had been deprived of the opportunity of earning a living. A combination of pressure from the US government and right-wing extremists meant American concert halls were closed to him, and the US State Department’s refusal to renew his passport meant he was unable to accept invitations for engagements in Europe and elsewhere. Robeson never stopped singing but was able to do so only at African-American churches and other relatively small venues. His annual income dwindled from more than $US100,000 to about $US6000.
At the time, Robeson was arguably one of the world’s best known African Americans. As a scholar at Rutgers University, he had endured all manner of taunts and physical intimidation to excel academically and as a formidable presence on the football field: alone among his Rutgers contemporaries, he was selected twice for the All-American side.
Alongside his athletic prowess, which was also displayed on the baseball field and the basketball court, he was beginning to find his voice as a bass baritone. When a degree in law from Columbia University failed to help him make much headway in the legal profession, he decided to opt for the world of entertainment, and made his mark on the stage and screen as a singer and actor.
An extended sojourn in London offered relief from the racism in his homeland and established his reputation as an entertainer, not least through leading roles in the musical Show Boat and in Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona.
(He reprised the role in a record Broadway run for a Shakespearean role in 1943 and again at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959)
Robeson returned to the US as a star in 1939 and endeared himself to his compatriots with a cantata titled Ballad for Americans.
In the interim, he had been thoroughly politicised, not least through encounters in London with leaders of colonial liberation movements such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru.
He had sung for republicans in Spain and visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Robeson’s refusal to reconsider his political affiliations once World War II gave way to the Cold War made him persona non grata in his homeland: his infatuation with the Soviet Union did not perceptibly pale in the face of horrific revelations about Stalinist excesses, partly because he looked on Jim Crow as his pre-eminent foe. It is therefore hardly surprising that exposure in Australia to Aboriginal woes stirred his passion.
On the day after his appearance at the Opera House site, at the initiative of Aboriginal activist and Robeson fan Faith Bandler he watched a documentary about Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges during which his sorrow turned to anger, and he vowed to return to Australia in the near future to fight for their rights. He made similar promises to the Māori in New Zealand.
But the years of persecution had taken their toll physically and psychologically: Robeson’s health broke down in 1961 and, on returning to the US in 1963, he lived the remainder of his life as a virtual recluse. He died in 1976, long after many of his once radical aspirations for African Americans had been co-opted into the civil rights mainstream. His political views remained unchanged.
It’s no wonder that, as writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams recalls, Robeson’s tour was like “a second coming” to “aspiring young lefties” in Australia.
Duberman cites Aboriginal activist Lloyd L. Davies’s poignant recollection of Robeson’s arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour, when he made a beeline for “a group of local Aborigines shyly hanging back”.
“When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms.”
Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.”
She would have been less surprised had she been aware of the Robeson statement that serves as his epitaph: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Left for Good – Peter Craven on Paul Robeson
The Weekend Australian. March 11 2017
What on earth impelled Jeff Sparrow, the Melbourne-based former editor of Overland and left-wing intellectual, to write a book about Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and actor?
Well, he tells us: as a young man he was transporting the libraries of a lot of old communists to a bookshop and was intrigued by how many of the books were by or about Robeson.
All of which provokes apprehension, because politics is a funny place to start with
Robeson, even if it is where you end or nearly end. Robeson was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, my father used to play that velvet bottomlessly deep voice singing not only Ol’ Man River — though that was Robeson’s signature tune and his early recording of it is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — but all manner of traditional songs. Not just the great negro spirituals (as they were known to a bygone age; Sparrow calls them slave songs) such as Go Down, Moses, but Shenandoah, No, John, No and Passing By, as well as the racketing lazy I Still Suits Me.
My mother, who was known as Sylvie and loathed her full name, which was Sylvia, said the only time she could stand it was when Robeson sang it (“Sylvia’s hair is like the night … such a face as drifts through dreams, such is Sylvia to the sight”). He had the diction of a god and the English language in his mouth sounded like a princely birthright no one could deny.
It was that which made theatre critic Kenneth Tynan say the noise Robeson made when he opened his mouth was too close to perfect for an actor. It did not stop him from doing Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings or The Emperor Jones, nor an Othello in London in 1930 with Peggy Ashcroft as his Desdemona and with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia.
Robeson later did Othello in the 1940s in America with Jose Ferrer as Iago and with Uta Hagen (who created Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as his Desdemona. He toured the country; he toured the south, which was almost inconceivable. When he was told someone had said the play had nothing to do with racial prejudice, Robeson said, “Let him play it in Memphis.”
Southern white audiences were docile until Robeson’s Othello kissed Hagen’s Desdemona: then they rioted. Robeson also made a point, at his concerts and stage shows, of insisting the audience not be segregated. James Earl Jones. who would play Robeson on the New York stage, says in his short book about Othello, “I believe Paul Robeson’s Othello is the landmark performance of the 20th century.”
Robeson would play the Moor again in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, though, he had fallen foul of 1950s America. He had been called before the McCarthyist House Un-American Activities Committee. You can hear a dramatisation of his testimony with Earl Jones as Robeson, which includes an immemorial reverberation of his famous words when senator Francis E. Walter asked him why he didn’t just quit the US and live in Russia.
“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
It’s funny how it was the real communists such as Bertolt Brecht and Robeson who handled the committee best. Still, in an extraordinary act of illiberalism, they took away his US passport and it took two years for the Supreme Court to declare in 1958 in a 5-4 decision that the secretary of state was not empowered to withdraw the passport of any American citizen on the basis of political belief.
When Paul Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House
It was this that allowed Robeson to do his Othello in Peter Hall’s great centenary Stratford celebration along with Charles Laughton’s Lear and Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus. It also allowed him to come to Australia. Very early on Sparrow tells the story of watching the clip of Robeson singing Ol’ Man River to construction workers in Sydney with the Opera House still a dream in the process of meeting impediments. The version Robeson sings is his own bolshie rewrite (“I must keep fightin’/ Until I’m dyin’ ”).
Well, fight he did and bolshie he was. I remember when I was a child my father telling me Robeson was a brilliant man, that he had won a sporting scholarship for American football (to Rutgers, in fact), that he’d gone on to receive a law degree (from Columbia, no less) and that he was so smart he had taught himself Russian.
But the sad bit was, according to my father, that he’d become a communist. Understandably so, my father thought, because of how the Americans treated the blacks. My father’s own radical impulses as a schoolboy had been encouraged, as Robeson’s were on a grander scale, by World War II where Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally in the war against Hitler’s fascism.
But this was the Cold War now, and a lot of people thought, with good reason, that it was behind the Iron Curtain that today’s fascists were to be found. Even if others such as the great German novelist Thomas Mann and Robeson thought they were encroaching on Capitol Hill.
Sparrow’s book No Way But This is circumscribed at every point by his primary interest in Robeson as a political figure of the Left rather than as a performer and artist.
It’s an understandable trap to fall into because Robeson was an eloquent, intelligent man of the Left and his status was also for a while there — as Sparrow rightly says — as the most famous black American on Earth. So his radicalism is both pointed and poignant.
His father, who became a Methodist minister, was born a slave and was later cruelly brought down in the world. But, unlike the old Wobblies whose bookcases he transported, Sparrow is not inward with what made Robeson famous in the first place and it shows.
No Way But This is a great title (“no way but this / killing myself, to die upon a kiss” is what Othello says when he’s dying over the body of Desdemona, whom he has killed) but Sparrow’s search for Robeson is not a great book.
As the subtitle suggests, it is a quest book but Sparrow is a bit like the Maeterlinck character cited in Joyce’s Ulysses who ends up meeting himself (whether in his Socrates or his Judas aspect) on his own doorstep. Sparrow goes to somewhere in the US associated with Robeson and meets a black-deaths-in-custody activist full of radical fervour. She introduces him to an old African-American who was in Attica jail for years. There is much reflection on the thousands of black people who were slaves on the plantations and the disproportionate number of them now in US prisons.
Yes, the figures are disquieting. No, they are not aspects of the same phenomenon even though ultimately there will be historical connections of a kind.
And so it goes. But this is a quest book that turns into a kind of travelogue in which Sparrow goes around the world meeting people who might illuminate Robeson for him but don’t do much for the reader except confirm the suspicion that the author’s range of acquaintance ought to be broader or that he should listen to people for a bit more rather than seek confirmation of his own predilections.
There are also mistakes. Sparrow seems to know nothing about the people with whom Robeson did Othello. There’s no mention of Thorndike, and when Ashcroft comes up as someone he had an affair with, Sparrow refers to the greatest actress of the Olivier generation as “a beautiful glamorous star”. Never mind that she was an actress of such stature, Judi Dench said when she played Cleopatra she could only follow Ashcroft’s phrasing by way of homage.
Sparrow also says “American actor Edmund Kean started using paler make-up for the role, a shift that corresponded with the legitimisation of plantation slavery”. Kean, who was the greatest actor of the later romantic period, was English, not American. His Othello would, I think, be more or less contemporary with William Wilberforce lobbying to have slavery made illegal. Sparrow seems to be confusing Kean with Edwin Booth, the mid-century Othello who happens to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s still hard to see where the plantations fit in.
A few pages later — and it’s not important though it’s indicative — we hear of the rumour that Robeson was “romancing Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma”. Well, whatever she was called in the early 1930s, it wasn’t Countess Mountbatten of Burma because her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia during World War II, didn’t get the title until after the Japanese surrendered to him — guess where?
Such slips are worth belabouring only because they make you doubt Sparrow’s reliability generally. It’s worth adding, however, that his chapter about the prison house that the Soviet Union turned itself into is his most impressive. And the story of the last few years of Robeson’s life, afflicted with depression, subject to a lot of shock treatment, with recurrent suicide attempts, is deeply sad.
He felt towards the end that he had failed his people. He just didn’t know what to do. It was the melancholy talking as melancholy will.
It’s better to remember the Robeson who snapped back at someone who asked if he would join the civil rights movement: “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.”
It’s to Sparrow’s credit that he’s fallen in love with the ghost of Robeson even if it’s only the spectral outline of that power and that glory he gives us.
Peter Craven is a cultural and literary critic
The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and NZ
Australians of a certain age know all about Paul Robeson’s magnificent voice. They know, too, that on a warm November day more than 60 years ago, the bass-baritone sang to 250 construction workers on the Sydney Opera House building site as the workers sat on scaffolding and stacks of timber and ate their lunch. Fewer know of Robeson’s Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet views and of how those beliefs damaged his career at home and abroad. And that’s not so surprising – as historian Ann Curthoys points out, the Cold War suppression of Robeson’s career and memory has been very effective.
Recovering the story of a man who was once the most famous African-American in the world and his equally impressive wife, Eslanda, is the task Curthoys, who grew up in an Australian communist family in the 1950s and 60s, sets herself in a new book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand.
It follows the couple’s tour – a mix of his concerts and their public talks and media interviews – to Australia and New Zealand over October, November and December 1960. Curthoys goes further, using the seven-week tour by this celebrated singer to explore the social and political changes just beginning in post-War Australia. Her interest is “the slow transition from the Cold War era of the late 1940s and 50s, to the 60s era of the New Left, new social movements and the demand for Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys is 79 now, but when Robeson toured she was 15 and living in Newcastle, a city the singer did not visit. Her mother, Barbara Curthoys, a well-known activist and feminist, was a fan of the singer but the trip passed the teenager by.
It was only decades later, as she researched her 2002 book on the 1965 Aboriginal Freedom Ride through regional NSW, that Curthoys connected with the story. As a university student she had taken part in the ride and moved from communism to the New Left. When she approached the subject as a historian, she realised that for some riders, their attendance at Robeson’s concerts five years earlier had been a defining moment in their “understanding of racial discrimination and Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys has had a long career in research and teaching at the Australian National University and the University of Technology, Sydney. She’s part of a remarkable family, and not just parents Barbara and Geoffrey, who was a lecturer in chemistry at Newcastle University. Her sister Jean is a leading feminist philosopher and her husband, John Docker, has written several books on cultural history, popular culture and the history of ideas.
Curthoys began researching The Last Tour in 2007, but put it aside for another project on Indigenous Australians before resuming work on it during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Post-Robeson, she has worked with two scholars on a forthcoming book on the history of domestic violence in Australia.
