Stephen Miller articulates Mr. Trump’s (and Hegseth’s and Putin’s and Netanyahu’s—almost everything argued here applies to them also) worldview in a few simple words:
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The most powerful moments of the World Cup did not happen only inside stadiums. They happened in restaurants, city streets, neighborhood bars, national parks, and conversations between strangers who realized the person standing across from them was not a stereotype. They were a human being.
An ancient proverb warns that a double-edged sword wounds not only its intended target but also the one who wields it. Critics and constitutional scholars increasingly invoke that metaphor to describe what they view as the evolving relationship between the Supreme Court and the Republican-controlled Congress. They argue that, by gradually conceding portions of their constitutional authority to the executive branch, both institutions have helped create what some describe as an “Imperial Presidency”—one possessing powers that now threaten not only America’s constitutional democracy but also the very institutions that helped create it.
When word came down that USAID was being dismantled in Nicaragua, I was sorting through old documents amid the chaos of the mission close-out. On the desk next to mine sat a book abandoned by a colleague: The Dictator’s Handbook, by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which lays out, in plain and clinical language, how dictators actually operate.
“These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists.” And they will:
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Donald Trump kicked up the cultural sparks in all three cases and started what I believe is legitimately called our Trumpster fire, surfacing live embers into an environment ready for a fiery backlash amongst aggrieved sectors of America, clearly acting out of the rage Trump spoke. It evolved into a political rally culture featuring racism, sexism, and hatred of those who came to America seeking refuge—often from the wars overseas that the US either started or fueled. His crude speech was exactly what angry sectors of the US loved, and they elected him—twice.
SIPRI’s annual report for 2025 notes: “More people were killed in armed conflict, were forced from their homes or needed humanitarian assistance than in recent years, probably for decades. On many battlefronts, peacemaking was non-existent or stalled.”
For generations, Americans were told that diplomacy and war were different roads. Diplomacy was supposed to keep armies from moving, create room for compromise and end violence already underway. Military force, by contrast, was the failure of that process — or at least its last resort. The Trump administration is erasing that distinction. It is treating talks and attacks as instruments that can be used at the same time, against the same country, for the same political objective.
We once took for granted that everyone concerned with global warming outside the Trump administration’s orbit accepted the scientists’ conclusion that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming was the critical threshold. Following on its pullout from the Paris Accords, the administration has ignored climate scientists’ overwhelming findings on the human causes of global warming and stifled publication of their research.