President Donald Trump just gave a preview of how he plans to acquire Greenland: economic warfare.  That was the unmistakable warning embedded in Trump’s rambling, complaint-heavy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, where he blasted European leaders and appeared to threaten retaliation if the US does not acquire Greenland. “We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump told the audience, before warning, “They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.” While Trump said that he wouldn’t “use force” to seize Greenland, he justified his ongoing demands to acquire the territory because the US keeps “the whole world afloat.” “Without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps,” he said. “After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now?” The president then shared a startling anecdote, which many viewed as an implicit warning of how the US could retaliate if it did not acquire Greenland. Trump told the audience that after initially planning to slap a 30 percent tariff on Switzerland’s exports to the US, he ultimately went up to 39 percent because Switzerland’s president at the time, Karin Keller-Sutter, had rubbed him “the wrong way.” “She just rubbed me the wrong way, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump told the audience. “And I made it 39 percent.” The US later reduced the tariff on Switzerland to 15 percent, which Trump described on Wednesday as evidence of his compassion: “I don’t want to hurt people.” The remarks appeared to underscore the exact warnings Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shared at the World Economic Forum just the day before.  “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” Carney said on Tuesday, stressing that “great powers” like the US have used “tariffs as leverage” and “financial infrastructure as coercion.”  Now, some leaders in Europe seem to be taking Carney’s approach. In response to the Trump administration’s continued threats to take Greenland, the chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee announced on Wednesday that it would pause a EU-US trade deal that would have, in part, suspended tariffs on all industrial goods.

President Donald Trump famously doesn’t like to read. And if his increasingly frequent public naps are any indication, his attention span is only getting shorter. But he did claim to watch what one historian praised as a “riveting, extraordinary and brutally honest” speech by Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada yesterday in Davos, Switzerland. And Trump’s reaction was typically petulant. Imploring an audience chock-full of European officials at the annual World Economic Forum to recognize that “nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney rallied middle powers—countries with economies similar to Canada—to bind together in the face of unilateral military and economic coercion by bigger powers. (Unspoken but clear among them: Trump’s America.) In doing so, Carney painted a stark view of a new world in which old rules have been torn up, and countries should stop pretending otherwise. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said. “Not a transition.” His call to the world: Resist subordination to the “great powers” who “have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms.” “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said. Trump was clearly irked. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us,” he said on Wednesday. “They should be grateful but they’re not.” “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” Carney’s speech, which received a standing ovation, is rooted in Carney’s personal experience after winning an election fought on protecting Canada’s sovereignty against economic attack from the United States in the form of tariffs and bellicose threats that Canada should be the 51st state of America. At Davos, Carney framed Trump’s attempts to “buy” Greenland as part of the same intimidation campaign: “Great powers began using economic integration as weapons,” he said. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” “We know the old order is not coming back,” he added. “But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just.” Read the full transcript here. And watch the speech below.

Once again, the response was quick, fuming, and filled with falsehoods. On January 7, about five hours after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis fatally shot a woman in her SUV, President Donald Trump addressed the reckless killing in a social-media post: The victim, he said, “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive.” Those were lies. Trump shared murky slow-motion footage from a distant door camera, but clearer videos from eyewitnesses had already gone viral and showed the reality. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good, an American citizen and 37-year-old mother of three, point-blank through the windshield and open driver’s-side window as Good tried to turn her slow-moving vehicle away from him. Ross then reholstered his gun and walked down the street toward where the SUV had crashed, eyewitness video showed. (Moments later in that same video, Ross can be seen even more clearly walking back up the street and showing no signs of serious injury. Trump officials have since claimed that Ross suffered from an unspecified degree of internal bleeding.) Trump’s post culminated with him blaming Good’s death on what he said was a sprawling conspiracy targeting ICE agents: “We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!” Just over a week later, amid tense protests and further violence by ICE in Minneapolis, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. Trump’s vitriol, though often seen as “unhinged” by critics, is methodical and by design. He uses any violent national tragedy as political ammo. During his first year back in the White House, he has seized upon assassinations, mass shootings, and other deadly traumas to stoke partisan division and justify extreme policies and actions. Fact-finding in the aftermath of a tragedy does not matter to him—only setting the narrative does. > “He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.” His top officials back him in lockstep. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared shortly after Good’s killing—before any investigation—that Good had committed “an act of domestic terrorism.” Noem’s description of what happened with the ICE agents defied reality: “A woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” Vice President JD Vance blamed the deceased victim for “an attack on the American people,” declaring it “classic terrorism.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that Good’s death was “a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country.” The brazen lying and demonization were familiar, the latest in a pattern from Trump that has included his response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a mass shooting at a Mormon church, a terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers, and even the shocking murders of Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. (Details on these and others below.) Most modern presidents have sought to console and reassure the country in the face of national tragedy, but Trump’s behavior stands alone, says Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “He seems incapable of trying to unify people or issue words of healing,” Dallek says. “I can’t think of a single instance in which he tried to calm tempers. He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.” Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush stated that true Islam “is peace” and urged Americans not to vilify millions of Muslims who were making “an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.” After the devastating gun massacre at a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015, President Barack Obama called for national soul-searching and emphasized the power of goodness and grace over racist hatred. You have to go back half a century, to “law and order” hardliner Richard Nixon, to find a more combative approach, Dallek notes. Yet even though Nixon was bilious and conspiratorial against the political left, he was more measured in his public reaction to national trauma and less willing than Trump to disregard reality. Nixon’s messaging included victim-blaming after four students were shot dead by national guard troops at Kent State University in May 1970—but he also acknowledged that most in the protest movement were “very peaceful” and said he would withhold judgement about the shooting until after a factual investigation. Trump’s tactics have been effective for helping him maintain a minority base of fervent supporters, says Dallek. “They can all get behind this idea that whatever is happening within MAGA is much less worse than the threat of ‘the radical left.’” He adds: “It justifies, after the fact, his very aggressive and even extremist policies, including the unleashing of ICE on blue cities and states. The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.” Trump provokes so much news and controversy for the public to process that his exploitation of violent tragedies tends to fade quickly from consciousness. The rhetoric has an intended effect, then attention is gone. But scrutiny of recent disasters reveals the clear pattern by which Trump has built up a leftist bogeyman (including designating antifa a domestic terrorist group) and has further cultivated contempt for immigrants and political adversaries. “WITH GOD AS MY WITNESS” When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, the Trump White House emphasized blame, rapidly and without evidence, on a broad conspiracy. Law enforcement authorities announced in the initial aftermath that the suspect charged in the killing, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, likely acted alone—and no evidence to the contrary has emerged in the more than four months since. Nevertheless, top Trump aide Stephen Miller hammered home the preferred narrative on Kirk’s former podcast, in a conversation with Vance that was live-streamed from the White House five days after the killing. “It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said. “And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks…and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” Attorney General Pam Bondi pushed broader blame in an interview with ABC News: “Who killed Charlie?” she asked. “Left-wing radicals, and they will be held accountable.” On Newsmax, Dan Bongino, then the FBI deputy director, leaned into talk of investigating a possible conspiracy. > “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.” Inside a Phoenix stadium 11 days after the killing, Trump led the memorializing of Kirk as a persecuted martyr. He said that Kirk had faced “menacing hate” everywhere on his campus tours from “rage-filled radicals.” He denounced “antifa terrorists” and claimed that “many of these people” allegedly targeting Kirk were highly paid “agitators.” In an especially dark turn, Trump went off script after saying that Kirk was a “noble spirit” with a forgiving view of the political opposition. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump added, waxing sardonic. “I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.” “ANOTHER TARGETED ATTACK ON CHRISTIANS” Later in September, a man committed a mass shooting and arson at a Mormon church in Michigan and was quickly killed by police. Less than three hours afterward, Trump commented on social media: “The suspect is dead, but there is still a lot to learn.” In that same post, however, he declared a motive: “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America.” Asked the next morning about motive on Fox & Friends, Leavitt said she’d learned from FBI director Kash Patel that all they knew so far was that the killer “hated people of the Mormon faith.” Further media reporting on the perpetrator, who killed four victims and injured eight others, soon complicated the Trump narrative of a war on Christianity. Friends said that 40-year-old Thomas Sanford was a right-wing Republican. Social media posts showed he’d backed Trump for president, and recently a Trump sign had been displayed on his home. His grievance with the Mormon church appeared to hinge specifically on a rough breakup he’d gone through years prior with a Mormon girlfriend. He was an ex-Marine who’d served in Iraq and had a history of substance abuse. He had a young son with a rare genetic disorder, a source of emotional and financial strain. Sanford, in other words, was like many other suicidal mass killers: his pathway to violence was complex, with no clear ideological explanation. The Trump White House said nothing further. Media coverage dwindled. But there was evidence from the start that some people had perceived the source of the massacre the way Trump wanted: As a Wall Street Journal reporter described from near the scene that day, “I’ve heard people yelling out car windows about radical leftists.” “SO WHACKED OUT” Depending on who the victims are, Trump’s divisiveness has taken other forms—including what he doesn’t say or do in the aftermath. Back in June of last year, when a man in Minnesota hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Trump was notably muted as a search was underway for the suspect. Trump offered only a brief, uncharacteristic written statement, posted by Leavitt on his behalf, in which he denounced the violence generally and said that the DOJ and FBI were fully on the case. After the suspect was captured and evidence emerged that he was a Trump supporter who held extreme far-right views, Trump began using media interviews to trash Gov. Tim Walz as “grossly incompetent” and “a terrible governor.” Normally after such a rare, high-stakes catastrophe, a president would offer support to regional leaders directly impacted, but not in this case. Trump sowed uncertainty in the media about whether he would reach out to Walz, and when asked again three days after the assassinations, he scoffed. “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him,” he said. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess.” Three months later, when asked by a reporter why he hadn’t ordered US flags lowered in honor of Hortman—as he had just done for Kirk—Trump said he was “not familiar” with who Hortman was. He added that he “wouldn’t have thought of” lowering flags for her and blamed Walz for not making the request. Earlier this January, Trump promoted a delusional conspiracy theory on social media suggesting that Walz himself was behind Hortman’s killing. “WE DON’T WANT THEM IN OUR COUNTRY” After an Afghan national gunned down two National Guard members in a terrorist attack just before Thanksgiving in Washington, DC, Trump unleashed a broad tirade against immigrants. The shooter had first been resettled in the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, a program for some who’d fought alongside the US military in Afghanistan. But although the shooter had later been approved for asylum under the Trump administration in 2025, Trump railed against his predecessor, vowing to “re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” In those same remarks from Mar-a-Lago the day of the attack, Trump went on to demonize “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota (overstating and misnaming that population). He blamed them for “ripping off billions of dollars” and alleged they hate America. Trump soon amped up his dehumanizing rhetoric as ICE began aggressive operations targeting Somalis and others in the Minneapolis region. During a Dec. 2 cabinet meeting broadcast live, the president laced into Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whom he has vilified for years: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work.” He said further of the Somali community, “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” Trump’s team applauded as Vance pounded the table enthusiastically. “A VERY SAD THING HAPPENED LAST NIGHT” Trump’s reaction to another high-profile tragedy late last year seemed especially revealing. It is difficult to conceive of any purpose—other than to express vengeful satisfaction and provoke outrage—for his response to the news that Rob and Michele Reiner had been stabbed to death in their home, and that their long-troubled son Nick was the suspected killer. Trump’s victim-blaming post on social media was bizarre, degrading, and grim: “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME… He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.” The outrage came indeed. (“We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House,” wrote conservative columnist Bret Stephens.) This pattern of conduct from Trump may be pushing the nation farther down a dark path, says Dallek, the historian. One concern is that the more violent events we have, the more divided the country could become. “Because the interpretation of those events by different factions is so in conflict, each violent episode worsens the atmosphere. It inflames people on all sides, and it’s impossible at that point for reason to triumph over the fury that people feel, in some cases justifiably.” > Trump has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the > American military against Americans. The risk has heightened around the killing of Renee Good and as ICE and Border Patrol operations have grown more lawless and violent. In Dallek’s view, Trump’s signals have been disturbingly clear: disinterest in the real facts of what’s happening on the ground, a total absence of accountability, and the White House doubling down on claims that it is their militarized deportation forces, not communities, that are under siege. “To all ICE officers,” Miller declared on Fox News this week, “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” “It creates a kind of permission structure,” Dallek says. “I think the leaders of the Trump administration have told ICE and Border Patrol to take off the gloves, to be very aggressive. Now we are seeing the results of that message on the streets of American cities.” Trump’s latest threat has long been building. Though the federal courts recently thwarted some of his extended deployments of National Guard troops, he has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the American military against Americans. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he told reporters in the Oval Office last fall. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”

In a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, Republican-chaired committees in the House and Senate announced that they have launched inquiries into an explosive Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to “kill everybody” aboard a vessel carrying suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. The occupants included two people who had survived an initial missile strike on the vessel and were seen “clinging” to the wreckage. “We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee said in a joint statement on Friday. “The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” leaders in the Senate Armed Services Committee said. The September 2 attack kicked off what has now been nearly two dozen attacks, killing at least 83 people, who the US military claims, without evidence, had been attempting to smuggle drugs into the US. The attacks, which President Trump justifies as a part of an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, have been likened to extrajudicial killings. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told CNN on Sunday that Hegseth’s actions, as reported by the Post, appear to be a war crime. “If what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over,” Kelly said. “We are not Russia. We are not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism.” Kelly is locked in a related battle of words with Hegseth after Kelly participated in a social media video with five other Democrats seeking to remind members of the military that they can “refuse illegal orders.” Hegseth has blasted the Post’s reporting on the missile strikes as “fabricated.” “As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote on X.

