It began with an unprecedented video in November 2025 featuring six Democratic lawmakers alerting military and intelligence community members that they had the duty to disobey illegal orders. That enraged Trump, who in an unprecedented move said the lawmakers were guilty of sedition, which is punishable by death. The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, made the unprecedented attempt to indict the lawmakers. The final element in this drama – the federal grand jury’s rejection of Pirro’s request – wasn’t itself unprecedented. That’s because it’s only the latest in an unprecedented string of losses for the Trump administration before grand juries.

Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge, spoke with The Conversation politics editor Naomi Schalit about the role of grand juries, why a grand jury would not indict someone – and how all of this is a reflection of the administration’s remarkable loss of credibility with judges and the citizens who make up grand juries.

How does the grand jury process work?

The grand jury really dates back to before the Bill of Rights, but for our purposes it’s memorialized in the Fifth Amendment within the Bill of Rights. It is meant to be a mechanism that screens cases brought by prosecutors.

Ordinary citizens, not fewer than 16 or more than 23, have the facts presented to them by a United States attorney or assistant United States attorney. They must make a determination as to whether or not there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. It is not the purview of grand jurors to determine guilt or innocence, but merely to determine whether there is probable cause sufficient to indict.

So that means that a prosecutor will come to a grand jury and present them with the facts that they have chosen to present them with. There’s no defense at that point, and the grand jury then, relatively routinely, says OK, “Indict that person,” or “Indict those people”?

That’s correct. It’s a very one-sided process. There are no defense attorneys present. There’s a court reporter, the grand jury, the United States attorney, and such witnesses as the United States attorney decides to call. While the target of a grand jury can endeavor to present witnesses, including themselves, that generally never happens because of the danger of self-incrimination. The grand jurors can ask questions of the witnesses, but the United States attorney can choose the evidence that it wants to present to the grand jury, and typically they present only such evidence as is necessary in order to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed.

Does the public know what is presented in a grand jury room by the prosecutor?

The grand jury proceedings are absolutely secret and they remain that way, unless a federal judge authorizes that they be unsealed. So in the case involving the six lawmakers, we don’t know what the prosecutor presented to the grand jury. We just know that the grand jury refused to return an indictment. As far as I know, we don’t even know what crimes were put before the grand jury, let alone what testimony was presented. What we do know is that in all six cases, the grand jury refused to vote in favor of the indictment that was requested by the United States attorney.

Why would a grand jury refuse to give the prosecutor what they want?

It’s unprecedented, although we now see a wave of grand juries pushing back against the government. I don’t recall a single instance, during the almost 20 years I served as a U.S. District judge, when a grand jury refused to return a true bill, an indictment. It just is completely aberrational. The grand jury would have to totally reject the whole premise of the case that’s being presented to them by the United States attorney because, remember, there are typically no witnesses appearing before the grand jury to dispute the facts. The grand jury is clearly saying, “Even accepting the facts you’re putting before us as true, we don’t think under these circumstances this case is worthy of a federal indictment.”

Can a prosecutor just try again?

They can return to the well, so to speak, and they did that in Virginia in the case of Letitia James. But it’s pretty perilous because, bluntly, it’s a way that a prosecutor can get their head handed to them twice.

Originally, as set out in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the grand jury was supposed to be a vigorous and robust check against prosecutors simply charging people with crimes. But over time, it’s become far less than that. And there is the famous quote by Judge Sol Wachtler in New York that a grand jury can be made to “indict a ham sandwich.”

So to see a grand jury fail to return true bills multiple times over the past couple of months is remarkable and unprecedented. It occurs to me that what is happening here is kind of parallel to what’s taking place with the administration and federal judges. I think we now have entered a world where the Department of Justice has lost its credibility with the judiciary.

We’re seeing that time and again in appearances in court where judges simply don’t believe what U.S. attorneys are telling them, based on past demonstrable falsehoods that have been stated in open court. And now we see grand juries that are also doubting the credibility of federal prosecutors. And these grand jurors are not blind to what is taking place in the world around them.

I think that this is further polluted by the fact that the president of the United States, for example, in the case of the six defendants from Congress and the Senate, said that they had committed seditious acts – which is punishable by death.

Obviously, this tilts the scales and is fundamentally unfair because it is destroying the concept of due process of law. People notice what the president says, and I am happy to see that the average citizen serving on a grand jury has retained what I think is a fundamental sense of fairness, even in the face of a pretty stacked deck.

What does it mean if you have a court system, judges and the grand juries who do not have faith in the administration and its legal claims?

It’s a complete drag on our system of justice. For all of the time that I sat on the federal bench, I had great respect for the Department of Justice, and the department had tremendous credibility. They were straight shooters. The prosecutors who appeared in front of me were professionals. I didn’t always agree with their arguments, of course, nor did I agree with a few of their charging decisions, but I can tell you that not once did I see a federal prosecution in front of me that I felt strongly should never have been brought at its inception.

But we now have a system where, because of the whims of the president, the Department of Justice has become utterly weaponized against his perceived enemies, and that’s a gross misuse of our prosecutorial power at the federal level.

Also, if, for example, these members of Congress had been indicted, they’d have to lawyer up, they’d have to fight their way out. That would take a lot of resources.

So, yes, the judiciary can be a bulwark against improvident prosecutions. But that comes at a cost to the defendant, and it’s been said that the process itself is the punishment. I suspect that’s what the president wants; it’s the trauma that you put somebody through that can be almost as bad as being convicted. And, of course, there’s the reputational harm as well.

John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Epstein papers have thrown up speculation about whether the late financier and sex offender might have performed services for one or another of the big intelligence agencies. And in the wake of that speculation, it has been noted that the father of Epstein’s one-time girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was the late Robert Maxwell, well-known as a larger than life publisher and newspaper proprietor in the UK from the 1950s to the early 90s. He, too, was the subject of much speculation that he might have been involved in intelligence work.

Epstein is now better known for his sex trafficking network and Maxwell for stealing from his employees’ pension funds. But their examples point to how intelligence, high finance and influence work.

Generally speaking there are three main classes of people involved in state intelligence gathering. “Officers” are full-time employees of state intelligence agencies such as MI6. They run their groups of “agents”, who are not formally employed by the state but who deliberately and knowingly gather intelligence and perform tasks for intelligence officers. And there are what is known as “intelligencers” (or sometimes assets) who may not even know they are providing information to a spy agency.

The currency of human intelligence is access, knowledge and often the ability to compromise officials and influential people.

We often think that intelligence agencies and their agent runners seek to directly recruit people with the access and motivation to pass on state secrets. While this is undeniably the case – and the examples of the American Aldrich Ames and the Briton Melita Norwood provide good evidence of this – intelligence agencies are equally interested in recruiting what’s known as “access agents”.

Access agents

The value of an access agent is not the secrets they have access to, but the social and professional access they provide to people who do. People in high-end society, scientific research, banking, politics and culture make excellent targets for access agents. And from an agency’s point of view, the best thing is that these agents are deniable and under the radar.

Intelligence officers and their operatives require funding, mobility and a credible back story (known as a legend). Businessmen like Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein had plenty of all three, making them excellent candidates to theoretically serve the needs of intelligence agencies.

But rather than indulging in speculation about Epstein and Maxwell, which is unlikely ever to be conclusively confirmed or denied, it’s more instructive to look at what we know about access agents. They are often business people, sometimes academics or journalists with a reason to travel and the opportunity to meet people in influential circles in the course of their legitimate business.

It’s worth remembering that Kim Philby, the most notorious of the Cambridge spy ring, cut his teeth as a reporter in Spain during the civil war, before embarking on a career as an MI6 officer (and Soviet double agent). Australian journalist, Richard Hughes – who appeared lightly disguised in novels by Ian Fleming and John le Carre – was believed by many to be an agent for British intelligence, working in southeast Asia during the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps the most famous businessman-agent was Cyril Bertram Mills who combined being the director of the Bertram Mills Circus with a four-decade career spanning the years before and after the second world war with British intelligence. Travelling widely in Europe, ostensibly to seek out circus acts, he provided his spymasters with evidence of German rearmament in the 1930s. He also recruited Garbo, one of the most successful double agents, who was instrumental in convincing Germany that the D-Day landings would be in Calais, not Normandy.

An access agent is trained “to be the friend the informant doesn’t have”. They can provide what their contact needs and cannot get hold of: whether that’s useful inside information of some kind, an introduction to someone important, a sexual partner or finance for one of their ventures.

MI5 is quite open about this on its website: “Agents operate by exploiting trusted relationships and positions to obtain sensitive information. They may also look for vulnerabilities among those handling secrets.

Secrets and lies

Determining truth in intelligence is complicated. Very rarely do we see a single piece of incontrovertible evidence that proves someone’s intelligence status or the ethics or efficacy of their actions. But then as we know, all of this is shrouded in secrecy and supposition.

In Maxwell’s case, historical scholarship and TV documentaries have provided unverified hints. In Epstein’s we have indicators such as the claim by former US attorney, Alexander Acosta that he was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence”, when he negotiated his plea deal. But it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the truth about either.

Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security & Dean of Faculty, University of Hull

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nearly half of U.S. households have one, and practically all owners see pets as part of the family – 51% say pets belong “as much as a human member.” The pet industry keeps generating more and more jobs, from vets to trainers, to influencers. Schools cannot keep up with the demand for veterinarians.

It all seems part of what Mark Cushing, a lawyer and lobbyist for veterinary issues, calls “the pet revolution”: the more and more privileged place that pets occupy in American society. In his 2020 book “Pet Nation,” he argues that the internet has caused people to become more lonely, and this has made them focus more intensely on their pets – filling in for human relationships.

I would argue that something different is happening, however, particularly since the COVID-19 lockdown: Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people.

In my own book, “Rescue Me,” I explore how today’s dog culture is more a symptom of our suffering as a society than a cure for it. Dogs aren’t just being used as a substitute for people. As a philosopher who studies the relationships between animals, humans and the environment, I believe Americans are turning to dogs to alleviate the erosion of social life itself. For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do.

And I am no different. I live with three dogs, and my love for them has driven me to research the culture of dog ownership in an effort to understand myself and other humans better. By nature, dogs are masters of social life who can communicate beyond the boundaries of their species. But I believe many Americans are expecting their pets to address problems that they cannot fix.

Dogs over people

During the pandemic, people often struggled with the monotony of spending too much time cooped up with other humans – children, romantic partners, roommates. Meanwhile, relationships with their dogs seemed to flourish.

Rescuing shelter animals grew in popularity, and on social media people celebrated being at home with their pets. Dog content on Instagram and Pinterest now commonly includes hashtags like #DogsAreBetterThanPeople and #IPreferDogsToPeople.

“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog” appears on merchandise all over e-commerce sites such as Etsy, Amazon and Redbubble.

One 2025 study found that dog owners tend to rate their pets more highly than their human loved ones in several areas, such as companionship and support. They also experienced fewer negative interactions with their dogs than with the closest people in their lives, including children, romantic partners and relatives.

The late primatologist Jane Goodall celebrated her 90th birthday with 90 dogs. She stated in an interview with Stephen Colbert that she preferred dogs to chimps, because chimps were too much like people.

Fraying fabric

This passion for dogs seems to be growing as America’s social fabric unravels – which began long before the pandemic.

In 1972, 46% of Americans said “most people can be trusted.” By 2018, that percentage dropped to 34%. Americans report seeing their friends less than they used to, a phenomenon called the “friendship recession,” and avoid having conversations with strangers because they expect the conversation to go badly. People are spending more time at home.

Today, millennials make up the largest percentage of pet owners. Some cultural commentators argue dogs are especially important for this generation because other traditional markers of stability and adulthood – a mortgage, a child – feel out of reach or simply undesirable. According to the Harris Poll, a marketing research firm, 43% of Americans would prefer a pet to a child.

Amid those pressures, many people turn to the comfort of a pet – but the expectations for what dogs can bring to our lives are becoming increasingly unreasonable.

For some people, dogs are a way to feel loved, to relieve pressures to have kids, to fight the drudgery of their job, to reduce the stress of the rat race and to connect with the outdoors. Some expect pet ownership to improve their physical and mental health.

And it works, to a degree. Studies have found dog people to be “warmer” and happier than cat people. Interacting with pets can improve your health and may even offer some protection against cognitive decline. Dog-training programs in prisons appear to reduce recidivism rates.

Unreasonable expectations

But expecting that dogs will fill the social and emotional gaps in our lives is actually an obstacle to dogs’ flourishing, and human flourishing as well.

In philosophical terms, we could call this an extractive relationship: Humans are using dogs for their emotional labor, extracting things from them that they cannot get elsewhere or simply no longer wish to. Just like natural resource extraction, extractive relationships eventually become unsustainable.

The late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant argued that the present stage of capitalism creates a dynamic called “slow death,” a cycle in which “life building and the attrition of life are indistinguishable.” Keeping up is so exhausting that, in order to maintain that life, we need to do things that result in our slow degradation: Work becomes drudgery under unsustainable workloads, and the experience of dating suffers under the unhealthy pressure to have a partner.

Similarly, today’s dog culture is leading to unhealthy and unsustainable dynamics. Veterinarians are concerned that the rise of the “fur baby” lifestyle, in which people treat pets like human children, can harm animals, as owners seek unnecessary veterinary care, tests and medications. Pets staying at home alone while owners work suffer from boredom, which can cause chronic psychological distress and health problems. And as the number of pets goes up, many people wind up giving up their animal, overcrowding shelters.

So what should be done? Some philosophers and activists advocate for pet abolition, arguing that treating any animals as property is ethically indefensible.

This is a hard case to make – especially with dog lovers. Dogs were the first animal that humans domesticated. They have evolved beside us for as long as 40,000 years, and are a central piece of the human story. Some scientists argue that dogs made us human, not the other way around.

Perhaps we can reconfigure aspects of home, family and society to be better for dogs and humans alike – more accessible health care and higher-quality food, for example. A world more focused on human thriving would be more focused on pets’ thriving, too. But that would make for a very different America than this one.