The tour, she says, was really several tours rolled into one with the Robesons covering many bases – from music to Cold War politics to feminism to Aboriginal rights. It was a conservative era: Robert Menzies’ Liberals ruled federally and five of the six Australian states had conservative governments. Robeson’s presence went unremarked by governments but for fans of his music – and his ideals – the tour was a significant event that was well covered by the press, even those opposed to his views on the Soviet Union.
For some fans, it was a music tour – 20 concerts in nine cities in Australia and New Zealand, at which Robeson sang his show-stoppers, including Deep River, Go Down, Moses; We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, and the song with which he is always identified, Ol’ Man River. The 62-year-old with the extraordinary voice also delivered “recitations” – a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello, an anti-segregationist poem Freedom Train, and William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem.
What a thrill for Australian audiences, some of whom had followed the handsome, 1.9m singer and actor since the 1920s. Even in an age of limited communications, Robeson was well-known here through films; records and radio. Curthoys notes that one indicator of his fame was the way promising Aboriginal singers in the 1930s were dubbed “Australia’s Paul Robeson”.
He was famous – and controversial. Unlike many other supporters of communist ideas, Robeson refused to break from the Soviets after the invasion of Hungary in 1958 and continued to defend Moscow. The “anti-communist repression and hysteria” that gripped the US in the McCarthy era had a profound effect on his life and career, Curthoys writes. He was cited in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “supporting the Communist Party and its front organisations”.
A 1949 US tour was destroyed “after mass cancelling of bookings by venue managers either vehemently opposed to his politics or afraid in such a hostile climate of being classed as communist sympathisers themselves”. Then in 1950, he lost his passport. Over the years, he would “become for communists an emblem of defiance in the face of adversity, and one of the communist world’s most prominent speakers for peace,” Curthoys writes.
Unable to travel until his passport was restored in 1958, Robeson was steadfast in his support for communist ideals. That commitment was evident in Australia when the “peace tour” – built around a series of public meetings – was as important to the singer as the popular concerts where he reached a different audience. Curthoys details a related strand – the “workers’ tour”, which involved seven informal concert performances to groups of railway workers, waterside workers and those at work on the Opera House on that November day.
She says the events revealed much about the “the nature of class in Australia and New Zealand” at a time when “strong and confident trade unions” were interested in “broad cultural concerns”. Over several weeks Robeson attracted people who loved his music alongside those who loved his politics. Far from being shunned for his pro-Soviet views, Curthoys suggests, there was support from two different audiences – music people and “left-wing people who were either pro-Soviet or not”.
Even so, the Cold War anxieties over the Soviets meant a positive reception was not necessarily assured when Paul and Eslanda flew into Sydney at midday on October 12, 1960. They were greeted by several hundred fans carrying peace banners but they faced pointed questions about the Soviet Union at the 20-minute press conference at the airport.
Robeson refused to condemn the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and media reports suggested a torrid exchange. Curthoys reviewed a tape of the press conference and says while the questioning was “a little aggressive”, the event was not as bad as reported in the media. Indeed it was “fairly friendly” albeit for a “bad patch” when Robeson refused to budge on Hungary.
That tape and others, along with newspapers and Trades Hall documentation, yielded rich material but so too did the ASIO files on the couple. At the Palace Hotel in Perth on December 2 an ASIO operative appeared to be among those at a reception organised by the communist-influenced Peace Council. Among guests were the writer (and well-known communist) Katharine Susannah Prichard and “two women by the name of Durack, who were writers and/or artists”.
Curthoys sees Robeson as a “very courageous, very intelligent, intellectual person, very thoughtful about music, about folk music, about people”, but says his commitment to the Soviet Union was a costly mistake. He had embraced Moscow when he and Eslanda visited in 1934 at the invitation of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Later, Robeson, a fluent Russian speaker, would say it was in the Soviet Union that he felt for the first time he was treated “not through the prism of race but simply as a human being”. Curthoys writes: “The excitement and validation he received during this visit would create a loyalty that later events would not dislodge and the public expression of which would damage him politically, commercially and professionally.”
The couple made several trips to the Soviet Union and accepted its political system completely. Curthoys notes: “They made no public comments about Stalin’s forced collectivisation policies that were in place during the 1930s and led to famine and the loss of millions of lives.” In Sydney Robeson was careful, but on November 5 he celebrated the forthcoming anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Waterside Workers Federation in Sussex Street. Two days later, during his first public concert in the city, he paid tribute to the Soviet Union as “a new society”.
The Soviet Union had been a great influence but so too was the Spanish Civil War, which Curthoys says helped define his view of the political responsibilities of the artist.
“Increasingly famous as a public speaker, on 24 June, 1937, he made a huge impression at a mass rally at the Albert Hall in London sponsored by prominent figures such as WH Auden, EM Forster, Sean O’Casey, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf, held to raise financial aid for Basque child refugees from the war. In what became his most well-known and influential speech, he stressed how important it was for artists and scientists and others to take a political stand: ‘Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.’”
After World War II, Robeson was deeply involved in radical and anti-racism politics in the US but in 1947, as the Cold War worsened, he had had enough. He announced he intended to abandon the theatre and concert stage for two years to speak out against race hatred and prejudice. In fact he stopped stage acting for 12 years but continued to perform as a singer, often in support of political causes.
It was another 13 years before Australian audiences heard that glorious voice “live”. Australians, it seemed were primed for Paul. The tour may have been ignored by governments but during her research, Curthoys was “overwhelmed” by people “ready to assist, donating old programs, photographs, pamphlets, records, cassette tapes, invitations and other documents”.
Today, much of the Robeson image is defined by his Opera House performance on November 9 – high culture delivered, without condescension, to a building crew by a champion of the workers. Robeson, in a heavy coat, despite the warm weather, sang “from a rough concrete stage”. A PR expert could not have dreamt up a a better way to “democratise” an opera house than having the “first concert” delivered in its half- built shell. Curthoys shows how the event, no matter how memorialised now, was a small part of a tour that proved a financial and political success for the Robesons, who left Australia on December 4.
A few months later, depressed and exhausted, Robeson tried to commit suicide in Moscow. Over the next three years he was treated but could no longer perform or engage in public speaking. Curthoys notes that though his affairs with other women had strained their marriage, he and Eslanda had a common political vision and were together until her death in 1965. Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77.
Helen Trinca’s latest book is Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of
Elizabeth Harrower (Black Inc.)
Economist and commentator Henry Ergas wrote in The Australian recently: “With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore. Understanding its divergence from overseas traditions is vital to recovering and redefining the distinctive voice it needs to deal with the latest threat to its existence.” I have repolished it below.
Personally, I find the crisis in contemporary conservatism, particularly as it pertains to Australia politics, fascinating. Here it is in danger descending into a culture of grievance and of populism (- defined as the quest for simple solutions to complex problems).
These fast-moving times are shaky ground for the creed. People are losing faith in institutions; the church no longer has moral influence; the social norms that once tied the community together are changing at lightning speed. Even many within what can be classified as the centre-right acknowledge what might be described as the conservative movement is apparently on the back foot, scrambling to define itself by what it opposes rather than what it believes, plagued by self-doubt and confusion as to what to believe what to stand up for.
As younger voters in the Anglo-sphere veer away from conservative parties, old warhorses and young fogeys, an incongruous, anachronistic cabal of reactionaries if ever there was one, desperately seek relevance and comfort as they endeavour to beat back what they see as the rising tide of progressivism and the proliferation of what they condemned as “woke” – a portmanteau word for whatever that dislike and disdain in politics and society’s at large.
“Conservatism” is an intriguing concept. It can broadly be translated as “traditional” values, and can embrace a varied spectrum of “isms”, including authoritarianism, hierarchy, nationalism, nativism and ethnocentrism, and also, en passant, religiosity, homophobia, and indeed, anything deemed antithetical to the old, tried and true ways. In a general sense, it has gained traction across much of the world as people yearn for order and stability and belonging and identity that western-style liberalism with its ecumenical emphasis on identity, equity and diversity cannot satisfy. Many highlight what they see as to the erosion of national institutions, of Western culture and even morality itself. Some advocate a national conservatism that hold nations to be distinctive and to seek to protect this distinctiveness.
It is in essence an atavistic worldview, one which harks back to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time and a yearning for “la recherche du temps perdu”. In its modern manifestations, it is in many ways a belligerent, intolerant creed, quite distinct from the late 18th century English parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s benchmark conservatism, namely the preservation of principles of the past which emerge from “the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property”, and in which institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. The comfort of continuity, in fact.
And it is different to what perennial Australian prime minister Robert Menzies was alluding when he formed the Australian Liberal Party in 1945: “a healthy and proud sense of continuity, is one of the greatest steadying influences and a superb element of sanity in a mad world… “ in his Forgotten People speech of 1942, he invoked homes material, homes human and homes spiritual – the homes humans can live in and where families can be enriched spiritually – rather than the merits of some cold ideology. It was a uniquely reassuring doctrine for homely, ordinary folk opposed to change or frightened by it.
In his essay, “Why I Became A Conservative“, the late British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that the romantic core of the creed was the search for the “lost experience of home”, the dream of a childhood that cannot ever be fully recaptured, but can be “regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression”. At the heart of conservatism, in other words, is love: love for things that exist or existed and must be saved.
In his introduction to A Political Philosophy, Scruton wrote: “the conservation of our shared resources — social, material, economic and spiritual — and resistance to social entropy in all its forms”. His conservatism was, above all, conservationist: constant care for institutions, customs, and family. His debt to Edmund Burke: society is a contract between the living, the dead and the unborn; a “civil association among neighbours” is superior to state intervention; “the most important thing a human being can do is to settle down, make a home and pass it on to one’s children”.
There is something quite benign about these concepts of conservatism. In stark contrast, conservatism that is gaining traction in many countries, particularly in eastern Europe, but also on the MAGA movement in the United States and on the far-right in Western Europe and also, Australia is a cold, atavistic and embittered beast. Populist in its nature, it appeals primarily to those who favour the reassuring hand of a paternal authority figure who is able to promise those aforementioned simple solutions to the modern world’s bewildering array of complex problems. Freethinkers, individuals, and all of heterodox opinions and practices, political, social, biological or spiritual – beware!
Disclaimer: the only thing this post has to do with Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist comedy drama Le Fantôme de la liberté is its title, although like the film, it challenges pre-conceived notions about the stability of social mores and reality.
With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore.
Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott, The Australian 10 May 2025
In the aftermath of last weekend’s devastating election loss it is easy to write off conservatism in Australia. This wouldn’t be for the first time. As historian Keith Hancock observed in Australia (1930), conservative, in this country, has always been a term of abuse, implying that its target is an out-and-out reactionary.
There is nonetheless a profound paradox. Although conservative may be a term of abuse, Australian politics has long had a marked conservative vein, even as its chief protagonists have studiously avoided the descriptor. A hardy perennial, with a distinctive voice that contrasts with overseas conservatism, the conservative instinct in Australia has run deep, dominating federal politics for decades – and recovering, time and again, from setbacks that had been claimed to foreshadow its demise.
US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance. Picture: AP
In part, that identity crisis reflects the factor that has made for conservatism’s enduring success: its infinite adaptability. Indeed, the term defies easy definition, just as the groups to which it has been applied defy ready categorisation, making the conservative identity inherently labile.
As Paul de Serville, a historian of Australian and British conservatism, has observed, every party that has emerged to represent conservatism’s interests and beliefs across the past 350 years “is a study in contradiction between opposing traditions and schools of thought”.
Even its founding parent, the movement that eventually became the Conservative Party in Britain, has “died or lain dormant” numerous times, split at least twice, and never settled on any singular set of policies, ideas and beliefs. Its capacity to incorporate diverse elements has in fact been one of its defining qualities. After all, “what other party has elected a Jewish novelist (Disraeli) to lead a group of wordless squires? Or a grocer’s daughter (Thatcher) to rule a sulky band of Tory Wets?”
But beneath the shifting terrain of cultural and political battlegrounds, there are in British conservatism some identifiable commitments. Originally, the commitment was above all to tradition. Born in the turmoil of the English civil war, the Tories (a term derived from the Middle English slang for outlaw) stood for loyalty to the Church of England and the crown. Unapologetic royalists, their clergy defended the church against the Puritans while stressing the values of family, home and nationhood. Over time, however, the primary emphasis of British conservatism changed into a commitment to the virtue of prudence.
