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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:

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(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:

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And this is our discussion of the “madman theory,” which is an idea that’s come up after President Trump’s two social media posts regarding Iran and his threat to end an entire civilization.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Of course, the madman theory is something both of us have studied and read a lot about. It’s associated primarily with President Richard Nixon, starting in 1969, his first year. There’s a lot of documentation of how he wanted to scare the Soviets into believing he was willing to do anything to end the war in Vietnam, and also to position the United States in a stronger place in the Cold War.

In 1969, he puts U.S. forces, including nuclear forces, at high alert to send a signal. There is the bombing campaign—the Christmas Day bombing campaign in 1972—against the North Vietnamese. And in 1973, with the Middle East, we see other incarnations of this.

The fears increased during the Watergate crisis that he was unstable and even drinking heavily. H.R. Haldeman, who was his chief of staff, is the one who articulates this years later when writing about Nixon. He says—and I have the quote here—that Nixon told him this was his theory: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.”

So that’s when that idea came into being. I’m curious how you think of Nixon in light of what we’ve just gone through.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, you know, in some ways it really starts with the Soviets. So when Khrushchev says, “We will bury you,” that’s a form of madman theory. Or when Putin says, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, “I may use nuclear weapons,” that’s a variation on the same thing.

The problem is, it doesn’t really work. The best example, as you mentioned, is the Christmas bombings of Hanoi. Supporters of Nixon will say, well, the next month, in early ’73, they get this peace treaty, right? No—they didn’t get a good peace treaty from the United States’ perspective. They got some kind of deal. In a way, there might be a deal with Iran now, but it was a bad deal. It sold out the people of South Vietnam, and it was a fig leaf to basically end the war.

So people are not intimidated by this kind of rhetoric, even when it’s way over the line. What Trump did on Easter Sunday, I think, will be remembered for a long time, because he was threatening an ancient civilization with annihilation. It wasn’t fooling anybody—except that Trump is so unhinged that I think all of us had, in the back of our minds, maybe he could do this. Because every time you think Trump has touched bottom, he crashes through the floor.

It turns out he was looking at it more like a real estate negotiation, where you attack the other side right before you come to some kind of deal. But the deal that he got out of this “madman theory” is horrible. Basically, the Iranians came back with a ten-point plan that, if the United States agrees to any significant part of it, would mean that Iran won.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’d just add—versions of the madman theory, like threatening to end an entire civilization rhetorically, have a cost to the moral standing of the United States. And secondly, you don’t control war, and the logic of war can sometimes lead you to actually go for things that are pretty devastating, like the Christmas bombing.

So I think that’s part of the fear from last week. It’s not always a controlled thing. And here we have a leader with nuclear weapons, so you never know where this goes.

JONATHAN ALTER:

An unhinged leader with nuclear weapons. Yeah, great point.

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I met Jeh Johnson, 68, about 25 years ago in Montclair, New Jersey, where we live a couple of miles apart. Ever since, I’ve admired his good judgment, good humor and commitment to public service, not to mention All Things Soul, his radio show. Jeh’s first name comes from a Liberian chief who in 1930 saved the life of his grandfather, Charles S. Johnson, later the president of Fisk University. After graduating from Morehouse and Columbia Law School, Jeh became an assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, partner in the law firm Paul Weiss (from which he recently retired), general counsel to the Air Force under President Clinton and general counsel to the Department of Defense under President Obama. In Obama’s second term, he joined his Cabinet as Secretary of Homeland Security.

On No Kings Day, Jeh gave a barn-burning speech to the Montclair rally: “The organization I once led, created to protect the American people and their homeland, is now a pariah -- consisting of armed, angry, masked men who patrol the streets of America and terrorize the people. Renee Good did not have to die; Alex Pretti did not have to die. But there will be no meaningful investigation, no accountability for their deaths. Your government wants you to forget them, or write them off as the perpetrators of domestic terrorism. This is NOT the America you and I know.”

We covered a lot of ground in this interview. Excerpts:

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JONATHAN ALTER:

When you were in government, did Iran have the capacity to use agents in the United States to commit terrorism against us that they didn’t use, or did they not have that [sleeper cell] capacity?

JEH JOHNSON:

I can’t say. Others have opined publicly in response to that question. I don’t believe I am at liberty to do so.

JONATHAN ALTER:

What do you think of Trump’s decision to go to war?

JEH JOHNSON:

I think he’s making a familiar mistake. It’s much easier to start a war than to finish one. Without clear goals or an exit plan, conflicts tend to drag on and become something you didn’t anticipate.

JONATHAN ALTER:

How could he or his advisors have thought the Iranian people would rise up if they didn’t have any guns?

JEH JOHNSON:

Rise up with what? That’s exactly the question I’d be asking in the Situation Room. I’d want an intelligence assessment of what happens among Iran’s roughly 90 million people if the regime is toppled. Is there chaos in the streets? Does public sentiment turn against the West because of what we did?

My suspicion is that whatever assessment was delivered, he either didn’t listen or his advisors were too cowed to tell him the hard truth about what would happen if he took out the Ayatollah.

JONATHAN ALTER:

What do you think of ICE agents wearing masks?

JEH JOHNSON:

I think it’s a bad idea for several reasons. You don’t see big-city police departments wearing masks, even in high-crime areas.

First, it diminishes accountability. If you don’t know who’s arresting you, there’s less accountability. Second, it creates the risk of criminals impersonating law enforcement, since faces and even IDs are obscured. And it simply doesn’t look like America. It looks like an authoritarian system that isn’t accountable to the people it serves.

Only in the most dangerous circumstances should that happen. Even the U.S. military generally doesn’t wear masks in the midst of hostilities.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Is it possible for Trump to use ICE or CBP to interfere in the midterm elections?

JEH JOHNSON:

Legally, I believe the answer is no. Any advance effort to send DHS personnel to polling places would likely be quickly enjoined by a court.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So a court would issue a temporary restraining order and stop it? And they’d respect it?

JEH JOHNSON:

By and large, yes. Despite the rhetoric, I believe this administration has mostly abided by court injunctions, with some notable exceptions that Judge Boasberg could tell you about.

JONATHAN ALTER:

All right, so Boasberg got involved with CECOT. What do you think of sending detainees to El Salvador?

JEH JOHNSON:

I didn’t realize until this administration, and I was DHS secretary, that you could deport someone from one country to a third country. I had assumed they had a right to be returned to their country of origin, not to some other place. That practice has now been enjoined.

JONATHAN ALTER:

How about administrative warrants? Did you use them?

JEH JOHNSON:

We did, for a range of things. But an administrative warrant is essentially an agency authorizing itself to act. It’s not a judicial warrant. To enter someone’s home, you generally need a judicial warrant.

There are exigent circumstances where that isn’t required. For example, if you had credible evidence that Nancy Guthrie was being held hostage inside a house next door, law enforcement could enter without a warrant. But simply to arrest an undocumented person you believe is inside, no.

JONATHAN ALTER:

What if they were on a list because they were the worst of the worst, like the true criminals you were going after in the Obama administration?

JEH JOHNSON:

First, at the secretarial level, you don’t make those calls. But if someone were truly dangerous, armed, and likely to shoot back, that could be an exigent circumstance where a judicial warrant isn’t required to enter an enclosed space. I’m speaking here as a lawyer, not as a secretary.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So an administrative warrant isn’t issued by an immigration judge; it’s just a bureaucrat signing it?

JEH JOHNSON:

Correct. It’s not a judicial figure.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So this violates the Constitution?

JEH JOHNSON:

The Fourth Amendment, yes.

JONATHAN ALTER:

It’s kind of amazing we’ve gotten to this point.

JEH JOHNSON:

This practice has long existed, but it’s now been brought into the open. My hope is that the next secretary takes a different approach.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Did you ever use arrest quotas when you were in government?

JEH JOHNSON:

Not to my knowledge, though I could be wrong. Tom Homan, who worked for me, may have used them, but I’m not aware of it.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Can you explain what’s wrong with arrest quotas?