Margret Grebowicz, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Missouri University of Science and Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And yet, the U.S. tourism industry is worried. While the rest of the world saw a travel bump in 2025, with global international arrivals up 4%, the U.S. saw a downturn. The number of foreign tourists who came to the United States fell by 5.4% during the year – a sharper decline than the one experienced in 2017-18, the last time, outside the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that the industry was gripped by fears of a travel slump.

Policy stances from the Trump administration on everything from immigration to tariffs, along with currency swings and stricter border controls, have seemingly proved a turnoff to travelers from other countries, especially Canadians – the single largest source of foreign tourists for the United States. Canadian travel to the U.S. fell by close to 30% in 2025. But it is not just visitors from Canada who are choosing to avoid the United States. Travel from Australia, India and Western Europe, among others, has also shrunk.

We are experts in tourism. And while we don’t possess a crystal ball, we believe that the tourism decline of 2025 could well continue through 2026. The evidence appears clear: Washington’s ongoing policies are putting off would-be travelers. In other words, the tourism industry is in the midst of a “Trump slump.”

Fewer Canadians heading south

The impact of Donald Trump’s policies are perhaps most pronounced when looking north of the U.S. border. According to the U.S. Travel Association, Canadian visitors generated approximately 20.4 million visits and roughly US$20.5 billion in visitor spending in 2024, supporting about 140,000 American jobs.

The economic impact of fewer Canadian visitors in 2025 affects mostly border states that depend heavily on people driving across the border for retail, restaurants, casinos and short-stay hotels.

The sharp drop in return trips by car to Canada is a direct indication that border economies might be facing stress. This has led elected officials and tourism professionals to woo Canadians in recent months, sometimes with “Canadian-only deals.”

And it isn’t just border states. In Las Vegas, some hotels are now offering currency rate parity between Canadian and U.S. dollars for rooms and gambling vouchers in a bid to attract customers.

Winter-sun states, such as Florida, Arizona and California, are facing both fewer short-stay arrivals and an emerging drop-off in Canadian “snowbirds.” Reports indicate a noticeable increase in Canadians listing U.S. properties in Florida and Arizona for sale and canceling seasonal plans, threatening lodging, health care spending and property tax revenue.

Economic and safety concerns

Economic policies pursued by the Trump administration appear to be among the main reasons visitors are staying away from the U.S. Multiple tariff announcements – pushing tariffs to the highest levels since 1935 – along with tougher border-related rhetoric and an aggressive foreign policy have contributed to a negative perception of the U.S. among would-be tourists.

Many foreigners report feeling unwelcome or uncertain about travel to the U.S., and some public leaders from Canada and Europe have urged citizens to spend domestically, instead. This significantly reduced intent to travel to the U.S. in 2025.

Meanwhile, exchange rates and inflation have further affected some aspiring travelers, especially Canadians. The Canadian dollar was weakened in 2025, making U.S. trips more expensive. This disproportionately affected day-trip and shopping-driven border crossings.

Travelers are also staying away from the U.S. because of safety concerns. Several countries have posted travel advisories about the risks of traveling to the U.S., with Germany being the latest. Although most worries are related to increased border controls, recent aggressive tactics by immigration agents have added to potential visitors’ decisions to avoid the U.S.

A wake-up call for the US

The current tourism outlook is reason for concern. Julia Simpson, president and CEO of the industry association World Travel and Tourism Council, has described the situation as a “wake-up call” for the U.S. government.

“The world’s biggest travel and tourism economy is heading in the wrong direction,” she said in May 2025. “While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the ‘closed’ sign.”

According to estimates, the U.S. stood to lose about $30 billion in international tourism in 2025 as travelers chose to travel elsewhere.

The disappointing figures for U.S. tourism follow a longer trend. The share of global international travel heading to the U.S. fell from 8.4% in 1996 to 4.9% in 2024 and was expected to drop to 4.8% in 2025. Meanwhile, arrivals to other top tourism destinations, including France, Greece, Mexico and Italy, are set to increase.

The decline is also being felt by the business tourism sector, with every major global region sending fewer people to the U.S. for work.

A World Cup bump?

So what does that mean for the upcoming FIFA World Cup, with 75% of the soccer matches being hosted across the United States? Traditionally, host nations benefit from sports events, although impacts are often overestimated. After a disappointing year, the U.S. tourism sector expects the World Cup to boost visits and revenue.

But Trump’s foreign policy may undermine those expectations.

A new visa integrity fee of $250 and plans for social media screening of some visitors make travel to the U.S. less attractive. And there are growing calls for a boycott of the U.S. following some of Trump’s policies, including his aggressive stance about Greenland.

Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter has suggested that fans avoid going to the U.S. for the World Cup.

It remains to be seen whether fans will follow his call. Bookings for flights and hotels were up after the dates and venues of games were announced in December.

But current political rhetoric is affecting travel decisions, especially given that fans from some specific countries may not be able to get visas. The U.S. government has imposed travel bans on Senegal, Ivory Coast, Iran and Haiti, all of which have qualified for the World Cup.

European soccer leaders have even discussed the possibility of a boycott, although such an action is unlikely to happen, given the revenue at stake for national teams and football associations.

Will the ‘Trump slump’ continue?

White House policies look unlikely to drastically change in the next few months. And this causes concern for tourism professionals, although most have remained silent about the recent immigration crackdown.

To make matters worse, federal funding for Brand USA, the national destination marketing organization, was cut deeply in mid-2025, leading to staff shortages that have reduced the country’s capacity to counter negative sentiment through positive promotion.

Soccer fans tend to be passionate about following their national side. And this could offset some of the impact of the Trump travel slump.

Yet, with sky-high match ticket prices and the international reputation of the U.S. as a tourism destination damaged, we believe it is unlikely that the tourism industry will recover in 2026. It will take a long time and good strategies to repair the serious damage done to the nation’s image among travelers in the rest of the world.

Frédéric Dimanche, Professor and former Director (2015-2025), Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Toronto Metropolitan University and Kelley A. McClinchey, Teaching Faculty, Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

That reaction is not just political. It is what unpredictability does to any system that requires stability. To act at all, you need some working sense of what is happening and what is likely to happen next.

One influential framework in brain science called predictive processing suggests the mind does not wait passively for events. It constantly guesses what will happen, checks those guesses against reality, and adjusts.

A brain that predicts can prepare, even when what it prepares for is uncertainty.The gap between what you expect and what actually happens is known as a prediction error. These gaps are not mistakes but the basis of learning. When they resolve, the brain updates its picture of the world and moves on.

This is not about what anyone intends, but about what unpredictability does to systems that need some stability to work. Trouble starts when mismatches do not resolve because the source keeps changing. People are told one thing, then the opposite, then told the evidence was never real.

The brain may struggle to settle on what to trust, so uncertainty stays high. In this view, attention is how the brain weighs up what counts as best evidence, and turns the volume up on some signals and down on others.

Uncertainty can be worse than bad news

When this keeps happening, it’s hard to get closure. Effort is spent checking and second guessing. That is one reason why uncertainty can feel worse than bad news. Bad news closes the question, uncertainty keeps it open. When expectations will not stabilise, the body stays on standby, prepared for many possible futures at once.

One idea from this theory is that there are two broad ways to deal with persistent mismatch. One is to change your expectations by getting better information and revising your view. The other is to change the situation so that outcomes become more predictable. You either update the model, or you act to make the world easier to deal with.

On the world stage, flattery can be a crude version of the second route, an attempt to make a volatile person briefly easier to predict. Everyday life shows the same pattern, such as unpredictable workplaces. When priorities change without warning, people cannot anticipate what is required. Extra effort may go into reducing uncertainty rather than doing the job.

Research links this kind of unpredictability to higher daily stress and poorer wellbeing.

The same pattern shows up in close relationships. When someone is unpredictable, people scan tone and try to guess whether today brings warmth or conflict. It can look obsessive, but it is often an attempt to avoid the wrong move.

Studies link unpredictable early environments to poorer emotional control and more strained relationships later in life.

The strain does not stay in thought alone. The brain does a lot more than thinking. A big part of its work is regulating the body, such as the heart rate, energy use and the meaning of bodily sensations.

It does this by anticipating what the body will need next. When those anticipations cannot settle, regulation becomes costly.

Words matter here in a literal sense. Language does not just convey information. It shapes expectations, which changes how the body feels.

Trump can do this at a distance. A few words about a situation can raise or lower the stakes for people, whether in Minneapolis or Iran. The point is that signals from powerful, volatile sources force others to revise their models and prepare their bodies for what might come next.

Communication is a form of regulation. Clarity and consistency help other people settle. Volatility and contradiction keep them on edge.

When a single voice can repeatedly unsettle expectations across millions of people, unpredictability stops being a personal stress and becomes a collective regulatory problem.

How to deal with unpredictability

So what helps when unpredictability keeps pulling your attention? Try checking for new information if it changes your next step or plan, otherwise it just keeps the uncertainty alive.

When a source keeps changing, reduce the effort spent trying to decode it. Switch to action. Set a rule that makes the next step predictable. For example, read the news at 8am, then stop and get on with your day.

Learn where not to look. When messages keep reversing, the problem is not a lack of information, it is an unreliable source.

Biological systems survive by limiting wasted predictions. Sometimes that means changing your expectations; sometimes it means changing the situation. And sometimes it means accepting that when Donald Trump is talking, the safest move is to stop trying to predict what comes next.

Robin Bailey, Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They cautioned that strange foreigners – the Spaniards – had invaded the land and posed a grave threat. The emissaries requested an audience with the Tarascan ruler, known as the Cazonci, King Zuanga. But Zuanga had recently died, most likely from smallpox brought by the Spaniards.

Relations between the two empires had long been tense. They had clashed on the western frontier since 1476, fighting major battles and fortifying their borders. The Tarascans viewed the Aztecs as deceitful and dangerous – a threat to their very existence.

So, when the emissaries arrived to speak with a king who was already dead, they were sacrificed and granted audience with him in the afterlife. In that moment, the fate of the Aztecs was sealed in blood.

The Aztec empire did not fall because it lacked capability. It collapsed because it accumulated too many adversaries who resented its dominance. This is a historical episode the US president, Donald Trump, should take notice of as his rift with traditional US allies deepens.

Carl von Clausewitz and other philosophers of war have distinguished the concepts of force and power in relation to statecraft. In the broadest sense, power is ideological capital, predicated on military strength and influence in the global political sphere. In contrast, force is the exertion of military might to coerce other nations to your political will.

While power can be sustained through a strong economy, alliances and moral influence, force is expended. It drains resources and can erode internal political capital as well as global influence if it is used in a way that is perceived as arrogant or imperialistic.

The Aztec empire formed in 1428 as a triple alliance between the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with Tenochtitlan eventually dominating the political structure. The empire exerted force through seasonal military campaigns and balanced this with a power dynamic of sacrificial display, threat, tribute and a culture of racial superiority.

In both its use of force and power, the Aztec empire was coercive and depended on fear to rule. Those subjugated by the empire, and those engaged in what seemed perpetual war, held great animosity and distrust of the Aztecs. The empire was thus built on conquered people and enemies waiting for the right opportunity to overthrow their overlords.

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who ultimately brought large parts of what is now Mexico under the rule of Spain, exploited this hostility. He forged alliances with Tlaxcala and other former Aztec subjects, augmenting his small Spanish force with thousands of indigenous warriors.

Cortés led this Spanish-indigenous force against the Aztecs and besieged them in Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs had only one hope: to persuade the other great power in Mexico, the Tarascan empire to the west, to join forces with them. Their first emissaries met an ill fate. So, they tried again.

In 1521, Aztec envoys arrived once more in Tzintzuntzan and this time met with the new lord, Tangáxuan II. They brought captured steel weapons, a crossbow and armour to demonstrate the military threat they faced.

The Tarascan king paid attention. He sent an exploratory mission to the frontier to determine whether this was Aztec trickery or truth. As they arrived at the frontier, they met a group of Chichimecs – semi-nomadic warrior people who often worked for empires to patrol borders.

When told the mission was heading to Tenochtitlan to scout the situation, the Chichimecs replied that they were too late. It was only a city of death now, and they were on their way to the Tarascan king to offer their services. Tangáxuan submitted to the Spanish as a tributary kingdom the following year before being burned to death in 1530 by Spaniards trying to find where he had hidden gold.

Had the Tarascans maintained normal political relations with the Aztecs, they might have investigated the report of the first emissaries. One can imagine how history would be different if, during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 40,000 Tarascan warriors – renowned archers – had descended from the mountains to the west. It is unlikely that Cortés and his army could have prevailed.

American foreign policy

The failings of the Aztec empire were not due to a lack of courage or military prowess. During their battles with the Spanish, the Aztecs repeatedly demonstrated adaptability, learning how to fight against horses and cannon-laden ships.

The failing was a fundamental flaw in the political strategy of the empire – it was built on coercion and fear, leaving a ready force to challenge its authority when it was most vulnerable.

The foreign policy of the US since 2025, when Trump entered office for his second term, has emulated this model. Recently, the Trump administration has been projecting coercive power to support its ambitions for wealth, notoriety and to project American exceptionalism and manifest superiority.

This has manifested in threats or the exercise of limited force, such as tariffs or military attacks in Iran, Syria, Nigeria and Venezuela. Increasingly, other nations are challenging the effectiveness of this power. Colombia, Panama, Mexico and Canada, for example, have largely ignored the threat of coercive power.

As Trump uses American power to demand Greenland, his threats are becoming more feeble. Nato nations are abiding by their longstanding pact with economic and military resolve, with their leaders saying they will not give in to Trump’s pressure. The US is being pushed towards a position where it will have to switch from coercive power to coercive force.

If this course persists, military engagements, animosity from neighbours and vulnerabilities arising from the strength of other militaries, economic disruptions and environmental catastrophes may well leave the world’s most powerful nation exposed with no allies.

Jay Silverstein, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and Forensics, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This mother-blaming is nothing more than an old trick with a new spin.

