2025-10-01 07:23:00
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s convocation of hundreds of generals and admirals today turned out to be, in the main, a nothingburger. Hegseth strutted and paced and lectured and hectored, warning the officers that he was tired of seeing fat people in the halls of the Pentagon and promising to take the men who have medical or religious exemptions from shaving—read: mostly Black men—and kick them out of the military. He assured them that the “woke” Department of Defense was now a robust and manly Department of War, and that they would no longer have to worry about people “smearing” them as “toxic” leaders. (Hegseth went on a tirade about the word toxic itself, noting that if a commitment to high standards made him “toxic,” then “so be it.”)
All in all, an utterly embarrassing address. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The assembled military leaders likely already knew that Hegseth is unqualified for his job, and they could mostly tune out the sloganeering that Hegseth, a former TV host, was probably aiming more at Fox News and the White House than at the military itself. What they could not ignore, however, was the spectacle that President Donald Trump put on when he spoke after Hegseth.
The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay. Several of Hegseth’s people said in advance of the senior-officer conclave that its goal was to energize America’s top military leaders and get them to focus on Hegseth’s vision for a new Department of War. But the generals and admirals should be forgiven if they walked out of the auditorium and wondered: What on earth is wrong with the commander in chief?
Trump seemed quieter and more confused than usual; he is not accustomed to audiences who do not clap and react to obvious applause lines. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he said at the outset. (Hegseth had the same awkward problem earlier, waiting for laughs and applause that never came.) The president announced his participation only days ago, and he certainly seemed unprepared.
Trump started rambling right out of the gate. But first, the president channeled his inner Jeb Bush, asking the officers to clap—but, you know, only if they felt like it.
Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank; there goes your future.
Laughs rippled through the room.
Trump then wandered around, lost in the halls of history. He talked about how the Department of War was renamed in the 1950s. (It was in the late 1940s.) At one point, he mentioned that the Atomic Energy Commission had confirmed that his strike on Iran had destroyed Tehran’s nuclear program. (Iran still has a nuclear program, and the AEC hasn’t existed since the mid-’70s.) He whined about the “Gulf of America” and how he beat the Associated Press in court on the issue. (The case is still ongoing.) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict? “I said”—he did not identify to whom—“‘How long have you been fighting?’ ‘Three thousand years, sir.’ That’s a long time. But we got it, I think, settled.”
He added later: “War is very strange.” Indeed.
And so it went, as Trump recycled old rally speeches, full of his usual grievances, lies, and misrepresentations; his obsessions with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama; and his sour disappointment in the Nobel Prize committee. (“They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” he said.) He congratulated himself on tariffs, noting that the money could buy a lot of battleships, “to use an old term.” And come to think of it, he said, maybe America should build battleships again, from steel, not that papier-mâché and aluminum stuff the Navy is apparently using now: “Aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.”
Ohhhkayyyy.
Even if these officers had never attended a MAGA event or even seen one, they were now in the middle of a typical, unhinged Trump diatribe. The president had a speech waiting for him on the teleprompter, and now and then Trump would hunch his shoulders and apparently pick off a stray word or phrase from it, like a distracted hunter firing random buckshot from a duck blind. But Trump has always had difficulty wrestling Stephen Miller’s labored neoclassical references and clunky, faux Churchillisms off a screen and into his mouth. Mostly, the president decided to just riff on his greatest hits to the stone-faced assembly.
As comical as many of Trump’s comments were, the president’s nakedly partisan appeal to U.S. military officers was a violation of every standard of American civil-military relations, and exactly what George Washington feared could happen with an unscrupulous commander in chief. The most ominous part of his speech came when he told the military officers that they would be part of the solution to domestic threats, fighting the “enemy from within.” He added, almost as a kind of trollish afterthought, that he’d told Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”
This farrago of fantasy, menace, and autocratic peacocking is the kind of thing that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan evocatively called “boob bait for the Bubbas” and that George Orwell might have called “prolefeed.” It’s one thing to serve it up to an adoring MAGA crowd: They know that most of it is nonsense and only some of it is real. They find it entertaining, and they can take or leave as much of Trump’s rhetorical junk-food buffet as they would like. It is another thing entirely to aim this kind of sludge at military officers, who are trained and acculturated to treat every word from the president with respect, and to regard his thoughts as policy.
