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Huge international sporting events on the level of the FIFA World Cup are a prime opportunity for a country to make a good impression on the world, but as a new piece from MS NOW argued, President Donald Trump took the perfect chance for the U.S. to do so and "blew it."

In the Sunday piece, MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem shared his own experience visiting Russia for the 2018 World Cup, calling the experience a "breeze" that left him rooting for Russia throughout the game and lamenting "the rich Russian culture that rarely gets covered in the Western press." This trip, one of the greatest of his life, was a prime example of "sportswashing," he explained, a phenomenon that involves "governments staging sports events to launder their reputation and divert attention from their misdeeds."

"President Donald Trump was handed a golden opportunity to boost America’s image to international visitors here for the 2026 World Cup," Aleem wrote. "He is the reason, after all, the world is suffering from higher oil prices. He can’t find his way out of a mortifying war he’s clearly losing, tourism is plummeting, and his international reputation is in swift decline. But he blew it."

He continued: "Trump achieved the opposite of sportswashing. His policies were hostile to visitors, he injected politics into the tournament, and he even brazenly meddled with what was happening on the pitch. In sum, his style of hosting cast the U.S. in an unusually negative light during the most widely watched cultural event in the world. Trump’s inability to see beyond his most reflexive impulses to throw red meat to his base sabotaged the larger opportunity to impress the world and soften his image. His failure to be the welcoming, gracious tournament host mirrors the way he operates with increasing frequency in domestic politics — blinkered, self-defeating. Trump’s modus operandi is one own goal after another, and an embarrassment for the United States."

Trump notably broke the trend of countries relaxing their immigration policies in order to welcome foreign World Cup spectators with open arms. Aleem noted that this was even true for past host countries like Russia and Qatar, which have similarly restrictive tendencies with their immigration laws. Instead, the U.S. made the trip "hellish, if not impossible" for many, with visiting fans from over a quarter of the event's participating nations running into bans, high rates of visa rejections or restrictions."

"A Somali referee was not allowed in the U.S. to do his job," Aleem detailed. "A number of individual players, including team members from Iraq and Haiti, struggled to get visas or were detained in airports. Many sports journalists from the Middle East and Africa were denied entry. The Iranian soccer team got treated like a band of murderers instead of elite professional athletes. Many members of the team’s support staff were barred from entering the U.S., and the team was forced to move its base training camp from the U.S. to Mexico."

He concluded: "None of this is to say that most fans who made it to the U.S. didn’t have a grand time and experience some heart-warming cultural exchanges. But the good feelings of our visitors happened despite Trump and his myriad offenses. The tournament succeeded in generating joy despite Trump’s unholy alliance with Infantino. Instead of allowing those visitors to focus on the best of America, he showed them the worst of himself

The Trump administration this week released new rules pertaining to the Endangered Species Act, and as one nature photographer warned for MS NOW, it could very well be a "mortal blow" to the protections that have done much to bring certain animals back from the brink of extinction.

Derrick Z. Jackson is an acclaimed and award-winning nature photographer, as well as a fellow in climate and energy at the Center for Science and Democracy's Union of Concerned Scientists. On Sunday, he published a new piece for MS NOW, sounding the alarm about changes implemented this week by President Donald Trump that are bound to imperil endangered animals.

"The administration’s new rule, which was issued by the Interior and Commerce departments and becomes effective Sept. 14, deletes a critical definition of what constitutes 'harm' to species on the brink of extinction," Jackson explained. "Under the old definition, harm wasn’t limited to actions that directly killed or injured wildlife. Developers, industrial polluters and landowners were also prohibited from rolling out bulldozers and backhoes and causing 'significant habitat modification or degradation' that damaged or destroyed endangered species’ 'breeding, feeding or sheltering' areas."

