2025-06-25 06:54:00
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Jessica Ramos, a Democrat running for mayor of New York, has had scathing words for Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who is also running for mayor. In 2021, the state senator called on Cuomo to resign or be impeached after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment (he denies wrongdoing); the New York state attorney general also found that his administration had undercounted COVID deaths in nursing homes.
On the campaign trail this year, Ramos called Cuomo a “corrupt egomaniac” and a “remorseless bully.” She said, “I wish I lived in a city where voters cared about women getting harassed.” She also used the scandal to question his acuity: “I imagine having to resign in disgrace must have really taken a toll on, at the very least, at the very least, his ego, but most certainly his mental health,” Ramos said, adding that the city could not “afford a Joe Biden moment.”
This made it surprising when, earlier this month, Ramos “cross-endorsed” Cuomo in the city’s ranked-choice voting system. (My colleague Annie Lowrey recently detailed the complicated system.)
“We need serious governing. We need delivery over dogma. Knowing how to govern matters, and that’s why I’m endorsing Andrew Cuomo for mayor today,” Ramos said at a joint rally with Cuomo. Making clear that this was a swipe at the leftist candidate Zohran Mamdani, she added that only one of the mayoral candidates has the “experience, toughness, and the knowledge to lead New York for what’s about to come.” Ramos is hardly alone: Politico found that more than 40 percent of Cuomo’s top endorsements by elected officials in the mayoral race came from people who publicly condemned him in 2021.
Voting in the Democratic mayoral primary ends today, and if the polls are right, Cuomo and Mamdani are the likely winners. The ranked-choice voting system means that the outcome is difficult to predict; Cuomo has led most polls, though an Emerson College poll released yesterday suggests that Mamdani could pull ahead once voters’ downballot choices are counted.
Cuomo’s strong position is a reminder that this is, for better or worse—almost certainly for worse—a golden age for comebacks. President Donald Trump is only the most blatant example. This has led journalists and political scientists to wonder whether scandals even matter anymore, or to bluntly assert that they don’t. Such despondency is understandable, but the situation is somewhat more nuanced. Where major scandals used to seem like simple disqualifiers, ending or thwarting many careers, voters and politicians now treat the taint of scandal as just another factor in a cost-benefit analysis.
Cuomo’s story illustrates how this has happened. The first relevant dynamic is a shift in how the public views sex scandals. Starting with President Bill Clinton, politicians realized that they could gut out a scandal rather than step down, a path since followed by Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Trump, and others. The #MeToo movement complicated that: Consensual-sex scandals might be survivable, but harassment and assault became grounds for banishment. Cuomo was never convicted in a criminal court (the only charge filed against him was dismissed in 2022), but an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James found that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” (Cuomo has admitted to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation," but continues to deny wrongdoing.)
Much has changed in four years. In The New Yorker last week, Alexis Okeowo profiled Tina Johnson, one of the women who accused the Alabama Republican Roy Moore, then a Senate candidate, of sexual assault in 2017 but who now feels forgotten. (Moore has denied the allegations and is suing Johnson and other accusers.) “The #MeToo movement had created a sense of immense possibility for survivors of sexual violence. But, in time, that sense seemed to fade,” Okeowo writes. “A general fatigue with ‘cancellation’ took hold, and conservative media outlets and politicians weaponized this weariness against the movement.” Cuomo didn’t just ride that wave: He participated in it, launching a podcast to complain about cancel culture and paint himself as a victim.
Second, in a perverse way, Cuomo likely benefited from the sheer number of accusations against him, as well as the nursing-home scandal. A 2021 paper by the political scientists Steven P. Nawara and Mandi Bailey, based on a survey experiment, found that although scandals exact a toll on candidates, multiple scandals don’t hurt them more, because the “cognitive load” required of voters to process additional stories is too great. “This finding is troubling from a perspective of democratic accountability, as it suggests voters are either incapable or unwilling to punish politicians involved in multiple instances of wrongdoing beyond the initial hit that those candidates take to their evaluations after a single scandal,” they wrote.