But American officers have never had to contend with a president like Trump. Plenty of presidents behaved badly and suffered mental and emotional setbacks: John F. Kennedy cavorted with secretaries in the White House pool, Lyndon Johnson unleashed foul-mouthed tirades on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Nixon fell into depression and paranoia, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden wrestled with the indignities of age. But the officer corps knew that presidents were basically normal men surrounded by other normal men and women, and that the American constitutional system would insulate the military from any mad orders that might emerge from the Oval Office.
Likewise, in Trump’s first term, the president was surrounded by people who ensured that some of his nuttiest—and most dangerous—ideas were derailed before they could reach the military. Today, senior U.S. officers have to wonder who will shield them from the impulses of the person they just saw onstage. What are officers to make of Trump’s accusation that other nations, only a year ago, supposedly called America “a dead country”? (After all, these men and women were leading troops last year.) How are they supposed to react when Trump slips the surly bonds of truth, insults their former commanders in chief, and talks about his close relationship with the Kremlin?
In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?
2025-10-01 06:45:00
In the days before Pete Hegseth stepped onstage to address the hundreds of generals and admirals he summoned for a mysterious meeting outside Washington, D.C., officials at the Pentagon joked that the defense secretary could have saved a lot of time and money by making his remarks via email instead. As it turns out, what Hegseth delivered at Marine Corps Base Quantico could very well have been a copy of his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, which offers an exhaustive rebuke of the military he left in 2021 with the National Guard rank of major.
Hegseth’s speech, which required yanking commanders from posts dotting the globe and whisking them to Washington at taxpayers’ expense, marked a new phase in the former Fox News host’s campaign to transform the military in his image and align it more closely with the MAGA agenda. All of the pathologies diagnosed in his book—diversity initiatives, facial hair, accommodations for women, systems to hold “toxic” commanders accountable—were struck down on the spot, ending what Hegseth depicted as a long journey through the wilderness for what should rightfully be known as the War Department. “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading, and we lost our way. We became the ‘Woke Department,’” Hegseth told an auditorium packed with senior brass. “Not anymore.”
“No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate-change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that shit,” Hegseth told the officers.
In a 45-minute speech that preceded an even longer one by President Donald Trump, Hegseth roamed the stage as though he were delivering a TED Talk. Speaking to a room full of career officers with far more experience than he had, he called out “fat generals,” decried the punishment of troops for minor mistakes, and promised to reverse what he falsely said was a lowering of unit standards to accommodate women and people of color. Vowing to rebuild a force worthy of his eldest son—he made no mention of his daughters—Hegseth said he would enact stricter fitness standards and a host of new regulations: no more exceptions, no more shaving waivers for “beardos,” no more adherence to “stupid rules of engagement.”
The Pentagon shared no information in the days leading up to the meeting about what Hegseth would do or say, fueling anxiety and speculation that he might fire generals en masse or escalate the administration’s nascent war against Latin American drug gangs. Hegseth appeared to relish the suspense, taking the trouble to comment on a retired general’s social-media post about a 1935 meeting in which Nazi generals were asked to swear allegiance to Hitler rather than the Weimar constitution. “Cool story, General,” Hegseth wrote.
Some generals and admirals took that prospect seriously, privately considering what they would do if Trump or Hegseth asked them to take such an oath. Some told their staff that they would resign. Others refused to discuss the meeting at all. Many thought about how to behave, mindful of the president’s June visit to Fort Bragg, when lower-ranking troops cheered and booed as the president criticized protesters and former President Joe Biden.
[Read: Why does Hegseth want more than 800 generals and admirals in the same room?]
During Trump and Hegseth’s remarks, most officers showed little visible reaction, applauding lightly when the speakers concluded and fidgeting during sections of the president’s speech, which rambled in typical Trump fashion. Some officers had been instructed to take their cues about when to applaud from the officers on the Joint Staff. They were silent as Trump derided “Sleepy Joe Biden” and the “corrupt press.” They appeared uncomfortable when Trump talked about sending U.S. troops to Chicago and Portland to wage “the war within.” There were light chuckles when the president talked about how he liked his own signature, how he hadn’t asked for the latest fighter jet to be named F-47, and when he said that he loved “tariffs.”