Often associated with a sense of human limitations and the impossibility of achieving utopia, British conservatism became the embodiment of a Western intellectual tradition that extends back at least as far as St Augustine.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led a populist style Conservative Party. AFP
Conservatism in the US had a starkly different origin and trajectory. Far from being a reaction to the threat of change, it was a by-product of the American Revolution’s fight against the crown. Initially, what it sought to conserve was the ideal of a “mixed constitution” whose myriad checks and balances could prevent the development of an overmighty state. That coexisted with the agrarian conservatism of the south that feared, above all, the centralism that might abolish slavery and privilege northern manufacturers over southern primary exporters. Together, those foundations fuelled the development of a staunchly conservative, often highly formalistic legalism whose power – unrivalled in any other Western country – grew with the ascendancy of the Supreme Court.
But as early as the 1820s that version of conservatism faced a powerful challenge from Andrew Jackson’s radical populism. Jacksonian populism had more than its fair share of incoherence but its grassroots pugnacity spawned one of US politics’ most enduring and certainly most distinctive notions: the spectre of a “deep state” that was liberty’s greatest enemy.
Permeated by a Manichean friend-enemy dynamic that distinguishes what American historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” in US politics, the Jacksonians portrayed the federal government as far worse than overbearing: having been hijacked by the enemies of the common man, it was an actively malevolent force hiding behind the facade of law and order. Only by dismantling it could freedom be preserved.
Former US President Andrew Jackson
The Jacksonians left a deep imprint on the American right and most notably on its rhetoric, but they never entirely conquered the field. The somewhat rigid constitutional conservatism that had preceded Jacksonianism survived and, inspired by intellectual leaders such as Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia, flourished.
At the same time, many other varieties of conservatism appeared and at times reappeared after having gone into abeyance.
For instance, Vice-President JD Vance’scommitment to an intensely moralistic vision of politics – that privileges honest labour over endless consumption, security at home over adventures overseas, family and local community over wider notions of society – renews a Catholic tradition that had waned as the ethnic communities that were its original bearers assimilated into the American mainstream.
Vice-President JD Vance
In that sense American conservatism was always as mutable, open-ended and diverse as the US itself. But for all of that diversity, the nature of the presidential contest periodically forced its differing elements to coalesce around a leader who somehow embodied the spirit of the times.
As with all populisms, Trump’s message jumbles together contradictory, even irreconcilable, components. But it isn’t intended as a coherent intellectual project – it is not a politics of ideas that Trump pursues but of emotive response and instantaneous impact.
Even less is it a politics of cautious pragmatism, as was the conservatism of Republicans George HW Bush or John McCain, who also channelled one of American patriotism’s many styles. And least of all is it, like Vance’s, a politics of high moral purpose. Rather, it is a politics of personal power, deployed, often arbitrarily, to purposes that can change unpredictably from day to day.
That it is not to deny that there runs through Trump’s project American conservatism’s golden thread: the goal of restoring what his supporters view as the freedoms that were the original promise of the American founding and, later, the American Revolution.
But much as was the case with the Jacksonians, that goal is to be achieved by demolishing existing institutions, which are cast as having betrayed the original promise, rather than through their cautious reform. Trumpism’s intensely antinomian character is starkly antagonistic to the American tradition of constitutional conservatism, which is why a number of unquestionably conservative scholars are challenging the administration’s actions in the courts. At the same time, its messianic quality, imbued with visions of future glory, breeds a fanaticism entirely alien to the British conservative tradition.
Trumpism breeds a fanaticism alien to the British and Australian conservative tradition. AFP
It is entirely alien to the Australian conservative tradition too. Here the greatest difference lies in the fact the Australian political ethos has not seen the state as the enemy, much less as a malignant force. It has been regarded instead as a tool to be effectively used to benefit the people and help them flourish.
That difference from the US has profound historical roots. America’s initial European settlement occurred in the 1600s, a period distinguished in Britain by what became known as the “Old Corruption”. Government offices were chiefly sinecures, officially apportioned rackets for personal gain, propping up an oligarchy whose favours were openly for sale.
In contrast, European settlement in Australia and New Zealand began as sweeping reforms to Britain’s system of government were taking hold. For the first time it was becoming possible to treat the government as a utility, dispensing valued benefits, rather than as a lurking predator. Colonial governors’ administrations, while not without their own rackety aspects, were shaped by changes reducing royal patronage and improving government accountability. As Australian historian John Hirst argued, that laid the seeds of an enduring respect for impersonal authority, exercised, at least in theory, in the pursuit of prosperity and good order.
There were, for sure, periodic outbreaks of radical opposition. But the Australian approach was almost always to absorb the conflict by institutionalising its protagonists. Embedding the agitators within the system they were fighting against, that solution traded moderation for tangible gains.
For example, violent class war and mass strikes in the 1890s Depression culminated in the birth of the ALP as an official parliamentary party, changing laws and winning government. Later, the Arbitration Court became run largely by what had been the warring parties – the infamous “industrial relations club”, as columnist Gerard Henderson called it. In exchange for prestigious sinecures, the former enemies descended into what Hancock derided as a “pettifogging” legalism that suffocated the radicals.
Equally, landless gold-diggers demanded the squatters’ leases be ripped up, and stormed Victoria’s parliament in the 1850s. The Land Selection Acts in the subsequent decades established a regional population of often struggling farmers whose 20th-century political incarnation took the form of country parties.
Those parties not only secured “protection all round” in the 1920s, along with significant direct subsidies; they also ensured the establishment of marketing boards to which party worthies were invariably appointed. And much the same could be said of the Tariff Board, which shaped manufacturing protection for decades.
The corollary of that solution was a particular type of conservatism. Yes, in the early years of settlement there had been “real” conservatives of the Tory variety. But when self-government began, they were rudely jostled aside. Australian conservatism would not draw its strength from them.
It was instead the middle class that provided the dominating motifs of enduring Australian conservative strength. It isn’t difficult to understand why. The “workingman’s paradise” was a place where ordinary settlers and working men could get ahead, not rags-to-riches style, as the American dream pitched it, but enough to acquire comfort, leisure and independence.
Australian wages had been essentially the highest in the world since first settlement and the political victory of liberalism, which occurred during the 1850s gold rushes, ensured free markets and social mobility. To become an independent small business owner, to own your own home, to provide for your family, your children – this was the dream, and in Australia they by and large found it.
The conservatism that resulted from that success story incorporated the liberal beliefs and practices that proved so decisively triumphant in the colonial context. Historian Zachary Gorman observes that liberalism’s 19th-century victory in Australia was so comprehensive it became “less of a clear agenda and more of a pervasive political culture”. No longer conservatism’s upstart challenger as in Britain, liberalism here almost instantaneously became the established mainstream – it became what needed to be protected, as well as what conservatives sought to conserve.
Australian conservatism, then, sprang not out of reverence for the past or social hierarchy but from attachment to the enjoyments and freedoms of ordinary life that the most liberal polity in the world encouraged to flourish. It kept faith with ordinary experience and the socially durable values of an open society.
It soon came to shape the whole of the centre-right, underpinning both the twin liberal traditions of early 20th-century Australian life – the neo-Gladstonian free trade liberalism typified by NSW’s Henry Parkes, George Reid and Joseph Carruthers and the Deakenite liberalism protectionist Victoria championed.
More pragmatic and willing to innovate than, say, Britain’s Home Counties conservatism, Australian conservatism was dispositional rather than traditionalist – as a byproduct of urban, aspirational, middle-class Australia, generally inspired by the hope of improvement, it had no difficulty accommodating an uninterest in the past. The attachment to steady improvement was the important thing.
Robert Menzies’ pitch in his justly famous “Forgotten People” broadcast in 1942 captures this spirit perhaps better than any other significant Australian political testament. In it Menzies speaks directly to the attachment to the home and the family as the cornerstone of the “real life of the nation … in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who … see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race”.
Accompanying that emphasis on home and family is a classically conservative sense of continuity.
“It’s only when we realise that we are a part of a great procession,” Menzies declared in laying the foundation stone of the National Library of Australia two months after he retired in March 1966, “that we’re not just here today and gone tomorrow, that we draw strength from the past and we may transmit some strength to the future.”
Across several decades of political leadership Menzies’ speeches pulsed with phrases that exemplified this disposition. His governments have been “sensible and honest”. He speaks “in realistic terms”, sustained “by an unshakeable belief in the good sense and honesty of our people”.
Former PM Robert Menzies is pictured in 1941. Picture: Herald Sun
Yet this stress on continuity in Menzies’ rhetoric complemented rather than contradicted a commitment to what he referred to as “solid progress”. This country was a settler society built by successive waves of migrants; since its earliest days, its life had been saturated with optimism: Australia, said Menzies, was “our young and vigorous land”, still embarking on its glad, confident morning.
It was the constant undercurrent of hope and aspiration that gave Menzies’ conservatism its distinctive flavour, making it more explicitly geared to the confident expectation of future possibility than its European or American counterparts.
And it was precisely because it was so oriented to progress that the term conservative was generally avoided by the movement he forged, even as a conservative disposition bubbled along beneath its immediate surface, and was mirrored in electoral preferences of voters – not simply by voting right of centre but by giving governments a second term even if their first had been somewhat disappointing, and by regularly knocking back proposed constitutional changes.
However, those two elements – continuity and change – were uneasy bedfellows: continuity could, and eventually did, act as an obstacle to indispensable change.
The institutionalisation of conflict through entities such as the arbitration tribunals and the Tariff Board had, for decades, moderated conflict – but only at the price of inefficiencies that became ever more unsustainable as the world economy globalised in the 1970s and 80s. At that point, Australian conservatism entered into a prolonged crisis, torn between the deeply embedded value of caution and the equally strong value of adaptation.
It was easy to repeat Edmund Burke’s axiom that “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”; but effecting sweeping change without destroying the party’s unity was of an entirely different order of difficulty.
Nothing more clearly highlighted the dilemma than Liberal leader John Hewson’s Fightback – a call to arms that was as close as the movement ever came to a truly Thatcherite policy revolution. Its failure had many causes but one was the complete absence of the sense of continuity and stability that has always been dear to the Australian middle class.
It lacked, too, the high Gladstonian moral clarity that Margaret Thatcher articulated in her heroic campaign to reverse Britain’s slide to socialised mediocrity. In fact, Thatcher’s argument for the moral basis of capitalism had far more in common with Menzies’ creed of “lifters not leaners” than with Hewson’s “economic rationalism”.
Former British PM Margaret Thatcher2001. Picture: AP
What was needed was a new synthesis. As Menzies had, John Howard, the first Liberal leader to actively identify himself as a conservative, provided it.
Nigel Lawson, who served as the Thatcher government’s most consequential chancellor of the exchequer, once commented that whereas “Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the (Conservative) party, Alec Home tolerated it, and Ted Heath loathed it, Margaret (Thatcher) genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it.” Exactly the same could be said about Howard: his scrupulous respect for his party’s traditional ethos helped him succeed for as long as he did.
That is not to deny that Howard at times pursued dramatic change – a GST, industrial relations reform, gun ownership – but the approach was rarely radical in style, much less revolutionary in tone. It is telling that the one reform that failed was Work Choices, which went furthest in dismantling existing institutions. And it is telling, too, that subsequent Coalition governments tinkered with the arrangements Labor put in its place rather than seeking their wholesale removal.
Now the synthesis Howard forged between conservation and change is yet again under extreme stress. So, too, are its electoral foundations, as the bases of politics undergo a profound transformation.
Because of Australian conservatism’s pragmatic nature, marshalling broad alliances against those forces and movements that endanger the foundations of the polity has always been its signature approach. Finding some common ground among its constituents, each of those alliances combined the shared opposition to an adversary with a positive program based on overlapping, if not entirely shared, values. The way Liberals, free-traders and protectionists alike rallied alongside Conservatives when threatened by a new common enemy, the ALP in the early 20th century, is a classic example.
John Howard pictured in 1996 after claiming victory for the Coalition. Picture: Michael Jones
However, the dominant force in contemporary politics is fragmentation: the centrifugal pressures that make coalitions hard to assemble but easy to destroy have become ever stronger as social media and identity politics shatter politics’ traditional alignments.
The centre-right is far from being immune from those tendencies, as the emergence of the teals shows. And they are compounded by the pressures of Trumpian populism, which is as hostile to the compromises coalition-building entails as it is to inherited institutions. The only coalitions Trumpism can forge are those that aggregate resentments: against the arrogance of the “progressives”, the abuses of power that occurred during the pandemic, the perception that common values are denigrated and despised.