He added later: "It is obvious who benefits from this outrageous change. Oil and gas drillers, building contractors, mining companies, road construction groups, ranchers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all chafed at the appropriately broad interpretation of 'harm.' In one statement, the Independent Petroleum Association of America claimed the Endangered Species act was “destroying economic growth and job creation.” In a bald-faced press release hailing the change, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called the old rules a 'regulatory trap.' The new ones, he said, will 'reduce unnecessary permitting, cut compliance costs, and eliminate confusion for landowners, small businesses, energy producers, farmers, ranchers and local governments.'”

With this rule change in place, Jackson warned that companies have been given a "neon green light inviting developers to plow through the wetlands that are left, cut down more forests, build along sensitive coastlines, cast fishing nets into precious feeding grounds for migratory birds and whales, and dump more pesticides and chemicals."

Environmental groups have already sued the administration to block this change, but Jackson said that these cases are unlikely to do much in the face of the extremely Trump-friendly Supreme Court, which he also noted has been "robotically" slashing away wildlife protections in particular.

"In 2023 the Supreme Court drastically limited the definition of a wetland," Jackson explained. I"n more sane days, the Environmental Protection Agency called wetlands a 'biological supermarket.' More than one-third of all the nation’s endangered and threatened species live full time in wetlands, and more than half of such species spend some time in them. The court ruled against a generous definition of a wetland even though between 2009 and 2019, according to the Interior Department under the Biden administration, the nation lost an area of vegetated wetlands larger than the size of Rhode Island."

One of the Trump family's companies this week unveiled the latest in their long line of moneymaking schemes, and according to the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America, it constitutes "truly one of the most wildly corrupt things that has ever happened."

President Donald Trump, his family and their many business holdings have been doggedly determined to milk as much money as possible out of his second term through an unending parade of schemes and grifts. As Trump himself admitted in a recent interview, he has felt no compunction about profiting off his station after realizing that no one would stop him if he did.

Earlier this week, the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Trump's Truth Social platform, announced its intention to sell early access to "market-moving" posts on the platform from some of its "highest-ranking" accounts. The president is by far and away the biggest account on Truth Social, with his continued use of it over other social media sites being essentially the only reason it still exists. In effect, the plan appears to be selling early access to Trump's posts so that banks and traders can take advantage of how they will impact the stock market.

In one of the most recent episodes of the podcast, the former Obama administration officials at Pod Save America dug into the news, calling it an alarming new low for Trump's corrupt second-term pursuits.

"Why don't they just start asking the Treasury to print money for the Trumps?" co-host Jon Favreau, the former head speechwriter for Barack Obama, said. "That is, I don't know why we're going through all of these schemes and this and that. Everything's so complicated. Just go to [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent, ask him to start printing money, put it in your pocket, walk away."

The other co-host, former senior Obama comms advisor Dan Pfeiffer, did not mince words with his reaction to the news.

"This is truly one of the most wildly corrupt things that has ever happened," Pfeiffer said. "And that's saying a lot."

Pfeiffer also stressed that, despite the fact that Truth Social is a "stupid platform" that few people outside of political circles pay attention to, Trump's posts there are legitimate presidential statements. In effect, he said, this new plan from the Trump Media & Technology Group would be akin to past presidential administrations giving Wall Street early access to official speeches or press releases.

"Example: president announces a new ceasefire with Iran, you can use that to buy oil futures," Pfeiffer explained. "He says the end of the ceasefire, you can sell your oil futures faster than anyone else because you have paid money to the president to get access to that market-moving information before everyone else in this country."

He further suggested that the move represented an "abuse of power" from Trump, as well as an example of "a high crime and a misdemeanor," referring to the sorts of offenses for which a president could be impeached.

Ahead of the pivotal 2026 midterm elections, Politico reports that a consistently red state is being pushed away from Republicans, all because of a longstanding environmental crisis resulting in cancer-causing water.

Once considered a swing state, in the last several election cycles, Iowa has emerged as a solid red state, breaking for President Donald Trump in all three of his races. Despite that trend, there remains a hope among Democrats, backed up by recent polling data, that they might be able to pull off wins in the state this November, given how toxic Trump and the Republican Party are becoming with voters. This is especially true in Iowa, where the president's economic agenda has caused major pains for the state's many farmers.