JEH JOHNSON:

There are essentially two types of deportation. One is expedited removal, when someone is apprehended at the border. The other involves people in the interior who have been here for weeks, months, or years, and that’s very different in character—very circumstantial—and often that person is hard to find. If that person is released into the community, it can take ten officers instead of two to find and arrest them. That’s not a wise use of resources. That’s why quotas don’t make sense.

I’d much rather see ICE arrest 20 convicted criminals than 50 people with no criminal record. Quotas make enforcement arbitrary.

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What I used to tell ICE leadership was: use common sense. One controversial arrest — someone’s grandmother or a high school student — can undermine your entire mission in a community. That’s what we’re seeing now, and it serves no one’s interest.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Did you hire Tom Homan?

JEH JOHNSON:

He was there when I arrived and retired just before I left.

JONATHAN ALTER:

He said during the transition, they’d go after the worst of the worst. That’s what he promised. What happened?

JEH JOHNSON:

They became preoccupied with mass deportations and numbers, which, in my judgment, isn’t a smart approach. I think even Tom Homan knows that.

JONATHAN ALTER:

DHS now has about 70,000 people in detention. How does that compare to the Obama years?

JEH JOHNSON:

When I was secretary, we had funding for about 33,000 beds, as I recall, and that number was consistent year to year.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Twenty-three people have died in custody in the past year. How does that compare? Would cases like that have reached you as secretary?

JEH JOHNSON:

I think it was a rare occurrence. If it did happen, I believe I would have known. Not saying it never happened on my watch, it probably did. The number may be higher now simply because they’re detaining so many more people. And it’s also important to distinguish between short-term detention at the border and detention of people in the interior. They’re very different situations.

JONATHAN ALTER:

During the Obama administration, family separation was considered as a deterrent. What happened?

JEH JOHNSON:

It was presented to me as an option, and I rejected it.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Did your people, to your knowledge, ever use bad detention conditions to encourage people to self-deport?

JEH JOHNSON: No, that was not a policy in the Obama Administration.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Do you sense this administration is trying to make conditions so harsh that migrants leave?

JEH JOHNSON:

Yes. I believe deterrence is being pursued very aggressively. When you send a migrant to a hardened prison in El Salvador, where standards of basic decency may be very different, that’s done principally as a deterrent. Publicizing it reinforces that message. A lot of what this administration is doing to make life difficult for migrants is driven by deterrence.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Do you think it’s wrong-headed to arrest somebody while they’re in the midst of their asylum hearing in immigration court?

JEH JOHNSON:

They’re arrested, taken into custody, and put into expedited removal as a deterrent, yet all that does is discourage people from showing up at their own immigration hearings.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Part of the problem stems from a broken asylum system in the Biden Administration. Instead of quickly adjudicating asylum claims at the border, people were allowed to enter the country, making it harder to track them.

JEH JOHNSON:

The overarching problem with the asylum system, which didn’t start in the Biden administration, is the backlog. There’s a tremendous volume of pending claims, and many are ultimately denied.

In some cases, applicants are advised to file anyway because the process can take years, during which they may receive work authorization. For some, the calculation is that spending a few years working in the United States and sending money home is better than staying in their home country.

JONATHAN ALTER:

If the system is too overloaded to handle even the initial screening, couldn’t you add enough retired judges and lawyers and other personnel to make it work?

JEH JOHNSON:

The question is scale. During the Civil Rights Movement, lawyers went south to support that effort. But here, you’d need hundreds, probably far more, for what is a difficult and often thankless job. And the demand fluctuates with migration levels. It’s not a fixed problem you can solve with a fixed number of people.

The legal standard for asylum is specific. You have to show persecution by your government based on your beliefs or associations. Economic hardship — drought, poverty, not being able to feed your family — doesn’t qualify. That’s not asylum under the current law.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Let’s turn back the clock. It’s January 2021. Joe Biden says, “Jeh, you have a lot of experience. What should we do to make sure immigration doesn’t become a political problem again?” What would you have told him?

JEH JOHNSON:

Biden was essentially a moderate on immigration. The challenge is that illegal immigration is highly sensitive to signals. If the U.S. is perceived as enforcing the law, numbers go down. If it’s perceived as weak, numbers rise. Over time, though, flows tend to return to longer-term trends driven by conditions in migrants’ home countries.

So you have to pursue two objectives at once: a secure border and a realistic approach to the millions of people already here. That means clear, visible enforcement, but also working with Congress on a broader solution to bring long-term residents into the legal system, as the 2013 comprehensive bill attempted to do.

The difficulty is political. I’ve long believed only a Republican president could fully accomplish that. And in the Biden White House, from the outside, there didn’t appear to be a single person consistently willing to take ownership of this issue. Roberta Jacobson understood it well, and Susan Rice didn’t shy away from tough issues, but there wasn’t sustained leadership. It became everyone’s least-favored problem, and the president didn’t fully engage until it reached crisis levels.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Let’s talk about Kristi Noem. What kind of job did she do?

JEH JOHNSON:

I think she was in over her head. She didn’t have the right skill set or guideposts for the job. My sense is that she became too focused on the trappings of office rather than doing the work.

The self-promotion, including the ad campaign, became a distraction and even drew criticism from Trump.

JONATHAN ALTER:

But isn’t Stephen Miller really running policy?

JEH JOHNSON:

Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, yes, that’s my impression. If I were coming in as DHS secretary, I’d want to know who’s actually running the show — is it me, Miller, or Homan? You’d need to set expectations accordingly.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Presumably, you would have fired this agent Bovino before things got out of hand.

JEH JOHNSON:

Why is a Border Patrol agent operating in the interior? They’re trained to enforce the law at the border. It’s a fundamentally different mission to conduct immigration enforcement inside the country.

It’s like asking a fighter pilot to fly a bomber. Border Patrol is trained to apprehend people at the border, where there’s a processing component. You’re not chasing people into the interior or looking for them in big cities. ICE does that. It’s a fundamentally different mission requiring a different skill set.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Do you think that’s part of what led to the tragic circumstances in Minneapolis? Those weren’t inexperienced agents.

JEH JOHNSON:

Correct. What’s obvious to me is a lack of deescalation training. The way these agents approach people, there’s anger. It’s aggressive and short-tempered. A good officer knows how to de-escalate a potentially dangerous situation.

You see it all the time. In a New York City subway, officers dealing with an agitated person will slow things down, let the situation cool, and then act. You don’t provoke something into a life-or-death confrontation.

Renée Good didn’t have to die. She was apparently blocking an operation, but there are many ways to handle that. You could have de-escalated and gotten her to move the car. Instead, the situation escalated to the point where deadly force was used.

We’ve seen this before. George Floyd. Eric Garner. Situations that didn’t have to end in death, but did because someone carrying a weapon lost control.

JONATHAN ALTER:

The Alex Pretti shooting was so cold-blooded. It looked from the video like the shooter could see his face.

So what happens now? You have all these agents getting $50,000 bonuses, and many of them are just entering the ICE workforce. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What are we in for over the next two and a half years on this issue?

JEH JOHNSON:

That’s a good question, because I do worry about the type of person being recruited to this mission and the expedited training before they hit the streets.

For at least a while, if you went to the ICE website and looked at their recruiting material, you’d see a slogan: “Defend your culture. Join us.”

Now, when you’re my age, if your parents saw a recruitment message from the Mississippi State Police in 1963 that said, “Defend your culture,” what do you think that would mean?

That’s a dog whistle to a lot of people, the wrong kind of people. If you’re a Mexican American in Texas and interested in law enforcement, the message is, You Need Not Apply. If you’re a Muslim American in Michigan or Minnesota, same thing.

I think it’s been taken down, but it was up for a long time. And the kind of person attracted by that message is not someone I want to see wearing a badge and carrying a gun.

JONATHAN ALTER:

But you’re going to see thousands of people responding to that message. So what are we looking at now, with all these detention centers they’re building across the country? It’s already larger than—

JEH JOHNSON:

Apparently, 11 detention centers,

JONATHAN ALTER:

Yeah, and how many did you have?

JEH JOHNSON:

Not 11 like that. I mean, there were facilities at the border, but then what often happens is ICE rents space in local facilities, like in Newark, New Jersey, that you don’t really know about.