One female officer, who like other officials spoke on condition of anonymity to share her candid views, told us that she was disappointed by the contents of Hegseth’s address. She said that most officers were open to altered fitness or grooming standards but expected the Pentagon’s highest official to be focused more on refining American strategy and winning future wars than on the details of physical training. “It’s something I would expect from a captain or a major,” the officer said. “I don’t want the secretary of war to be focused on baseline PT stuff.”
At the Pentagon, one defense official told us that the speech made them “uncomfortable.” Another told us that he believed that the message would resonate with parts of the force.
Hegseth, who is the subject of a soon-to-be-released investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over his sharing of attack plans on a Signal chat that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that he would reform the IG process because, as he saw it, official investigations had “been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues, and poor performers in the driver’s seat.” He also announced measures to alter promotion and disciplinary processes, providing greater leeway for troops accused of wrongdoing. Immediately afterward, the Defense Department issued seven memos codifying Hegseth’s remarks, including a 60-day review of training standards and a 30-day review of how the department defines bullying and hazing, which Hegseth believes has wrongly resulted in disciplinary action for troops being tough on subordinates or being politically incorrect.
After listing the proposed changes, Hegseth gave the assembled officers a warning: “If the words I’m speaking today are making your hearts sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.” If the commanders wanted to better understand what he was saying, he jokingly told them, they could pick up a copy of his book.
Trump followed Hegseth, outlining in an hour-long speech his own vision for a revamped force, promising to employ the military to tackle “the enemy within,” referring to protesters, drug traffickers, and migrants crossing the border. It was all part of his newfound commitment to using the National Guard, and even active-duty forces, for law-enforcement missions in American cities. At one point, the president suggested that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” and asserted that gang activity has made the nation’s capital a more hazardous environment than troops faced in their 20-year war against the Taliban.
Kori Schake, the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an Atlantic contributing writer, told us that it was “disgraceful” for Trump and Hegseth to subject military leaders to what she described as a “blatantly partisan” event. “Worse, it’s dangerous for the civilian leadership to agitate for our military to use our cities as ‘training grounds’ for war,” she said. “And it’s flat-out ridiculous to say that Washington, D.C., is more violent than anything the American military experienced in Afghanistan.”
Hegseth’s speech reflected the importance he has placed on physical fitness, a question he has elevated to a matter of morality. Although he has backed away from the assertion he made in The War on Warriors that women should not be permitted to serve in combat roles under any circumstances, today he repeated previous false statements about combat-job standards being lowered to accommodate the Obama administration’s 2015 decision to open those roles to women. Since taking office, Hegseth has repeatedly conflated occupational or job-specific standards, which are gender-neutral, and physical-fitness or health-related standards, which in most services are adjusted for age and gender. (The Army recently made its physical-fitness test gender-neutral but adjusted for age for combat positions.)
[Read: The backdoor way that Pete Hegseth could keep women out of combat]
“It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth said. “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat-arms physical standards as men.”
Some officers we spoke with voiced concern about how Hegseth’s message would affect recruiting and retention, metrics that have been improving over the past year. One general officer who attended the speech told us that Hegseth’s new policies on discipline, promotion, grooming, and fitness will complicate efforts by women and Black troops to advance and flourish in the ranks. “He wants to make it harder for service members to file complaints for harassment and bullying, which only paves the way to discriminate [against] the force until it looks how he wants it to,” the officer said.
The female officer we spoke with noted that Hegseth’s contention that new standards are necessary because combat doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman doesn’t square with his decision to roll out a new test that is gender-neutral but adjusted for age. “I’m fine with one standard,” she told us. But “if you can’t distinguish between a woman and a man, then you can’t distinguish between a 20-year-old private and a 50-year-old general.”
2025-10-01 05:51:00
To: Entire Military Leadership of the United States, Stationed All Over the World, Who Would Have to Be Flown In Very Disruptively and Expensively If This Weren’t an Email but for Some Reason Were an Urgent In-Person Address
From: Pete Hegseth
CC: Donald J. Trump
Subject: WARFIGHTER ETHOS
PLEASE DROP EVERYTHING YOU ARE DOING TO READ THIS EMAIL AT ATTENTION. THIS IS NOT SPAM AND I AM EXTREMELY SOBER! YOU ARE TOO FAT TO FIGHT WARS!