On top of all that, Politico on Sunday released a report revealing that a long-term ecological crisis is also triggering a "political reckoning" in the Hawkeye State, and it could end up being a disaster for Republicans.

Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for Iowa's secretary of agriculture, told Politico that his "decade as a research engineer, monitoring the state’s rivers and streams," led him to pursue public office, to address the alarming things he discovered about the state's rivers and lakes. As the report explained, "Iowa’s lakes and ponds are often murky and fetid from algae blooms fed by fertilizer runoff, a byproduct of the state’s vast agricultural industry’s reliance on farming chemicals."

"Iowa has a long-simmering water problem that has finally begun to boil over — and it’s changing Iowa politics," Politico explained. "People are angry and worried about the quality of the state’s water, the health risks it poses and its increasingly undeniable tie to the state’s signature industry: agriculture."

It continued: "In recent years, Iowa’s cancer rate has climbed significantly above the U.S. average. It now stands as the nation’s second highest, and Iowa is one of only three states where the rate is rising. The situation has put a spotlight on nitrates, which are linked to a growing body of science to kidney, brain and ovarian cancer. Nitrates are a key component in the deluge of chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the state’s farmers, some of which washes off farm fields and into waterways. A second culprit is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the world’s most common weedkiller, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared 'probably carcinogenic' in 2015, an assessment rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

While candidates on both sides have long been wary of tackling issues stemming from Iowa's all-important farming industry, things are different this year. Voters are "steaming mad" about the impact these chemicals are having, and as a result, candidates from both parties have taken aim at the industry, and found success doing so. In a development that is "scrambling" the common understanding of Iowa's politics, "some of those winning candidates are Democrats."

"In the Republican primary for governor, a businessman, farmer and political operative named Zach Lahn shocked the political establishment by edging out Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra for the nomination," Politico explained. "Lahn won, in part, by openly acknowledging the state’s water crisis and connecting the dots between agriculture and cancer. Lahn was also the first candidate for statewide office endorsed by MAHA Action, the main PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. MAHA voters supported Kennedy and President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, but have since rebelled against some of their moves, especially the Trump administration’s open support for glyphosate."

It continued: "As for the Democrats, they have their best shot in a decade or more of winning statewide offices in November’s election. Democrat Josh Turek is neck-and-neck in recent polling with Republican Ashley Hinson in the open race for U.S. Senate. And Lahn’s Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, bested him by one percentage point, within the margin of error, in recent polling in the governor’s race."

President Donald Trump delivered a widely-maligned speech on Thursday night claiming without evidence that China had stolen the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Even as he attempts to use this to justify having the Department of Homeland Security order states as to who can vote, a Wall Street Journal columnist argues that his spreading of the China lie promotes a double standard that undermines his administration in other ways.

“President Trump during his prime-night speech on Thursday broke the non-news that China has sought to interfere in U.S. elections,” Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley wrote on Sunday, referring to the fact that it has long been widely known that nations like China and Russia have tried to alter presidential election results. “Xi Jinping must have chuckled at the president’s professed outrage.”

From there, Finley pointed out that Trump’s actions as president are not those of a man who views China as a threat to US security.

“On his first day in office, Mr. Trump gave the Chinese Communist Party a license to spy on Americans and meddle in U.S. elections when he issued an executive order that suspended enforcement of a law requiring TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, or be banned in the U.S,” Finely wrote. “The TikTok reprieve may be the biggest blunder of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and it is coming back to bite him as the platform fuels the rise of socialism and opposition to the war in Iran.”

She added, “A recent study found that TikTok’s algorithm systemically suppressed pro-U.S. content on the war and amplified anti-U.S content. Odds of such a skew occurring by chance are about 1 in 6.5 million. Is this Beijing’s invisible hand at work? It’s impossible to know, which is the problem.”

As one example, Finley described how TikTok seemed to help the candidacy of a Colorado Democrat running for Congress, Melat Kiros, who defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in part because of Kiros’ popular TikTok video. At the same time, Finely did not attribute possible amplification of Kiros to the Democrat being associated with the political left, noting that TikTok also seemed to boost Trump’s content during the 2024 presidential election.