With these 11 detention centers, there’s a possibility, certainly if Democrats take control after the midterms, Congress won’t agree to fund all of it. Congress has to agree to fund it.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Didn’t they get funding in that big bill? Even if it wasn’t an appropriations bill, didn’t they get billions to build this out?

JEH JOHNSON:

There’s a difference between authorization and appropriation. And even if they’ve acquired the space, they still have to build it out into a detention facility.

JONATHAN ALTER:

You have large numbers of people held there for misdemeanors.

JEH JOHNSON:

Don’t interpret this as defending the practice, but these are misdemeanors committed by people who are not lawfully present in the country. They’re not just people who committed misdemeanors.

JONATHAN ALTER:

But some are. People who came here illegally and then get picked up for something minor, like speeding.

JEH JOHNSON:

[Under Trump] they’re presumably on their way to being deported. Look, I don’t think that’s the wisest use of taxpayer dollars. I can see expanding detention space during a surge at the border to accommodate that surge. We did that on my watch. But I don’t know how much sense it makes to engage in mass detention of people pulled out of the interior.

JONATHAN ALTER:

There have been 15,000 habeas petitions in just the last two months.

At what point do you start calling this something like a gulag? To convey the scale of it. In some ways, it’s worse than Japanese internment, both in numbers and conditions. Sometimes when you’re living through history, you don’t recognize how bad it is.

JEH JOHNSON:

It depends on the circumstances of detention. But I don’t endorse or support that kind of approach to enforcing our immigration laws. And people do have a right to be heard before they’re deported.

Again, I suspect it’s part of an overarching effort to deter border crossings. In other words, you make things look and sound so inhumane that you’re deterring people from coming.

What Stephen Miller and others don’t get is that these people are making a judgment to flee a burning building. They would rather take their chances in the United States, whether it’s under Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, than stay where they are.

JONATHAN ALTER:

But they’re not coming across now under Trump.

JEH JOHNSON:

That’s a short-term phenomenon. It’s a reaction to his presidency, but the numbers tend to revert to their longer-term trend lines.

JONATHAN ALTER:
He could have taken political credit for reducing crossings, but overplayed it.

JEH JOHNSON:

He took credit for it — it was right at the start of his State of the Union. But in doing so, he also exposed some of his flaws as a politician.

JONATHAN ALTER:

He lost that goodwill. His numbers with Latino voters are dropping. Why not use that moment to push for broader reform?

JEH JOHNSON:

He could have had the best of both.

Any other Republican president with those kinds of numbers at the border would be told: You’ve achieved something significant. Now make it your Nixon-goes-to-China moment. Go out and achieve comprehensive immigration reform and claim something Bush or Obama couldn’t do.

But he’s not that kind of politician. He’s incapable of seeing it that way. It’s not in his makeup. He will never be able to achieve that kind of greatness, because it’s not in his makeup — that’s the same reason he’ll never win a Nobel Peace Prize.

.JONATHAN ALTER:

I want to ask you the same question you asked when you came in. Are we going to make it?

JEH JOHNSON:

So I believe in the pendulum effect of American politics. Every eight, maybe even sixteen years, voters want something radically different from what came before — a new generation, new politics, new character, new personality.

And when you look at history, you can see that pattern. Eisenhower to Kennedy. Nixon and Ford to Carter. Reagan and Bush to Clinton. Bush to Obama. That was an exact sixteen-year cycle. We broke it in 2024 because we didn’t have the right choices. But by 2028, I think the American voter is going to be itching for a very different kind of president than Donald Trump.

Swing voters continually want someone who will radically change things, because so many Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. The candidate, whether from the far left or the far right, who convinces those voters that they will really shake things up and change the country’s direction is the one who wins.

So I do believe we’re going to have somebody very different from Trump in 2028, who will likely preserve our democracy.

The big caveat is what bothers me most about the Trump presidency: he is creating new norms. New norms in terms of executive authority. New norms in terms of a lack of compassion in how you govern. New norms in terms of ethics. And new norms regarding the observance of constitutional and legal norms.

So much of our Constitution is gray. The First Amendment is forty-five words. But in those forty-five words are embodied freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. Those principles have been preserved not because they are spelled out in endless detail, but because, up to now, we have had elected leaders who respected the norms they express.

And when you have somebody who does not respect constitutional and legal norms and says, “Well, the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say there’s birthright citizenship, so I’ll challenge it in the courts and see what happens. I’ve got six appointees on the Supreme Court,” you end up in a situation like the one we have now.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Is there a corrective mechanism, like after Watergate, in which Democrats would commit to rebuilding guardrails — not just restoring the integrity of the Justice Department but also limiting presidential power?

JEH JOHNSON:

After Vietnam and Watergate, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 to rein in the president’s ability to wage war without congressional authorization. Nixon vetoed it, and Congress overrode that veto because there was strong bipartisan agreement that constitutional norms had to be restored.

I don’t know that you could get two-thirds of Congress to do something like that anymore. I don’t think that’s going to happen now — even after the midterms. There’s just too much partisan adherence.

JONATHAN ALTER:

The repair process can’t really begin until 2029. The question is whether Democrats are prepared for that moment.

Just as the Heritage Foundation had Project 2025, Democrats need to be ready with a clear agenda. I’m asking my readers to submit ideas.

One potential silver lining is that Trump relied heavily on executive orders rather than statutory change. He had the political capital to pursue legislation, but he didn’t have the patience.

JEH JOHNSON:

And people told him, You could do this right.

JONATHAN ALTER:

If Democrats regain control, they should have what I call a Codify Agenda. On Day One, repeal most of Trump’s executive orders, keep the two or three that make sense, and then embed the replacement policies into law.

That way, a future president can’t just reverse everything with new executive orders. These reforms would actually be codified.

Thanks, Jeh.

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)

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

And I’m Julian Zelizer from The Long View.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

So this week, as soon as the news broke that Attorney General Pam Bondi was no longer going to be with the administration, that President Trump was getting rid of her, my mind went back not that far in history. Back to 2018, when President Trump was in his first term, after the midterm elections, which went poorly for the Republicans. The news came that a letter of resignation, at the request of President Trump, had come from Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions had been a very conservative congressman from Alabama, a senator, a supporter of Trump, but he had recused himself when the investigation opened up into Russia under Robert Mueller, who recently passed away. So he had been a very controversial figure, and most people interpreted this as Trump wanting to gain more control over the investigation.

And so I was thinking about how do we think of that in the first term, vis-à-vis where President Trump is today and Bondi.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, you know, Trump has been consistent in one area. He wants the attorney general to be his personal lawyer. In the first term, that involved defending him against accusations, defending him against possible scandals. That’s why he fired Sessions, because Sessions was not defending him. By bringing in a special counsel, he was saying, well, let the investigation take its course. He was doing the right thing, even though there was a lot that was wrong about Jeff Sessions. In that case, he was doing the right thing that the attorney general is supposed to do, by statute, by tradition, and everything else. Trump fired him for it.

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This time, it wasn’t about Pam Bondi not defending him enough. She was doing that quite aggressively on Capitol Hill. It was about her not seeking enough retribution against his enemies. So in the first term he wanted his AG to be a watchdog. This time he wants his AG to be an attack dog. And when she wasn’t doing it effectively enough, she did try to prosecute people like Letitia James and others. She went after everybody that Trump wanted her to go after, all of his critics. But it wasn’t working. These cases were getting thrown out of court.

And so now I think he’ll at least try to get an attorney general who will revive those cases, but he’s not going to get anywhere because these cases are bullshit.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

From watchdogs to attack dogs, Jon, I think is a great way to capture the shift in how Trump is trying to use the legal system, law and order. I think that was an astute insight.

Anyway, thanks everyone for joining us, and we’ll talk again next week.

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Here’s my short conversation with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer earlier today about how “No Kings” stacks up against the huge anti-war protests of 1969. Every Friday morning at 10:00 a.m., you can watch live as Julian and I put the pressing events of our time in historical context. Please join us next week!