To use a phrase American constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt coined for the left, Trumpism’s dominant mode of action is “common-enemy politics”, with the adversary being the principal factor unifying its disparate parts. There are no shared values, nor any shared aspirations; the glue comes from shared hatreds.
But intransigent oppositionalism is no basis for a viable politics. Regardless of what Trump’s Australian acolytes believe, its transposition to this country would make for a future of repeated failure.
Rather, for a broader alliance to be possible again, a new synthesis is needed. Australia’s two greatest prime ministers, Menzies and Howard, suggest the way. Both exemplified a social conservatism that drew from the distinctively Australian emphasis on the conservative temperament over and above distinctive philosophical creed. Both forged a synthesis that combined an attachment to liberal principles with a commitment to large-scale changes needed to underwrite prolonged prosperity and progress.
Now, after the rout of last weekend’s election, that synthesis desperately needs to be redefined.
In the end, politics is about argument and arguments are about ideas. When politics seems so entirely bereft of them, Australian conservatives have no choice but to think again.
Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
If I ruled the world
Every day would be the first day of Spring
Every heart would have a new song to sing
And we’d sing of the joy every morning would bring
If I ruled the world
Every man would be as free as a bird
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel
On his inauguration on January 20 2025, US President Donald Trump declared to the American people, “My fellow citizens, the golden age of America begins right now.”
Pundits and partisans right across the political spectrum, both at home and overseas, agree that Donald John Trump’s second presidential term is probably the most consequential since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is perhaps the only thing that they can agree on.
After 100 days in office, he is in command, testing the limits of executive power, resetting political and cultural perceptions and expectations, and reframing America’s role in the worked. But it would seem to many that having arguably declared war on America and the world, he is veering out of control.
There is almost no part of American society which has not felt the blizzard of change from the day he was sworn in. In a stand-over style that is more mob boss than head of state, he has forged a new American imperialism to project what he perceives as US interests, secure strategic assets and rebuild American economic self-sufficiency. The global trading system that has been in place for 75 years has been crippled, if not destroyed, and economists and stock markets surmise that the US economy is on the verge of crashing. America is no longer the leader of the free world because the world is no longer following America, but rather, is taking evasive action. Trump has united the people of most countries around the world around their political leadership, and yet he has not united America and Americans.
In a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre and former Congressional staffer, wrote a concise overview of Trump’s tumultuous first 100 Days. I have borrowed from it to write the following précis.
Trump is not governing by legislating but by an unprecedented exercise of executive power. He has signed fewer bills into law than any recent modern president while his 100 executive orders have triggered a tidal wave of new policies to change what the government can and cannot do. His political style of is marked by decrees coupled with complete domination of the airwaves for several hours each day, from greeting world leaders in the Oval Office to his televised cabinet meetings. For Trump, it is all streaming, all the time.as he remarked in the prime-time public takedown of the Ukrainian president in the Ovak Office, this it makes for “good television”.
On foreign policy, Trump promised groundbreaking early success on the world stage. But he has to date failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, come close to a nuclear deal with Iran , or settling the dozens of trade wars he launched against his allies. Instead, there are constant reversals in tactics and rhetoric. He has decoupled America from the wider world with ramifications which will be felt for many years, if not decades. He has treated allies like adversaries, withdrawn America from numerous global institutions and treaties, erected daunting tariff barriers on all US trading partners and slashed US foreign aid and the State Department, terminating foreign aid, vaccines and food programme. The cumulative effect has been to gravely weaken America’s ability to wield soft power at a time when China and Russia are rushing to fill the vacuum.
Aided and abetted by billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump unleashed Project 2025’s sledgehammer to the bureaucracy with overriding acts of Congress to dismantle agencies and programmes, mass firings, loyalty oaths, and the seizure of databases. And, as he promised on the campaign trail, Trump is exacting vengeance on his enemies. He has called on judges who have ruled against him to be impeached. He has blacklisted law firms that worked with Democrats, or else shook them down for millions of dollars of free work. In a speech at the Department of Justice, Trump said his enemies were “scum”, that the cases brought against him were “bullshit”, that the judges who ruled against him were corrupt, his prosecutors were deranged, and that those who came after him should be imprisoned. In a war against the nation’s most prestigious universities, he is demanding their leftist woke elitism be expunged, or else research dollars and tax-free status will be eliminated. Meanwhile, he continues to target the media as the enemy of the people. The Associated Press has been excluded from presidential events; the Voice of America has been shut down; and Trump has asked the regulator to cancel the broadcast license of CBS whilst moving to defund public media’s NPR and PBS.
The Democrats in Washington meanwhile are adrift and effectively leaderless. With control of the House and the Senate, Trump dominates everything in the capital. The force, speed and scope of his administration’s actions are so intense that the Democrats cannot respond effectively. Its not as if everyone has been taken by surprise. If they had been paying attention, this is exactly what Trump and his team said they would do. It is the scale of this revolution that has put everyone into a spin. It is a time of everything happening everywhere all at once – in accordance with the MAGA mantra of “move fast and break things”.
But, say optimists, the pushback is coming. Every weekend, people are flooding the streets in cities across the country. That movement is growing. If all that Trump and his administration have let loose comes into full force but does not deliver the American miracle he promised – with recession, inflation, and chaos taking hold across the land – the midterm elections next year could be a turning point. The Democrats are in striking distance of retaking control of Congress. If so, Trump’s power may be checked and his golden age may be stillborn. And yet, nothing about Trump is certain. His approval ratings might now be at a historical low, but he has been wrongly written off many times before.
So, how did it come to this?
As the authors of the long but excellent opinion piece in The Atlantic published below explains, Donald Trump’s Second Coming began four years ago and took meticulous planning.
That’s right, it’s come to this Yes, it’s come to this And wasn’t it a long way down? Wasn’t it a strange way down?
L Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag
Postscript: a bad case of imperial purple …
The story goes that Roman Emperor and stoic “philosopher king” Marcus Aurelius engaged a slave to follow him as he walked around Rome; his only job, whenever his master was praised, was to whisper in his ear, “Remember, you are just a man, you are just a man”. Washington, meanwhile, is starting to resemble some of the more excruciating scenes from the BBC’s iconic sword and sandals series I Claudius.
‘Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington … In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been plainer: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself … The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State) … At a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrat congressman Jared Huffman said: “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump”.’
Illustration by Dale Stephanos. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty.
Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president:
In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details the goals of the interview, the broad areas of concern, and the many reasons the president must, for his own good, talk to these particular reporters and not other, perfectly adequate but still lesser reporters. This pitch is then sent to White House officials. If the universe bends favorably, negotiations ensue. If the staff feel reasonably confident that the interview will somehow help their cause, they will ask the president—with trepidation, at times—to sit for the interview. Sometimes, the president will agree.
Such is what happened recently to us. We went through this process in the course of reporting the story you are reading. We made our pitch, which went like this: President Donald Trump, by virtue of winning a second term and so dramatically reshaping the country and the world, can now be considered the most consequential American leader of the 21st century, and we want to describe, in detail, how this came to be. Just four years ago, after the violent insurrection he fomented, Trump appeared to be finished. Social-media companies had banned or suspended him, and he had been repudiated by corporate donors. Republicans had denounced him, and the country was moving on to the fresh start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Then came further blows—the indictments, the civil judgments, and the endless disavowals by people who once worked for him.
And yet, here we are, months into a second Trump term. We wanted to hear, in his own words, how he’d pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in political history, and what lessons, if any, he’d internalized along the way.
Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom. But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.
But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked.
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporterswho had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
Donald Trump after being sworn in as president for his second term in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol (Shawn Thew / Reuters)
He had empowered one of his top political donors, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to slice away at the federal government and take control of its operating systems. He had disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture installed after Watergate, and had declared that he, not the attorney general, was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He had revoked Secret Service protection and security clearances from political opponents, including some facing Iranian death threats for carrying out actions Trump himself had ordered in his first term. He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.
Old foes were pleading for his grace. Meta—whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had become an enthusiastic supplicant—had paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with Trump that many experts believed was meritless. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced that he was banning his opinion writers from holding certain opinions—and then joined Trump for dinner the same night at the White House.
“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” the president told us, referring to Bezos. “Zuckerberg’s been great.”
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
EXILE
that trump now finds himself once again in a position to blow things up is astonishing, considering the depth of his fall. So much has happened so fast that the improbability of his comeback gets obscured. Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.
In the waning days of his first term, his approval rating stood at a pallid 34 percent. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on television while an insurrection he incited overran the Capitol; polls showed that a clear majority of Americans believed he bore responsibility for the attack. The House of Representatives had just impeached him for the second time—making him the only president to ever achieve that ignominy. And although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to convict—the most members of a president’s own party to vote for an impeachment conviction in history.
Twitter and Facebook, his favorite social-media platforms, had banned or effectively silenced him, along with Instagram and YouTube. To try to reestablish direct connection with his followers, he would launch a blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But it gained little traction and was abandoned within weeks.
Major corporations announced that they were cutting off political contributions to officials who had supported Trump’s election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank decided to stop doing business with Trump and his companies. Perhaps most painful to the president, the PGA of America yanked its scheduled 2022 championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf course. Former members of his own Cabinet and staff—people he had hired—would declare him, or had already declared him, “a moron” (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state), “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine” (James Mattis, secretary of defense), “the most flawed person I have ever met” (John Kelly, chief of staff), and “a laughing fool” (John Bolton, national security adviser). And now longtime allies were abandoning him. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, had discussed pushing Trump to resign from office. On the evening of the insurrection, Senator Lindsey Graham, a compass reliably magnetized toward wherever power in the Republican Party lies, pointed away from Trump for the first time in four years. “Count me out,” Graham had declared on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.” Rupert Murdoch, then the chairman of Fox Corporation, sent an email to a former Fox Broadcasting executive in which he declared, “We want to make Trump a non person.” Coming from Murdoch himself, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told us recently, “that’s a papal bull.”
On the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump was a dozen miles southeast of the festivities, at Joint Base Andrews, preparing to depart for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson, in 1869, to boycott the swearing-in of his successor.) Standing before a modest crowd, his dark overcoat a meager bulwark against the cold, the soon-to-be-former president cut a diminished figure.
Just before boarding Air Force One for the final time, to head to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke to those gathered to bid him farewell. “We will be back in some form,” he said, a notably modest framing from such a formerly oversize figure.
Few believed him. It didn’t even sound like he believed it himself. The Trump era was over.
Almost as soon as Trump arrived at his gilded Elba, he began plotting his return. He missed the press pool—the gaggle of reporters that tails every president—and once tried to summon it, only to be told that no such pool still existed. But it would turn out that the lack of attention in those first months—and the lack of access to social-media platforms—was a blessing. Enforced obscurity gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his comeback.
To understand how Trump rose from the political dead, and how he set himself up to wield power in his second term, we spoke with dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants. Many who talked with us did so only on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or to avoid angering the president. The story they told us revealed that Trump’s time in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.
He had been in Palm Beach a week when an opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy would be in South Florida for fundraisers. Though the two men had clashed after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting happened, news of it leaked to The New York Times, shaking the political universe: Were Republican leaders, who had seemed so intent on purging Trump, embracing him again? When Trump and McCarthy met in person, the former president asked the minority leader who had tipped off the Times.
Donald Trump departed Washington in 2021 a pariah, twice impeached, abandoned by former allies, and banned or suspended from his favorite social-media platforms. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Noam Galai / Getty; Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.)
“I know who leaked it—you did,” McCarthy replied, multiple people briefed on the exchange told us.
“It’s good for both of us,” Trump shot back.
Both men were right. McCarthy had already concluded that the path back to Republican control of the House in the 2022 midterms—and his own path to the speakership—required a unified party, one that included Trump and his MAGA base. After the meeting, each man separately released the same photo: the two of them grinning amid the ostentatious splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump had taken his first step toward political redemption.
It is a truism that Trump has never felt governed by the traditional rules of politics. And he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6. The real-estate mogul who branded buildings with his name everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, who sold the “world’s greatest steaks” and the “finest” wine and “fantastic” mattresses, had mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, to Trump, is fungible. While reporting on Trump over the past four years, we were repeatedly struck that, in failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, all of the would-be vampire slayers—Democrats, Never Trumpers, Republican-primary opponents, prosecutors, judges, media critics—only strengthened him. Which brings us to a second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they could behave with near impunity by embracing controversies and scandals that would have taken down just about any other president—as long as they showed no weakness.