“Mr. Trump granted TikTok a reprieve, convinced that the platform helped him win the election,” Finley argued. “He may be right. A study found that TikTok’s algorithms favored Republican content during the campaign. Might TikTok engineers have tweaked the algorithms to help Mr. Trump in hope that he would suspend its death sentence?”

She added, “Mr. Trump charged Vice President JD Vance with brokering a deal to save TikTok through a sale to U.S. investors. The ultimate deal was as lousy as Mr. Vance’s memorandum of understanding with Iran. lt allowed ByteDance to retain a 19.9 [percent] stake in TikTok—the largest of any investor—and control over TikTok’s algorithms.”

Overall, Finley concluded that Trump’s own actions regarding TikTok undercut his claims to be alarmed at Chinese influence over American politics.

“It’s no small irony that Mr. Trump’s TikTok reprieve has helped socialists like Zohran Mamdani, whose 2025 campaign for New York mayor caught fire on the platform, where his videos received 307 million views,” Finely argued. “You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether Chinese Communist Party wizards behind the screen abetted his success.”

She added, “Beijing wants nothing more than to poison American politics by fomenting discord and distrust in its institutions, including its capitalist system. Could the Communist Party be covertly amplifying the rancorous voices like Mr. Mamdani and Tucker Carlson? It deserves investigating.”

President Donald Trump is able to stay in power because of a “structural” problem in American democracy — at least according to a former Trump adviser who has previously warned about the nation losing its sense of shame regarding the Republican leader’s conduct.

“America has a structural problem,” Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street worker and former Trump communications director, posted on X on Sunday. “When you gerrymander your district and screen out everyone who doesn’t already agree with you, you never have to modify your positions. You never have to meet anyone in the middle. You just keep winning by playing to your base.”

Yet in the process, Scaramucci observed, politicians are not required to compete in the marketplace of ideas against individuals who might effectively push back on them, both philosophically and politically.

“But imagine if we drew districts that actually reflected the demographics of the area, regardless of party,” Scaramucci wrote. “Suddenly candidates are in a marketing competition. They have to appeal to moderates. They have to move toward each other.”

He concluded that, because this does not happen, members of both parties are encouraged to become increasingly extreme.

“The system used to produce that naturally,” Scaramucci wrote. “Members of Congress used to go to lunch together, socialize, build relationships across the aisle. The system is now designed to prevent that.”

Scaramucci has been an outspoken opponent of Trump during his second term. For example, he recently appeared on MS NOW to tell host Nicolle Wallace that the teleprompter operator accused of insider trading based on the president’s speeches erred by believing someone like him — who is not wealthy — would be protected just like Trump’s wealthy insiders.

“He doesn't qualify, the poor kid, because he doesn't make enough money,” Scaramucci said. “He's not influential enough, and his last name isn't Trump. So the kid's obviously in a lot of trouble, and he's going to pay the price while the president's going to go on to make several billion dollars for himself.”

He added, “He sees it as incredibly smart: ‘Look how smart I am. The other people that held his position, they couldn't do this. Look how great I am.’ While Barack Obama had a seven- or eight-page financial disclosure, he had a phone book of 927 pages. And, oh, by the way — you pointed this out — he thinks it's peanuts compared to what the tech blogs make, etc. He also thinks a lot of the stuff that he's doing is legal.”

Scaramucci concluded, “And if you look through the financial disclosure, where he was actually breaking the disclosure law, he's paying the $200 requisite fine. So he's laughing his way to the bank. His attitude is, ‘You know, this is what all presidents should have been doing. Look how smart I am.’”

President Donald Trump appears to be more and more consumed by his obsession with the 2020 election and his false claims about election fraud, and according to his one-time biographer, this fixation seems to be the result of a genuine "mental illness" separating him from reality.