When I went out to fetch lunch last Wednesday, three Louisiana Guard members were lounging outside the Mother Jones building, enjoying the perfect weather and watching dialysis patients spilling out of Metro access vans. The soldiers wore handcuffs on their belts and handguns strapped to their thighs, unaware that they were protecting some enemies of the people inside. Later that afternoon, even more soldiers flocked to our building after a fire truck and ambulance pulled up to deal with a medical emergency. The Guard members stomped around, barking into walkie-talkies, but they contributed little more to the operation than the reporter and other rubberneckers on the sidewalk. They were back on Friday, clustered near the parking garage like smokers sheltering from the wind. President Donald Trump has deployed more than 2,200 of these National Guard members to DC to execute his “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as he described it during an August 11 news conference. “This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back.” City officials protested that crime in DC had fallen to near-historic lows. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser called the presence of the military in the city “un-American.” > American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is > #UnAmerican. > > — Muriel Bowser (@MurielBowser) August 17, 2025 Nonetheless, armored vehicles rolled in the next day and lined up in front of the Washington Monument. The initial optics of an occupied city were terrifying, the fever dream of a budding authoritarian. Several weeks later, however, the military “liberation” of DC looks a lot different from the war on crime that Trump had promised to bring to our city. National Guard members here aren’t actually doing much. Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our varied dining offerings. On Tuesday, when I was walking my dog, I ran into a few Guard members patrolling my local coffee shop. The regulars were chatting them up, while expressing polite outrage at the militarization of this quiet, historic, gayborhood. The soldiers were from Louisiana, a state whose capital city boasts a crime rate twice as high as DC’s. In their civilian lives, one was a cop, another an “assistant chiropractor.” They seemed oblivious to the pressing local crime wave: cyclists in the nearby bike lane blowing through the stop light, a scourge endlessly decried by the café denizens. > Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like > tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our local dining > offering The presence of all these soldiers in my orbit this week left me pondering something that had nagged me since they first arrived in DC last month: If I got mugged in broad daylight, what could those National Guard members really, legally, do? I put the question to John Dehn, a West Point grad and professor in the national security and civil rights program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The answer, he explained, depends on the mission and “the specific operational plans that have been put in place.” These guidelines, he said, are spelled out in the “Rules for the Use of Force,” which Guard members are supposed to carry with them. Two weeks ago, a HuffPost reporter got one from a local Guard member and posted it online. > Had a chance to stop a member of the Guard and ask whether they carried any > guidance on their person about Posse Comitatus Act (and/or a list of > "exceptions" like the troops in LA were given per DOJ). He didn't seem sure > what PCA is but did show me this doc he had in his pocket on rules of force. > > — Brandi Buchman (@brandibuchman.bsky.social) 2025-08-23T15:51:43.825Z The RUF and Rules of Conduct state that “This is a civilian SUPPORT mission.” The document emphasizes that the National Guard can’t arrest people. Nor can soldiers investigate anything or conduct searches and seizures, hostage negotiations, or extract a suspect from a barricade. Trump made a big deal recently about allowing Guard members to carry weapons, but the RUF says they are strictly prohibited from using those weapons except for self-defense and defense of others. No pulling a gun on a fleeing suspect. (“Warning shots are NOT authorized.”) A JTF-DC spokesperson later confirmed that the National Guard “will not be conducting law enforcement.” However, the Department of Justice recently deputized many Guard members as US Marshals. The DC Attorney General has argued in a lawsuit that deputizing them does, in fact, empower National Guard members to make searches, seizures, and arrests, and as such, violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from participating in domestic law enforcement. Given all the mixed messages, the Guard members I spoke with appeared somewhat confused about what the rules of engagement were. But they seemed to agree that if they witness a crime, they are mainly supposed to detain a suspect if possible, call for help, and wait for real cops to show up. “If there’s any concerns, we notify Metropolitan Police Department or the right personnel to make sure that the situation is taken care of,” US Air Force Maj. Jay Green, a chaplain with the 113th Wing, District of Columbia Air National Guard, explained in one recent Defense Department website posting. That seems to be what they’re doing in DC. The Washington Post recently sent out a team of reporters to observe troops during rush hour in the Metro system. Fanning out across various stations, Post reporters witnessed National Guard members standing around watching Metro police arrest a woman with an outstanding warrant. They did not assist. In another station, a Metro rider mistakenly assumed the soldiers could help and told them someone was selling drugs on a stalled train. What did they do with that information? “One of the Guard members passed the details about the alleged drug dealer to Metro police,” the Post reported. The Defense Department has published several puff pieces on military websites touting the National Guard’s work in DC. But even those official accounts indicate that when Guard members witness a crime, their main job is to call for help and wait for the local cops to arrive. Last month, for instance, Joint Task Force-DC proudly announced in an online release that two Guard members had “alerted local law enforcement to a potentially life-threatening situation involving a man brandishing a knife and threatening another man at the Waterfront Metro Station.” “We showed our presence and then made sure that citizens around that area were safe,” said US Army Capt. Giho Yang, with the District of Columbia Army National Guard. “To do that, we had to partner up and communicate with the law enforcement officers that were nearby, making sure that we had eyes and ears on the situation to keep everyone safe.” They didn’t mention whether any ordinary citizens also communicated with the nearby law enforcement officers or called 911, as they are wont to do when they see someone brandishing a knife in a subway station. It’s probably a good thing that the National Guard isn’t doing more to fight crime in DC. They’re not trained for domestic law enforcement. Besides, DC has seen plenty of enhanced federal policing since Trump declared his crime emergency. Most of the action is driven by the city’s multitude of federal law enforcement agencies, such as the US Park Police, plus the stepped-up presence of ICE and Border Patrol. They’re the ones kidnapping and beating up DoorDash drivers, chasing drivers with fake tags and causing car crashes, and arresting people for drinking in public. But using soldiers as props in Trump’s fake crime emergency seems insulting to people serving the country honorably. Indeed, deployed to a city whose crime rate was already plummeting, the National Guard has been filling the time by picking up trash and spreading mulch in federal parks. Social media wags have dubbed them “National Gardeners.” (“Fighting crime one weed at a time,” the local joke goes.) > National Guard doing landscaping right now in McPherson Square. > byu/sillychillly ineconomy As humiliating as this might be for the troops, they are providing DC with a useful service. Some 200 US Park Service employees once helped maintain the city’s parks and gardens. But soon after taking office this year, Trump got rid of all but 20 of them, leaving the city’s lovely green spaces seriously neglected. Of course, at the cost of $1 million a day, the military troops make very expensive landscapers. The pointlessness of sending the National Guard to pretend to fight crime in DC isn’t deterring Trump from planning to repeat the operation in other cities, even though a federal judge just ruled that it’s blatantly illegal. Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” US District Judge Charles Breyer warned in a September 2 decision, finding that Trump’s use of the military in LA earlier this summer violated the Posse Comitatus Act. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, Trump has had more leeway in deploying the National Guard here. Nonetheless, on Thursday, the city sued the administration, arguing that the National Guard deployment in DC is illegal and runs “roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement.” Trump has claimed that DC “is very safe right now” since he sent in the troops, and that crime has plummeted. Even if that’s true, and it’s not clear that it is, the ceasefire is likely to be short-lived. “You can have a massive police presence that you put in the communities,” Elliott Currie, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, told me recently. “They can really show some impressive optics when they do this… But history tells us you can never sustain this for very long.” The DC National Guard recently announced that its deployment to the city will be extended through December. But eventually, the local criminal class seems likely to realize that the soldiers are no more of a threat to their activity than CVS security guards. And when that happens, Trump’s vaunted crime reduction may prove as ephemeral as his plan to end the war in Ukraine.

President Trump is planning to ramp up his federal reach into local enforcement after first flooding the streets of DC with National Guard troops, and this week he promised to send troops to more cities—including Baltimore. Despite a federal judge ruling that Trump broke the law when deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer, Trump insisted during a press conference on Tuesday that his administration had “a right to do it because I have an obligation to do it to protect this country… and that includes Baltimore.” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been speaking out in defense of his city, including in a sit-down interview this week with me. Scott pushed back against Trump’s claims, saying that this year, his city has witnessed “the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s a 50-year low, and that’s still not good enough for me.” The Washington Post recently reported that homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted nearly 23 percent compared with the first half of 2024, while non-fatal shootings fell by nearly 20 percent. Scott also decried federal cuts to the very programs he says have been instrumental in reducing crime in Baltimore. “Community violence intervention, victim services, all of those kinds of services that have been cut,” he said. “What we want from the president is very simple — reinstating all the cuts that they’ve made to federal grants to programs that have been working to reduce violence.” Watch the full video here:

The Trump administration’s campaign of vengeance against perceived political enemies escalated Friday morning when the FBI raided the home and office of former national security adviser John Bolton, a vocal Trump critic. That search follows Attorney General Pam Bondi directing federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into whether former President Barack Obama and his aides concocted evidence about Russia’s efforts to help Trump in the 2016 election. Last month, the Justice Department said it was separately investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, without specifying the allegations. Meanwhile, loyal Trump underlings— including DOJ official Ed Martin and Bill Pulte, a real estate heir running the Federal Housing Finance Agency—are using government power, along with social media gimmickry, to allege wrongdoing by frequent Trump foils. The various investigations may differ in their legitimacy. But they are all the manifestation of Trump’s promises to use the White House to prosecute his enemies. The threat of an authoritarian president using his office and control of federal law enforcement to try to imprison critics is not hypothetical. It is happening, as Trump advisers race to please him by launching probes aimed at his foes. These efforts are predicated on concocted claims that it was the administration’s Democratic predecessors who misused federal agencies for politics. The Trump administration is politicizing intelligence, law enforcement, and other government functions while pretending to be punishing politicization, as with the ironically named “Weaponization Working Group” that Martin now leads. That can feel a bit confusing, but it is more easily understood as a string of efforts by individual Trump advisers to their please boss by helping him crack down on dissent and deliver retribution. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s report on “Russiagate” was widely derided, but it came following reports that suggested Trump was considering firing her after she contradicted his claims about the danger of Iran’s nuclear program. The former Democratic representative appears to have protected her job by handing Trump a report that helped him try to shift attention amid scrutiny of his relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bondi, too, has faced withering attacks from within MAGA over her botched handling the Epstein scandal. Her quickly launched investigation aimed at Obama may never meet the standards of federal judges, but it made her boss happy. The search of Bolton’s home required a judge to find probable cause to issue a warrant. The FBI is reportedly looking into accusations that Bolton, who was investigated during the first Trump administration for revealing sensitive information in a book, had leaked national security information more recently. Trump on Friday claimed he was not aware beforehand of the Bolton raid. But that claim, true or not, overlooks the reality that various Trump advisers appear to be using attacks on his enemies to win or keep the mercurial president’s favor. Vice President J.D. Vance even weighed in on Bolton Friday. “If we think Ambassador Bolton committed a crime, of course eventually prosecutions will come,” Vance told NBC’s Meet the Press. Vance added that “classified documents are certainly part of it, but I think that there’s a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton.” FBI director Kash Patel—who attacked Bolton in a 2024 book, complaining at length that Bolton had dragged his feet on hiring him during the first Trump administration—tweeted about the raid at the time it occurred, writing: “NO ONE is above the law…@FBI agents on mission.” Bondi then reposted Patel, adding, in part: “Justice will be pursued. Always.” Such public pronouncements were once unusual for DOJ officials. But they are increasingly standard under Trump. Martin, who got his current position after the Senate declined to confirm him as US attorney for DC, is seeking presidential favor through highly public, if legally dubious, campaigns. He said in a May press conference that he planned to use publicity to attack Trump foes. “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” he declared. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” Earlier this week, Martin appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letita James, where—clad in the trench coat he has attempted to make his signature—he posed for pictures taken by the New York Post, all part of an effort to call attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings. In a letter to James’ lawyer, Martin said he would consider it “an act of good faith” if James resigned. The New York Times recently noted that Martin’s actions violate a slew of DOJ rules and norms: “Prosecutors are barred from making investigative decisions based on politics; they are asked not to comment on specific cases; and they are supposed to avoid turning their investigations into public spectacles.” But Martin took a similar tack this week in a letter he reportedly sent Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell urging him to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board member, over allegations that Cook had improperly claimed a property she owns in Atlanta as her residence. “Do it today before it is too late!” Martin wrote. The allegations against Cook came from Pulte, the 37-year-old head of an agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has used his post to highlight unproven mortgage fraud accusations against James, Cook, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and has issued letters asking the DOJ to investigate. (All three have denied breaking the law.) Martin reportedly met with Pulte early this month. Pulte, who has 3 million followers on X, posted recently that he had “obtained” a document submitted to the government that he claims shows Cook committed fraud. Pulte’s accusation was quickly taken up by Trump, who is attempting to gain control of the Federal Reserve and oust Powell before his term ends, in effort to push for lower interest rates. Bloomberg reported Friday that Pulte, who has been “struggling” to maintain influence with the White House” amid irritation by some officials there over his bombastic online behavior—including his habit of announcing significant policy changes via tweet—had returned to favor with the president through his attacks on Cook. Trump’s efforts to target his critics also got help earlier this month from the Office of Special Counsel, or OSC, a small independent agency charged with enforcing federal rules. The office, which is not part of DOJ, announced that it was investigating whether Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who twice indicted Trump, had violated a law barring federal workers from using their government jobs to engage in political activity. Since the strongest sanction OSC can apply is to urge the firing of a federal employee, it cannot impose any real penalty on Smith, who resigned from his post in January. But the agency—whose previous head Trump fired earlier this year, and where Trump has tried to install a far-right loyalist—appears eager to ingratiate itself with the president. Such efforts show how a president can attack officials he wants to oust—and how the vast powers of a sprawling federal government can be wielded against his critics. These attacks certainly reflect Trump’s own pathology. But they would be impossible without the collaboration of influence-seeking enablers using public positions to enact Trump’s vengeance agenda.

Since March, the Trump administration has dismantled a leading office at the Department of Homeland Security whose mission was averting terrorism and targeted violence. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, has been stripped of funding, and most of its 40-plus personnel have been fired, reassigned, or otherwise pushed out. Amid this process, the White House temporarily put in charge a 22-year-old Trump superfan who arched an eyebrow for his agency portrait and has zero leadership experience in government, let alone in national security. The demise of CP3 comes as the White House has diverted major law enforcement and security resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants. It also comes as high-profile acts of political violence have surged in the United States. The list of recent devastation includes an ISIS-inspired truck massacre in New Orleans, the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, and a spate of antisemitic attacks—including the murder of a young couple working for Israel in Washington, DC; an arson attack against the governor of Pennsylvania; and a fiery assault on peaceful marchers in Boulder, Colorado. Last year, a healthcare CEO was gunned down point-blank in Manhattan, and President Trump barely avoided death from an assassin’s bullet on the campaign trail. Twelve days ago, a right-wing extremist in Minnesota targeted Democratic state lawmakers in a deadly gun rampage, killing former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and gravely wounding two others. The nation is now also on heightened alert after Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, a major state sponsor of terrorism. Though political extremism has been rising, it is almost never the only factor in targeted violence, including with most, if not all, of the above cases. Most perpetrators are also driven by a mix of rage and despair over acute personal problems, such as financial or health crises—and many are suicidal. This complexity was a focus of CP3’s $18 million in annual grants to state and local partners. Drawing on long-established public health research, the office worked with law enforcement, educators, faith leaders, and others to use “upstream” interventions with troubled individuals who may be planning and moving toward violence. The work gained traction over the past couple of years, according to William Braniff, a military veteran and national security expert who was director of CP3 until March. He said that many states were working with the office to build this kind of strategy and that CP3 was flooded with $99 million in eligible grant applications—exceeding its funds by more than fivefold. He resigned when eight of his colleagues were fired without cause. “I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance,” Braniff told me. “A lot of the headquarters-based offices within DHS are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted.” As the wave of recent attacks shows, a variety of extremism is fueling the danger. Researchers have tracked growing acceptance and endorsement of political violence in America in recent years, particularly among people who identify as MAGA Republicans, a finding reaffirmed in a new national study from the Centers for Violence Prevention at University of California, Davis. > “We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our > democracy.” In response to my email asking for an explanation of the shutdown, DHS assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said CP3 “plays an insignificant and ineffective role” in DHS counterterrorism efforts, and further claimed, without providing any evidence, that CP3 was “weaponized” under the Biden administration for partisan purposes. Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, explained in our recent interview (lightly edited below for clarity) how CP3 built out its national model for violence prevention. He also spoke about what citizens and communities can do to counter the danger of political violence—and the disturbing normalization of it. First, can you talk a little bit about the CP3 strategy and how the programs worked? From school shootings and grievance-based workplace violence, to hate-fueled violence, to terrorism, we needed an approach out of the federal government that would address all of those. And so we looked to the public health community, and specifically the decades of work on violence prevention from places like the Centers for Disease Control—evidence-based programs for prevention of suicide, intimate-partner violence, violence against children, and community-based violence. And we said, well, what if we could apply those tested approaches to some of these more “exotic” forms of violence? For too long, and especially after 9/11, we exoticized terrorism as this foreign kind of violence, when in reality, underneath the manifestation, you have these very human things happening: individuals who have unaddressed risk factors in their lives. That might be an adverse childhood experience, trauma, or financial hardship. That might be social isolation. And these risk factors, when left unaddressed, might spur the individual to go seeking answers down dark rabbit holes that preach hate, that preach violence for the sake of it. And regardless of the way that violence might manifest later, there are these upstream preventative programs that we can put in place. So CP3 was the primary entity in the US government for creating these upstream programs, informed by public health. Social isolation is a massive risk factor for all kinds of negative health outcomes, including self harm and perpetration of violence. And so you look at these underlying risk factors and you say, well, we can actually mitigate against them. Very rarely in the national security realm do we get to talk about building positive programs that make us all happier and healthier and less susceptible to violence as a solution. Sometimes people still might gravitate towards violence. And in those instances, we invested in secondary prevention. These are multidisciplinary interventions, so that if someone makes an offhand comment about starting a racial holy war, accelerating the downfall of the government, or being an infamous school shooter, these ideations of