Organized gangs of ‘wine moms’

A Fox News columnist recently wrote that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “antifa tactics” to “harass and impede” ICE activity. In the opinion piece, he claimed that “confusion” over the what constitutes civil disobedience is what “got 37-year-old Renee Good killed.”

Similarly, Vice-President J.D. Vance called Good a “deranged leftist” while a new acronym, AWFUL — Affluent White Female Urban Liberal — has appeared on social media.

In framing protesters like Good, a mother of three, as confused, aggressive and “delusional,” this narrative delegitimizes and pathologizes maternal activism.

This strategy aims to divert blame from the U.S. government and its heavy-handed approach to immigration — which has resulted in yet another slaying of a protester by ICE agents in Minneapolis, this time a male nurse who was reportedly coming to the aid of a female demonstrator — while also drawing on a centuries-old strategy of blaming mothers for social problems.

What makes a ‘wine mom?’

The term “wine mom” emerged over the last two decades as a cultural symbol of the contemporary white, suburban mother who turns to a nightly glass of wine (or two) to cope with the stresses of daily life.

The archetype goes back much further, reflected in literature, film and television characters, such as the wily Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development.

Yet, this motif is less light-hearted than assumed: a recent systematic review reveals a strong link between maternal drinking and stress, especially for working mothers.

While it would be easy to view problematic drinking as another example of maternal failure, it is important not to. Here’s why.

Mother-blame in history

Throughout history, mothers have found themselves in the midst of what American sociologist Linda Blum calls a “mother-valor/mother-blame binary.”

When behaving in accordance with socially acceptable and desirable parameters — that is with warmth, femininity and selflessness — mothers are viewed as “good.” When mothers violate these norms, whether by choice, circumstance or by virtue of their race or class position, they’re “bad mothers.”

Mother-blame ultimately reflects the belief that mothers are solely responsible for their children’s behaviour and outcomes, along with the cultural tendency to blame them when things go wrong. Yet, as Blum points out, “mother-blame also serves as a metaphor for a range of political fears.”

Perhaps the most striking example of this is the suffrage movement, which represented a direct challenge to patriarchal notions that women belonged in the domestic sphere and lacked the intelligence to engage in political discourse.

Suffragettes in the United Kingdom — many of them mothers — occasionally used extreme tactics, such as window-smashing and arson, while women in the U.S. obstructed traffic and waged hunger strikes.

These activists were framed as threatening to not only the establishment, but also to families and the moral fabric of society.

Ironically, despite the fact that women’s entry into politics led to increased spending and improved outcomes related to women, children, families and health care, scholars have found that mother-blaming was as common after the women’s movement as it was before.

Contemporary mother-blame

Beyond political matters, contemporary mother-blame is rampant in other domains.

Mothers have been blamed for a wide variety of their children’s psychological problems, including anxiety, depression and inherited trauma. In media and literature, mothers are often blamed for criminality and violence, reflecting the notion that “mothers make monsters.”

When children struggle in school, educators and administrators may blame the mother. Mothers risk being called “too passive” if they don’t advocate for their children or “too aggressive” when they do.

Similarly, the “crazy woman” or “hysterical mother” is a well-known trope in custody law, and mothers may be blamed even when their children are abused by others. Mass shootings? Mom’s failure. The list goes on.

By setting up mothering as a high-stakes endeavour, the cultural norm of mother-blame also serves to “divide and conquer.”

In my sociology research, I found that mothers on Facebook worked to align themselves with like-minded “superior” mothers, while distancing themselves from perceived “inferior” mothers. This feeds into the cultural norm of “combative mothering,” which pits mothers against each other.

An old trick with a new spin

The “wine mom” narrative builds on this historical pattern of mother-blame. It is meant to trivialize, delegitimize, divide and denigrate mothers who are, in fact, well-organized and motivated activists concerned for their communities.

While there are legitimate concerns around maternal drinking as a coping mechanism, the “wine mom” label has begun to represent something different. Mothers are reclaiming the title to expand their cause.

As @sara_wiles, promoting the activist group @redwineblueusa stated on Instagram: “They meant to scare us back into the kitchen, but our actual response is, ‘Oh, I want to join!’”

We should acknowledge that rather than causing societal problems, mothers have a long history of trying to fix them, even if imperfectly. Mothers like Renee Good are no exception.

Darryn DiFrancesco, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Human and Health Sciences, University of Northern British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Chouinard’s inventive approach across these spheres makes the recent biography Dirtbag Billionaire by The New York Times journalist David Gelles an intriguing read.

The anti-authoritarian entrepreneur started out making basic rock-climbing equipment. He then built a business reputation based on ethical commerce, and eventually gave away his company, promising all profits to fighting the climate crisis.

From an Australian perspective, there are lessons to learn given growing environmental and climate concerns, while both corporate giving and corporate distrust have surged in the past decade.

The wild early years

Chouinard prefers the “dirtbag” label to that of businessman or billionaire. It’s a reference from his 1960s lifestyle, a term for someone who sleeps rough, roams widely and disdains material possessions.

As a young climber chasing adventures with friends on rock faces, rivers and waves, Chouinard lived frugally. He ate cat food, squirrels and porcupines.

In these years, inventive Chouinard revolutionised climbing. Using a junkyard forge, he hand-crafted innovative, reusable, softer metal spikes to drive into rock faces. At first selling from his car boot, he built up a US and international customer base.

But, faithful to his environmental values, Chouinard then risked the company by ditching his original top-selling metal spike that damaged rock faces for one that did less harm to the cliff face.

Along the way he employed many fellow climbing, surfing and kayaking enthusiasts, prioritising employee wellbeing and engagement in the business. This was decades before employees were seen as a stakeholder, or internal culture was considered important in a business.

A clash of values

However, with the success of his Patagonia clothing business formed in 1973, Chouinard the conservationist had entered a highly capitalistic sector. The retail market was based on trend-driven overconsumption and exploitative labour and environmental practices.

His quest to do capitalism differently is instructive.

Despite higher costs, Chouinard moved the company into organic cotton use and encouraged regenerative topsoil practices. The principled actions built customer trust and loyalty.

His approach also inspired others who saw decisions that put environmental considerations above profit were good business all round.

As Patagonia grew into a billion-dollar company, he maintained a policy of donating 1% of sales (not just profit) to the environment, no matter how tight the times.

Chouinard co-established 1% for the Planet in 2001 as an accrediting body to encourage companies worldwide to donate 1% of their sales to environmental organisations. Since founding, over 11,000 companies in 110 countries have donated a total of US$823 million (A$1.2 billion).

Chouinard also actively called out corporate greenwashing, and Patagonia was a corporate activist on multiple issues. This included suing US President Donald Trump in 2017 to keep wilderness reserves safe from oil and gas exploration and land development.

One of the first B Corps

In another leadership move, Patagonia in 2012 became the first California company to become a certified Benefit Corporation, better known as a B Corp.

This is a legally binding, transparently measured commitment to act sustainably, live up to independent performance standards and consider worker, society and environmental interests.

Then, aged 83 in 2022, Chouinard established a pioneering succession trust structure and nonprofit collective for the business. This would see Patagonia continue as an independent, environment-led activist company rather than be floated or sold and have its values and foundations diluted.

This organisational restructure supercharged Chouinard’s philanthropy.

The family retains a voice, while giving away 100% of their estimated US$3 billion and all of Patagonia’s future profits that are not reinvested in the business. (US$100 million in 2022).

Even the legendary industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie only gave away 90% of his fortune.

Lessons for future philanthropists

My previous research records the top five motivations for Australian philanthropists as:

• making a difference
• giving back to the community
• personal satisfaction
• aligning with moral or philosophical beliefs, and
• setting an example.

Chouinard’s philanthropy touches on all of these.

US philanthropy researcher Paul Schervish uses the phrase “hyperagency” to capture the character and capacity that some individuals have to achieve the outcomes they deem important for society.

Schervish suggests such changemakers build their own world rather than staying within the constraints of traditional approaches.

Chouinard built his own version of capitalism. He continues to argue the Earth is the only resource base for business, and is therefore the prime business stakeholder. Without it, there are no customers, shareholders, employees or business.

Patagonia’s core mission became: “We’re in business to save our home planet”. The company established Earth as its major shareholder.

A message in Dirtbag Billionaire for givers small and large, individual and corporate, is that authentic giving is about values.

Such authentic giving across a lifetime using money, time, voice, networks, workplaces and ethical principles is rarely so well on display as in the life of Yvon Chouinard.

Wendy Scaife, Adjunct Associate Professor and Director, Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Those limits have long been found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002, for a primer on the Fourth Amendment, and what the changes in the ICE memo mean.

Okay, I’m going to read the Fourth Amendment – and then you’re going to explain it to us, please! Here goes:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Can you help us understand what that means?

Since the beginning of the republic, it has been uncontested that in order to invade someone’s home, you need to have a warrant that was considered, and signed off on, by a judicial officer. This mandate is right within the Fourth Amendment; it is a core protection.

In addition to that, through jurisprudence that has evolved since the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, it is settled law that it applies to everyone. That would include noncitizens as well.

What I see in this directive that ICE put out, apparently quite some time ago and somewhat secretly, is something that, to my mind, turns the Fourth Amendment on its head.

What does the Fourth Amendment aim to protect someone from?

In the context of the ICE search, it means that a person’s home, as they say, really is their castle. Historically, it was meant to remedy something that was true in England, where the colonists came from, which was that the king or those empowered by the king could invade people’s homes at will. The Fourth Amendment was meant to establish a sort of zone of privacy for people, so that their papers, their property, their persons would be safe from intrusion without cause.

So it’s essentially a protection against abuse of the government’s power.

That’s precisely what it is.

Has the accepted interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed over the centuries?

It hasn’t. But Fourth Amendment law has evolved because the framers, for example, didn’t envision that there would be cellphones. They couldn’t understand or anticipate that there would be things like cellphones and electronic surveillance. All those modalities have come into the sphere of Fourth Amendment protection. The law has evolved in a way that actually has made Fourth Amendment protections greater and more wide-ranging, simply because of technology and other developments such as the use of automobiles and other means of transportation. So there are greater protected zones of privacy than just a person’s home.

ICE says it only needs an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, to enter a home and arrest someone. Can you briefly describe the difference and what it means in this situation?

It’s absolutely central to the question here. In this context, an administrative warrant is nothing more than the folks at ICE headquarters writing something up and directing their agents to go arrest somebody. That’s all. It’s a piece of paper that says ‘We want you arrested because we said so.’ At bottom that’s what an administrative warrant is, and of course it hasn’t been approved by a judge.

This authorized use of administrative warrants to circumvent the Fourth Amendment flies in the face of their limited use prior to the ICE directive.

A judicially approved warrant, on the other hand, has by definition been reviewed by a judge. In this case, it would be either a U.S. magistrate judge or U.S. district judge. That means that it would have to be supported by probable cause to enter someone’s residence to arrest them.

So the key distinction is that there’s a neutral arbiter. In this case, a federal judge who evaluates whether or not there’s sufficient cause to – as is stated clearly in the Fourth Amendment – be empowered to enter someone’s home. An administrative warrant has no such protection. It is not much more than a piece of paper generated in a self-serving way by ICE, free of review to substantiate what is stated in it.

Have there been other kinds of situations, historically, where the government has successfully proposed working around the Fourth Amendment?

There are a few, such as consent searches and exigent circumstances where someone is in danger or evidence is about to be destroyed. But generally it’s really the opposite and cases point to greater protections. For example, in the 1960s the Supreme Court had to confront warrantless wiretapping; it was very difficult for judges in that age who were not tech-savvy to apply the Fourth Amendment to this technology, and they struggled to find a remedy when there was no actual intrusion into a structure. In the end, the court found that intrusion was not necessary and that people’s expectation of privacy included their phone conversations. This of course has been extended to various other means of technology including GPS tracking and cellphone use generally.

What’s the direction this could go in at this point?

What I fear here – and I think ICE probably knows this – is that more often than not, a person who may not have legal standing to be in the country, notwithstanding the fact that there was a Fourth Amendment violation by ICE, may ultimately be out of luck. You could say that the arrest was illegal, and you go back to square one, but at the same time you’ve apprehended the person. So I’m struggling to figure out how you remedy this.

John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The video of an ICE agent shooting and killing Renee Nicole Good – a U.S. citizen – in Minnesota on Jan. 7, 2026, is one example of the brazen, sometimes deadly tactics that the agency employs.

Part of the reason why recent ICE tactics have shocked Americans is because most people haven’t seen them before. Historically, the country’s militarized immigration enforcement practices have played out closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. And for decades, agents with Customs and Border Protection have carried out most deportations near the border, not ICE.

From 2010-2020, nearly 80% of all deportations were initiated at or near the U.S.-Mexico border. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that number jumped to 98%, as both the Trump and Biden administrations utilized Title 42, a public health statute that allowed the government to rapidly deport recently arrived migrants.

But Trump during his second presidency has greatly shifted immigration enforcement north into the interior of the U.S. And ICE has played a central role.

As international migration and human rights scholars, we have examined recent federal immigration policy to determine why ICE has become the main agency detaining and deporting migrants as far away from the southern border as snowy Minnesota.

And we have also explored how the transition in immigration control from the southern border to more Americans’ front lawns could be shifting the public’s views on deportation tactics.

Migration as a threat

ICE is a relatively new agency. The 2002 Homeland Security Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, created the Department of Homeland Security, known as DHS, by merging the U.S. Customs Service – previously under Treasury Department control – and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, formerly under the Justice Department.

DHS has 22 agencies, including three that focus on immigration: Customs and Border Protection, ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages legal immigration and naturalization.

There is no inherent reason that immigration enforcement should fall under homeland security. But immigration was deemed a national security matter by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11.

In a 2002 presidential briefing justifying DHS’s creation, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.”

The U.S. government has viewed immigration from this national security perspective ever since.

The full impact of the deportations

The Trump administration in early 2025 set a goal of deporting 1 million people during its first year.