A third factor is the polarized, partisan landscape of politics today. Many partisans feel that every election is not just important but existential—if their side loses, they may also lose their way of life. (They aren’t necessarily wrong!) You may be more willing to vote for a candidate you dislike if you believe they are more “electable,” or if you find their rival’s worldview not just worse but also unacceptable. New York’s Democratic primary is an intraparty affair, but it is strongly polarized—for a sense of this, see this New York Times rundown of celebrity ballot rankings, which shows a Cuomo faction and a Mamdani/Never Cuomo faction, including most of the other candidates, in various ranked orders. Or look at Ramos’s endorsement, in which she doesn’t absolve Cuomo but voices a fear that only he can effectively protect the city from Trump’s wrath. Other reluctant Cuomo backers have cited Mamdani’s leftist politics or inexperience as their motivation.
Trump embodies these dynamics just as much as Cuomo does. His misdeeds instigated #MeToo, and later, he was a beneficiary of its fade; he is embroiled in so many scandals that hardly anyone can keep them all in mind, and his political rise has both encouraged and been fueled by hyperpartisan polarization. Various things should have disqualified Trump from a return to the White House—most notable, his attempt to steal the 2020 election—but saying that the scandals didn’t hurt him is too nihilistic. The Times’ Nate Cohn has argued that given voter dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden and the economy, Republicans might have done better in 2024 had they not been weighed down by Trump.
The fact that scandals can still hurt a flawed politician, as part of a broader consideration of pluses and minuses, is reassuring. Even so, one can imagine a version of American politics in which voters feel that they can hold their leaders to an even higher moral standard.
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2025-06-25 05:55:00
“I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God. We love you, God.”
— Donald Trump, announcing strikes on Iran
Hi. It’s Me, God.
I know what you’re thinking: I always imagined that if God existed, and cared about one thing, it would be peace. Peace, and keeping children from dying, perhaps? How did You get involved in sending those bombers to Iran, to “lower the temperature of global conflict while simultaneously kind of raising it here in order to lower it,” in the immortal words of freshman Representative Pat Harrigan of North Carolina?
Does Your involvement imply that anyone has a plan, other than thinking that they are smarter than every other president? There is a Greek word for that, and it isn’t plan.
No God worth Their salt would be tangled up in war, you are thinking, least of all a war being waged by the Trump administration, which has the long-term strategic acumen of an enraged opossum stuck in a trash bag. This is a president who thinks he can will a cease-fire into being via Truth Social posts alone.
Didn’t you used to make helium and rhinos and the concept of time? What happened to you, God? How did you get mixed up in this?
What can I tell you? Everything that’s going on now is so depressing. I had to tune out for the sake of My mental health, and that may have been taken the wrong way.
My days look different now from when I was busy inventing that thing that dew does when it gets stuck in a spider’s web and the light catches it just right. Mostly, I spend my time agonizing over who should win Super Bowls and giving people partial piggyback rides across the sand. I lurk perennially just out of range for Margaret.
I care deeply about the outcomes of football games. It matters to me that people pray in the end zone. I pay attention to that kind of thing.
Awards shows, of course, I watch intently, to make certain I am thanked. (I have a long memory for ingratitude.) I am constantly on TikTok, doing oddly specific favors for some people and threatening others, unless they engage in constant prostration. “Nice house,” I am always saying. “Nice life. Nice kid. Would be a shame if something happened to it.” Remember what I did to Job? (Allegedly.)
I am big into decor. Look for my influence on a driftwood sign between eat and love. I work hard so that influencers have blessed days. I come up with personalized plans for Drake and people who are going through rough breakups. I am always sending messages, especially around lottery-ticket purchases. I made sure Nicole Scherzinger got that Tony Award. I decided whether George Santos stayed in office. I looked out for Bob Menendez, up to a point. I told a pastor in Denver to sell some very dubious cryptocurrency.
When I’m not backseat-driving high-school football coaches’ prayers, I love to pose for John McNaughton paintings. I’m there, whispering my thoughts to Mikes (Huckabee, Johnson) and telling them I like that they’re in charge. I care if Speaker of the House Mike Johnson watches porn. I care a great deal!
I am involved in everything these days, except what matters. So many small, weird yeses to disguise the enormity of the no’s. I help out with awards, and I listen to Speaker Johnson’s concerns, and I assist with personal vanity projects, and I ignore everything else. Yes, everything. Need to send more bombs somewhere? Sure, especially if you think it’ll help your brand! Just don’t ask me to help out a single child or bend the arc of the universe toward justice anymore. I’m taking some time for Me now. You’re welcome, Donald Trump. Good luck with everything! So excited to collaborate on collectible Bibles with you!
