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As you may have noticed, the U.S. and Iran are still skirmishing in the Strait of Hormuz. And Donald Trump is still issuing bombastic threats. If the Iranians don’t bend to his will, Trump said last week, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will cease to exist!”

Get used to hearing that. When the 60-day Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the two nations expires later this summer, we’ll see even more acrimony, even as the terms will allow tens of billions of dollars to flow into Iran with no strings attached. Of course that will allow the Iranians to rebuild their defenses. Trump has already said they have a right to deploy missiles. Meanwhile, Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz will give it a hammer over the head of the global economy for the foreseeable future.

There was a better way. In 2015, I went to Israel and interviewed a former head of Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), a former head of Mossad, and four or five other security officials. I asked what they thought of the Iran nuclear deal known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), negotiated by the Obama Administration with the backing of China, Russia and most of the rest of the world.

Their first reaction was that Obama was “a terrible negotiator.” But when I followed up by asking if that meant they were against the deal itself, the answer was no.They told me that if you can force Iran to export almost all of its highly enriched uranium and get tight inspections, which is what the deal did, that’s a real win. And they said that when the deal expired, there would be a clear basis for renewing it under favorable terms. All of these former officials insisted on anonymity, because saying publicly that the deal was a good one was “suicide in Israeli politics.”

In 2018, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu killed the JCPOA. It’s now clear this will be seen by historians as a tragic mistake. Over the last few weeks, I spoke to two experts on Iran. Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council under President Carter, is a long-time Columbia professor. In 2023, he and I co-authored an article in the New Republic about “The October Surprise,” the plot by Reagan campaign officials to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran until after the 1980 election. Ray Takeyh is a former State Department official and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Excerpts from some of their comments, oral and written:

GARY SICK:

The reality is that Iran is a nation of negotiators. As a middle-level power, Iran is always trying to get leverage wherever it can, and they’ve been doing so very effectively. We used to joke when we were sitting around the White House about how we play checkers, and Iran plays chess. They invented the game we call chess, and they’re good at it.

This is a group that spent two full years negotiating with the Obama administration and produced a remarkable document at the end. On the front page of that document, the Iranians insisted that the U.S. put in a sentence saying that under no circumstances will Iran ever [import], develop, store, or use nuclear weapons.

At my first meeting with the Iranians, at Columbia, maybe 40 years ago, the people who worked on strategy were the first ones to tell me they did not want to build a nuclear weapon. All the Americans in that group said, “Come on, we know they’re not telling the truth. You’d have to be naive to buy this.” But the reality is that Bibi has been saying for literally 40 years that Iran would have a nuclear weapon within five years unless we did something about it. He’s been making that same statement endlessly, and they never have.

Now they don’t need to. Trump has given them something even greater than a nuclear weapon to use as leverage against us. I can just see people sitting in their Situation Room in Iran saying, “Okay, we don’t really need anything else. If we just look askance, all of a sudden insurance rates around the world go sky-high, and we stop traffic coming out of the Strait of Hormuz.” That is a huge thing for Iran, and we’ve given it to them because of our bombing. We have basically gifted Iran with the chance to turn on and turn off international relations and international trade whenever they choose to.

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They weren’t joking when they said they weren’t going to build a nuclear weapon, but they have used the nuclear issue like a hostage — something they can leverage. They run material through centrifuges and increase the yield of the materials they’re working with, and we’ve treated that, basically, as a threat to build a nuclear weapon. But you may have noticed that, despite the 40 or 50 years that have gone by, when they reach 60% enriched uranium, what do they do with it? In the end, it gets buried. They did the same thing with other materials they obtained earlier. Our national intelligence services, over and over again, have come to the conclusion that yes, Iran is building a nuclear infrastructure, but it has not made the decision to build a nuclear weapon.

The biggest trouble Trump is going to have in the next election is explaining this basic problem: that he has not done what he said he was going to do, and that he’s put America’s economic interests in the hands of people who are really our enemies. That’s a hard question for him to answer, tricks or no tricks.

RAY TAKEYH:

Wars are defined by their narratives. The much-touted Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the United States has been received very differently in each country. Americans speak of peace; Iranians proclaim victory. The agreement that was finally released closely resembles the fourteen-point plan that Tehran has been promoting for months. Its most consequential provision is the decision by the United States and Iran to lift their respective blockades on maritime traffic through the Persian Gulf and then spend the next two months resolving all remaining issues. It is difficult to see how this timetable can be sustained, and extensions are likely to come.

Thus far, the Iranians have succeeded in setting the agenda. The nuclear issue is not in the MOU, but Israel’s conduct in Lebanon is. Indeed, when Israel took military action in Lebanon, the agreement nearly collapsed. The next rounds of negotiations are likely to be difficult and may well end in a stalemate. Tehran has already made clear that it will not ship out its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the mullahs have little confidence in the International Atomic Energy Agency or its director, Rafael Grossi, whom they blame for facilitating the attacks on their nuclear facilities by issuing critical reports in the run-up to the war.

Nor has the Islamic Republic given up its attempt to monetize its geography. The MOU itself stipulates:

Tolls can take many forms — transit fees, or payments in exchange for refraining from attacking the Gulf sheikdoms. The former would constitute a formal arrangement; the latter is the prerogative of an imperial power [Iran extracting tribute]. The war reveals much about mediations of power in the twenty-first century. In the end, the overwhelming imbalance of military power mattered less than expected. Iran managed to frustrate a superpower with relatively primitive technologies such as drones and speedboats.

Like many leaders who launch preventive wars, Donald Trump assumed that the benefits would outweigh the costs and that the enemy would ultimately accept terms dictated by Washington.

Instead, after being bombed twice in the span of nine months, the Iranians came to regard the conflict as existential and were determined to ensure that the United States understood the price of its belligerence. By all appearances, they succeeded.

Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer, our latest weekly effort to convey some of the historical context of the news:

(edited transcript)

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Then & Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Jon is a traveling man. I’m always in the same place.

I was thinking this week was a big week on policies related to refugees. There were a bunch of Supreme Court rulings in the last few days that expanded President Trump’s power to make decisions, particularly about Haitians, for example, and Syrians who are in the country. This is obviously part of a broader moment where the administration has tried to really clamp down on refugees coming in and on protections for those already here.

I was thinking about President Carter. You and I have both spent time with him. During the Cold War, he was also dealing with refugee policy and, in 1980, signed legislation that set the parameters for many of the policies we still have today. I’m curious what your thoughts are about Carter in that period as a contrast to where we are today on this issue of refugees.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

First of all, let’s put this in the context of seeking asylum, where the country you’re coming from is dangerous. For a lot of refugees, that’s the reason they come.

Just so we understand where we are right now, the only people Trump has admitted as refugees are about 900 white South Africans. Think about all of the murderous regimes around the world. Trump is completely unsympathetic to refugees fleeing those regimes.

Jimmy Carter also faced a country that was ambivalent about immigration. This was at the end of the Vietnam War, and there was a lot of debate about what to do with Vietnamese refugees. Carter finally decided to admit hundreds of thousands of the “boat people,” as they were called, fleeing communism in Vietnam. They turned out to be model citizens and a very important part of the country we have today.

But it doesn’t always work out quite as well, at least in the short term. The other refugee policy Carter was known for involved Cubans. He admitted many of those who came during the Mariel boatlift, including some with criminal records whom Castro had essentially expelled.

When detainees rioted at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, in 1980 while they were being held before processing, it created a huge political problem for Carter. Bill Clinton later said it cost him his reelection as governor that year.

So the politics of this can often be difficult.

The larger problem is that the Refugee Act of 1980, which Carter signed and which regularized all of this, has been abused in recent decades. A lot of people have come here claiming asylum, but they’re really here for economic reasons. The law is dysfunctional, and that’s one reason so many people think we need comprehensive immigration reform.

We were headed toward that on a bipartisan basis in 2024. Donald Trump told the Republicans: don’t vote for it. I want to use it as a campaign issue, which he then did.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Thank you. That was really interesting. We’re two of the biggest Carter scholars and students around, so it’s always great to have these conversations with you.

Have a great wedding. Congratulations to the couple, and thanks for walking us through that history.

Thanks, Jon. We’ll talk again next week.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Thanks, Julian.

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(edited transcript)

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Then & Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Jon, I remember weeks ago we touched on this, but I think it’s the question people need to keep asking.

In 2015, President Obama—who you wrote about—completed a historic deal with Iran on nuclear weapons. The formal name was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. It was controversial, although many people were optimistic that it would curtail Iran’s nuclear capacity.

Fast-forward to today. President Trump and his administration have announced a memorandum of understanding, with some details emerging about what an agreement with Iran would theoretically look like.

How do the two compare in terms of what Obama achieved versus what Trump has—or hasn’t—achieved?

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Let’s just talk about the JCPOA for a second, because people totally misunderstood that deal.

I remember going to Israel and interviewing security officials there who knew it was a good deal, but politically it was impossible for them to say so publicly.

Under that agreement, Iran didn’t merely promise to ship out 97 percent of its enriched uranium—they actually did it. All they had left under the deal could only be enriched to a little over 3 percent, which isn’t anywhere close to what’s needed to make a nuclear weapon.

Then Trump blew up the deal in 2018, with considerable help from the Israelis.

As a result, Iran now has uranium enriched to more than 60 percent. Nothing in this new deal requires them to ship it out of the country. They’re going to try to blend it down, but that process can easily be reversed.

Republicans spent years screaming that Obama had “given Iran billions of dollars.” In reality, he provided only limited sanctions relief. This new agreement would provide complete sanctions relief. Iran would initially receive something like $20 billion, and eventually roughly $300 billion would flow into the country.

This is one of the most disastrous acts of surrender in modern diplomatic history. It’s further evidence of this president’s extraordinary incompetence.

It’s hard to exaggerate how complete this surrender to Iran is. Iran basically won. They got what they wanted, and moving forward they can hold the world hostage through the Strait of Hormuz.

The deal essentially says they can start charging tolls there before long. That’s terrible for the global economy, regardless of the nuclear provisions. It will hurt countries around the world.

It’s pretty clear what this was about, Julian. Trump wanted to get gas prices down before the midterm election. That’s all he cares about. He’s trying to avoid impeachment, and he knew that if he waited any longer, there wouldn’t be enough time for those prices to come down.

So he made the deal now, entirely on Iran’s terms. We got nothing.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

The Art of the Bad Deal could be his next book.

Thank you for that comparison. I think that’s exactly the question people need to keep coming back to—the comparison between what we had and what we might be getting now.

