2025-05-10 05:39:00
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In January 2023, I traveled to Memphis to report on the killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man beaten to death by a group of Memphis police officers. Like most Americans, I have seen far too many videos in recent years of police brutalizing people, and I had reported on the particular failures of justice in Memphis, a city afflicted by both underpolicing—in the form of high rates of violent crime in its poorest neighborhoods—and overpolicing, in the form of widespread abuse.
Even so, I was shocked by what I saw when the city released videos. A team of police from a special squad called the SCORPION unit savagely beat Nichols and then didn’t bother to provide any medical aid. They did most of this underneath SkyCop, one of the ubiquitous Memphis surveillance cameras, evidently unworried that they would face repercussions for their actions.
They were wrong—but not that wrong. Although five officers were quickly fired, and the SCORPION unit was disbanded, it now seems possible that few, if any, will be convicted of the most serious charges in a man’s senseless death. This week, at a trial in Memphis, a jury acquitted three of the former officers involved in Nichols’s death on several charges, including second-degree murder. Two others have agreed to plead guilty to some federal and state charges, and one testified in the trial. The same three officers were convicted of witness tampering in a federal trial last year, and one was convicted of violating Nichols’s civil rights by causing bodily injury.
There is still no good explanation for why any of this happened; Memphis Police Chief C. J. Davis said that the officers appeared to have no reason to pull Nichols over in a traffic stop. Yet as soon as they did, some of the officers drew weapons and began pepper-spraying and manhandling him. When he—understandably—tried to escape, police called for backup, gave chase, and eventually caught him. “I hope they stomp his ass,” one officer, who did not chase Nichols and was not charged, was recorded saying. His fellow officers did, beating Nichols just yards from his mother’s house. He died at a hospital.
Prosecutors did face some challenges in this case, despite the existence of video evidence. First, officers are seldom charged with murder, and when they are, they are seldom convicted. Second, the three former officers who stood trial were, in the words of the deputy district attorney, the “least culpable,” compared with the two who agreed to plead guilty. Third, defense lawyers successfully argued that widespread news coverage in Memphis of the killing would preclude a fair trial, so instead of a jury pool from Memphis, which is majority-Black, the jury was all white and drawn from around Chattanooga, on the opposite side of Tennessee.
Even so, District Attorney Steve Mulroy seemed shell-shocked after the verdict. “Was I surprised that there wasn’t a single guilty verdict on any of the counts or any of the lesser included offenses, given the overwhelming evidence that I think that we presented?” he said, his voice straining. “Yes, I was surprised. Do I have an explanation for it? No.”
Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, not bound by the same ethical guidelines as a prosecutor, was blunter. “Those people were allowed to come here, look at the evidence, and deny the evidence,” she said.
The outrage that met George Floyd’s murder in 2020 seemed at first to be a turning point for criminal justice. After a string of high-profile cases starting in 2015, officials and the public were aligned in demanding law-enforcement reforms that would punish and prevent needless killings. But as I wrote when Derek Chauvin was convicted for kneeling on Floyd’s neck until he died, that case was a rare exception—not least because of the stomach-churning video evidence involved and the strong condemnation by the Minneapolis police chief. Although individual prosecutions were important, the greater need, I argued, was for systemic reforms.
The verdict in Memphis shows what an outlier Chauvin’s conviction was: Despite videos at least as horrifying, despite the police chief’s quick action to fire the officers and condemn their behavior, these three former officers escaped murder convictions. Meanwhile, the changing political winds and rising violent crime after 2020 helped the movement toward broader reform stall out, both locally in Memphis and nationally.
In early 2024, the Memphis city council refused to reappoint Davis, but she continued serving as interim chief. Earlier this year, Davis got her permanent title back. Around the same time, the city of Memphis refused to enter into a consent decree that would allow oversight from the U.S. Department of Justice, which had found “a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” documented in appalling detail. City leaders knew that once Donald Trump took office, the Justice Department would pull back on oversight of local police departments and civil-rights laws, just as his administration had done the first time.
Trump has long called for more brutal policing, complaining that cops aren’t allowed to fight crime with the necessary toughness. “Please don’t be too nice,” he said in a speech to Long Island officers in 2017. After taking office this time, he closed a database tracking serious offenses by federal police officers, which was designed to facilitate background checks; he also issued an order to “unleash” police officers and to have private law firms provide pro bono legal defense for officers accused of misconduct.