Trump's 2020 obsession entered a new phase this week, as he used a primetime address on Thursday to claim that newly uncovered documents proved that there was outside interference in the election that he lost to Joe Biden. Closer examinations of these materials by reporters, however, showed that they proved nothing of the sort. Trump also seems stuck with no way to push his election fraud obsession forward, given that the SAVE America Act remains stalled in the Senate without enough votes to pass.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive insider-sourced coverage of Trump's political career. In the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he touched on Trump's unending 2020 fixation, claiming that it is by no means a bluff from him to try and create the pretense for election rigging, but rather a genuine belief that the race was stolen from him.

“I think everyone around him understands, in fact, that he absolutely believes this,” Wolff explained to his co-host, Joanna Coles. “No one else believes it. No one else believes that he won the 2020 election. But he does believe it.”

He added further: “And that to me is actually the kind of the scarier thing, the larger thing than that. This is another way for him to try to manipulate the election, or another way for him to set up a rationale for losing the election. There is mental illness here, and it’s kind of a result of his paranoia, his resentments, his insecurity, his inability to appreciate reality, I think you might most accurately say.”

When pressed by Coles about why Trump would bother "reopening this wound" when there are so many other pressing concerns at the moment, Wolff said that it is "because he’s a nutter," and the election fraud idea is "an obsessive thing in his mind." This obsession with something that has no political upside at a time when he and the GOP overall are floundering, Wolff argued further, is more proof that Trump is mentally unwell.

“Again, this is another description of why you have to see this as an illness: that he can’t get away from this,” Wolff said. “This does no good for him, and I think we’ve seen in the reaction of other Republicans, this is a political negative for him. And yet he pursues it because he can’t not pursue it.”

In a recent post to Substack on the same topic, Wolff detailed personal encounters with Trump that drove home how much his thinking about 2020 is driven by a kind of "delirium."

"On two occasions I’ve sat with him as he has outlined his case for the stolen election. All his hurt on display,” Wolff wrote. “It’s an obsessive recitation of numbers that he’s been told and then revised to his own specifications of strange things that happened. He’s been told in the night of fragments of information that might easily be disputed or corrected, but have long since lodged in his head. It’s a kind of delirium.”

The Iran war is already controversial, as it has taken a toll on the US economy and was opposed by most Americans from the beginning. President Donald Trump has blood on his hands by waging the Iran war without any seeming purpose, at least according to a Republican who advised the previous GOP president, George W. Bush.

“Two more Americans are dead,” Steve Schmidt, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote on his Substack on Sunday. “That fact stands apart from politics. It can’t be explained away by speeches, obscured by patriotic slogans, or redeemed by presidential bravado. Two American families have entered a fraternity of grief that no one chooses to join. Their loss is permanent. The decisions that led to it demand scrutiny.”

He added, “This is Donald Trump’s war. No one compelled him to widen this conflict. No one forced him to make the judgment that military escalation best served the national interest. Those were presidential decisions. In the American system, the authority to commit military force carries with it the obligation to answer for the consequences. Every commander in chief owns the wars he begins, and every commander in chief owns the burden of explaining why Americans are asked to fight, to bleed and, sometimes, to die.”

Schmidt went on to accuse Trump of waging the war in Iran without any clear mission or plan for victory. As a result, he characterized the loss of American lives as immoral rather than merely tragic.

“The office of the presidency is the greatest public trust ever bestowed by a free people,” Schmidt argued. “It grants one individual the authority to send young Americans into mortal danger. No responsibility in our constitutional system is more profound. None requires greater humility. None permits less vanity.”

He added, “History is unmoved by rhetoric. It asks only a handful of questions. Was the country safer? Was the cause necessary? Were the sacrifices justified? Could wiser judgment have prevented the loss? Those questions aren’t answered at campaign rallies. They’re answered in military cemeteries. They’re answered in rehabilitation wards. They’re answered in the quiet grief of Gold Star families. Two more Americans are dead. The burden of proof belongs to the men who led them into this war.”

Schmidt concluded, “Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have yet to carry it.”

Ever since the Iran war commenced, Schmidt has been one of the most prominent conservative voices denouncing it. For example, in April, he noted that the war is directly responsible for many of the economic problems facing Americans.

“The economy is in free fall — it's in a state of collapse,” Schmidt posted on X at the time. “There are fuel shortages all over the world, and diesel is $7 a gallon. In California, there will be food shortages because fertilizer can't make it through the Strait of Hormuz, and neither can hydrogen or helium, or dozens of other precursor agents that are necessary to sustain the global economy.”

He added, “This is a lost war led by a fool.”

Multiple experts are warning that President Donald Trump is gradually eroding American democracy through his actions since resuming office in 2025. Now, a new study from the American Journal of Political Science explains how so many Americans are willing to go along with his authoritarianism.

To learn this, researchers turned to Norway in order to assess how ordinary people reacted when surrounded by individuals with authoritarian ideologies, reported PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan on Sunday. In a paper co-authored by Sirianne Dahlum, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Alexander Wuttke, the scholars conducted a “field experiment [which] randomly assigned soldiers to different rooms during boot camp, so soldiers lived among peers with varying levels of openness to authoritarian rule. We found that many individuals adjusted their privately reported support for authoritarian rule to align more closely with their peers.”

They added, “Further survey-experimental evidence among soldiers and the general Norwegian population confirms that learning about others’ level of support for authoritarian rule changes both perceptions and own support. Our results suggest that support for authoritarian rule can have a social basis and could potentially spread through social contagion in established democracies.”

As a result of their study, the researchers concluded that there are weaknesses in democratic cultures when it comes to combating authoritarian ideas.

“The social basis of regime preferences that we have identified could imply that support for authoritarian rule could quickly spread in a society when citizens realize that these attitudes are more widespread than previously thought,” the authors explained. “It also points to the potential for cascade effects, where initial shifts in attitudes—through exogenous shocks—can spread rapidly through social networks, potentially leading to widespread changes in political norms. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for identifying how authoritarian sentiments might proliferate even in seemingly stable democracies and for developing effective strategies to reinforce and sustain democratic values.”

The researchers learned this first by studying over 1,300 Norwegian military recruits and how their authoritarian views evolved based on whether they were placed in rooms with peers who held or did not hold authoritarian views. They examined how these recruits’ attitudes changed over a period of eight weeks based on those exposures. Then they did the same thing with people outside the Norwegian military.

“To test whether these findings apply outside the military context, the scientists replicated the survey experiment using a representative sample of 1,500 general Norwegian citizens,” Dolan wrote. “The participants received similar prompts about the popularity of strongman leadership in a recent public opinion poll. A control group answered the questions without receiving any prior information about the views of others.”

Dolan added, “The findings in the general population closely mirrored the results from the military recruits. When ordinary citizens were informed that authoritarian views were widespread, they reported higher levels of personal support for strong leaders. The researchers then conducted a final replication using a massive cross-national sample of over 25,000 respondents from more than 29 different countries, which yielded the same pattern of social influence across diverse cultural contexts.”

As Kotsadam told PsyPost, “The field experiment shows that attitudes can converge among people who actually live together, while the survey experiments indicate that simply learning what other people believe can itself alter stated preferences. More broadly, the findings suggest that the stability of democracy depends not only on what citizens privately believe, but also on what they think their fellow citizens believe.”

If there is any silver lining to the study, it is that these views are not set in stone.

“They can be influenced by the surrounding social climate,” Kotsadam told Doland. As such, “making support for democratic principles visible may help reinforce those principles.”

Writing for Zeteo in April, journalist John Harwood further identified how Trump has eroded democratic norms to turn America into a dictatorship.

"To state the obvious, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler," Harwood wrote. "MAGA is not Nazism. No despot or movement in history compares to the Third Reich, and the nature and scale of evil it perpetrated. Moreover, Trump's handiwork appears less formidable today. Most of America recoils from his second-term grotesquerie. If permitted free and fair elections, voters will punish his Republican Party this fall — just as Hungarian voters have now punished Trump's authoritarian role model Viktor Orbán. But the lessons Rees identifies remain relevant to the crisis confronting 21st-Century America. And that is not merely because Trump and a disturbing number of his young fans have, at times, expressed admiration for Nazi strength and ruthlessness."