I’m sure most of you are attending your local No Kings rally, but if you aren’t, please reconsider working it into your Saturday plans. And please share your photos of funny and pointed protest signs in the comments below.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Jon, tomorrow is another round of No Kings Day. People are predicting this might be the biggest one of all, maybe one of the biggest days of protest ever. I have been reading about the Vietnam Moratorium in October of 1969, which was at the time one of the largest days of protest.

The protests followed many years of opposition to the Vietnam War, and what was notable about October 15, 1969, was that the protests took place all over the country — small towns, rural areas, urban areas, college campuses, and more. And it showed how much this had grown from what was a fringe movement or a radical movement into something that was very much mainstream.

It didn’t change President Nixon right away. He continued with his policy, but it did put pressure, we know retrospectively, on Congress and on members of the administration because they were seeing that the opposition was reaching a critical mass.

So I was thinking of that day and its significance relative to what might happen tomorrow, and more broadly, the protests that we’ve seen over and over again with No Kings Day.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

So the two situations are actually quite different, and not just because No Kings Day is much bigger.

There were two moratorium marches, October 15, 1969, and then a month later, November 15. The second one was bigger, with about 500,000 people in Washington. There were also big demonstrations in other cities, but not anywhere close in total to the 7 million that we saw the last time with No Kings, and this time it’s likely to go over 10 million.

So the size here is different, and the political context is very different.

The Vietnam War was much more unpopular at that time than it had been, and about 40,000 people had already been killed. Nixon had broken his promise that he made in the 1968 election to end the war; in fact, he was escalating. Despite all that, after Nixon gave his Silent Majority speech between the two moratorium marches in the fall of 1969, he went to a 67% approval rating.

Donald Trump, in some surveys right now, is at 34%, maybe 40%, low 40s at the highest in the most favorable polls. So Trump is much more unpopular now than Nixon was at that time, even though there was tremendous anti-war sentiment.

And remember, Nixon went on to get re-elected in 1972 with 49 states.

So Trump is much weaker politically than Nixon was, and these marches extend far wider than any of the anti-Vietnam War marches did, not just in terms of total numbers, but in the number of communities taking part.

Those 1969 protests were not just on college campuses. They were in a lot of different cities. But in this case, with No Kings, we’re talking about literally thousands of different locations.

In 2025, fear was contagious. In 2026, courage is contagious.

Which is why this is becoming the largest mass movement in all of American history.

So if you’re going out tomorrow, you’re part of history.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

I would just add: the Vietnam movement was about Vietnam. This is much broader, which in many ways is a source of strength. It includes many issues, and it reflects a broader sentiment about the direction of American politics under the president.

(modified transcript)

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Amended transcript:

When I saw that Bob Mueller had died, it made me sad. When I saw that Donald Trump, just moments later, said he was glad he was dead, it made me sick.

Speaking of sick, who says “I’m glad he’s dead” publicly? A sick, deranged, despicable person who should not be within a million miles from the White House.

I remember seeing Bob Mueller at Ground Zero three days after 9/11. I was part of a press pool covering President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Mueller, whe had just been sworn in a few days earlier as the new head of the FBI. In that job, he restored the integrity of the Bureau, caught a lot of terrorists, and was, by all measures, the best director of the FBI in history.

He had earlier done a stellar job helping run the Justice Department, and then, late in his career, he left private practice and went back into government to prosecute local criminals in Washington, D.C., several levels down from where he had served before. That’s a public servant. A man of decency.

And there’s more: When his friends from Princeton were dodging the draft, Mueller went to Vietnam and won a Purple Heart.

Compare that to Trump, who told Howard Stern “my Vietnam” was fear of getting the clap. Now Captain Bone Spurs wants tanker captains to show courage in the Straits of Hormuz.

Remember how Trumpsters tried to get anyone who didn’t express profound grief over the death of Charlie Kirk fired? Now they don’t bat an eye over Trump celebrating Mueller’s death. Imagine if someone at their kid’s school said he was “glad” that another kid died. Or someone at their company. The student would be sent to the school psychologist. The co-worker would likely lose his job. But they’re fine with it in the White House.

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Yes, I was a little disappointed by the 2019 Mueller report. But Trump lied when he said he was exonerated. The report concluded that Russia tried to steal the 2016 election from Hillary, the Trump campaign knew about it, and on 10 separate occasions, they obstructed justice.

Mueller also said that he didn’t have enough to charge Trump with a crime. And that’s too bad. But even if he had, it wouldn’t have gotten Trump out of office. The Supreme Court would have just given the president immunity five years earlier.

So in the long view of history, Mueller should not be remembered for fumbling the ball on that. He should be remembered for a career of true public service.

When I think of Bob Mueller, the word that comes to mind is integrity. With Donald Trump, it’s depravity.

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Here’s my short weekly conversation about historical context with Princeton professor Julian Zelizer. You can watch it live at 10:00 a.m. on Fridays.

(transcript via ChatGPT)

Edited transcript:

JULIAN ZELIZER
So Jon, I was teaching my class about the 1990s and I touched on Operation Desert Storm, which is, of course, when the United States, under President George H. W. Bush, launched a military operation to remove Iraqi troops under Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, where they had invaded.

At the same time, I was reading the news recently about pressure on war coverage coming from the administration. And part of what happened in Operation Desert Storm, the first major conflict since Vietnam, is the government did try to find ways to limit some of the negative coverage. They had a pool system where reporters were confined to certain areas and escorted by military officials. There were security clearances before a lot of things could be published. There were approved briefings, which were very choreographed in terms of what kinds of material from the conflict was being presented.

It became a big issue of that war—what kind of pressure was coming from the administration. So how do you think that compares to some of what we’ve been hearing about in the first few weeks with Iran?

JONATHAN ALTER
Well, first, just a couple of quick differences.

Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, and President George H. W. Bush then began a campaign of several months to build public support and also to have the time to move a very large ground force into the region. The operation, which lasted only 100 hours, took place in February of 1991.

So people had a long time to debate this. A lot were against it. Sam Nunn, a big hawk, was among those opposed to the Gulf War. A lot of Americans thought it was just a war for oil and that we shouldn’t risk lives to free Kuwait.

But they went ahead and did it, and at the time, the people in charge had more credibility than our leaders do today, and not just at the presidential level. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, and he was actually, at that time, pretty well regarded. Colin Powell was the chair of the Joint Chiefs, and General Norman Schwarzkopf—”Stormin’ Norman”— was the commander of U.S. forces.

Schwarzkopf would give these briefings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that were very complete, very detailed, and far superior to what we’re getting now from Hegseth.

So while there were restrictions, and most wars do have restrictions of one kind or another on press coverage, you didn’t see amateur attacks on the press like we’re getting from Hegseth and Trump. And the press wasn’t sucking up, but they were operating within the restrictions to try to tell their readers and viewers as much as they could about a fast-moving situation.

So there are always tensions in war. The saying goes, truth is the first casualty in any war.

But I think the difference this time is that there are no ground troops to embed with or to get a closer look with. And also, you have just no confidence at all that you’re getting a straight story from this administration.

When Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell would say something in those briefings, you couldn’t necessarily take it to the bank, but you could give them the benefit of the doubt that when they were describing the details of a military operation, they were basically giving you a pretty good sense of what happened. That’s not true nowadays.

JULIAN ZELIZER
And I’ll just add, then there was no context of the administration, as much as they might have distrusted or disliked the press, threatening them, threatening hosts, threatening stations, using the FCC as a weapon. That was not part of the Bush administration. It creates a really different context now.

JONATHAN ALTER
Correct. There was tension. But when Bush would complain about the press, it would be in the form of a campaign button: “Vote Bush, Annoy the Media.”

There’s a big difference between that and trying to trash anybody who dares criticize you.

One more thing:

Bush was at 90 percent popularity after the Gulf War, and a year and a half later, he’s beaten badly by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. All of his support for that war just evaporated.

And Trump started well under 50 percent support for this war, and it’s not likely to go up. He could fall a lot further.

JULIAN ZELIZER
This is “Then and Now.” Jon, talk to you next week.

JULIAN ZELIZER
Welcome back to “Then and Now.” I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER
And I’m Jon Alter of Old Goats.