“What I do know is this: Tyre Nichols is dead, and deserves to be alive,” Mulroy said on Wednesday. The failure of courts to secure murder convictions for the former officers who beat him, and of politicians to bring greater accountability, means that he will not be the last to suffer an unjust death.
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Evening Read
AI Is Not Your Friend
By Mike Caulfield
Recently, after an update that was supposed to make ChatGPT “better at guiding conversations toward productive outcomes,” according to release notes from OpenAI, the bot couldn’t stop telling users how brilliant their bad ideas were. ChatGPT reportedly told one person that their plan to sell literal “shit on a stick” was “not just smart—it’s genius” …
But this was not just a ChatGPT problem. Sycophancy is a common feature of chatbots.
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Retell. Making the film Warfare (in select theaters) was an exercise in exposure therapy for the veterans whose memories it reconstructs, Shirley Li writes.
Read. These stories offer a starting point—and perhaps some insights—for those trying to understand their mom, Sophia Stewart writes.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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2025-05-10 04:23:00
Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one.
Millions of Americans know Pirro as a prolific conservative-television pundit, most recently as a member of Fox News’s afternoon talk show, The Five. Even compared with other right-wing TV personalities, Pirro’s record of unwavering Trump support, including at his most vulnerable moments, is distinctive. She came to his defense in 2016 after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, declaring, “I have been involved in a million situations with him and his children. He has always been a gentleman.” She has been urging Trump to send the Department of Justice after his supposed enemies, including Hillary Clinton, since 2017. And she promoted Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories so vigorously that, in 2021, she was named as a defendant in a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit brought by the voting-machine manufacturer Smartmatic.
Before all that, Pirro had a legal career that—at least on paper, and by the feeble standards set by Trump’s other appointments—prepared her for her new job as D.C.’s top prosecutor. After stints as an assistant prosecutor and a state judge, she served from 1994 to 2005 as the elected district attorney of Westchester County, New York, a jurisdiction larger than Washington, D.C. This distinguishes her from Ed Martin, her immediate predecessor in the D.C. role, whose tenure ended this week after Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina shot down Martin’s prospects of getting confirmed on a permanent basis. Unlike Martin—a former defense attorney who had no prosecutorial experience before being appointed—Pirro has tried cases, made charging decisions, and managed an office full of prosecutors.
Whether that is good news or bad news is not a straightforward question. The U.S. attorney for D.C. has a big job. The role combines the functions of a federal prosecutor (that is, enforcing federal law) with those of a district attorney: prosecuting everything from low-level misdemeanors to the most serious felony cases. The office also has the power to bring—or decline to bring—cases against the many elected officials and government appointees who live and work in the nation’s capital. Someone with an actual prosecutorial background might be more effective at using the legal system to persecute Trump’s enemies and protect his allies than a similarly devoted but less experienced lackey.
Perhaps Pirro will throw herself into the nitty-gritty work of fighting crime in a big city that has plenty of crime to fight. (Even there, her record of bigoted comments—which in at least one instance, aimed at Representative Ilhan Omar, led Fox News to “strongly condemn” her remarks—does not bode well for her ability to administer justice in a majority-minority jurisdiction.) Then again, perhaps not. Everything suggests that she was chosen for other reasons. Consider the fate of Jessie Liu, whom Trump appointed to the same job in 2017. A traditional pick, Liu had elite conservative-legal credentials and substantial relevant experience. In 2019, Trump nominated her for a top role at the Treasury Department. But her nomination was dropped, and her government career ended, after activists convinced Trump that Liu was not to be trusted. Among her sins: overseeing the prosecution of Trump’s ally Roger Stone and declining to indict former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, one of the MAGA movement’s most reviled “deep state” villains.
One struggles to imagine Pirro being dismissed for such reasons. The question is less whether she intends to faithfully execute Trump’s will and more whether she’ll be any good at it. Martin’s failure to keep the job stemmed in part from a certain guilelessness: He spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 5, 2021, and has appeared more than 150 times on RT and Sputnik, the Russian propaganda networks. After assuming the interim D.C.-prosecutor role, he proudly described himself as one of “Trump’s lawyers.” And he seemed to genuinely believe that his position entitled him to act as a roving inquisitor on behalf of Trump, sending buffoonishly unconstitutional letters to the likes of Chuck Schumer, Georgetown Law School, and even the American College of Chest Physicians’ medical journal demanding explanations for insufficiently MAGA-compliant exercises of free speech. Any actual cases brought along those lines would have been laughed out of court.