2025-06-25 05:25:22
Last night, President Donald Trump announced a “total and complete” cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Iran’s nuclear program, Trump said, had been “obliterated” and “totally destroyed” by the U.S. strikes, and Iran’s retaliation was “very weak” and resulted in “hardly any damage.”
If the cease-fire holds, this episode would appear to mark a major foreign-policy victory for the president. But Trump may have made a crucial mistake that could bring about the very outcome that successive American presidents have sought to prevent: an Iranian nuclear weapon.
The problem is that the cease-fire is not linked to a diplomatic agreement with Iran on the future of its nuclear program. Trump apparently sees no need for further negotiation, because the military strikes were, to him, an unqualified success. But as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Sunday morning, assessing the damage to the sites will take some time. A preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that the strikes had failed to destroy some core components of the nuclear program, CNN reported today.
[Read: The true impact of Trump’s strike on Iran]
If parts of the program survived, or if Iran stockpiled and hid enriched uranium in advance of the strikes, then Tehran’s next steps seem clear. It will end cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Without eyes and ears on the ground, the international community will lose the ability to monitor Iran’s program. Iran could then choose to build a bomb covertly.
There is a worrisome parallel here to North Korea, which ended cooperation with the IAEA, pulled out of the NPT, and slowly resumed production of highly enriched uranium. A few years later, Pyongyang tested a nuclear device, much to everyone’s surprise.
The Iranian regime may conclude that withdrawing from the NPT is its most effective form of retaliation. At the start of the Trump administration, the Islamic Republic was in its weakest position since coming to power in 1979, because of its own catastrophic choices. On October 8, 2023—the day after Hamas attacked Israel—Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, joined the war against Israel at a low level. Within a year, Israel had decimated the Lebanese militia. Since then, Israel has significantly weakened Hamas, and another Iranian ally, Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled by local militias. Iran launched two massive air attacks on Israel in 2024—in April and October—with the clear intent of killing hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis. The United States led a regional coalition to shoot down practically all of Iran’s missiles, and Israeli counterstrikes destroyed much of Iran’s air defenses.
Tehran has been left with no good options for retaliating against the Israeli and American strikes that just took place. If it seeks to kill large numbers of Americans, either in assaults on U.S. bases or by carrying out a terrorist attack in the United States, it will risk enraging Trump and drawing the U.S. into a prolonged conflict that could threaten the regime. Iran could try to close the Strait of Hormuz, but sustaining that would be difficult given Tehran’s shortage of missile launchers and vessels, and the likelihood of a significant international response. And if it expands the war to Saudi Arabia, Iran will just be bringing more enemies into the fray.
Hunkering down, buying time, and perhaps building a nuclear weapon is a much more viable option by comparison.
[Tom Nichols: The United States bombed Iran. What comes next?]
So long as Iran is a member of the NPT, it has a commitment to allow the IAEA access to its nuclear sites for inspections and a framework under which to accept strict limits on its uranium-enrichment program. If it withdraws, none of that will be enforceable. A robust diplomatic deal was preferable to a military strike because it would have provided a verifiable way of permanently preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon rather than a temporary reprieve.
Iran’s weak position before the air assault gave the United States enormous diplomatic leverage, and Trump had been pursuing such a deal. Exactly why that fell apart isn’t known. Perhaps Israel acted militarily because it feared that a U.S.-Iran deal wouldn’t fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, or perhaps new intelligence about Iran’s program came to light.
Regardless of the reason, once Israel acted, Trump was in a tough position. If he didn’t follow suit, Iran’s deeply buried Fordo facility could survive largely intact, and Iran might make a dash for the bomb. If he did act, the United States could get dragged into a protracted war without a clearly defined end goal.
Trump sought to address these dangers by ordering precise strikes on Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan and then almost immediately leaning on Israel to accept a cease-fire so that the United States would not get drawn into a forever war. But the primary risk of the military option remains: If it was not completely successful, Iran could withdraw from the NPT and make the decision to build nuclear weapons.