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JULIAN ZELIZER
So Jon, I was doing two things. I was teaching my class about the 1990s, and I touched on Operation Desert Storm, which is, of course, when the United States, under President George H. W. Bush, launched a military operation to remove Iraqi troops under Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, where they had invaded.

At the same time, I was reading the news recently about pressure on war coverage coming from the administration. And part of what happened in Operation Desert Storm, the first major conflict since Vietnam, is the government did try to find ways not to control the news, but certainly to limit some of the negative coverage. They had a pool system where reporters were confined to certain areas and escorted by military officials. There were security clearances before a lot of things could be published. There were those approved briefings, which were very choreographed in terms of what kinds of material from the conflict was being presented.

It became an issue of the war, of what kind of pressure was coming from the administration. So how do you think that compares to some of what we’ve been hearing about in the first few weeks here with Iran?

JONATHAN ALTER
Well, first, just a couple of quick differences.

Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, and President George H. W. Bush then began a campaign of several months to build public support and also to have the time to move a very large ground force into the region. The operation, which lasted only 100 hours, took place in February of 1991.

So people had had a long time to debate this. A lot of people were against it. Sam Nunn, a big hawk, was among those against it. A lot of Americans thought it was just a war for oil and that we shouldn’t risk lives to free Kuwait.

But they went ahead and did it, and at the time, the people in charge had more credibility than our leaders do today, not just at the presidential level. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, and he was actually, at that time, pretty well regarded, this pre-Iraq. Colin Powell was the chair of the Joint Chiefs, and General Norman Schwarzkopf was the commander of U.S. forces.

He would give these briefings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that were very complete, very detailed, and far superior to what we’re getting now.

So while there were restrictions, and most wars do have restrictions of one kind or another on press coverage, you didn’t see these amateur attacks on the press like Hegseth and Trump are doing. And the press wasn’t sucking up, but they were operating within the restrictions to try to tell their readers and viewers as much as they could about a fast-moving situation.

So there are always tensions in war. The saying goes, truth is the first casualty in any war.

But I think the difference this time is that there are no ground troops to embed with or to get a closer look with. And also, you have just no confidence at all that you’re getting a straight story from this administration.

So when Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell would say something in those briefings, you couldn’t necessarily take it to the bank, but you could give them the benefit of the doubt that when they were describing the details of a military operation, they were basically giving you a pretty good sense of what happened. That’s not true nowadays.

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JULIAN ZELIZER
And I’ll just add, then there was no context of the administration, as much as they might have distrusted or disliked the press, threatening them, threatening hosts, threatening stations, using the FCC as a weapon. That was not part of the Bush administration. It creates a really different context now.

JONATHAN ALTER
Correct. There was tension.

So Bush, when he ran for reelection and he lost to Bill Clinton, this is also quite interesting. He was at 90 percent support after the Gulf War, and a year and a half later, he’s beaten badly by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. All of his support for that war just evaporated.

And Trump started well under 50 percent support for this war, so it’s not likely to go up.

So just one other thing. When Bush would complain about the press, it would be in the form of a campaign button: “Vote Bush, annoy the media.”

There’s a big difference between that and trying to shape coverage to your liking and trash anybody who dares criticize you.

JULIAN ZELIZER
This is “Then and Now.” Jon, talk to you next week.

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Tim Weiner, 69, is our best chronicler of the tangled history of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1988 he won a Pulitzer at The Philadelphia Inquirer for a series of stories on black budget spending at the Pentagon and CIA. He spent 16 years at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Sudan and broke a ton of stories as a national security correspondent in Washington. Tim won the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA and followed it up with Enemies: A History of the FBI and The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945–2020. His 2025 book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century won great reviews. I spoke with him about it last month at the Open Book/Open Mind series at the Montclair (N.J.) Public Library, and some of his answers are chilling in light of what has happened since we talked, e.g., “Killing civilians does not endear you to the populace. It makes the war that you are prosecuting unwinnable. We saw that in Afghanistan, and we saw that in Iraq.” Afterwards, I followed up with a few questions about the Iran War. Excerpts:

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JONATHAN ALTER:

This war was predicated on a lie, right?

TIM WEINER:

The American attack was justified by lies. Iran doesn’t have the bomb and it wasn’t about to make or test one. As with Bush and Iraq, Trump invented a threat to start a war.

JONATHAN ALTER:

You’ve written about the infamous role of the CIA’s Kim Roosevelt (Theodore’s grandson) in restoring the Shah to the throne in Iran in 1953. I was especially interested in that because I knew Kim Roosevelt slightly (his son, Mark Roosevelt, was a close friend in college). Roosevelt’s coup had a poisonous effect on Iranian-American relations for generations. How will this war play into that long and twisted history?

TIM WEINER:

An Iranian drone hit part of the sprawling CIA station at the American embassy in Riyadh ten days ago. A payback, in a way, for the CIA coup that overthrew the duly elected leader of Iran and installed the despotic Shah in 1953. That’s the original sin of the story.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Did the CIA blow it when it didn’t realize that part of an Iranian military base had been turned into a girls school?

TIM WEINER:

The attack on the girl’s school wasn’t the CIA’s fault. [Responsibility apparently lies with the Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon, which used outdated intell in its targeting].

JONATHAN ALTER:

According to press accounts, the National Intelligence Council told Trump the regime change was “unlikely.” What’s the point of high quality intell if the president doesn’t listen to it?

TIM WEINER:

It’s clear that intelligence reporting on the chances for dire outcomes is being disregarded.

JONATHAN ALTER:

I’d like you to compare your two books about the CIA. Legacy of Ashes was about the CIA in the 20th century, from its founding in the late 1940s to its becoming notorious worldwide. Your new book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, almost feels like a sequel. You argue the CIA was in some ways worse, or at least as bad, and in other ways better than it was in the 20th century. Does that summarize it?

TIM WEINER:

The CIA was created in 1947 for two purposes, under a very short six-page charter. Primarily, President Truman wanted it to collect intelligence from around the world and give him a daily newspaper that was better than The New York Times. The second purpose was espionage, spying on other nations, to gather intelligence that would inform analysis, allow the president to conduct American foreign policy, and look for threats over the horizon.

All of that changed very quickly as the Cold War heated up. The Pentagon and the State Department demanded that the CIA conduct covert and paramilitary operations, not to know the world, which was its chartered purpose, but to change the world.

The fulcrum that transformed the CIA was September 11. The president ordered the CIA to become a paramilitary army and to do something it was never supposed to do and was never trained to do: take prisoners, imprison them, and torture them. That was the first transformation of the CIA in the 21st century.

This happened because, when we were attacked, we lacked intelligence. I’m going to quote Bob Gates, who was CIA director at the time, and later Secretary of Defense. Gates said that on September 12, 2001, we didn’t know jack shit about Al-Qaeda. If we had known who they were, how they moved people and money, and what their chain of command was, then none of this, by which he meant secret prisons and torture, would have been necessary. That transformation happened because of a lack of intelligence, and it drove the White House crazy.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Tim, before we get too far into George Tenet, why would he, or any CIA director, bring raw intelligence into the Oval Office instead of refining it, running it to ground, and establishing at least some plausibility for these reports?

TIM WEINER:

I was in Washington, D.C. for about six weeks after 9-11 and then shipped out to Afghanistan. Every time your cell phone rang, it felt like a harbinger of disaster. Fear gripped Washington in those days, weeks, and months. It flowed into a toxic cocktail of fear, secrecy, and ignorance. Who are these guys? We didn’t know. Not really.

I knew George Tenet pretty well. We had done many interviews together when he was on the National Security Council, and later when he was deputy director and then director of the CIA. George running the CIA would be like making me the head of General Motors. He had been promoted far above his pay grade after the agency went through five directors in six years during the tumult of the 1990s.

To underscore the point, the CIA’s analysts knew that George had gone to every friendly and unfriendly intelligence service in the world and said, send us threat information. Some of those services had bad actors who were happy to scream fire in a crowded theater just to mess with the United States. Tenet felt he could not miss anything. It was a terrible idea, and his top analysts said so.