The bizarre new announcement out of President Donald Trump's Pentagon has effectively "kicked a hornet's nest," according to a new report from The Hill, with experts expressing grave concern about the lack of scientific backing and the dangers the new policy could create.

This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new policy whereby all military officers 30 and older would be required to submit to screenings of their testosterone levels, and any found to have a deficiency would be required to undergo hormone replacement therapy to correct the supposed issue. The policy, met with widespread confusion and mockery, fits the secretary's longstanding insistence that the military's shortcomings could be fixed with a greater focus on masculinity.

The scientific community, however, is not at all convinced by the idea. In a report published Sunday, The Hill spoke with experts who warned that Hegseth's rationale for the policy lacks sufficient scientific evidence and warned that trying to influence testosterone levels in military officers could lead to dire side effects.

"Hegseth argues the effort, to become part of the military’s periodic health assessment for troops over 30, will ensure the optimal performance and long-term health of warfighters," The Hill explained. "But medical experts say Hegseth’s rationale for the directive isn’t backed by science, warning of overdiagnosis and warning of side effects like heart problems and infertility. Coming amid the broader embrace of the hormone among White House officials, the move plays into Hegseth’s focus on appearances and masculinity, which one Democrat said this week borders on 'homoeroticism.'”

Speaking with the outlet, Derek Griffith, the director of the program for research on men’s health at the University of Pennsylvania, stressed that low testosterone is far from a common issue, noting that only around 2 percent of the male population is impacted by it. Given that the military is already staffed by "a group of relatively younger, fitter men and women," Griffith doubted that low testosterone would be anything close to a "major issue" there. He also noted that things like "heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, depression and alcohol abuse" were the actual major causes of health issues in men that the military ought to focus on.

“I don’t fully understand,” he said of the new screening guidelines. “I don’t know what they’re seeing or what data they’re using to say ‘this is where we need to really focus and put our energy.'"

He added: “It’s not what’s usually a major issue for healthy men. I imagine for most active-duty military, they’re pretty much at a healthy weight. So I would be curious what percentage they’re expecting to identify who have low testosterone and would be in need of a treatment.”

Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor in the department of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University, warned of the side effects that increased testosterone doses could carry.

"Testosterone even in low doses increases heart problems, kidney problems, infertility and fractures, which hardly seems like a good way to keep soldiers in fighting form," Fugh-Berman said. Hegseth’s remarks seem to imply that testosterone increases longevity, and there is no evidence for that. It shrinks testicles, too. How manly is that? It’s ridiculous to screen a population for a questionable condition which has a treatment with unproven benefits and proven risk.”

Brooke Nickel, a public health researcher in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney, also expressed worry about "Young, healthy men are being told that common experiences like tiredness, stress or changes in libido are signs that something is medically wrong and that testosterone is the solution."

Even as Christian nationalist views decline throughout the United States, one pastor closely linked to President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is gaining more power through his influence at the Pentagon.

“Pastor Doug Wilson gave a surprisingly dispassionate interview to NPR’s Leila Fadel last week,” wrote The Dispatch’s Michael Reneau and Hannah Anderson for The Dispatch on Sunday. “I describe it as ‘surprisingly dispassionate’ because in the interview, Wilson espoused repealing the 19th Amendment, ending no-fault divorce, and introducing religious tests for public office; yet his delivery of these radical ideas was decidedly unbothered—a marked contrast to the responses the interview elicited from evangelicals and beyond. The emotional gap between Wilson’s rhetoric and how people respond to it is one of the defining features of his public presence. It’s also a key to understanding his ideas and how he uses them.”

Wilson is an evangelical pastor from Moscow, Idaho, who is particularly influential with Hegseth and the Defense Secretary’s inner circle. Wilson was even invited to preach at a Pentagon worship service that the cabinet officer began last year.