Thanks, Jon. We’ll talk again next week.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Bye, Julian.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Bye-bye.

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Everyone is right to expect a big blue wave — maybe a tsunami — in the midterms this fall. Even with all of the gerrymandering, the odds of Democrats winning control of the House are strong. The Senate, which Republicans now control 53-47, is much closer, which makes it more likely to be the locus of a constitutional crisis.

Donald Trump is a chaos agent, and his fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous. He can’t cancel the midterms, but he will use the enormous powers of his office to try to invalidate the election of Democrats, even where the margins aren’t close.

It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself. When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.

In the not-so-fanciful scenario below, I try to show that only a powerful outside-inside resistance can save us from a constitutional crisis late this year.

The outsiders are all of us, working for a Democratic landslide starting this summer, getting out the early vote, and poll watching on November 3, then taking to the streets in November, December, and January, probably under the No Kings umbrella.

The insiders, if they have the patriotism for it, are former presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden; former vice presidents Quayle, Gore, Cheney (represented by his daughter Liz), Pence and Harris; former Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer; former federal Judge Michael Luttig (representing thousands of lawyers and retired judges), former Fed Chair Jerome Powell and investor Warren Buffett, among other luminaries, who need to be in touch with each other and prepared to speak as one when Trump’s coup attempt goes operational. Call them meta election observers. We’ll need them.

Maybe Trump will be so weak politically that he won’t try anything. But that didn’t stop him on January 6, and he’s more emboldened now. Immunity has bred impunity.

The following is all-too-plausible. I’m pretending it’s January 3, 2027, and this is a roundup story about how we got to this sorry pass. Everything before July 1, 2026, is accurate; everything after is speculative:

Washington, January 3, 2027…

The 2026 Election Crisis eased today as both houses of Congress accepted the states' certificates of election and, on the first day of the new session, completed the peaceful transfer of power from Republican to Democratic control.

Powered by big Democratic victories in November, Democratic Rep. Hakim Jeffries was easily elected the new House Speaker. The Senate can wait before electing a majority leader, but the vote to seat the five newly-elected Democrats assures that the new leader will also be a Democrat.

The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud. His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states. Republican lawmakers only broke from Mr. Trump today under pressure from a group led by all living former presidents, vice presidents and Supreme Court Justices.

Mr. Trump never made any secret of his intentions, explaining to Republicans in January of 2026 on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection:

“You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,”

That month, he informed The New York Times that there were no external limits on his power:

“There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”

In a Reuters interview, he was more specific:

“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

The roots of the crisis go back to 2016, when Mr. Trump, with the help of the Russians, sowed doubt about the integrity of the American election system, even though it is decentralized. He did so again in 2020 and 2024, despite multiple investigations that have shown that American elections are cleaner and more secure than at any time in U.S. history. Out of the billions of ballots cast in the last 25 years, election officials and prosecutors have identified only a few cases of non-citizens voting, and that was by accident.

Mr. Trump hoped gerrymandering would help Republicans hold power. After Texas, California, and eight other states drew new maps, it was clear by late June of 2026 that the gerrymandering wars netted six seats for the Republicans. Added to the three-vote GOP margin in the outgoing Congress, that meant Democrats had to flip 10 out of the 25-30 most vulnerable Republican seats to take control, which, throughout 2026, even many Republicans considered likely.

Frustrated by his continued poor prospects in the midterms, Mr. Trump planned several other ways to restrict voting. He pressured Republican lawmakers to pass the SAVE Act, which banned all mail-in voting and required proof of citizenship to vote. The bill would have disenfranchised tens of millions of women whose birth certificates, if they could even find them, do not match the married names they used to register.

As the federal bill floundered, Mr. Trump in March signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile state-by-state citizenship lists with personal information (e.g. Social Security numbers and phone numbers), and instructing the Justice Department to investigate groups distributing ballots to ineligible voters, though there is no evidence of any such groups ever doing so.

An April executive order banned mail-in voting. When that was challenged in court on the grounds that the Constitution explicitly says states determine the rules of elections, Mr. Trump changed tactics. He leaned on the U.S. Postal Service, an independent government entity, to issue a new rule requiring post offices to refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in states that won’t give the Trump Administration the records containing personal information demanded in the March executive order. After 23 states filed suits to block these breaches of privacy, three courts in early 2026 ruled against Trump, who continued his efforts to discredit mail-in ballots, now used by 30 percent of voters.

Ever since his second term began, Mr. Trump has focused on expanding his emergency powers. On September 25, 2025, he signed a National Presidential Security Memorandum, known as NPSM-7. This extraordinary document grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “ anti-Christian” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” NPSM-7 gives the Trump Administration a green light to target any protester, violent or not, and anyone working on any Democratic campaign or voter registration drive, and to treat political speech as terrorism.

The president also possesses classified emergency powers in the form of PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents), which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington. Such powers include the authority to detain individuals designated as terrorists, restrict movement, seize property, and assume control of communications systems.

Mr. Trump has also spoken several times about invoking the Insurrection Act, but the sweeping powers he already enjoys—through NPSM-7 and PEADs—may be easier to implement.

Mr. Trump’s is still trying to spread his debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In February of 2026, FBI agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots from the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta, despite no evidence of wrongdoing. The probe—a kind of dress rehearsal for the midterms— began with an election denier working in the Trump White House. Tulsi Gabbard, then director of national intelligence, was on the scene, an early sign that Mr. Trump might make use of intelligence services in domestic politics, a violation of federal law.

In a second rehearsal for the coming confrontation, the FBI in June of 2026 tried to intimidate Ohio Democrats by raiding the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a George Soros-backed progressive group. Federal agents searched the homes of people associated with the group, and a board member of the grassroots organization accused the agents of “intimidation tactics and harassment.” The FBI operation laid the groundwork for post-election accusations of voter fraud in Ohio.

A third rehearsal, focused on delegitimizing the whole idea of elections, came after the June California primary. Because of its extensive use of mail-in ballots, California, which has a reputation for clean elections, takes days to count the vote. Mr. Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and federal prosecutors in California all took this as evidence of fraud, and prosecutors opened bogus investigations.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified that he could not rule out sending troops to polling places, even after warnings from lawmakers that doing so would be clearly illegal.

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Attorneys trying to block Mr. Trump’s efforts later acknowledged that they had not done enough to deter abuses by threatening pro-Trump lawyers with disbarment and civil suits if they intervened in the midterms, and by warning government officials that, unlike the president, they enjoyed no immunity from prosecution.

As the campaign heated up, Mr. Trump’s numbers continued to sag. He thought that he had put the Iran War behind him with his June 19 deal. But the ceasefire expired in late August, and Iranian negotiators were determined to embarrass the American president. This ensured that Trump’s failures in Iran would be back in the news over Labor Day, just weeks before early voting began. Inflation came down a little, but not enough to help Republicans.

In October, Elon Musk and the crypto and AI industries poured tens of millions into Republican campaigns. This affected the outcome of several contests, but it would not prove decisive overall. As in Wisconsin’s 2025 judicial elections, Musk’s involvement boomeranged on any Republican taking his money. And outspent Democratic candidates compensated for all of the SuperPAC money being used against them with effective ads charging that their opponents were “bought by billionaires.”

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As early voting began, “No Kings” rallies drew 15 million people nationwide. The message from organizers was that if even 10% of attendees volunteered to get out the vote, the Democratic operation would easily exceed Barack Obama’s 2008 million-member Election Day operation as the largest political organization in U.S. history.

At three of the more than 2,100 “No Kings” events, some of the same violent protesters who disrupted peaceful vigils outside an ICE detention center in New Jersey made news by clashing with police.

With that pretext, Trump announced that he was sending ICE and other federal law enforcement personnel to polling places, as recommended by Steve Bannon after ICE agents were deployed in airports. The decision was fiercely resisted in federal court and caused another sag in Trump’s popularity..

On Election Night, 2026, the trend line for the midterms was apparent early. Just as in special elections in 2025 and 2026, Democrats romped. By 1:00 a.m., it was clear that even with many mail-in ballots still uncounted, Democrats would have at least a 20-seat majority in the House. Most of the new seats were in states with Democratic governors, which meant there was little chance the results would not be certified. The Senate was much tighter, but Democrats were on track to pick up five seats, giving them a 52-48 majority.

As he did in 2020, Mr.Trump went on TV late in the evening to say that Republicans had won “by a lot” and this time he said he would use all of his authority to investigate and prosecute Democrats for vote fraud. They’re crooked and we will lock them up,” he said of Democrats.

At 3:00 a.m., the president called Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, where James Talarico had claimed a narrow victory and Ken Paxton announced he would not concede — ever. With Latino voters streaming back to the Democrats, two of the five new seats created by the new maps that had set off the mid-decade redistricting frenzy had gone blue, plus TX-15, where a popular singer knocked off an incumbent.

To calm Trump down, Abbott told him what he wanted to hear, despite the lack of any evidence: “There is massive voter fraud underway in Texas, Mr. President. Not everywhere, but along the Rio Grande and in Austin, Houston, and a few blue areas of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro. The secretary of state, Jane Nelson, is my appointee, and you can rest assured, she will not be certifying Talarico or those three other Dems before we have full recounts and investigations.”

Over the next month, with control of the Senate still hanging in the balance, the national conversation turned to certification of elections, which is a ministerial duty with no discretion by county officials or secretaries of state, especially after recounts.

In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper flipped the seat held by retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, and the bipartisan North Carolina Board of Elections certified his election. But Trump made sure that Attorney General Todd Blanche reminded the three Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys in North Carolina that he expected them to open fraud investigations.

One of the brightest spots for Democrats was the election of Paralympic gold medalist Josh Turek in Iowa. But U.S. Attorney Leif Olson, a hardcore Trump loyalist in a state where the GOP is extremely pro-Trump, announced a criminal investigation of voter fraud and bristled when reporters pressed him for evidence.

Georgia was a mess. Senator Jon Ossoff, a hot Democratic prospect for 2028, won by a healthy six points, but even a much larger margin would not have prevented Mr. Trump from crying foul. The president couldn’t call Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger again, looking to “find” votes, as he had in early January of 2021. But he didn’t need to. After the 2020 election, Georgia adopted new administrative rules that invite many election officials to investigate results before certifying, a recipe for slowing the process.