The politicization of law enforcement works best when the parties involved pretend not to be doing it. Pirro will presumably bring a higher degree of legal competence and a good deal more media savvy to the tasks at hand than Martin did. The tasks themselves, however, may prove all too similar.
2025-05-10 01:47:00
Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.
A visit to the website paints a slightly fuller picture: Buy as many tokens as you can of Trump’s personal cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, and you could be invited to a private event later this month at the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. There, you will get the unique opportunity to meet with the president and “learn about the future of Crypto.” The gala looks very much like a thinly veiled gambit to pump up the price of $TRUMP, a so-called memecoin that is mostly owned by Trump-backed entities. Funnel the greatest amount of money to the president of the United States, and you could win some face time with the big man himself.
In 2021, Trump called bitcoin a “scam.” Now he seems to understand exactly what crypto can do for him personally: namely, make Trump and his family very, very rich. The $TRUMP gala is one part of a constellation of Trump-affiliated crypto efforts that includes Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs, a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, and a bitcoin-mining firm. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the Trump family has already banked nearly $1 billion from these projects. Long before he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower a decade ago, Trump’s public image was rooted in his business prowess. But compared with his real-estate projects or The Apprentice, crypto is already turning into his most successful venture yet.
[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]
Trump perhaps wouldn’t be president at all if it wasn’t for crypto. During the 2024 campaign, the industry was among his campaign’s biggest donors. That money flowed in from both crypto corporations and individual donors, such as the bitcoin billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (The identical twins gave $1 million each in bitcoin to the Trump campaign, but had to be refunded because they exceeded the legal donation limit.) In exchange, Trump promised the imperiled industry a fresh start after four years of a Biden-sanctioned crypto crackdown. Last summer, as the keynote speaker at the annual bitcoin conference, Trump promised that if elected, he would make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” The crypto industry is now getting its money’s worth. Consider the crypto firm Ripple, which spent four years squaring off against Biden’s regulators in federal courtrooms and donated $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Yesterday, the new administration dropped the government’s case, as the White House has effectively stopped enforcing crypto rules.
Trump is still tapping crypto magnates for money. On Monday, he attended a super PAC’s “Crypto & AI Innovators” fundraiser, for which donors shelled out $1.5 million to get in the door. But for Trump, crypto has quickly become about more than soliciting campaign donations and rewarding supporters. In September, Trump announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized-finance company to be managed by his sons Eric and Don Jr. and a couple of young entrepreneurs. (One previously ran a company called Date Hotter Girls, while the other is the son of Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally serving as special envoy to the Middle East.) Then, in January, just before Inauguration Day, he launched $TRUMP. Like all memecoins, it has no underlying business fundamentals or links to real-world assets—the point is to just quickly capitalize on a viral trend, conjuring value out of practically nothing. This proved extremely lucrative almost immediately: $TRUMP initially spiked in value before crashing back down, at one point accounting for almost 90 percent of the president’s net worth. (There’s also an official $MELANIA coin, if that’s more your thing.)
With crypto, Trump has found an unnervingly effective way to transmute the clout and power of the nation’s highest office into cold, hard cash. Last week, World Liberty Financial announced that its cryptocurrency, USD1, would facilitate an Abu Dhabi investment firm’s $2 billion stake in the crypto exchange Binance. Eric and Don Jr. are also on the crypto press circuit, with plans to speak at the 2025 bitcoin conference later this month. Some of Trump’s decisions as president, such as creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” may also function to inflate his crypto riches, in the sense that a rising tide lifts all boats; promoting crypto as part of the national interest can only support the idea that these coins are worth buying into.
[Read: Trump’s crypto reserve is really happening]
Crypto is a conduit for the self-interest that has defined Trump’s entire political career—an M.O. that has consistently blurred the boundary between public and private, country and party. For the most part, Trump has been especially good to those who line his pockets, rewarding them with all kinds of preferential treatment.
During his first term, Trump enriched himself the old-fashioned way—by way of merchandising deals and real-estate investments across the globe. But with crypto, all of that has ratcheted up in Trump’s second term. In crypto, money is fast, loose, and digitally native—properties that have made his personal dealings in the industry even more galling, and potentially more vulnerable to outside sway. Someone looking to gain access to Trump might have once had to pay thousands of dollars a night for a room at Mar-a-Lago for a chance encounter with the president on the golf course. Now the door is open for influence from almost anyone in the world with an internet connection.