I AM SICK OF SEEING FAT TROOPS! NO FAT TROOPS! ALSO, TRANSPHOBIA IS BACK IN A BIG WAY. NO THANKS FOR YOUR SERVICE! OUR DIVERSITY IS NOT OUR STRENGTH. I DON’T WANT WOMEN ON THE FRONT LINES, AND I DON’T WANT ANYONE WHO CAN’T BE CLEAN-SHAVEN FOR ANY REASON. WHOOPS, DOES THAT ELIMINATE A LOT OF BLACK TROOPS? NO, IT DOESN’T. YOU’RE RACIST FOR EVEN SUGGESTING THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING. AND, OBVIOUSLY, RACISM IS ILLEGAL.
BULLYING IS BACK NOW! LAY HANDS ON THE NEW RECRUITS! AND FEEL FREE TO MAKE MISTAKES. ESPECIALLY IN COMBAT! IT WON’T GO ON YOUR RECORD. WE’RE BRINGING MORE OF A LOOSE, IMPROVISATIONAL FEEL TO WAR. NOT DEFENSE. WAR. JUST ONE OF MANY IMPROVEMENTS! DON’T LET YOUR HANDS BE TIED BY THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. THOSE ARE POLITICALLY CORRECT, AND WE ARE DONE WITH THAT. WE ARE BRINGING BACK STANDARDS, AND BY STANDARDS, I MEAN PHYSICAL-FITNESS STANDARDS.
EVERYONE KNOWS I AM FIT FOR MY JOB! PHYSICALLY! HAVE YOU SEEN THAT VIDEO OF ME DOING SOMETHING THAT RESEMBLES A PULL-UP, LIKE IF YOU TOLD A LITTLE KID TO DO A PULL-UP AND HE HAD NEVER SEEN ONE BEFORE? EVERYONE SHOULD DO THAT.
OKAY, YES, I WENT THROUGH THE ARMY AND REMOVED PEOPLE MY GUT SAID WERE BAD. YOU MAY NOTICE THAT SOME OF THEM WERE WOMEN AND PEOPLE OF COLOR. YEP. CAN’T HELP IT. GUT FEELING. REMEMBER, WHENEVER SOMEONE WHO ISN’T A WHITE MAN IS IN A POSITION OF LEADERSHIP, THAT’S A SIGN THAT STANDARDS WERE LOWERED UNACCEPTABLY DUE TO DEI. QED. RIF. FAFO.
IF ANYONE COMPLAINS, THEIR CAREER SHOULD BE OVER! IF THIS SPEECH MAKES YOUR HEART SINK: GET OUT! WE DON’T WANT YOU. EVERYONE ELSE, GET EXCITED TO POLICE OUR DOMESTIC ENEMIES!
REMEMBER WOUNDED KNEE? THAT WAS GREAT. WE SHOULD DO MORE OF THAT.
I AM TOXIC AND PROUD! NO, THE DEFINITION OF TOXIC HAS NOT CHANGED, I AM JUST EXCITED TO KILL EVERYTHING I TOUCH. WE SHOULD TELL PEOPLE, “JOIN THE ARMY, AND YOU CAN KILL PEOPLE UNDER THE COLOR OF LAW!” I’M DISAPPOINTED HOW FEW PEOPLE I SERVE WITH SEEM TO SHARE THAT ETHOS. DON’T THEY REALIZE HOW COOL IT IS TO KILL?
OVER TO YOU, MR. PRESIDENT! LET’S HEAR FROM YOU IN YOUR ACTUAL WORDS! BUT JUST A CHOICE SELECTION OF YOUR ACTUAL WORDS, BECAUSE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE THIS IS AN EMAIL, WE RESPECT YOUR TIME!
YOURS, LETHALLY,
PETE
To: Entire Military
From: Donald Trump
Cc: Pete Hegseth
Subject: Re: WARFIGHTER ETHOS
War is very strange. You never know what’s going to happen with war.
To me, it was always the Gulf of America. I could never understand. We have 92 percent of the frontage, and for years—actually, 350 years, they were there before us—it was called the Gulf of Mexico. I just had this idea. I’m looking at a map, I’m saying, “We have most of the frontage. Why is it Gulf of Mexico? Why isn’t it the Gulf of America?”