Earlier in 2026, a Trump-appointed federal judge upheld the Justice Department’s raid on the Fulton County Courthouse and its seizure of 2020 ballots, despite no evidence of tampering. This gave Blanche an excuse to send the feds in to seize all 2026 Fulton County ballots and election equipment. Election officials there sat down in front of the voting machines and were arrested for obstructing a federal investigation, but their civil disobedience went viral and was copied everywhere FBI raids took place.

In early December, No Kings produced another day of huge protest, but this time Mr.Trump told his followers to stage counter-protests at the same sites. The Proud Boys, including some of the same violent insurrectionists pardoned by Trump, began beating peaceful anti-Trump protesters. When a few fought back, Trump had the pretext he needed to invoke NPSM-7 and PEAD.

The FBI raided the homes of law-abiding anti-Trump activists, including No Kings organizers, as it had in Ohio in May of 2026. Under NPSM-7, hundreds were designated as “domestic terrorists” and jailed. And under PEADs, Mr. Trump could act now and worry later about civil liberties.

With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers — intended for nuclear war — was unconstitutional in domestic politics.

The same morning, former Fed Chair Powell, a member of the committee, told CNBC that he expected the market to lose one-third of its value if the election results were not respected and the U.S. was seen as no longer being a democracy. A day later, the organizers of No Kings called for a general strike starting January 6 that promised to shut down the U.S. economy until the will of the people was respected.

On December 28th, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that NPSM-7 and PEADs did not apply in domestic politics and that while fraud investigations could continue, they could not delay the resolution of the midterm elections. The majority opinion noted that under the Constitution, the Senate alone determines who should be seated in that chamber.

That set up the historic Senate vote before noon today, in which Republican lame ducks Cassidy, Collins, Cornyn, and Tillis (plus Murkowski) voted with the Democrats to seat the new members. At noon, all the senators-elect became senators.

Under the Constitution, the vice president is president of the Senate, but he has no role in determining the composition of that body. All that was left for Vice President Vance was to announce the results and bring down the gavel, symbolizing the failure of Mr. Trump’s efforts to steal the election.

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Resources to join the fight against what former Reps. Dick Gephardt and David Skaggs and former Sen. Tim Wirth call a “rolling coup”:

Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote For This, by Ira Shapiro and Anne Kim

• The Brennan Center for Justice

• Protect Democracy

• Democracy Docket

• Keep Our Republic

JULIAN ZELIZER

Hi everyone, welcome back to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Longview.

JONATHAN ALTER

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER

So, Jon, I was reading the Financial Times, and I saw an article that I thought would interest both of us. It essentially makes the comparison between President Carter and Iran in 1979 and ‘80 during the Iran hostage crisis, and President Trump and Iran today.

The author, Ed Luce, points to many differences. He argues that Carter rejected the Monroe Doctrine, while Trump seems to embrace it. Carter did the Rose Garden strategy of essentially going dark for a while on the issue, while Trump is trying to shape how people see this.

But he argues that, in the end, both presidents became trapped, so to speak, by the logic and dynamics of what Iran wanted and their internal politics. And I was curious, as the biographer of Carter, what you thought of that comparison.

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JONATHAN ALTER

Well, Carter was the un-Trump in many ways. I remember when I was turning the pages of the documents at the Carter Library in Atlanta, they would sort of brush aside the toxins of Trump when I would read about Carter’s honesty and integrity.

But it’s a pretty valid comparison in that both of them, as you said, are kind of hostages to the Iranians.

So, in Carter’s case, it was real hostages: 52 Americans who were being held hostage. And then they essentially took his presidency hostage by holding them.

In Trump’s case, the hostage is the Strait of Hormuz. That’s the hostage. And it allows the Iranians to yank Trump’s chain in the same way they yanked Carter’s chain.

And whatever else you say about them, the Iranians are terrific negotiators. And I don’t think it’s engaging in unfair stereotypes to say that anytime somebody’s bought a Persian rug, they know what I mean.

So the chances of Trump getting out of this in an advantageous position, I think, are quite low. And you’ll see him continue to muddle through, continue to change his mind day to day on what’s going to happen next. And you will see continued erosion in his support for a very, very unpopular war.

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JULIAN ZELIZER

And just to add to one point you just mentioned, in both cases, it’s Iranians seizing on something relatively small compared to the U.S. arsenal. In one case, actual hostages, and in this case, the Strait of Hormuz, which is bigger, but it’s still not kind of a massive piece of land or weapon. And in both cases, exposing the fragility of American power.

JONATHAN ALTER

Yeah, no, I think that’s a great point. Nixon talked about the U.S. becoming a helpless, pitiful giant. He was saying that in the context of the Vietnam War.

But Carter did look weak on that issue. And he was a terrific president in many other ways, as I explain in my book, and you do in your book about Carter. But when it came to Iran, he was just basically out of his depth, and the same is true of Trump.

JULIAN ZELIZER

Well, I hope by the time we speak next week, the New York Knicks are the NBA champions, but we will wait and see. Thanks, Jon. We’ll talk soon.

JONATHAN ALTER

Thanks. Bye-bye.

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JULIAN ZELIZER:

Welcome back to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer ofThe Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, Jon, President Trump’s not the first president to have a complicated relationship with the IRS. President Richard Nixon also did.

And I think there were three ways in which Nixon had problems or controversy.

• One involved his taxes, and in 1973 stories about charitable deductions that he had taken, which wiped away his tax obligations involving vice presidential papers, ultimately led to the release of his tax returns, which then became a precedent, and Jimmy Carter did it as a candidate in 1976. But there were questions about his own taxes.

• Second were revelations later on that he tried to pressure the IRS into using audits against opponents and being friendly with his friends, even though the IRS commissioner resisted doing that.

• And finally, stories about using the IRS to go after the tax-exempt status of organizations connected to the anti-war movement and more.

So this became a big part of the Watergate investigations and his legacy.

Is Trump worse than Nixon on all of these matters?

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JONATHAN ALTER:

That’s what we’re not quite sure of yet, because Nixon was really bad, and he also paid little in taxes himself. He paid $1,000 on $200,000 of income. That’s more than Trump paid in 2016 and 2017, where he paid $800 on his millions and millions of dollars in income.

So I guess you can usually safely say that Trump is going to be worse, but there’s some interesting dimensions to the Nixon story that I was reminded of when I was looking into it a little bit.

One is that Nixon threatened to prosecute George Wallace on taxes if he ran again as an independent in 1972. So you might remember that Wallace ran as a Democrat, and he actually got shot during that campaign. But Nixon, because Wallace had almost cost him the election in ‘68, was worried that he would run again as an independent, so he basically blackmailed him and said, “You can run for president, but only as a Democrat, not as an independent.” I found that kind of interesting.

And then I was reminded that when Nixon had some papers backdated in violation of the law, the guy who did that was a fantastic guy, Ralph Newman, who owned the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, which I go to to this day in Chicago.

And he ended up, I think, going to prison over this, over misappraising these documents at Nixon’s direction. It was an example of how it’s often the peripheral people who suffer the real consequences when the president does something.

And then, finally, it was on taxes that Nixon famously said in 1973, “I am not a crook.” That was in response to some of these questions about his taxes, and they did become part of the House impeachment inquiry.

So Trump is now saying that he will never, never be able to be audited. If the Democrats get the Congress, the first thing they should do is pass a bill saying, “No, he must be audited, if necessary, like any other American,” and watch him veto that bill. It can pass with 51 votes. It is a tax measure, and watch him veto that bill.

So I think that’ll be a big issue next year if the Democrats take both houses of Congress.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, thank you. That was Then and Now. Interesting look. Follow the money, look at the IRS. It all gets to the heart of presidential politics with two administrations, and we’ll be back next week.

Go Knicks!

JONATHAN ALTER:

Bye-bye.

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For some reason, this 60 Minutes story put me in mind of 1968.

That was the horrible year in American public life when 60 Minutes first went on the air. It was also the year that the Ford Mustang put a V-8 engine in the car, and Steve McQueen used that fantastic Mustang in the movie Bullitt.

What happened at CBS News is that they gave the keys to the Mustang to a know-it-all woman named Bari Weiss, and she drove that Mustang right into a brick wall.

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I wasn’t against Nick Bilton coming in as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. I’ve admired Bilton’s work as an investigative reporter and loved one of his books, American Kingpin.

Any institution can use a shake-up once in a while. But it’s just bad management to fire the executive producer, the deputy executive producer, and, with Scott Pelley’s firing, three correspondents in one fell swoop. Add Anderson Cooper’s resignation and 60 Minutes is down four correspondents this year. It’s like some management expert said, “Get all the bloodshed done at once.”

That’s not how you treat a precious institution, especially one that’s making $200 million a year for your network and is up 9.1% in the ratings over last year.

It’s just bad management by people who don’t know what they don’t know.

Look, I’m a print journalist by training, and what I think is happening here is that a couple of print journalists, Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton, have a kind of a condescending view of television. I know, because when I was young, I shared it a little bit myself.

The attitude is that correspondents in television are not as intellectual as those in print journalism, and often don’t even write their own stories. Print people think TV is very performative, which, by the way, was the word that Nick Bilton used in the letter firing Scott Pelley to describe what he had been doing in a meeting.

All of these guys are performers. Mike Wallace was a performer. Morley Safer was a performer. Dan Rather was a performer.

That’s what took 60 Minutes to the very top of the ratings. It combined hard-hitting journalists with on-air performance, and there were all sorts of off-camera feuds to write about.

I covered media for Newsweek in the 1980s and ‘90s. I used to go over and sit with Don Hewitt, the street smart founder of 60 Minutes, a guy with the attention span of a gnat, the greatest news producer in the history of the medium, and watch as he reviewed pieces he was considering whether to air. Hewitt would always say, “It’s the audio, not the video.” That’s the key to a great piece.

It took very talented producers and very talented, yes, performers, who got into all kinds of public fights with each other, with the network, all the time. It gave me a lot to write about at Newsweek. It took all of those people to create a show with the quality of 60 Minutes.

It’s not easy to make a 13-minute 60 Minutes piece that millions of people want to watch. I get the sense that Weiss and maybe Bilton think it is. Why else would she go over to the 60 Minutes offices the day before a piece was supposed to air and pull the thread on a story producers had been working on for six months?

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These jokers come in, and they think that, oh, we can just use 60 Minutes for brand extension. We can put 60 Minutes on TikTok. I don’t know exactly what their big new idea is, but they apparently want to take the formula and see if they can put their own twist on it.