But with so few crossings, and thus deportations, at the U.S.-Mexico border, the administration instead has focused its efforts on the U.S. interior.

Trump’s 2025 tax and budget bill reflected this reprioritization, allocating US$170 billion over four years to immigration enforcement, compared to approximately $30 billion allocated in 2024.

Roughly $67 billion goes toward immigration enforcement at the border, including border wall construction. But the largest percentage of the bill’s immigration funding – at least $75 billion – goes toward arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S.

The Trump administration did not initiate deportations from the U.S. interior. They have formed part of other administration’s policies, both Democratic and Republican.

Interior border enforcement increased under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s with the introduction of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which widened the criteria for deportations. And former President Barack Obama was referred to as the “Deporter in Chief” after his administration carried out more than 3 million deportations over his two terms, with roughly 69% of deportations occurring at the border.

But the astronomical growth of government funding toward migration control – at the border and in the U.S. – got the country to where it is today.

Between fiscal year 2003 and 2024, for example, Congress allocated approximately $24 toward immigration enforcement carried out by ICE and CBP for every $1 spent on the immigration court system that handles asylum claims.

The new money allocated under the 2025 budget bill, and the reprioritization of immigration enforcement from the border to the interior, partly explains why Americans are now seeing the long-term consequences of border militarization play out directly in their communities.

Americans may not know about the experiences of migrants who are quickly deported near the border, but it is harder to ignore recent images of people snatched up within their own neighborhoods.

Now the visible targets of border enforcement are increasingly immigrants who have built their lives in the U.S. – neighbors, friends, co-workers – as well as anyone who opposes ICE’s tactics, like Renee Good.

Changing political attitudes

In fact, the violence of Trump’s mass deportation campaign may be changing how Americans view immigration.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, a Gallup Poll found that 28% of Americans believed that immigration was the most important problem facing the nation – the highest percentage since Gallup began tracking the topic in 1981. This number dropped to 19% in December 2025, reflecting how more Americans see immigration as a routine issue that the government can manage rather than a crisis that needs to be dealt with.

This is supported in the academic literature. Migration scholars have shown that voters often support strict immigration policies in the voting booth but resist and protest when governments attempt to implement those policies in organized immigrant communities.

In 2002, for example, migration scholar Antje Ellermann documented that immigration officers reported it was more difficult to detain and deport people in Miami – because of resistance by a politicized immigrant community – compared to relatively conservative and less organized communities in San Diego.

But in both places, Republican and Democratic lawmakers were influential in intervening in individual cases to prevent deportations. This is because senior immigration officials, Ellermann noted, were influenced by media attention and pressure by members of Congress to grant relief.

Support for Trump’s handling of immigration is trending downward. Only 41% of Americans approved of Trump’s approach to immigration as of early January 2026, compared to 51% in March of last year, according to CNN polling.

This declining support for Trump’s tactics comes as Republican senators such as Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Joni Ernst of Iowa have criticized ICE and its operations in Minnesota.

Kelsey Norman, Fellow for the Middle East, Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University and Nicholas R. Micinski, Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Cultural Relations, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

These rust-belt and rural counties were drawn to his promises of economic revival, border security and non-interventionism. Yet, emerging signs of fracture in this Maga base suggest a potential backlash in the upcoming midterms.

The administration’s domestic policies, coupled with aggressive foreign postures, are accelerating disillusionment among Trump’s core supporters.

Domestically, Trump’s intensified immigration enforcement has backfired. Ramped-up ICE raids were sold as fulfilling pledges of mass deportations targeting “criminals”. But these operations have swept up undocumented workers essential to rural economies. Small family farms and businesses in states including California, Idaho and Pennsylvania are reliant on immigrant labour for harvesting crops, dairy operations, and meatpacking. They now face acute shortages.

Agricultural employment dropped by 155,000 workers between March and July 2025, reversing prior growth trends. Farmers in Ventura County, California, for example, denounced raids that targeted routes frequented by agricultural workers. Fields lie unharvested signalling financial ruin for some operations. Family-run farms struggle to find replacements. Low wages and gruelling conditions simply fail to attract American-born labourers.

This labour crisis exacerbates a broader sense of betrayal. Rural voters supported Trump for his anti-elite rhetoric, expecting protection for their livelihoods. Instead, the administration’s actions have hollowed out local workforces without viable alternatives.

The H-2A visa programme, meant to provide temporary foreign workers, has been streamlined – but remains insufficient amid ongoing raids, which deter even legal migrants. These disruptions ripple through small-town economies, where agriculture underpins community stability. Democrats, sensing opportunity, are investing in rural outreach, emphasising economic populism to woo disillusioned voters who feel abandoned by Trump’s enforcement zeal.

Compounding these woes are the ongoing tariff disruptions. Trump touts his tariffs as tools to “make America great”, but in fact they have driven up costs for the same rural groups. Between January and September 2025, tariffs on imports from China, Canada, Mexico, and others have surged, collecting US$125 billion. However, the figure may be even higher according to experts.

But while the administration claims these taxes punish foreign adversaries, the burden falls squarely on American importers and consumers. Small businesses, which account for around 30% of imports, faced an average of US$151,000 in extra costs from April to September 2025, translating to $25,000 monthly hikes. Farmers, already squeezed by low grain prices, pay more for necessities, such as fertilisers (hit by 44% effective tariffs on Indian imports) and machinery parts.

Midwest producers of soybeans, corn, and pork – key US exports – suffer doubly from retaliatory tariffs abroad, which reduce demand and depress revenues. In Tennessee and Pennsylvania, builders report 2.5% rises in material costs, while food prices climb due to duties on beef, tomatoes and coffee.

Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. This disparity fuels resentment. Polls show Trump’s approval slipping in swing counties, with economic anxiety eroding the loyalty that once overlooked his character flaws.

Foreign policy compounds domestic fractures

These domestic fractures are mirrored in foreign policy, where Trump’s interventionism starkly contradicts his campaign pledge of “America First” restraint. Having promised no new wars, he has instead pursued aggressive postures that many Republicans view as unnecessary. The most emblematic is his renewed bid to acquire Greenland, apparently by negotiation or force, which has swiftly followed the US raid on Venezuela in the first week of January, accompanied by threats against other Latin American countries including Cuba and Colombia.

The US president has justified demands for control over the Arctic island – citing threats from Russia and China – as a strategic necessity. But but Nato allies such as Denmark – of which Greenland is a constituent part – have rebuked it as an potentially alliance-shattering move. Congressional Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis, have broken ranks, warning that force would obliterate Nato and tarnish US influence.

Such dissent highlights broader paradoxes. Trump’s populist realism prioritises tough rhetoric for domestic consumption but yields aggressive, even reckless actions abroad. His administration is effectively dismantling post-1945 institutions while embracing 19th-century spheres-of-influence and outright colonialist thinking, including invoking an updated version of the 1823 Monroe doctrine.

Rural voters, weary of endless wars, supported his non-interventionist promises. Now they see echoes of past entanglements in Trump’s suggestion that the US could intervene in Iran. This cognitive dissonance is accelerating disillusionment with his presidency.

These self-inflicted but inherent contradictions are hastening a pivotal reckoning for Trumpism. In many counties that have thrice backed him – and especially in swing counties – economic hardship and policy betrayals erode the cultural ties binding rural America to the Republican party. Democrats, through programmes such as the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, are betting on this “betrayal” narrative, spotlighting farmers’ plights to flip seats in November 2026.

Polls show Latinos and independents souring on Trump, with the US president’s base turnout potentially waning as the midterm elections approach in November. If Republicans suffer larger-than-expected losses in those elections, it could mark the decline of Trumpism’s grip by exposing its elite-serving underbelly beneath populist veneer.

Yet, without a compelling alternative vision, Democrats risk squandering this opening. For now, the fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind. Whether Trumpism proves resilient or begins a long decline may well be decided not in Washington and Mar-a-Lago, but in the county seats and small towns that once formed its unbreakable base.

Inderjeet Parmar, Professor in International Politics, City St George's, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Adding insult to injury, he’s openly mocked European leaders by posting their private messages and sharing an AI-generated image of himself raising the American flag over Greenland.

But behind these headlines a different story is emerging.

Trump’s military threats have toxic polling numbers with the American public. His Republican allies have openly threatened to revolt. European countries are rapidly sending reinforcements, raising the costs of any invasion. And Europeans are starting to think about what economic retaliation might look like.

Far from being inevitable, Trump’s Greenland gambit appears to be on increasingly shaky ground.

No good options

Trump has three options to take control of Greenland: diplomacy, money and military force. The latest diplomatic talks collapsed as Greenland and Denmark’s foreign ministers left the White House in “fundamental disagreement” over the future of the territory.

Simply buying the territory is a non-starter. Greenlanders have already said the territory is not for sale, and U.S. Congress is unwilling to foot the bill. That’s left military force, the worst possible option.

It’s difficult to convey in words just how stunningly unpopular this option is with Americans. A recent Ipsos poll found that just four per cent of Americans believe using military force to take Greenland is a good idea.

To put that in perspective, here are some policies that are more popular:

• Billionaires should pay less tax (five per cent)
• Pardoning convicted drug trafficker and Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez (13 per cent)
• Government book bans (14 per cent)
• Stopping the release of all the Jeffrey Epstein files (seven per cent).

If your official foreign policy is less popular than pardoning drug traffickers, then your foreign policy might be in trouble.

Sensing this unpopularity, Trump has already begun to walk back his military threats. Using his platform at Davos, he claimed “I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”

It is too early to tell whether Trump’s claims are sincere. Not long after claiming to be the “president of peace,” he was invading Venezuela and bombing Iran.

The broader point is that if diplomacy has failed, money is a non-starter, and now military action is ostensibly being taken off the table, then Trump has no good options.

The danger of defections

Trump’s political coalition, in fact, is increasingly fragile and in danger of defections. The Republican House majority has shrunk to a razor-thin margin, and Republicans are already signalling a loud break with Trump over Greenland.

Nebraska congressman Don Bacon recently told USA Today: “There’s so many Republicans mad about this … If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency.”

The situation in the Senate looks even worse. Multiple Republican senators have pledged to oppose any annexation, with Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski visiting Copenhagen to reassure the Danish government. With enough defections, Congress could sharply curtail Trump’s plans and force a humiliating climb-down.

There’s yet another danger of defection. Senior military officers can resign, retire or object to the legality of orders to attack America’s NATO allies. Just last year, Adm. Alvin Holsey, the leader of U.S. Southern Command, abruptly retired less than year into what is typically a multi-year posting.

Holsey’s departure came amid reports that he was questioning the legality of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean. Americans still have a high level of confidence in the military, so when senior officers suddenly leave, it can set off alarm bells.

Creating a tripwire

In recent days, Denmark and its European allies have rushed to send military reinforcements to Greenland. These forces, however, have no hope of defeating a committed American invasion. So why are they there?

In strategic studies, we call this a “tripwire force.” The reasoning is that any attack on this force will create strong pressures at home for governments to respond. Once Danes and Swedes — and other Europeans for that matter — see their soldiers being captured or killed, this will force their governments to escalate the conflict and retaliate against the United States.

The Trump administration would like to seize Greenland, face no European forces and suffer no consequences. But the entire point of a tripwire force is to deny easy wins and to signal that any attack would be met with costly escalation. It creates a price to invading Greenland for an administration that rarely wants to pay for anything.

The B-word

Amid the Trump administration’s threats, people are forced to grapple with what comes next. European governments are already quietly debating retaliation, including diplomatic, military and economic responses.

Chief among these is the European Union’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, colloquially known as the “trade bazooka,” that could significantly curb America’s access to the EU market.

But for ordinary Europeans a different B-word will come to mind: boycott.

Some Europeans began boycotting U.S. goods last year amid Trump’s trade threats — but never to the same level as Canadians. That could quickly change if the U.S. engages in a stunning betrayal of its European allies. Fresh anger and outrage could see Europeans follow Canada’s lead.

Trump repeatedly threatened Canada with annexation, and it triggered a transformation of Canadian consumer habits. Canadians travel to the U.S. less, buy less American food and alcohol and look for more home-grown alternatives. Despite Canada’s small population, these boycotts have caused pain for U.S. industries.

Now imagine a similar scenario with the EU. In 2024, the U.S. exported almost US$665 billion in goods and services to the EU. It’s one of the largest export markets for the U.S., fuelling thousands of jobs and businesses.

The real danger for American companies, however, is when consumer pressure moves upwards to governments and corporations. European governments and corporations who buy from American giants like Microsoft, Google and Boeing will start to see public pressure to buy European — or at least not American. America’s most valuable corporate brands risk being contaminated by the stigma of the U.S. government.

Will he, won’t he?

None of this will stop the Trump administration from trying. Trump’s own words — that there is “no going back” on his plans for Greenland — ensure he’s backed himself into corner.

The more likely scenario seems to be starting to play out — Trump will try and then fail. His threats to annex Greenland will likely be remembered next to “90 trade deals in 90 days” and “repeal and place” in the pantheon of failed Trump policies.

The tragedy here is not simply a Trump administration with desires that consistently exceeds its grasp. It’s that the stain of betraying America’s closest allies will linger long after this administration is gone.

Eric Van Rythoven, Instructor in Political Science, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

He spoke about a “rupture” in the world order and the duty of nations to come together through appropriate coalitions for the benefit of all. It was a paean to multilateralism, but one that recognised that the US would no longer provide the glue to hold alliances together. Carney never mentioned the US by name in his speech, instead talking of “great powers” and “hegemons”.

Carney’s quiet, measured and evocative case-making demonstrated his ability to be the leader France’s Emmanuel Macron would like to be and the UK’s Keir Starmer is too cautious to be. He was clear, unequivocal and unafraid of the bully below his southern border. In standing up to the US president, Donald Trump, he appeared every inch the statesperson.

Then, on January 21, Trump took the stage. There was none of Carney’s self-awareness and nor did he read the room recognising the strengths, talents and economic power of the audience. Trump started with humour, noting he was talking to “friends and a few enemies”.