The White House insists that there is nothing to see here. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement. Keeping that wealth in a trust may do very little to sever the connection between Trump and his riches, though, depending on the exact conditions of the arrangement. Even when Eric and Don Jr. serve as a buffer, the money stays in the family.
Crypto’s anonymous nature poses unique challenges in understanding exactly what is happening—transactions on a blockchain are typically posted using long strings of numbers known as addresses, rather than verified by legal name. By all accounts, to interact with $TRUMP is to funnel money directly into the president’s pockets, but the campaign-finance laws that caused the Winklevosses’ exorbitant donations to be refunded don’t apply here. Nothing is stopping, say, agents of foreign powers, or tech billionaires looking for favorable tariff treatment, from using $TRUMP to gain access to the highest echelons of government. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to get it: Yesterday, three GOP senators joined Democrats to block a major crypto bill that would serve to benefit World Liberty Financial.
Ironically, Trump’s embrace of crypto is pumping money into the industry while simultaneously damaging it. Since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, the image of crypto as a haven for scams and hackers has loomed large. At a moment when the crypto industry is trying to claw its way back to respectability and legitimization, Trump has taken every opportunity to cement it in the minds of the Americans as nothing more than a vehicle for channeling money directly to him. In crypto, “there are many people who have ethics, and have been working for years to build the system because they believe what they are doing is in the public interest,” Angela Walch, a crypto expert and former law professor, told me. “And what this does is it makes all the messaging that has come from extreme crypto critics about, ‘It’s only a tool for grift,’ and makes it look like that.”
By hitching their wagon to Trump, the industry’s leaders have unleashed a force they can’t control. The moment the president cashed in on crypto, the calculus shifted. Like the hot dogs at Costco, “being the president” is the loss leader; crypto pays the bills.
2025-05-10 01:00:00
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The wives in Mavis Gallant’s stories aren’t happy. In “The Flowers of Spring,” from 1950, a woman named Estelle visits her paralyzed husband, Malcolm, at the hospital. She feels sorry for him but also resentful and trapped, and she wonders whether the wives of other disabled men also feel “despair and discontent.” She’d “been a charming bride”; now, a few years later, she sees herself as a “delinquent wife.” She has no desire, despite the doctor’s entreaties, to discuss her husband’s condition.
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
Many of Gallant’s characters are “strays,” as Vivian Gornick wrote last week. They are out of place in the world, supremely lonely, seeking something better or different in life. Three of the Canadian writer’s later stories, which appear in the collection Varieties of Exile, focus on a woman named Lily Quale, who agrees to marry a humdrum diplomat named Steve Burnet, despite not loving him. She trusts that Steve will get her out of provincial Canada—but although he makes good on his promise, taking her to live in Europe, Lily has no interest in spending her life tied down to this kind yet dull man, and she leaves him not long after they arrive in the south of France. Why is she willing to do something so reckless to get what she wants? Gornick observes that Lily lives in a time when a woman couldn’t make her way in the world alone. “Whatever the future held for her, she was bound to pursue it through a man in whom she aroused desire: the only card she ever had to play,” she writes. Some women used that connection to advance, as Lily does. Others, Gornick notes, spent too much time with “one Steve Burnet or another,” and the person they never became “hardened” inside them.
Women today might have more freedom and more choices than Gallant and her characters did—but the kind of burdenlessness that Gallant’s women seek can still be out of reach. Gallant herself yearned to be “perfectly free,” Gornick writes, and found that the only way she could do it was by living in Paris, where she “never felt at ease,” among people she never felt intimate with. She chose to have neither children nor a husband (after a brief youthful marriage) and was thus able to devote herself to her work. For her characters, freedom is more urgent than security; they make their choices without looking back.
But some women may feel more ambivalent. Even if these decisions are no longer as binary as they were in Gallant’s era, attaining total independence in the 21st century can still mean forgoing, or de-emphasizing, the kinds of attachments that place demands upon us—things such as marriage, children, and a steady career. And in this less black-and-white world, where women have the opportunity to balance family, work, and leisure, people who feel pulled toward multiple kinds of fulfillment may find that dedicating themselves to one over the other is less simple than it was decades ago. There are now more paths to choose from, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the choices are any easier to make.