And I made the change, and it went smoothly.
The name is the Gulf of America. Google Maps changed the name, everybody did, but AP wouldn’t, and then we won in court. How about that? Isn’t that so cool?
You know, when I have a general and I have to sign for a general—because we have beautiful paper, gorgeous paper. I said, “Throw a little more gold on it. They deserve it.” Give me—I want the A paper, not the D paper.
We used to sign a piece of garbage. I said, “This man’s going to be a general, right? Yeah? I don’t want to use this, I want to use the big, beautiful, firm paper.
And I sign it. Actually, I love my signature, I really do.
My favorite word in the English dictionary is the word tariff. And people thought that was strange. And the fake news came over, and they really hit me hard on it. They said, what about love? What about religion? What about God? What about wife, family? I got killed when I said tariff is my favorite word. So, I changed it. It’s now my fifth favorite word. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that. But they hit me hard. But it is. I mean, when you look at …
The other day they had 31 billion that they found: $31 billion. So, we found $31 billion and we’re not sure from where it came.
A gentleman came in, a financial guy. I said, “Well, what does that mean?” He said, “We don’t know where it came.” I said, “Check the tariff shelf.” “No, sir, the tariffs haven’t started in that sector yet.” I said, “Yes, they have. They started seven weeks ago. Check it”—comes back 20 minutes later: “Sir, you’re right, it came from tariffs.” Thirty-one billion. That’s enough to buy a lot of battleships, Admiral, to use an old term. I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships.
I’m an aesthetic person. And I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do. I’m a very aesthetic person, and I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically. They say, “Oh, it’s stealth.” I say, “That’s not stealth.” An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.
By the way, the B-2 bombers were incredible.
We’re actually considering the concept of battleship: solid steel, not aluminum. I’m sort of open to it.
We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling downstairs—said, it’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs, like, I’m on stairs, like these stairs. I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well.
A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I’d never say—da da da da da da ba ba ba, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president.
We will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win, win.
[Delete] [Mark as Spam]
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DJT
2025-10-01 04:15:00
In the 1960s, the authors of one of the world’s first popular compendiums of fun and interesting facts entreated readers not to mistake the “flower of Trivia” for the “weed of minutiae.” Trivia stimulates the mind, Edwin Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky wrote in More Trivial Trivia; minutiae stymie it.
Happily, The Atlantic’s garden bursts with the former and is almost entirely lacking in the latter, and in this new project of daily quizzes, I get to share a bunch of that trivia with you, curious readers. So set down the Snapple cap and stop to smell the blooms—is that geranium?—with questions from recently published stories.
To get these questions in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily.
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily written by Tom Nichols:
The global fan event Tudum gets its onomatopoeic name from the sound that plays at the start of original productions of what streaming service?
— From Shirley Li’s “It’s Not Just [ANSWER]—It’s Your Entire Life”
In keeping with the tradition of albatross or ravens as an omen, what Tchaikovsky ballet would the Soviet government play on loop on TV during periods of political instability?
— From Anna Nemtsova’s “Moscow Can’t Stop the Music”
What music festival of the late 1990s derived its name from the mythical first wife of Adam, who in Jewish folklore preceded Eve and left the Garden of Eden rather than be subservient to her husband?
— From Sophie Gilbert’s “The Hard-Won Lessons of [ANSWER]”
And, by the way, did you know that the chess term check comes from the Persian word shah, as in “king”? And that checkmate comes from shah mat, or “the king is frozen”? (That latter bit happens to be close enough to Persian’s mata—“to die”—that for a good long while, Westerners who learned the game might have thought it more regicidal than strictly necessary.)
For Monopoly lovers, modern Persian’s angoshtane varshakaste shode is “thimble gone bankrupt.”
See you tomorrow!
Answers:
How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, or read below for previous ones. And if you think up a great one after reading an Atlantic story—or simply want to share a stimulating fact—send it my way at [email protected].
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily written by Tom Nichols:
What international sporting event occurred last weekend in New York, after happening most recently two years ago in Italy … and before that in Wisconsin … and before that in France (after Minnesota, after Scotland, after Illinois, etc.)?