Now, by this time, CBS had already done a lot of damage to 60 Minutes. Corporate cowards gave Donald Trump $16 million to settle an absolutely preposterous case that he brought against 60 Minutes for the way it edited Kamala Harris’s interview.

Stephen Colbert was absolutely right. That was a simple bribe by CBS, and by saying that on television, Colbert probably sealed his own fate.

So, the problems at 60 Minutes have been accumulating, and the question now is whether Weiss and Bilton have murdered 60 Minutes, as Scott Pelley alleged.

I hope not. I hope it’s not dead.

We need institutions like 60 Minutes to survive this sorry passage in our public life.

I wish them luck. I hope that talented journalists go to 60 Minutes now to help them come back. And I hope that the many talented producers who are still working at 60 Minutes can dry their tears and go to work on creating a terrific 59th season for one of the greatest shows in the history of television.

Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer (taped before Pelley’s firing), comparing the launch of Fox News led by Roger Ailes in 1996 and the latest changes at CBS News under the leadership of Bari Weiss in 2026.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

Welcome back, everyone, to Then and Now. Jon, I’m sure you and I have both been following the stories about Bari Weiss this year, who is now an executive at CBS and has been making all kinds of changes to the news division that have been front and center as part of the conversation about the pressure networks are facing under the Trump administration.

I was thinking back to another time we both remember, in 1996, when Fox News started and Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to run the station. Ailes, of course, was a well-known political operative. He worked for Richard Nixon on his campaigns and helped him become more media savvy. He worked with many other candidates as well, including Mitch McConnell during the 1980s.

Ultimately, Fox epitomized, in that era, this intertwined relationship between news and politics. I’m curious how you think about that and what Ailes did at the station compared to what, at least as far as we know, is happening with CBS in various ways.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, first of all, the administration does want CBS News to become a kind of less obviously right-wing Fox. They want it to be Fox. That’s their goal.

But they don’t have quite the same ally in Bari Weiss that they had in Roger Ailes, who was an ideological right-winger ,and threatened to sue me at one point for something I wrote about him.

Bari Weiss sounds sometimes a little bit like a neocon, but she’s not nearly as doctrinaire as Roger Ailes. She also has no experience, whereas Roger Ailes was a very experienced television producer, going back to when he worked on The Mike Douglas Show. He was a television programming genius.

Bari Weiss is a woman who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and she’s in a medium that she doesn’t understand. So I’m going to be very interested to see how Nick turns out. He’s new at the head of 60 Minutes. He wrote a wonderful book called American Kingpin, so he’s got a lot of talent. It could be that he works out and develops something really interesting.

But why not just have him develop a new show? 60 Minutes was doing really well. I think its ratings were up 9 percent or something. It brings in a ton of advertising money. It’s kind of like taking your Cadillac out and wrecking it.

A lot of her decisions, and that’s not the only one, I think are a reflection of her inexperience. I don’t think she’s taking orders from the White House, but she might be doing a version of obeying in advance. Not quite obeying, but pulling your punches a little bit in advance.

That’s a very different thing from Roger Ailes simply being an extension of any Republican presidency.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

As always, a very interesting look back and comparison. Thanks for doing it, Jon. We will talk again next week.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Thanks, Julian. Bye-bye.

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Amended transcript:

After Tuesday’s Republican primary in Texas, there was a lot of cheering in the Democratic Party.

“Oh, Talarico is such a great candidate. Paxton’s such a flawed candidate. Maybe the Democrats can win this race.”

“Maybe” no longer does justice to the odds. Democrats should not get overconfident, but it’s time to move a Talarico win from “possible” to “likely.”

Why?

Look at the turnout. It was pathetic on the Republican side.

Fewer than a million and a half Republicans voted on Tuesday. Paxton got fewer than a million votes.

Compare that to two years ago, when Ted Cruz was running almost unopposed in the Republican Senate primary. He got roughly a million more votes in that noncompetitive primary than Paxton did this time.

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Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, more than a million additional people voted in this Senate primary compared to two years ago.

So the current story, at least based on the raw numbers, is this: Democrats are flocking to the polls. Republicans are staying home.

A lot can change between now and Election Day. But Ken Paxton probably needs something very big and very damaging to emerge about Talarico if he’s going to have a real chance of winning.

If you look strictly at the numbers right now, the likelihood is that James Talarico will be the next senator from Texas. That makes it likely the Senate will turn blue, and true accountability (though not removal of Trump from office) will finally be at hand.

Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer, our latest weekly effort to convey some of the historical context of the news:

transcript:

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Hi everyone, welcome back to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

So, Jon, slush funds are in the news. Republicans, at least for now, are not going along with this proposed fund from the Department of Justice, a lawfare fund that the attorney general wants to put into place.

It brings back memories of slush funds that we’ve heard about in the past. Of course, one of the most famous was in 1972: the Committee to Re-elect the President, and that was President Richard Nixon.

This operation had a slush fund of its own. It raised money in illicit ways from individuals and corporations. It was undisclosed money. And the money was used to finance all sorts of secret tricks during the election of 1972, from the break-in to G. Gordon Liddy’s multiple operations that he had running at the time.

Then it was also used to try to keep people quiet during the investigation. Hush money. And it became part of the Watergate investigations and revelations, and really a symbol of the problems of money and politics, the abuse of power. Ultimately, we had campaign finance reform in ’74.

So that was a different time, a different kind of slush fund. But how do you think of the comparison between the two?

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, first of all, I like to call this the “Self-Deal Steal.”

And just a couple of surface differences between these two slush funds: Nixon’s slush fund was $700,000. It was raised from contributors, Nixonites, and it was thoroughly corrupt and used for illegal, corrupt purposes.

Trump’s slush fund is $1.8 billion, $1.776 billion, because I thought that was cute. And it’s not raised from his contributors. At least the first part, the ballroom, is trying to get taxpayer money for that too. But this is from us. This slush fund is from us.

It’s stealing from the American people to reward people who took part in a coup d’état attempt against our country.

And we’ve been, in some ways, numbed to the January 6 part of this. We were all sort of shocked when he pardoned all of them, when J.D. Vance said that he would not do that. And now we’re all sort of shocked by this.

But this is beyond pardoning them. It’s giving them money. It’s just insane.

And the good news, or possibly good news, is that there are some Republicans on the Hill, including some who have just been victimized by Donald Trump and had their careers ended, who are maybe not as willing to go along lockstep on this.

So apparently, at the Republican lunch of Republican senators the other day, 25 of them spoke out about this and were not happy about it.

So it remains to be seen whether this will go through, but it’s the most corrupt act, I think, of any in American history. Anything that Warren Harding, or even Nixon, did just pales in comparison to this.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

I think your basic point is quite stunning: taxpayers are being asked to finance it, as opposed to contributors. It’s another step, in this case, having the public pay for a fund to support those who tried to overturn an election.

It’s an amazing proposal, and we’ll see if Republicans stick with this opposition.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Just one other thing. They said, “Oh no, none of this money is going to go to Trump and his family members.”

I saw them in court. Trump felt he was totally victimized and a victim of lawfare, which I don’t think is a very useful term. People don’t really know what it means.

But they will figure out a way. If this $1.8 billion goes through and you think none of that will end up in the pockets of the Trumps through some sort of kickback or daisy-chain laundering process, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

They’re going to get some of that money if it goes through.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, that was Then and Now. Jon, we’ll talk next week.

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My view of Stephen Colbert and the demise of his show is even less objective than that of all of the superstars who have been paying elaborate tribute to him in recent weeks. He and his formidable wife, Evie, are good friends in Montclair, N.J., where we have all lived for many years. My formidable wife, Emily Lazar, worked for Stephen in a senior role from the start of The Colbert Report in 2005 until she left The Late Show 11 years later.

Emily echoes Stephen when she says that the people who have worked with him on both shows deserve more credit than the press has given them.

Geniuses in any realm always say the same. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Jony Ive; Bruce Springsteen has his E Street Band, and Stephen, the ringmaster, has had an inspired team of writers and producers behind him all along. Sadly, most of them are now looking for work.

Let’s start with Tom Purcell, Stephen’s muse and alter ego in nerdiness. Like Raymond Siller for Johnny Carson or Merrill Markoe (with big assists from Steve O’Donnell, Bill Scheft, and others) for David Letterman, Tom’s role has been bigger than just executive producer. From the start, beyond great jokes, he has provided intellectual heft, especially on politics. If, like millions of others, Colbert has helped you process your disgust with Trump, you can thank Tom along with Stephen himself. Supervising Producer Paul Dinello, one of Stephen’s oldest friends, is a human oil can who loosens up his comic joints. Head writer Jay Katsir has written an astonishing array of good jokes -political and otherwise - over the years.

If, like me, you think that Stephen’s character on the old show was one of the most brilliant creations in the history of television, you should also thank Allison Silverman, an executive producer of The Colbert Report, who, with Rich Dahm, helped him form the character.

Stephen’s high-status blowhard look on that show–an underrated dimension-was fashioned largely by makeup artist Kerri Plante-Price. Matt Lapin has been both shows’ versatile court jester – Colbert’s Colbert. Andro Buneta, the art director, created a visual look that made the graphics almost another character. Set designer Brendan Hurley, costume director Antonia Xereas (critical for comedic bits), scrappy talent booker Amy Schwartz, and the late, great Amy Cole (Stephen’s uber-competent chief of staff) are just a few of the altar boys and girls who offered up the high priest (Stephen) what he needed before he even knew himself. I’m sorry for not mentioning all the other great teammates.

This is not just because she’s my wife: Emily Lazar was the talent producer, and later an executive producer, in charge of the guests, and her vision of who Stephen’s character should meet, argue against, and improvise with was critical to the success of The Colbert Report. My favorite moments were when she convinced Stephen to run as a South Carolina favorite son candidate for president in 2008 (he eventually withdrew); she convinced President Obama to order General Ray Odierno to shave Stephen’s head in Iraq; and she convinced Stephen to dance a pas de deux from the Nutcracker with the principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. On The Late Show, she produced an intimate interview about death with then-Vice President Biden.

In The New York Times this week, Bill Carter writes that Chris Licht, best known for being fired as president of CNN, was responsible for stabilizing The Late Show after a rocky start in 2016 by injecting more material lampooning Trump. This ticked me off because I was an eyewitness to what really happened. At the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia and the Republican Convention in Cleveland, I watched as Emily pleaded in vain with Licht to include more Trump material and political guests at the conventions and beyond. He ignored her before finally adopting her recommendation after Trump won.