But he quickly shifted to a riff on the greatest hits of the first year of Trump 2.0 with the usual weaving away from his script down the rabbit holes of his perceived need for vengeance. Joe Biden still takes up far too much of Trump’s head space, but the next hour could be summed up as: “Trump great: everyone else bad.”

The president is the most amazing hype man for his own greatness, but it’s a zero-sum game. For him to win, others must lose, whether that’s the UK, Macron or the unnamed female prime minister of Switzerland whom he mocked for the poverty of her tariff negotiation skills. It’s worth noting Switzerland has no prime minister and its current president is a man.

While Carney was at pains to connect with his audience of allies, Trump exists happily in his own world where support – and sovereign territory – can be bought, and fealty trumps all. As ever, Trump played fast and loose with facts, wrapping real successes, aspirations and his unique view of the truth into a paean to himself.

He actually returned to his script to make the case for taking Greenland. The case is built on a notional need for “national and international security”, underscored by pointing out the territory is “in our hemisphere”. As so many commentators have said, collective security will do the job Trump insists that only the US can – and won’t require Denmark to cede territory. But Trump is sounding ever-less the rational actor.

Contrasting visions

The coming year is one of inflection for Trump’s presidency. His Republican party may well lose control of the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterms, which would severely curtail his ability to impose his will unfettered.

Trump is focused on his legacy and demands he’s up there with former US presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, James Polk and William McKinley, expanding the American empire and its physical footprint. This may be a step too far, even for a president with such vast economic and military power.

Carney’s speech played well both at home and around the world. His line, “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” clearly resonated with his fellow western leaders. His vision for how “the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield them together”, also offered a positive vision in a dark time.

Trump told the audience that he would not use “excessive strength of force” to acquire Greenland. But, ever the real estate developer, he demanded “right, title and ownership” with an ominous threat: “You can say no – we will remember.”

As Trump laid out his grand vision of protecting and cherishing the rich and aligning nations to do America’s bidding, it was in stark contrast to Carney. The hyperbole and self-aggrandising, the insults and threats, and the singular vision of seeing the world only through the personal impact it has on him mark the US president out as remarkable, even exceptional.

But is this the exceptionalism the US wants? Is America about more than the strongman politics of economic and military coercion?

The immediate reaction in the US was relief, jumping on the line that Trump won’t take Greenland by force. It will be telling to look at the commentary as the country reflects on the president’s aim of lifting America up, seemingly by dragging the rest of the world down.

One leader donned the cloak of statesmanship at Davos this week. It wasn’t Donald Trump.

Mark Shanahan, Associate Professor of Political Engagement, University of Surrey

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

During Trump’s second term, those offers have turned to threats.

Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social in late December 2024 that, for purposes of national security, U.S. control over Greenland was a necessity. The president has continued to insist on the national security rationale into January 2026. And he has refused to rule out the use of military force to control Greenland.

From my perspective as an international relations scholar focused on Europe, Trump’s national security rationale doesn’t make sense. Greenland, like the U.S., is a member of NATO, which provides a collective defense pact, meaning member nations will respond to an attack on any alliance member. And because of a 1951 defense agreement between the U.S. and Denmark, the U.S. can already build military installations in Greenland to protect the region.

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which stresses control of the Western Hemisphere and keeping China out of the region, provides insight into Trump’s thinking.

US interests in Greenland

The United States has tried to acquire Greenland several times.

In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward commissioned a survey of Greenland. Impressed with the abundance of natural resources on the island, he pushed to acquire Greenland and Iceland for US$5.5 million – roughly $125 million today.

But Congress was still concerned about the purchase of Alaska that year, which Seward had engineered. It had seen Alaska as too cold and too distant from the rest of the U.S. to justify spending $7.2 million – roughly $164 million today – although Congress ultimately agreed to do it. There was not enough national support for another frozen land.

In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark proposed a complex trade involving Germany, Denmark and the United States. Denmark would give the U.S. Greenland, and the U.S. would give Denmark islands in the Philippines. Denmark would then give those islands to Germany, and Germany would return Schleswig-Holstein – Germany’s northernmost state – to Denmark.

But the U.S. quickly dismissed the proposed trade as too audacious.

During World War II, Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, and the U.S. assumed the role of protector of both Greenland and Iceland, both of which belonged to Denmark at the time. The U.S. built airstrips, weather stations and radar and communications stations – five on Greenland’s east coast and nine on the west coast.

The U.S. used Greenland and Iceland as bases for bombers that attacked Germany and German-occupied areas. Greenland had a high value for military strategists because of its location in the North Atlantic – to counter Nazi threats to Allied shipping lanes and protect transatlantic routes, and because it was a midpoint for refueling U.S. aircraft. Greenland’s importance also rested on its deposits of cryolite, useful for making aluminum.

In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland for $100 million, as U.S. military leaders thought it would play a critical role in the Cold War.

The secret U.S. project Operation Blue Jay at the beginning of the Cold War resulted in the construction of Thule Air Base in northwestern Greenland, which allowed U.S. bombers to be closer to the Soviet Union. Renamed Pituffik Space Base, today it provides a 24/7 missile warning and space surveillance facility that is critical to NATO and U.S. security strategy.

At the end of World War II, Denmark recognized Greenland as one of its territories. In 1953, Greenland gained constitutional rights and became a country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland was assigned self-rule in 1979, and by 2009 it became a self-governing country, still within the Kingdom of Denmark, which includes Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Denmark recognizes the government of Greenland as an equal partner and recently gave it a more significant role as the first voice for Denmark in the Arctic Council, which promotes cooperation in the Arctic.

What the US may want

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy identifies three threats in the Western Hemisphere: migration, drugs and crimes, and China’s increasing influence.

Two of those threats are irrelevant when considering Greenland. Greenlandic people are not migrating to the U.S., and they are not drug traffickers. However, Greenland is rich in rare earth minerals, including neodymium, dysprosium, graphite, copper and lithium.

Additionally, China seeks to establish mining interests in Greenland and the Arctic as part of its Polar Silk Road initiative. China had offered to build an infrastructure for Greenland, including improving the airport, until Denmark stepped in and offered airport funding. And China has worked with Australian companies to secure mining opportunities on the island.

Those rare earth minerals appeal to the European Union, too. The EU lists some 30 raw materials that are essential for their economies. Twenty-five are in Greenland.

The Trump administration has made it clear that controlling these minerals is a national security issue, and the president wants to keep them away from China.

Figures vary, but it is estimated that over 60% of rare earth elements or minerals are currently mined in China. China also refines some 90% of rare earths. This gives China tremendous leverage in trade talks. And it results in a dangerous vulnerability for the U.S. and other nation states seeking to modernize their economies. With few suppliers of these rare earth elements, the political and economic costs of securing them are high.

Greenland has only two operating mines. One is the Tan Breez project in southern Greenland. It produces 17 metals, including terbium and neodymium, that are used in high-strength magnets used in many green technologies and in aircraft manufacturing, including for the F-35 fighter planes.

Consider for a moment that Trump is not interested in owning Greenland.

Instead, he is using this threatening position to secure promises from the Greenlandic government to make economic deals with the U.S. and not China. Thus, Trump’s threats could be less about national security and much more about eliminating competition from China and securing wealth for U.S. interests.

This form of coercive diplomacy threatens the political and economic development of not only Greenland but Europe. In recent interviews, Trump has made it clear that he does not respect international law and the sovereignty of countries. His position, I believe, undermines the international order and removes the U.S. as a responsible leader of that framework established after World War II.

Steven Lamy, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations and Spatial Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nevertheless, it is common for commentators and citizens to revisit old elections to learn what might be coming in the ones that lie ahead.

The historical lessons from modern midterm congressional elections are not favorable for Republicans today.

Most of the students I taught in American government classes for over 40 years knew that the party in control of the White House was likely to encounter setbacks in midterms. They usually did not know just how settled and solid that pattern was.

Since 1946, there have been 20 midterm elections. In 18 of them, the president’s party lost seats in the House of Representatives. That’s 90% of the midterm elections in the past 80 years.

Measured against that pattern, the odds that the Republicans will hold their slim House majority in 2026 are small. Another factor makes them smaller. When the sitting president is “underwater” – below 50% – in job approval polls, the likelihood of a bad midterm election result becomes a certainty. All the presidents since Harry S. Truman whose job approval was below 50% in the month before a midterm election lost seats in the House. All of them.

Even popular presidents – Dwight D. Eisenhower, in both of his terms; John F. Kennedy; Richard Nixon; Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan in 1986; and George H. W. Bush – lost seats in midterm elections.

The list of unpopular presidents who lost House seats is even longer – Truman in 1946 and 1950, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, Jimmy Carter in 1978, Reagan in 1982, Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in both 2010 and 2014, Donald Trump in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2022.

Exceptions are rare

There are only two cases in the past 80 years where the party of a sitting president won midterm seats in the House. Both involved special circumstances.

In 1998, Clinton was in the sixth year of his presidency and had good numbers for economic growth, declining interest rates and low unemployment. His average approval rating, according to Gallup, in his second term was 60.6%, the highest average achieved by any second-term president from Truman to Biden.

Moreover, the 1998 midterm elections took place in the midst of Clinton’s impeachment, when most Americans were simultaneously critical of the president’s personal behavior and convinced that that behavior did not merit removal from office. Good economic metrics and widespread concern that Republican impeachers were going too far led to modest gains for the Democrats in the 1998 midterm elections. The Democrats picked up five House seats.

The other exception to the rule of thumb that presidents suffer midterm losses was George W. Bush in 2002. Bush, narrowly elected in 2000, had a dramatic rise in popularity after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The nation rallied around the flag and the president, and Republicans won eight House seats in the 2002 midterm elections.

Those were the rare cases when a popular sitting president got positive House results in a midterm election. And the positive results were small.

Midterms matter

In the 20 midterm elections between 1946 and 2022, small changes in the House – a shift of less than 10 seats – occurred six times. Modest changes – between 11 and 39 seats – took place seven times. Big changes, so-called “wave elections” involving more than 40 seats, have happened seven times.

In every midterm election since 1946, at least five seats flipped from one party to the other. If the net result of the midterm elections in 2026 moved five seats from Republicans to Democrats, that would be enough to make Democrats the majority in the House.

In an era of close elections and narrow margins on Capitol Hill, midterms make a difference. The past five presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden – entered office with their party in control of both houses of Congress. All five lost their party majority in the House or the Senate in their first two years in office.

Will that happen again in 2026?

The obvious prediction would be yes. But nothing in politics is set in stone. Between now and November 2026, redistricting will move the boundaries of a yet-to-be-determined number of congressional districts. That could make it harder to predict the likely results in 2026.

Unexpected events, or good performance in office, could move Trump’s job approval numbers above 50%. Republicans would still be likely to lose House seats in the 2026 midterms, but a popular president would raise the chances that they could hold their narrow majority.

And there are other possibilities. Perhaps 2026 will involve issues like those in recent presidential elections.

Close results could be followed by raucous recounts and court controversies of the kind that made Florida the focal point in the 2000 presidential election. Prominent public challenges to voting tallies and procedures, like those that followed Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of victory in 2020, would make matters worse.

The forthcoming midterms may not be like anything seen in recent congressional election cycles.

Democracy is never easy, and elections matter more than ever. Examining long-established patterns in midterm party performance makes citizens clear-eyed about what is likely to happen in the 2026 congressional elections. Thinking ahead about unusual challenges that might arise in close and consequential contests makes everyone better prepared for the hard work of maintaining a healthy democratic republic.

Robert A. Strong, Senior Fellow, Miller Center, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The greatest threat to how Trump completes his term is how he wields his power.

Indeed, in the most foolish act in foreign policy in Trump’s presidency, he has threatened punitive tariffs on Denmark and seven other NATO allies in Europe to force the sale of Greenland to the United States. They are outraged. This is a ridiculous ploy that will not deliver Greenland to Trump.

Trump’s escalation in Denmark has already strengthened Putin’s iron resolve to get as much of Ukraine as he can. Prospects for ending the war in Ukraine are now near zero.

On top of Trump’s pending tariffs on Europe, if Trump seizes Greenland, the consequences will shake the world – including Australia. NATO will be terminated. Australia will face an existential question of whether, under those circumstances, it must terminate its alliance with the US.

We can see in a raft of polls at this one-year mark of Trump’s second term that voters across the country are expressing growing disquiet about his management of the economy and the affordability of housing and groceries, the raids by ICE agents as they seize and deport migrants as we saw last week in Minneapolis, and uncertainty about Trump’s foreign adventurism in the Americas and with Iran.

Trump is exercising this power because he can. This will jolt Republicans in Congress to break with Trump on this issue – the first such rift between Trump and his party since his re-election.

Welcome to Trump’s year six.

Trumpism in his second term

Following his election victory in 2024, Trump has been faithful to three of four pillars of Trumpism that made his base a movement that has changed America:

• nativism (favouring US-born citizens over immigrants)
• protectionism and tariffs
• America First nationalism (“Make America Great Again”).

To those ends, Trump is acting aggressively, with immigration agents arresting and deporting tens of thousands, and threats to deploy US troops in American cities to enforce these policies. Trump has imposed punitive tariffs against every trading partner – including Australia, which has a significant trade deficit with the United States. Trump demands foreign companies invest in the United States and build new factories.

But on the fourth Trumpism pillar – America-First isolationism as a driver of America’s foreign policy – Trump has redefined his foreign policy settings with grander ambitions.

Trump has rejected the history of the US waging wars to project American values: protecting Asia from communism in Korea and Vietnam; turning back brutal aggression in Kuwait; punishing the export of radical Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump has applied these lessons to Iran – so far. It is one thing to take out Iran’s nuclear capability. It is another to do regime change – a bridge too far back to the “forever wars” Trump despises.

Trump has buried America’s posture of globalism. He has withdrawn the US from virtually all the architecture, save the United Nations itself, erected after the second world war to ensure global security, stability and prosperity. He has ordered the US out of global organisations, and has cut billions in foreign aid.