Even now, Trump—who described himself to us as “a very positive thinker”—struggles to admit that his return to power was a comeback. To concede that he’d had to come back would be to admit that he had fallen in the first place.
Early in our reporting for this article, we asked the Trump loyalist and former Breitbart News editor Raheem Kassam to explain how the president had been able to bend the country, and the world, to his will. Over a meal of oysters brûlées, duck confit, and fries cooked in beef tallow at Butterworth’s, the new MAGA haunt on Capitol Hill, he responded crudely, if vividly. “He didn’t bend them to his will,” Kassam said. “He bent them over.”
When we spoke with Trump in late March, his approval ratings seemed steady, his political base apparently unshakable. Institution after institution was submitting to him—“obeying in advance,” as the historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has put it. Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the instigation of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, critical workers had been getting fired—and then hired back. An embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operations-security snafu, in which the editor of this magazine was included on a Signal group chat that discussed imminent attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen, made the administration look incompetent, in a fashion reminiscent of the clown-car chaos of Trump 1.0. The president’s tariff rollout was shambolic, tanking the stock market and causing even some loyalists to question him publicly. His approval rating on the economy, long a buttress of his polling support, went negative. Was this what happens when a feeling of indomitability curdles into hubris? Or was this just the next setback for Trump—some combination of Houdini and Lazarus—to recover from?
he had almost been destroyed before. After a real-estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump found himself on the brink of financial ruin. His near bankruptcy and recovery led to his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. For his political advisers in exile, this book became essential reading.
The first pages list Trump’s “Top Ten Comeback Tips.” When we met one of his advisers recently, this person recounted from memory some of the rules on the list. “Rule 1 is: Play golf,” this adviser told us. “Rule 9 is: Get even.” (Rule 10, “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” seemed less applicable to politics.)
To stage a comeback, Trump would need the right staff. He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election. Biden had won the election that year by flipping back into the Democratic column five key states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (along with a lone congressional district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 had been Florida, where he had increased his winning margin from 2016. What, Trump began asking his allies after the election, had he done right in Florida that he hadn’t done in the rest of the country?
The answer, in large part, boiled down to Susie Wiles, who had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the state. Wiles, the daughter of the legendary NFL announcer Pat Summerall, is an experienced campaign operative (she was a scheduler for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), who over the past three decades had developed deep Florida ties. After every campaign she runs, Wiles writes an “after action” report, documenting what worked and what didn’t. Over dinner with Trump on the patio at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she delivered “the Florida memo.” Soon after, he hired her to run his political operation, which eventually became his 2024 campaign.
Wiles saw that one thing that had held Trump back in 2020 was that he had not finished taking over the Republican Party during his first term. Part of Trump’s leverage had been his ability to endorse in Republican primaries—influence he was eager to reprise. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told us on the phone. “But even when I endorse them in the general election, mostly they win. It’s important.” (Now when Trump calls to pressure a fellow Republican about an issue or a vote, they are almost always grateful for his past support, or feel that they owe their seat to him.)
The Wiles process for evaluating potential endorsees—which she undertook with James Blair, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Brian Jack, now a congressman representing Georgia—involved researching how they had spoken about Trump in the past. “The basic thing was their loyalty and their political viability,” one adviser told us. “So we were looking for things like: So, what did they say on J6? What did they say during the Access Hollywood tapes? What is their voting record with us?” Trump was building a coalition of loyalists, something he hadn’t sufficiently done during the first term.
Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities. But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.
At first, Trump’s banishment from the big social-media platforms, along with mainstream media outlets’ reluctance—including Fox News’s—to give him much coverage, seemed potentially devastating. But Trump turned to the far-right platforms and activists still welcoming him. Taylor Budowich—now a White House deputy chief of staff—worked with MAGA influencers to evade the Twitter and Facebook bans: They would print out pro-Trump social-media posts; Budowich would have Trump sign the paper with his Sharpie, and then mail the signed post back to the influencer; almost invariably, the influencer would then post the signed missive, flexing their access and building their audience—while simultaneously amplifying Trump’s voice. At the same time, a video ecosystem grew up around Trump, with streaming platforms such as Right Side Broadcasting Network stepping in to cover his events when cable networks would not.
“Him being banned gave rise to people like me, because the president’s supporters followed me to find out what he was saying,” one MAGA influencer told us. “It backfired on the tech people who deplatformed him, because it platformed all of us.”
Trump, meanwhile, continued to promote the lie that he’d won the 2020 election, and that January 6 was just an ordinary Wednesday. Normal political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But his shamelessness, as ever, remained a strength. By repeating something frequently enough, he could slowly make it feel true, at least for his supporters.
Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
“BE READY!”
the first televised hearing of the House select committee on January 6 was scheduled for the beginning of June 2022, and it was sure to be a spectacle that reminded viewers of the horror of the insurrection and emphasized the former president’s culpability. Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to distract attention from the hearing. At one point, someone proposed a brazen gambit: Trump could announce his 2024 bid for the presidency just minutes before the hearing gaveled in.
Trump’s response was telling. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “We’re not ready for this right now.”
“That was the first moment of, like, ‘Okay, he’s not just thinking about it; he’s seriously thinking about how he wants to do it,’ ” one of his advisers told us. “He’s not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”
Before long, Trump began emphasizing behind the scenes that he was serious. “Be ready,” he would repeat to people who had served with him the first time around. “Be ready! Be ready! We’re coming back! Be ready!”
Still, when Trump did launch his campaign, in November 2022, it did not get off to an auspicious start. Even his most fiercely supportive advisers concede that the announcement, in the form of an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago, was a dud.
Surprisingly few political reporters from major outlets were in attendance; it was as though the mainstream media still didn’t believe that Trump could be a viable candidate again. Worse, some members of Trump’s own family hadn’t bothered to show up. As the speech dragged on, even Fox News cut away, switching to what Bannon called “a C-level panel,” before returning for the final few minutes.
The campaign struggled to gain traction. Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told us that even months later, into early 2023, getting donors to attend the first big super-PAC event “was like pulling teeth.” And although Trump was now a declared presidential candidate, his team said it was still having trouble getting him booked even on shows such as Fox & Friends.
The first turning point, several advisers told us, came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, spewing toxic material. Sitting in the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters one day, Trump’s team watched Joe Biden’s press secretary struggle to answer a question about the president’s plans for outreach to East Palestine. Soon after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., saying that his father ought to just show up there himself. When Wiles brought the suggestion to Trump, in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal: “That’s a great idea,” he enthused. “When can we go?”
Trump’s visit to East Palestine—and the footage of him buying McDonald’s for the first responders—had a potent effect. “It just reminded everyone that people still like this guy,” one adviser told us. “He’s still a draw.” Nearly two years later, Trump’s visit continued to resonate. “People are living their lives and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” a woman across the border in the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. “All they know is that Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s” and that Biden hadn’t visited for more than a year.
The halting start to the campaign kept Trump off the radar, giving his team time to plan. Former Trump advisers had used their years out of power to set up their own groups—America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America—to prepare for a second Trump administration.
“The people who were the true believers knew Trump was going to run again and win,” Caroline Wren, a former top Trump fundraiser, told us, adding that Trump’s policy loyalists “sat there and prepared executive orders for four years.”
The time out of the spotlight also allowed the team to build a new election strategy. By now, Trump had alienated a significant share of the voting public, and he was polling lower among some demographic groups than in previous elections. The conventional wisdom was that the criminal investigations and legal proceedings then under way would only increase that alienation. His campaign directors decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into a strength. Chris LaCivita, who was a co–campaign manager alongside Susie Wiles and a military veteran wounded in the Gulf War in 1991, took to exhorting younger staffers with a Marine slogan: “Embrace the suck.”
The impulse to let Trump be Trump, so contrary to the instincts of much of the first-term staff, was laid out in a memo that James Blair and Tim Saler, the campaign’s lead data expert, sent to Wiles in early 2024. This became known around the campaign as the “gender memo.” “Instead of saying, ‘Look, we did two points worse with white suburban women between 2016 and 2020’ and ‘How do we get those points back?,’ what if we did it the other way?” an adviser familiar with the memo told us. “What if we said, ‘We gained eight points with non-college-educated men. What if we won them by 12?’ ”
During his brief political exile, Trump hired the campaign operative Susie Wiles. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: ablokhin / Getty; Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty; ZUMA Press / Alamy.)
The strategy had the benefit of letting Trump be the version of himself that appealed to those men. In a moment when the Democratic Party often felt like an amalgamation of East Coast elitists, niggling scolds, and far-left activists, Trump appeared to offer judgment-free populism to a populace sick of being judged.
Trump’s own view, we were told, was more self-referential: “Why would I distance myself from my people? They love me.”
“IT MADE ME STRONGER”
on friday, may 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in a New York City courtroom, the treasurer at Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budowich, with good news. A large wire transfer was incoming—a record $15 million. The call set off an internal scramble, because the bank needed the donor’s name to approve the transfer, and nobody knew who it was.
Shortly thereafter, the treasurer called back. “I’m so sorry,” he told Budowich. “I misheard him. It’s not $15 million—it’s $50 million.”
“Don’t be sorry!” Budowich said. (The donation was eventually traced to Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.)
The Democrats assumed that Trump’s legal issues would politically neuter him. “A convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden would say. But all the scandals and controversies that would have sunk a different candidate became background static. “The thing about the court cases is there were too many of them, and this is one of Trump’s superpowers—he never just breaks the law a little bit; he does it all over the place,” Sarah Longwell, a formerly Republican, anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups, told us. “And as a result, there were so many court cases that it was just white noise to voters. They couldn’t tell them apart.”
The Democratic base remained outraged. Trump’s base continued to believe his claims that all the criminal investigations and January 6 hearings constituted a “witch hunt.” But for the sliver of voters who would actually decide the election, the Democratic argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was too far removed from their more urgent concerns about grocery prices. As time passed and Trump continued to rewrite history to turn insurrectionists into “patriots,” the events of January 6 receded into abstraction for many of these voters.
“If you said, ‘What’s J6?,’ it’s like, ‘What is that? Bingo? Are you playing Battleship?’ ” the adviser familiar with the gender memo told us, describing what the campaign’s voter research had found.
Trump’s felony conviction actually proved to be a boon. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump had been indicted over hush-money payments to a porn star, his support in Republican-primary polls jumped 10 points within a month, to more than 50 percent—a level it would never drop below again. In the first three months of 2023, MAGA Inc. had reported raising only about $600,000; in the three months following the indictment, the group took in nearly $13 million. “Democrats just played right into our hands,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told us.
For Trump’s base, the cases were energizing, and they put his Republican-primary opponents in the difficult position of having to defend Trump against “lawfare” or risk being seen as supporting the Democrats’ position. So even while campaigning against him for the nomination, they were in effect campaigning for him.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump had ignored the traditional fundraising circuit, which increased donor skepticism of him. But during his time in the wilderness, he began to enjoy raising money. He asked advisers to schedule more call time for him with top donors. He wrote personal notes, and he regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential donors to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. He judged generosity not by the size of the check, his allies told us, but by the size of the check relative to the donor’s net worth. He liked pressuring donors to bet on him—and watching them squirm if they hedged. Sometimes he was blunt, invoking the specter of a President Kamala Harris taking their wealth.
(“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” he would tell a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago after the election. “Look at your profit-and-loss statements. You realize what would have happened to you if she was president? What’s wrong with you?”)
The Supreme Court decision in July 2024 regarding a legal challenge to the federal prosecution of Trump for interfering in the 2020 election gave Trump and his allies further momentum. Trump v. United States addressed the question of legal liability for a president, but Trump’s allies focused on how the Court described the presidency itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch were imbued in the personage. “Unlike anyone else,” the Court wrote, “the President is a branch of government.” That the prosecution of Trump both revivified his candidacy and then gave him more executive power in his second term remains a stinging irony for Democrats.
When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. “Shockingly, yes,” he said. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says—you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”
He paused. “Yeah, it made me stronger, made me a lot stronger.”
In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, by contrast, told aides that he wanted to put resources into picking up voters even in states he was already certain to win.
“We don’t want anyone to know—it’s a surprise—but I think we might win the popular vote,” Trump would say to his advisers. “We have got to run up the score.”