It’s cold comfort for Colbert, but his firing last year will be in history books a century from now as an illustration of how America’s would-be tyrant tried to silence criticism. Don’t let cowardly CBS executives confuse the issue. I learned from a lawyer close to the deal that Trump had decreed that Skydance Media’s purchase of Paramount would not be approved unless Colbert was fired. Period. Sure, there were financial losses, but on their own, they would not have led to the show's cancellation.

Don’t worry about Stephen’s future. He has loads of talent and lots of opportunities. It will be fun to see how he seizes them.

Leon Panetta is arguably the last of the elders who served with great distinction in several high-ranking government positions in government and actually know what the hell they’re talking about. Born in Monterey, California in 1938, Panetta became an officer in the U.S.Army in the early 1960s and began his political career working for a Republican senator and in the Nixon Administration, where he defied Nixon by enforcing anti-discrimination laws as director of the Office of Civil Rights. Panetta was a widely-respected eight-term Democratic congressman from northern California and his son, Jimmy Panetta, now holds his seat. After Congress, he became President Clinton’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, then Clinton’s White House chief of staff. Under President Obama, he served as director of the CIA and later Secretary of Defense. In 1997, Panetta and his wife Sylvia founded the Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University, Monterey.

For the last few years, I’ve been part of a regular Zoom call with a couple dozen former Carter Administration officials, plus a few journalists and others. Started by Les Francis, a former senior White House aide to Carter, it’s called Carter Old Farts Amiable Discussions, or COFAD. Earlier this month, Panetta was the COFAD guest and the following are excerpts from his remarks.

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I think this country is going in one of two directions:

We can have an American Renaissance with strong leadership in a very dangerous world. Or we could become a country in decline if we allow fears, hatred, prejudice, discrimination, and division to consume us, as they are today.

We could very easily go the way of past empires. The path we take will depend on leadership. What I tell the students at the Panetta Institute is that in a democracy, we govern either by leadership or by crisis. If leadership is willing to take smart risks, we can avoid a crisis. But if that leadership isn’t there, we largely govern by crisis. And that’s pretty much what we’re doing today.

I think that’s probably true for foreign policy as well. It takes real leadership to provide good foreign policy.

Let me just say: for 80 years after World War II, whether the president was Republican or Democrat, despite their political differences, they broadly believed in the same foreign-policy principles:

• America must lead in a dangerous world.
• We must build and maintain strong alliances.
• We must maintain a strong military.
• We must maintain strong diplomacy around the world.
• Democracy is central to American strength.
• Tyrants and autocracies must be confronted, not accommodated.

They also believed in process. They had smart advisors and a functioning National Security Council, where people debated issues, developed options, examined consequences, and tried to define the objective, the strategy, and ultimately the endgame.

The Trump era has basically turned 80 years of American foreign policy on its head.

During his first term, there were guardrails. He had people like Mike Pompeo, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Mark Esper, and H.R. McMaster, who largely performed that role. But in the second term, those guardrails are gone.

The people Trump has picked this time were chosen not for experience, knowledge, or understanding of the job, but for loyalty. There are some exceptions. Rubio is probably one. CIA Director John Ratcliffe is another. And certainly Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fits that category.

But overall, it reflects what Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper: It’s about the exercise of power. It’s not about values. That’s fundamentally wrong. Of course, foreign policy is about power. But it also has to be about democratic values.

Policy in this term has been largely defined by Trump. He operates by the seat of his pants. He looks for simple solutions and quick exercises of power. There is no diplomacy. There’s no real effort to sit down, work through these issues, and truly negotiate.

He’s reached the point where he thinks that if he says something loudly enough, it will happen. And if it doesn’t, he resorts to threats and bullying tactics to get there.

The War in Iran

All of that, I think, is true with regard to the war in Iran.

In many ways, Trump missed an opportunity. The 12-day war [last June] did damage Iran and its nuclear capabilities. The Supreme Leader was weak. He was old. He was likely to move on. Iran’s economy was doing terribly. Protesters were in the streets. And the president said help was on the way, but help never came.

There was an opportunity at that point, certainly using the CIA and some of our other capabilities, to help develop leadership among the protestors and give them the assistance they needed. I think there was a good chance the regime could very well have changed.

Look, you’re not going to bomb your way to regime change. We’ve learned that lesson too many times. It has to happen from the bottom up. But there was an opportunity to build on what was underway there, and obviously, that did not happen.

They [Trump people] tried to negotiate, particularly on the nuclear issue, but their negotiators don’t understand what negotiating is all about. I actually think Iran made some pretty good offers at one point regarding the nuclear issue. They virtually ignored them.

In the meantime, Israel argued that it had good intelligence on where the leadership was, that it could essentially wipe them out, and that within days the regime would collapse. U.S. intelligence said there was no way that was going to happen. But Trump was looking for a simple solution. He likes to exercise power quickly and believed he could get it done in a matter of days.

It was a gross miscalculation. A terrible mistake.

Not only did he fail to do any real planning or think through the consequences, he also didn’t talk to Congress, our allies, or the American people.

Although the military campaign hit some 15,000 targets and undoubtedly damaged Iran, in the end, they underestimated the regime’s ability to survive, maintain its missiles and drones, and use them effectively — not just against Israel, but in ways that threaten Arab countries across the Middle East.

The administration had one objective. The president said it on the night of the attack: regime change. That did not happen.

So the president started shifting rationales. First, there was an imminent threat. Then intelligence said there wasn’t. Then he talked about unconditional surrender. Then, about appointing a new leader in Iran. The rationale kept changing. We’re now at a stage where both sides are exhausted.

The problem is this: even though much of Iran’s top leadership was wiped out, intelligence indicates that the IRGC and the military remain firmly in control. The new Ayatollah is more of a symbol. The real power now rests with the Revolutionary Guard and the military.

They’re obviously hurting financially because of what’s happened to the country. But they have stood up to both Israel and the United States. They’ve survived repeated attacks. They still possess roughly a third of their missiles and drones, and they continue to hold enriched nuclear fuel.

And in addition to all of that, they closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Every plan we ever discussed for dealing with a possible Iran conflict made clear that one of the first things Iran would do was close the Strait of Hormuz. So it astonishes me that the president and others claimed to be surprised by it. It was an obvious result.

And closing the Strait of Hormuz has given Iran enormous leverage because of the economic impact not only on the United States, but on economies around the world.

The United States did go after military targets, and you have to give credit to the military, working alongside Israel, for its ability to hit those targets.

But the problem now is that the force is stretched. As The New York Times has reported, munitions are being depleted. We’ve used large numbers of Tomahawks and Patriot missiles. Those stockpiles have gone down significantly.

Don’t forget, many of these forces have effectively been deployed for more than four months, going back to Venezuela before they were moved to Iran. They’re really stretching the military.

And it’s clear that America doesn’t support this war. The polling makes that clear. And people are obviously blaming high prices on the war and on Trump.

Under the War Powers Act, we’re [past] the 60-day mark. And I think there’s a real possibility that both the House and Senate could pass some kind of War Powers resolution, particularly if the war is not resolved.

And lastly, on the Strait of Hormuz, the United States has now imposed a blockade on top of Iran’s blockade to make damn sure nothing gets through the strait. And it’s clearly having an economic impact.

The IMF has warned that if the fuel disruption continues, the world could face not only slower growth but a global recession. I think that’s true.

In many ways, Trump has boxed himself in. We’re now in a stalemate. Both sides are jockeying for position. There are no real talks underway.

The United States says to continue the blockade and, if necessary, fire on boats laying mines. So the threat of military action continues. Iran has seized ships, closed the strait, and laid mines. And the U.S. says it could take six months to clear those mines once the decision is made to reopen the waterway.

So the problem right now is that the United States is very boxed in. It’s dealing with a regime that is, frankly, worse than the previous one. They’re deeply entrenched. They clearly don’t trust the United States, and given the current leadership, they probably shouldn’t.

And the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz will cause serious economic damage.

The Nuclear Threat

The problem is that the president has never really taken the time to understand the complexities of the nuclear issue.

The Obama administration did. It took two years to negotiate that agreement. Whether you agreed with every part of it or not, the reality is that it was effective in limiting Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.

And this isn’t simple. Even if enrichment is delayed, you still need the IAEA to inspect, monitor, and verify compliance.

Some of these facilities may now be buried, but intelligence also suggests there may be other enrichment sites. The only way to deal with that is through continued IAEA access and monitoring.

So this is complicated. It’s going to take real work to resolve these issues. You can’t just say, “We’ll postpone enrichment for five years or 20 years.” It requires much more than that.

And if the United States resorts to further military action or puts boots on the ground, it won’t just run into War Powers issues. It will run into growing anger from the American people.

Republicans are already in trouble heading into the midterms. Even they acknowledge that. And there are increasing signs that Democrats could retake not only the House, but possibly the Senate as well.

We also have to remain concerned about Israel. Israel wants regime change and always has. They are unlikely to stop pursuing it. And there’s still the Hezbollah situation in Lebanon.

So Israel remains another major factor that has to be dealt with.

What Happens Next in the Middle East

My sense is that both sides do want to end the war. But at best, it’s going to happen in stages.

The first step would be to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: end the blockade, clear the mines, and restore shipping. It would make sense to create a joint international force with our allies to help secure the strait going forward. That would likely require an indefinite ceasefire, along with at least some sanctions relief for Iran to help stabilize the country after the war.

The nuclear issue will take much longer. So will dealing with missiles and drones, and creating any meaningful monitoring system. And there will also need to be a longer-term relief fund for countries affected by the conflict.

But the bottom line is this: there is no trust here, and there shouldn’t be.

And unless something fundamentally changes, I think that within four or five years Iran will rebuild its military capabilities and we’ll be back at war. That has been the cycle in the Middle East for almost 80 years. Israel defeats an enemy, and within a few years faces that enemy, or some version of it, emerges again — whether Egypt, Hamas, or other forces in the region.

So what continues is the cycle of violence.

With a different president and a different administration, this could actually become an opportunity for a broader peace effort in the Middle East.

One constructive thing the Trump administration did was move forward with the Abraham Accords. Those accords could serve as the basis for a more unified regional framework that recognizes Israel while also providing security and economic support across the region.

You could build a regional development fund. You could work to reduce the influence of proxy forces. You would need Israel’s cooperation. And most importantly, you would need movement toward a Palestinian state.

If you truly want to address the root causes of instability in the Middle East, those are the larger issues that have to be confronted. But I don’t believe this administration will do that.

So while they may eventually find a way to end this war in the short term, I think we’ll ultimately be back at war within four or five years.