Trump could have managed that risk by telling the public that although the strikes appeared to have been successful, fully ascertaining their results would take time. He could then have insisted on a week-long cease-fire for the purpose of concluding a diplomatic agreement with Iran—one that would have insisted on limits to Iran’s nuclear program and continued access for the IAEA, whose inspectors remain in Iran but have not been admitted into nuclear sites. Given the likely damage done to the program, he could have afforded to stop short of demanding full dismantlement and settled instead for strict limits on enrichment, as well as round-the-clock inspections with no expiration date.
But Trump took a very different path by declaring the problem fully solved and not using the moment of leverage to extract commitments from Tehran.
[Read: Trump’s two-week window for diplomacy was a smoke screen]
Tensions between Washington and Jerusalem seem all but inevitable in the aftermath of this choice. Trump has made abundantly clear that he expects only one answer from the U.S. intelligence agencies now poring over the evidence to assess the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear program. Congressional intelligence committees may need to step up to get at the truth. Israel, meanwhile, has a pressing interest in finding out whether or not the strikes succeeded. If they didn’t, and Iran is able to rebuild its program within a year or two, the Israeli government will presumably want to deal with that and not pretend that the strikes ended the threat for good.
Trump does have one means at his disposal for tacking back to diplomacy without fully reversing his position. The Obama-era nuclear deal had a provision, called “snapback,” that allowed its signatories to reimpose United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran without a Russian or Chinese veto should Tehran be found acting in violation of the agreement’s constraints. The United States withdrew from that agreement in 2018, so it can’t activate snapback—but France, Germany, and Britain are still signatories, and they have until October to make use of the clause.
The United States could continue to insist that Iran’s nuclear program was completely destroyed and is no longer operable. This would make snapback more difficult to activate. But if Trump still wants a diplomatic deal, he can work with the Europeans to present Iran with a clear choice: If it agrees to inspections and strict limits on its program, it can have sanctions relief. If it doesn’t, snapback will take effect. This may not be enough to persuade Iran to stay in the NPT. But without it or something like it, Trump may find himself confronted with a new Iranian nuclear crisis later in his term.
2025-06-25 03:10:00
Think of a famous storm—maybe Hurricane Katrina, gathering force over the warming Atlantic surface and pinwheeling toward the mouth of the Mississippi River to flood the great city of New Orleans. You may remember that Katrina killed more than 1,300 people. You may remember other, less deadly storms, such as Sandy, which killed dozens of people in New York City, and at least 147 overall. Now think of a famous heat wave. It’s more difficult to do. And yet, heat waves can be fatal too. In 2023, scorching weather lingered for more than a month in Phoenix, Arizona, pushing temperatures to 119 degrees and killing an estimated 400 people in the county. Two years later, it’s all but forgotten. A major storm is history. A major heat wave is the weather.
This week’s heat wave is menacing much of the entire country: Almost three-quarters of America’s population—245 million people—have been subjected to temperatures of at least 90 degrees, and more than 30 million people are experiencing triple digits, according to one estimate. Yet few of us will remember this shared misery, unless we ourselves happen to be hospitalized because of it, or lose someone to heat stroke. Instead, these few days will blur together with all the other stretches of “unseasonably warm weather” and “record-setting temperatures” that now define summer in America. They will constitute just one more undifferentiated and unremembered moment from our extended slide into planetary catastrophe.
Heat waves have always been anonymous disasters. They lack the flashy action of earthquakes, volcanoes, or plagues, and they don’t show up much in ancient histories and myths. No single heat wave from human history has been assigned the narrative resonance of the Vesuvius eruption, or the mythic power of the storms that imperiled Odysseus. When heat waves do appear in stories, they tend to come in aggregate, after a series of them, occurring over months or years, have intensified droughts and famines. Our main cultural record of these collected runs of extreme heat consists of ruins left behind by civilizations that vanished after too many rainless years and failed harvests.
What if heat waves could be called by name, like Katrina and Sandy? Maybe that would give them greater purchase on our cultural memory. Several organizations have recently argued that we ought to label heat waves as we do tropical storms. (This week’s, if it were the first in some new system, might be called “Heat Wave Aaron.”) Supposedly, this would make heat loom larger in public discourse: More people would become aware of it and stay indoors. In 2022, a team working with the mayor’s office in Seville, Spain, piloted this idea. They assigned a local heat wave that had reached 110 degrees the name Zoe. According to a paper the team published last year, the 6 percent of surveyed residents who could recall the name without prompting also said they’d engaged in more heat-safety behaviors.