They knew that somewhere between 50 and 99 percent of what came in was bullshit. They knew it, but they could not say so. It went unfiltered into the Oval Office. That was George’s imperative. It was cover-your-ass bureaucratic thinking driven by fear. Fear of the unknown. And it is the job of the CIA to know the unknown.

JONATHAN ALTER:

But we know from what happened with Iraq that one of the most disturbing things, in hindsight, is how quickly that war entered the picture. Literally on 9-11, Bush and his people were already talking about going to war with Iraq. This wasn’t a decision made a year later. It was that afternoon. So why? Was it about revenge for what Saddam did to George H.W. Bush?

TIM WEINER:

Correct. In 1993, Bush the elder went to Kuwait to celebrate the success of the first Gulf War, and Saddam and his brutal but feckless intelligence service had a plot to kill him. Psychoanalyzing the son is a fool’s errand; he had a simple attitude: you tried to kill my daddy, I’m going to kill you.

There was another belief at work among W’s coterie, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, that if you overthrew Saddam, democracy would flourish across the nations of Islam, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be solved, and the earth would smell of roses forevermore.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So just to come back to George Tenet, you’ve clarified that the “slam dunk” remark was about selling the case, not the intelligence itself. But why did he go forward with such weak intelligence? And why didn’t Colin Powell, before going to the UN to make the case for war, get to the bottom of the fact that they were relying so heavily on information that was bullshit?

TIM WEINER:

Bush turned to Colin Powell, the most respected general in American history since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and said, “I need you to sell the case for war.” That is almost a direct quote.

The case was a dossier compiled by Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council, including Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others. It was a collection of rumors, gossip, hearsay, innuendo, and bullshit, the cover of which was a mushroom cloud. Parenthetically, large swaths of the American press were complicit in this, including my former newspaper.

Powell was supposed to make the case for war in front of the United Nations. You all remember this. Powell is there, and George Tenet is sitting right over his shoulder, saying that everything he is about to tell the world is fact, is ironclad intelligence. None of it was.

Tenet had spent the previous weekend, 72 hours around the clock at CIA headquarters, putting together the case for war. Analysts who had doubts were excluded from that process by Tenet. The top analysts who were there listened to the case being made and knew it was bullshit, but they said nothing.

That silence was a consequence of the fear of the time. We must do this. If we don’t, we will be attacked again.

JONATHAN ALTER:

I want to go back to late 2001, when we could have gotten bin Laden at Tora Bora, and the CIA blew that too. How did that happen?

TIM WEINER:

Well. I was there. I was at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in early December 2001. I had written a pretty hot story saying bin Laden was holed up in the mountain caves there. We rushed down. There were B-52s circling in the blue sky above us, contrails making figure eights.

I was excited. I thought, this is going to be the end of the war on terror, and I’ve got a front-row seat. At that very moment, the president of the United States told the combatant commander, Tommy Franks, that he had to prepare for war against Iraq.

The thread was lost.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Bin Laden got away, and it took 10 years to track him down. One of the points you make is that the CIA’s only customer is the president, and that the CIA was never, as Frank Church once said, “a rogue elephant.” It always reflected the president’s priorities.

So let’s go through the presidents of the 21st century, starting with George W. Bush. You’ve touched on this already, but what would you say were his biggest mistakes as they related to the CIA?

TIM WEINER:

Every president uses and abuses the CIA in his own way. The thread that runs through every presidency, going back to Harry Truman, is that ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you are an ideologue, you don’t care what the intelligence says when it contradicts your preconceptions. Your mind is made up. You don’t want to be confused with facts.

Bush operated very much in this mode for the first six and a half years of his presidency. It wasn’t until his third CIA director, General Mike Hayden, who had previously run the National Security Agency, took over that Bush began to listen.

He certainly didn’t listen before 9-11. The CIA told the president 36 times in early 2001 that Al-Qaeda was planning to strike the United States. They didn’t know the time or the place. Bush didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.

In the spring of 2001, George Tenet went to the National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, with his hair on fire and said that something terrible was about to happen and that we needed to go to war against Al-Qaeda. Rice, who is a Soviet expert, said they could not make a policy decision because the president had no policy on Al-Qaeda.

He had no policy on Al-Qaeda because he had no policy on Afghanistan. He had no policy on Afghanistan because he had no policy on Pakistan. And he had no policy on Pakistan because he had no policy on India.

Meanwhile, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was publicly proclaiming that spring that the United States had no national security threats.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So let’s go back to the period after 9-11, when the focus shifted to Iraq. What was the Bay of Goats?

TIM WEINER:

One of the CIA officers I interviewed was Luis Ruena. Luis became an American because of the Bay of Pigs. He was born in Cuba, and his father was one of the Cubans who worked with the CIA to try to overthrow Fidel Castro. When that failed, his father was imprisoned, and the family eventually fled to the United States.

One day, Luis was ordered to create a covert action plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He went around Washington telling the vice president, Paul Wolfowitz, and others that you were not going to overthrow Saddam unless you sent in the 82nd Airborne. Covert action was not going to do it. They didn’t listen.

Instead, they believed they had a secret weapon: a criminal fraudster named Ahmed Chalabi, who had charmed much of the Washington establishment, including far too many reporters. Chalabi was supposed to be the new king of Iraq. The CIA had issued a burn notice on him years earlier, a rare step warning the entire intelligence community to have nothing to do with him because he was a liar and the truth was not in him.

Despite that, Chalabi, who had not been in Baghdad since the late 1950s, became one of the most influential figures shaping American policy toward Iraq. Someone predicted that if the United States backed him, the result would be like the Bay of Pigs, except the Bay of Goats.

It wasn’t the Bay of Goats precisely, but it may have been the worst foreign policy decision by an American president since Lyndon Johnson sent combat troops into Vietnam in 1965.

The question is how the CIA was supposed to do its job, to educate the president about the world and inform the foreign policy it was meant to execute. Under Bush, the entire system broke down.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And on top of that, they started torturing people at secret sites. A lot of people saw Zero Dark Thirty, which raised not only the question of whether there was a connection between torture and finding bin Laden, but the broader question of whether torture ever works. That’s something I got on the wrong side of a bit myself in my journalism.

TIM WEINER:

Briefly about the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The CIA has — and always has had — a public information office, and it worked with the screenwriter and producer of that film to help create a storyline that torture worked and that torture blazed the trail to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad.

That is a lie.

JONATHAN ALTER:

What was the real explanation? And then there’s the broader question, which you seem agnostic on: does torture ever work?

TIM WEINER:

Okay, those are two big questions.

The path to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad was blazed not through information extracted by torture, but through old-fashioned espionage. At a time when counterterrorism was swamping everything else, the CIA was recruiting al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan and turning them into agents. That information came from espionage, not torture.

Does torture work? A little history. The CIA was not created to be torturers or to run secret prisons. But at the time, the head of the clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, turned to the Navy and the Air Force, which had programs training pilots how to resist torture if they were downed behind enemy lines. Those programs included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and confinement in small boxes.

Some people had been through this. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of defense under Bush, had experienced it during the Vietnam War. I asked him what it was like, and he said plainly: it was torture.

The Air Force and Navy learned how these techniques worked from the testimony of pilots captured during the Vietnam War and earlier in Korea. But the North Vietnamese were not torturing American pilots to gain intelligence. They didn’t know when the next bombing run was coming. They tortured them to extract false confessions for propaganda.

That salient fact was lost in translation over the years.

JONATHAN ALTER:
So to segue to Obama, his view was: don’t torture them, kill them first.

TIM WEINER:
It was better to incinerate than incarcerate.

JONATHAN ALTER:
And how does that hold up as a national security priority?

TIM WEINER:
Kill them all. Let God sort them out. The question is kill or capture. Use drones or deal with them as prisoners. You can’t get intelligence from a corpse. So it is not a solution. And the problem, of course, with kill them all, let God sort them out, is that you are going to kill civilians.

JONATHAN ALTER:
And he did. He killed an American citizen by mistake.

TIM WEINER:
Well, that’s a different issue. But civilians in villages in places where I’ve been, Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as happened in Vietnam. Killing civilians does not endear you to the populace. It makes the war that you are prosecuting unwinnable. And we saw that in Afghanistan, and we saw that in Iraq. So Obama’s basic policy, he summarized as, don’t do stupid shit.