The Writer Who Understood Aloneness
By Vivian Gornick
Mavis Gallant’s short stories are about people, especially women, who prefer to live on the social margins. I cherish one of them most of all.
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, by Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid’s account of her three-week trek in Nepal—undertaken to collect rare seeds with several botanist friends—is sure to make any reader appreciate their local flora. Kincaid views the Himalayas through the lens of her own home garden in Vermont, searching for plants she can cultivate in the North Bennington climate as her group climbs up through the mountains. I often paused as I read to look up the species she mentions, shocked to see some of the huge plants that grow naturally in alpine zones. She approaches the experience as a true amateur, always ready to learn something new, and her honest reflections on the trip’s difficulties make the book intimate and amusing. Reading Among Flowers feels like traveling alongside Kincaid: You can experience the highs of the journey (gorgeous vistas, rare native-plant sightings, camaraderie and companionship) alongside the lows (leeches, arduous climbs, Maoist guerrilla groups) without ever having to navigate the forbidding range yourself. — Bekah Waalkes
From our list: Six books you’ll want to read outdoors
📚 Freedom Season, by Peniel E. Joseph
📚 The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong
📚 Happiness Forever, by Adelaide Faith
Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?
By Spencer Kornhaber
What art can do is remind us that our lives are not simply shaped by systems—they’re also a product of our own thoughts, inspirations, and relations. My favorite new TV show of this decade is HBO’s Fantasmas, a comedy created by the former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres. It’s a magical-realist depiction of a near future in which people live with bumbling AI assistant bots in housing complexes owned by corporations such as Bank of America. Torres’s character wants to make surreal films about animals, but is being pressured to cash in on his backstory as a gay immigrant. (A streaming service run by Zappos—yes, the shoe company—commissions a screenplay called How I Came Out to My Abuela.) This subject matter asks, quite darkly, whether the artistic spirit can survive modern life. But the imaginative way the show is rendered—in a dreamscape of interconnected skits, featuring handcrafted set decoration, performed by talents from today’s offbeat comedy world—offers a hopeful answer.
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2025-05-10 00:54:00
In the span of his infant papacy, Robert Prevost hasn’t had time to make many decisions besides what to say from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, what to wear when he said it, and what name to take as pope. This last choice is the most instructive. As the novelist Laurence Sterne once wrote, names exert “a strange kind of magick bias” on their subjects. This is especially true for popes, ever since Jesus told a Jewish fisherman named Simon that he would be called Peter, the rock on which Christ built his Church. Many observers try to discern the politics of a new pope through his chosen name, searching the past for Christians who shared it. They may be disappointed to find that the name Leo resists easy ideological categorization. As read through both Church and world history, the name suggests something much different from mere progressivism or conservatism.
In the run-up to the conclave, most observers saw Leo as aligned with Pope Francis’s legacy. Like his immediate predecessor, Leo prioritized concerns for the poor and marginalized, particularly those in the global South, and Francis had recently tapped him for major roles in Rome. But unlike Francis—who idiosyncratically selected a papal name that had never been used—Leo went back in time, by more than 100 years, and also by more than 1,000. His choice by no means signals a rejection of Francis; in fact, it seems to affirm their connection. But it also suggests that the new pope is more invested in pursuing continuity within the deep tradition of the Church.
After Leo finished his opening remarks at St. Peter’s Basilica, a Vatican spokesperson explained that his name was meant to invoke two predecessors: the last Leo and the first. When viewing the papacies of Leo XIII and Leo I together, three themes emerge: a pronounced concern for the poor and oppressed, a renewal of the global life of the Church through unity and tradition, and a holy challenge to secular power.
Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903, is best remembered for his encyclical Rerum Novarum or On Capital and Labor, which begins by describing the contemporary world as one in which “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay up on the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself.” Against this reality, Leo XIII affirmed the rights of workers to receive a living wage, form unions, and strike. This may seem self-evident and even paternalistic now, but in the late 19th century, it wasn’t. Rerum Novarum was a major statement of papal support for the weak against the powerful, in a world not unlike ours: marked by growing inequality, limited worker rights, and harsh working conditions. The encyclical also inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching, and several later popes anchored their teaching on human dignity in Leo XIII’s work.