violence are not dismissed. We created these programs so that bystanders had a place to refer someone they cared about. And the purpose wasn’t criminal justice, it was to get them access to help. > “You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from > more mental health professionals and social workers. We were bringing these > folks together and blending their assets.” Out of the 1,172 interventions that we funded through our grant program, 93.5 percent of the individuals who were exhibiting threatening behavior got help. They got access to a clinician or a caring professional. In 6.5 percent of the incidents, the persons had already broken the law or were an imminent threat to public safety, and they were referred to law enforcement. And that wasn’t the point of the intervention, but there was that safety net there for when that person really was an imminent risk to their community. We could balance public health and public safety through these multidisciplinary, evidence-based programs. There’s a lot of research on their efficacy, including to make sure that persons of color are getting equitable treatment and programs are not succumbing to implicit bias in schools and workplaces. And so there’s all sorts of value to these programs socially as well as economically. They’re much cheaper than criminal justice or the cost of violence. Given that we’re in this heightened environment of political extremism and attacks, why shut down CP3? What is your view of that? I don’t think that CP3 was targeted by the Trump administration specifically. I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance. A lot of the headquarters-based offices within the Department of Homeland Security are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted. Ignorance is not an excuse for what’s happening. The primary mission of DHS, as enshrined in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, is to prevent terrorism. And CP3 was the latest manifestation of an office within DHS that was trying to find a way to get traction in this prevention space. And we got it in the last couple of years. Eight states worked with CP3 to publish a state strategy, and when I left in March, another eight states were drafting their strategy with CP3’s help. Twenty-seven states had agreed to work with CP3 and were in the queue. So we were normalizing this at the state and local level. Why? Because it’s pragmatic. It’s cost-effective. It works. You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from more mental health professionals and social workers, because law enforcement officers are not equipped to do this kind of upstream intervention. We had $99 million of eligible grant applications for our $18 million grant pool, which means we were wildly oversubscribed. We were bringing these folks together and blending their assets. A whole range of political ideology and extremism feeds into targeted violence, but we also know there’s been a steady rise in far-right domestic terrorism in recent years. I’m curious how you view the long-term impact of losing this type of work in the federal government, particularly as it relates to things like Trump’s clemency for January 6 insurrectionists, including a lot of violent offenders who attacked police. Some groups associated with that event are again instigating on social media for potentially violent behavior. What message is this all sending, and what does it do in terms of the political environment that we’re in? It’s such a good set of questions. We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy. And that is a potential death blow to a free and open society. It’s not to say that these things can’t gravitate back towards a norm of nonviolence. But right now we are creating permission structures for individuals to dehumanize the transgender community, to dehumanize Jews or equate their individual actions with that of the Israeli government, half a world away. We’re at risk of normalizing school shootings among youth who don’t imagine a healthy future for themselves and are succumbing to this kind of nihilistic manipulation that we’re seeing in [online extremist] movements like “764.” And when these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse. And so what we were doing at CP3 and what we’re doing now at my current organization at American University is trying to normalize prevention, the idea that we can and should build thriving communities where individuals don’t need to buy the violent empowerment that either a politician or an online groomer is selling that leads to violence. The things you’ve listed are incredibly concerning, and frankly, we all have to decide that we care about this issue. If we don’t, if we decide we’re going to be apathetic about it, the violence is going to win the day because it’s going to capture the news headlines, and the algorithms, and the path of least resistance is to surrender to violence as a norm in our current information environment. And so it’s going to take intentional decision making by all of us as individuals to decide that’s not the country or the community that we want to live in. So there are some real problems in our political system right now with a permission structure, as you describe it, for violence. Isn’t rejecting that part of not normalizing it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the techniques that we study and work with at PERIL is called video-based inoculation. It’s the idea that you can give individuals a microdose of some sort of manipulative tactic that they might come across on social media or cable news. And you give them this microdose of this manipulation so that they develop “antibodies” to it. They realize that they’re being manipulated. That is really important, for us to sort of throw sand in the gears of what otherwise spreads like wildfire when we’re passive consumers of information. And so with the last antisemitism video that we tested, individuals were 24 percent more likely to openly challenge manipulative material online if they saw the inoculating video first. So we think there’s a lot of promise there to engage all of us as stewards of our information environment. Is it your hope or expectation that this kind of prevention work will come back more strongly in the federal government in the future? Yes, it has to. The threat is growing and manifesting in more and different ways. There’s been nearly a 2,000-percent increase in mass casualty attacks in the United States since the early 1990s. There are approximately three violent attacks per day that either are plotted or carried out in the United States. School shootings are up linearly since the Columbine attack of 1999. Political assassinations are being normalized. We have to marshal resources to push back on this. I do believe it’ll come back—I think Americans will demand it, but only if they know that violence is preventable, which it is. If, instead, they’re told by their government or anyone else that this is just inevitable and we should be resigned to it, they may believe that. Instead of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of school shooters tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, and that nearly 50 percent of mass-casualty attackers tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, we’ll ignore that reality and just accept the violence. And so it’s really important that we continue to push on this now, but ultimately demand it of our federal government.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed shah of Iran met in the Paris suburbs of Neauphle-le-Château to plan for the final stages of the revolution, a revolution that after 46 momentous and often brutal years may now be close to expiring. The two men had little in common but their nationality, age, and determination to remove the shah from power. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated professor of law. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leading Shia opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were in their 70s at the time. Sanjabi had arrived in Paris with the draft declaration of goals of the coming revolution the two men were to lead. The document stated that the revolution would be grounded on two principles: that it be democratic and Islamic. Yet Sanjabi later recalled to historians that at the Paris meeting Khomeini in his own handwriting added a third principle to the declaration—independence. > Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense > that it was the wronged partner. That third principle, the primacy of independence, born of Iran’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, helps to explain what may seem otherwise mysterious in the current dispute between Iran and the US: Iran’s dogmatic insistence that it must have the right to enrich uranium. It has been the issue that dogged the talks between Iran and the west over Tehran’s nuclear program since the turn of the century and was the sticking point in the two years of discussions that were eventually settled in Iran’s favor when the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) was agreed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is the reason why Iran is being bombed now by Israel and, over the weekend, by the US. Yet to many American eyes, this obsession with enrichment inside Iran, instead of importing, for instance, from Russia, is only explicable if it is accepted that Iran covertly wants to build a nuclear bomb. The fatwa against “un-Islamic” nuclear weapons twice issued by the supreme leader has to be a smokescreen, this US perspective goes. On social media last week, Vice-President JD Vance largely took that view. He wrote: “It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It’s another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it’s still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium. “I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I’ve yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its nonproliferation obligations.” The process for enriching uranium to make civil nuclear energy and a nuclear bomb is broadly the same. It is generally accepted that uranium enriched to 3.67 percent is sufficient for civil nuclear energy, while purity levels of 90 percent are required for a nuclear weapon. Once purity levels reach 60 percent, as in the case of Iran, it is not a lengthy process to proceed to 90 percent. Iran, of course, argues there is no mystery why it has enriched to these high levels of purity. It was part of a clearly signalled staged escalatory response to Donald Trump unilaterally pulling the US out of the JCPOA in 2018—an act that that had deprived Iran of the sanctions relief it had negotiated. Moreover, Trump, by imposing secondary sanctions, made it impossible for Europe to trade with Iran, the second planned benefit of the JCPOA. Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner, and the US confirmed as inherently untrustworthy. Centrist figures such as the former president Hassan Rouhani and the foreign minister Javad Zarif expended huge internal political capital to sign a deal with the west, and the west promptly reneged on it. Meanwhile, Israel, a country that is not a member of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty—unlike Iran—and which has a totally unmonitored and undeclared nuclear weapon, receives largesse and support from the west. Nevertheless, Vance may have a point. As a casus belli, the right to enrich uranium to purity levels of 3.67 percent, the level permitted under the JCPOA, seems on the surface an implausible issue for the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to risk martyrdom. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pointing) during a visit to the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2008. Associated Press Why did a country with large oil reserves feel such a need to have homegrown civil nuclear energy? A persuasive new account by Vali Nasr, entitled Iran’s Grand Strategy, helps unlock the key to that question by placing the answer in Iran’s colonial exploitation and its search for independence. He wrote: “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or US sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or efforts to export the revolution, as well as the sordid legacy of Iran’s confrontations with the west, the future supreme religious guide and leader of Iran valued independence from foreign influence as equal to the enshrining principles of Islam in the state.” Khamenei was indeed asked once what was the benefit of the revolution, and he replied “now all decisions are made in Tehran.” > It was the British and the Americans who introduced nuclear power to Iran. Nasr argues that as many of the lofty ideals of the revolution such as democracy and Islam have been eroded or distorted, the principle of Iranian independence has endured. The quest for sovereignty, he argues, arose from Iran’s benighted history. In the 19th century, Iran was squeezed between the British and Russian imperial powers. In the 20th century its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice its leaders—in 1941 and 1953—were removed from office by the British and Americans. The popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 due to his demand to control Iran’s oil resources. No event in contemporary Iranian history is more scarring than Mosaddegh’s toppling. For Khomeini it confirmed Iran still did not control its destiny, or its energy resources. Although civil nuclear power and the right to enrich became a symbol of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out it was the British and the Americans that introduced nuclear power to Iran in what was named an “atoms for peace” program. The shah of Iran, with US approval, embarked on a plan to build 23 civil nuclear power stations, making it possible for Iran to export electricity to neighboring countries and achieve the status of a modern state. Michael Axworthy, the pre-eminent British historian of contemporary Iran, said: “Using oil profits in this way seemed a then sensible way of investing a finite resource in order to create an infinite one.” In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US secretary of state he raised no objections to the plants being built. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he said. Work started on two nuclear reactors including one at the port city of Bushehr with the help of the German firm Kraftwerk Union a subdivision of Siemens and AEG. The shah recognized the dual use for nuclear power, and in June 1974 even told an American journalist that “Iran would have nuclear weapons without a doubt sooner than you think,” a remark he rapidly denied. Gradually the US became more nervous that the shah’s obsession with weaponry might mean Iran’s civil program turning nuclear. > “In my view, Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be > recognized as a regional power.” After the Iranian revolution in 1979, progress on the near-complete two stations ground to a halt. Khomeini regarded nuclear power as a symbol of western decadence arguing bloated infrastructure projects would make Iran more dependent on western imperialist technology. He said he wanted no “westoxificiation,” or gharbzadegi in Farsi. The program was largely ended, to the disappointment of some nuclear scientists. But within a year or two electricity shortages and the population boom put pressure on Tehran’s policy elite to start a discreet reversal of the shutdown. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran’s sense of diplomatic isolation in seeking international condemnation of Iraq’s repeated attacks on the incomplete Bushehr nuclear station, and finally multibillion-dollar legal wrangles with European firms over the incomplete nuclear program of the shah, together spawned a nuclear nationalism. By 1990, Iran’s Atomic Energy Authority declared that by 2005, 20 percent of the country’s energy could be produced by nuclear electric power and 10 power vaults would be built over the next decade. Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s speaker of the parliament during the 1980-88 war and then president from 1989 to 1997, made numerous appeals to Iran’s nuclear scientists to return home and build the program. In 1988 he said: “If you do not serve Iran, whom will you serve?” Suddenly Iran’s nuclear program had shifted from a symbol of western modernism to a source of patriotic pride. By the turn of the century, the Iranian nuclear program was erroneously thought to consist primarily of several small research reactors and the nuclear light water reactor being constructed by Iran and now Russia at Bushehr. Rafsanjani later admitted Iran first considered a deterrent capability during the Iran-Iraq war, when the nuclear program first resumed. He said: “When we first began, we were at war and we sought to have that possibility for the day that the enemy might use a nuclear weapon. That was the thinking. But it never became real.” Rafsanjani travelled to Pakistan to try to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program who later helped North Korea to develop an atomic bomb. In mid 2002, a leak from a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear installations designed for enriching uranium at Natanz near Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. Iran said it was under no obligation to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency UN nuclear inspectorate of the existence of the plants because they were not operational. Iran added the nonproliferation treaty declared it was the “inalienable right” of all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards. In itself, uranium enrichment is not a sign of seeking to make a nuclear weapon, but critics said it was hard to explain why Iran needed to make nuclear fuel at a stage in which it had no functioning nuclear reactor. From then on, the diplomatic dance started and has continued at various levels of intensity ever since. In October 2003 via the Tehran declaration, Iran under huge international pressure due to the leak, agreed to sign the additional protocol, which authorized the the IAEA to make short-notice inspections. In November 2004, under the Paris agreement, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment temporarily pending proposals from the E3 (France, Germany and the UK) on how to handle the issue on a more long-term basis. But in deference to Iran’s sovereignty, the E3 recognized that this suspension was a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s populist president elected in June 2005, became more assertive, insisting Iran’s technology was the peaceful outcome of the scientific achievements of the country’s youth. “We need the peaceful nuclear technology for energy, medical and agricultural purposes, and our scientific progress,” he said. Gradually the case for negotiation increased. With the US demanding an end to enrichment and Iran insisting on its legal right to enrich, the E3 were caught in the middle. All kinds of compromises were floated, including by Brazil and India. But western opinion was shaped by the then head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said: “In my view Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power, they believe that the nuclear knowhow brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the US engaging them.” Rouhani made a similar point in an article in the Washington Post. He said: “To us, mastering the atomic fuel cycle and generating nuclear power is as much about diversifying our energy resources as it is about who Iranians are as a nation, our demand for dignity and respect and our consequent place in the world. Without comprehending the role of identity, many issues we all face will remain unresolved.” Nevertheless, if Iran’s goal with its nuclear program was security and independence, and not something more sinister, the leadership has paid a huge and probably self-defeating price.

President Donald Trump insists that accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s ruling family would not amount to huge bribe. That’s because this opulent new Air Force One would go to his “library”—not to him personally—when he leaves office. That, at least, is what the president claimed amid concern that he might make personal use of a library-owned aircraft. Disputing that, he has suggested the plane would instead serve as a museum piece, like the decommissioned former Air Force One displayed at President Ronald Reagan’s library facility. It’s not yet clear whether this curious claim—that a so-called “flying palace” that US taxpayers may pay more than $1 billion to upgrade will be parked at a to-be-determined site in Florida after just a few years of use—will really come to pass. Facing rare bipartisan criticism over his plan to accept what experts call an unconstitutional emolument, Trump left Qatar Thursday without a public announcement finalizing a deal for the plane. But Trump’s explanation is part of a trend. The president, or unnamed aides, are regularly attempting to wave off ethical concerns by saying that various huge donations will eventually go to the “library.” Trump’s inaugural committee hasn’t said how much remains from the record-shattering $250 million raised via fealty displays from corporate chieftains. But the balance will go to the library, a “person close the inauguration” told the Wall Street Journal. Proceeds from the million-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million-one-on-one meetings with the president—organized by the pro-Trump MAGA Inc PAC—are “all going to the library,” a “person familiar with the dinners” told Wired. Then there are Meta (owner of Facebook) and Disney (owner of ABC News), which settled dubious lawsuits Trump had filed against them by pledging $15 million and $22 million, respectively, to Trump’s presidential library foundation.   There is ample reason to be wary about how the money could ultimately be used. For one, these are pledges to give money to a organization that is only partly established. Disney, in its a settlement actually said it would transfer settlement funds “to a presidential foundation and museum” before one existed. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library was incorporated in Florida a few weeks later, apparently as a way to accept the settlement. (Meta’s January settlement, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “looks like a bribe,” is also reportedly bound for that foundation.) Modern presidential libraries are run by nonprofit foundations. They often take the form of hagiographic museums, which include a repository of presidential papers administered by the National Archives. Trump’s library foundation has not indicated if it has yet sought IRS recognition as a nonprofit, and it hasn’t publicly announced a board of directors. Trump’s record with non-profit organizations leads to additional reasons for concern. In 2019, a New York judge ordered his nonprofit Trump Foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then to dissolve entirely—after finding Trump misused the foundation to further his political and business interests. In 2022, the Trump Organization and Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a suit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused nonprofit funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” Trump-owned companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.” Trump, of course, was indicted in 2023 for hiding highly classified government documents he had removed from the White House. Trump reportedly insisted the federal records, which belonged to the National Archives, were “mine.” Whether the 747 and the millions in donations and settlement money truly end up benefiting the future library—which would be run in part by the very same National Archives—remains to seen. “If past is precedent, I don’t know that we should take them at the word until we see how the money is spent,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Mother Jones. Regardless, the library itself is hardly an ethical panacea. Gifts to presidential libraries “fall between the cracks of campaign finance regulations and rules governing ethics in office,” Jacob Levy, a political theory professor at McGill University, wrote in a recent op-ed arguing that presidential fundraising for libraries while in office creates a “loophole you could fly a plane through.” Levy noted that the foundations are bound only by loose rules applied to US nonprofits. Critics have labeled presidential libraries, generally, “a scam.” “The fact that, according to President Trump, the plane would not remain in service to the United States but would rather be donated to his presidential library after his term concludes further raises the possibility that this ‘nice gesture’ is intended as a bribe to Donald Trump,” Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee charged in a letter to Trump’s attorney general and White House counsel. The plan, they argued, was “corrupt.” Though legally Trump cannot simply pocket funds and assets intended for the library, he faces few other limits. He could choose to “take a salary,” Levy told Mother Jones. “He can fly around on the plane.” Trump’s ability to raise donations that he could later personally benefit from creates a major ethical issue, Levy argued. “The fact that he can solicit those contributions” from people currying his favor during his presidency, Levy said, “makes them corruption.”