JONATHAN ALTER:
And did he basically make good on that and do fewer dumb things than other presidents?

TIM WEINER:
Toward the middle of his second term, Obama dialed this down to almost nothing. He became convinced by people around him, including one of his advisers, Samantha Power, and the deputy director of the CIA at the time, Avril Haines, that the kill-them-all, let-God-sort-them-out strategy was, to put it politely, counterproductive.
Bin Laden was dead by then, and by the end of the Obama years, there were other threats. Russia. China. Obama was trying to swivel American intelligence back toward those 20th-century threats.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So, before we get to Trump and everybody gets completely depressed, let’s go to some good news. Something very positive that the CIA did. You mentioned a couple of the women involved in the management of the intelligence establishment. I was very interested that there were many important female characters in your story, and the one that I knew the least about was a woman named Paula Doyle. So tell me what she and Robert Gorelick did for this country and the world. This is a great story.

TIM WEINER:
Again, we have to go back to the late 20th century. Abdul Qadir Khan was a Pakistani metallurgist. In 1998, Pakistan exploded a nuclear weapon, the Islamic bomb, and Khan was the architect of it. He had spent 25 years importing the technologies needed to build a nuclear weapon into Pakistan.

At that point, unseen by the CIA and the rest of the world, he flipped the switch and became an exporter instead of an importer of nuclear weapons technology. Over the next few years, he dramatically improved the nuclear capabilities of North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

The CIA got wind of this. Paula Doyle, who looks like a science teacher in a Catholic grade school and is from a small town in South Dakota, along with her partners Jim “Mad Dog” Lawler and Robert Gorelick, set up a sting. They created a fake nuclear technology proliferation company in Dubai and used it to penetrate Khan’s operation.

By 2001, the CIA had acquired so much material that it could almost have become its own nuclear state. Then, in 2003, they learned that a massive shipment of nuclear weapons technology, roughly 100 tons, was moving from Khan’s base in Malaysia to Qaddafi in Libya. The CIA intercepted the shipment and pressured Qaddafi directly.
Qaddafi decided he did not want to end up on a gallows like Saddam Hussein and renounced his nuclear program.

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JONATHAN ALTER:

That’s probably the stupidest thing he's ever done, right? Because we wouldn’t have been able to try to take him out if he had nuclear weapons.

TIM WEINER:

I would debate that point. The beauty of this operation was that, in 2003, the CIA, through espionage, destroyed an existential threat of weapons of mass destruction at the very same time the United States was going to war, a disastrous war, against an imaginary threat of weapons of mass destruction.

That underscores my point: espionage is a good thing. That’s why the CIA exists, not to torture or kill people, not to drone them, but to spy on them. Spying is, as everyone knows, the world’s second-oldest profession.

JONATHAN ALTER:

We’re going to skip over Biden, who had a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but also a major intelligence success in predicting Russia’s invasion.

TIM WEINER:

Let me speak to that before we get to Trump. A really monumental event happened in the spring of 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the Russians running what was probably the most successful covert operation since the Trojan horse to manipulate the U.S. presidential election.

A few months later, there was a new chief of the clandestine service, the top spy at the CIA. His name was Tomas Rakusan. He’s Czech. His parents are Czech. He was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968. His feelings about the Russians were bred in the bone.

Rakusan called in his top people, the top operations officers at the CIA, and said, the Russians just manipulated our fucking election. How do we make sure this never happens again?

And he said to them, take the talents people have. These guys had been doing counterterrorism 24-7, 365, for 15 years. Take the talents you’ve honed in targeting terrorists, figuring out who they are, how they live, who they love, who they hate, and how to recruit them, and train those talents on the Russians. Recruit Russian spies. Russian diplomats. Russian oligarchs.

And the upshot was, four years later, the CIA stole Vladimir Putin’s war plans for Ukraine. The CIA had been trying to penetrate the Kremlin since 1947, a record that was, with a few exceptions, unblemished by success until this. Stealing your opponent’s war plans, that’s a neat trick.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Although they were wrong in thinking that Ukraine was going to lose in short order.

TIM WEINER:

That’s a quibble. And they told the world about it. The CIA is not in the habit of telling the world when it steals a big secret. It didn’t stop the war, but it had an immediate galvanizing effect on the nations of Europe.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So that was a very good decision. To support Ukraine. And Joe Biden made a really good decision in declassifying all of that intelligence to create the coalition.

TIM WEINER:

Yes. It was the CIA director Bill Burns’s imperative.

JONATHAN ALTER:

So just one more thing about Trump. You argue that he’s not Putin’s agent so much as his ally, consorting with an adversary the United States has faced for 70 years.

How does that affect the mission of Russia House at the CIA? What happens to those parts of the agency when Russia is no longer treated as an adversary by the president?

TIM WEINER:

Oh, it’s still our adversary.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Well, Trump doesn’t think it is.

TIM WEINER:

I’ll back up a bit. I came of age when Richard Nixon was president. As we learned from the Church Committee report, we saw what happens when an intelligence service is under the command of a lawless president. The dangers of a secret intelligence service in an American democracy governed by a lawless president are immense.

The greater danger now is that the president of the United States is dismantling the architecture of American national security created after World War II to protect the United States and its allies against, among other things, Russian imperialism.

There has been a purge at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon of anyone unwilling to swear fealty to Donald Trump. Anyone who worked on the investigations into Russia’s interference in our elections. Anyone who supported Ukraine. Anyone who opposed Russia.

JONATHAN ALTER:

You say that 16 people you quoted in the book, all of them former CIA officials speaking on the record, have had their security clearances revoked. So if you had waited a few months to do this book, you wouldn’t have been able to report it.

TIM WEINER:

I don’t think this book could be reported now. This ideological purge sweeping the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the entire national security and intelligence establishment is increasing the risk of a catastrophic, systemic intelligence failure of the kind we’ve experienced before.

The purge of people for ideological reasons across the national security apparatus carries a historical parallel. I don’t want to overdraw it, but in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, people were purged because they wore glasses, because they could read. Today, people are being purged from the diplomatic, intelligence, and national security establishment because they see things clearly.

The president has set fire to the national security establishment of the United States, the so-called deep state.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Just one quick follow-up on that. Is the clandestine service disabled, too, or is Trump secretly doing all these things around the world right now?

TIM WEINER:

The clandestine service is still capable of doing remarkable things, including helping snatch the president of Venezuela out of his safe house in the dead of night.

What it is not doing is the most important thing America could be doing right now: working for the survival of Ukraine. Putin has declared war across Europe through assassination, sabotage, subversion, propaganda, and political warfare. If he is allowed to keep a single square inch of Ukraine, he will not stop there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:

When do you think or would you say Trump was compromised by the Soviets or Russians?

TIM WEINER:

This is a question that those of us interested in such matters have been grappling with for ten years. I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump likes Putin because he wants to be like Putin.

That said, Trump first went to Moscow in 1987, a rich American businessman with a taste for Slavic women, looking to build a hotel in Red Square in partnership with the Soviet government. He was already cheating on his first wife. If the KGB did not target him at that point, they would have been guilty of criminal negligence.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2:

Tulsi Gabbard. Is she a threat to the country right now where she sits?

TIM WEINER:

Tulsi Gabbard is, by title, the Director of National Intelligence, the bureaucratic supremo of the American intelligence community. She is a crackpot and a conspiracy theorist and has, at this point, been written out of the intelligence community.

Her shop is called the Directorate of National Intelligence. The Trump administration takes those initials to mean do not inform. She’s a danger to herself and to others, including us.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3:

In your previous book, you wrote that a generation of Iranians grew up knowing the CIA had played a major role in installing a deeply oppressive government. In the current context, what does the evidence show about the CIA’s presence in Iran today, or its ability to operate there at all?

TIM WEINER:

To my knowledge, the CIA operates largely through the Israelis to assassinate, subvert, and undermine the Iranian regime, particularly its nuclear scientists. There are probably, and this is a rough estimate, about ten people at the CIA capable of working undercover in Iran. Possibly fewer.