[Francis X. Rocca: The conclave just did the unthinkable]
But Leo XIII was much more than a reformer. Through another encyclical, Aeterni Patris, he helped revive traditional Scholastic philosophy, elevating the teaching of the medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas to singular preeminence in the Church. Leo XIII also cut against his reputation among some as a progressive when he sided with conservative U.S. prelates against lay Catholics who were trying to establish greater interreligious dialogue in America.
The new Leo—the Church’s first American pope—will likely take a different view of American Catholicism’s role in public life. In February, an account on X that appeared to belong to Prevost shared an article pushing back on Catholic Vice President J. D. Vance, who had recently invoked the theological concept of ordo amoris as a justification for prioritizing the concerns of one’s fellow countrymen over others. In response, the profile bearing Prevost’s name posted the headline of the essay: “JD Vance is wrong; Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
That statement is in keeping with the teaching of the Augustinians, a centuries-old religious order that the new Leo led. The order follows the monastic rule set forth by the fourth-century theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo, which prescribes a communal life of prayer and works focused on the needs of others, with no distinctions made according to national identity.
Likewise, the first Pope Leo sought to resolve global discord. During his reign from 440 to 461, various breakaway movements were dividing the Church, as were debates about Mary and her motherhood of Christ. Leo I was so successful in bridging the Church’s several divides across Europe and Africa that he became popularly known to Catholics as Leo the Great. Like his ancient predecessor, Leo XIV also faces a geopolitically divided Church, largely split between the West and the global South. A new set of questions cleaves Catholics today, particularly those related to the role of women in the Church as well as the Church’s ongoing efforts to engage LGBTQ Catholics.
[Matthew Walther: The real legacy of Pope Francis]
But that would be true of any pope in 2025, choosing any name. Perhaps the most provocative connection between Leo I and the new pope goes well beyond immediate Catholic concerns. In 452, Leo I risked his life by traveling hundreds of miles from Rome to meet Attila the Hun, who was in the midst of a murderous campaign across continental Europe. Leo is said to have dressed in papal finery and flattered Attila by praising his military successes. But he also directly challenged Attila. According to ancient testimony, Leo concluded the meeting with a religious plea that was just as much a blunt challenge: “Now we pray that thou, who hast conquered others, shouldst conquer thyself.” Popular legend has it that Attila decided against attacking Rome after he met with Leo, sparing countless lives.
The new pope will face no such threat, of course, but he takes office at a time when expansionist strongmen are ascendant around the world. Whether—or perhaps, how—he follows the legacy of his namesake in this area, among many others, will help shape the future of both the Church and the world.
2025-05-10 00:35:14
Out of nowhere, for reasons mainly unknown (or unexplained), President Donald Trump has spent the early days of his second term insulting Canada and threatening its sovereignty, repeatedly suggesting that Canada should, and would, become an American state. He has stoked an on-again, off-again trade war, risking $900 billion in trade between the two countries. Canada is not blameless in the relationship; it spends paltry sums on its own defense, traditionally preferring to have the U.S. taxpayer absorb that burden. At a recent Atlantic event, I spoke with the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, about Trump’s aggressively anti-Canadian posture, and about her country’s defense spending and trade policies.
Jeffrey Goldberg: My colleague Anne Applebaum recently said something that struck me: Donald Trump has achieved the impossible. He’s made Canadians angry. Are you angry at the way Canada is discussed by President Trump?
Kirsten Hillman: Well, first, thank you for having me, in my polite Canadian manner.
I think Canadians have gone through a range of emotions: surprise, disbelief, confusion, sadness. But we, I think, are angry and frustrated. Angry sometimes because we are unsettled by a behavior, in particular with respect to the tariffs, that is having serious and immediate impacts on our well-being, economically. It’s having big impacts here as well, but it’s having impacts on our well-being, and Canadians are like, “Well, can we just talk about this? Because we don’t think this makes sense for you, for us. This isn’t how good friends work together. Let’s get down and talk about it.” And we will. But I think, yes, Canadians have become very seized of this issue, very seized indeed.
Goldberg: How do you explain Trump to your colleagues in Ottawa? Do you tell them, “Oh, he means it. He literally wants to make Canada a state”? Do you take him seriously but not literally?
Hillman: One: I think that it’s clear that the president of the United States and his administration are seeking to transform, in particular, their economic relationship with the world and, therefore, very much with us. We have the single biggest trading relationship with you, of any country in the world; we’re your biggest customer. We buy more from you than China, Japan, the U.K., and France combined. It’s a huge relationship, in all ways, not just economic. And the president and his administration are seeking to change that in ways that I think are quite consequential. And that is what it is. It will change, and therefore we will change, and therefore we will move into something different than we have been in for a few generations.