During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line. “This is your favorite president, Donald Trump,” he’d say, before launching into brief remarks. They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day. In this way, working around the old mass media, Trump reached thousands of voters directly.
“If there was someone in America in some state, still awake, Donald Trump would find a way to get to them,” Chris LaCivita told us.
In 2016, Trump had been so frustrated about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he’d falsely asserted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Eight years later, he didn’t have to pretend. As Election Night gave way to dawn in Palm Beach, Trump basked in the comprehensiveness of his victory—all seven swing states, and a strong showing in the popular-vote tally, which he ultimately won. Several aides got calls from him around 4 a.m. “You won’t believe it,” Trump crowed, according to one. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
Some time later, Trump addressed a gathering of supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. During his first term people would say, “Yeah, he won, but he doesn’t have a mandate, ” Trump told the crowd. “Now they can’t say it anymore.”
THE TRANSITION
people who worked with Trump in his first term used to play a parlor game of sorts. What would happen, they wondered, if they, the human guardrails, weren’t there to correct the president’s errors, to explain to him all the things he did not know or understand, to talk him out of or slow-walk his most destructive impulses?
During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all over the government: from the courts and from the Democrats, but also from Republicans in the House and Senate, who at times treated him like a floundering student. The contempt was mutual. “Paul Ryan was a stupid person,” Trump told us in March, referring to the former Republican speaker of the House. “And Mitch, Mitch wasn’t much better,” Trump said of Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader and, lately, the epicenter of GOP resistance to Trump, such as it is. But some of the most crucial pushback came from within the executive branch. At times, his chief of staff and his White House counsel declined to carry out his orders. Trump had been apoplectic when “his” Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, opened an independent-counsel investigation into whether the Russians had influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with them.
This time would be different, because he’d learned from experience. “When I did it before, I never did it, you know?” he told us. “I didn’t know people in Washington.”
On January 15, at 8 p.m., five days before the inauguration, Trump sent out an incendiary post on Truth Social. In it, he described the sorts of people his incoming administration would not be hiring—a list that included anyone who had ever worked for, in his words, “Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongerers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz,” and anyone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” For those staffing Trump’s second term, the missive was doctrine: This time, loyalty would be absolute.
In 2016, few experienced Republicans had been involved in Trump’s campaign, so the pool of presumptive loyalists to draw from was small. His incoming team also used key transition picks—Cabinet secretaries, West Wing advisers—to reassure a still-skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This produced a dysfunctional dichotomy in which Reince Priebus, a mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, and Steve Bannon, a revolutionary hell-bent on dismantling the administrative state, shared top billing in the West Wing. The competing camps—the MAGA fire-breathers, the establishment swamp creatures, “Javanka” and the globalists—leaked relentlessly to the media and tried to knife one another. A miasma of chaos surrounded Trump, and impaired the administration’s ability to carry out its policy agenda.
But by 2024, Trump had effectively consumed the party, and he had no need to recruit traditional Republicans, if any even remained. Cliff Sims, who during Trump’s first term had served as a communications aide in the White House before going to work for the director of national intelligence, helped the transition team manage hiring for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration wasn’t hard this time, Sims told us: “Don’t hire anyone who wasn’t committed to the agenda last time.”
“I knew that Stephen Miller would ultimately run the policy operation, with immigration as a top priority,” Sims told us, referring to Trump’s senior domestic-policy adviser, who is, famously, an immigration hard-liner. “So I just asked him, ‘Who do you want? Who should prepare DHS? Who should prepare ICE? Who are the rock stars from your team? Let’s get them all rolling.’ ” Same, too, with trade. Sims called Jamieson Greer, who had served as the chief of staff to the U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term before taking over the role himself this time around. He asked Greer who Trump’s pro-tariff “killers on trade” were. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve been sitting here hoping someone would call about this; I’ve already got a list ready,’ ” Sims told us.
Because the transition hiring for the second term harvested a uniformly loyalist crop of staffers, getting things done the way Trump wants became easier. In the first term, executive orders designed by the MAGA faction were sometimes rushed through without proper legal vetting, in an attempt to prevent a warring faction from killing the directive, someone familiar with this process told us—which made them vulnerable to court challenges. This time around, the process for generating the orders is more disciplined.
Trump’s aides and advisers also now understood the hydraulics of the government better. They’d learned, for instance, that immigration policy was not contained solely within the Department of Homeland Security, and that to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border, they also needed to install loyalists in crucial roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they now knew they needed MAGA diehards in key roles. This kind of knowledge would now be applied to thousands of hires across dozens of agencies.
When his cabinet nominees hit trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. “It was ‘You’ll eat your breakfast and you’ll like it,’ ” a veteran Republican operative told us. The first major test came during the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s quest for confirmation as defense secretary.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, was skeptical about Hegseth’s qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate; Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat roles. Ernst is also a sexual-assault survivor; Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other misconduct, including alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the accusations.) But when Ernst publicly signaled that she might not be able to support the nomination, Trump’s allies leaped into action. On private text chains, they talked about how failing to win confirmation for Hegseth was untenable. The consensus was clear: Because Matt Gaetz had already had to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general, if they lost another major nominee, there would be blood in the water. Even the most controversial—Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—needed to be muscled through.
Trump and his team saw the confirmation of their most controversial Cabinet nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard—as a chance to flex their power over the Republican Party. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Philip Yabut / Getty; Print Collector / Getty.)
They decided to make an example of Ernst, as a warning to other senators about what to expect if they stepped out of line. An op‑ed implicitly excoriating her appeared on Breitbart News ; Bannon and the gang on his War Room podcast hammered her relentlessly; and the powerful young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA team threatened to send resources to Iowa to oppose her reelection in 2026. Ernst’s effort to “end Pete Hegseth,” Kirk posted on X in early December, “is a direct attempt to undermine the President and his voters. Pete Hegseth is the redline. If you vote against him, primaries will ensue.”
Trump’s team knew that once the most prominent MAGA figures began their onslaught, second-tier influencers would follow. Ernst called around to Trump allies, begging them to stop the attacks. But they wouldn’t relent; she voted to confirm Hegseth.
Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and physician from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in the hot seat as he struggled with his confirmation vote on Kennedy, a vaccine critic who has misstated scientific findings, to lead the nation’s top health agency. (Cassidy was also viewed as a problem by Trump supporters because he’d voted to convict the president for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)
Cassidy ultimately supported Kennedy’s nomination, though he maintained that the vote had nothing to do with his own reelection prospects in 2026. Afterward, in the course of general conversations about the midterms, Cassidy’s team sought Trump’s support in his upcoming GOP primary. Trump told an aide to relay to Cassidy: “I’ll think about it.” (A Trump adviser told us that, for the moment, the president and Cassidy have reached “an uneasy détente.”)
Business leaders fell more quickly in line. After the election, they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
At dinner with Silicon Valley moguls, Trump would sometimes play “Justice for All”—a song by the J6 Prison Choir that features men imprisoned for their actions on January 6 singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One Trump adviser gleefully recounted how confused the tech billionaires appeared when “Justice for All” started, looking around for cues before inevitably rising and putting their hands over their hearts.
“The troll is strong,” the adviser told us.
The Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump’s was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the once and future president held up his phone to show off his recent-call log.
“Look who called in the past hour,” Trump boasted, then scrolled through a list that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, all were former Trump critics who, eight years earlier, had tried to keep their distance.
SHOCK AND AWE
the start of a new presidency is a famously harried and jury-rigged affair. But Trump and his team had spent his time out of office preparing for his return. Longwell, the anti-MAGA strategist, told us—echoing something our colleague David Frum had warned about four years ago—that watching Trump’s second-term team attack the federal bureaucracy was like watching “the velociraptors who have figured out how to work the doorknobs.” Day one of the second term, the product of weeks of meticulous planning, was all about—in the Trump team’s words—“shock and awe.” “We did all the immigration and border executive orders,” an adviser told us. “If we just left it at that, all the stories would have been about what bad people we are—we’re kicking people out of this country. But then right after he signed those border executive orders, bam: the J6 pardons.” The adviser explained that, along with Trump’s multiple speeches that day and inaugural balls that evening, this meant “the media had to choose what to cover. It’s either the J6 pardons or the immigration executive orders.” This convulsion of activity, the adviser told us, was all “planned”—designed to overwhelm.
“We have everyone kind of in the barrel, like everyone’s on the spin cycle, just getting whipped around, and that’s advantageous for us,” another adviser told us.
In his first term, Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland—speaking of it almost offhandedly as a potentially intriguing if unusual real-estate acquisition. But now, even before taking office again, he had suggested that Canada should be America’s 51st state, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, and vowed to gain control of Greenland—“one way or the other,” as he would later put it. He followed this during his inaugural address by invoking “manifest destiny,” the 19th-century idea that the United States has a divinely ordained right to control North America.
He added that many of the things that, in his first term, Trump had floated as provocations or trollings or idle musings are now things the president realizes he can actually do. “These are all doable,” Bannon told us. “When you’ve come back from such long odds, you clearly feel, ‘I can do anything.’ ”
In his first term, Trump and his team had not done certain things—fired key bureaucrats, upended certain alliances, overhauled various initiatives—because, as one former adviser told us, “we thought they were red-hot.
“And then you touch it,” the former adviser continued, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.” This may be the key insight of Trump’s second term. The first time around, aides were constantly warning him that the stove was too hot. This time, no one is even telling him not to touch the stove.
Tradition holds that artists honored with lifetime-achievement awards at the Kennedy Center meet with the sitting president. During Trump’s first term, some of the most prominent artists refused to do so. He, in turn, didn’t attend a single performance there.
“I didn’t really get to go the first time, because I was always getting impeached or some bullshit, and I could never enjoy a show,” Trump said, according to an adviser familiar with the comments. But as planning for the second inauguration got under way, someone mentioned the possibility of holding an event there, impelling Trump to muse aloud about naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, a position that had long been held by the philanthropist and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein. Trump ordered, “Call David Rubenstein and tell him he’s fired.”
Overnight, Trump’s cultural remit went from queuing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s premier arts institutions. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
Some of Trump’s advisers have learned to operate by an unofficial rule: They make sure to do things after he says them twice. This is a necessary and important rule because, as one adviser explained, “he says a lot of shit.” So the second time Trump mentioned wanting to take over the Kennedy Center, his aides got to work, and in early February, Trump fired most of the board and named himself chairman. His cultural remit had gone overnight from entertaining his aides by playing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the board of one of the nation’s premier arts institutions.
One of the most chaotic departures from convention has been Elon Musk’s prominent role in the administration. The disruption Musk has unleashed through DOGE, putting swaths of government “into the wood chipper,” as he described it, has tended to obscure the fact that the richest man in the world, who is one of Trump’s biggest financial donors, is attending Cabinet meetings while continuing to run his private businesses, which benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. The conflicts of interest here run fathoms deep. But Trump has confidently normalized all of it, even going so far as to conduct an infomercial for Tesla on the White House grounds.
In previous presidencies, Musk’s role in the administration would have been a scandal that dominated the media and congressional hearings for months. In Trump’s second term, this—by design—gets drowned out by everything else.
So, too, does Trump’s complete departure from convention regarding the Justice Department, which has historically had some independence from the president. In April, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, who in Trump’s first term ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which declared the 2020 election secure and Biden the legitimate winner. Trump, in short, wanted to prosecute Krebs for accepting reality. He has also made clear that he wants the attorney general to protect his supporters, including Musk, whose Tesla dealerships and charging stations have been targeted by vandals. “When I see things going on like what they’re doing to Elon, that’s terrible,” Trump told us. “That’s a terrible thing. That’s terrorism.”
Trump boasted to us of Musk’s private business successes as if they were his own. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, had just helped to retrieve astronauts who had been marooned for months on the International Space Station. “They don’t come out of there at some point, you know, the bones start to break down,” Trump said.
Trump marveled at the media’s coverage of the splashdown. “They said, ‘And the rocket’s coming down in the Gulf of America.’ They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it,” he told us. “It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed. It’s been a long time. And that’s good.”
“THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR”
for all of trump’s success in dominating the political sphere, Democrats have grown more optimistic that his political fortunes may be changing. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress in early March, told us that some of her constituents say their votes for Trump were born of despair. “They’ll say to me, ‘Look, it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo. It may hurt like hell. It may not work at all. But I’m at the end of my rope, and I’ll try anything.’ ”
We asked her whether now, several months into the second Trump administration, her constituents think the chemo is working. “I can’t tell you how many Trump voters have said to me, like, ‘Look, I voted for him to make the economy work. I did not vote for all of this craziness, and I certainly didn’t vote, for instance, for cuts to the VA,’ ” Slotkin said. “That is not what they signed up for.”