It’s not a good projection, but it’s what I believe.

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Threats to Democracy

Frankly, I don’t trust the president to accept the results of the midterms. We should have learned that lesson from January 6th. And he continues to signal it.

The administration continues to target ballot access and build what I think could become a rationale for an emergency declaration.

The best way to confront that threat is to build a strong coalition among the states, because the Constitution makes clear that states control elections. Republican and Democratic governors alike have to stand up and say: we are not going to allow the federal government to take over the election process. And ultimately, they are the ones who will have to stand up to Trump.

But I think the real key is the governors. Republican and Democratic governors have to come together and make clear to the president of the United States: We are not going to allow the federal government to interfere with the election process.

Some governors are every bit as bad as Trump, and you won’t get them on board. But if a majority of governors are willing to stand up and say clearly that the Constitution gives states control over elections, that matters.

No matter what kind of intimidation is used or what legal tactics are deployed, the states must be prepared to fight back — including in court. That means having a strong legal operation ready to go if the president tries something like this.

NATO and the Collapse of Trust

Many of our allies have already concluded that it’s only a matter of time before Trump walks away from NATO. And it’s clear they no longer fully trust the United States.

You saw the same thing in discussions with Iran. Iranian officials essentially said: Why should we enter another nuclear agreement if a future administration can simply tear it up the way Trump did?

So the bottom line is that there is now deep distrust of American leadership.

But there is also a positive side to what’s happening. Europe is beginning to pull itself together on security and defense, and I think that’s a good thing.

Europe has stepped in to help fill the vacuum around Ukraine. With Orbán gone, they’ve been able to release badly needed support for Ukraine and strengthen cooperation within NATO.

And I think there’s real value in Europe developing a greater independent capacity for security and coordination.

A future American president could help encourage that effort while also restoring the United States as a more reliable partner in NATO and other alliances.

I’ve always believed that in a dangerous world, the best way to maintain stability is through alliances — whether in NATO, the Middle East, the Pacific, or Latin and Central America.

I’m not sure the future will be built around U.S.-dominated alliances. But we can help countries in these regions work together to develop their own security structures and stronger economic cooperation.

I’ve often thought that in Southeast Asia, where many countries are growing stronger economically, the United States should have been helping build regional security cooperation to send a clear message to China that these nations can collectively represent a meaningful military and strategic force.

If a future president can help strengthen regional partnerships — on security, economics, and broader cooperation — that may ultimately be the key to stability.

And a future president will have to recognize that reality. If we simply try to return to the old way of doing business, we’re going to run into enormous distrust.

The United States will have to help allies and regional partners build the capacity they need to provide security for themselves and for the future.

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The Future of the Democratic Party

I think Democrats can only win in 2028 with a Clinton-type candidate: probably a governor from the Midwest, someone who understands the frustrations that drove much of Trump’s support, but who also knows how to speak in terms of unity.

If a Democrat can win in a red state, they understand the kind of politics required to reach people beyond the base. If Democrats nominate someone from the far left, I think they’ll lose.

You need somebody who understands outreach and knows how to communicate with the American people.

Clinton had his faults, but he had real political strengths. He could put himself in other people’s shoes and speak in a language they understood. Clinton and Obama were both intellectually strong and able to explain complicated issues effectively.

That’s the kind of leader Democrats will need, because people are angry. They’re angry about Iran, and they’re angry about what’s happened to the country more broadly.

It’s going to take a healer as president — someone capable of reaching out and helping repair some of these divisions.

In many ways, Lincoln understood that. Even in the middle of the war, he continued talking about unity and about building the country together. And he had a remarkable ability to speak to the American people in a way they understood.

So yes, it’s going to take an unusual person to win the presidency. But I think that’s the only way Democrats can win, and the only way the country begins to heal.

It has to be someone who can not only speak to both sides but also work with both sides. I still believe democracy cannot be governed by one side alone. You govern by reaching out to others, bringing them into the process, and working together.

The presidents I’ve worked for who were successful understood how to do that kind of outreach and bring people together around major issues. That’s why I keep coming back to the idea that it’s either leadership or crisis.

We’re going to need extraordinary leadership in the White House and on Capitol Hill. We need leaders in both parties who are willing to put governing first and solving problems ahead of politics. That’s what has made this country strong for more than 250 years.

Will that kind of leader anger parts of his own party? Of course. Good presidents often do, because they’re focused on doing what’s right for the country.

And if people believe that’s what you’re trying to do, you have a chance to bring the country together. But ultimately, I think it comes down to the quality of the person who runs for president.

AI and America’s Future

The administration has basically gone AWOL on AI. Their attitude is: give the industry free rein and let the tech companies do whatever they want. But AI carries real risks, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t already be putting policies in place to address them and reduce the danger of worst-case outcomes.

This administration isn’t going to do that. And I’m not convinced Congress is capable of doing it right now either.

So if anything meaningful happens, it may have to come from the business leaders themselves — people in the industry who understand the stakes and recognize that some safeguards and standards are necessary before AI outruns our ability to manage it responsibly.

That’s a lot to ask of the business community, especially since many business leaders have been reluctant to challenge Trump publicly. But some of them do understand what’s at stake.

America already needs to do much better on cybersecurity. And we’re going to need that same seriousness when it comes to AI.

Hegseth and the Military

One thing I learned as Secretary of Defense is that our military leadership represents some of the very best people this country has. These are experienced leaders, many of them veterans of war, who understand both the military and the proper use of military force.

And I think General Caine, despite some of the orders that may be coming down, is trying to make sure the military continues to operate professionally.

But Hegseth has done real damage. He’s consumed with fighting “woke” culture wars instead of focusing on what it takes to lead the military effectively during a dangerous time.

So he’s a disaster.

There are still good people beneath him on the civilian side, trying to keep things on track. But the turnover at the top is deeply damaging. It creates confusion, instability, and a loss of experienced leadership. He’s pushed out many highly qualified commanders, in some cases because of their ties to previous administrations, and in other cases because he’s fixated on issues involving race and gender.

I’ve always believed one of the strengths of the U.S. military is that it opened opportunities to everyone willing to serve. Weakening that principle weakens the military itself. And when leaders signal that the rules of war and standards of accountability don’t matter, it sends a dangerous message to people on the front lines.

So yes, I think he’s doing real damage. Everyone I talk to at the Pentagon describes a high level of concern.

That said, I still believe the military institution itself is strong enough to hold together. But it’s putting enormous pressure on military leaders, because the message from above is clear: if you don’t do what they want, they’ll come after you.

Can Democracy Still Work?

I’ve always believed that political leaders have to remember why we elect them. We don’t send people to Congress to sit in trenches and scream at each other. We elect them to govern.

But that’s increasingly what Washington has become: trench warfare. And as a result, very little gets done. This may be one of the least functional Congresses in modern history.

So yes, it’s going to take somebody willing to unify the country. I understand that every politician depends heavily on their party base. That’s reality. But if all we do is elect people to fight ideological wars, we’re going to continue failing. We need leaders who are willing to reach out, build coalitions, and govern.

My son Jimmy has seen what Congress used to be like when Republicans and Democrats actually worked together. We traveled together, had dinner together, and built real relationships across party lines.

There are still members trying to preserve some of that spirit. Jimmy is part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, where Republicans and Democrats are genuinely working together. It’s difficult, and leadership often doesn’t give them much room, but they’ve had some success. Many of the newer members involved are veterans who didn’t come to Washington just to sit in partisan trenches and accomplish nothing.

There are senators trying to build similar bipartisan coalitions as well.

But ultimately, it’s going to take a president willing to bring both parties into the room and say: I need your help. We have to solve this together. Historically, presidents who were willing to do that kind of outreach were able to get things done. You can’t govern Washington without reaching out across the aisle.

There hasn’t been enough of that kind of outreach in recent administrations — not enough effort to unify the country and work across party lines to actually get things done. And look, if a president truly governs that way today, he may end up being a one-term president. That’s possible. But the country would still be better off if meaningful progress were made.

I’ve always believed that when government actually delivers results, politics eventually changes. Democrats and Republicans alike begin to recognize that the country is moving in the right direction.

But it’s going to take a different kind of leadership. Right now, the country is deeply divided — red states, blue states, ideological camps everywhere. That’s why I keep saying the next president has to be a healer. Democracy ultimately depends on human relationships. It depends on whether people are willing to respect each other, even when they disagree.

I come from the Tip O’Neill and Bob Michel era. They had major political differences, but they also understood that on the biggest issues, you had to work together.

In those days, committees functioned. Bills went through hearings, markups, and debate. Republicans, even in the minority, still had a role and a voice in the process. We’ve largely lost that system. “Regular order” has become more of a slogan than a reality.

Today, it’s easier for leadership to write legislation behind closed doors, push it through the Rules Committee, and send it straight to the floor. But Congress works better when members actually participate and feel invested in the process. That’s how we used to govern, and frankly, we got a lot more done.

So yes, it’s going to take a new generation of leadership to restore the way democracy is supposed to function.

Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer, our latest weekly effort to convey some of the historical context of the news:

(edited transcript)

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

I couldn’t help but think this week about 1972, when another president, Richard Nixon, went to China. It was a major event. He was the first president to go there since the Communist takeover in 1949. Nixon brought with him an entire television production team, and they covered his meetings with leaders, including Mao Zedong, along with all kinds of ceremonies. It culminated in the Shanghai Communiqué, which continues to be an issue to this day because of the status of Taiwan.

Henry Kissinger, who joined him, said the basic aim of the trip was to put off the issue of Taiwan for the future. The fact that Nixon actually went was seen as a major diplomatic breakthrough. What are your thoughts on that relative to today?

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JONATHAN ALTER:

This was one of the master strokes of recent American history because we were in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger, who helped set the trip up, completely changed the strategic chessboard by breaking the deep freeze with China.

It came just a couple of months after the Watergate break-in, but before Watergate had erupted into a full scandal. Nixon went on to win reelection carrying 49 states, and China was a big part of it.

Compare that to today, where there are basically no diplomatic deliverables of any significance. Nothing major is likely to come out of this trip.

China’s rise as a great power is tied directly to Nixon opening the door to China and then Jimmy Carter normalizing relations later on, which is an important part of the story that people often forget. After Deng Xiaoping returned from his summit with Carter, China legalized private property, and that helped launch the greatest economic growth story in human history.

So much of what followed started with Nixon’s trip. China had to open itself to the United States and the West for any of that transformation to happen.