No one knows whether that effect would have lasted through other heat waves, once the novelty of naming wore off for the Sevillians. Either way, the idea may be tricky to implement. In the Atlantic Ocean, fewer than 20 tropical storms, on average, are named each year. But the United States alone is subject to hundreds of annual heat waves, and they vary immensely in scale. Some are city-size, and others—like this week’s—drape themselves across the country like a thick and invisible down blanket. And unlike tropical storms, which are categorized according to wind speed, heat waves kick in at different temperatures in different places. (Seattle’s heat wave might be Santa Fe’s average summer day.) So which of these deserve a name tag, and which ones don’t? Even if the naming idea catches on, these details will need working out.
Alas, heat waves will likely remain anonymous for most of us for a good while longer, if not forever. But perhaps we should not be so ashamed of this. Our inability to record these sweltering spells in a more conspicuous way is shared by the natural world, which rarely shows the marks of an episode of hot weather in any lasting way. A storm or an earthquake can reconfigure a landscape in a single moment of violence, leaving behind scars that can still be seen with the naked eye millennia later. In nature, as in culture, heat waves tend to show themselves after they have piled up into a larger warming trend. Only then are they visible in tree rings and ice cores, in coastlines that move inland, and in the mass extinctions that glare out from the fossil record—a thought to console yourself with as you wait for this week’s heat to break.
2025-06-25 01:59:32
Updated at 4:05 p.m. ET on June 24, 2025
At 1:08 a.m. eastern daylight time, President Donald Trump proclaimed on social media that a cease-fire between Iran and Israel was “NOW IN EFFECT,” potentially ending an intense 12 days of violence and allowing all sides to step back from a wider, more destructive regional war. “PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!” Trump wrote.
By 6:50 a.m., the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had dispatched aircraft on a mission to strike back after what Israeli officials said was an Iranian violation of the emerging truce. Trump returned to Truth Social. “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” the president wrote. “BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”
Those early-morning hours of whiplash in the most destructive phase of Iran and Israel’s decades-long conflict underscored the uniquely Trumpian way that the president has managed the hostilities: with a running social-media commentary that has been at times bellicose, at times conciliatory, and always bountiful with his unfiltered views of the war.
In recent days, Trump has posted real-time information about the conflict, announcing the massive raid the United States conducted on a trio of nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, suggesting that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime should be forced from power, and demanding that “EVERYONE” keep oil prices down. (He has also been posting his usual fare of favorable poll ratings and a graphic reading: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT about everything.”)
The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, speaking to reporters in Washington this morning, said he found logic in the president’s flurry of bombastic and sometimes-contradictory social-media statements. “Alone, they’re a one-instrument band,” Leiter said. “Together, they form a concert.”
[Read: The true impact of Trump’s strike on Iran]
Trump’s latest burst of Truth Social diplomacy began yesterday, after Iran launched a counterstrike against the United States, directing missiles at Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar. Trump boasted on Truth Social about Iran’s “very weak response” and said that no missiles had reached their targets. “Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same,” he wrote. He concluded, as he had in other posts over the past week, “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Later in the day, around 6 p.m., Trump announced that the two countries had reached a cease-fire deal and that it would take effect in several stages overnight. The truce, “on the assumption that everything works as it should,” would end what he called “THE 12 DAY WAR.” Late yesterday and into today, at 10:18 p.m. and again at 1:08 a.m., Trump warned both countries to respect the agreement. Many of the details, however, were unclear, especially the timing and the sequencing. Iran initially denied that any such deal had been reached.
According to U.S. and Israeli officials, Israel launched a round of strikes on Iran around 3 a.m. local time, which Israel said had targeted Iranian forces in Tehran. Shortly before 7 a.m. in the Middle East, when the cease-fire was supposed to take effect, Iran launched missiles in response, Iranian and Israeli officials said. Israel accused Iran of firing subsequent volleys after the deal took effect. Israel’s air force scrambled to respond, launching jets toward Iran. (Iran denied violating the cease-fire.)