— From Sally Jenkins’s “Golf’s Very Loud Weekend”
According to many commentators on the right, when progressives penalize wrongdoing, it’s “cancel culture”; when conservatives do it, it’s merely what other double-c phrase suggestive of an action’s inevitable repercussions?
— From Idrees Kahloon’s “Illiberal America, MAGA Edition”
Dealing as much with loss and grief as with physical monstrosity, what Victorian epistolary novel was referred to by its young author as her “hideous progeny”?
— From Jon Michael Varese’s “ChatGPT Resurrected My Dead Father”
And, by the way, did you know that Transnistria, the Russia-aligned breakaway region of Moldova, is the only place in the world that circulates plastic currency? A friend visited recently (don’t ask) and returned with some of these “coins,” which are neither exchangeable back into other currencies nor accepted anywhere else on Earth, except—and only sometimes—by a few cross-border-bus operators back in Moldova proper. They do, however, make excellent bingo chips.
Answers:
The Ryder Cup. Sally writes that the biennial contest between U.S. and European golfers is a noisy affair even at its civilest and was bound to be particularly raucous once you packed in hundreds of thousands of born hecklers from across New York’s boroughs and beyond. Read more.
“Consequence culture.” This is, for what it’s worth, also what a lot of progressives call it when they themselves are doing it. Idrees worries that the self-excusing and hypocrisy is kicking off a spiral from which America will struggle to extricate itself. Read more.
Frankenstein. The echoes of Mary Shelley’s novel bounce crystal-clear through all the instances Varese relates of grieving people trying to resurrect lost loved ones through AI—a group that includes the writer himself. Read more.
2025-10-01 03:49:35
Yesterday, President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point proposal for ending the devastating conflict in Gaza. On paper, it’s a mostly sensible deal—and certainly better than the alternative, which is what it should be measured against. Among other elements, the plan would end the war, return the remaining hostages, surge aid into Gaza, disarm and potentially exile Hamas, and provide an eventual pathway toward Palestinian self-government. Crucially, the proposal also repudiates Trump’s prior push to “clean out” Gazans in order to build an American resort, reversing an egregious blunder that had fanned the Israeli settler right’s dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza.
In short, the Trump plan is a bunch of generally reasonable ideas that have been circulating for years but have not been implemented, because both parties to the conflict have strong reservations about some of them. The question is whether any of that has changed. Trump’s proposal has the backing of the European Union, the Palestinian Authority, key Arab states, Israeli hostage families, and the Hamas patrons Turkey and Qatar. At the White House, the plan also received qualified support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised it as achieving Israel’s war aims.
[Yair Rosenberg: The real reason to recognize Palestine ]
All of that, however, was the easy part. The hard part is the follow-through. Trump, always the salesman, presented the agreement as a done deal. But the real work has only just begun. Can Trump and his Middle Eastern allies get Hamas to assent to concessions, such as demilitarization, that it has thus far refused? And can the president keep Netanyahu from flipping on the deal if and when it threatens his far-right coalition in Parliament? For this plan to work, Trump will need his friends in Qatar and Turkey, whose countries shelter Hamas leaders, to deliver the terrorist group, and he will need to babysit the Israeli prime minister to ensure he upholds the bargain.
In theory, the president is uniquely situated to accomplish these aims. Trump has enjoyed warm relations with the leaders of Qatar and Turkey, having hosted both recently in the White House. He also has leverage over Netanyahu that no recent American president has enjoyed. That’s because, although Netanyahu previously marketed himself in his own country as a bulwark against pressure from liberal American presidents such as Barack Obama, insulating him from their demands, he has presented himself as an ally of the populist Trump. The prime minister even featured the president on massive campaign posters, implying to voters that only he could manage Israel’s relationship with the mercurial American leader. With new elections looming in 2026, Netanyahu cannot afford to be at odds with the man whose support is central to his own electoral argument, which is why he had no choice but to back Trump’s plan in Washington.
That early buy-in matters, but it is no guarantee that the deal will succeed. Hamas has not yet agreed to the proposal, and may respond with a “yes, and” intended to drag out negotiations and shift blame for their eventual failure to Israel. Netanyahu, meanwhile, will face blowback from the hard-right members of his coalition—who seek to ethnically cleanse, annex, and resettle Gaza—and may try to extricate himself from the agreement if he fears it will collapse his government.