The Nixon trip also became a political metaphor. Sometimes a president can do something their own base would normally oppose because they have the credibility to pull it off. If a Democratic president had tried to open relations with Communist China, they would have been politically destroyed. Nixon could do it because he was already known as a hardline Cold Warrior.

So if Trump wanted a real “Nixon goes to China” moment, it would probably involve solving the immigration problem. He actually has the political credibility with conservatives to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. Don’t hold your breath. It’s not going to happen. But if he had even a fraction of Nixon’s strategic talent in this area, that’s the kind of move he would make.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

We’ll talk next week.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Jon, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot as I follow the Trump administration and the president saying the war in Iran is over, while the war in Iran then looks like it’s continuing. It’s just tons of information coming at us. None of it seems to be particularly credible or solid.

I was thinking about one of the famous moments in the ’60s, the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, which was a surprise attack by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong against South Vietnamese and U.S. forces that really caught the military and the country by surprise.

In the end, U.S. forces were victorious, but it was really a shock here because it came at a time when President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the head of the military effort, had all been saying the war was about to end. Everything was coming to a close. And this just showed that wasn’t true.

It increases the credibility gap that President Johnson faced back then. So I was curious, thinking about that, how you think of that moment and what it might tell us today.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

It was a critical moment, and it helped drive Johnson from the race. A couple months later, he withdrew from the 1968 campaign, and it also kicked off the Paris peace talks in May 1968.

Actually, there had been a kind of second Tet Offensive just before those peace talks. And what’s mind-blowing to me about those talks, where they started out arguing about the shape of the table, is that they went on from May of 1968 until January of 1973. Four years.

And what that indicates to me is that what we might be in for now is a protracted series of talks between the United States, Iran, Israel, and there might be some other parties, as there were during the Vietnam War, trying to make peace.

This will fade from the headlines. Trump wants it off his plate. The Iranians have a lot of leverage with the Strait of Hormuz, and it’s just going to sink into one of these endless negotiations that bores people pretty quickly but does long-term damage to the economy.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Of course, as you once said, this is all heading toward reopening the strait that was open before this started, and a deal that will look a lot like what President Obama already had on the books, if that.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Yeah, but what’ll happen is, they’ll sort of make a preliminary deal, and they’ll get the strait open, and then the ceasefire will be violated. They’ll talk again. It’ll be violated again.

This is going to go on for years before there’s any kind of endgame. I mean, nobody knows what’s going to happen, right? It will start to feel like the Vietnam War, with many fewer casualties.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Yeah. Well, this is Then and Now, and Jon we’ll talk again next week. Thanks for talking.

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In 1970, Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska defended one of President Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees, Judge G. Harrold Carswell, from charges that he had a mediocre record on the bench. “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers,” Hruska famously said. “They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”

If only President Trump’s judicial nominees were merely mediocre, like most of those in his first term. Now, Trump is nominating candidates for federal judgeships who run away from the very Constitution they will, if confirmed, swear to apply and uphold.

For more than a decade, we’ve been “shocked but not surprised” by what Trump and his craven lackeys have said and done. It’s important that the shock continues. If it recedes — if we lose our sense of outrage — we’re really in trouble.

Even so, it takes a lot to shock me these days. Trump’s assaults on the body politic — like a boxer with a punching bag — come so fast that it’s impossible to keep up. But every so often, we need to slow down and smell the swill.

So consider this April 29 exchange in the Senate Judiciary Committee between Delaware Senator Chris Coons and John G.E. Marck, a former assistant district attorney in New York City and now the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas:

SENATOR COONS:

Mr. Marck, if I might, just tell me about the 22nd Amendment. What does it provide?

JOHN G.E. MARCK:

The 22nd Amendment — Senator, my career has mostly been in criminal prosecution. I haven’t had an opportunity to use that one specifically.

COONS:

Anyone able to help him on the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution.

ANOTHER JUDICIAL NOMINEE:

Senator, I believe it is the amendment that deals with a two-term limitation.

COONS:

Correct. It states that no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.

COONS:

Mr. Marck, is President Trump eligible to run for president again in 2028?

MARCK:

Senator, without considering all the facts and looking at everything depending on what the situation is, this, to me strikes—is more of a hypothetical of something that could…

COONS:

It’s not a hypothetical. Has President Trump been elected president twice?

MARCK:

President Trump has been certified the President of the United States two times.

COONS:

Is he eligible to run for a third term under our Constitution?

MARCK:

I would have to review the actual wording of it.

COONS:

All I need to tell you is that the language of the constitutional amendment makes it clear that no, he is not eligible to run for the third term.

Anybody else brave enough to say that the Constitution of the United States prevents President Trump from seeking a third term? Anybody willing to apply the Constitution by its plain language in the 22nd Amendment?

Nobody.

All right, let’s move on.

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Anyone hoping to be a judge must know —and be held to—some basic American history: George Washington declined to run for a third term and that informal precedent was followed until Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II was elected to a third and fourth term. This was not popular, even among many Democrats, so a constitutional amendment was passed and ratified that, with 100 percent clarity, limits a president to two terms.

The Orwellian obtuseness about basic facts is a defining feature of the Trump Administration, as we saw again when Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal moved on to January 6. He asked another nominee, Michael Hendershot: “Was the Capitol attacked on January 6?” Hendershot replied: “It’s a matter of significant political controversy.”

That’s it? This smug young rightwinger who could be on the bench for 50 years thinks there was no attack?

Like earlier Trump nominees to the federal bench and other posts, Marck, Hendershot and two other Trump nominees for the U.S. District Court — Arthur Jones, and Jeffrey Kuntz — all refused to say Joe Biden won the election. Instead, they used the same stock phrase their White House handlers insisted upon: “President Biden was certified the winner.”

Even the committee's ancient chairman, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, thought this was stupid. When Senator Richard Blumenthal was speaking, Grassley can be heard on an open mic off camera asking, “What would be wrong if they said Biden won?”

Blumenthal articulated the obvious but nonetheless shocking explanation for “what would be wrong.” He told the cowering, gutless nominees:

“You’re unwilling to use that word [won] because you are afraid. Afraid of what? President Trump? That is exactly what we do not need on the federal bench today. We need jurists who are fearless and strong, not weak and pathetic.”

Blumenthal was speaking slowly, and, I thought, sincerely:

“I can’t tell you how disappointed I am. We can disagree on issues of law. We can disagree on issues of fact, but for you to simply avoid a factual and responsive answer, I think, is a disrespect to this committee as well as to us.”

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was more direct:

“I hope you realize how ridiculous the four of you look spouting these preposterous, canned answers in a forum in which you’re supposed to tell the truth and you’re supposed to demonstrate the judicial capacity to make independent factual decisions in hard cases.

If you can’t even sit here and say that Joe Biden won that election or that the Capitol was attacked, what if a hard case comes your way as a judge? Let’s say the Trump administration is bearing down on that. Why would we ever believe that you would give the litigants a fair hearing and a fair decision if the executive branch was leaning in on you [as it’s] leaning on you to give these ridiculous answers today?

It would be nice if you could tell your executive branch handlers: I don’t need to make myself ridiculous at your direction.”

These nominees are backed by Republican senators who mostly have secure seats but prefer to bend the knee, anyway, violating their own oaths to defend the Constitution. Unless something unforeseen happens, the four who appeared on April 29 — two from Texas, one from Florida, one from Ohio — will be confirmed on a 12-10 party line vote.

You should know the names of all of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee so you can remember who thinks it’s OK to have a judge who might try to figure out how to let Trump run again. Maybe Trump will be prevented from trying to do so, but “attention must be paid” (to quote from Death of a Salesman, enjoying another Broadway revival), to which senators could countenance it, and when they’re up for reelection:

• Chuck Grassley (Iowa): 2028

• Lindsey Graham (South Carolina): 2026

• John Cornyn (Texas): 2026

• Ted Cruz (Texas): 2030

• Josh Hawley (Missouri): 2030

• Thom Tillis (North Carolina): Retiring

• John Kennedy (Louisiana): 2028

• Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee): 2030

• Eric Schmitt (Missouri): 2028

• Katie Britt (Alabama): 2028

• Ashley Moody (Florida): (Took Marco Rubio’s seat in 2025)

There’s always a chance that Tillis (who has bouts of integrity) and one other Republican will stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law. We shouldn’t hold our breath, but there’s no point in giving up, either. Let these senators know that they must not vote for nominees who won’t back the Constitution and don’t have the independence to say who won the 2020 election. Those are the absolute minimal standards for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

Here is the full video of the hearing.

Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer, our latest weekly effort to convey some of the historical context of the news:

Subscribe now

(transcript):

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, Jon, there was a huge Supreme Court decision this week with Louisiana v. Callais, which undermined another pillar of the Voting Rights Act. This is the second major case since 2013.

I was thinking back to a different era for the Court, for Congress, for American politics. In 1969, four years after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson had signed, a case came before the Court involving voting procedures in Virginia and Mississippi.

In that case, the Court upheld what the Voting Rights Act had put into place. It ruled that the preclearance requirements for changes in voting procedures were legitimate and constitutional. Even if those changes looked administrative or technical, they were still subject to the law.

It was a 7–2 decision, and it was very significant because it entrenched this landmark legislation just four years after its passage.

We are in a very different place in 2026. I’m curious for your thoughts.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, first of all, this most recent case did not involve preclearance.

Preclearance meant that certain states, mostly in the South, had to get federal approval before changing voting laws. For example, if they wanted to reduce the number of polling places in a county, which could make it harder for Black voters to vote, they had to clear that change with the federal government.

In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court overturned that preclearance requirement. But it left open the possibility that Congress could reapply preclearance nationwide instead of singling out Southern states.

Congress didn’t do that. It should have, but there weren’t the votes.

This new decision goes after other parts of the Voting Rights Act. It doesn’t completely gut the law, but it undermines it. It takes the teeth out of it.

The best argument against this decision came from Elena Kagan, who asked why the Supreme Court is stepping in to do what should be Congress’s job. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. If Congress wants to change it, it can.

So this is judicial overreach.

We don’t yet know the full consequences. I read a piece this morning suggesting Republicans could pick up two seats as a result of this decision. After the 2030 census, and possibly as early as 2028, you could see a series of redistricting maps that eliminate districts currently represented by Black members of Congress.

What Chief Justice Roberts and the other conservatives are arguing is that we’re past this. We don’t need the Voting Rights Act anymore.