The exchange angered Trump. Before his departure for a NATO summit this morning, he told reporters outside the White House that Iran and Israel “have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” Once aboard Air Force One, Trump called Netanyahu, demanding that Israel call off any further strikes. The Israeli leader agreed to limit his country’s response, a Trump-administration official told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. According to Netanyahu’s office, most of the attacks were called off, and Israel struck only one radar site.
By early evening in the Middle East, the cease-fire was holding, an Israeli security official told us. The official said it was the Iranians who had first violated the cease-fire, prompting the Israeli-air-force raid that Trump had asked Netanyahu to halt. Both countries have denied violating the cease-fire, and Iran accused Israel, as well, of breaching the deal.
[Read: American democracy might not survive a war with Iran]
Experts predicted a litany of challenges to any lasting cease-fire, among them the president’s impulsiveness. “It’ll be shaky and Trump’s endless use of troll power will risk undercutting the weak foundation at every moment,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told us. “But the center of gravity across the region remains more interested in de-escalation, particularly among Gulf states like Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.” The Gulf states, Katulis said, “have quietly served as quiet shock absorbers during this war and will continue to play that role.”
Aboard Air Force One, the details of the murky early-morning episode seemed to fade as Trump fired off a series of social-media posts on other matters, including European defense spending, his administration’s deportation actions, and his use of the National Guard against protesters in California. But he also continued to highlight what he portrayed as a major victory, one that lines him up (as suggested in posts he amplified) for a Nobel Peace Prize. The war was over—for now—but the president’s social-media commentary lived on.
“Nobody will be hurt, the ceasefire is in effect,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
This article has been updated to correct the timeline of Israel’s and Iran’s strikes.
2025-06-24 23:06:20
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Updated at 2:28 p.m. ET on June 24, 2025
In April, Ezibon Khamis was dispatched to Akobo, South Sudan, to document the horrors as humanitarian services collapsed in the middle of a cholera outbreak. As a representative of the NGO Save the Children, Khamis would be able to show the consequences of massive cuts to U.S. foreign assistance made by the Department of Government Efficiency and the State Department. Seven of the health facilities that Save the Children had supported in the region have fully closed, and 20 more have partly ceased operations.
Khamis told us about passing men and women who carried the sick on their shoulders like pallbearers. Children and adults were laid on makeshift gurneys; many vomited uncontrollably. These human caravans walked for hours in up to 104-degree heat in an attempt to reach medical treatment, because their local clinics had either closed completely or run out of ways to treat cholera. Previously, the U.S. government had provided tablets that purified the water in the region, which is home to a quarter-million people, many of whom are fleeing violent conflicts nearby. Not anymore, Khamis says; now many have resorted to drinking untreated river water. He told us that at least eight people—five of them children—had died on their journey that day. As he entered a health facility in Akobo, he was confronted by a woman. “She just said, ‘You abandoned us,’” Khamis told us.
[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]
We heard other such stories in our effort to better understand what happened when DOGE dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. In Nigeria, a mother watched one of her infant twins die after the program that had been treating them for severe acute malnutrition shut down. In South Sudan, unaccompanied children were unable to reunite with surviving relatives at three refugee camps, due to other cuts. Allara Ali, a coordinator for Doctors Without Borders who oversees the group’s work at Bay Regional Hospital, in Somalia, told us that children are arriving there so acutely malnourished and “deteriorated” that they cannot speak—a result of emergency-feeding centers no longer receiving funds from USAID to provide fortified milks and pastes. Last month, 14 children died from severe acute malnutrition at Bay Regional, Doctors Without Borders wrote to us. Many mothers who travel more than 100 miles so that a doctor might see their child return home without them.
One man has consistently cheered and helped execute the funding cuts that have exacerbated suffering and death. In February, Elon Musk, acting in his capacity as a leader of DOGE, declared that USAID was “a criminal organization,” argued that it was “time for it to die,” and bragged that he’d “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. Last month, in an interview with Bloomberg, he argued that his critics have been unable to produce any evidence that these cuts at USAID have resulted in any real suffering. “It’s false,” he said. “I say, ‘Well, please connect us with this group of children so we can talk to them and understand more about their issue,’ we get nothing. They don’t even try to come up with a show orphan.”