[Jon Finer: The West Bank is sliding toward a crisis]
As the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid put it today, Netanyahu “usually says ‘yes’ in Washington, when he stands in front of cameras in the White House and feels like a groundbreaking statesman, and the ‘but’ when he returns to Israel and the base reminds him who’s boss.” In fact, Netanyahu has a long history of reneging on painstakingly negotiated agreements because of domestic political considerations. But none of those agreements had an American president on the other side. Trump has the power to compel Netanyahu; the question is whether he is capable of paying the sustained attention necessary to do it.
The bleak truth about the Gaza war is that most Palestinians and Israelis have wanted it to end for many months, but their leaders have instead privileged their own ideological interests over the popular will. As Mohammed al-Beltaji, a 47-year-old from Gaza City, told AFP after Trump announced his plan, “As always, Israel agrees, then Hamas refuses—or the other way around. It’s all a game, and we, the people, are the ones paying the price.” This latest round of diplomacy can hardly be expected to turn out differently. But it would be wrong not to hope.
2025-10-01 02:39:00
On Sunday morning, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints woke to the news that Russell M. Nelson—the leader of their faith, and a man they considered a prophet of God—had died. The sadness of the news was tempered somewhat by its foreseeability. Nelson, who had recently celebrated his 101st birthday, was the oldest living global religious leader, and he spoke freely about his own mortality. “At this point,” he said in a 2022 speech, “I have stopped buying green bananas.”
I had interviewed Nelson several years earlier for The Atlantic, and the late prophet was on my mind Sunday morning as I drove my family to our Latter-day Saint ward in Northern Virginia. After the sacrament meeting, I walked two of my kids to the Primary room, where they’d been given small assignments in that day’s children’s program. As the kids began to sing, I heard a fellow congregant behind me say, “There’s an active shooter at an LDS church.”
A quick glance at my phone revealed a stream of nightmarish news alerts from Grand Blanc, Michigan: Witnesses were reporting that a man had crashed his pickup truck into a Mormon chapel, opened fire on the congregation with an assault rifle, and set the building on fire. Early details were sketchy—the number of victims varied; some reports mentioned homemade explosive devices. But one image dominated my feed: an aerial shot of a utilitarian brick church, which looked strikingly similar to the one I’d driven my family to that morning, wreathed in flames.
[McKay Coppins: The death of a prophet]
I put my phone away. I watched my 7-year-old daughter say a prayer and my 10-year-old son read a verse of scripture. I flashed them a thumbs-up and slipped out the back of the room. Walking down the halls of the church, I found myself mentally noting the location of the exits.
As the day wore on, the discourse around the shooting took on a grimly familiar pattern. Conservatives rushed to declare that “Christianity is under attack,” while liberals circulated photos of a Trump sign hanging outside the alleged shooter’s house. The stampede to politicize the shooting dispirited me—I knew the story would likely vanish from the news cycle unless the killer’s motives proved narratively convenient to one party or the other. But I just kept thinking about Nelson. How would he have responded to the horrific violence in Michigan if he’d lived one more day? I doubt the shooter’s motives would have changed his answer. I suspect that Nelson—who spent his final years urgently pleading with Latter-day Saints to be peacemakers in a fractious and angry world—would have reminded us of that most radical, and unnatural, of Christ’s teachings: to love your enemy.
I first met Nelson in 2019, a year after he’d ascended to the presidency of the Church. His energetic tenure up to that point had surprised many observers—myself included—who expected the 93-year-old, a former heart surgeon, to play more of a caretaker role. Instead, he set out to transform the Church. He shortened worship services and introduced new hymns; he appointed the Church’s first Asian American and Latin American apostles and reversed a policy that restricted baptisms for children of same-sex couples. He announced scores of new temples to be built around the world and dramatically increased humanitarian spending to nearly $1.5 billion a year.
I had been assigned to write a feature on Mormonism, pegged to the faith’s bicentennial, and I was hoping that Nelson—who rarely sat down with reporters—would agree to an interview. To help make the case, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, had accompanied me to Salt Lake City. This convening of my boss and my spiritual leader made for a slightly unsettling dynamic, especially when Goldberg began talking up my qualifications.
“McKay is one of the most gifted young journalists in America,” he asserted, not without hyperbole.
The discerning prophet, looking surprised and perhaps a bit skeptical, glanced at me. “Really?”