The Israelis have been at this for a very long time, and they are enormously influential within the intelligence community in shaping U.S. policy toward Iran, for better or for worse, probably the latter.

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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.

I’m sure you’ve been thinking about this a lot. We are now in the middle of an oil crisis, an oil issue, an oil problem as a result of the conflict involving Iran. It brings back memories of the 1970s, when we first had, first in 1973, an energy crisis triggered by an OPEC embargo against the United States. Then there was a second one in 1979, triggered by the Iranian Revolution and the effect on oil.

That caused all sorts of problems in the United States: long gas lines, difficulties heating homes, shortages, and rationing in different states. It became a big issue for President Carter, who famously gave a speech in July 1979 trying to address the underlying causes of the issue. Energy and oil were on everyone’s mind in 1979. How, many people are asking, does that compare to what’s going on today?

JONATHAN ALTER:

That was a much more serious issue. The Arabs and some other members of what we called OPEC, you rarely hear that anymore, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, they had us over a barrel, quite literally. We were extremely dependent on oil from the Middle East, and we are not today.

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We are net exporters of oil. We have a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is being tapped and which is there for this very purpose. In terms of the oil that we do import, a lot of it does not come through the Strait of Hormuz. So we are in a much less vulnerable position than we were in 1973 and in 1979.

When the Iranian oil fields went out of production after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, that had a much bigger effect than anything related to oil in Iran today. That does not speak to the wisdom or foolishness of this war, but I think people do need to keep the energy part of it in perspective.

It will not be very long before those oil prices go down. They are not going to stay at $100 a barrel for very long.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Well, that is a useful contrast and comparison to that period. It is also a reminder of how one crisis affects the next, and how many of the changes that resulted from 1979 are part of what explains the differences in conditions today, among other things.

Anyway, thanks for doing this. I know you are on the run, but I enjoyed the conversation as always, and we will talk next week.

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(transcript via ChatGPT)

JULIAN ZELIZER:
Hey 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, the news in Iran has clearly accelerated since we last spoke. We are now in a full-scale military operation there, and the situation continues to unfold. There’s been a lot of discussion about how this compares with Iraq in 2003, when the United States went in. Back then, we were in the aftermath of 9/11. We had already gone into Afghanistan and temporarily knocked down the Taliban regime.

The buildup to the war in Iraq, as we know, was a full-scale push by the administration that included faulty intelligence and misleading information and claims about Hussein and his connection to 9/11, and weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be what the administration said. It became a long war, a controversial war, a costly war, and one that had a huge effect on American politics, including on President Trump, who until recently positioned himself against it. So thinking about that moment, how do you see the comparison between that and where we are today?

JONATHAN ALTER:
It’s important when you do historical analogies not to overdo it and assume that history is going to repeat itself. But, as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme.

At that time, one of the key lines was from Colin Powell, who unfortunately put his credibility on the line to peddle lies about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. That war and this war were both predicated on lies. Trump lied when he said Iran posed an imminent threat. Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee said they won’t have an ICBM until 2035 at the earliest. So that was a flat-out lie. He also lied when he said their nuclear capacity had been obliterated last June.

But there are important differences. When Colin Powell invoked the Pottery Barn rule, if you break it you own it, that was true for Iraq. That’s true when you have boots on the ground. It’s not true if you’re just using an aerial assault. You can basically play 52-card pickup with a country and then walk away. And that’s what Trump is going to do in the next couple of weeks. He’s not going to let this become a quagmire.

When Hegseth says we could have boots on the ground, Hegseth is an idiot, but that was actually the right thing to say. You never want to say to your enemies you’re not going to put boots on the ground. That’s not smart. Bill Clinton did that with Serbia in 1998, and I wrote at the time in Newsweek that it was a big mistake. You don’t take anything off the table.

But I think even Trump is not crazy enough to send hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iran. So that’s unlikely to happen, and that would be a very big difference from the Iraq War.

The big similarity is this: it’s easy to start a war. It’s a lot harder to end it. Extracting ourselves from this and dealing with the inevitable surprises is going to be very challenging, not just for Trump but for the country in the next few weeks.

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JULIAN ZELIZER:
And I’ll just add, Jon, one other difference. For all the many problems of the Bush administration, they at least approached Congress and made a misleading case but took that part of it as essential to the process. Here, Congress was basically written out altogether. So it’s another step up in presidential war powers.

JONATHAN ALTER:
Yeah, that’s true. And I do think they should go to Congress. But Obama didn’t go to Congress either. The tradition going back quite a ways is that if it’s air power alone, administrations say they don’t have to go to Congress. That’s not right, but that has been the way it’s gone for presidents of both parties.

The other thing to keep in mind is this: I think this was a bad idea. They should not have done this. But it’s also a bad idea to stop right now. If you’re going to destroy the Iranian Navy, finish the job so that you don’t have to go back later to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. So I think this war does need to go on for at least a few more days until they complete the mission of taking out the Iranian Navy.

JULIAN ZELIZER:
Well, that was Then and Now, and we’ll be back next week to talk about a new issue. Thanks, Jon.

JONATHAN ALTER:
Thanks, Julian. Bye-bye.

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Amended transcript:

First, it’s good that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. He was the worst tyrant of the last half-century, anywhere in the world. That doesn’t justify this war, but let’s not forget all the blood on his hands.

Second, this war was predicated on a lie when Donald Trump said he was launching it because of an “imminent threat to Americans.” That was untrue. Recent intelligence that leaked showed that Iran would not have an ICBM that could hit the United States until 2035, at the earliest.

Another lie came last June, when Trump said that Iran’s nuclear capacity at Fordo and other sites had been, “obliterated by those strikes”, but he never produced any evidence of that. So clearly part of the motive for this most recent attack was to finish the job.

In the video where he’s wearing the USA golf hat (his hairdresser apparently had the day off), Trump told the Iranian people to rise up and take control of their own destiny. They’re noble and they’re courageous. But the people of Iran have no guns. In any society, power resides with those with a monopoly on violence. So the protesters cannot really rise up, and we will likely be stuck with the remnants of this terrible regime. Absent a military coup by moderate officers, there will not be any regime change.

The Ayatollah named three possible successors. One was killed, and the other two will presumably now duke it out, which is what usually happens in these situations. That’s a good thing, because it means that when they’re fighting each other for who’s going to get power, the rest of the world is less threatened. A chaotic power struggle inside the country—even civil war— might affect the rest of the world, but I doubt it. Recall the very long and bloody Iran-Iraq War in the Eighties. Our ironic but correct policy was to hope that both sides lost.

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Is the U.S. at risk? Sure. But in the six years since a U.S. drone strike killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the murderous Qud Forces, Iran hasn’t had a lot of success hitting soft targets. And they’re in no position to do so now. Retaliation directed at hard targets isn’t going much better for them. So far, they haven’t killed anyone in Israel, or very many in the Gulf States. Might they be conserving their missiles for later counter attacks? I doubt it. Thst’s not the kind of calibrated decision you make when the bombs are raining down. More likely, U.S. and Israeli drones in the next several days will take out a large number of their missile launchers, which have already lit up and betrayed their positions.

So where does that leave the Middle East?

The main takeaway in the region is that the State of Israel is now more secure than it has been at any time since its founding in 1948. For decades, Israel was surrounded by what was called a “ring of fire”. The country was threatened by Hezbollah from Lebanon, threatened by Hamas from Gaza, and threatened by Iran from over the horizon. Those threats have been eliminated, which will save many lives. But it’s not all a good thing because Israel has become quite arrogant. In any event, the Jewish state isn’t going anywhere, and people should get used to it.

So the anti-Zionist “from the river to the sea” crowd should give that up and move on to advocating for a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, not a non-Jewish one-state solution with an Arab majority, which will simply never happen. That’s the only way to get any justice for the Palestinian people.

As far as Iran’s role in the midterms and the next presidential election: Believe it or not, within a month or two, Iran may go on the back burner. That’s the pattern in the Trump Era. Then we’ll all focus again on the herpes of our politics, the story that never goes away: the Epstein case.