Musk is wrong, as our reporting shows—and as multiple other reports (and estimates) have also shown. But the issue here is not just that Musk is wrong. It is that his indifference to the suffering of people in Africa exists alongside his belief that he has a central role to play in the future of the human species. Musk has insisted that people must have as many children as possible—and is committed to siring a “legion” himself—and that we must become multiplanetary. Perhaps more than anyone else on Earth, Musk, the wealthiest man alive, has the drive, the resources, and the connections to make his moon shots a reality. His greatest and most consistent ambition is to define a new era for humankind. Who does he believe is worthy of that future?
For more than 20 years, Musk has been fixated on colonizing Mars. This is the reason he founded his rocket company, SpaceX; Musk recently proclaimed that its Starship program—an effort to create reusable rockets that he believes will eventually carry perhaps millions of humans to the Red Planet—is “the key branching point for human destiny or destiny of consciousness as a whole.” This civilizational language is common—he’s also described his Mars ambitions as “life insurance for life collectively.”
He claims to be philosophically aligned with longtermism, a futurist philosophy whose proponents—self-styled rationalists—game out how to do the most good for the human race over the longest time horizon. Classic pillars of longtermism are guarding against future pandemics and addressing concerns about properly calibrating artificial intelligence, all with a focus on protecting future generations from theoretical threats. Musk’s Mars obsession purports to follow this logic: An investment in a program that allows humans to live on other planets would, in theory, ensure that the human race survives even if the Earth becomes uninhabitable. Musk has endorsed the work of at least one longtermist who believes that this achievement would equate to trillions of lives saved in the form of humans who would otherwise not be born.
Saving the lives of theoretical future children appears to be of particular interest to Musk. On X and in interviews, he continuously fixates on declining birth rates. “The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And so unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” Musk told Fox News’s Bret Baier earlier this year. “Humanity is dying.” He himself has fathered many children—14 that we know of—with multiple women. Musk’s foundation has also donated money to fund population research at the University of Texas at Austin. An economics professor affiliated with that research, Dean Spears, has argued in The New York Times that “sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries—many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them.”
But Musk’s behavior and rhetoric do not track with the egalitarian principles these interests would suggest. The pronatalist community that he is aligned with is a loose coalition. It includes techno-utopians and Peter Thiel acolytes, but also more civic-minded thinkers who argue for better social safety nets to encourage more people to have families. The movement is also linked to regressive, far-right activists and even self-proclaimed eugenicists. In 2023, The Guardian reported that Kevin Dolan, the organizer of a popular pronatalist conference, had said on a far-right podcast that “the pronatalist and the eugenic positions are very much not in opposition, they’re very much aligned.” Via his X account, Musk has amplified to his millions of followers the talk given by Dolan at that 2023 conference.
Although other prominent pronatalists disavow the eugenics connection, the movement’s politics can veer into alarming territory. In November 2024, The Guardian reported that Malcolm and Simone Collins, two of the pronatalist movement’s most vocal figures, wrote a proposal to create a futuristic city-state designed to save civilization that included the “mass production of genetically selected humans” to create a society that would “grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents.” Last month, the Times reported that Musk has “privately” spent time with the Collinses.
Musk has also dabbled with scientific racism on X. The centibillionaire has engaged with and reposted statements by Jordan Lasker, a proponent of eugenics who goes by the name Crémieux online, according to reporting from The Guardian. On his Substack, Lasker has written about supposed links between national identity and IQ—defending at length an analysis that suggests that people in sub-Saharan Africa have “very low IQs” on average. Musk may not have explicitly commented on Lasker’s work, which implies a relationship between race and intelligence, but in 2024, he responded favorably to an X post that argued that “HBCU IQ averages are within 10 points of the threshold for what is considered ‘borderline intellectual impairment.’” The original post was ostensibly criticizing a United Airlines program that gave students at three historically Black colleges and universities an opportunity to interview for a pilot-training program. In his response to that post, Musk wrote, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE.” (“DIE” is Musk’s play on DEI.)