“Given his proximity to power, Wilson has become the subject of national media coverage, which often focuses on his claim to want to establish the United States as a Christian theocracy,” The Dispatch wrote. “Such language conjures visions of a real-life Gilead, the authoritarian and patriarchal republic that is the setting for The Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be a mistake to read Wilson as an ideologue. In fact, he spoke pragmatically in the NPR interview, naming the work of democracy as the work of persuasion. Wilson’s demeanor, even if slightly awkward, was not forceful or aggressive. He was measured, friendly, playful. But that disconnect—between the weight of what Wilson is suggesting and how easily he suggests it—is what’s concerning. “

The Dispatch pundits identify Wilson as a dangerous theocrat precisely because he is able to present his ideas in a seemingly rational manner, and also knows how to pull them back when he arouses controversy. In that vein, he also knows how to make his critics seem like they are being uncivil when they object to what he says and does.

“One way Wilson distinguishes himself, however, is how he uses radical ideas,” The Dispatch explained. “Unlike those who might hide a radical agenda, Wilson speaks openly about it—almost performatively. Those familiar with his broader body of work know that he delights in the drama of it all in much the same way that President Donald Trump seems to. Wilson doesn’t reverse course so much as place responsibility for the drama on others. He courts outrage and then retreats to the abstract when others react. ‘Screamers,’ he called them in the NPR interview.”

They added, “Speaking with Fadel, Wilson suggested that previous interviewers just threw ‘mud at the wall. You’re a fascist. You’re a Nazi. You’re a thing, you know…’ but now, he’s ‘risen to the dignity of needing to be intelligently opposed.’ In other words, the problem isn’t what he said; it’s that you (mis)understood. You were too sensitive. Satire is a legitimate form of argumentation, and you don’t understand how rhetoric works.”

Even when Wilson treads on incendiary ground, like downplaying the horrors of American slavery or encouraging people to interact with child sex abusers, he does not seem to lose influence within the MAGA universe.

“Wilson’s ability to separate the theoretical and actual also explains how he could devote his first book to a philosophical exploration of American slavery, writing that it was a ‘normal sinful situation’ rather than an ‘apocalyptic evil,’” The Dispatch explained. “The cover image is of a ‘black and tan,’ a mixed drink made by pouring a darker beer over a lighter one. This same indifference explains how Wilson could guide a young woman who was a New St. Andrew’s student to marry a convicted pedophile who was a part of their church community (and who had abused children within the church as an NSA student himself). Not only did Wilson mishandle the previous cases of sexual abuse, he diagnosed the groom’s behavior as ‘temptation,’ with the theoretical cure being sexual expression in marriage. The groom was later removed from the home when a judge ruled he could not live with his infant son due to failed polygraphs and further violations.”

They concluded, “If being a pastor is akin to being a doctor, Wilson is the doctor willing to experiment on his patients. And now, it seems, the nation itself.”

Wilson’s rising influence speaks to how the Trump political structure is inextricably tied to Christian nationalism. In March, The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe reported that “people not attuned to the evangelical world may have missed the growing prominence of hyper-politicized churches such as Mercy Culture, which have become a key wing of the MAGA coalition. Compared with the religious right of previous generations, this cohort of pastors, influencers, and self-described prophets offers up a version of worship that’s at once more mystical, with an emphasis on supernatural powers, and more militaristic, with heightened political rhetoric.”

Monroe continued, “Many adopt a Christian-nationalist framework, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed as such.”

This philosophy directly contradicts the ideas of America’s key founding fathers, including President Thomas Jefferson, who was the chief author of the Declaration of Independence.

"His 'empire of liberty' offered the potential to dismantle the artificial hierarchies inherited from the past and imbue all aspects of life with the promise of freedom and happiness," Dean Caivano, an assistant professor of political theory at Lehigh University and author of "A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy," explained to this author for Salon Magazine in 2024. "Although this idealized image of a free and harmonious American society is undeniably marred by the institution and legacy of slavery, overlooking the role of education and science as prerequisites for freedom and equality diminishes our ability to assess the historical and contemporary limits of American democracy critically."