In terms of taking the president seriously, Donald Trump is the president of the United States—of course we take him seriously. He’s a man with enormous influence and power over this country and the world. And so yes, we take it seriously.
Goldberg: Among the things Donald Trump told The Atlantic in a recent interview is that the U.S. is “subsidizing” Canada “to the tune of $200 billion a year.” True or untrue?
Hillman: Untrue.
Canada and the U.S. have the biggest bilateral trading relationship in the world. We sell, back and forth, in goods and services, $2.5 billion a day. In that relationship, for those who are looking at this through the perspective of balanced trade, which the president most certainly does, Canada has a trade deficit—in other words, we buy more than we sell—of manufactured goods, of electronics, certainly of services, stuff that Americans make and manufacture, the things that the president is very deeply concerned about. We buy more of that from you than you buy from us. And we are about one-tenth your size, just to put that in perspective. Another thing to put in perspective is, in manufactured products for the United States, more than half of what you manufacture in the United States, you export. So, selling your manufactured products to other countries is very important for the jobs that the president wants to create. And I think 77 percent of your economy runs on services. Again, we are a huge consumer of American services.
But a third of what we sell you is energy, and a lot of that is oil, and the Canadian oil that we sell is transported down to the Gulf Coast, where it’s refined. It is, frankly, according to many Canadian experts, sold at a discount. That product is then refined and resold at three times the price into the United States, to third-country markets, keeping your manufacturing costs down, right? So yes, we sell you more energy than you sell us—that is absolutely true. And because a third of what we sell to you is energy, overall, we have a trade deficit, but it’s about $60 billion, not 200. But if the United States wants to balance trade with Canada, the only way to really do that—we can’t buy that much more from you; we are 41 million people; there’s only so much we can buy. We will have to sell you less energy. And I don’t actually think that’s what the administration wants.
Goldberg: So, when he says we don’t need anything that you make, that is untrue?
Hillman: I believe that the U.S. benefits from the Canadian-energy relationship, from our manufacturing relationship. We sell you critical minerals. We sell you uranium. We sell you all sorts of products that, if you weren’t buying them from us, and if you don’t have them in the ground, if you don’t actually have them, then you’re going to buy them from someone else. And is it going to be Belarus or Venezuela? Why wouldn’t you buy it from us? An ally, a steadfast ally and friend and an ideologically aligned country that wants democracy and rule of law.
So what does need mean? Does it mean the United States could survive without affordable Canadian energy? Probably. Does it mean that the price of all sorts of things would go up for Americans? Yes, it does. Does it mean you might buy it from Venezuela? Probably. Is that the objective? I don’t think so.
Goldberg: Does the president understand economics?
Hillman: I think the president has a very specific vision of what he’s trying to do in America. I think there are a lot of people that don’t feel that the means by which he is seeking to do that make sense or are traditional. But he’s undaunted.
Goldberg: Can you explain the Canadian position on these tariffs?
Hillman: Tariffs are a tax on anything that’s imported into the country. And they serve a variety of purposes. They raise revenue. They disincentivize imports—they make imports more expensive—and by disincentivizing imports, they can potentially, I suppose, incentivize domestic production. All of that works in the abstract and sometimes in the concrete. But again, coming back to Canada-U.S., we are deeply integrated over generations to be as efficient and competitive as possible as neighbors and partners by using the comparative advantages of each country. So, we are a commodity country. I mean, we do lots of great stuff other than commodities, but in our relationship with the United States, largely what we do—70 percent of what we sell to you—are inputs that you put into products that you manufacture in the United States, and often sell back to us.
Goldberg: What does an angry Canadian look like?
Hillman: Well, did you watch that last hockey game?
Goldberg: What does an angry Canadian look like off the ice? We could make jokes about stereotypes, but at a certain point, you are discovering a national pride that has not been right up there on the surface, the way it is with some other countries, including the United States. Your conservative candidate lost because he was seen as too close to MAGA ideology. Would you really reorganize your economy to pull away from the United States, at a certain point? I mean, if you can’t get what you consider to be a good deal, what does the future look like?
Hillman: I think that it’s a question of mitigation. We will seek to strengthen our own economy, and we’re doing that already. We will seek to reinforce relationships that we have all over the world. We have a trade agreement with Europe. We have a trade agreement in Asia. Canadian businesses are already giving me anecdotes about selling their product into those markets.