Musk frequently engages in this type of cagey shitposting—comments that seem to endorse scientific racists or eugenicist thinking without outright doing so. Those seeking to understand the worldview of one of the most powerful men on Earth are left to find the context for themselves. That context should include Musk’s own family history, starting with his upbringing during the apartheid regime in South Africa and the beliefs of his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who, as Joshua Benton reported for The Atlantic in 2023, was a radical technocrat and anti-Semite who wrote of the “very primitive” natives of South Africa after he moved there from Canada.
As Benton correctly notes, the sins of the grandfather are not the sins of the grandson; Musk’s father, for example, was a member of an anti-apartheid party in South Africa, and Ashlee Vance reported in his biography of Musk that the apartheid system was a primary reason Musk left South Africa. But, as Benton also writes, “when Musk tweets that George Soros ‘appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization’—in response to a tweet blaming Soros for an ‘invasion’ of African migrants into Europe—he is not the first in his family to insinuate that a wealthy Jewish financier was manipulating thousands of Africans to advance nefarious goals.”
Musk is also preoccupied with the far-right theory of white genocide, posting at various points in the past couple of years on X about how he feels there is a plot to kill white South Africans. Though South Africa has among the highest murder rates in the world, there is no evidence of a systematic white genocide there. Yet during Musk’s political tenure, the Trump administration welcomed 59 white Afrikaner refugees while effectively closing off admission from other countries, including Sudan and the Republic of the Congo.
Here’s a thought experiment: Based on the programs that Musk has cut, based on the people he meets with and reads, based on the windows we have into his thinking, who do you imagine might be welcomed on the Starship? On X, Musk has implied that the following are all threats to “Western Civilization”: DEI programs, George Soros, the supposedly left-wing judiciary, and much of what gets put under the umbrella of “wokeness.” Transgender-youth rights, according to Musk, are a “suicidal mind virus” attacking Western civilization.
Even the idea of empathy, Musk argues, is a kind of existential threat. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said in February on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response,” he said of liberal politicians and activists. Musk, of course, was defending his tenure in the federal government, including his dismantling of USAID. Canceling programs overseas is consistent with his philosophy that “America is the central column that holds up all the places in civilization,” as he told Baier during his Fox appearance. Follow that logic: Cutting global aid frees up resources that can be used to help Americans, who, in turn, can work toward advancing Western civilization, in part by pursuing a MAGA political agenda and funding pronatalist programs that allow for privileged people (ideally white and “high IQ”) to have more children. The thinking seems to go like this: Who cares if people in South Sudan and Somalia die? Western civilization will thrive and propagate itself across the cosmos.
[Graeme Wood: Extreme violence without genocide]
Those who believe in this kind of thinking might say that line items on USAID’s ledger are only of minor consequence in the grand scheme of things. But the world is not governed by the logic of a science-fiction plot. “The fact is, it’s all interconnected,” Catherine Connor, the vice president of public policy at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, told us when we asked about the grants Musk’s team had terminated at USAID. “If you take one thing away, you’ve broken a link in a chain.” She described a situation that her organization is seeing play out on the ground right now, where new HIV-positive mothers take their infants for a dry-blood-spot test to determine if the child has HIV as well. The spot test must be transported to a lab to get results, which will determine if a child is HIV positive and if they should receive lifesaving medication. “In many of our sites, in many of the countries we’re working in, that lab transport has been terminated,” Connor said. “So we can do all these things, but because we lost the lab part, we don’t know if this child’s HIV-positive or not.” A link in the chain is broken; people are left on their own. The future becomes less certain, a bit darker.
“There’s a sense of despondence, a sense of hopelessness that I haven’t sensed in my time working in this field,” Connor said. “The level of uncertainty and the level of anxiety that’s been created is almost as damaging as the cuts themselves.” It seems this hopelessness is a feature of a worldview committed to eradicating what Musk calls “suicidal empathy.” Regardless, Musk, it appears, is much more interested in talking about his self-landing rockets and a future he promises is just on the horizon.
But much as Musk might want us to divert our eyes upward, something terrible is happening on Earth. The world’s richest man is preventing lifesaving aid from reaching the world’s poorest children, closing off their future as he fantasizes about another.
Illustration sources: Oranat Taesuwan / Getty; Neutronman / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty
This article previously misstated the number of children dying of malnutrition at Bay Regional Hospital.