The US attack on Venezuela was about much larger goals than arresting its leader. It was about power – controlling power over critical resources in the Americas, from Venezuela to Greenland and everything in between, from Mexico to Cuba to Canada.

Politics at home

Trump is paying a high price at home for his activism in wielding power abroad. Every day Trump spends projecting power outside the United States means he is not paying attention to the American people.

A recent poll shows 56% of US adults believe Trump has gone too far on Venezuela. 57% do not want the US to strike Iran. Even before Trump’s tariff announcement on Greenland, only 17% approved of Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland, and 71% rejected using military force to do it.

Trump’s overall polls are bad. His approval rating is 40% – nearly 10 points down since his inauguration – and disapproval is at 60%. AP-NORC also finds that “Trump hasn’t convinced the Americans that the economy is in good shape.”

CNN polling reports that 55% of those surveyed believe Trump’s policies “have hurt the economy” and that Trump is not doing enough to lower prices. Grocery prices are up sharply. The latest Wall Street Journal poll shows Trump is underwater by double digits on handling inflation, and that he is not focusing enough on the economy.

On immigration, the unrest in Minneapolis and other cities from the harsh methods employed by ICE agents is also taking a toll, with Trump’s approval on that issue lagging below 40%.

But even with all these red flags and warnings from the field, Trump is undeterred. He believes that as president, he can do anything he wants to do. Guardrails that have for decades protected America’s democracy have been cast aside.

Trump has not been blocked – yet – by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court or the pliant Republican Congress for the tariffs he is imposing, the government agencies he has shut down, the monies appropriated by Congress he has terminated, the hundreds of thousands of government employees he has fired, the military strikes he has ordered without advising, much less getting approval from, Congress.

Trump is seeking more control over the economy by seeking to prosecute the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, an independent agency that sets monetary policy, and to pack its board with loyalists to Trump’s demands that interest rates be lowered.

Since his inauguration, Trump has instructed the Justice Department to prosecute those who attempted to bring him to justice in courtrooms and impeachment proceedings in Congress.

Trump’s musings on power

As Trump consolidates his power, Trump’s musings become imperatives. After months of expressing a desire to own it, Trump is now acting aggressively to conquer Greenland.

At home, Trump is now also musing – twice so far this month – over whether the US midterm elections will be cancelled. Trump knows the likelihood of the Democrats taking back control of the House of Representatives is high. That is precisely what he suffered in the 2018 congressional elections in his first term.

Trump told Reuters last week, “We shouldn’t even have an election,” because of all his great successes.

In January, Trump told Republicans in the House, “I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections cancelled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.” He told them that if the Democrats take the House back they will “find a reason to impeach” him.

Any steps taken – such as declaring martial law to suspend the midterm elections – will be catastrophic. And that is an understatement.

Based on Trump’s restless mind and command of what he believes is absolute power, at stake this year are the future of democracy at home and alliances abroad.

Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today, however, a different feature – which as recently as 2019, some critics dismissed as “obsolete” – is getting more attention: its vision of a world divided into three spheres, controlled by autocratic governments that constantly form and then break alliances.

In 2022, Vladimir Putin initiated Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine. This year began with the US mounting a raid on Venezuela and snatching its president, while Donald Trump speculated about US actions against various other countries in Latin America and Greenland. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping regularly repeats China’s intention to “reunify” with Taiwan – by force if necessary.

“Orwell-as-prophet” commentators began showing more interest in the superstate idea early in the decade, often leading with references to Putin’s imperial ambitions. This trend became more pronounced when Trump’s second term began.

Last year, American historian Alfred McCoy led with a tripolar reference in his Foreign Policy essay: “Is 2025 the New 1984?” A Bloomberg report on the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska last August was headlined: “It Looks Like a Trump-Putin-Xi World, But It’s Really Orwell’s”. The article described Nineteen Eighty-Four’s fictional model of global affairs as “prophetic”.

Many observers now see Big Brother-like leaders wielding power in Washington, as well as in Moscow and Beijing. In her first essay of 2026, Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic that: “Orwell’s world is fiction, but some want it to become reality.”

The American journalist and historian noted a dangerous desire of some for “an Asia dominated by China, a Europe dominated by Russia, and a Western Hemisphere dominated by the United States”. Social media is awash with comments and maps in the same vein.

Orwell’s influences

Analysts have claimed that elements of Orwell’s portrayal of politics inside Oceania paralleled various parts of dystopian novels written before Nineteen Eighty-Four. They cite, in particular, the potential influence of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) – works Orwell discussed in a 1940 essay.

Then there’s Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921), which Orwell wrote about in 1946, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), which he wrote about in 1941. Both inspired him with their criticism of the real Soviet Union.

Could these or other utopian and dystopian texts – such as Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), and Noël Coward’s play Peace in Our Time (1946) – have given him ideas about future geopolitics?

In fact, most of the works mentioned downplay or ignore international issues. Koestler focuses on one unnamed totalitarian country, Zamyatin and Huxley on a single world-state, London and Lewis on an America transformed by a domestic tyrannical movement, and Coward a Britain conquered by Hitler.

Two other novels provide partial precedents. The first is The War in the Air (1908) by H.G. Wells, an author Orwell read throughout his life. It has a tripolar side, depicting a war between Germany, the US and Britain, and a Chinese and Japanese force. The second is Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine).

Orwell never referred to Swastika Night in any publication, and his most prominent biographer, D.J. Taylor, has claimed there is no definitive evidence that he read it. However, as it was a Left Book Club selection and he was a Left Book Club author, Orwell would at least have known about it. The novel describes a world divided into two rival camps, not three, but portrays allies becoming rivals. The competing superstates are Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, who were on the same side when the book was written.

In his own words

The most satisfying place to look for inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four’s geopolitical vision, though, is in Orwell’s own experiences and non-fiction reading. Before the 1940s, Orwell spent a lot of time learning and writing critically about three oppressive systems: capitalism, fascism and Soviet communism.

In terms of capitalism, working as a colonial police officer in Burma in the 1920s left him disgusted with what he called the “dirty work of empire”. Living in England later led him to write works on class injustices such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

In terms of fascism, he wrote scathingly about Hitler and Franco. Orwell was also appalled by accounts of repression under Stalin. His time fighting in Spain reinforced his dark view of Moscow and he saw erstwhile allies become arch-enemies as the anti-Franco coalition broke down, and the Soviets began treating groups that had been part of it as villains.

Second world war news stories had an impact as well. In 1939 and 1941 respectively, newspapers were full of reports of Moscow and Berlin signing a non-aggression pact, and then of Moscow switching sides to join the Allies.

And in a 1945 essay, Orwell mocked news of many people on the left embracing the fervently anti-Communist Chinese Nationalist Party leader, Chiang Kai-shek, once he was with the Allies – seemingly having forgetten their earlier disdain for Chiang’s brutal effort to exterminate the Chinese Communist Party.

But perhaps the most notable 1940s news story of all relating to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s geopolitics has been flagged by Taylor as one that broke in 1943. He notes that Orwell sometimes claimed a key inspiration for his final novel were the reports of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill talking at the 1943 Tehran conference about carving up the post-war world into three spheres.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has had extraordinary longevity as a go-to text for political commentary. There are many explanations for its staying power, but right now a key feature of it may be its relevance to thinking about both repression of dissent and Newspeak-style propaganda in many individual countries – and the unsettling geopolitical tensions in the world at large.

Emrah Atasoy, Associate Fellow of English and Comparative Literary Studies & Honorary Research Fellow of IAS, the University of Warwick and Upcoming IASH Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the University of Edinburgh, University of Warwick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of Chinese and World History, University of California, Irvine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders. […] You must refuse illegal orders.

The lawmakers were issuing the warning against the backdrop of US airstrikes on boats off the coast of Latin America the Trump administration claims are suspected drug runners. Many Democrats and legal experts, however, argue these strikes, as well as the subsequent arrest of Nicolas Maduro and his wife, are illegal.

Since returning to office, Trump has successfully expanded his power over his own party, the courts and the American people. Now, like many autocrats around the world, he’s trying to exert control over the military.

In the final episode of The Making of Autocrat, Joe Wright, a political science professor at Penn State University, says:

I am very concerned that getting the military to do illegal things will not only put US soldiers at more risk when they do engage in international missions in the future […] it’s a first step to using the military to target domestic political opponents. That’s what really worries me.

Listen to the interview with Joe Wright at The Making of an Autocrat podcast, available at Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode was written by Justin Bergman and produced and edited by Isabella Podwinski and Ashlynne McGhee. Sound design by Michelle Macklem.

Newsclips in this episode from MS NOW, PBS Newshour, Reuters, and US Department of Homeland Security.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feedor find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Operation Absolute Resolve achieved its objective of seizing Maduro through a mix of extensive planning, intelligence and timing. R. Evan Ellis, a military strategist and former Latin America policy adviser to the U.S. State Department, walked The Conversation through what is publicly known about the planning and execution of the raid.

How long would this op have been in the works?

Operation Absolute Resolve was some months in the planning, as the Pentagon acknowledged in its briefing on Jan. 3. My presumption is that from the beginning of the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and the establishment of Joint Task Force Southern Spear in the fall, military planners were developing options for the president to capture or eliminate Maduro and other key Chavista leadership, should coercive efforts at persuading a change in the Venezuelan situation fail.

Prior to Southern Spear, U.S. military activities in the region were directly overseen by Southern Command – the part of the Department of Defense responsible for Central America, South America and most of the Caribbean. But establishing a dedicated joint task force in October 2025 helped facilitate the coordination of a large operation, like the one conducted to seize Maduro.

Planning for the Jan. 3 operation likely became more detailed and realistic as the administration settled on a concrete set of options. U.S. forces practiced the raid on a replica of the presidential compound. “They actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into with all the same, all that steel all over the place,” President Donald Trump told “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

Why did the US choose to act now?

The buildup had been going on for months, and the arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford in November was a key milestone. That gave the U.S. the capability to launch a high volume of attacks against land targets and added to the already huge array of American military hardware stationed in the Caribbean.

It joined an Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, which included a helicopter dock ship and two landing platform vessels. An additional six destroyers and two cruisers were stationed in the region with the capability of launching hundreds of missiles for both land attack and air defense, as well as a special operations mother ship.

Trump’s authorization of CIA operations in Venezuela was probably also a key factor. It is likely that individuals inside Venezuela played invaluable roles not only in obtaining intelligence, but also in cooperating with key people in Maduro’s military and government to make sure they did – or did not do – certain things at key moments during the Jan. 3 operation.

With the complex array of plans and preparations in place by December, the U.S. military was likely ready to execute, but it had to wait for opportune conditions to maximize the probability of success.

What constitutes the opportune moment?

There are arguably three things needed for the opportune moment: good intelligence, the establishment of reliable cooperation arrangements on the ground, and favorable tactical conditions.

Intel would have been crucial. Trump acknowledged his authorization of covert CIA operations in Venezuela in October, and evidently, by the end of the year, analysts had gathered the information needed to make this operation go smoothly. The intelligence would have had to include knowing exactly where Maduro would be at the time of the operation, and the situation around him.

Over the past few months, according to media reporting, the intelligence community had agents on the ground in Venezuela, likely having conversations with people in the military, the Chavista leadership and beyond, who had crucial information or whose behavior was relevant to different parts of the operation – such as perhaps shutting down a system, standing down a military unit or being absent from a post at a key moment. A report from The New York Times indicates that the U.S. had a human source close to Maduro who was able to provide details of his day-to-day life, down to what he ate.

The more tactical conditions that were needed for the opportune moment involved things like the weather – you didn’t want storms or high winds or cloud cover that would put U.S. aircraft in danger as they flew in some very treacherous low-level routes through the mountains that separate Fort Tiun – the military compound in Caracas where Maduro was captured – from the coast.

How did the operation unfold?

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has given some details about how the plan was executed.

We know the U.S. launched aircraft from multiple sites – the operation involved at least 20 different launch sites for 150 planes and helicopters. These would have involved aircraft for jamming operations, some surveillance, fighter jets to strike targets, and some to provide an escort for the helicopters bringing in a special forces unit and members of the FBI.

As an integral part of the operation, the U.S. carried out a series of cyber activities that may have played a role in undermining not only Venezuela’s defense systems, but also its understanding of what was going on. Although the nature of U.S. cyber activities is only speculation here, a coherent, alerted Venezuelan command and control system could have cost the lives of U.S. force members and given Maduro time to seal himself in his safe room, creating a problem – albeit not an insurmountable one – for U.S. forces.

There was also, according to Trump, a U.S.-generated interruption to some part of the power grid. In addition, it appears that there may have been diversionary strikes in other parts of the country to give a false impression to the Venezuelan military that U.S. military activity was directed toward some other, lesser land target, as had recently been the case.

U.S. aircraft then basically disabled Venezuelan air defenses.

As U.S. rotary wing and other assets converged on the target in Caracas – with cover from some of the most capable fighters in the U.S. inventory, including F-35s and F-22s, as well as F-18s – other U.S. assets decimated the air defense and other threats in the area.

It would be logical if elite members of the U.S. 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were used in the approach to the compound in Caracas. Their skills would have been required if, as I presume, they came in via the canyon route that separates Caracas from the coast. I have driven the road through those mountains, and it is treacherous – especially for an aircraft at low altitude.

Once the team landed, it would have taken a matter of minutes to infiltrate the compound where Maduro was.

Any luck involved?

According to Trump, the U.S. team grabbed Maduro just as he was trying to get into his steel vault safe room.

“He didn’t get that space closed. He was trying to get into it, but he got bum-rushed right so fast that he didn’t get into that,” the U.S. president said on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

Although the U.S. was reportedly fully prepared for that eventuality, with high-power torches to cut him out, that delay could have cost time and possibly lives.

It was thus critical to the U.S. mission that forces were able to enter the facility and reach and secure Maduro and his wife in a minimal amount of time.

R. Evan Ellis, Senior Associate, Americas Program, The Center for Strategic and International Studies

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other crimes committed during the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump granted clemency to the over 1,500 defendants convicted of crimes connected to the storming of the Capitol.