Goldberg: You’re a two-ocean country, just like we are.
Hillman: Right. So the products that are not as competitive down here because of the tariffs, they’re going to go to these other countries. The U.S. buyers aren’t happy, but the Canadian sellers are doing what they have to do for business. But of course, we want to get to a place of sort of stability and predictability with the United States.
Goldberg: But what if you can’t?
Hillman: You know what? I think we can. This administration has changed the paradigm about the role that it wants to play and how it proceeds in trade and economic discussions or relationships. There’s no question about that. And we have to adapt. But the American people, the businesses here in America, consumers here in America, are better off with a more stable relationship with your biggest customer.
Goldberg: Has Canada made any mistakes along the way in managing its relationship with the United States?
Hillman: That’s a good question. I mean, we all make mistakes, don’t we? I’m not sure I would characterize it as a mistake. I think that what Canada and probably all of America’s allies around the world have to continually make sure we fully understand is that the U.S. is seeking to play a different kind of role, to do things differently. We have to actually act in a way that fully recognizes that, and relate to this administration from where they are, right? They want to transform the way the U.S. relates to the world. They will do that, and we will therefore have to do the same.
Goldberg: Let me ask one specific question on the subject of noneconomic relationships. Your military is very small. You have, I think, 68,000 active-duty soldiers, airmen—
Hillman: 70,000.
Goldberg: You don’t spend even 2 percent of GDP on defense, although you’re trying to move it slowly. Isn’t there a legitimate reason for Americans to say, “Canada, like many European countries, just hasn’t pulled its NATO weight.” I mean, I’m wondering if that’s something that stimulates some American resentment of Canada.
Hillman: I think that there’s no question that not just the U.S., but all of our NATO allies are eager to see Canada spend more and faster. We have tripled our spending in the last 10 years or so, but yes, we can do more and we will do more. We just had an election yesterday. I anticipate that that will be something that our new prime minister will speak to soon. So yeah, I think that that’s a fair point. But I guess the other thing that I would say—so, absolutely a fair point—where we are trying to really orient ourselves in our defense priorities, is toward things that we can do that are specific to Canada.
Goldberg: Under pressure, Canadian patriotism is becoming a thing. Do you feel differently now as a Canadian than you did six months ago?
Hillman: Not me. I represent Canada in a foreign land. And I am every single day reminded of my Canadian-ness. It’s a big part of my job to understand that and to express who we are as a nation to you here in the United States. We’re a deeply patriotic country with a strong sense of our values, who we are, and our hopes and dreams. But more to your beginning point, we’re a quieter bunch about it. We are not born of revolution. We are born of negotiation. We are born of a much more gentle birth, if you will, than the one you encountered. And I think that—
Goldberg: You were kind of ambivalent about King George III. We get it. [Laughing.] “There are good people on both sides.”
Hillman: Our founding nations are France, the U.K., but of course, our First Nations, our Native people, were there, who remain a huge part of our cultural reality and important to our cultural identity. So we’re just a different country, but we’re the less rowdy cousin at the Thanksgiving table.
Goldberg: Right.
Hillman: But not today. Not today.
Goldberg: Not today?
Hillman: Getting rowdier.
Goldberg: And my final question: When you met Donald Trump five years ago, when you first came to Washington to do this job, did you think that he was anti-Canadian? Did anything suggest that, oh, there’s trouble afoot here?
Hillman: No, in fact, I met President Trump during the NAFTA renegotiation a few times and then over the course of the COVID crisis, when we had to slow down the border. And on the contrary, I think he is very supportive of Canada-U.S., very supportive of us. I don’t think that President Trump is anti-Canada, just to be clear. I don’t think President Trump is anti-Canada at all. And Canada’s not anti–United States. We love you guys. You’re our neighbors and our friends. I mean, you were talking about the military: We fought and died together in all the wars—First World War, Second World War, Korea, Afghanistan, all over the world. So there is no greater partnership. We have almost half a million people go between our two countries every day. Not, maybe, lately. But truly, we have an enormous amount of interconnection. If you ask me why I’m confident that we will figure this out, it’s because of that. It’s because of the half a million people almost every day; it’s because of all of this. We have to—those of us who represent our people—our job is to figure it out, and we will. And I’m convinced that the president will be happy to do so, or will certainly do so.