But in nearly every conversation we had with various Trump advisers, they told us that delivering on what people had voted for was in fact essential to holding the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterms. Trump himself has his eyes on a larger, long-term political realignment. “It’s a much different party,” he told us. “I got 38 percent of the male Black vote. Nobody knew that was possible. That’s a lot. I got 56 percent of Hispanics. How about that one? Every county along the Texas border is Hispanic. I won every one of them.” Though every single number he cited was wrong, the general thrust of his observation was correct.
Delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, his advisers told us, was the key not only to securing his legacy but to transforming the MAGA base into Republican voters for decades to come. (This project—persuading MAGA supporters to vote for Republicans even when Trump is not on the ballot—is a “central theme” of this presidency, one adviser repeatedly told us.) During the campaign and then the transition, Trump’s aides kept a shared document that meticulously cataloged and updated his promises for what he would do on day one, as well as what he’d promised to do more generally. The advisers we spoke with said that voters had absolutely known what they were asking for when they pulled the lever for Trump—and Trump’s team was determined to deliver.
But this is where the now nationally ingrained tendency to take Trump seriously but not literally may have created a disconnect between what Trump’s supporters thought they were voting for and what they are now getting, even among his most committed base. Over the years, Trump said many things that never came to fruition. Or he spoke with such hyperbole that everyone substantially discounted the reality of what he was ostensibly committing to. Or the policy implications of what he said would get obscured in the cloud of his ruminations about shark attacks and electrocutions and Hannibal Lecter—allowing voters to focus on what they liked and to ignore the riskier, more worrisome aspects of his promises. So although it’s true that Trump is delivering on commitments to impose tariffs, cut government waste, and aggressively deport immigrants, many of his voters are only now beginning to realize the effect these policies will have on their daily lives.
Several months into his second chance, the blitzkrieg of the early days continues—but it seems to be meeting more substantial resistance. Federal courts are once again blocking—or at least trying to block—Trump plans that flout the Constitution or stretch legal reasoning. The repeated rollouts and rollbacks and re-rollouts of his tariff measures have pushed the world toward an economic breaking point. (Even in the best-case scenario, any renaissance of the U.S. industrial base remains a long way off.) The Federal Reserve recently adjusted short-term-inflation projections higher, and GDP projections are getting lower. Financial analysts say the odds of a recession have risen significantly. The stock market just had its worst quarter in three years. When we talked with him in March, Trump had told us that Vladimir Putin “is going to be fine” in the Ukraine peace negotiations—but Putin has thwarted Trump’s promise of a quick deal. (“I’m trying to save a lot of lives in the world,” Trump told us. “You know, Ukraine and Russia—it’s not our lives, but it could end up in a Third World War.”)
The Signalgate fiasco appalled even a majority of Republicans. (Here Trump has so far stuck to his second-term policy of conceding essentially nothing, of never admitting weakness or a lie. To date, no one has been fired over Signalgate—though advisers we spoke with privately predicted that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the attack-planning chain, would exit the administration by the end of the year, if not much sooner.) Mass anti-Trump protests, notably absent during the first two months of this term, have become more frequent, including in red states.
Even as Trump continually seeks to expand his presidential powers, he at times seems to acknowledge that they have limits. In our March conversation, he seemed frustrated at the notion that a court might try to curb his ability to deport anyone he wanted, however he wanted. Yet when we asked if he would go so far as to actively disregard a judicial order, his answer suggested that he understood the Constitution would not allow that. “I think the judge is horrible,” he said, referring to James Boasberg, the federal-district-court judge who had tried to stop deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. But Trump then referenced the Supreme Court’s more congenial opinion in Trump v. United States, which had given him immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as part of his core “official” duties as president. “But I’ve had a lot of horrible judges, and I won on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal,” he said. He told us that the Court is “going to do what’s right” when reviewing his expansive use of executive power, and he spoke with uncharacteristic charity about the Court’s Democratic appointees. “I see them at the State of the Union, things that I do, and I think they’re very good people,” he said.
When questioned, Trump has sought to evade direct responsibility for individual deportations by his administration, legal challenges to which are wending their way through the courts.
“You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that,” Trump told us when we asked if he was worried that he may have mistakenly deported innocent people. “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”
Trump’s advisers argue that, overall, the shock-and-awe approach is working. “Think about everything that’s happened immediately on immigration,” Cliff Sims told us. “Oh, we’re just going to ship gang members to a prison in El Salvador? ‘Sure.’ We’re going to send Tom Homan”—Trump’s border czar—“to kick down the door of every criminal illegally in the country? ‘Have at it.’ It is the ultimate example of the ruthless efficiency of Trump 2.0.”
We asked Trump about the portraits on the walls of the Oval Office. Who, we wondered, had a legacy that he himself might like to have? “Ronald Reagan, I like in terms of style. But he was not good on trade—terrible on trade,” Trump replied. We pointed out that Reagan was also far more welcoming of immigrants. “Well, the toughest one in immigration was Eisenhower, believe it or not,” Trump said. “He was tough, and he just didn’t want people to come in illegally, like, you know, me. Well, I’m great on trade.”
Trump has also started talking publicly about running for a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment clearly prohibits. This started as joking comments with advisers—before making them, he would sometimes teasingly instruct the sober-minded Wiles, “Susie, close your ears”—but now seems to have become more serious. MAGA acolytes outside the administration have said they’ve been investigating ways of getting around the Twenty-Second Amendment, and an adviser acknowledged that if Trump thought a third term could somehow be made feasible, he would likely consider it.
We asked Trump about a rumor we’d heard that he had tasked his Justice Department with looking into the legality of his running again in 2028. He said he hadn’t, but then seemed to leave open the possibility. Was this the rare democratic norm he was unwilling to shatter? “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused, laughing. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.” He noted, twice, that his supporters regularly shout for him to seek a third term, but concluded, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.” But not, it appears, a hard thing to profit from: The Trump Organization is now selling “Trump 2028” hats.
As a final question during our conversation in March, we asked the president whether he had concerns that his successor will follow his precedent and directly steer the powers of the presidency against his opponents, something he had accused Biden of doing against him. Wasn’t he laying the groundwork for an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retribution?
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve already gone through it,” the president told us. “I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”
Three weeks after our initial phone call, the political complexion of the moment seemed to have shifted rather dramatically, and we wondered if that had changed Trump’s thinking. So we called the president’s cellphone, hoping to ask some follow-up questions. He didn’t answer. We left a voicemail.
That night, Saturday, April 12, Trump traveled from Mar-a-Lago to Miami to watch the mixed-martial-arts spectacle of UFC 314. He entered the arena like a conquering general, surrounded by a coterie of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level advisers and officials. The cheers from the adoring fans were uproarious. After some of the fights, the winner would rush to the side of the ring where Trump was sitting, to demonstrate fealty.
When the fights were over, well after midnight, Trump’s motorcade headed back to Air Force One, at the Miami airport. The next morning, one of us awoke to find that, at 1:28 a.m., the president had called, just as the pool report showed he was getting back in his motorcade. He hadn’t left a message. Had he been calling to ask if we’d seen what had transpired—the display of obeisance from these gladiators, and from his base? Or was this merely a late-night pocket dial? His team declined to clarify.
We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.” As is often the case with Trump, his business advice could also be interpreted as a kind of a threat.
The president had one last message for us. “What can be said?” Trump had instructed his aide to tell us. “I won the election in a landslide, and there isn’t anyone who can say anything about that. What can they write about?”
We thought we’d finished our story. But for Trump, negotiation is a perpetual state, and nine days later, he reversed himself again. We were asked to report to the Oval Office on the afternoon of April 24 for the interview we had first requested two months earlier. Trump also invited the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he had recently attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to join the meeting. Then, hours before we arrived, the president announced the interview to the world.
“I am doing this interview out of curiosity,” he wrote on Truth Social, “and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ ” Goldberg, he added falsely, was a writer of “many fictional stories about me.” (Several White House aides, upon reading the message, joked about playing a prank on National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, the official who had accidentally added Goldberg to the Signal chat. “Tell Waltz to go into the Oval,” they dared one another, “but don’t tell him who’s in there.”)
“This will be very, very interesting,” Trump said, by way of greeting us as we approached the Resolute Desk. “You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”
In private, Trump often plays against the bombastic persona he projects in larger settings—at rallies, on television, on social media. He was launching a charm offensive, directed mainly at Goldberg. There was none of the name-calling or hostility he regularly levels at our magazine. He boasted about the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had imported from Palm Beach to decorate the Oval Office. “The question is: Do I do a chandelier?” he asked. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.”
“I am in the first group, believe it or not,” he said. (This was indeed difficult to believe, we interjected.) “But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated.” In our presence, he seemed inclined to outsource his retributive id to others. But soon after we left the Oval Office, Trump sought to exact further political revenge on his foes by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.
When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.” Trump also said that Waltz was “fine” despite being “beat up” by accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal chat. What had Trump told his staff after the controversy? “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
He spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity. “I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon.”
Trump pushed back on the notion, popular among some Wall Street analysts, that financial turmoil—plummeting markets, the threat of a recession, a weakened dollar—would cause him to roll back his tariff policies. “It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line, no “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.
We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged.
We pressed further, again bringing up his efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. What would happen, we asked, if his administration accidentally got the wrong person—a legal resident, or even an American citizen? “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he said.
Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.
The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”
“I’d like to say that that is reality,” Trump said. “Probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that.”
Never mind that the votes had been counted, the court cases concluded. He was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This.”
“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”
So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE. [From In That Howling Infinite‘s Deconstructing Donald – translating Trumpspeak]
Fast track to the present day as second coming began with a barnstorming inaugural address:
“ … the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons [and] will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”.
In a pugnacious declaration of American exceptionalism and, dare we say it, Magafest Destiny, he said: “Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans, the future is ours, and our Golden Age has just begun.”
His first press conference followed shortly afterwards as he signed off on a plethora of executive orders and bantered with the assembled Fourth Estate. Apart from his customary vindictiveness, grievance-driven musings and hyperbole, he was clearly in good humour, folksy even. We were, against our better instincts, bemused, amused, entertained even.
Whatever comes next – and the hectic events of the last fortnight have provided many clues. Along with the name “Gulf of Mexico”, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has moved into the White House as the new power behind the throne; the purge of public servants and the deportation of illegal migrants have begun; foreign aid is suspended; and “woke” programmes and pronouns are cactus. Panama and Greenland are on the president’s shopping list, and the trade wars are now on: “This will be the golden age of America,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!) But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it.
Meanwhile there’s predictable faux panic on the left, in Australia and elsewhere, as armchair and keyboard warriors whinge from the sidelines with the same old discussions, the same old articles, serviced by the same bias-confirming algorithms, denigrate and demean America and Americans, and endeavour to tar our own ostensibly “trumpian” conservatives with the same tired brush. Countless social media memes and comments about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self-righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become. But while they may derive some vicarious satisfaction from their predictable put-downs, they are just pissing in the wind.
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it. The march to the “right side of history” has turned out just to be to the right. And there’s nothing we can about it. As a Facebook friend commented recently, ” … it’s like watching the Titanic sail away knowing it’s going to sink, but the details of where and when are unknown. But it keeps our old brains active”.
It’s not that people are unaware of Trump’s faults. They harbour no illusions that he will behave any better this time around. They know he will never change; he is erratic, unhinged and foments chaos; he is arrogant, has no sense of history, and is completely transactional. He never apologises, recants or retreats. He never expresses regret for his actions. When under attack for scandalous behaviour or abuse of power, Trump has one playbook: deny, denounce, discredit, defame.
Even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives acknowledge this. Former Australian attorney general George Brandis wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18 November:
“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerising and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
Commentators and author Troy Branston wrote in The Australian, on 9th November 2024: “It’ll be a wild four years with Trump back in power. He remains a despicable and disgusting man devoid of integrity and ethical values, is boorish, moronic, and unstable, and I fear, by a narrow margin, Americans have made the wrong decision. But it a decision that they must live with we must accept”.
We are on the threshold of a consequential four years. Like it or not, we are in interesting times.