Trump did not pardon Rhodes – or some others found guilty of the most serious crimes on Jan. 6. He instead commuted Rhodes’ sentence to time served. Commutation only reduces the punishment for a crime, whereas a full pardon erases a conviction.

As a political anthropologist I study the Patriot movement, a collection of anti-government right-wing groups that include the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Moms for Liberty. I specialize in alt-right beliefs, and I have interviewed people active in groups that participated in the Capitol riot.

Rhodes’ plans to relaunch the Oath Keepers, largely composed of current and former military veterans and law enforcement officers, is important because it will serve as an outlet for those who have felt lost since his imprisonment. The group claimed it had over 40,000 dues-paying members at the height of its membership during Barack Obama’s presidency. I believe that many of these people will return to the group, empowered by the lack of any substantial punishment resulting from the pardons for crimes committed on Jan. 6.

In my interviews, I’ve found that military veterans are treated as privileged members of the Patriot movement. They are honored for their service and military training. And that’s why I believe many former Oath Keepers will rejoin the group – they are considered integral members.

Their oaths to serving the Constitution and the people of the United States are treated as sacred, binding members to an ideology that leads to action. This action includes supporting people in conflicts against federal agencies, organizing citizen-led disaster relief efforts, and protesting election results like on Jan. 6. The members’ strength results from their shared oath and the reverence they feel toward keeping it.

Who are the Oath Keepers?

Rhodes joined the Army after high school and served for three years before being honorably discharged after a parachuting accident in 1986. He then attended the University of Nevada and later graduated from Yale Law School in 2004. He founded the Oath Keepers in 2009.

Oath Keepers takes its name from the U.S military Oath of Enlistment, which states:

“I, , do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States …”

Informed by his law background, Rhodes places a particular emphasis on the part of the oath that states they will defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

He developed a legal theory that justifies ignoring what he refers to as “unlawful orders” after witnessing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Following the natural disaster, local law enforcement was assigned the task of confiscating guns, many of which officers say were stolen or found in abandoned homes.

Rhodes was alarmed, believing that the Second Amendment rights of citizens were being violated. Because of this, he argued that people who had military or law enforcement backgrounds had a legal duty to refuse what the group considers unlawful orders, including any that violated constitutionally protected rights, such as the right to bear arms.

In the Oath Keepers’ philosophy, anyone who violates these rights are domestic enemies to the Constitution. And if you follow the orders, you’ve violated your oath.

Explaining the origin of the group on the right-wing website “The Gateway Pundit” in November 2025, Rhodes said: “… we were attacked out of the gate, labeled anti-government, which is absurd because we’re defending the Constitution that established the federal government. We were labeled anti-government extremists, all kinds of nonsense because the elites want blind obedience in the police and military.”

Rebuilding and restructuring

In 2022, the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets leaked more than 38,000 names on the Oath Keepers’ membership list.

The Anti-Defamation League estimated that nearly 400 of the names were active law enforcement officers, and that over 100 were serving in the military. Some of these members were investigated by their workplaces but never disciplined for their involvement with the group.

Some members who were not military or law enforcement did lose their jobs over their affiliation. But they held government-related positions, such as a Wisconsin alderman who resigned after he was identified as a member.

This breach of privacy, paired with the dissolution of the organization after Rhodes’ sentencing, will help shape the group going forward.

In his interview with “The Gateway Pundit,” where he announced the group’s relaunch, Rhodes said: “I want to make it clear, like I said, my goal would be to make it more cancel-proof than before. We’ll have resilient, redundant IT that makes it really difficult to take down. … And I want to make sure I get – put people in charge and leadership everywhere in the country so that, you know, down the road, if I’m taken out again, that it can still live on under good leadership without me being there.”

There was a similar shift in organizational structure with the Proud Boys in 2018. That’s when their founder, Gavin McInnes, stepped away from the organization. His departure came after a group of Proud Boys members were involved in a fight with anti-fascists in New York.

Prosecutors wanted to try the group as a gang. McInnes, therefore, distanced himself to support their defense that they weren’t in a gang or criminal organization. Ultimately, two of the members were sentenced to four years in prison for attempted gang assault charges.

Some Proud Boys members have told me they have since focused on creating local chapters, with in-person recruitment, that communicate on private messaging apps. They aim to protect themselves from legal classification as a gang. It also makes it harder for investigators or activist journalists to monitor them.

This is referred to as a cell style of organization, which is popular with insurgency groups. These groups are organized to rebel against authority and overthrow government structures. The cell organizational style does not have a robust hierarchy but instead produces smaller groups. They all adhere to the same ideology but may not be directly associated.

They may have a leader, but it’s often acknowledged that they are merely a figurehead, not someone giving direct orders. For the Proud Boys, this would be former leader Enrique Tarrio. Proud Boys members I’ve spoken to have referred to him as a “mascot” and not their leader.

Looking ahead

So what does the Rhodes interview indicate about the future of Oath Keepers?

Members will continue supporting Trump while also recruiting more retired military and law enforcement officers. They will create an organizational structure designed to outlive Rhodes. And based on my interactions with the far-right, I believe it’s likely they will create an organizational structure similar to that of the cell style for organizing.

Beyond that, they are going to try to own their IT, which includes hosting their websites and also using trusted online revenue generators.

This will likely provide added security, protecting their membership rolls while making it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to investigate them in the future.

Alexander Lowie, Postdoctoral associate in Classical and Civic Education, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They’re unelected and unaccountable, yet they wield a huge amount of power.

This is the role Stephen Miller has played for Donald Trump – he is the architect in chief for the second Trump administration. He has so much power, in fact, he’s reportedly referred to as the “prime minister”.

So who is Stephen Miller? And why are architects so important in helping a would-be autocrat amass power?

As Emma Shortis, a Trump expert and an adjunct senior fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, explains in episode 2 of The Making of an Autocrat:

[Miller] is the kind of brains behind particularly Trump’s hardline stances on immigration and the Trump administration’s ability to use the levers of power, and expand the power available to the president.
I think what Stephen Miller demonstrates and, and history has demonstrated over and over again is that autocrats cannot rise to power by themselves. They often require a singular kind of charisma and a singular kind of historical moment, but they also need architects behind them who are able to facilitate their rise to power.

Listen to the interview with Emma Shortis at The Making of an Autocrat podcast.

- YouTube youtu.be

This episode was written by Justin Bergman and produced and edited by Isabella Podwinski and Ashlynne McGhee. Sound design by Michelle Macklem.

Newsclips in this episode from CNN, CNN, ABC News, and Timothy Snyder’s Substack.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feedor find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

So, where does Donald Trump fit in?

In this six-part podcast series, The Making of an Autocrat, we are asking six experts on authoritarianism and US politics to explain how exactly an autocrat is made – and whether Trump is on his way to becoming one.

Like strongmen around the world, Trump’s first step was to take control of a party, explains Erica Frantz, associate professor of political science at Michigan State University.

Trump began this process long before his victory in the 2024 US presidential election. When he first entered the political stage in 2015, he started to transform the Republican Party into his party, alienating his critics, elevating his loyalists to positions of power and maintaining total control through threats and intimidation.

And once a would-be autocrat dominates a party like this, they have a legitimate vehicle to begin dismantling a democracy. As Frantz explains:

Now, many Republican elites see it as political suicide to stand up to Trump. So, fast forward to 2024, and we have a very personalist Trump party – the party is synonymous with Trump.
Not only does the party have a majority in the legislature, but it is Trump’s vehicle. And our research has shown this is a major red flag for democracy. It’s going to enable Trump to get rid of executive constraints in a variety of domains, which he has, and pursue his strongman agenda.

Listen to the interview with Erica Frantz at The Making of an Autocrat podcast.

This episode was written by Justin Bergman and produced and edited by Isabella Podwinski and Ashlynne McGhee. Sound design by Michelle Macklem.

Newsclips in this episode from CNN, The Telegraph, CNN and Nayib Bukele’s YouTube channel.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feedor find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The midterm elections for Congress won’t take place until November, but already a record number of members have declared their intention not to run – a total of 43 in the House, plus 10 senators. Perhaps the most high-profile person to depart, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, announced her intention in November not just to retire but to resign from Congress entirely on Jan. 5 – a full year before her term was set to expire.

There are political dynamics that explain this rush to the exits, including frustrations with gridlock and President Donald Trump’s lackluster approval ratings, which could hurt Republicans at the ballot box.

Rather than get swept away by a prospective “blue wave” favoring Democrats – or possibly daunted by the monumental effort it would take to survive – many Republicans have decided to fold up the beach chair and head home before the wave crashes.

As of now, two dozen Republican House members have either resigned from the House or announced their intent to not run for reelection in 2026. With only two exceptions – Republicans in 2018 and 2020 – this is more departures from either party at this point in the election calendar than any other cycle over the past 20 years.

There is also growing concern within the House Republican caucus that Greene’s announcement is a canary in the coal mine and that multiple resignations will follow.

As a political scientist who studies Congress and politicians’ reelection strategies, I’m not surprised to see many House members leaving ahead of what’s shaping up to be a difficult midterm for the GOP. Still, the sheer numbers of people not running tells us something about broader dissatisfaction with Washington.

Why do members leave Congress?

Many planned departures are true retirements involving older and more experienced members.

For example, 78-year-old Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler is retiring after 34 years, following mounting pressure from upstart challengers and a growing consensus among Democrats that it’s time for older politicians to step aside. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who will turn 86 in March, is also retiring.

Sometimes, members of Congress depart for the same reasons other workers might leave any job. Like many Americans, members of Congress might find something more attractive elsewhere. Retiring members are attractive hires for lobbying firms and corporations, thanks to their insider knowledge and connections within the institution. These firms usually offer much higher salaries than members are used to in Congress, which may explain why more than half of all living former members are lobbyists of some kind.

Other members remain ambitious for elective office and decide to use their position in Congress as a springboard for another position. Members of the House regularly retire to run for a Senate seat, such as, in this cycle, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan. Others run for executive offices, including governor, such as Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

But some are leaving Congress due to growing frustration with the job and an inability to get things done. Specifically, many retiring members cite growing dysfunction within their own party, or in Congress as a whole, as the reason they’re moving on.

In a statement announcing his departure in June, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., mused that “between spending another six years navigating the political theater and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with my family,” it was “not a hard choice” to leave the Senate.

What’s unique about 2026?

In addition, there are a few other factors that can help explain why so many Republicans in particular are heading for the exits leading up to 2026.

The shifting of boundaries that has come with the mid-decade redistricting process in several states this year has scrambled members’ priorities. Unfamiliar districts can drive incumbents to early retirement by severing their connection with well-established constituencies.

In Texas, six Republicans and three Democrats – nearly a quarter of the state’s entire House delegation – are either retiring or running for other offices, due in part to that state’s new gerrymander for 2026.

All decisions about retirement and reelection are sifted through the filter of electoral and partisan considerations. A phenomenon called “thermostatic politics” predicts that parties currently in power, particularly in the White House, tend to face a backlash from voters in the following election. In other words, the president’s party nearly always loses seats in midterms.

In 2006 and 2018, for example, Republican members of Congress were weighed down by the reputations of unpopular Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Republicans had arguably even greater success in midterm elections during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Currently, 2026 looks like it will present a poor national environment for Republicans. Trump remains highly unpopular, according to polls, and Democrats are opening up a consistent lead in the “generic ballot” question, which asks respondents which party they intend to support in the 2026 midterms without reference to individual candidates.

Democrats have already been overperforming in special elections, as well as the general election in November in states such as New Jersey and Virginia, which held elections for governor. Democrats are on average running 13 points ahead of Kamala Harris’ performance in the 2024 election.

As a result, even Republicans in districts thought to be safe for their party may see themselves in enough potential danger to abandon the fight in advance.

Retirement vs. resignation

One final, unique aspect of this election cycle with major consequences is not an electoral but an institutional one.

House conservatives are quietly revolting against Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership style. That members may be frustrated enough not just to retire but resign in advance, leaving their seats temporarily vacant, is a notable sign of dysfunction in the U.S. House.

This also could have a major impact on policy, given how slim the Republicans’ majority in the lower chamber is already. Whatever the outcome of the midterms in November, these departures clearly matter in Washington and offer important signals about the chaos in Congress.

Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There are political dynamics that explain this rush to the exits, including frustrations with gridlock and President Donald Trump’s lackluster approval ratings, which could hurt Republicans at the ballot box.

Rather than get swept away by a prospective “blue wave” favoring Democrats – or possibly daunted by the monumental effort it would take to survive – many Republicans have decided to fold up the beach chair and head home before the wave crashes.

As of now, two dozen Republican House members have either resigned from the House or announced their intent to not run for reelection in 2026. With only two exceptions – Republicans in 2018 and 2020 – this is more departures from either party at this point in the election calendar than any other cycle over the past 20 years.

There is also growing concern within the House Republican caucus that Greene’s announcement is a canary in the coal mine and that multiple resignations will follow.

As a political scientist who studies Congress and politicians’ reelection strategies, I’m not surprised to see many House members leaving ahead of what’s shaping up to be a difficult midterm for the GOP. Still, the sheer numbers of people not running tells us something about broader dissatisfaction with Washington.

Why do members leave Congress?

Many planned departures are true retirements involving older and more experienced members.

For example, 78-year-old Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler is retiring after 34 years, following mounting pressure from upstart challengers and a growing consensus among Democrats that it’s time for older politicians to step aside. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who will turn 86 in March, is also retiring.

Sometimes, members of Congress depart for the same reasons other workers might leave any job. Like many Americans, members of Congress might find something more attractive elsewhere. Retiring members are attractive hires for lobbying firms and corporations, thanks to their insider knowledge and connections within the institution. These firms usually offer much higher salaries than members are used to in Congress, which may explain why more than half of all living former members are lobbyists of some kind.