Nelson agreed to the interview. But by the time I got on his calendar—10 months later—the world was unraveling. It was May of 2020, and a plague of biblical proportions was wreaking havoc on society.
As I sat across from the socially distanced prophet in a giant, wood-paneled conference room, I felt conflicted. I’d been struggling with the assignment. Should I approach the story as an observer or a believer? Could I really write thousands of words about a subject so personal to me while maintaining journalistic distance? In preparing for my interview with the prophet, I felt the tug of competing impulses. I had a list of reporterly questions to ask—about the Church’s history and its future and the painful tensions of the present—and the journalist in me wanted answers. But in the apocalyptic spring of 2020, I was looking for something more from the encounter—wisdom, hope, a measure of spiritual comfort.
[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]
I don’t know if Nelson sensed my ambivalence, but he had a doctor’s bedside manner that put me at ease. He prayed for each member of my family by name, and gave me business cards with little notes made out to each of my kids. About 15 minutes into the interview, he began talking about the various identities we carry through life. I mentioned that I sometimes found myself compartmentalizing the different roles I played—journalist, parent, person of faith—and his eyes lit up. “Don’t separate them,” he said.
He told me that when he was in medical school, a professor had once chastised him for failing to draw a line between his faith and his studies. “Why should I separate them?” Nelson recalled thinking. “If it’s true in one place, it’s true in another.” Studying human anatomy could enrich his faith in the creative powers of the divine; embracing the Christian ethic of patience and forbearance could improve his behavior in the operating room. Nelson chose not to be a doctor at the hospital and a Christian at church—he was both things all the time, and he was better off for it.
Some epiphanies are realized only in retrospect. I didn’t see it at the time, but Nelson’s teaching had a lasting effect on both my spiritual life and my journalism.
In his final years, Nelson concentrated much of his ministry on the ruinous divisions that define modern life. In a landmark 2023 sermon titled “Peacemakers Needed,” he called on his flock to reject the “venomous contention that infects our civic dialogue” and to instead build “bridges of understanding” to those with whom we most profoundly disagree. He pressed this point until the very end: In an op-ed published three weeks before his death, he wrote, “A century of experience has taught me this with certainty: anger never persuades, hostility never heals, and contention never leads to lasting solutions.”
Nelson’s diagnosis of our times wasn’t necessarily prophetic. He was seeing what we all see—a world riven by war, a country spiraling into hatred and violence. What made his prescription so powerful was how unfashionable it was. For all the talk lately of “lowering the temperature,” vanishingly few people seem interested in understanding their perceived enemies. Nelson’s example inspired me—and many others—to at least try.
Last night, I drove back to our chapel in Northern Virginia. There were no meetings to attend, but I had an urge to check on the building. It had been about 36 hours since news of the Michigan shooting first broke. The casualty count had been confirmed—four dead, eight injured—and the motives were becoming clearer: According to The New York Times, the shooter had nursed an irrational hatred of Mormons for years, apparently stemming from a breakup with a Latter-day Saint girlfriend.
But other stories were coming out, too—about the church members who used their bodies to shield children from bullets; about the nurses at a nearby hospital who, though they’d been on strike, left their picket line to attend to the injured.
[Listen: Why assassinations shaped the 1960s and haunt us again]
Sitting in the church parking lot, I thought about one of the last things Nelson had said to me. We were nearing the end of our interview when he began to contemplate the questions he would face in his imminent interview with God.
“I doubt if I’ll be judged by the number of operations I did, or the number of scientific publications I had,” he said. “I doubt if I’ll even be judged by the growth of the Church during my presidency. I don’t think it’ll be a quantitative experience. I think he’ll want to know: What about your faith? What about virtue? What about your knowledge? Were you temperate? Were you kind to people? Did you have charity, humility?” In the end, Nelson told me, “we exist to make life better for people.”
Nelson was not naive about the world in which he lived. He surely knew that he would die before seeing peace triumph over contention. But he kept inviting us to reach for something better, because that’s what a prophet does—and because he knew that some of us would take him up on it.
As I pulled out of the parking lot, I passed the church’s VISITORS WELCOME sign. The sun had set, but a nearby light illuminated the sign just enough to reveal a small bouquet of flowers left on top of it by a stranger.