From time to time, I republish articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe are worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall – and those who, out of misguided principle, refuse to read articles by its more erudite and eloquent contributors. This, by The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, is one of those.
We published a similar piece exactly six years ago at the commencement of Trump’s first term:The Ricochet of Trump’s Counter-revolution. Back then, we were unsure what the next three years would bring. This time around, we probably have a good idea, and it’s likely to be a wild ride for America and also the world.
I find it hard to tell you, ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very very mad world
Trump remakes America with a revolution in common sense
Greg Sheridan, The Australian 25 January 2025
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.
Here is the Donald in unimagined glory, the victor of all he surveys, not just embarking on the latest unbelievable chapter in a completely unbelievable American life, from reality TV to the White House, via porn star dalliances, assassin’s bullets and politicised felony convictions that voters rightly ignored, but promising the very reinvention, the historic renewal, of America itself.
It’s a scene with biblical resonance.
But is Trump a modern Moses leading his people into the promised land? Or is he the Apocalypse? It’s too early to tell, but the blizzard of activity in Trump’s first few days demonstrates he is changing America, probably fundamentally. As with all things Trump, there will be good and bad, courageous and cringeworthy, inspiring and implausible.
The dangers are manifold: that Trump goes too far; that his administration is ill-disciplined if not incoherent; that the opposition in the courts and Democrat-controlled states frustrates his program; that he ignores the law; that he confuses personal profit with public policy; that America’s adversaries, wise to Trump this time, less intimidated by his bluster, refuse him the deals he wants, the deals he needs; that the meanness inherent in parts of Trump’s program becomes exaggerated or dominant; that he encompasses some monumental blunder.
But the promise is also manifold: that Trump unleashes the entrepreneurial spirits of the American economy; that the US military streaks ahead of the rest, providing unassailable deterrence; that the US sets up a huge lead in artificial intelligence and other areas of hi-tech; that America leads the West out of the debilitating ideologies of self-hatred and identity politics that grip the Western academy; that race is delegitimised as a central feature of Western politics and culture; that inflation is slayed; that bureaucracy is tamed, government spending reduced; that deregulation liberates business and slashes costs.
The frisson of danger that always accompanies Trump is palpable. It’s tied up not only with Trump’s personality but with his essential modus operandi. Everything is psycho-drama. Everything is a deal. So everything is unpredictable. Positions that seem solid, change in a minute, sacrificed as leverage in a deal. Strategic unpredictability can be an asset in negotiation, but as former diplomat Peter Varghese has argued, strategic unpredictability can easily become strategic unreliability.
To take one relatively minor example, Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, a few days before the inauguration, said any of the January 6, 2021, rioters who had attacked police wouldn’t be pardoned. Then Trump pardoned them anyway, saying they’d been in jail long enough. Vance surely had spoken to Trump before he made his public comments. Trump presumably was undecided until the last minute, characteristically. He certainly wasn’t fussed about embarrassing Vance.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette AFP
Still, stepping back from the sheer volume and speed of action in the first days, you can see that Trump’s election, notwithstanding the new/old President’s many foibles, represents a characteristic American response to perceived decline and stagnation. The old left liberal orthodoxy that was strangling America, its economy and its society, just as it’s strangling Europe and even Australia, just wasn’t working. Everyone could see that except left-liberal ideologues. Crime. Homelessness. Skyrocketing energy prices. Uncontrolled illegal immigration. These things were a mess.
No nation suffers paradigm paralysis less willingly than the US. If things really aren’t working, its voters have a visceral reaction: throw the bums out! And if the next lot don’t work, throw them out too.
Often the US has looked permanently crippled by its internal difficulties – after the civil war in the 19th century, or the savage internal polarisation over Vietnam in the 1960s, or the stagflation of the ’70s. But every time, America comes roaring back.
Is it roaring back now? America certainly has profound social problems – drug abuse, especially fentanyl, gun violence, homelessness, inner-city crime, obesity. Ruinous inflation. But never forget the incredible American achievement.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson claimed recently that by the end of 2024, the poorest US state, Mississippi, was richer than the richest province of social democratic Canada, after a decade of enlightened left-liberal incompetence and ideological posturing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The poorest American state enjoys a higher per capita income than Britain or France. The US is about $US30,000 ($47,700) richer per head than Canada, about twice as rich per capita as the EU. Even when America is doing poorly, it’s doing better than almost everybody else. Nonetheless, America has dangerously lost much of its manufacturing industry. In today’s militarily fraught environment, that’s dangerous.
A homeless encampment in San Francisco. Getty Images
But the modern world was still made in America – from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, from Pulitzer prizes to nation-shifting podcasts, from the internet to space travel. So while left-liberal formulas are failing, Trump inherits an America still possessed of profound strengths. Nonetheless, he’s going to change its direction and, if he can, its character. He’s attacking every issue with frightening energy.
His first week was political shock and awe: dozens of presidential executive orders; two states of emergency, energy and the southern border; two big international withdrawals, from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organisation; a string of important appointments; a half-trillion-dollar AI investment announcement; the establishment of a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, to slash government spending; and the greatest repudiation of racial preferences by abolishing every program of the federal US government implementing or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump gave us real actions in a dizzy range of policy areas. These include: the economy, including tariffs, energy policy, climate change, tax cuts, deregulation; foreign policy, including China, Russia, Israel and the Middle East; immigration, especially the southern border; and every aspect of identity politics, to promote “a colourblind society based on merit”.
It’s a cultural revolution, perhaps as Tesla boss and Trump bestie Elon Musk, head of DOGE, claimed, “a fork in the road of human civilisation”.
There will be plenty of resistance, even if Democrats rightly feel like idiots at the moment, demoralised at their loss, stunned at the people’s rejection, humiliated that the majority did not regard Trump in anything like the lurid light that Democrats had painted for eight years.
Nonetheless, although Trump’s victory was clear, it was relatively narrow. Trump got 77.3 million votes to Kamala Harris’s 75 million. That’s good but not landslide territory. He won 49.8 per cent of a relatively low turnout to Harris’s 48.3 per cent. Trump didn’t win a majority of the popular vote as George W. Bush did in 2004.
The result was, in the prescient phrase of former Trump campaign manager and adviser Kellyanne Conway, a “narrow landslide”.
Trump won all the battleground states, but narrowly. If Harris had won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, she would be president. She lost those states respectively by 120,000, 80,000 and 29,000. So if just 115,000 votes in three key states, out of a total of more than 155 million votes cast, had gone the other way, the Trump revolution would be just one of the ghostly ifs of history.
None of this diminishes Trump’s victory. Given everything thrown against him, it was a magnificent triumph. But America is still a 50-50 nation. Trump will need to score successes that affect people’s lives to cement his political revolution. Just as conservatives were energised by Joe Biden’s appalling presidency, radical activists will be motivated to oppose Trump. Though not just yet, perhaps.
What do Trump’s early actions tell us about how he’ll govern? Stylistically, they’re revealing. This will be a personalised presidency where all big policy issues are deals, supervised by the President.
Some specific policies are clear. Trump will secure US borders. The American people want that. He says he will deport people who are in the US illegally. That’s more than 12 million people. He can’t physically deport that many. But he can deport a lot if he wants to.
Barack Obama, liberal hero, deported hundreds of thousands of people every year. That’s what it means to enter the US illegally. You don’t have the right to be there. If Trump concentrates on illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and the more than a million who have been ordered to be deported but have not actually been removed, that’s likely to maintain strong support.
US Customs and Border Protection officers. AFP
For the moment, Trump has stopped all refugee arrivals. That surely must be temporary. Attempting to end automatic citizenship for babies born in the US appears unconstitutional. The constitutional amendment was first introduced to allow slaves and ex-slaves to become citizens. That will be fought legally.
Energy policy is clear. Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, ended federal mandates for electric vehicles and reversed every one of Biden’s multitudinous executive orders restricting fossil fuel exploration and exploitation. During the election, Harris did not campaign on climate change at all. This issue could be gone for the left.
Most politicians try to sniff the breeze. Some politicians make the weather. Trump is doing this, perhaps literally and figuratively, on climate change and energy. His administration will promote the use of every source of energy – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar – everything altogether all at once. There will be a lot of legal battles but the direction is clear. And the US taxpayer won’t contribute a dime to green energy funds.
There are only a couple of nations formally outside the Paris Agreement. But Trump’s action demolishes global climate plans as they exist and demonstrates the extreme folly of the Albanese government bankrupting our economy to pursue the fantasy chimera of net zero.
Most developed nations have substantially deindustrialised because of crazy net-zero targets and the consequent spiralling costs of energy. This week’s Spectator magazine contains a mournful essay outlining the process in Britain. A recently returned European diplomat observes to me that climate action and green energy policies have damaged German industry more than the Royal Air Force did in World War II.
Trump won’t let this happen in America. Further, the big greenhouse gas emitters, whose emissions are growing most strongly, are not developed economies but nations such as China, India, Indonesia and so on. These nations are part of the Paris accords but don’t face any serious burdens under them. They use every source of energy they can.
The US Mexico border at El Paso, Texas. AFP
With the US effectively joining them, it’s the failing economies of Europe, and not much better performing Australia, that look out of touch with reality and committed to self-destruction. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are both right to say Australia can’t exit Paris like the US has done. This would be to become a target. It should instead do what so many do: stay notionally in Paris but maintain the economy anyway with traditional energy sources. And it should embrace nuclear.
Trump wants to cut taxes and attract foreign investment into the US. None of this foreign investment will hesitate for a nano-second because of ethical concerns about climate. Trump will face his greatest opposition in the courts, from some Democrat states such as California; and, if Republicans lose congress in two years, from congress as well.
On tariffs, Trump is still a mystery. He says punitive tariffs may begin against Canada and Mexico in a week or two. He’s unhappy that they let too many people, and too much fentanyl, cross into the US. Such tariffs would devastate Mexico and Canada. The slight delay seems to be an invitation to their governments to make him an offer he can’t refuse.
He has delayed the giant tariffs he was planning on China even further. Though Trump said he would impose such tariffs, it’s clear they were always essentially a bargaining ploy. He’s open to deals.
Trump offered actions and indications of direction on the Middle East, Russia and China. The actions are unified by Trump’s deal-making and by his America first predilections, but they can’t be connected by coherent policy otherwise.
On the Middle East, he forced a welcome ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. If Hamas comes back to dominate Gaza, Trump will likely back Israel if it decides it must resume military action.
Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in 2018. AFP
On Russia, Trump wants a deal. However bad it is in principle, in that Ukraine should not have had to give up any territory, in reality the shape of the deal is obvious. Russia gets to keep the Ukrainian territory it has already conquered and Ukraine gets genuine security guarantees – if not NATO membership, perhaps the presence of British and French troops on its soil.
Trump began by hectoring Russia’s Vladimir Putin, saying he was destroying Russia and waging a ridiculous war. He threatened more sanctions if Putin didn’t make a deal. That seems a hollow threat but Trump’s deals typically begin with a lot of bluster. Trump wants this deal very badly.
On China, Trump has sent mixed and confusing signals. His decision to save TikTok is extremely perplexing. Congress passed legislation to force TikTok to sever its connection with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or cease operations in the US. Trump has delayed enforcement of this law, and that in itself seems highly dubious legally. Trump also says he would accept a deal in which the US, whether government or private companies, owned 50 per cent of TikTok. But that would still be in breach of the law, which Trump himself called for way back in 2020, and would not stop China from harvesting all the user data from TikTok.
As a result of Trump’s stay of execution, TikTok has been lavishing praise on him. That’s pretty dubious from every point of view.
Trump has appointed genuine and profound China hawks such as new Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elbridge Colby, the new Under Secretary of Defence for Policy at the Pentagon. But he also has appointed business-as-usual types to Treasury. Similarly, he has talked of wanting to visit China soon, which would seem unlikely if he’s levying punishing tariffs. The best you can say is that China policy is a movable feast, likely to harden over the course of Trump’s presidency, as it did during his first term.
Trump wants to renovate, modernise and expand American power. He’s greatly drawn to tariffs and economic sanctions as his “hard” power tools of choice. He’s pro-business, pro-hi tech, pro-patriotic and in alliance with many good forces in US society. And of course, he has his dark side and his share of very bad hangers-on.
History has often used much worse men than this to conduct necessary national renovations. Trump is planning to reinvent himself and reinvent America. The world awaits the reinvention.
In That Howling Infinite 
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.