Other members remain ambitious for elective office and decide to use their position in Congress as a springboard for another position. Members of the House regularly retire to run for a Senate seat, such as, in this cycle, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan. Others run for executive offices, including governor, such as Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

But some are leaving Congress due to growing frustration with the job and an inability to get things done. Specifically, many retiring members cite growing dysfunction within their own party, or in Congress as a whole, as the reason they’re moving on.

In a statement announcing his departure in June, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., mused that “between spending another six years navigating the political theater and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with my family,” it was “not a hard choice” to leave the Senate.

What’s unique about 2026?

In addition, there are a few other factors that can help explain why so many Republicans in particular are heading for the exits leading up to 2026.

The shifting of boundaries that has come with the mid-decade redistricting process in several states this year has scrambled members’ priorities. Unfamiliar districts can drive incumbents to early retirement by severing their connection with well-established constituencies.

In Texas, six Republicans and three Democrats – nearly a quarter of the state’s entire House delegation – are either retiring or running for other offices, due in part to that state’s new gerrymander for 2026.

All decisions about retirement and reelection are sifted through the filter of electoral and partisan considerations. A phenomenon called “thermostatic politics” predicts that parties currently in power, particularly in the White House, tend to face a backlash from voters in the following election. In other words, the president’s party nearly always loses seats in midterms.

In 2006 and 2018, for example, Republican members of Congress were weighed down by the reputations of unpopular Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Republicans had arguably even greater success in midterm elections during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Currently, 2026 looks like it will present a poor national environment for Republicans. Trump remains highly unpopular, according to polls, and Democrats are opening up a consistent lead in the “generic ballot” question, which asks respondents which party they intend to support in the 2026 midterms without reference to individual candidates.

Democrats have already been overperforming in special elections, as well as the general election in November in states such as New Jersey and Virginia, which held elections for governor. Democrats are on average running 13 points ahead of Kamala Harris’ performance in the 2024 election.

As a result, even Republicans in districts thought to be safe for their party may see themselves in enough potential danger to abandon the fight in advance.

Retirement vs. resignation

One final, unique aspect of this election cycle with major consequences is not an electoral but an institutional one.

House conservatives are quietly revolting against Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership style. That members may be frustrated enough not just to retire but resign in advance, leaving their seats temporarily vacant, is a notable sign of dysfunction in the U.S. House.

This also could have a major impact on policy, given how slim the Republicans’ majority in the lower chamber is already. Whatever the outcome of the midterms in November, these departures clearly matter in Washington and offer important signals about the chaos in Congress.

Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

President Donald Trump and his administration have presented the country’s growing military operations against Venezuela as a war against drug trafficking and terrorism. Trump has designated the government of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro as a foreign terrorist organization, the first country to ever receive that designation.

The U.S. military has killed at least 99 crew members of small boats that Trump claims, without presenting evidence, were carrying illegal drugs destined for the U.S. The New York Times reports, however, that “Venezuela is not a drug producer, and the cocaine that transits through the country and the waters around it is generally bound for Europe.”

Trump’s administration has justified the bombing of these boats by declaring they are manned by combatants. U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told the Intercept news outlet that the administration “has offered no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence for these strikes.”

There is no war. Yet.

On Dec. 12, 2025, Trump said, “It’s going to be starting on land pretty soon” and announced four days later a “total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela.”

As Trump increasingly sounds like he is preparing to go to war against Venezuela, it might be helpful to examine the run-ups to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam – two wars based on lies that led, together, to the deaths of 62,744 Americans.

As an investigative journalist who has written about the vast, secret operations of the FBI and the man who ran it for decades, I am well aware of the dangerous ability the government has to deceive the public. I also covered the opposition to the Vietnam war and the release of information years later that revealed that lies were at the heart of the start of both the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

Fear used to gin up public support

Consider the run-up to the Iraq War.

Fear was the main tool used to convince the public that it was essential for the U.S. to go to war in Iraq. The manufacturing of fear was evident in a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney in August 2002 to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

In 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council on information and intelligence that he believed showed the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Cheney said, without evidence, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was planning to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and its allies. If the U.S. did not go to war against Iraq, he said, it might experience another Pearl Harbor.

President George W. Bush chose Secretary of State Colin Powell to make the administration’s most prominent public case for going to war in Iraq in a televised speech at the United Nations. Powell was perhaps the most respected official in the Bush administration.

The White House provided Powell with a draft speech. But Powell pressed the CIA regarding what he thought were unsupported claims in the White House draft. Despite his efforts, his speech on Feb. 5, 2003, contained significant unsupported claims, including that Hussein had authorized his military to use poison gas if the U.S. invaded.

“Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world,” Powell solemnly declared that day.

He later expressed regret for making the case for war.

“I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world,” Powell later said. By then, he said, the speech was “painful” for him personally and would forever be a “blot” on his reputation.

Intelligence agencies pressed to justify war

No weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, nor was Hussein connected with al-Qaida, as the Bush administration had said it was. And Iraq did not release poison gas when the U.S. invaded the country. Early postwar assessments of how the U.S. could have invaded Iraq on the basis of serious false claims suggested it happened because the CIA and other intelligence agencies gave President Bush false or inadequate intelligence.

But as extensive official records of pre-war deliberations became available to journalists and others in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, a different explanation emerged.

John Prados, historian at the National Security Archives, discovered an explanation in hundreds of official records that meticulously document the run-up to the war.

They revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had let themselves be used, he wrote, as “a tool of a political effort, vitiating the intelligence function … They all yielded intelligence predictions of exactly the kind the Bush administration wanted to hear … The intense focus on achieving the conditions for war instead of solving an international problem led to crucial faults in military planning and diplomatic action.”

The administration did not attempt to engage in diplomacy before deciding to go to war. There never was a serious effort, even within the administration, to consider alternatives to war.

George J. Tenet, director of the CIA at the time, later wrote that “based on conversations with colleagues, in none of the meetings can anyone remember a discussion of the central questions: Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right thing to do?”

Most journalists accepted PR at face value

A dearth of serious reporting contributed to the public being ill-informed.

Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University, recently wrote that only one news organization, the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder – later known as McClatchy – exposed the Bush-Cheney “administration’s lies and falsehoods during the run-up to the disastrous war in Iraq.”

Other reporters relied on the public relations push for war being made to journalists by high-level political appointees in the military, foreign service and intelligence agencies. But Knight Ridder journalists relied on expert, longtime career officers in those agencies who were “deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration’s deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.”

Lies to Congress and the public also were at the heart of the run-up to the war in Vietnam.

President Johnson reports to Congress and the American people on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which he said happened off the coast of Vietnam but which was later disputed.

Of the two attacks on a destroyer that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson said required an immediate vast buildup of troops in August 1964, one was provoked by the United States and the other one never happened.

Few if any questions were asked when the House and Senate voted – with only two no votes – on the request for what would be known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution was used by Johnson and his successor, President Richard Nixon, to keep expanding the war for nearly a decade. By mid-1969, there were 543,400 American troops in Vietnam.

Truth and transparency are crucial

It may seem obvious that the most important lesson to be learned from those wars is that the president and all who contribute to decisions to go to war should tell the truth. But, as shown by the presidents who led the U.S. into wars in Iraq and Vietnam and from Trump’s daily remarks, truth is a frequent casualty.

That increases the need for Congress, the public and the press to demand to be fully informed about these decisions that will be carried out in their name, with their money and with the blood of their sons and daughters. That’s necessary to prevent a president and Congress from making decisions that lead to consequences like these:

In the Iraq War, 4,492 American military members were killed and approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. In the Vietnam War, 58,252 American military members were killed, 1.1 million Vietnamese military members were killed, and a staggering 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed.

Betty Medsger, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, San Francisco State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The openly racist and antisemitic podcaster has emerged as an influential figure on the American political right. Recent profiles in The Atlantic and The New York Times have elevated the 27-year-old into practically a household name.

But as a scholar of the American right, I’ve been fascinated by one aspect of Fuentes’ rise: the way some Black podcast hosts and political influencers have been receptive to some of his views.

“Isn’t that amazing?” Black pastor and radio host Jesse Lee Peterson gushed after hosting Fuentes on his show in 2023. “Finally, a white man standing up for what is right. And you heard him say it – he hate no one.”

At first blush, this might sound counterintuitive. Fuentes champions a racist vision of national populism. He has promoted the idea that the country’s identity depends on preserving its white majority. In the past, he’s defended Jim Crow, the segregationist legal regime that governed the South from the late-19th century to the 1960s, arguing that segregation was better for both Black and white Americans. He’s openly disavowed miscegenation, and castigated Vice President JD Vance for marrying an Indian woman and fathering mixed-race children.

Black people and white nationalists, however, have joined forces in the past. And a number of cultural and political shifts have broadened Fuentes’ appeal to Americans of all races.

Finding common ground

In the 20th century, Black and white nationalists were able to find common ground on the topic of racial separatism.

Marcus Garvey, a leading proponent of the back-to-Africa movement in the 1920s, and Elijah Muhammad, the former leader of the Nation of Islam, saw white nationalists as kindred spirits.

Garvey envisaged a new nation built by the descendants of African slaves. To him, the ostensible racism of the Ku Klux Klan helped drive home his message that the U.S. would never be a place that could incorporate Black people as equals. In 1922, he met with Edward Young Clarke, the Klan’s acting leader. Garvey later explained how the two shared the same vision: Clarke “believes America to be a white man’s country, and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa.”

Meanwhile, Muhammad embraced the idea of Black superiority.

In George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party from 1959 to 1967, Muhammad saw a white man who may have disagreed about which race was superior but was nonetheless serious about carving out a territory somewhere in the U.S. to build a separate Black nation. Even though Rockwell spoke of Black people as a “primitive race” and had organized a “hate tour,” Muhammad invited him to speak at the Nation of Islam summit in 1962. To Muhammad, they both had the same goal: separation of the races.

Uniting in opposition to Israel

Importantly, among both Black nationalists and white nationalists, race mixing was often cast in an antisemitic framework, with Jews accused of spurring racial integration. Rockwell claimed Jewish communists were behind the Civil Rights Movement, while the Nation of Islam published a pseudo-historical book in 1991 claiming that Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade.

Today, antizionism and antisemitism are where Fuentes and some Black conservatives appear to have found common ground.

Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s ensuing annihilation of Gaza have destabilized politics not only in the Middle East but also in the U.S.

Historically, the mainstream media in the U.S. has championed Israel, while both of the country’s major political parties have backed Israel financially and militarily.

However, due to a number of factors – including Americans’ widespread exposure on social media to the destruction of Gaza, the growing diversity of the U.S. and its ballooning debt – cracks in this uniform support have emerged.

Fuentes routinely implicates a “Jewish oligarchy” as the source of many problems that bedevil the world today, and his strident denunciation of Israel and the larger Jewish community has endeared him to antisemites and anti-Israel factions on the right, and this includes some Black Americans.

Take Myron Gaines, an internet personality who founded the “Fresh and Fit Podcast” in 2020. Born in Brooklyn, Gaines is of Sudanese descent and was raised as a Muslim. Originally, his podcast focused on issues related to the manosphere, a largely online movement that champions masculinity and opposes feminism.

But since the Oct. 7 attacks, Gaines became a vociferous critic of Israel, claiming “Zionist fingerprints” were “all over” the 9/11 attacks and JFK’s assassination. On this issue, he found common ground with Fuentes, who has frequently appeared as a guest on his program. On occasion, Andrew Tate, a popular British biracial social media personality, has joined them for discussions.

All three share an antisemitic worldview – promoting, at various points, the notion of Jewish control of finance, media and governments – with a pronounced misogynist streak.

Then there are the Hodgetwins, Keith and Kevin Hodge. The Black twin brothers launched their podcast in 2008 and now boast an estimated 2 million followers. They’ve recently interviewed a range of antisemitic guests on their program, including Fuentes, David Duke, Leonarda Jonie and Stew Peters.

In July 2025, Candace Owens hosted Nick Fuentes for a two-hour interview on her podcast. They had traded barbs in the past, but they had also, at times, praised each other. When Owens was fired from The Daily Wire for her criticism of Israel in 2024, Fuentes instructed his supporters to “stand with Candace.”

During the July 2025 interview, there were some tense moments: Owens needled Fuentes over why he hadn’t married and started a family. She also objected to his belief that race determined a person’s abilities and to his claim that Black civilization was inherently inferior. But the tone was generally cordial, and they agreed that the pro-Israel lobby had an outsized influence on American politics.

Race is becoming less black and white

There’s also a broader cultural shift at play: Racial identity is becoming increasingly fluid.

As political scientist Eric Kaufmann argued in his 2019 book, “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities,” America may be becoming more racially diverse, but this doesn’t necessarily portend a politics of racial liberalism.

Instead, he argues that those with multiracial backgrounds will tend to identify – and be identified – with the largest and most socially dominant racial group. In other words, a significant number of multiracial Americans will “airbrush” their polyglot lineage and instead focus on their European provenance. As racial boundaries become more fluid, more people of multiracial heritage may come to culturally and politically identify as white.

Just as President Donald Trump was able to draw a higher share of Black and Latino voters than any GOP presidential candidate in recent memory, Fuentes has been able to connect with nonwhite audiences. And just as Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Oath Keepers, is part Hispanic, the former leader of the “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, is Afro-Cuban American.

Fuentes himself reflects this trend. He acknowledges his Mexican ancestry – from his paternal grandfather – and yet remains an unapologetic white nationalist, calling for “total Aryan victory.”

Black podcasters may be amenable to Fuentes due to the country’s racial reality. Any program of forced racial expulsion and separation simply doesn’t seem feasible in contemporary, multiracial America.

Fuentes seems to recognize this; in fact, he recently called for a united populist front to include the political left. He urged leftists to jettison their advocacy of open borders and wokeism. Meanwhile, he’s counseled the political right to abandon its reverence for the free market.

Perhaps Fuentes favors a form of national socialism not unlike the kind that emerged in fascist Germany and Italy. But for Gen Zers who are experiencing economic uncertainty and social isolation, such a program can sound attractive – no matter their race.

George Michael, Professor of Criminal Justice, Westfield State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.