Justice Ginsburg, in her dissent in the Shelby case, said that’s like saying, “It’s storming outside, but I’m not getting wet, so I don’t need an umbrella.”

The Voting Rights Act is that umbrella.

Arguably, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the most important single piece of legislation in American history. Before that, we weren’t fully a democracy. If you had majority-Black counties in the South with only a handful of Black registered voters, that’s not democracy.

We’ve really only had a full democracy since 1965.

What this decision does is knock another support out from under that democracy. And we have a lot of struggles ahead, including whether we can reform the Supreme Court and build enough political power at both the state and federal levels.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

I would just add two things.

First, many lives were lost, and many people were hurt in the fight for voting rights legislation. It was incredibly difficult to reach that point.

Second, beyond its practical effects, the Voting Rights Act represented a commitment by the federal government that the injustices following Reconstruction would not be tolerated again.

Now we are in a moment when that promise is no longer part of federal policy in the same way. It has been significantly weakened.

We’re at another turning point. We’ll see what happens.

Thanks for talking, Jon.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Thanks, Julian.

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(amended transcript of video)

Last night’s results in Virginia were historic, and not just because they make it quite likely that the Democrats will regain control of the House.

Sometimes things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. That’s the case with gerrymandering, where you’re seeing horrible anti-democratic maps on both sides right now.

It started with Trump doing something very squirrely, getting the governor of Texas to redraw maps in the middle of a decade so he could keep his stranglehold on the House. That’s not something that we’ve done in this country since the 19th Century. Trump’s aim was to get five new seats. Turns out, the Republicans might only get three of those seats and could lose some other ones in Texas that they thought were safe.

Meanwhile, the Democrats decided to play tough, as they should. So in California, they went to the voters and picked up five seats with new gerrymandered maps.

Then the fight came to Virginia. Now, Democrats, in a state that’s roughly 50–50, will likely win nine out of 10 seats. Florida will try to retaliate but the whole thing is looking like a wash.

What does that do beyond this fall’s midterms? It makes the end of gerrymandering a real possibility.

There’s a bill that the Democrats have sponsored for the last few years called the Freedom to Vote Act. It does a number of good things—encouraging early voting, mail-in voting—that a lot of Republicans, unlike Trump, believe helps their rural voters. There’s potential buy-in for that part of the bill even if some other provisions get dropped.

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And now, there might also be at least some buy-in for the bill’s provision that gets rid of partisan gerrymandering, which the U.S. Supreme Court said recently was something that the federal government could legally and constitutionally do.

So flash forward to 2029. Democrats introduce this bill, it passes the House, it’s going to be signed by a Democratic President, but they need 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.

Let’s say, they need six, seven, eight Republican votes. A number of Republicans, looking at Virginia last night, were saying, “Hey, maybe this gerrymandering game’s not working out for us. Let’s go for fair maps, like Schwarzenegger got in California.”

If that happens, a wretched tradition going back to the 1790s, when Governor Elbridge Gerry drew a map in Massachusetts with districts that looked like salamanders, will end. That tradition, which is fundamentally anti-democratic, will be part of our past, not present.

Check back in three years. You heard it here first.

transcript from video:

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Hi, I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, Jon, we’ve been talking about the military operations, air strikes, war in Iran—whatever term you want to use. And people sometimes remember that in 2015, President Obama had been part of a negotiation that put an agreement into place called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It was the product of long negotiations. It was a multilateral agreement, which included the United States and several other countries, as well as Iran. And it revolved, from my understanding, around creating a system of transparency and inspections. Iran would agree to limit its nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions.

And in 2015, that marked a big moment in Obama’s presidency. There was a lot of controversy, right, on questions about some of the limits of the agreement, attacks from conservatives that the Iranians couldn’t be trusted. But it marks a difference, certainly, from the approach that President Trump has taken to deal with the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons.

So how do you think of these two in comparison?

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, first, in 2016, I went to Israel, and I interviewed the former head of Mossad and the former head of Shin Bet. These are top national security people in Israel. And they all told me something in private that was at odds with what they or anybody else could say publicly. Not just Netanyahu, but all of them had to be against this deal, because it didn’t rid Iran of nuclear weapons and it expired after ten years.

So when I’d interview these people, they’d say, “Your president, he doesn’t make a very good deal,” talking about Obama. “A terrible deal, terrible deal.” And so I finally said, “Well, are you against it?” And they’d say, “No, no, of course it’s worth doing, because it buys us ten years.” So it’s worth doing, but they couldn’t say that publicly.

Just to get a little granular for a second on what that deal did: right now, as a consequence of Trump blowing up the deal, the uranium that has been enriched—some of which is now under rubble but also stored elsewhere—is enriched to about 60 percent, which is basically weapons-grade. The agreement kept it at 3.67 percent enrichment, which was a long way from a nuclear weapon.

Not only did it cap enrichment at that level, it removed about 98 percent of Iran’s enriched uranium when it was implemented in 2016 and 2017. And it was enforceable, because there were cameras everywhere as part of the deal. Nobody who actually looked at this closely said that the Iranians were violating the agreement. They had essentially been denuclearized by this very important deal.

And of all of the horrible things that Trump has done, blowing up that deal is close to the top of the list in terms of consequences. It’s why we have the situation we have now. Yes, Israel has assassinated some of their scientists, but they still have the know-how to build nuclear weapons. And they will do so now, because it’s the only thing that will prevent and deter another attack by the United States and Israel.

So you can expect them, once they get back on their feet, which they will, to race toward the development of a nuclear weapon. And this is a terrible, terrible thing for the peace of the world.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, that’s a sobering history and an important look back at that agreement and what happened after.

Thanks, Jon, and we’ll talk next week.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Thanks, Julian. Bye-bye.

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With “Doctor Trump” denying he’s Jesus and all the other hideous nonsense assaulting our senses, it’s easy to forget the positive stories coursing through our lives. They are clear signs that MAGA is not the wave of the future.

Yes, when Trump thundered that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” he was trashing our civilization, too. Enlightened societies don’t threaten genocide. That’s what despots do. Witness the “Death to America” slogan of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. On top of all the other stupidities of the war, we are in danger of becoming what we’re trying to fight.

And any good news of this week is tempered by the chilling fact that we still have more than a thousand days to go with this sicko president and his gang of thugs and grifters — nearly as long as the entire Kennedy administration. More bad shit is on the way, every day, and the lickspittle Trump Cabinet will never invoke the 25th Amendment.

So I’m not saying this struggle against authoritarianism is over. What has changed is the deep fear in 2025 about the inevitability of the bad guys winning and a curtain of shamelessness and corruption descending over the West.

Hungarian Patriots

The thumping of Viktor Orbán in Hungary showed that if Democrats stay focused, the worst of our long national nightmare will soon be a memory. That’s because we now have a good idea of how the traumatic American story ends: the way Orbán’s just did, with defeats so crushing they defy the strongman’s criminal intent to reverse them.

Remember, it was Orbán who wrote the playbook on strangling democracy. Over the last decade, he instructed MAGA and right-wing movements worldwide on how to buy off the media, corrupt the courts, slime critics, steal with pride and use fear and threats of violence to run up margins in rigged elections.

Recall how CPAC — the premier Republican organization in the U.S. — actually held one of its big conventions in Budapest. Last week, J.D. Vance didn’t just praise Orbán; he broke 250 years of precedent and directly campaigned for a foreign candidate — while accusing Ukraine of electoral interference. (I was tempted to put an exclamation point here to emphasize the extreme hypocrisy of doing so but then I’d need to do that at the end of every sentence I write about these goons).

Then came this moment of historic inspiration.The Hungarian people refused to be intimidated and now the tectonic plates of global politics are shifting.

History shows that global politics are often tidal. If Mussolini had lost power (as he nearly did in 1924) in Italy, Hitler would have had more trouble gaining it in Germany. And if Franco, despite Nazi help, had lost the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Hitler would have had less of the momentum he needed to launch World War II.

It works the other way, too. In the decade after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, more than 50 nations transitioned toward democracy. That’s more than a quarter of all countries on Earth. All of them had weaker democratic muscle memory than we do when they turned in the right direction.

Because we don’t have a parliamentary system, we can’t begin our own transition right now with a vote of no confidence.

But relief is at hand. House Speaker Mike Johnson said in February that if Republicans lose the midterms, “It would be the end of the Trump presidency.” That means we have only six months to go before Trump is the lamest of lame ducks. Then we can begin to hold some of these jokers accountable.

Artemis II

It’s no coincidence that quiet patriots inside NASA named the Artemis II spacecraft Integrity. The glorious mission showed that for all the poison in our public life, we remain a collection of decent people. I tuned in to CNN to watch the splashdown live and found myself glued to the screen for hours as Anderson Cooper chatted with Mark Kelly and other veterans of the Space Shuttle and watched the smiling astronauts emerge, symbols of all that is good about our country. I found it hugely refreshing and I wasn’t alone.

We heard former Space Shuttle astronauts describe the feeling of getting real mayo on a Subway sandwich or sleeping in an Airbnb on the day of their return. It was a good reminder that we still have plenty of idealistic, talented public servants who, even when they’re in space, have their feet on the ground. A charming William Shatner put the Artemis mission in the context of the expeditions of Magellan and Shackleton.

When he was aboard Artemis II, Astronaut Victor Glover, noticing the chord the mission had struck, emailed his friend Mike Massimino:

“Tell the world to keep this energy going. Let’s invest in togetherness.”

Beyond the science, that was the core of the mission. “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbed in the universe,” Christina Koch recalled of her view from space:

“Planet Earth—you are a crew.”

Describing a mission of “humanity and humility,” Commander Reid Wiseman said:

“You’re not looking at us. We’re a mirror of you. If you like what you see, look a little deeper. This is you.”

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The Pope Strikes Back

Pope Leo hopes we see our better selves, too. He may be a White Sox fan (I favor the Cubs) but this pope knew just how to respond to the first attack on a pope by a head of state since the Middle Ages. When Trump tread where even Hitler and Mussolini dared not go (in part because Pope Pius was agnostic on fascism), Leo pivoted to peace — a place where the country and the world are solidly on his side.

And he got off a quip about Truth Social that was no papal bull:

“It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

Trump lost Catholics by five points to Joe Biden, but he carried them by 20 against Kamala Harris. Now he’s way below 50 percent with Catholics and the polls that show the hemorrhaging were taken before his tiff with the pope.

Our time of salvation will come — if we “invest in togetherness.” And the midterms.

Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer, our latest weekly effort to convey some of the historical context of the news: