For decades, reporters have been taught not to make Hitler analogies in stories about American politics. Adolf Hitler was so uniquely evil that any comparison of an American politician with the Nazi leader was considered unfair and out of bounds.

And then came Donald Trump.

Trump is the first modern American political figure to force journalists to reassess whether Hitler references meet their editorial standards.

In my columns and other articles for The Intercept, I have drawn attention to the increasingly obvious parallels between Hitler and Trump and between the Nazi movement and the MAGA cult. Yet most mainstream journalists have stubbornly stuck to the de facto ban on Hitler analogies and have refused to compare the two. That reluctance to point out the truth about Trump has been part of a larger pattern in the media of the so-called sane-washing of Trump, in which his demagoguery, wild conspiracy theories, and racist proposals are given credence and serious treatment by the political press corps. 

But in explosive new statements, Trump’s own former White House chief of staff has made it virtually impossible for the press to justify a continued ban on Trump/Hitler references. John Kelly, a retired Marine general and Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, told the New York Times and The Atlantic in interviews published this week that when he was president, Trump made it clear that he admired Hitler and yearned for his authoritarian power.

Kelly said that Trump repeatedly said in private that Hitler “did some good things,” and that Trump said he wanted the kind of “German generals” who served under Hitler and committed unspeakable war crimes in World War II. 

Kelly said he is convinced that Trump is a fascist.

In his interview with the New York Times, Kelly pointed out the definition of fascist, and said that it fits Trump: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy … he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Meanwhile, Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump wanted American generals to act like Hitler’s Nazi generals. Kelly recalled asking Trump, “‘Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’”

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It has been widely known for years that Kelly knew explosive details about Trump’s time in the White House, but he has largely remained silent until now. He says that he has finally decided to reveal what he knows about Trump because he was fearful of Trump’s recent statements that he wants to use the U.S. military against his political rivals and dissidents. Trump has called his political opponents the “enemy from within,” and Kelly said that those statements finally prompted him to go public.

It is important that Kelly has finally spoken out before the election. But he could have done this much earlier; it is a wonder that the January 6 insurrection didn’t prompt him.

Of course, January 6 also didn’t convince the mainstream press to begin to regularly compare Trump to Hitler, even though the similarities between the 2021 insurrection and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 were there for all to see.  

The irony is that if Trump was a political figure in another country, the American press would have long since labeled him an autocrat. The U.S. media is susceptible to domestic pressures and so frequently avoids obvious truths about American political figures and about the actions of the U.S. government. In fact, the refusal by the American press to say that Trump is a would-be dictator is similar to the way in which the U.S. press refused to say that the Central Intelligence Agency had tortured prisoners at its black-site prisons during the war on terror. Rather than say that the CIA engaged in torture, the press shamefully used euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation” and “harsh interrogation.” For many years, the use of the word “torture” to describe what the CIA did was forbidden at many news organizations. That rhetorical smoothing helped the CIA avoid accountability.

Today, the press needs to avoid repeating that failure and plainly draw comparisons between Trump and Hitler. 

Now, finally, Kelly’s statements provide all the ammunition that the press needs. He has confirmed that Trump wants to be a dictator and that he represents an existential threat to American democracy. His warning comes like a fire bell in the night that the American press — and the American people — must heed.

The post Mainstream Media Was Afraid to Compare Trump to Hitler. Now the Press Has No Excuse. appeared first on The Intercept.

Maybe, just maybe, Judge Juan Merchan saved American democracy last week.

On Friday, the New York state judge delayed Donald Trump’s sentencing on his felony conviction for falsifying business records to hide his hush-money scheme to buy the silence of a former porn star in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign. 

Trump was trying to cover up his affair with Stormy Daniels just after his campaign had nearly been derailed by the October release of an “Access Hollywood” videotape in which he talked openly about how he harassed and molested women. Figuring his campaign might not survive a second sex scandal, Trump was willing to break the law to keep the adulterous incident secret. 

Now, Trump won’t be sentenced in the case until after the November election.

Many political pundits and analysts called Merchan’s decision a victory for Trump, validating Trump’s campaign to sidetrack and delay his four criminal cases before the election. 

Initially, I agreed with that assessment. But then I started to think about the dangers of allowing a demagogue to portray himself as a victim. 

Of course, Trump has long cast himself as a persecuted victim: a victim of the Justice Department, Congress, the media, or whoever else has most recently sought to hold him accountable for his many lies, impeachable actions, and criminality. It is the cynical playbook that he has used over and over again to whip up his followers and get them to believe his insane conspiracy theories. He doesn’t care that his rhetoric incited an effort to overturn the government during the January 6 insurrection, or that violent white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys follow his lead, or that his dark conspiracy theories led to an attack on an FBI office. Research has found that more than a quarter of Republicans now believe that political violence is acceptable. 

But a criminal sentencing in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign would have helped Trump sell his fake victimhood to a wider audience, beyond his MAGA minions. 

Without the sentencing — and with his other three criminal cases in limbo — Trump can still claim he is persecuted, as he did during this week’s presidential debate, but it will be less effective.   

History shows there is a risk in holding would-be dictators accountable for their actions at crucial political moments. The best-known case happened exactly one century ago. 

Adolf Hitler’s 1924 trial for treason provides an important lesson for how to deal with Trump.  

Hitler was a fringe political figure in Germany before his trial began in February 1924. The trial came just months after Hitler led an insurrection that became known to history as the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed effort by Hitler and the new Nazi Party to take over the provincial government of Bavaria as a precursor to staging a coup in Berlin to take over all of Germany. Hitler was trying to follow the model set by Benito Mussolini, another fascist who had gained power in Italy after his 1922 March on Rome. 

Hitler’s putsch began on November 8, 1923, when he and his fellow Nazis stormed a political meeting at a beer hall in Munich where Bavaria’s state commissioner was speaking. Hitler fired a pistol and announced that “the national revolution has begun,” while other Nazis surrounded the hall and blocked its main entrance with a machine gun. 

But Hitler’s coup attempt quickly began to collapse. When about 2,000 Nazis tried to march into central Munich the next morning, they were met by police and a firefight broke out, leaving 15 Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander dead.

Hitler and many of his lieutenants were soon arrested and charged with high treason. At first, Hitler was despondent; he thought his life was over. But by the time his trial began, he was primed to turn the courtroom into a platform from which he could spout his lies and propaganda. 

Hitler had the benefit of going on trial at a fraught political moment. Post-war Germany was suffering an economic meltdown, while many Germans were casting about for people to blame for the nation’s defeat in World War I and were resentful of the onerous terms imposed on Germany by the victorious allies in the Treaty of Versailles. A large percentage of Germans came to believe that Germany had not really lost the war on the battlefield. Instead, they were convinced by the “stab in the back” conspiracy theory: that the German army hadn’t been defeated, and instead the nation’s political will had simply collapsed in the closing weeks of the war. For that, they blamed Jews and Socialists and other groups that they claimed had forced the surrender and the abdication of the Kaiser.           

Hitler took advantage of this chaotic political climate during his trial. Sympathetic judges allowed him to engage in demagogic speech, enabling him to portray himself as a martyr who was trying to save Germany from the evil forces behind Germany’s postwar Weimar Republic. Hitler didn’t try to fight the treason charges but instead just claimed that he was a German patriot determined to oust the real criminals in the government. He called the Weimar government the “traitors of 1918,” who were to blame for Germany’s defeat.

Before the trial’s end, Hitler gave a dramatic speech in the courtroom that resonated wildly with his diehard right-wing supporters. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the verdict of this court,” he said. “For she acquits us.” 

Hitler received an unbelievably light sentence; he was released after serving just nine months. While in prison, he dictated “Mein Kampf” to other Nazi prisoners. 

The putsch and his theatrical trial turned Hitler into a political star in Germany; he and his supporters were able to claim that he was persecuted by a corrupt legal system. 

To be sure, the parallels between Hitler and Trump are not precise. It took Hitler nearly a decade after his trial to gain power, while Trump’s sentencing would have taken place just weeks before the presidential election. Most importantly, the economic and political conditions in the United States today are nothing like Germany in the 1920s.  

But Hitler and Trump have relied on the same style of victimization and demagoguery. Both saw their political fortunes rise thanks to claims of persecution and martyrdom. Trump’s playbook — claiming that he is a patriot battling dark forces inside the government and other elite institutions — was also Hitler’s playbook. 

While it is disappointing that Trump has yet to be held accountable for any of his many crimes, it is possible that it is better for the nation that he won’t be seen by many voters as a persecuted victim in the weeks before the election. Trump in handcuffs might only help him politically.

The post It’s Good Trump Won’t Be Sentenced Until After the Election appeared first on The Intercept.

At the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, competing under the American banner has put some athletes at odds with their own government, transforming them — in a handful of candid remarks — from cereal-box patriots into political liabilities swiftly pilloried by the conservative establishment.

When reporters asked American freestyle skier Hunter Hess how it felt to wear the U.S. flag in front of the world in this moment, he said it “brings up mixed emotions.” Hess drew a clear line between the country he competes for and the policies coming out of Washington, saying, “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”

Hess’s plain, honest answer triggered one of the most striking political crosscurrents of these Games: President Donald Trump logged on to Truth Social to call Hess “a real loser” who shouldn’t have tried out for the Olympic team at all. 

Hess wasn’t alone in speaking out. Curler Rich Ruohonen, an attorney and Minnesota native, criticized recent federal law enforcement actions in the state, saying the operations were “wrong” and violated Americans’ constitutional rights. Snowboarder Chloe Kim, whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea, defended her fellow teammates, saying Trump’s immigration policies “hit pretty close to home” and that athletes are “allowed to voice” their opinions.  

The response from conservative media was instant: shame, dismissal, and, at times, openly cheering against the very athletes carrying the American flag.

Vice President JD Vance told reporters that Olympians are “not there to pop off about politics” and said they should expect “pushback” if they do. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds went further on social media, telling U.S. athletes that if they don’t want to represent the flag, “GO HOME.” 

Conservative commentators also charged in on behalf of the administration. After U.S. figure skater Amber Glenn, who won gold in the team event, voiced support for her LGBTQ community, conservative podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly branded her “another turncoat to root against” to her 3.6 million followers. The outrage snowballed, and Glenn said she received a “scary amount of hate/threats,” prompting her to take a break from social media altogether. (She later returned to TikTok with a carousel of images of her and teammate Alysa Liu wearing their team gold medals and addressing her critics: “They hate to see two woke bitches winning.”)

The intensity of the backlash illustrates how symbolic these Games have become — not just for who wins medals, but for who gets to define what national representation means on the international stage. While the Olympic Committee and the U.S. government prefer to present the Games as a neutral display of discipline, athletic poise, and national pride, the truth is less tidy. The Olympics have always served as a global window into the political and social conditions athletes come from — and when that window opens, protest has rarely been far behind.

Seen, Not Heard  

Although the modern Olympic Charter’s Rule 50 aims to ban political, religious, or racial “propaganda” from competition, the idea that the Games have ever been apolitical ignores more than a century of history. Long before the International Olympic Committee tried to censor athletic competition, athletes and states recognized there was no separating sports from politics. At the 1906 Athens Games, Irish track and field star Peter O’Connor protested being listed as a British competitor by climbing a 20-foot flagpole and unfurling a green flag bearing the words “Erin Go Bragh” — Ireland forever — and went on to win gold. 

As the Olympics entered the broadcast era and the audience stretched far beyond the stadium, political leaders were acutely aware they could use the Games’ reach to bolster their legitimacy. By the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler and his propagandists transformed the Games into a showcase for the Nazi regime’s image and ideology. The widely publicized spectacle of a nation unified under Nazism was engineered to sanitize the Third Reich at home and abroad, cementing the modern Olympics as a global platform for state propaganda — and, inevitably, for those willing to resist it. Jewish organizations, labor leaders, and civil rights groups in the United States and Europe tried to organize a boycott of the event, warning that participation would validate Hitler’s regime and its persecution of Jews, but the effort ultimately failed. Athletes responded with the most direct act of resistance available to them: by winning, in open defiance. Jesse Owens — an African American runner — shattered Hitler’s carefully staged narrative of “Aryan” superiority by winning four gold medals, turning his victories into a de facto rebuke of the regime’s racial ideology. 

Decades later, the 1968 Mexico City Games delivered one of the clearest political statements in Olympic history: sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the medal stand in protest of racial injustice in the United States — an enduring image that turned the podium into a site of public dissent in front of the world.

The backlash was swift. Olympic officials expelled them from the Games, much of the press cast them as radicals, and both men faced threats and professional fallout for years afterward. Their protest remains one of the most controversial moments in Olympic history — and, as Smith later put it, entirely necessary: “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”

At the 2024 Paris opening ceremony, Palestinian boxer Waseem Abu Sal wore a shirt depicting the bombing of children in Gaza and told AFP it was meant to represent “the children who are martyred and die under the rubble,” bringing the war’s human toll visibly into the Olympic spotlight.

Across decades and continents, athletes and nations alike have used both participating in and abstaining from the Olympics to make statements about war, occupation, racial oppression, and human rights. This long history underscores a simple truth: When the whole world is watching, both governments and their critics understand the Games are too powerful a platform to leave unused.

More Than a Podium

It’s important that dissent shows up at the Olympics for more than just symbolic reasons: The conditions that shape who gets to compete are deeply connected to the social and political structures in the athletes’ home countries. Sports in America are advertised, sold, and draped in red, white, and blue so completely that they become impossible to separate from nationalism, transforming competition into a ritual where athletic achievement is inseparable from the story the nation tells about itself.

American Olympic success is not a vacuum. An analysis by researchers at George Mason University found that roughly 3 percent of athletes on Team USA at the 2026 Winter Games were born abroad and another 13.5 percent are children of immigrant parents — meaning nearly 17 percent of the delegation has direct ties to immigrant communities. That reality reflects how the United States develops and recruits athletic talent across communities, including immigrant families and underrepresented groups whose contributions have long powered American sports on the world stage.  

For athletes whose families or personal histories intersect with immigration pathways, this shift is not an abstraction. It’s about who has secure status in the United States and who faces potential removal or legal uncertainty. The ways in which these forces shape an athlete don’t stop when they step on the snow or ice, no matter what flag is on their back.

The Games are built on spectacle, but beneath the pageantry is a hard truth: Athletes do not compete only for themselves, they compete as symbols of the nation they represent. When Americans step onto that global stage, they are presented as proof of what the United States claims to stand for — freedom, dignity, equality — even as the country itself struggles to live up to those ideals. That contradiction carries a real moral weight. Competing under the flag is not just an honor; it’s a responsibility to confront the distance between national image and national reality.

The post It’s Correct and Moral to Use the Olympics to Speak Out About Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

It worked. “Fuck you,” Fuentes wrote back. 

This was Rectenwald’s shot. He apologized, calling Fuentes “a brilliant guy.” He reposted an uncannily gorgeous, computer-generated woman in a cross necklace and blazer encouraging the two men to “drop the beef.” She sat in front of an American flag and six light-up letters spelling “AZAPAC,” the acronym for Rectenwald’s new group. If Fuentes would just endorse it, Rectenwald promised, he’d “take it all back.”

Rectenwald launched the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee in August, vowing to fight to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and root out pro-Israel influence in Congress. AZAPAC aims to raise money to unseat pro-Israel legislators in the coming midterm elections, targeting some of the main recipients of cash from influential groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel.

It’s a goal that might sound appealing for the electoral left, whose members have long struggled to make meaningful progress on Palestinian rights in Washington, D.C., largely because of the strong grip the pro-Israel lobby holds on U.S. politicians. And as Israel’s genocide in Gaza stretches into a third year, AZAPAC’s policy goals may tap into a political energy currently unaddressed by either major party: growing anti-Israel sentiment on the right.

Though the Republican party loudly backs Israel and its war effort, far-right online spaces are growing increasingly critical of Israel. While accusations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel mainstream often dog Israel’s critics on the left, they appear as little cause for concern to far-right figures and their followers. As the nonpartisan AZAPAC works to sway the 2026 midterms, Rectenwald’s group will test whether candidates across the political spectrum will be similarly pressed on the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

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The AZAPAC founder has attempted to connect with openly antisemitic figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who famously praised Hitler. Rectenwald is a regular on The Stew Peters Show, which streams on the Peter Thiel and JD Vance-funded YouTube alternative Rumble, where the host has used slurs to describe Jewish and Black people — to no objection from Rectenwald. He’s courted support from popular manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed Jewish people are behind DEI policies, transgender identity, and “open borders.” AZAPAC is helping fund at least one candidate who is a Hitler apologist and another who has participated in white nationalist demonstrations.    

In a conversation with The Intercept, Rectenwald made clear he’s aware such affiliations could be detrimental to his cause. He said he is no longer seeking the support of Fuentes, though he remains interested in his fan base — they’re “more sincere than him on some things” — and that he was unaware of “the depth of” Bilzerian’s antisemitic views, which are well–documented online.   

Asked about Peters’s language, Rectenwald told The Intercept he would no longer appear on his show, then reversed and said he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.” Peters, Rectenwald added, has “helped us quite a bit.”

Affiliating with such figures perpetuates harmful and often violent rhetoric toward Jewish people, antisemitism and hate speech experts told The Intercept, and in the most extreme cases, conspiracy theories can motivate violence, as occurred when a white nationalist shooter massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.  

These antisemitic allyships also risk undermining legitimate criticism of the state of Israel — a heightened liability at a time when the federal government and its pro-Israel allies have launched largely spurious claims of antisemitism against advocates on the left who support Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide. 

“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders,” said Ben Lorber, an author and researcher of antisemitism and white Christian nationalism. “It stands to really harm the movement.”

Rectenwald appears to understand what he’s risking. After The Intercept reached out to AZAPAC-endorsed candidates for this story, two rejected the group’s backing and were scrubbed from the site, and a third threatened to do the same. Rectenwald accused The Intercept of trying to sink his PAC.

Rectenwald himself has used language commonly associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories of global Jewish control, and he argues that other Israel critics embrace similar language. Online, he regularly refers to “the Jewish mafia” and “Jewish elites,” and last April, he self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” as he said on a podcast, but Amazon barred him from using the title. 

“We don’t use the same language and talk about the same things with the same terms,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, referring to Peters. And yet, he said, “I do believe he’s doing pretty good work in terms of exposing the Zionist network and what it’s up to.” He said a significant portion of AZAPAC’s early donations arrived after his appearances on Peters’s show, which also runs commercials for the group.

During a September episode while introducing Rectenwald, Peters referred to Jewish people using a common antisemitic slur. A month earlier, he used an anti-Black slur to describe Department of Justice attorney Leo Terrell in another episode with Rectenwald. In that episode, Peters said the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad, satanic, Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” 

Rectenwald promised Peters in his August appearance that AZAPAC does not have “infiltrators,” “dual allegiances,” or “sneaky Jews coming in and running the show.” He closed out the episode by offering Peters an invite — which he told The Intercept has since been rescinded — to be a member of AZAPAC’s board.

The 2026 Slate

An AZAPAC ad launched in November and produced by the far-right company Dissident Media shows Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, Palestinian children killed by Israel, re-enactments of the American Revolution — and the red, clawed hands of a puppet master manipulating strings overlaying a mashup of the American and Israeli flags. 

Rectenwald told The Intercept that he was not aware “puppet master” was a well-known antisemitic trope and that the strings represented the pro-Israeli donor class’s influence on the Trump administration. Plus, the trailer was a success: Donations poured in as it drew attention online, Rectenwald said.  

AZAPAC had raised $111,556 by the end of December, according to recent FEC filings.  

Of AZAPAC’s 10 publicly endorsed candidates, six are running as Republicans with three Democrats and a Libertarian on its slate. The group is more focused on Republicans, Rectenwald said, because he aims to put a dent in the GOP’s pro-Israel base. AZAPAC is backing Aaron Baker, for example, an America First conservative who is running to unseat Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a vocal supporter of Israel and Netanyahu.

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At least one AZAPAC candidate drew national headlines five years ago. Tyler Dykes, a Republican candidate running for Rep. Nancy Mace’s congressional seat in South Carolina, was famously accused of performing a Nazi salute, which he denies, while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers with a stolen riot shield. (Trump pardoned Dykes on his first day in office.) Dykes also received a felony conviction for his participation in the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where organizers protested the removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”

Reached by The Intercept, Dykes said in an emailed statement he denounces “violence and extremism in all its forms.” He added that “Robert E. Lee was a hero, and deserves to be honored as such.”

Rectenwald told The Intercept that AZAPAC’s board had vetted Dykes and other candidates. He said he was willing to tolerate certain disagreements with the candidates and their views. The endorsements, Rectenwald said, are “a pragmatism of sorts.” 

“We don’t agree with all of these candidates,” Rectenwald said. “We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”

AZAPAC’s endorsement process is primarily based on a 19-part questionnaire, which Rectenwald shared with The Intercept. It asks things like whether a candidate would pledge not to receive campaign donations from prominent pro-Israel groups or “any other foreign lobby/PAC”; what they think of laws restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or imposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism; and whether they would vote to end military aid to Israel.

The group’s contradictions are perhaps best captured by two brief recent endorsements: two former American soldiers, Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, running for Congress as progressive Green Party candidates. As a contractor working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Aguilar, who is running in North Carolina, became a whistleblower alleging that GHF employees were firing into crowds of starving civilians at aid sites. Stoker, running in Texas, took part in last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, a humanitarian mission meant to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Their AZAPAC endorsements were short-lived. 

After receiving questions from The Intercept about Rectenwald’s language and AZAPAC’s associations with far-right figures, both Aguilar and Stoker rejected the group’s backing. Mentions of them had been erased from AZAPAC’s online presence by Tuesday.

In explaining his withdrawal, Aguilar’s campaign acknowledged that anti-genocide and anti-Zionist activists “are falsely accused on antisemitism on a regular basis” to discredit their work. “For that reason, we want to avoid being associated with any group whose statements or actions raise credible concerns of actual antisemitism,” Aguilar’s campaign manager said in a statement.

Stoker told The Intercept that “I have always used my platform to fight against racial superiority,” adding that AZAPAC’s narrow focus on “old conspiracy theories” and eradicating the pro-Zionist lobby “is not going to fix any of the larger systemic issues facing working class Americans.”

Christine Reyna, a professor at De Paul University who studies the psychology of extremism, questioned why AZAPAC would endorse candidates like Dykes and Casey Putsch, a racecar driver and AZAPAC-backed Republican candidate for Ohio governor. In August, Putsch posted a video asking Grok to list “all the good things Adolf Hitler did or was responsible for creating in his life” and railed against the Jewish right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whom he called “an annoying little rodent.” While there’s a growing number of other candidates who oppose sending military aid to Israel or have sworn off AIPAC donations, backing candidates like Putsch and Dykes could serve as a dog whistle, Reyna said, to some of the most extreme corners of the far right.

“When you package these really frightening and terrible and dangerous ideologies and you hide them behind this front-facing organization that gives them legitimacy,” Reyna said, “That can be extremely dangerous.”

Aligning with such America First nationalists, who tend to ignore the issue of America’s own ambitions of control and profit, can harm other communities, antisemitism researcher Lorber warned, because of their anti-Blackness, xenophobia, or anti-LGBTQ views. In the case of Israel, these far-right alliances can also injure the movement for Palestinian liberation, he said.

“If we get distracted chasing fantasies of Jewish cabals, it harms our analysis, it makes our work less informed and less effective,” Lorber said, “and it also divides our movements.”

Palestinian-American advocate and analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa, whose family is from Gaza, is acutely aware of the ways pro-Israel institutions have attacked anti-Zionist work for being antisemitic. He said those bad-faith attacks were why he was concerned about AZAPAC’s affiliations with the far right, which has long rooted its criticism of Israel in “actually racist and antisemitic” beliefs. 

“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel,” Kenney-Shawa said. “But neo Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”  

The day after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Putsch, who did not respond to outreach from The Intercept, doubled down on his support for ICE’s mass deportation campaign. On social media, Putsch, who is Christian, often attacks his opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith and Indian ancestry. On his campaign site, his platform includes anti-immigrant calls to “accelerate deportations” and limit the number of H-1B visas offered to immigrant workers.

His platform makes no mention of Israel or foreign policy.

The Founder’s Journey

“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, acknowledging that on occasion, he has used the words “Jew” or “Jewish” instead. A search of his X account turned up at least 43 references to the “Jewish mafia,” and he’s repeatedly invoked the “Jewish elite” on his Substack. He claimed to have borrowed the latter term from Norm Finkelstein, a pro-Palestinian author and activist who, unlike Rectenwald, is Jewish himself. 

“It’s not just an ‘israeli lobby.’ LOL. It’s a Talmudic Jewish mafia that runs the U.S. and the world,” Rectenwald wrote in one post in March. The same day, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia did 9/11.”

When The Intercept asked about Rectenwald’s use of the term “Zionist Occupation Government,” which has a history of popularity among white supremacists, he brought up AZAPAC-backed candidates like Bernard Taylor, a firefighter and Democrat hoping to unseat Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a former IDF volunteer. Rectenwald cited Taylor, who is Black, as proof that “we are not like bigots,” adding that AZAPAC planned to endorse other people of color.

Taylor, who accepted an endorsement from AZAPAC in December, said he also was not aware of Rectenwald’s rhetoric until approached by The Intercept for this story.

“I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s not concerning to me,” Taylor told The Intercept in a phone call, referring to Rectenwald’s language. In an emailed statement, he said his campaign rejects antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy, but would keep the AZAPAC endorsement based on policy. Taylor said that if he feels AZAPAC is “crossing the line” into overt antisemitism, he will reject its endorsement and refund donations from the group.

“If I made, you know, some slips here and there, it isn’t intentional — I’m not trying to dog whistle to anybody,” Rectenwald said. “I’m just trying to be precise, and sometimes, you know, precision is difficult.” 

In “The Cabal Question,” Rectenwald’s self-published novel, a former professor finds his worldview transformed when a friend “thrusts him into the JQ,” or Jewish question, as the book’s Amazon summary puts it, working with “a steadfast ex-occultist turned Christian nationalist to trace the strands of the cabal’s reach.” The story mirrors his own evolution of getting “J-pilled,” or “Jew-pilled,” Rectenwald has said, though he insists the novel is not about promoting antisemitism but rather “a Christian redemption story.”

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Rectenwald once identified as a leftist. He taught liberal studies as a Marxist at New York University — until a fallout that began in 2016, when it was revealed that he was behind the since-deleted Twitter account @AntiPCNYUProf with the screen name “Deplorable NYU Professor.” Rectenwald used the account to act “in the guise of an alt-righter,” as a way to argue against politically correct use of pronouns, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.  

He took a paid leave from NYU and claimed he was a victim of liberal censorship in a splashy op-ed and a sit-down on Fox & Friends. When he came back, Rectenwald invited far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class and later sued NYU for defamation. Court records indicate the case was dropped with prejudice, and Rectenwald said he settled out of court for a cash payment in exchange for his departure from the school in 2019.

NYU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The experience prompted Rectenwald to denounce the left and his several decades of Marxist scholarship, and in 2024, he launched a failed bid for president as a Libertarian, representing the conservative Mises Caucus.

It’s unclear when his fixation on Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories took hold. But on the right-wing podcast The Backlash in May, Rectenwald used the protagonist of “The Cabal Question” to describe how his views developed. 

In the book, Rectenwald said, the main character flees persecution and surveillance from the government controlled by “the Jewish mafia.” The character ends up finding refuge with “radical right wingers,” who help him escape the country. The more closely he affiliates with the right-wing network, however, the more he risks damaging his own reputation. 

“Art imitates life, right?” said the host. Rectenwald agreed.

The post A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists. appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy in the United States. If he is elected president, he will try to become a dictator.

That warning must be repeated, over and over again, so Americans don’t forget it in November.

But that’s not the daily news that you will read or hear in the American press today. Instead, it’s mostly coverage of polls favorable to Trump and cute scene-setting stories about the carnival-like atmosphere at his crazed rallies, where his massive cult following is on display.

That daily coverage ignores the five-alarm fire burning up the 2024 election. The mainstream political press is effectively ignoring the coming national apocalypse. How can that be? How can they once again screw up covering Trump?

After all, Trump isn’t hiding his lust for dictatorial power. He admits it publicly. In December, when his Fox News lackey, Sean Hannity, gave him an opportunity to dispel fears that he wanted dictatorial power, Trump instead offered a rare truth. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked. “Except for day one,” Trump replied.

Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.

In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.

Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”

Trump is a fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.

With their obsession with horse-race coverage, political reporters tend to judge what Trump says or does by whether his words and actions will help him politically. By doing so, the press is saying that Trump’s racism, corruption, criminality, and insane abuses of power matter only so far as his electability.

There are exceptions: major news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done some important stories about Trump’s dictatorial plans for a second term. But those investigative stories are drowned out by the chorus of horse-race stories — sometimes published on the same days and by the same news organizations behind more substantial coverage.

The media is sleepwalking.

I’ve often wondered how the press, both in Germany and around the world, failed to see Hitler for the monster that he was before he gained power. After Trump, I think I understand.

Hitler took advantage of the incremental nature of daily journalism. For years, his rise in Germany was not taken seriously in the United States, and that period of American inattention and isolationism enabled Hitler to become a much greater global threat. The American press played a significant and ugly role in downplaying the threat Hitler posed to the Western world.

American journalists initially viewed Hitler as little more than a German version of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who they saw as a blustering demagogue, yet also a leader who had helped save Italy from the economic chaos of the post-World War I era.

The New York Times credited Mussolini “with returning turbulent Italy to what it called normalcy,” according to a study of the press coverage of Hitler and Mussolini in Smithsonian Magazine in 2016.

When Hitler first burst into German political life, the American press sought to downplay his importance by treating him as a joke; the Smithsonian notes how Newsweek called him a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” and that his appearance suggested “Charlie Chaplin.”

Over time, American journalists’ views of Hitler began to shift, but mostly just to show greater respect for his skills as a charismatic public speaker and a successful demagogue. Ultimately, through more than a decade in German politics before he came to power, Hitler was normalized by American reporters. The press became numb to the outrageous things he said and wrote and did. He kept saying the same things for years; he laid out many of his plans and intentions in “Mein Kampf” in 1925, eight years before he came to power. By the time of the crucial 1932 German elections and Hitler’s subsequent rise to power in 1933, his rabid antisemitism and his lust for power were treated as old news.

The American press is making the same mistake today.

Ever since Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, reporters have alternated between depicting him as a goof who couldn’t be taken seriously and showing respect for his skills as a demagogue.

Two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and one insurrection later, Trump is normal now, at least as far as the political press corps is concerned. The January 6 insurrection, in which Trump tried to illegally hold on to power, is old news. Just like Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was old news by the 1932 German elections.

After Trump’s chaotic four years in office, too many journalists think that everything about Trump’s insane record has already been reported and written. This leads to more coverage of his poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.

Mainstream journalists are increasingly open about their refusal to cover the campaign in crisis terms. In a recent interview, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn bristled at the notion that the Times needs to recognize the threat that Trump poses to the republic. He claimed that would just be doing the bidding of the Biden campaign and would turn the Times into a state propaganda organ like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”

Kahn’s defensive crouch is symptomatic of the press today. After years of losing to social media companies in the fight for advertising and attention and fending off a constant barrage of attacks from right-wing critics who seek to discredit their journalism, major news organizations have become increasingly insular. A sudden surge in readership and viewership during the Trump administration has waned, while a drive to make newsrooms more diverse by hiring a wave of young progressive journalists has left older white editors embittered that the new generation has dared to challenge the status quo.

News organizations have always been hostile to outside scrutiny, but their hypocrisy about transparency and openness have reached new heights. Earlier this year the Times launched an ill-conceived leak investigation of its own staff to find out who talked to The Intercept for a story, while more recently the Washington Post has sought to downplay evidence that its new publisher, Will Lewis, was involved in a scheme to conceal evidence about phone hacking of British royals and celebrities while he was an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in London. Semafor reported this week that an editor at the Post ordered the staff not to promote on its newsletters one of the Post’s own stories that included new allegations about Lewis from a lawsuit filed by Prince Harry in London.

Expect little accountability for these actions; the Post got rid of its ombudsman in 2013, and the Times got rid of its last public editor in 2017. Both the Times and the Washington Post have media reporters, but they rarely write about their own newsrooms and instead spend most of their time punching down on smaller news organizations.

Last year, CNN went through an internal crisis as well, after its new owners sought to force the newsroom to bend more toward Trump. That controversy ultimately led to the firing of CNN’s chief, but it is not clear whether the new ownership group still plans to push for more Trump-friendly coverage.

These efforts to build protective bubbles around their organizations at a time of unprecedented volatility in the news business seem to be at the heart of the refusal by the mainstream press to get out in front of the voters and take a stand on Trump.

In fact, many in the news business would secretly be thrilled by Trump’s return to the White House, particularly old, white pundits and commentators who claim to be liberal but quietly believe that “cancel culture” is a bigger threat than Trump. Many corporate executives in the news business would likewise be happy to see a return to Trump-era revenues.

But the basic reason the press isn’t sounding the alarm about the threat Trump poses to American democracy is much more banal. It’s about the structure of journalism. 

Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today?

For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time.

But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.

The post The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s death on Monday could be the perfect opportunity for media institutions in the U.S. to take a sober look at the George W. Bush era — but it’s more likely they’ll fire up the nostalgia machine than confront reality. 

Liberal network MSNBC’s flagship a.m. program “Morning Joe” somberly announced the news on Tuesday and quickly worked to portray Cheney as a strong leader who fought for the country at all costs. Host Joe Scarborough said the former vice president was defined by his determination not to see another 9/11. Later in the show, author and historian Jon Meacham called Cheney “a remarkable American figure.”

“We don’t make them like this anymore,” Meacham said, implying this is a bad thing. 

Scarborough celebrated Cheney as a “defender of democracy” for his opposition to Donald Trump, a common theme in his final act. The former vice president and Republican hard-liner was greeted warmly in recent years by powerful Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Adam Schiff for the pivot.

It’s a pattern we’re likely to see continued in the wake of his death — and a sign that Democrats have still not learned hard lessons about their role in sending the country into the abyss.

In fact, Cheney had more of a role in giving us Trump than his later opposition might suggest, pioneering a cruel brand of post-truth politics that Trump would perfect. 

Cheney said whatever he needed to in order to push his agenda. He cast aside clear legal constraints, wantonly starting illegal wars and ignoring nettlesome obstacles like the legal prohibition on torture. He ruthlessly attacked his perceived political enemies, decrying anyone who disagreed with him as “terrorist” sympathizers. Sound familiar?

Legacy of Bloodshed

The former vice president’s legacy is one that came with gallons of Iraqi blood and billions in profit for his friends and allies in the private sector — something that has been overlooked and papered over.

Cheney was part of three Republican presidential administrations: Gerald Ford’s, George H.W. Bush’s, and George W. Bush’s. In the latter two, Cheney helped prosecute wars on Iraq: first, the Gulf War in the early 1990s, which set the stage for the second disastrous Iraq War that defined the younger Bush’s presidency and wrought destruction across the Middle East.

A masterful manipulator of the national media, Cheney was a point man for selling the 2003 Iraq War. He appeared on “Meet the Press” multiple times during the 2000s, plying obsequious host Tim Russert with lies and misleading statements comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and implying that the Iraqi dictator was involved in the 9/11 attacks. 

After Iraq devolved into chaos due to the U.S. invasion, Cheney returned to Russert in 2006 to imply that critics of the war were aiding and abetting the enemy by raising doubts among allies about U.S. commitment to the mission.

“Those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States,” Cheney said. “Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”

Maintaining a presence in Iraq had its own consequences. The “surge” of U.S. troops to pacify the country led to the deaths of thousands more and continued to destabilize the region, and led to the rise of a number of fundamentalist groups, culminating in the ISIS militant takeover of Mosul and the resulting brutality visited upon the Iraqi people. 

You can’t even spin doubling down on the war as an international win for the U.S. The biggest benefactor of the conflict was geopolitical rival Iran, which saw its power and influence grow in the wake of the disaster.

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At home, the ramifications of the Iraq War damaged and discredited U.S. institutions. The media’s role in promoting the war was shameful and the source of much of the mistrust and discontent that the American people still have for the Fourth Estate. 

Rather than take on the lessons of that time and hold the architects of war policy accountable, corporate U.S. newsrooms have, by and large, worked overtime to launder the reputations of the leaders of the Bush administration in the intervening years. 

Trump Era Turncoat

Cheney lived to see his image fully rehabilitated, as have many of the neocon figures in and around the Bush administration, including Bush himself. Cheney was part of a cottage industry of wayward Republicans who raised their profiles, earned liberal plaudits, and made millions by rejecting Trump.

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Desperate to differentiate between the mythical “good Republican” and the vulgar, far-right MAGA movement, liberal media institutions spent much of the president’s first term from 2017 to 2021 rehabbing the images of Bush White House officials as a de facto “resistance” that broke with Trump as just a step too far.

The turncoats’ motives, however, may not have been so pure as “defending democracy.” Both Cheney and his daughter Liz, who followed in her father’s footsteps as a GOP representative from Wyoming, embraced the opportunity to reject Trump, not least by repudiating his America First foreign policy doctrine. Their problem? Not enough war-making; Trump eschewed the kind of wholesale invasions and occupations the Cheneys embraced.

It was the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that finally forced a clean break for the Cheneys, whose adherence to the unitary executive was total.

It’s possible that Cheney, a polarizing figure — he voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 — will prompt a more subdued response from liberals in the halls of power and among the media, despite his late-in-life conversion on democracy. 

His legacy of blood, destruction, and death, however, is one that must be accounted for, rather than made a footnote in the career of a so-called public servant.

The post Dick Cheney Doesn’t Deserve Your Heartfelt Eulogies appeared first on The Intercept.

Among the donors to the Ross GoFundMe was billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who shared a post about the fundraiser on Saturday and donated $10,000.

The fundraising campaign for Ross was created by an account using the name of Clyde Emmons, of Michigan. Other online accounts, linked to the GoFundMe and bearing the same name, posted white supremacist imagery and called Good “a stupod bitch who got what she deserved.”

At the time the GoFundMe page popped up, a Facebook page for Emmons was using an extremist meme as a profile picture. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the image used by the Emmons account depicts a Nazi salute and is a hate symbol. The “paper beats rock” symbol shows a Hitler salute hand over the Black Power fist and is considered an allusion to white supremacy, the ADL says in its explanation of the image.

GoFundMe is investigating the campaign, the company told The Intercept in a statement. (Neither Emmons nor Ackman responded to requests for comment.)

The campaign for Ross has raised over $400K — with Ackman’s donation being the largest to date. On Saturday, Ackman shared a right-wing influencer’s post about the fundraiser for Ross, and around the same time, a $10,000 donation from “William Ackman” appeared on the page.

In a Sunday post on X, Ackman confirmed that he made the donation, saying he wanted to also donate to the fundraiser for Good but it was closed by the time he went to give.

“The whole situation is a tragedy,” he wrote. “An officer doing his best to do his job, and a protester who likely did not intend to kill the officer but whose actions in a split second led to her death.”

A Friday post to a Facebook page identified as belonging to Emmons gave a very different explanation for starting the GoFundMe.

“The stupid cunts wanna make a go fund me for the stupod bitch that got what she deserved,” said the since-edited post, which linked to the Ross campaign. “i made one for the ice officer that did his job lets get this man some money.”

When Ackman donated to the campaign for Ross, the description included a reference to Ross’s legal fees.

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The description, which was later removed, said: “After seeing all the media bs about a domestic terrorist getting go fund me. I feel that the officer that was 1000 percent justified in the shooting deserves to have a go fund me. Funds will go to help pay for any legal services this officer needs. I am currently in contact with his father and awaiting the officers response so I can send him the link to hand this over to him personally.”

GoFundMe’s terms generally prohibit fundraising for the legal defense of violent crimes, and “any activity in support of terrorism, extremism, hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorist financing, extremist financing, or money laundering.”

Other images on Emmons’s Facebook depict apparent images about race, like one from the movie “Blazing Saddles” showing a joke about the Ku Klux Klan. “When everyone wasn’t offended by every little fucking thing,” the Emmons account wrote as a caption.

After Emmons’s fundraiser began going viral on social media, he changed his profile picture from the hate symbol to an image from the TV show “The Simpsons.”

The GoFundMe was still live and accepting donations on Monday. GoFundMe is investigating the organizer and if the campaign falls under their rules, a spokesperson for the company told The Intercept in an email Sunday.

“Our Trust & Safety team is currently reviewing all fundraisers related to the shooting in Minneapolis to ensure they are compliant with our Terms of Service,” the company said. “We are also working to gather additional information from the organizer of this fundraiser. During the review process, all funds remain safely held by our payment processors. GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit fundraisers that raise money for the legal defense of anyone formally charged with a violent crime. Any campaigns that violate this policy will be removed.”

Ackman has been an outspoken critic of what he alleged was antisemitism on American university campuses, often aligning with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on the issue. Ackman supported the ADL’s defense of what many observers thought was a Nazi salute by Elon Musk; ADL called it an “awkward gesture.”

The Trump administration has defended Ross’s killing of Good as justified, while Minnesota state leaders call for an investigation. Video obtained by The Intercept shows events that contradict the administration’s accounts of that morning.

The post Bill Ackman Gave $10,000 to Jonathan Ross GoFundMe Created by User Linked to Nazi Salute Image appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is a psychopathic criminal. He is a racist, fascist cult leader determined to destroy American democracy.

Those facts must be repeated over and over this year, because so many Americans appear willing to re-elect him president.

In the wake of his sweeping victory in the Iowa caucuses, Trump stands astride the ruins of the Republican Party, which he has transformed into a cult of MAGA zombies who believe every lie and conspiracy theory he spouts. Other Republican politicians have long since surrendered, even those who have gone through the motions of contesting the Republican primaries. These days, virtually all Republican politicians try to outdo each other in their goose-stepping fealty to Trump, while Republican voters who hate him have long since become quiet collaborators or left the party.

So Trump will easily win the Republican nomination this year for the third straight time.

The real question is whether non-MAGA Americans will fall for his demented act. Will voters remember why they chose his opponent in 2020?

Trump hopes not; he is counting on America’s recency bias and social media-fueled short attention span to cast a veil over the ugliness and criminality of his first term.

The danger lies in the possibility that Trump’s egotism and criminality will once again be normalized during the presidential campaign, accepted as nothing more than background noise. When voters size up the candidates, will Trump’s greed and dishonesty merely be seen as unpleasant character traits, about equal to the drawbacks of Joe Biden’s advanced age?

Covering the Horse Race

The political press corps is certainly doing its best to make that happen. They are largely ignoring the danger Trump poses to the nation.

Political reporters hate to be perceived as biased, so they usually focus on the horse-race aspects of elections, providing a running tally of who’s up and who’s down in the polls. That lets them avoid focusing on policy substance – or, in this case, on whether Trump wants to be a dictator. After each election, often following harsh criticism for their failures, political reporters write laments seeking to diagnose why they failed; famously, they traveled to diners in the Midwest to talk to Trump voters after his surprise 2016 win. Then they went right back to horse-race coverage, which is too easy and addictive to give up because it makes reporters feel like insiders who understand the game of politics. 

When they do write about Trump’s many scandals, political reporters often feel the need to provide “balance.” So they write about purported Biden scandals that they know Republicans have fabricated. Congressional Republicans understand this dynamic, and they have ginned up an impeachment of Biden without any evidence, counting on the press to cover it.

The reporters who fall for this gimmick can’t handle the truth: that the GOP no longer exists as a legitimate political party and is merely a collection of Trump lackeys who will deceive the American people to further his autocratic interests. Reporters don’t want to admit that this presidential race will be a contest between a reasonable, centrist Democrat and a would-be dictator.

This could be the last free election in American history. If Trump wins and his MAGA acolytes gain control of Congress, they will work tirelessly to destroy the American republic and the electoral process.

Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch

One sign of Trump’s dictatorial ambitions lies in the ominous parallels between his view of the January 6 insurrection and the way Adolf Hitler viewed the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. They were dress rehearsals for later seizures of power.

Trump now views the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as a key element of the mythological, violent birth of his MAGA movement. It has become Trump’s version of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed effort to use street violence to gain power.

Almost exactly a century ago, on November 9, 1923, between 2,000 and 3,000 armed Nazis marched into central Munich and tried to take over the provincial government of Bavaria; Hitler planned to follow his coup in Bavaria with a march on Berlin to take control of Germany. But the Nazis were defeated by police in a gun battle that killed 16 of them, along with four police officers. Hitler was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to five years in prison, but released after just nine months, time he spent writing “Mein Kampf.” The putsch brought him fame, and when he became Germany’s dictator a decade later, he turned the Nazis who died in the uprising into sacred martyrs. The Beer Hall Putsch became central to the Third Reich’s origin story; it is clear that Trump views January 6 in similar terms.

Trump already calls the rioters arrested for their involvement in January 6 “hostages.” It isn’t too difficult to imagine that, if he regains the presidency, he will mythologize the mob the same way Hitler did the putsch, perhaps pushing for a monument to the 2021 insurrection on the National Mall in Washington, similar to the twin “temples of honor” the Third Reich built in Munich to entomb the Nazi dead of November 9, 1923.

The post Don’t Normalize Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

“We’re going to have a big, big celebration, as you know, 250 years,” he said during a Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. “Can you imagine? I missed that four years, and now look what I have, I have everything. Amazing the way things work out. God did that.”

The massive military parade and related festivities planned for June 14 will cost an estimated $25 to $45 million, according to the Army. This is likely a significant underestimate due to many expenses that are unaccounted for – or will be billed later, such as damages to local infrastructure caused by armored vehicles. Members of Congress are already expressing outrage at what they see as a gross misuse of funds.

“Trump squandering $45 million in taxpayer dollars on a military parade for his birthday is the epitome of government waste,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “If the Trump Administration truly cared about celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Army, they would honor past and present soldiers and reinstate the thousands of veterans who they fired from the federal workforce — not throw away millions on an extravagant parade.”

The purpose of the parade is also seemingly up for interpretation. The White House now says the parade is a celebration of the Army’s semiquincentennial after, last month, denying reports that a parade would be held on the president’s birthday. Trump, for his part, has offered shifting explanations, stating that the parade is a celebration of Flag Day, the military writ large, or tanks and other weaponry.

The current plan, nonetheless, involves a martial spectacle reminiscent of the Soviet Union or North Korea in the heart of America’s capital, with armored vehicles rolling down Constitution Avenue. It is slated to involve more than 100 vehicles, including 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, four M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzers, as well as military relics like World War II-era Sherman tanks, a B-25 bomber, and a P-51 Mustang single-seat fighter plane, according to Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith. She added that the parade will also feature 34 horses, two mules, one wagon, and one dog.

“Join us on June 14th for the U.S. Army’s 250th Anniversary Grand Military Parade on the National Mall! Hosted by President Donald Trump,” reads a White House post on X announcing the event, which will also feature 50 helicopters flying overhead, including Apaches, Black Hawks, and tandem-rotor Chinooks. The White House says that Trump will “deliver remarks celebrating 250 Years of the U.S. Army’s exceptional service, significant achievements, and enduring legacy.”

Trump previously called the price tag of the parade “peanuts compared to the value of doing it.” The White House did not respond to questions about the additional costs beyond those cited by the Army. 

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., suspects the costs could be markedly higher than the current estimates. “This administration does not have a credible history of telling the truth about anything. And so, when they estimate $45 million, you know that’s a low-ball figure,” he told The Intercept. “I don’t know if it includes transporting the troops from their home stations to Washington or feeding them on that trip.”

Cohen brought up other costs from aircraft flyovers — “How much fuel do they burn up? How much maintenance is required before and after the flight?” — to the construction of stands and viewing platforms on the parade route.

The total burden on taxpayers could also soar higher because the federal government is on the hook to fix city streets and other infrastructure torn up by the armored vehicles (each Abrams tank, for instance, weighs almost 70 tons). “If military tanks were used, they should be accompanied with many millions of dollars to repair the roads,” said D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser in April, adding that tanks rolling through the city’s streets “would not be good.” 

The Army says they have this covered — at taxpayer expense. “As a prevention measure to ensure there are no damages to the roads, one-inch-thick steel plates, varying in size from 4 feet by 8 feet and 8 feet by 20 feet will be placed on the roads at any pivot point and all new rubber tracks will be placed on vehicles,” Heather J. Hagan, an Army spokesperson, told The Intercept. “The federal government would be responsible for any damages.”

Additional expenses, like cleanup and an increased police presence, are also apparently not part of current estimates, although Daniel Gleick, Bowser’s press secretary, was unable to provide projected local costs. The sheer number of agencies the Army is working with, however, speaks to the likelihood of wide-ranging additional expenses. “The Army is coordinating with local law enforcement, National Park Services, District Department of Transportation, Federal Highways Administration, U.S. Park Police, and DC Water, who will assess the roads and bridges,” said Hagan.

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One major expense of the parade to be borne by taxpayers is the cross-country transport of mammoth military vehicles. The Abrams tanks have, for example, already been loaded onto flatbed railcars at an industrial rail yard facility at Fort Cavazos, Texas, for their long journey toward Washington. The tanks will then be trucked to a staging area near the parade route.

The district will also be flooded with close to 7,000 troops. The Army did not want to disclose the locations for force protection reasons, but service members will be housed in the Agriculture Department and General Services Administration buildings, according to Pentagon sources. Contracting materials examined by The Intercept show the Army National Guard is seeking to rent “800 Sleeping Cots in Support of Army 250 Parade in Washington D.C.”

“They’re going to sleep on cots. They’re going to get cots and MREs,” said Smith, the Army spokesperson, referring to “meals ready-to-eat,” the military’s moniker for rations. 

Cohen, the Tennessee representative, also referenced the inclusion of large numbers of National Guard members. “They’ll have to take time from their jobs. And are they being paid by the state extra for this time as being in the National Guard? That’s another expense,” he said.

The Army is also looking into potential lodgings — like hotel rooms or furnished apartments — to house 280 personnel from June 12 to 16 and another 275 personnel from June 13 to 16 near the National Mall. These people will, however, eschew MREs for more sumptuous victuals: a hot breakfast, a bag lunch, and a hot dinner, according to a request for information issued by the Army earlier this month. Smith said she did not have details about this effort. Hagan, the other Army spokesperson, did not have a more granular breakdown of other parade costs.

Trump has Fixated on military parades for decades — and has repeatedly found himself mired in controversy as a result. When he was merely a real estate developer and New York City gadfly, his involvement with the Nation’s Parade, celebrating the Second World War’s 50th anniversary in 1995, sullied “an otherwise positive day,” according to the New York Times. As reporter Robert McFadden observed at the time: “Many veterans were angry that organizers had agreed to name Mr. Trump, who is not a veteran, as grand marshal in exchange for his contribution of $200,000 and help in raising additional funds.”

In 2017, during his first term, Trump watched the Bastille Day parade in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron and returned home obsessed with staging his own défilé militaire. Plans for a 2018 parade were postponed after local officials in Washington, D.C., raised concerns about damage to the capital city’s streets, the Pentagon tossed up additional roadblocks, and public reports of the estimated $92 million price tag caused the White House to retreat. “When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it,” Trump groused in a tweet at the time. “Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN.”

A top aide to then-Defense Secretary James Mattis wrote that the former general privately said he would “rather swallow acid” than watch Trump’s military spectacle.

Trump seems to have learned lessons from past parade problems and has been deflecting talk of June 14 being a festival in his honor. “Your birthday’s coming up,” NBC News’s Kristen Welker said during a wide-ranging interview with Trump earlier this month. “Yeah,” the president responded. “And there are reports that you’re looking into the possibility of a military —” said Welker, with Trump replying “Yeah” as she said “parade.” But the president immediately walked it back. “Well, my birthday happens to be on Flag Day. So … I think they’re talking about Flag Day. But I view it for Flag Day, not necessarily my birthday,” Trump went on. “It’s Flag Day, plus we’re going to have different days. You know, if you look at Russia, they celebrate Victory Day.”

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The Questionable Case of Kristi Noem’s $50 Million Luxury Jet

Lavish spending on the military parade comes as the Trump administration is requesting $1 trillion for the Pentagon and pursuing massive cuts to nonmilitary programs like housing assistance, education initiatives, environmental programs, and foreign aid. 

Cohen reiterated the need to pass his Halting All Parades for Presidents’ Yearly Birthdays; It Risks Taxpayer Harm, Damages, And Your (HAPPY BIRTHDAY) Budget Act, which he introduced last month. “The egotist-in-chief wants taxpayers to foot the bill for a military parade on his birthday. This would be an unprecedented waste of money to please this self-absorbed con man,” said Cohen, whose legislation would bar public funds from being used for presidential birthday parades. “It also sends the message that Trump is not a king, and we don’t pay tribute to tyrants.”

Despite their opposition to Trump’s military spectacular, both Cohen and Blumenthal emphasized their appreciation for the military. “I strongly support celebrating the Army’s 250 years of service and sacrifice, but in a more appropriate way,” said the senator.

“We all appreciate the Army. We all appreciate the soldiers. We appreciate the veterans. We don’t have to have this parade to do that,” Cohen told The Intercept.

“Even if the parade costs $45 million, that’s a lot of money. And that could feed a lot of kids who are losing SNAP payments,” said Cohen, referencing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps. “So I think it’s misprioritization of monies. And it just contributes to the whole idea of a fascist state with an authoritarian leader like Mussolini or Hitler.”

The post Expect Trump’s Military Parade to Cost More Than the Army Says appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everybody’s making a hard turn for ‘Fuck off Jew.’ It’s a hard right turn,” Fuentes says, laughing. The line is a reference to “Heck Off, Commie,” a far-right YouTube show run by one of Fuentes’s competitors. The crowd eats it up, chanting back “Fuck off Jew, fuck off Jew.” Fuentes shakes his head, grinning. “No, but that’s only a joke!”

He then gets serious, turning to former President Donald Trump’s support of Israel. The issue has always been a point of contention for Fuentes and has only intensified since October 7. Trump used to be their voice, Fuentes says, but now he seems more concerned with Israel. “I don’t know about you guys, but when he goes up there and says, ‘We’re gonna throw out all the anti-Israel protesters,’ that’s not my voice,” Fuentes says, referring to Trump’s promise to deport any foreign students participating in pro-Palestine protests on college campuses.

“You know that I am your voice,” Fuentes reassures them. “So in the spirit of me being your voice, I want you to raise your right hand, and repeat after me: ‘I solemnly swear that I will put America First and I will put Israel last every single time, because Christ is our king.’”

As he pauses for the audience response, people hold their right hands up as though they are taking a pledge. One man extends his arm into a Sieg Heil, giving Fuentes the Nazi-era salute as he repeats the words. Some people drop their hands early, perhaps noticing the salute, or maybe just tired of the position. But others slowly stretch their arms out too. By the end of the pledge, several people have made Sieg Heils.

“Because Christ is our king.”

Welcome to the fourth America First Political Action Conference.

Mainstreaming Extremism

Detroit is probably not the place you would expect to find a Republican convention, but that’s exactly where Turning Point USA chose to hold the People’s Convention in June. Founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012, Turning Point USA is an ostensibly mainstream youth-oriented conservative organization that has shifted into solidly MAGA territory. While TPUSA started as a network of conservative clubs on college campuses, it now includes high school chapters, a faith group, and a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit. The latter entity, Turning Point Action, is the arm responsible for the annual conference — and it is also boosting Trump 2024’s campaign. TPA is planning to spend $108 million on get-out-the-vote efforts in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Turning Point Action also has a sizable footprint at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week, taking over an entire restaurant within the secured perimeter for what it dubbed the Turning Point RNC Headquarters.

Fuentes has piggybacked off of the Republican conference circuit for years, holding his increasingly explicitly white nationalist America First Political Action Conference near the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and Turning Point USA. He has been banned from events hosted by both organizations, and for good reason. Fuentes has openly praised Hitler, suggested he would like to marry a 16-year-old girl, and clearly stated that he does not want Jewish people in government. But having his own conference in such close proximity to mainstream events allows for a built-in audience — and the chance to recruit new, sympathetic followers.

For a time, association with Fuentes was enough to tank a career in politics. TPUSA used to make an effort to maintain a distance from him, even severing ties with an influencer after she appeared in a photo with Fuentes. On the first day of the TPUSA conference, Fuentes showed up knowing he would be kicked out. Wearing a red hoodie, sunglasses, and ill-fitting jeans, he led a small group of young men into the convention center. Once inside, attendees broke out in applause and chants of “groyper, groyper,” the name Fuentes fans have given themselves. Security quickly showed up and escorted Fuentes out.

The process is tradition at this point. The man who escorted Fuentes out had done so in the past at TPUSA events in other cities. Something different, though, was Fuentes’s posse’s lack of effort to conceal their identities or their status as TPUSA attendees. Some of the men who followed Fuentes into the convention were known figures. MMA fighter turned right-wing poster Jake Shields was in the mix, as were streamers from Fuentes’s livestreaming platform. But one lower-profile man hung close to Fuentes, only obscuring his face with sunglasses: Alec Beaton, the youth chair for the St. Clair County, Michigan, GOP. Like many of the men in the group, Beaton had a Turning Point badge around his neck. While TPUSA still does not directly associate with Fuentes, its conference attendees openly hanging out with him suggests that its hard line has changed. (Shields later told me that he had come out “because I had a pass for Nick,” and that he returned to the conference the next day. TPUSA did not respond to my request for comment, nor did Beaton.)

It’s possible the groypers’ confidence was brought on by the political connections Fuentes has managed to make within the GOP. In November 2022, he accompanied hip-hop artist Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. In October of last year, Fuentes met with former Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland for nearly seven hours. Stickland was the head of both a well-connected consulting firm and a political action committee that distributed money largely from Tim Dunn, one of the biggest conservative donors in Texas. The Republican Party of Texas was briefly thrown into disarray; some wanted to outright ban party-affiliated groups from associating with Fuentes. The movement ultimately failed, and the PAC and consulting firm emerged from the kerfuffle largely free of any consequences. A new spinoff PAC, Texans United for a Conservative Majority, brought in $3.75 million from Dunn in a three-month period earlier this year. While Stickland is unaffiliated with that PAC, he has launched a new firm with help from a senior Texas GOP official.

“I don’t think Fuentes is the kiss of death that people think he is,” said Shane Burley, co-author of the book “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide To Fighting Antisemitism.” “The world of these online influencers who say outlandish things has moved mainstream. You’re more likely to be around extreme voices and not have to take responsibility for it.”

A Hostile Reception

Fuentes planned to hold his fourth rendition of AFPAC alongside the People’s Convention in Detroit at the Russell Industrial Center. The day before his conference, the Russell Industrial Center told Fuentes it would not host the event. The venue told the Detroit Free Press that it was tricked by AFPAC, stating it would never have agreed to host the group, which had reserved the space through a third party. When Fuentes didn’t leave, the staff called the police, who sided with the venue. Fuentes said he planned to sue.

Fuentes did not tell would-be attendees that the venue was in jeopardy, leaving them in the dark. He would later claim, in tweets and during a livestream, that he was busy looking for a new place to hold the conference. Regardless of the reason, his silence meant that on the day of AFPAC, groups of men wearing suits and blue America First hats were stuck wandering around downtown Detroit, asking one another if they had any idea where or when AFPAC would be. Eventually, Fuentes came clean to his supporters: AFPAC IV was canceled.

Compared to the other cities that have held AFPAC, it seemed Detroit was particularly hostile to Fuentes’s ideas. The groups of would-be attendees, some of whom had made clear on social media they weren’t thrilled about coming to Detroit to begin with, were now without any plans at all. They managed to all find each other and march around the city a bit, before reconvening for an impromptu rally in front of a hotel across from the convention center.

Even though Trump was still inside TPUSA giving his speech and Fuentes himself was nowhere to be found, a sizable crowd had gathered by the time I showed up. I was a little worried that I would face a hostile reception. Some of the men who were taking charge of the rally knew me from my year undercover in the far right, or from my reporting that followed. Others might have known me because Fuentes has ranted about me on his show in the past.

Right away, I spotted Paul Ingrassia, an attorney who sits on the board for the New York Young Republican Club. Ingrassia works for the National Constitutional Law Union, an organization that aims to be a right-wing version of the ACLU. Both groups have ties to Trump, who recorded a video testimonial for the NCLU’s fundraiser a few months ago and was the keynote speaker at NYYRC’s annual gala in 2023, where he thanked Ingrassia for his support. Ingrassia refers to himself as Trump’s favorite Substacker, spends time in Mar-a-Lago, and pals around with Roger Stone. This week, he was in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.

Ingrassia and I both stood near the raised platform in the concrete courtyard of the hotel that was being used as a makeshift stage. A few of Fuentes’s friends and streamers were speaking, presumably hoping to ramp up enough energy to draw Fuentes in. Unfortunately for them, the wind was working against them, making it difficult to hear. After 15 minutes of straining to hear, someone announced that Fuentes was on the way. Chants of “We want Nick” and “groyper, groyper” broke out.

When I reached out to Ingrassia to ask about his decision to attend the rally, he accused me of stalking him, made a barely veiled threat to sue me, and declared, “As a matter of best practices, to the extent you publish anything using my name, you have a duty to reprint my statement in full.” (I don’t, and I won’t.) Ingrassia said “it looked like a prayer vigil or some type of protest” and claimed he “walked past there for maybe 5 minutes out of curiosity … there was a lot of confusion, it was impossible to avoid if you were heading on foot in that direction.”

I replied with photos and video showing that not only had he stood directly in front of me for nearly 20 minutes listening to inflammatory speeches about making America a Christian nation; how unfair it was that Turning Point had banned Fuentes; and that “the Jews” controlled what Charlie Kirk does; but also that he had moved through the crowd and to the very front when Fuentes arrived. I pointed out that Fuentes and Ingrassia follow each other on X, so he must have known who Fuentes was. Instead of responding to this factual record of the rally, Ingrassia blocked me on X, ending our conversation. 

When Fuentes showed up, he commandeered the rooftop of the hotel, with his posse guarding the steps up. The group was steadily growing as TPUSA attendees exited Trump’s speech.

“Henry Ford was a genius,” Fuentes shouted into his megaphone, before bemoaning Ford’s “cancellation” for his intense antisemitism. “But Henry Ford is a great patriot, and his activism in exposing the influence of the Zionist movement and the Jewish mafia in the United States was an act of patriotism that we are all grateful for.”

“I freaking love Hitler!” one of Fuentes’s friends on the rooftop shouted.

A sea of maskless groypers stood staring up at Fuentes. Some of the men near me had Turning Point USA badges around their necks. Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for credentialed TPUSA attendees to be in the middle of this crowd. Now, it hardly seemed to matter.

“Astonishingly Self-Assured”

The crowd thinned out shortly after Fuentes’s speech. After facing two cancellations, it seemed like the night was over for the groypers. It didn’t take long for them to start posting that the left could not keep them down, though. They had found another venue: Exodos Rooftop.

Fortunately for me, the bar next to Exodos Rooftop had couches out front, giving a direct view at anyone who entered or exited the club. I bought a drink and had a seat, waiting to see who would try to walk by. I figured I would be sitting there a while before they left, but within minutes groypers started to file out.

Inside the venue, there had been several increasingly bigoted speeches, according to videos that were posted online and my interview with a reporter who was in attendance. Jared Taylor, who organizes the white nationalist American Renaissance conference, talked about making America a white country. (He did not respond to my email about the event.) By the time Fuentes spoke, the antisemitic chants were too much. The staff, unaware who they had given the space to, turned the music up over their voices, drowning out the speeches. (The club did not respond to requests for comment.)

The crowd grew angry, and a groyper threw a drink at security. Conservative social media influencer Joey Mannarino got in the face of a bouncer and screamed “Fuck you!”, video from that night shows. (Mannarino later told me that he “arrived late” and “didn’t really get to see any of the speeches.” Mannarino, who is mutuals with Fuentes on X, also said, “I don’t know much about his ‘reputation’ because he’s so hard to watch due to social media banning him I haven’t ever had the chance to really see much of what he has to say.”)

The crowd joined in, chanting “Fuck you!” Finally, Sneako, a misogynist, pro-Hitler streamer and ally of white nationalism, reached up and knocked the bouncer’s hat off, another video shows. (Sneako, who is Black, did not respond to my request for comment.) In an instant, the bouncer raised his fist and dove through the air, punching Sneako in the face and breaking one of his teeth in half. The party was finally over.

As they trickled out, I saw Mark Ivanyo, the executive director of Republicans for National Renewal. RNR is a populist organization that often tables at TPUSA and CPAC (in both the U.S. and Hungary). It is known for its parties that show off how well connected its members are. Ivanyo spoke at CPAC Hungary earlier this year and recently was elected to be an at-large delegate for Texas at the Republican National Convention. Ivanyo had been slated to be a featured VIP guest at AFPAC. The conference’s social media team had tweeted a flier advertising his appearance, before quickly taking it down.

“Mark! Mark Ivanyo!” I yelled out, trying to get his attention, but to no avail. Ivanyo seemed to be ignoring me. When I later contacted him to ask about his attendance at the rooftop gathering, and his briefly advertised appearance as a VIP guest, he told me he was no longer an RNC delegate due to a “scheduling conflict,” offering no corroboration for this claim. He asked for evidence of my allegations, though he did not reply after I sent him photos, videos, and a screenshot of the tweet promoting his appearance.

A few days later, I ran into Ivanyo in Milwaukee at the RNC, where he refused to look at me or acknowledge my questions in person. While the Republican Party of Texas did not respond to my email asking if Ivanyo had been replaced as a delegate, he has been in photos posted to social media showing him with the Texas delegation on the convention floor.

Back in Detroit, Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP’s 2020 candidate for Senate, also appeared in videos from the event. She has boosted the baseless QAnon conspiracy and believes that Jewish people should not be in positions of power in our government. There was also Juliana Lombard, a VIP guest of the People’s Convention, and NYYRC’s former socials chair. In video of Fuentes’s speech, Lombard can be seen watching the show from a balcony, while the crowd below her chants “Fuck off Jew.” Lombard is currently running for a municipal office as a Republican in Hudson County, New Jersey. (She didn’t respond to my messages asking about her attendance.)

At previous AFPACs, attendees have adhered to strict rules about taking photos or video, but this year, footage from even the “private” event was readily shared all over social media. “They seem astonishingly self-assured about making their connections explicit,” said David Neiwert, a researcher, author, and journalist who has tracked the far right for years. “They deeply believe Trump will win and they will be in charge, so it makes sense to them to just make it a known reality.”

Correction: July 25, 2024
A previous version of this article identified a hotel in Detroit that was scheduled to host a VIP dinner for AFPAC, based on an employee’s verbal confirmation. After this article was published, the venue provided evidence that it was hosting a different group and said the employee “was confused and mistakenly confirmed over the phone that the hotel’s restaurant was hosting an event for America First Political Action Conference, when the hotel’s restaurant was closed for a long-planned private event with an entirely separate and unrelated group.” The reference to the venue has been removed.

The post I Watched Groypers Descend on Detroit — Where They Were No Longer Pariahs Among Mainstream Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

With each successive trove of documents from the Epstein files the Department of Justice releases, we’re treated to rare insight into how our ruling class behaves in private, and how connected many of them were to the late sex trafficker. 

The list of elites who maintained close relationships with Epstein is long and includes prominent politicians, media figures, academics, and business leaders. In contrast, the list of people who have faced any meaningful consequences, at least in the United States, is so far quite short. Recently, Brad Karp, a top Democratic Party fundraising “bundler,” was removed as chair of the white-shoe law firm Paul Weiss after his extensive ties to Epstein were revealed. Peter Attia, the celebrity doctor and a new hire at Bari Weiss’ CBS News, resigned from a protein bar company after emails showed him making dirty jokes with Epstein. The economist Larry Summers was deemed toxic after a previous DOJ disclosure, went on leave from teaching at Harvard, and was unceremoniously dropped by numerous institutions. So far, that’s about the extent of it.

To be very explicit, this lack of serious consequences is a choice that powerful people in the United States are making. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Prince Andrew is prince no more, reduced to merely Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after King Charles removed all of his remaining royal titles; the former CEO of Barclays has been barred from the finance industry; the British ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, has been forced out; Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and a Mandelson protege, was forced to resign under pressure; and Starmer risks losing his post over the Mandelson appointment. In Slovakia, the national security adviser to the prime minister has resigned. Accountability, if you care to enforce it, is in fact possible.

But on this side of the pond, elites have moved to protect powerful people with Epstein connections (themselves included). Donald Trump is the most obvious example; for any other president, the relationship between the two men would have been a fast track to impeachment. The documents also reveal how many powerful people maintained relationships with Epstein years after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008: Among them are former presidential adviser and current podcast bro Steve Bannon, Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Tesla et al. CEO and “MechaHitler” progenitor Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Extensive redactions to the documents by the Justice Department have slow-walked matters even further, but on Tuesday, Rep. Ro Khanna took aim by reading off the names of “six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason” on the floor of Congress.

To make matters worse, many figures who appear in the files have reacted to the ongoing Epstein disclosures in ways that merit aggressive eyebrow raising. After the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, former President Bill Clinton, who for years had a close relationship with Epstein, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have finally, under pressure, agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee. The Clintons resisted subpoenas, even calling them “invalid and legally unenforceable,” until a bipartisan majority of the House Oversight Committee voted to move the measure to hold them in contempt to the full House. Before that inflection point, they apparently expected Democrats to close ranks around them, as they always have in the past. Republican maneuvering aside, the presumption that noncompliance with a legitimate subpoena from Congress is somehow permissible, or even noble, reflects the air of impunity that ruling elites have toward basic functions of the rule of law.

But make no mistake: If there’s to be any measure of real accountability, the powerful people who palled around with Epstein, asked his advice, or otherwise provided cover for him need to be cast out of polite society forever.

Beyond being packed with salacious gossip and more than enough material for months more of investigative journalism, the newly released documents are striking in how they reveal elites’ widespread casual disdain for us commoners. Perhaps more than anything, the Epstein files are jarring for how transparently they communicate that members of our elite believe that norms, consequences, and even laws don’t apply to them. There seems to be no end to the number of emails from powerful people seeking out Epstein’s advice for how to handle controversies ranging from sexual assault allegations to formal human resources investigations to media scrutiny. (Former Arizona State University professor Lawrence Krauss is probably the clearest example; as Grace Panetta wrote for The 19th, “Krauss turned to Epstein for public relations advice and strategy, sent him possible cross-examination questions for his accusers, forwarded an article on the dos and don’ts for apologizing, and fielded Epstein’s edits and feedback on draft statements.”) 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it should absolutely be disqualifying to seek image management tips from someone like Epstein, particularly years after they pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor. If you’re running to a convicted child sex trafficker to plan your PR strategy, if you’re chummily asking for his insights and making social plans, or if you are seeking advice on how to use professional leverage to induce a subordinate to have sex with you, then you are probably someone we should never hear from again.

It is worth being quite clear here: This does not mean everyone who makes any appearance at all in the files needs to be excised from public life. For instance, the political commentators Megan McArdle, Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, and Ross Douthat recently recorded a podcast episode titled “We’re All in the Epstein Files,” which notes that they all are there because of tweets that a third party shared with Epstein, mostly via a newsletter sent out by Gregory Brown. That sort of thing is not the point. In order to actually clean house, we need to be clear where the dirt is. 

But there are many cases where influential figures were cavorting with Epstein for years, maintaining close relationships with a prominent sex trafficker, and often being creepy in the correspondence itself. In many more, the emails became damning in context. 

For example, the MIT Media Lab, an initiative heavily backed by billionaire Hoffman, accepted Epstein’s donations for years after his conviction, including soliciting donations in 2016. Importantly, MIT Media Lab staff internally flagged Epstein’s criminal history in 2013 — even sending a helpful link to his Wikipedia page — when Media Lab director Joichi Ito raised him as a prospective funder, according to a report commissioned by the university. Ito ignored those concerns, accepted Epstein’s money, and remained in touch until well into 2019, including exchanging text messages in May, just three months before Epstein’s death.

The new documents also show Ito attempted to arrange a meeting with himself, Hoffman, and Epstein during a 2016 conference, while promising to “drag interesting [p]eople over” from the conference to a nearby house. That awkwardness is compounded by the fact that the MIT Media Lab gave Epstein an appreciation gift even later in 2017. Ito, for his part, did resign from MIT, as well as from the boards of multiple foundations in 2019.

Or take prominent evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who continued to solicit funding from Epstein until at least 2017, based on a check from January and a thank you note from August of that year. Trivers, along with Ito, shows how Epstein was still influential in shaping our public discourse long after he became a publicly known sex offender. In a February 2017 email, Trivers even passed along a “small joke” about his association with Epstein being described as a “folly” and he a “fool” for continuing the relationship (an allusion to Trivers’ book The Folly of Fools). Trivers also credited Epstein with coming up with the idea to branch out in order to land speaking gigs, which resulted in a speaking engagement in London.

The Epstein saga has been unfolding against the backdrop of eroding trust in institutions and elites. What it has taught the public so far is that elites were undeserving of our implicit trust in the first place and, more broadly, that their shared interests are only with one another. If we want to move back toward a healthy public sphere where people are able to believe in the system and their ability to shape it, we need to reform it to be worthy of that trust. That will require never again letting people lacking any concept of basic human decency set the terms of our public discourse, dictate our moral frameworks, wield the powers of our government, or serve as our leaders. We need to cast out the creeps — permanently.

Correction: February 10, 2026, 6:49 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to clarify that Summers went on leave from his teaching role at Harvard voluntarily.

The post Americans Want Accountability With the Epstein Files. Elites Couldn’t Care Less. appeared first on The Intercept.

Johnny “Taz” Mulford belongs to a Florida chapter of the Infidels, a biker group for veterans of U.S. wars and private military contractors like Blackwater. In May, Mulford began recruiting among his Facebook network for an unspecified job opportunity, asking anyone who “can still shoot, move and communicate” to contact him.

Reached by phone on Friday, Mulford confirmed to The Intercept that he is currently in Israel, adding that he was “on his way to a checkpoint,” but declined to comment further. Two sources directly familiar with the Gaza operations of UG Solutions, including former contractor Anthony Aguilar, confirmed Mulford’s employment to The Intercept. Mulford’s ties to the motorcycle group were first reported by Zeteo.

UG Solutions is a contractor providing security at aid distribution sites run by GHF, the aid effort in Gaza backed by the Trump administration and Israel.

“They’re in a primary Arab Muslim population, delivering food at the end of the gun.”

Mulford’s membership in the Infidels and numerous tattoos widely linked to the Crusades and contemporary far-right movements raise questions about his role as a contractor for the GHF mission. Among other posts on Facebook, Mulford nods to Christian Zionism by sharing a post calling Israel “God’s chosen nation” and a video mocking pro-Palestine protesters.

“If I went into Israel with a Nazi swastika on my arm and said ‘Heil Hitler,’ what would people think of me?” said Aguilar, a former Green Beret and UG Solutions contractor who has become a public critic of the GHF, raising concerns about Mulford’s tattoos and Infidels affiliation in the Middle East. “They’re in a primary Arab Muslim population, delivering food at the end of the gun.”

Mulford and the GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Infidels national umbrella and a local Florida chapter did not respond to requests made, respectively, to an online form and a chapter official.

“Johnny Mulford is a respected contractor in the industry, with over 30 years of cleared service supporting U.S. government and allied efforts. Any allegations suggesting otherwise are categorically false and defamatory,” Drew O’Brien, a UG Solutions spokesperson, said in a statement. “We do not screen for personal hobbies or affiliations unrelated to job performance or security standards. Every team member undergoes comprehensive background checks, and only qualified, vetted individuals are deployed on UG Solutions operations.”

O’Brien declined to comment on Mulford’s tattoos.

The Infidels were founded in 2006 by an American mercenary in Iraq nicknamed “Slingshot,” according to the club’s website, which says the early members were security contractors and military veterans. According to its website, “Infidels Motorcycle Club is a veteran formed and based MC for Patriotic Americans and our supporting allies.”

“Bearing in mind that we support the war against terrorism, and many of our Club members have and are serving in Iraq and other locations worldwide as either members of the military or as civilian contractors, our political views may not be shared by everyone,” says the national umbrella group in a Facebook post. “We neither support nor tolerate the Jihadist movement and those who support it. If on the other hand you do support the country’s efforts against Islamic extremism, then support your local Infidels MC!”

In 2015, the Infidels’ Colorado Springs chapter threw a pig roast barbecue party “in defiance of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan,” according to an event flyer that also “included comparisons of Muslim men to pedophiles,” a local outlet reported at the time.

Mulford, who registered the local chapter in Florida, is an active member of the Infidels, according to his and others’ social media postings. He is frequently shown in photos online posing with fellow club members at meet-ups. The Infidels wear matching leather vests bearing the club name and a red cross on the back. In one photo, Mulford’s vest has an embroidered patch on the front that says “Original Infidel.”

Crusader Iconography

The Infidels — including Mulford — frequently employ Crusader iconography in their tattoos and apparel.

Photos of Mulford show him tattooed with crosses affiliated with the Crusades and, more recently, right-wing Christian movements.

A photo of Mulford on Facebook shows him without a shirt after an apparent outing to fish. On his right forearm is an American flag rendered in flames and overlain by a so-called Templar symbol: a shield emblazoned with a red cross, styled after the Christian military order of the Knights Templar. His left bicep displays another Templar shield. A tattoo on his right forearm displays the Jerusalem or Crusader cross, a squared-off cross with smaller crosses in each of the corners.

In another photo, Mulford can be seen wearing a vest that includes both the Infidels name and an amalgamation of several Crusader-style crosses.

According to Matthew Gabriele, a medieval studies professor at Virginia Tech and an expert in Crusader iconography, the Jerusalem cross and Templar shield are frequently embraced by white supremacists and the far right, — a nod to an imagined “existential conflict between Islam and Christianity” in the Middle Age, Gabriele said. Crusader iconography of this kind doesn’t reflect the historical record, but rather a sort of Christian revenge fantasy.

“It doesn’t have a whole lot of specific attachment the Middle Ages themselves, but a nostalgic version in which this existential conflict between Islam and Christianity, that has gone back to Islam’s founding, has always put Christianity on the defensive,” Gabriele said. Crosses and shields “symbolize that during the Crusades, Christianity struck back in a positive way. It really is a particular stance toward Islam and the Middle East.”

The Crusader aesthetic and the proud self-labeling of oneself as an “infidel” grew in popularity during the war on terror and have remained as gestures of anti-Muslim sentiment on the right.

“It was a way for a particular kind of American soldier,” Gabriele said, “to kind of reflect back Al Qaeda’s rhetoric: ‘Yeah we are the crusaders, we’re going to come there and kick your ass.’”

Crusader symbols have attracted scrutiny when worn by figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was questioned about his Jerusalem cross tattoo during Senate confirmation hearings. Hegseth defended the cross as a symbol of Christianity.

In July, while the GHF’s food distributions were ongoing, Mulford posted an illustration on Facebook of a kneeling Crusader knight with a glowing cross in the background and a superimposed biblical quote.

Other Facebook photos shared by Mulford show him with Crusader-style crosses on his arms and the number 1095 across his chest — the year Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade.

The date of 1095 has been cited as symbolically important by violent right-wing actors, Gabriele said, from Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik to Brenton Tarrant, perpetrator of the anti-Muslim massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The date 1095, Gabriele said, represents a worldview in which Muslims are “a threat to be killed” and driven from the Holy Land.

In 2018, the national Infidels umbrella group shared a photo montage from what it describes as a “Crusader ride” organized by its members.

Security Contractor

Mulford served in the Marine Corps from 1982 to 1985 before a stint in the Army from 1987 to 2007, when he saw multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an Army spokesperson. Subsequently, according to a personal website, he served overseas as a “security agent” for a “government agency.”

His service records include numerous commendations and achievements. A report stated that Mulford was “debarred” following “nonjudicial punishment” under military disciplinary rules related to an alleged scheme where “Mulford received a kickback from a contractor who provided skydiving training to Fort Bragg Soldiers.” Mulford’s debarment, a designation the military uses in deciding to award contracts, was terminated in 2007, shortly before his retirement from the Army at the rank of master sergeant.

The company employing Mulford is one of at least three U.S. contractors for the GHF, the nonprofit distributing food in Gaza with Israel’s approval.

To distribute what it says are over 108 million meals so far, the foundation has hired a pair of U.S. companies — one helmed by a former CIA official, the other by a Green Beret veteran — to provide logistics and armed private security contractors. Other aid organizations say the idea of staffing aid distribution sites with armed contractors violates basic principles of neutrality and have refused to work with the GHF.

One of UG Solutions’ partner organizations has already drawn scrutiny for its leader’s views on Islam and Palestinians.

In July, independent journalist Jack Poulson reported that Matthew Murphy, the president of a small relief organization called the Sentinel Foundation that partnered with UG Solutions to distribute aid in Gaza earlier this year, had a record of making bigoted remarks against Muslims generally and Palestinians in particular. In a podcast interview last year, Murphy referred to Palestine as “a little shithole.”

“Killing and beheading and raping and treating, you know, Christian and Jewish women as lesser-than and slaves is not just something terrorists think, it’s Islam,” Murphy said.

The Sentinel Foundation was co-founded by former Green Beret Jameson Govoni, who went on to found UG Solutions.

The GHF and its partners have drawn worldwide scrutiny since they began aid distributions in May.

At least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed seeking food since the foundation began its work in Gaza, including 859 people near distribution sites and 514 along food convoy routes, according to the United Nations. Palestinians say that many have died under gunfire from the Israeli military.

In job listings, UG Solutions describes itself as “a fast-moving, mission-driven private security company with global reach.” The Charlotte-based company first got involved in the conflict earlier this year when its private soldiers were tasked with manning checkpoints during a ceasefire.

The company has sought out former U.S. Special Forces veterans, according to job listings.

Four Democratic members of Congress last week wrote to UG Solutions and another GHF contractor, warning them that the companies’ employees could be held liable if war crimes have been committed. Working closely with the Israeli military, those members warned, has exposed the company’s staffers to great legal risk.

UG Solutions has denied mistreating Palestinians in Gaza, while acknowledging that its contractors have used pepper spray and “warning shots” to disperse crowds.

The post Team Leader at Gaza Aid Distribution Sites Belongs to Anti-“Jihad” Motorcycle Club, Has Crusader Tattoos appeared first on The Intercept.

American presidential elections are binary. Either a Democrat or a Republican wins. Nobody else.

The 2024 presidential election will be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. No matter how much Americans may wish for other candidates, that’s the choice.

Third-party candidates don’t win, can’t win; they only steal votes from the mainstream Republican or Democratic candidate with whom they are most closely aligned. They help the candidate at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

This year, progressives who vote for a third-party candidate, or don’t vote at all, are really voting for Trump.

In 1992, Ross Perot ran one of the most significant third-party campaigns in American history, winning nearly 20 percent of the vote. The Dallas entrepreneur campaigned as a folksy populist conservative, a slightly crazy-sounding fiscal and trade hawk with a billionaire business resume — sort of a precursor to Trump but without the racism, fascism, and criminality. Perot took millions of votes from disaffected Republicans angered by President George H.W. Bush’s willingness to compromise with congressional Democrats on taxes. When Bush ran for president in 1988, one of his key campaign pledges had been not to raise taxes; his reversal once he was in office fueled Perot’s rise. Perot’s strong showing in 1992 ensured the election of Bill Clinton, returning the Democrats to the White House for the first time since Jimmy Carter.

I covered Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign for the Los Angeles Times, and the experience convinced me that third-party candidates launch what they know are futile presidential bids to satisfy their egos or because they harbor grudges against one of the major candidates and hope to damage their campaigns.

In Perot’s case, it was both. He had a massive ego. I saw that side of him during one interview over lunch, when I challenged one of his false assertions about his business background. Perot stared at me in fury and then took out his wallet, slammed it on the table, and loudly said that he would bet all the money in it that he was right. I laughed and told him that I didn’t have as much money as he did.  

Another key driving factor for Perot was his bitter hatred of Bush and the Bush family, who he saw as rich northern carpetbaggers and not real Texans. Throughout the campaign, Perot spouted strange conspiracy theories about Bush and other Republican officials.

Perot ended his presidential bid abruptly in July 1992, just when he was starting to come under real scrutiny. He weirdly restarted his campaign in October, in time to join the televised presidential debates. At almost every turn, Perot’s actions helped Clinton; he quit the race just as the successful Democratic National Convention in New York was ending, stunning the nation and solidifying Clinton’s standing as the only alternative to Bush. When Perot got back into the race in October, he kept Bush from regaining momentum. Perot ran again in 1996 with less success, but still hurt Republican nominee Bob Dole.

A MAGA Dark Age

None of the third-party candidates this year are likely to come close to Perot’s 1992 vote total, but it is possible that a combination of left-wing votes for third-party candidates and low voter turnout among young progressives because of an antipathy to Biden could damage the Democratic incumbent in a handful of critical states and doom his reelection bid. That would put Trump back in the White House.

So, just to be clear: A progressive who doesn’t vote, or who votes in the general election for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West or Jill Stein — or whoever No Labels puts up as a candidate — is voting for Donald Trump.

A Trump presidency means the return of a vengeful maniac to the White House, determined to destroy anyone who gets in the way of his lust for power and ambition to become an American dictator. It means the ascendancy of a deranged MAGA Republican agenda, more vicious and poisonous than ever before, an agenda that will usher in a dark age for the United States.

That agenda would likely bring major wars abroad and cultural fundamentalism at home. MAGA-world wants wars with China and Mexico. Trump and his backers would undoubtedly support the complete Israeli takeover of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the dislocation of millions of Palestinians. He would endorse a Russian victory by cutting off U.S. aid to Ukraine; a U.S. withdrawal from Europe would likely follow, along with a Russian invasion of the Baltic states.

Despite acknowledging that it would be bad politics, Trump would almost certainly support a complete, nationwide ban on abortion and probably also endorse Christian fundamentalist demands to ban contraceptives, along with nationwide book bans. His aides are already on record calling for the creation of concentration camps for immigrants, while he has made it clear he wants to prosecute and imprison his political opponents, journalists, and other dissidents.

As president, he would name hundreds of more judges who would eagerly bring about the end of voting rights for minorities. And of course, Trump would pick up where he left off during his last term and loot the government’s coffers. The twice-impeached, four-times-indicted Trump is already vowing to politicize the Justice Department to escape his myriad legal troubles. America will be subjected to a government in the thrall of White Christian nationalists, who don’t believe in the separation of church and state.

Above all, Trump is clearly unfit for the presidency, or any leadership role. He constantly spews threats and hate on social media. Many of his former advisers now agree that he shouldn’t be in a position to give orders to the U.S. national security apparatus.

They are right. Trump poses an existential danger to the United States.

Progressives should not make the same mistake that Ernst Thälmann made in 1932. The leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann saw mainstream liberals as his enemies, and so the center and left never joined forces against the Nazis. Thälmann famously said that “some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest” of social democrats, whom he sneeringly called “social fascists.”

After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, Thälmann was arrested. He was shot on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.

The post Don’t Fall for the Third-Party Trick appeared first on The Intercept.

Since Donald Trump left the White House, he’s been developing some new material that reached its apogee in a speech he delivered soon after his indictment for mishandling classified documents. Take a listen to this part, as the former president of the United States — and current frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination — tells us that “at the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.”

At another point in the same speech, Trump proclaimed, “This is the final battle. With you at my side … we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists.”

He’s made similar remarks on many occasions. Here he is haranguing us about the Marxists and communists:

Last November he was musing about how “the problem we have is that we are headed toward communism. … There’s never been a period of time like that in our country’s history. And that’s the way communism starts. And we can’t let it happen.”

This fixation on “communism” has also been seeping into the right at large. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s fellow Republican presidential candidate, recently signed a law designating November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day.” The point, he said, was “to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

For its part, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that was once staid and corporate, is frothing at the mouth. In a recent report, it explained that “many Americans and others around the globe justifiably believed that communism had been defeated,” but “cultural Marxism today presents a far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” You might have thought it was bad when Russia had 45,000 nuclear weapons, but that was but a mere bagatelle compared to pronouns in Twitter bios.

The ranty, shouty, red-faced rage of this has made my brain feel itchy indeed. Just a few days ago, I was compelled to open up several cardboard boxes of my late grandfather’s keepsakes. Past the plaque from the University of Illinois Ma-Wan-Da Honor Society, past a crumbly notebook of clippings of his coverage of the aeronautics industry in the Chicago Daily News, past a photograph of him and my grandmother petting a lion on a carefully mown Hollywood lawn, past a teacup emblazoned with the Nazi eagle and swastika that he brought home from World War II, I found what I was looking for: the May 2, 1945, Paris edition of Stars and Stripes.

The headline understandably takes up half the front page: “HITLER DEAD.”

Every aspect of this historical artifact is compelling to me. It cost one franc. It’s the Paris edition because my grandfather, then a U.S. Army captain, was there, where he’d been assigned to run the 19th arrondissement. This job consisted of trying to find whoever was in charge of the 19th arrondissement before the war and urging them to be in charge again.

Almost every story describes mass human slaughter. “1,500 Japs Die in Fierce Fight Outside Shuri.” There’s the firebombing of Hamamatsu, “in which not a Superfort was lost.” Also, Benito Mussolini was “buried nude” in a potter’s grave. But then there’s page seven with the comics, including Dick Tracy, Blondie, Joe Palooka, Li’l Abner, and Abbie an’ Slats. There’s even a tiny lost and found section, which, in the midst of World War II, speaks of a truly optimistic spirit.

But I was searching for it to read the story about Adolf Hitler again, specifically the words of Karl Dönitz. Dönitz was a German admiral who became leader of the Reich after Hitler shot himself on his sofa. Stars and Stripes reports that Dönitz said this in a radio broadcast to his countrymen:

My first task is to save the German people from destruction by Bolshevism. …

Adolf Hitler recognized beforehand the terrible danger of Bolshevism and devoted his life to fighting it. …

His battle against the Bolshevik flood benefited not only Europe but the whole world. …

The British and Americans do not fight for the interest of their own people but for the spreading of Bolshevism.

Then Stars and Stripes dismisses this in a single sentence fragment with a pair of scare quotes. Dönitz, it tells us, was “harping on Hitler’s old theme of the Red ‘menace.’”

There were three things that struck me about this. First, there’s the useful reminder of the central place of communism in the Nazi cosmology. They weren’t embroiled in a titanic battle against a simple Jewish conspiracy but rather a more complex Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. Sometimes there was even more to it, and they spoke of an international Judeo-Masonic-Communist enemy. And obviously this wasn’t just Hitler, as Dönitz demonstrated with his post-Hitler soliloquy. An obsession with the towering communist threat was absolutely central for Nazi motivational speakers.

Second, there’s the casualness with which Stars and Stripes brushed Dönitz’s words aside. In 1945, American liberalism was at the heights of its popularity and confidence, confidence and popularity that it would never again match. This wasn’t in the Liberal New York Times or the Liberal Washington Post, but in Stars and Stripes. We’ve heard all of this jabbering before, it says in a tone of boredom, and we don’t need to waste any time on it.

The third thing was what sent me hunting for the paper in the first place: how, in 1945, Dönitz sounded exactly the same as the leaders of the Republican Party today. Here’s what Trump recently said again:

“At the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.”

And here are more of Dönitz’s words:

“It is my first task to save the German people from destruction by the Bolsheviks.”

It’s tough to know how exactly to feel about this. It may be the case that ultra-right wing political rhetoric always reaches this destination, but only occasionally explodes in a farrago of mass murder.

Obviously it’s also true that ferocious anti-communism was the organizing principle of U.S. foreign and (partly) domestic policy from the late 1940s to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. And during the period of the Red Scare, there was a great deal of right-wing bloviation about communism indistinguishable from that of today.

However, after the fading of McCarthyism, the frequency and intensity of this kind of language faded too, at least in the heights of the political system. One of Dwight Eisenhower’s aides spoke of how he should model “vigilance without fanaticism” about communism. U.S. policy remained reactionary. But rarely did top figures erupt with the fury and venom that we see today, especially directed toward other Americans.

In addition, the U.S. right has always been controlled by corporate America. And while our most advanced businesspeople have sometimes been fascism-curious, they’ve usually drawn the lines at death camps, perhaps because they don’t want to kill off too many customers. Most importantly, Nazism seems to require lots of energy, and I personally suspect America is now too old and fat for it. You can’t have effective torch-lit rallies when all the attendees need mobility scooters.

And yet — as I look at this soft, dusty newsprint, currently two inches from my elbow, I feel someone walking over my grave. Something truly unwholesome is growing on the U.S. right, a story that they’re telling themselves, a slow accretion of fantasies that is giving them permission to do something. It makes me feel that this newspaper has traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, though uncounted attics, and across 78 years of time, to say something to us. What I hear is that the humans of 1945 were exactly the same kind of creatures as we are today, and we should understand that as though our lives depend on it.

The post Trump’s “Final Battle” appeared first on The Intercept.

“The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me,” says Jordan Uhl of Donald Trump’s Tuesday evening State of the Union. This week on the Intercept Briefing, co-hosts Uhl, Akela Lacy, and Jessica Washington disentangle Trump’s nearly two-hour-long speech so you don’t have to. 

“This is who these people are. In some ways, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it,” says Lacy, in reference to Trump talking about kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “It is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.” 

Washington adds, “The whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech.”

The co-hosts also dissect the Democratic Party’s official response to the State of the Union, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript 

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl, Intercept contributor and co-host of this podcast, joined by my co-hosts.

Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

JU: Akela, Jessica, it is late. We just sat through — endured, rather —nearly two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union and the multiple responses. We’ll get into some of what will surely be the main takeaways from this speech, but in a word or a few words, what are both of your initial reactions to tonight’s State of the Union?

JW: My word is “long.” I don’t think it needs an explanation.

AL: This is not a word, but I kept having an image in my head of villains in a superhero movie, standing around, laughing at what they’ve accomplished. [laughs]

JW: No, but you’re totally right because that one line about the food stamps. So there was this line from the very long speech that we’re describing where Donald Trump says that, he — I can’t remember exactly what word he gave. 

AL: “Lifted off.” I think he said “lifted off.”

JW: Lifted off.

AL: Yeah.

JW: Lifted off 2.4 million people from food stamps as like an economic accomplishment. And that does give like Disney villain in a very specific way.

AL: “Dark” — dark is my one word.

JU: Yeah, that was certainly one way to frame plunging millions of people into food insecurity. And of course that was an applause line.

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My takeaway would be the weaponized contrast. One thing I thought was a significant departure from past State of the Unions was how Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points. Now in the state of the union’s past, of course, the opposition party for the most part remains seated, but tonight felt like a slight departure from that partisan tradition where he singled them out. Repeatedly pointed out that they weren’t standing and clapping, and even on some points remarked how he was surprised that they even clapped. 

Trump delivered his last [joint session of Congress] address a year ago in a very different environment, coming off winning the presidency for a second time and major GOP wins that year. Things aren’t so rosy this time around. What do you both think has been the biggest change for Trump? What was the primary obstacle that he needed to clear or try to spin in tonight’s speech?

JW: There’s a lot that he had to clear up. I think there’s his loss on tariffs, obviously he’s still smarting from that, now saying that he’s going to do it anyway. A little bit confusing on what he means by that.

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I think his “anti-war” agenda that he’s been trying to spin himself as very anti-war is difficult when he just did what he did in Venezuela and when we’re watching the preparations for a very likely strike on Iran. So he’s got a lot that he has to spin because he’s tried to create this image of himself as anti-war, as good on the economy — and those things are not panning out even remotely close to what he’s promised.

AL: And the Epstein files blowing up in his face. There was reporting today that apparently DOJ scrubbed allegations against Trump sexually abusing a minor, and we have some Democrats, I think Rashida Tlaib was yelling at him during this to release the Epstein files. And this is high on many Democrats’ mind, but obviously not that he would address this, but that’s in the background here. Not even in the background, it’s in the foreground right now. 

And then, yeah, his approval ratings are lower than they were at this point in his first term. His disapproval ratings, I would say are higher, and his approval is about the same. 

And there are two very different stories being told about the economy right now. Obviously, Democrats are — we’ll get to the response later — but trying to focus on affordability issues. And you have Trump pretty much making a mockery of that and trying to throw that in their faces while claiming that everything is fine and dandy when we know very clearly that it’s not, people have lost their health care, are paying exorbitant amounts just to get through on a day-to-day basis. 

And I feel like this didn’t really come through. If you haven’t been paying attention, and you might have just been watching the State of the Union for pleasure — which I don’t know many people who are doing that — but he was able to get the One Big Beautiful Bill. As Jessie mentioned, the tariffs are falling apart. That was another major part of his economic agenda. 

But you also have Republicans who are saying that they’re not necessarily going to go through with his pressure to have them codify tariffs or codify any of these other things into law. And this is not a “Let’s hand it to Republicans” moment, but they have also broken with him on Epstein in very small numbers. But not everything is hunky dory with him and the Republican caucus right now as well.

JU: I think any Republican opposition in Congress to another attempt to institute tariffs isn’t out of concern for those costs being passed on to the consumer. It’s simply out of fealty to corporate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, their donors.

That’s where he would meet opposition, not out of any purported concern for their base. And like you’re saying, there are two different stories about the economy. He’s bragging, similar to Pam Bondi in the Epstein hearing, about the Dow hitting 50,000. He’s bragging about the stock market.

Donald Trump: The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year.

JU: Those gains rarely affect the average working person. And then on the other side, you have “60 Minutes” reporting that SNAP and Medicaid benefits are facing the biggest federal funding cuts in history.

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Another part of the speech that stood out was the focus on militarism. Along those lines on these funding cuts for these social safety net programs, we’re seeing a massive uptick in military spending. He’s committing to 5 percent of GDP in our military spending. And we saw a report over the past few days from Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that said a requested $500 billion increase in military spending is slowing down the budget process because the military doesn’t even know how they would spend that additional $500 billion.

So I’m curious, from both of your perspectives, how do you think this lands in the minds of the average voter? Granted, like you said Akela, who’s watching this for fun? But we live in a shortened attention span economy where people will see clips, and surely some of these narratives will filter out. So when they see him bragging about the economy saying it’s robust and strong, meanwhile they’re looking at their bank accounts and they see a totally different story but ratcheting up military spending, how does this land?

JW: Yeah, I think that kind of stuff backfires. I think you’re talking about kind of two separate but connected things, which is military interventions, which we know are unpopular with a lot of, even the Republican base, a lot of Trump’s base is uninterested in that.

And then there’s also — which is the same mistake that the Biden administration made — which is telling people what the economy looks like for them. And I interviewed members of the Biden administration during the presidential election. And something that they kept saying was, people feel great, the economy is strong, people are doing fine. And people didn’t feel that, and they didn’t vote that way. 

And so I think they’re going to run into the exact same problems that every administration runs into, when they’re campaigning on their accomplishments, which is, it actually has to match up with how people are feeling economically, and the indicators just aren’t there.

I also listened to Summer Lee’s rebuttal for the Working Families Party, and this was something she brought up really directly. And I think this is something that has been talked about in our politics a lot recently, which is, we have money for bombs overseas, but we don’t have money for health care. We don’t have money to actually provide a good life for our citizens. And that’s something that Summer Lee brought up. They’re trying to distract you with all these different issues when the real problem is we’re giving money to corporations, we’re spending money on bombs, and we’re not spending money feeding people as Donald Trump himself pointed out. And we’re also not spending money on people’s health care.

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Summer Lee: Don’t let anybody tell you we can’t afford it. We somehow find endless money for ICE, for private prisons to warehouse Black and brown people and for bombs to be sent abroad. But we’re told health care and childcare are too expensive. And when we begin questioning those priorities, the powerful try to divide us once more. But that old playbook is losing its grip.

AL: I was reading some reporting in Punch Bowl on Tuesday that Republicans were talking about how they wanted Trump to frame this military spending. This is talking about him wanting to increase Pentagon funding by 50 percent. And they’re like, we don’t want him to sit to say the number $1.5 trillion. We want him to talk about it as a percentage of GDP and how it compares to past decades of military spending. Basically so it doesn’t sound as bad, but they also want him to frame it as what we’re doing to modernize the military and counter threats from our enemies around the globe.

Which we did hear him, reverting to this, what is a theme for him, painting this image of himself as a strongman, like policing the world while also telling everyone that he’s not policing the world and he’s the president of peace. So it’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.

But to their credit, Republicans are at least acknowledging openly that you have to frame this in a way that makes sense to the American public, whether it’s accurate or not. And I think that is the one thing that if you’re someone who is already giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and you listen to this, that sounds good, right, on its face?

JU: Yeah. It’s much more abstract when you’re talking about percentages of GDP than a $1 trillion-plus military budget.

JW: You guys can’t forget that he ended the war in the Congo, though. That was a key accomplishment from the speech. [laughs]

JU: Oh, who could forget? Where were you?

AL: Can we talk about the Venezuela thing? Because that —

JW: Please,

AL: Freaked me out to my core. Like jokingly, let’s not forget about our buddy Venezuela, when you kidnapped the fucking president, and JD Vance and Mike Johnson are behind him, like, laughing. I don’t know, that moment for me was just so blatantly, this is who these people are. In some ways, yes, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways, they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it. And it is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.

JW: Yeah.

JU: Yeah. Not just that, but the deliberate reckless killing of fishers. Yeah, that was a laugh line. Yeah. Oh, we decimated their fishing industry, and you get hardy laughs from the Republican caucus.

DT: We have stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea. You probably noticed that. [Laughter]

We very seriously damaged their fishing industry. Also nobody wants to go fishing anymore. [Laughter]

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JW: The Intercept’s reporting, which we’ve done a lot of great reporting on this from Nick Turse. But we’re talking about these strikes where people were clinging, dying with no relief. Just like these strikes are horrific, if you read about them the strikes have now passed over 150 dead. So just to keep that in mind for the laugh line there.

JU: The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me as yet another departure from past State of the Unions, and we saw that also in how they talked about the Somali population in Minnesota. Trump made, if you want to call it a joke, that once they crack down on Somali fraud in Minnesota to a sufficient extent, we will balance our budget. And this served as a segue to brutal crackdowns in our cities, the deliberate targeting of certain populations in places like Minneapolis and St. Paul. And what was also interesting to watch in this part of the speech was the vocal opposition from Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Talib. Now, what were both of your reactions during this part and what stood out to you?

AL: What really stood out to me beyond the disgusting racism was the fact that he telegraphed that they’re going to do this in other states. At the end of that whole thing, he was like, oh, the number of this fraud is much higher in California, Massachusetts, and Maine. Places where he’s also been sending ICE. There’s been ICE agents terrorizing people all over those states and ramping up operations in Maine, particularly after Minneapolis. So that was alarming.

DT: There’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota. Where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that, and California, Massachusetts, Maine, and many other states are even worse.

This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe. So tonight, although started four months ago, I am officially announcing the War on Fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance.

AL: We’ve been talking about this and doing a lot of reporting on this, but a perfect and fully disturbing example of how the racist conspiracy theories that incubate in the far-right corners of the internet, become policy like that in this administration. And where like where this whole thing came from is a far-right influencer who started peddling this online. Chris Rufo picked it up and a couple months later, ICE agents killed two people in Minneapolis. 

Like these are the consequences of this. And I think people understand that is directly linked to what he’s doing with ICE. This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens. 

JU: Chris Rufo, of course, for those unfamiliar, is with the Manhattan Institute and has been a key player in nationalizing right-wing controversies and culture wars, specifically the rights fight against “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — initiatives among other “hot-button issues.” He really does have a significant and outsized ability to shape narratives on the right.

AL: And while we’re talking about DEI, there was raucous applause to Trump saying we ended DEI. I think that was the most applause that I heard the whole time. And like, people were cheering. 

JU: Kitchen table issue. 

AL: You can also thank Chris Rufo for that.

JW: To your point, the whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech — not all of it, but large sections of it. Particularly when he says that Somali pirates are coming to commit fraud and also to ruin the culture. The cultural elements of the ways he was talking about Somali people, I think are some of the most kind of clearly racist elements.

But I have been just thinking about the State of the Union in the light of Trump posting that really racist image of the Obamas, because in some ways he’s broken the racism barrier is the way I would think about it is that he’s done something so blatantly racist in our culture. And just to be clear, I’m referring to the photo, sorry, the AI image that he posted on Truth Social of the Obamas as apes. So he’s already broken this racism barrier. So there is almost no point. to a certain extent, in even talking about him saying that Somali people are ruining the culture, the kind of Hitler-esque things that he said before about immigrants poisoning the blood — there is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. And so this white national speech, it just makes sense. It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.

AL: It just makes me so upset because each of these things are issues where Democrats ceded so much ground in the beginning that like allowed him to just be like, OK, actually yeah, now we’re just doing racist stuff because you guys let us get really far on immigration and claiming this was a problem and claiming there were people flooding in. 

They’re like, some people are ruining the culture, not quite in the way that you’re saying it. Some people are creating all this crime problem, not quite in the way that you’re saying it, and like that being their strategy to win back voters is like to cede ground on these issues effectively. And it just makes me really mad when I think about it for too long. That’s what you saw in my eyes.

JW: On that point, I do want to talk about his anti-trans rhetoric. Speaking of Democrats ceding ground on issues, Donald Trump brought a Liberty University college student at one point, who he had brought as a guest, to make this point about transgender children, essentially. And so he had said that a school had enabled her to transition, which had then led her to run away and be kidnapped and sex trafficked. Now the mom and this girl are suing multiple entities that they hold responsible, including the school. But Donald Trump really used this moment to try and fearmonger against trans children.

This kind of idea on the right that they’re going to kidnap your children and make them trans — I think this is really an issue where we’ve seen a lot of Democrats cede ground. Obviously there was the infamous Seth Moulton comment about not wanting his kid, his young daughters, to play with males — referring to trans children that they would potentially be playing soccer with, trans girls. 

So we’ve seen Democrats really cede ground on this issue and say it’s fair that people have these concerns. It’s fair that people are scared about their children being kidnapped and turned trans — which is not a thing that’s happening.

But it’s really just this massive ceding of ground. We’ve seen obviously outlets like The Atlantic, the New York Times have obviously really contributed to this paranoia. And it’s legitimizing this fearmongering that Republicans have invested millions and millions of dollars, and it’s doing the work for them instead of actually talking about this issue directly or not just throwing trans kids under the bus is another option. So that’s my little rant.

AL: I’ll also just add one thing on that, I am not a fan of Abigail Spanberger. She’s a moderate and she’s an ex-CIA agent. We’ll leave it at that. But the fact that she delivered the Democratic response after winning a gubernatorial election, in which her Republican opponents repeatedly tried to bait her on trans issues and weaponize this issue against her — We did some reporting on that, talking with analysts about how her win was an example of Democrats sticking to their values on this issues is not necessarily a liability. I can’t speak to her record throughout Congress on this stuff, but at least in charting the path for midterms for both parties tonight and the Democratic response, I just thought that was interesting, that like after doing this whole dog-and-pony show over trans stuff, like they picked someone who stood firmly on that to give the response.

JW: I will also say anecdotally, so I’ve been covering the Senate primary race between Seth Moulton and Ed Markey, and I would say anecdotally, people are still really upset about those comments that Seth Moulton made about trans children.

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And so there’s this idea that there’s only political upside to throwing part of your base and parts of your base that your base also cares about, right, even if they aren’t a large part of your voting block. I think there is a political penalty for that that Democrats don’t see, and I think that’s true with immigrants. That is true on issues related to transgender people. They only see the upside of winning over this kind of mythical moderate and they never seem to see the downside, where you lose people who actually thought that you supported their values.

[Break]

JU: One of the other areas on the topic of ceding ground that I’m really fascinated by that Trump talked about in this speech were his purported desires to ban private equity in Wall Street from buying single-family homes and his calls for Congress to pass a ban on congressional stock trading. Now the devil’s in the details with these sorts of things and with the stock trading ban further reporting shows that he opposes a version of this bill that would also apply to himself, the White House and the judiciary.

Then while he says he wants to stop Wall Street and private equity from buying single-family homes, he’s calling on Congress to do that. And similar to the expected opposition from Republicans in Congress on tariffs at the behest of corporate interests, I expect similar opposition on this. But in rhetoric alone, I do think those are two things that resonate with the average American. What did you both make of those two points tonight?

AL: It’s one of those things where he knows what to say. He knows to say the right thing. Less than 1 percent of the population is going to be like, is this true? Maybe that’s ungenerous, but you know what I mean. Democrats, on the flip side, tangle themselves up in the these particular issues, not only because they’re doing the thing that’s bad, like they’re doing insider stock trading, they’re siding with corporate landlords and fighting or doing everything they can to not really do anything on housing, but they’re so afraid to say something that isn’t poll tested that again, they’re ceding ground to him on this when he’s clearly lying and enriching himself and doing all these things that would negate this behind the scenes, particularly for himself, as you’re saying. 

But the fact that Democrats are also hypocrites on this doesn’t really work because they won’t say the thing. It’s not that hard to go toe to toe with him. It’s actually very simple, but you’re so concerned about making sure that you’re not turning off again, this middle of the road person, that you don’t take this low-hanging fruit. 

And like you saw Elizabeth Warren standing up. This is the only part that they panned to her during this. I don’t know if she stood otherwise, but she was like pointing at him, being like, what about you? OK, let’s get that. Let’s get that in the response. Let’s get Abigail Spanberger hitting that on the head.

JW: Yeah. To your point, Akela, in her response for the Working Families Party, Summer Lee brought up the fact that Democrats are hamstrung by their commitment to corporate donors.

SL: The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. On one side are millions of working people demanding bold action, lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for all. On the other side are corporate donors and consultants who are terrified of upsetting the very interests that rigged this economy in the first place.

JW: You cannot be sworn to the American public, sworn to working people and to their benefit, and also sworn to corporations that we cannot bring down MAGA while also making billionaires comfortable. And I think she’s really poking at that weak center point of the Democrats that you keep mentioning, which is that they are unwilling to, I think there’s both the issue of everything needs to be tested, but they’re also unwilling to throw off the shackles of corporate money, corporate interests.

JU: And to add some context to Trump’s investments, specifically Dave Levinthal in NOTUS has a piece from December 23, 2025, where he wrote that Trump has invested tens of millions of dollars into corporate and government bonds, including those of companies and local governments his administration’s decisions could affect according to a new financial disclosure. So it’s not just that he’s enriching himself off of dealings with other governments, dealings with other oil Gulf state figures. He’s also making money in the market and his own decisions influence the performance of those investments. So of course, he’s going to oppose applying a stock trading ban to himself.

But I also want to go back to Spanberger and the Democratic Party’s decision to pick her to deliver the official response. Like you said Akela, you’re not necessarily a fan, she’s extremely moderate, we’ll say, former CIA official. What do you think this says at a time where we’re seeing surprising flips in state legislatures in red states, massive swings in favor of Democrats, poll numbers for Trump in the tank, you’re seeing Trump voters, some of Trump’s loudest supporters switch? They’re changing their tune entirely. They’re criticizing him over his handling of the Epstein files, of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies’ presence and actions in cities across this country. That seems like a window where they can shift things more to the left, but here they rolled out Abigail Spanberger. Does that send up a red flag for you going into the midterms?

AL: I’m of two minds about this because you can’t ignore the fact that she just won her race and that Glenn Youngkin was the governor of Virginia. For a while, Democrats thought they had it in the bag. She was openly talking about her win in her response, pointing to the fact that they had Republican voters, Independent voters, Democratic voters, this big tent. And that’s important in a state like Virginia.

Is that a roadmap? Is that what’s going to help them win back the house? Wild card Senate even might be up for grabs. Republicans seem really concerned about this. I don’t think so, but I do think, again, the fact that she didn’t see it on some of these “cultural war” issues in her last race is a positive sign. Do I think that means that’s how Democrats are going to play this? Absolutely not.

I’ll also mention that Abigail Spanberger was a pretty big recipient of corporate PAC money while she was in the House and during the 2023 to 2024 cycle. AIPAC was her top single donor. So these are all issues that we know have lost Democrat support and mixing that with a couple of things that are positive and helped her win her election, I don’t think that’s enough to get them where they want to be.

I was not shocked at all that they pick someone like Abigail Spanberger. They typically pick a moderate. I was pleasantly surprised, I would say, because the bar is on the floor, the fact that she was saying Trump is not telling you the truth, talking about the fact that he’s enriching himself, talking directly about the impact that him unleashing federal agents on U.S. cities has had.

Abigail Spanberger: In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does. He lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted, and he offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse. He tries to divide us. He tries to enrage us to pit us against one another, neighbor against neighbor. And sometimes he succeeds.

And so you have to ask who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress? Somebody must be benefiting. He is enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented.

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AL: She didn’t say this explicitly, but shortly after being sworn in as governor, she said Virginia law enforcement was going to stop cooperating with ICE. These are things that we know are moving Democrats. And so whether that translates into the whole party getting on board with this, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. But it wasn’t like, didn’t Elissa Slotkin give the response one year? And I just remember sitting there and being like, this is worse than the State of the Union, and I didn’t feel that way coming out of this. So what does that mean? I don’t know.

JU: I guess that’s good.

JW: That was a ringing endorsement from Akela [laughs]: The speech didn’t make me feel like it was worse than the two-hour speech we all just listened to from the president.

AL: Sorry, the thing that pissed me off the most about Abigail Spanberger’s speech, I will say, and I think this gets to the heart of the issue, was that she’s in Virginia, she’s in Williamsburg where I went to college. So I understand sort of the nerdy allusions to what our Founding Fathers would’ve wanted.

But she was using this like trite device to be like, Trump is ruining the America that our Founding Fathers wanted for us. And we could sit here and talk about all day how stupid that is. But that is like the model: It’s just like third-grade patriotism — a couple of jabs here and there, and we’re going to get everyone back on board. Again, I just don’t think it’s enough.

JW: Like you said, I’m not at all surprised that they picked her. They want a moderate. It obviously looks good for the Democrats to have a woman combating Trump. So that’s clearly part of the calculus as well. Spanberger did just win her election, flip the governor’s mansion, if you want to call it that. But with Spanberger’s election, you also have to keep in mind the context of Trump and what he did to the federal government.

He decimated the economy of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The massive layoffs, the anger at Trump in this area is astounding, so it’s not at all shocking, frankly, that she would win in this exact moment. Is that something that can be replicated throughout the country? Are they feeling the same direct impacts of Trump? I think in some ways, they are. When you look at SNAP cuts, when you look at cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, when you even just see videos of the violence happening in cities from ICE. But it doesn’t have that same direct impact, and so I don’t know if she’s as exciting [for] somewhere that’s not Virginia.

JU: As we wrap, we’re all exhausted. We’re fed up. What was the bright spot tonight for both of you? Was there a funny moment?

JW: This is not necessarily funny, but it made me think of a funny joke, when he brought out the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Now, they’d also had this kind of video stunt where the team had also been hanging out with Kash Patel, the FBI director; they had Trump on the phone where he made a joke about, I’ve gotta invite the women’s hockey team [or be impeached] — which, by the way, declined.

But the only thing that kept going through my mind was that this was terrible hockey PR. And “Heated Rivalry” had worked so hard to get us all into the spirit, to get all of us woke people who are too woke for hockey into it, and they’ve just tarnished the reputation of hockey. Once again, it can’t recover.

JU: Akela, what about you?

AL: I’m somewhere between the communist mayor of New York City, his little homage to Zohran Mamdani, who he’s obsessed with, and I just think it’s funny. And said again, I don’t like his policies, but I like him a lot [laughs] which honestly probably applies to like more than 75 percent of people outside of New York in his age demographic. They’re like, there’s something about this guy, I like him.

Either that, or this is just my brain being broken, because this made me laugh — this is not funny at all, but the response was funny — when he was like, “This should have been my third term.” And in the audience, you hear — I heard — like a mixture of what sounded like “Awww” and like boos. And I was just like, yeah, that sums it up pretty much.

JU: Someone did yell out “Four more years,” which is —

JW: Oh, great.

JU: Disconcerting. I’d say mine was, again, not funny subject matter, but the reaction was funny when he was talking about Iran yet again, trying to escalate tensions there, making not-so-veiled threats. Credit to the camera people and the control room for the event because somebody wisely fixated their camera on Lindsey Graham, who looked like he had reached another plane — like just the bliss that was so visible on his face throughout his body did make me laugh, as horrifying as it is. And that one was mine.

AL: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

JU: Yeah. Good Lord. I want to thank you both for suffering through this with me, and hopefully we saved the listeners two hours of their precious lives.

JW: Thanks, Jordan. 

AL: Thanks, Jordan.

JU: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl.

The post Rambling Man: Trump’s State of the Union  appeared first on The Intercept.

To understand the state of American politics today when it comes to Gaza, Israel, and Palestine, just look at the very different ways in which the House of Representatives handled the cases of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, and Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican.

Tlaib was punished for her views on Israel and the war in Gaza. Mast was not.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, was censured by the Republican-controlled House in November after she posted a video of protesters in Michigan chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters claim the chant is code for a desire to wipe the Jewish state off the map, but Tlaib responded that it was just “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”

“I can’t believe I have to say this,” she added, “but Palestinian people are not disposable.” 

Tlaib’s censure was a symbolic act that has no substantive impact on her ability to function in Congress, but that wasn’t the point. House Republicans just wanted to embarrass her and politically marginalize any congressional support for the Palestinian people. House Democrats briefly sought to censure Mast for comparing Palestinians to the hundreds of thousands of German civilians carpet bombed into oblivion by the Allies in Nazi Germany during World War II. His implication was that Palestinians deserve to be obliterated for the crimes of Hamas, just as German civilians were annihilated for the crimes of Hitler and the Third Reich. “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians,” he said. “I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”

The motion to censure Mast was introduced in the House last November, at the same time the Republicans were going after Tlaib. But while the censure motion against Tlaib succeeded, the motion against Mast was quietly withdrawn.

Ever since, Mast has doubled down on his anti-Palestinian rhetoric without facing any consequences. He even wore an Israeli military uniform to a Republican conference meeting on Capitol Hill. When questioned about it by reporters, he said that since Tlaib displays a Palestinian flag outside her office, he thought he should wear his old Israel Defense Forces uniform. A U.S. Army veteran who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2010, Mast briefly volunteered with the IDF in January 2015, performing support functions like packing medical kits. Virtually every other Republican in Congress shares Mast’s views and would gladly don an IDF uniform if they had one.

Earlier this year, Mast expanded on his comments about Palestinian civilians, saying that even Palestinian babies are not innocent and are thus legitimate targets. “It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters,” he told Code Pink protesters. When asked about images of Palestinian infants being killed in Israeli attacks, he said “these are not innocent Palestinian civilians.” 

The contrasting outcomes of the Tlaib and Mast cases highlight an undeniable fact: The American political establishment still strongly favors Israel over the Palestinians. But if Donald Trump gets back into the Oval Office, he and his MAGA Republicans like Brian Mast will be even worse.

Trump is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims. During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was “freaking evil,” but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of “our great fighters.” Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.

After the October 7 Hamas attack, Trump was briefly critical of Netanyahu and blurted out that Hezbollah was “very smart.” Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has battled Israel on its northern border with Lebanon. Trump was immediately and roundly attacked by other Republicans for his comments, and he quickly renewed his long-standing pledge to align the United States fully with Israel. If he’s reelected, he will give Israel unalloyed support for all-out war, and he will do so with the wholehearted backing of the Republican Party.

Republicans’ support for Israel is matched or exceeded by their hatred for Palestinians. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who was secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, has proposed legislation that would prevent Palestinians from entering the United States and trigger the mass deportation of those already here. It would ban those holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority from obtaining U.S. visas, while mandating the removal of Palestinian passport holders already living here. 

Many Republicans express their unwavering support for Israel in biblical and apocalyptic terms. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Christian evangelical, made his first public appearance after being elected House speaker last October at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he said that “God is not done with Israel.”

It is dangerous to get between evangelicals and their theology. Trump recognizes their importance to his political success, and his support for Israel is a way to satisfy his evangelical Christian base. “No president has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump claimed in 2022. “Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”

At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump pushed through a provision in the party platform ending GOP support for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state. Now, Trump and Republicans agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel can no longer agree to a two-state solution. “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu said in January. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do? This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel.”

That’s fine with Trump and Republicans like Brian Mast.

Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. What’s more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White House’s approach to Israel. Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire; such new pressure from the Biden administration appears to be working, as Israel and Hamas now seem closer to an agreement.

Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a ceasefire — or a Palestinian state. Mast has harshly attacked Biden for continuing to support a two-state solution, dismissing the idea by saying that “a Palestinian state would be run by terrorists.”

There are limits to Biden’s support for Netanyahu. Trump and the Republican Party have none.

Correction: March 4, 2024 8:26 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the organization that Trump called “very smart.” It was Hezbollah, not Hamas.

The post On Israel, Trump Is Even Worse Than Biden appeared first on The Intercept.

Cuba is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis. The country’s long-standing economic and political turmoil reached new heights this week as the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade took hold.

The president’s targeting of Cuba is part of the administration’s broader attacks on the region, where the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores earlier this year and has executed more than 140 people in boat strikes.

As the U.S. hurtles toward war with Iran and further military action in the Middle East and continues to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Cuba is just the latest foreign policy arena where the Trump administration has further ensnared the U.S. This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks with fellow reporter Jonah Valdez about how U.S. foreign policy is impacting the upcoming midterm elections and Valdez’s recent reporting on how a new anti-Zionist PAC has associated with influencers who have made statements that are outright antisemitic. 

Lacy also speaks to University of Miami history professor Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability, about the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Missing from mainstream news coverage of Trump’s attacks on Cuba and U.S. efforts to impose regime change in the region is a recognition of how Trump’s policies fit into his attacks on immigrants in the U.S., Bustamante says.

“One of the, I think, subtext of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, ‘We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do,’” Bustamante says.   

“It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think, is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change, per se.”

The Trump administration’s strategy is likely to backfire, Pertierra says.

“You don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear,” he says. “So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America. I think it’s going to further weaken it.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept. 

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept, also covering politics and U.S. foreign policy.

AL: We have been deep in midterms coverage. We had early voting in Texas start this week. The first real midterms of the cycle are less than a month away in March.

Jonah, you’ve been reporting on a new and interesting fundraising group that’s active in midterms this cycle — a group called the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC. Tell us a little bit about them.

JV: AZAPAC got its start in August, and so they’ve been around for a few months now, but really sort of hit traction online when they posted sort of like an ad video in November.

And the video is full of a lot of explosive imagery and language from Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands, to a lot of images of Israel’s bombs blowing up Palestinian civilian infrastructure, a lot of dead children. And in this, there’s this voiceover stating the whole thesis for the thing, which is “We need to get Zionists out of American politics. They are extorting Americans of their taxpayer dollars and they have too much influence over the U.S. government.” And they list some of their top enemies, which is AIPAC — which, Akela, you’ve reported on extensively — on top of the more moderate group J Street. So they’ve really positioned themselves as a group that is diametrically opposed to the pro-Israel lobby establishment in U.S. politics.

However, when you go a little deeper into its founder Michael Rectenwald, who is a former New York University professor, and the associations that he’s made with figures on the far right, the picture starts to be a lot muddier than just opposition of Zionism.

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It’s a tricky thing, right? Because, as you know, it’s like the biggest weapon that the pro-Israel establishment has against the free Palestine movement, against any sort of advocacy to hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza or any of its actions, is a blanket statement that all of that is antisemitic. A phrase that’s commonly used is, you know, claims of the genocide in Gaza is “antisemitic blood libel.” So you have this situation where this group is trying to be a very loud anti-Zionist voice, but is also making affiliations with figures who are very clearly interested in rooting their criticism of Israel in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

AL: Are they gaining a lot of traction? Are they raising a lot of money? Why should people care about what this group is doing?

JV: That’s a good question. I mean, the first FEC filings came out in January. And so from August when they were founded up until December, they raised about $111,000 — which in the grand scheme of things, when you’re going up against a PAC as large as AIPAC, it’s not a lot.

But I think why we should care about them is what makes them unique. And what makes them unique is they are very directly trying to win over support from not just the left, not just progressives, but also the right and growing criticism of Israel on the right, which has been a huge question mark for pro-Palestine advocates for the past year. Of like, how do we grapple with growing criticism of Israel among the Republican base or even further right than that, and people who are disaffected voters who may not have voted or even avoided voting for Trump altogether, but still have conservative views and are now criticizing Israel for its genocide in Gaza? How do we treat them? Should we ally with them? Should we get support wherever we can? Or should we be skeptical because of their other views?

And so AZAPAC is really, especially in its early months, really catered to that audience. And we see this with its founder Michael Rectenwald going on podcasts such as The Stew Peters Show. Which, if you’re not familiar with Stew Peters, he is a far-right white nationalist who has a show, a podcast that has gained popularity but really took off during Covid. But a big feature of his brand is what he calls the “Zionist occupation” of the government, and a lot of Jewish antisemitic conspiracy theories basically blaming Jewish people for all the issues, including domestic issues of the U.S. government.

He says the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad Satanic Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” And in that same episode, he referred to Department of Justice Attorney Leo Terrell [as] the N-word, and also in another episode referred to Jewish people using another antisemitic slur. And this is just kind of run of the mill for folks like Stew Peters, who, again, the AZAPAC founder Michael Rectenwald is associating himself with, willingly, he told me, to gain support from other audiences to have a broad range of support.

AL: Jonah, I know you’ve had extensive conversations with Mr. Rectenwald, but can you tell us a little bit about his responses to some of your reporting?

JV: I reached out hoping to have an open-ended conversation. Just giving everyone the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are trying to be critical of Israel. It’s like, OK, well, let me hear out what you have to say. 

But before our call, I did a little bit of digging — of like, how is he kind of framing the argument when he’s off-camera? Just going on his Twitter, his X account, and what I found was a lot of references, not just to Zionism, but a lot of references to what he calls the “Jewish mafia” or “Jewish elites,” which are pretty common dog whistles to the far right.

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So I bring some of these questions to our conversation, and he gratefully agreed to talk with me on the phone. And [I] gave him a chance to let me know what his platform is, and he reiterated that he wants to end all U.S. military support to Israel. He opposes the genocide, wants to oppose the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, and he is pouring money into certain campaigns that are looking to unseat certain pro-AIPAC members, such as Randy Fine in Florida. 

Then I ask him about, well, what about the language that you use? Don’t you think that this risks kind of blurring the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? And that’s when he started kind of going on the defensive, and he disavowed any idea that he himself was antisemitic.

At the time, I only knew that he was on The Stew Peters Show for one appearance. And he said that that was like a very uncomfortable situation for him and that he would’ve called out Peters, but he’s a very aggressive person on his show and he didn’t want to startle him or anything. After our conversation, I come to realize that he has actually been on The Stew Peters Show three to four times to promote AZAPAC.

So I call him back and press him on this more. I say, like, hey, what’s going on here? You’re clearly a regular, and I think you’re clearly trying to gain his support and the support of his audience.

This time, he said, Stew Peters really helped us out in the beginning and after appearing on his show a lot of donations poured in and I don’t want to throw him under the bus. And he didn’t rule out any future appearances.

AL: Who are the candidates that this PAC is working with?

JV: I want to highlight two of them that stuck out to me. One of them is Tyler Dykes. You might recognize him as a convicted rioter from the Capitol riots on January 6. He pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, but also was accused, famously, of performing a Nazi salute on the Capitol steps while storming the Capitol building. And even before that, he was also convicted of taking part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Actually, for that, he was also sentenced for carrying a burning tiki torch, which I guess there’s a charge in Virginia for carrying a burning object to intimidate.

Anyway, there’s also figures that AZAPAC is supporting, like Casey Putsch who is running for governor in Ohio. He posted a video where basically he is giving a lot of Hitler apologist statements. 

But there’s two other candidates that I wanted to mention who AZAPAC supported and endorsed, which is Anthony Aguilar, who is running as a progressive Green Party candidate out of North Carolina. And he was actually one of the whistleblowers from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that blew the whistle on violence aimed at aid-seeking Palestinians in Gaza. He’s taken that moment into a whole political career. 

He actually decided to rescind his endorsement after The Intercept approached him — after we approached him — with our reporting on both Rectenwald, his statements, his associations with the far right, but also these backgrounds of other candidates that Aguilar’s campaign wasn’t aware of.

And it’s the same case for another recent AZAPAC endorsement, which is Greg Stoker, who is also a progressive Green Party candidate. He was part of one of the flotillas to break the siege in Gaza. And, you know, similar case where when we approached him with our reporting on Rectenwald and AZAPAC — decided to rescind his endorsement. And sure enough, as of this week, all mention of both Aguilar and Stoker’s campaign were removed from AZAPAC’s website, scrubbed from social media.

I think they are making a calculation similar to some concerns that I’ve raised in my reporting — it harms the movement.

AL: Jonah, we’re looking forward to reading your piece, which is up now. Thank you for walking us through your reporting. You know, while frustration over Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a major focus of our reporting and covering how the Israel lobby is approaching midterms and how much voters still care about that — this is far from the only foreign policy issue that is top of mind for voters right now. 

We are potentially moving toward war with Iran, according to reporting from Axios on Wednesday. There is a very large aircraft carrier moving toward the Middle East.

Our episode today focuses on what’s happening as the U.S. is ramping up sanctions in Cuba. If you’ve been following The Intercept’s reporting, you know, we’ve been tracking the more than 140 people the administration has killed in boat strikes in the Caribbean. Amid these boat strikes, we hope you did not forget that the U.S. also kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

After toppling Maduro, the Trump administration demanded the Venezuelan government hand over its oil. This has led to a fuel shortage in Cuba, which largely depends on Venezuela’s oil. Now the Trump administration has Cuba squarely in its crosshairs. At the end of January, Trump signed an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security — we’ve heard that one before — which has led to an oil blockade, which is now spiraling into a humanitarian crisis in Cuba as we speak. 

To understand what’s happening, I spoke to Michael Bustamante, an associate professor of history and chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability. 

Here’s our conversation. 

Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrés Pertierra: Thanks for having me. 

Michael Bustamante: Thanks for having me.

AL: To start, Andrés, the last time you spoke to The Intercept in 2024, you were joining us from Havana, Cuba. You’ve since left. What can you tell us about what life was like for people in the country when you were last there?

AP: I was there in 2024. Things were really bad already when I was there. The country was recovering from the Covid crisis more or less, protest waves had gone from a historic exception to part of the new normal. And while I was there, there were actually the beginning of what became, I think, in total six national blackouts. Six times that the entire national grid collapsed, usually for two to three days. Inflation was out of control. Wages had gone back to basically symbolic, at least if you were in the state sector. 

And there was just a despair, a generalized despair, that I had never remembered seeing before. I mean, people were always desperate and frustrated, but there was a despair of things ever getting better that was novel, that was kind of pushing people to leave en masse. In the last five years about 20 percent of the population has left the island, which is pretty extraordinary for a country not in a state of war.

AL: Recently, a reporter asked Trump about Cuba making a deal with the United States. Let’s hear Trump’s response.

Reporter: You’re warning Cuba to make a deal. What does that deal look like? What do you want them to do? 

Donald Trump: Make a deal. Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don’t even have jet fuel to get for airplanes to take off. They’re clogging up their runway. We’re talking to Cuba right now. They have Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal because it’s really a humanitarian threat.

AL: In that clip, Trump goes on to say, “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no anything.” Michael, can you bring us up to speed? Tell us about the long-standing U.S. embargo against Cuba and the Trump administration’s efforts to increase pressure.

MB: I think it’s widely known that the United States has had a program of comprehensive sanctions on Cuba since the early 1960s that come out of the consequences of the Cuban Revolution, the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties and businesses, the emergence of Cuba as a kind of a Cold War flashpoint. That history has never gone away. 

What I think has changed over time is sort of the degree to which there are holes that are poked in that sanctions regime. There have been openings and closings — most memorably, perhaps, under the Obama administration that really moved to try to put relations with Cuba on a new footing and try to normalize diplomatic ties. In fact, they did that. But the sanctions as such have been codified under law since the 1990s, and that really limits the purview of what the executive branch can do on its own.

The first Trump administration when it came in promised to undo the “bad Obama deal” with Cuba, and it did so, piling on sanctions particularly by 2019 that certainly made things difficult — more difficult — in Cuba.

But the last decade in particular, I would say, has also been a time in which there is a greater and greater consensus inside Cuba, among Cuban economists, among Cuban social scientists, that the country itself is desperate for reforms of a political and economic variety, that the government has been slow — sort of slow footing. And those reforms are needed, not because the United States says so, but because foe and friend alike to Cuba have been been telling them so. 

And so the Cuban people are left in the middle, it seems to me, of a U.S. policy that particularly in the last few weeks has intensified even further in the wake of the ouster of Nicolás Maduro, and the particular vulnerability to that pressure that comes from Cuba’s own inability to put forth a reform program and do so successfully. 

So that’s kind of where we are. And right now, there are few lifelines available to Cuba in an economic sense. The Trump administration feels that it has the leverage and is trying to use it, albeit, as you heard the president admit, at a potentially, very significant humanitarian cost.

AL: Andrés, can you talk more about how these sanctions work and how they’re playing a role in the current state of Cuba’s economy and its prospects for governance? Walk me through how we got here, like I’m 5.

AP: I think that the most urgent sanction, which is the novelty here, is the current oil embargo.

Basically, the United States has declared it as a matter of policy that if you ship oil to Cuba, the United States government is going to increase tariffs and basically engage in punitive economic measures against your country. And so this obviously creates a huge disincentive for countries that even want to sell oil.

So Venezuela would give oil, it would sell it at below-market rates, it would aid Cuba for political reasons. That’s over, thanks to the change of leadership with Delcy Rodríguez. With Mexico, [President Claudia] Sheinbaum has made it clear that she wants to help Cuba. But she’s not really willing to cross Trump on the oil issue. So she’s sending every kind of aid except for oil. That is the real key thing that is basically causing the wheels to come off the bus, as it were. 

But if you’re talking about broader sanctions and regimes, you have Helms-Burton. Trump, during the first Trump administration, activated Title III, which had never been activated before, which among other things, basically says if you’re doing business in a way that engages with or uses resources that were nationalized by the Cuban government, never compensated owners for them, and the owners are U.S. citizens — blah, blah, blah, lots of caveats there — but basically that you can then be sued.

For example, if you have a cruise ship and it docks in a port that was owned by a Cuban who has U.S. citizenship, da da dah, you can then be sued. So the Carnival cruise ships died overnight. That entire sector just collapsed. And I actually had a friend who part of his business model was giving day tours for the tourists who were just there for the day — dead overnight.

Or another thing is, by Trump, and this is — I’m not sure if this is technically an economic sanction, this is not technically an embargo. But another policy that’s hurt Cuba is by putting Cuba on the [state] sponsors of terrorism list. That means that if you’re a European citizen who normally qualifies for an ESTA visa to come to the United States, you no longer qualify if you visit Cuba for a period of, I think, five years, which obviously also impacts the tourism sector.

Also the famous one is, if you have a shipping container and you dock in a Cuban port, you can’t dock in an American port for six months. Like there’s a lot of different measures that turn up the pressure, but really it’s the state sponsors of terrorism list plus the oil embargo that’s really like turning the volume up to 11, right now.

MB: I just wanted to add to that — Andrés has done a good job zeroing in on some of the more recent things and some of the more specific things. But of course, there’s just a broader trade embargo, right? Which means that U.S. companies, by and large, with few exceptions, cannot export goods to Cuba, nor can U.S. persons or actors or companies import goods from Cuba.

Now, there have been exceptions to that put in place over time. A big one came in the year 2000 for the export of food stuff. So it is legal to export food. In fact, a lot of the chicken that gets consumed in Cuba is from the United States. 

One of the, I think, Achilles’ heels of the Cuban economy is the degree of import dependence for foodstuffs. A lot of which has been coming over the last 10, 20 years through that loophole. But I think because of that, and because of loopholes like that, and then also because of the fact that the trade embargo per se is a bilateral thing, it doesn’t impact in theory the ability of Cuba to trade with France or Brazil or whatever else. You often hear this commentary, “Well, you know, embargo, what embargo if Cuba can trade with the rest of the world?” And that’s kind of true, but it neglects sort of the impact of the sanctions regime on global financial institutions.

The fact of the matter is that because the global financial system is so integrated and so tied into U.S. banking institutions — because particularly of Cuba’s addition to the state sponsors to terrorism list — any transaction that Cuba might want to do with an enterprise in Europe, say, but that has a link to a U.S. bank or that has a subsidiary that operates in the United States, they just don’t want to touch it. Cuba is radioactive. 

And so there are significant kind of extraterritorial effects of the U.S. sanctions regime that obviously don’t make it any easier for Cuba to do business elsewhere in the world, even when in some ways they can.

AL: President Barack Obama, as you mentioned Michael, tried to normalize relations with Cuba when he first entered office, lifting restrictions on remittances and travel to Cuba. In 2014, Obama and President Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro’s brother, took steps to fully restore diplomatic ties, and there were signs of positive economic outcomes as a result. Then Trump won in 2016, immediately reversed those Obama-era policies. Biden comes into office and tries to normalize relations again. Then Trump is back in office, this time increasing pressure on the country even more.

What has that back and forth on U.S. policy toward Cuba meant for the nation and what is driving the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts, which I will note that the United Nations is warning that the humanitarian situation will “worsen and if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” Andrés, I’ll start with you.

AP: I think that the first thing the listeners should understand is that pre-1991 and post-1991 U.S. Cuba policy have similar but very different dynamics. In the context of the Cold War, you could make more arguments about Cuba as a national security threat. You could make these arguments, like Cuba is intervening in Angola and U.S. interests and all the rest, or U.S. support for guerrillas in Central America. Post-1991, the problem is more like a Jeep that’s stuck in the mud on the side of the road, right? Even though the consensus — 

AL: I love that image. Yes.

AP: The consensus post-1991 has long been, at least in foreign policy circles, like a rational Cuba policy would be normalization. It would be engagement. I mean, think back to the ’90s. What is the U.S. approach to China? More trade, more investment, more integration in the hopes that you’re going to defeat Communism with Nike and Coca-Cola. That’s similar to what people have been thinking about Cuba for a long time. But because of the fact that an increasingly well-organized Cuba lobby in a strategic swing state — like Florida — is able to basically leverage that. Not saying you can’t cross them; you can. Obama did, and he won Florida anyway.

But it increased the pressure. And part of it is, Cuba is not important enough to kind of escape those shackles of domestic politics. If it were a national security issue, then those domestic policy issues could be overridden much more easily. But it’s not, and that’s kind of the core problem. It can have this kind of lobby interest capture in a way that many other countries don’t. And I think that’s the core problem.

AL: Michael.

MB: First, just on the flip-flopping between relative degrees of openness and closeness in U.S. policy — it certainly doesn’t do anything to help, say, the investment landscape in a place like Cuba.

Imagine you’re a European company or whatever, and you’re watching this sort of flip-flop. You want stability in whatever the framework is in which you have to figure out how to operate. And by the way, that also applies to the increasingly important Cuban private sector, which has been growing slowly but surely through ups and downs in Cuba’s own internal regulatory framework. But in 2024, the Cuban private sector was doing more business just in terms of retail sales to the population than the Cuban state. And that is a very significant shift in kind of the internal economic logics of the place. 

But they also are contending not only with an unstable policy landscape internally and the sort of ups and downs of opening and closing to private sector expansion, which have not been helpful. They’re also dealing with the ups and downs of U.S. policy and thinking, OK, can I get a visa to go to the United States and think about sourcing goods in the United States under certain embargo loopholes? Well, are they going to close me off, are they not? Is the U.S. going to authorize investment, for perhaps, in the private sector with the notion that United States might have a strategic interest in supporting the growth of the private sector versus the state economy?

So the flip-flopping makes it very difficult to sort of envision a path forward. It means that I think both for Cuban officials, but also Cubans on the ground who are trying to push their country forward sometimes against the ways that their officials are not happy with. Everyone’s sort of playing whack-a-mole constantly, right? 

One thing I would just amend your description of the recent years slightly. And just to say that A, when Trump was elected the first term, he didn’t undo the Obama thing right away. It took a couple years and cruise ships kept going to Cuba for a couple years, and that was sort of an odd thing. Despite the rhetorical change, obviously. It’s really in 2019 when they put in place what they call a maximum pressure policy tied to a similar policy on Venezuela at the time.

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And then the Biden administration, I think there was some expectation that when they came in, Biden would roll back the clock to what Obama had done. For better or worse, that didn’t happen. And part of that didn’t happen because when Biden comes in, he’s got a huge agenda. It’s the middle of the pandemic. Cuba’s not high on the geopolitical priority list, as Andrés mentioned.

And then when in July of 2021, Cuba was at the low point of the pandemic itself and the economic crisis that had been induced by it or worsened by it and there are these mass protests across the island. And the Cuban government responded to mass protests of people who wanted food, electricity, and greater political freedoms by throwing a thousand kids in jail. 

And so, like it or not, the Biden administration is not going to step into that moment and say, “Yeah, let’s open the doors.” I wish they had been more, had more foresight on the humanitarian front, but there’s also a pattern here of the Cuban government doing things over time that make the political optics fair or unfair for the United States to move its own policy ball forward more difficult. 

And when the Cuban president at the time says, you know, we’re sending out people to the street to combat these anti-revolutionaries, I mean, how do you think the United States is going to respond, even under a Democratic administration? So again, I just again and again, see that in this back and forth, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle of this geopolitical game between both governments. And we’re now seeing those consequences have really probably the most tragic effects that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

[Break] 

AL: Michael, for the Journal of Democracy, you recently wrote, “Many U.S. policymakers, diaspora leaders, and opposition figures have embraced humanitarian suffering as a tool of political change.” You’re touching on this — I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that and what effect the Trump administration’s pressure campaign is having on the Cuban people and the government? That’s some of the least of what I’ve seen in the reporting on this, about the real effects on the ground. And I’m also curious what has been the response from Cuban people to the U.S.’s latest efforts to oust the government?

MB: Those lines in the piece alluded to the fact that, in addition to the effort to sanction or disincentivize further oil shipments and really cut off oil, Cuban American elected officials and other voices in the community have been calling for further measures. Measures that would include cutting off commercial flights that still exist between the United States and various places in Cuba that are largely used by members of the Cuban diaspora to go visit and support their families. The ability of Cubans to send remittances to send gift parcels of various kinds, right?

All of these things are really very important lifelines for Cuban families in unequal ways, because not every Cuban on the island has family outside, and not everyone has access to those remittance dollars. But those remittance dollars are a vital lifeline.

I think the position of the elected officials is, is that any kind of economic lifeline to the Cuban economy helps the Cuban state stay afloat. And they are arguing that if the Trump administration is really going to try to crack down, you might as well go all the way if you want to use leverage and try to force them to the negotiating table or force the Cuban government to cede to U.S. wishes or whether opening to U.S. economic interests or political change — you got to cut off every source of supply. 

This has been a more delicate thing for Cuban American politicians to navigate in recent years because they’re well aware that many of their constituents are sending money to their families. Sending, you know, in a country that has — there’s no antibiotics, let alone basic painkillers, right? The care package that you can send really, really makes a difference. 

And just to put it into context, while it’s really hard to calculate the number of remittance or the value of remittance that go into Cuba because a lot of it is sort of in people’s suitcases. It’s thought that the income that the Cuban economy gets from this is really on par of what it has gotten in from something like tourism. So it’s a major contributor to the Cuban economy, but it’s sensitive to cut that off because it touches people. It’s one thing to say, “Down with the Cuban government.” It’s another thing to say, “You can’t send painkillers to your mom.” But lately they have been saying it. The Cuban American officials have been saying it. They’re calling for it. And I think they’re making a bet that you step up the pressure to 1,000 percent and you have a better chance of getting the Cuban government to cede. Of course, there’s a huge humanitarian risk there.

I think it’s a mistake in some of the reporting I’ve seen to attribute the degree of, say, the trash piling up on Cuban streets or the degree of the economic problems to just what’s happened since January. This has been a rolling train wreck for a while. What we’ve done is ratchet it up, and there’s this very dangerous game of chicken that’s happening between both governments. And I think as time passes, the more difficult it is for U.S. policymakers to allege that none of the suffering is on their hands, that this is only the Cuban government’s fault. I mean, it’s both. And again, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle wondering which side is going to back down first.

AL: Andrés, can you expand on that?

AP: I did want to say that a lot of people, and I think Michael has already touched on this, is a lot of people think, oh, Miami Cubans, and you’re thinking about a bunch of white Cubans who left between 1959 and 1975 — that’s a minority. 

Since 1980, not only do Cubans often come from working-class backgrounds, they grew up or were born under the revolution, they maintain closer ties. But many of them still buy in for reasons of extreme frustration with the Cuban government. So I think that even as I disagree with their policies, I do think it’s important for listeners to understand that this is not just the same kind of caricature of the white Cuban who left back in the day. This is like, I have classmates who are pro-Trump — or former classmates, because I did my undergrad in Cuba — and they are pro-Trump, despite being Black and Cuban. That is a dynamic that I think listeners should be aware of. 

But I agree with another thing that Michael said and I think is really important here, which is that it’s not just that this is going to hypothetically hurt people, but this is going to kill people and it’s probably already killing people. What happens when someone has an asthma attack, and there’s no meds at the hospital? Or someone has an asthma attack, and you can’t even get to the hospital because there’s no ambulance, there’s no transportation, there’s no gas? Something that’s small or should be small then suddenly becomes this catastrophic life-changing event.

I even met someone two years ago — two years ago, before this mess — whose father-in-law fell and broke his hip. And she was told by the doctors that she would have to import basically everything, including surgical supplies, not just medicines for him to have his hip replaced or his hip operated on. And I said, “But that means he’s not going to be able to walk.” And she’s like, yeah. 

That is the kind of impact that a maximum pressure campaign has. Which is why traditionally, it’s one thing to, for example, in World War I create this maximum pressure sanctions — no oil, no nothing — campaign against Germany in the context of aggression in World War I or World War II. Or even maximum pressure sanctions against Russia that’s invading Ukraine. Like, that is one thing. 

It is entirely another to have this policy against a government which is despotic, which abuses its citizens, which is incompetent, which does all of these things — I’m not trying to dodge any of that — which throws kids in jail, draconian measures, all that stuff. But then who’s footing the bill? It’s everyday people, and the politicians don’t take responsibility for that. They still try and dodge, by and large, their responsibility.

And the fact that they are killing people and they’re doing it from the safety of Florida — which to me, beyond the intellectual component — to me just feels like, come on, if you really want to commit to this, you’re not even going to suffer from these policies that you’re enforcing. You’re not even going to take responsibility for it. And I don’t think it’s justifiable.

MB: Andrés is right, that it feels a little cheap to say pile on the pressure — pile on pressure from the outside — when you’re not going to be on the receiving end of it. But one thing that I think is important is that because of the tremendous recent migration from Cuba, some of the people who are calling on for piling on pressure do have family members in Cuba.

And they have grown embittered by the fact that they have to send remittances to their family in the first place. And this translates to more and more people I know on the island — I mean, of course there are people on the island who are horrified by what the United States is doing — but there are others who are saying, you know what? Between the sort of unwillingness to move the ball forward internally between our government officials saying we would rather sink in the sea than cede to the Americans when maybe we should cede a little because that would help me breathe too. And then the sort of hostility of the outside, I hear people saying more and more, listen, enough with the sort of middling approaches from the United States, whether it’s poke a little hole in the embargo this, or close down this. It’s either you rip off the band-aid of sanctions and let the economy breathe, and you just learn to live with the Cuban government — or send in the F-16s.

And I don’t say that to sound callous or to endorse that way of thinking, but that’s the mindset of many, many Cubans I know who are, I think, more open than they have ever been to some kind of drastic U.S. action, if it would at least maybe move the ball forward, even if there are tremendous risks that come from it, and rather that than this kind of slow-rolling humanitarian disaster that may unfold if the governments continue to just be playing the standoff over the oil shipments and other kinds of trade.

So I think there’s a thirst for decisive action, but of course this is an administration, if we want to go there, I think they’ve shown quite clearly in Venezuela that they’re not too keen on long-term boots on the ground and trying to do this sort of remote governance, in a sense, by proxy of the Delcy Rodríguez regime. In Cuba, that’s a much more difficult proposition to envision. And so one of the other things I argue in that piece of Journal of Democracy is that, ultimately, if the United States really wants to force regime change here, it might require a kind of forcing of the issue from the outside in a way that I think could get uncomfortable for more isolationist actors within the Trump administration. So that’s going to be very important to watch too — how that conflict internally in the decision-making process in Washington evolves.

AL: You also wrote, “Exile groups, for their part, are as numerous as they are competitive for influence and attention. With Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Cuban Americans have never held more sway in the U.S. federal government. But unlike during the heyday of the Cuban American National Foundation in the 1990s, there is no single organization or leader who can claim to speak for the entire diaspora community.”

I want to talk a little bit about Rubio’s influence here and of the Cuban diaspora, as well as what you describe as “credible architecture for political change.” And the question in the back of my mind here is also like, how much of what we’re seeing here is part of a lobbying effort on behalf of the Cuban diaspora or Cuban interests in the U.S. versus how much of this is just like, we don’t like communism?

MB: I mean, unquestionably, Marco Rubio has been highly influential, if not determinant in the direction of U.S–Cuba policy under this administration. He was certainly in the ear of the Trump administration, the first go around, albeit from the Senate. And it’s no secret that the secretary of state has had a long interest in seeing a different political and economic model in Cuba and believing that U.S. sanctions are the tool to achieve that. 

You know, everybody’s making the Venezuela comparison. So the parts of my piece that you cited come a little bit in response to that. U.S. diplomats have floated this idea that what we want is to combine external pressure with sanctions, with trying to find someone in Cuba to negotiate with. That for someone like Rubio, I find to be highly interesting from a political point of view because this is somebody who made his career in a sense — or at least part of his career, part of his foreign policy bonafide — arguing, as many Cuban American elected officials have, that any talks whatsoever with the Cuban government are tantamount to legitimizing a government that is illegitimate.

That was their response to the Obama normalization, and yet, in effect, what the president himself keeps saying, and Rubio confirms and denies — a little bit more, more unclearly — is that there may be talks underway. There’s a report in Axios that suggests that the secretary of state himself is actually engaged in a kind of a back-channel dialogue with Raúl Castro’s grandson, who is, let’s just say not a particularly beloved figure among most Cubans. How Rubio sells that to a Miami constituency, I think, is quite interesting. But that kind of deal-making impulse is very much in keeping with the Trump administration’s focus. 

And I also happen to think that in the Venezuelan case, Rubio has said in response to criticism, look, you don’t get a political transition overnight, a political transition is not something you cook for two minutes in a microwave oven. I think he’s right in most cases, right? This idea of the Cuban government or the Venezuelan government just kind of imploding and disappearing and to be replaced by something that’s unclear is a little bit of fantasy, I think, in these two contexts. And particularly in the Cuban context where, as I argue, there are opposition actors in Cuba and groups and certainly in exile, but there is nothing comparable to the figure of María Corina Machado that acts as a force around which both an internal opposition and a diaspora opposition can gravitate. And so I think the big missing piece here, in this vision of forcing change through sanctions and dialogue is, where’s the counterpart? And so that’s the paradox of this moment, too. 

I mean, you’ve never had Cuban Americans more influential in the foreign policy-making process toward Cuba, right? It’s not the Cuba lobby anymore. It is a Cuban American who’s the secretary of state. He doesn’t need to be lobbied perhaps in the same way that others needed to. This is his issue. But the Cuban American community is as divided as ever. Not necessarily in terms of their vision for change on the island, but who is to lead it and the politics — the intergroup politics — of this group or that group. I mean, that is as old as time and hasn’t gone away. And contrast with the moment in the 1990s when the Cuban American National Foundation was really the leading organization of the Cuba lobby, so to speak, and claimed, I think with a bit more credibility, to speak for the community as a whole. That’s disappeared. And there’s this sort of scrum of elected officials, influencers, you know, all sort of vying for attention. 

But what is the actual structure of governance that would follow a supposed fall of the Cuban government on the island? I don’t think it exists. And that might explain why this administration, even under Rubio, is flirting with this idea of some kind of negotiated exit, even as improbable or fantastical as that may seem at this juncture.

AL: Andrés, do you want to jump in?

AP: I agree with what he’s saying, and I think that also it kind of underlines this broader tension in the MAGA coalition, as it were. So you don’t just have these conflicting interests and all these positions within the Cuban diaspora, but you also have this coalition where you’ve got the more isolationist wing and you’ve got the hawkish wing.

The hawkish wing is obviously more the Rubio wing. While the isolation of swing is, I guess, more Stephen Miller and JD Vance, though, I’m not sure how seriously Trump takes Vance, but Stephen Miller at the very least. 

So you have all these conflicting interests, and this does seem to be narrowing the possible policies that the Trump administration is willing to do. So no boots on the ground. And this risks not only with Venezuela, with Delcy Rodriguez, that’s not a consummated regime change operation, right? They took out one person. They have someone who’s more pliable, but she’s in a very delicate position domestically.

So it remains to be seen how much of a transition there will be. There’s already like problems over how many political prisoners she’s released, you know, will she try and break free of this kind of quasi vacillation. So, not only is the Venezuela 1.0 model still a question mark, but you also have these tensions within the Trump coalition that severely constrain how much Rubio or Trump or anyone can have a coherent policy towards a country that is, you know, as Mike said, very different and very complex. 

For context, I mean, not only is it that Cuba has a very different level of dissident organization, all the rest — like look at Eastern Europe, look at the USSR. In almost all cases, accept in Poland with Solidarity, dissident movements were microscopic until the very end. In Cuba, you had attempts to organize a broader dissident organization. There was right after the 2021 protest, you had the attempts to articulate something called Archipiélago. That movement was broken. Its leaders were basically given the choice of exile or jail. And there is no leadership.

And so really what you would have to do is negotiate with the state, but then that creates the tension that Mike’s already talked about, which is OK, how do we do that without pissing off these people? It seems like they’re going to piss off part of their coalition no matter how they handle it, even if the current approach is “successful,” right? So it’s really like even seeing things in terms of whatever they’re doing right now is successful, it is going to create problems down the road for them. And I’m not sure that it is going to be successful in the way that they think it is. 

AL: For both of you, what do you think mainstream media, particularly in the U.S., is missing in how it’s covering the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Cuba right now?

MB: I mean, part of it is what I said already. I think there’s some missing context that this humanitarian crisis — like, it didn’t just start. There was already a humanitarian crisis. 850,000 Cubans came to the United States since 2021. That is the largest Cuban migration in history ever. That’s happening for a reason, right?

So where we are now hasn’t come out of nowhere. And I think there’s a kind of a presentism in coverage sometimes that is understandable but I think is missing a little bit of the boat of this wider history. That’s one thing. 

To shift gears slightly to another issue that’s been kind of in the ether, particularly in the diaspora, all throughout this period, and certainly since Trump retook office, is the subtext of migration policy. And thinking about how the Trump administration has treated the historic numbers of those Cubans who came in recent years and sort of revoked status. Long story short, 400 to 500,000 Cubans of that giant recent exodus have some kind of indeterminate status that the Biden administration gave them, that the Trump administration has either tried to pull away or seems less likely than Biden ever was to sort of convert it to permanent status.

Deportations have been increasing, and they’ve been continuing even since January at a slow clip or relative to the size, but nonetheless significant. And so I think one thing that would even in a circumstance in which a Cuban government falls — there’s a regime insider that becomes the Delcy Rodríguez of Cuba, the best-case scenario that the Trump administration can imagine — the politics for the Cuban American community are going to be really important to watch because one of the, I think, subtexts of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, “We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do.” It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does then the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change per se.

AL: Andrés.

AP: One of the core things that I think a lot of the coverage has kind of struggled with is how to balance systemic failure from embargo policy in a particular Trump-era policy. And I think that part of the problem is that if you talk to a lot of people, especially politicians or activists, you’re going to get either it’s all the fault of the government, or it’s all the fault of sanctions, and there’s no real room in between or even like the beginnings of a framework to understand how to approach this.

And I think that, not only to mention it in the same breath is important because it’s clearly both factors. But also something that might be helpful for journalists covering this to think about is, think of the systemic economic and policy failures in Cuba as kind of an immune disease. People often miss that because these systemic failures, these policy problems, the unreformed nature of Cuban agriculture — meaning that a country that is a historical ag exporter is importing previously about 60 to 80 percent of its food. Now, I don’t doubt, somewhere around 95, like they’re importing everything at this point.

Like these are things that are aggravated by the embargo, but they’re not caused by the embargo. And that you need to see the embargo as multiplier rather than cause of why the system just is struggling to breath. Why there’s kind of like a pneumonia — economic pneumonia — in the country right now.

AL: Both of you have touched on the fact that this is happening right after our kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. And I won’t say unprecedented because it’s not unprecedented, but probably the most U.S. intervention in Latin America that we’ve seen since the coup spree of the ’50s through the ’80s. What does this mean for Latin America more broadly?

Michael, I’m really glad you brought the immigration policy into this, but you know, we’ve killed people in boat strikes in the Caribbean. And as you mentioned Andrés, people are probably already dying now from the most recent sort of ratcheting up of these sanctions. 

But as we’ve talked about, it’s not being covered in the same way. So I wonder if you could just speak to that and sort of what you were expecting to see in the future.

MB: The conversation about Cuba policy is intimately related to broader conversations about U.S. national security strategy. If you read that national security strategy that was put out by the administration late last year I believe, I think what was so striking to many folks was how far it leaned away, even from the rhetoric of kind of great power competition and more that we will let China and Russia do their thing, but it’s really about spheres of influence.

And so I think, all this business about the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the “Doroe” doctrine, and aggressive force projection, to put it mildly in the Western Hemisphere, feels like deja vu for someone who teaches about the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America in the early 20th century quite often. So it’s inseparable from that. There’s this notion that the administration feels that this is our hemisphere. I mean, they’re using this language much more boldly and baldly than I think we’ve seen since, I don’t know, Teddy Roosevelt or something.

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What I think is interesting about this moment is that Latin America itself as a region has had its own backs and forths in terms of the ideological direction of leadership but right now is in a moment of largely or sort of more of a swing to the right with few exceptions. You know, [Gustavo] Petro (Colombia) and Lula (Brazil) are exceptions in the regional political landscape. And also, there’s no love lost in much of the region even on the center left for parts of the region, for someone like Nicolás Maduro who, you know, Venezuela became the source of a mass exodus in its own right that impacted a number of countries and became a political problem across the region.

So I think part of that is why you don’t see many voices in the region necessarily standing up and criticizing too much what the administration has done in Venezuela. The critiques have been more pro forma, but also because those governments that might be more likely to critique those actions, they’ve got their own fish to fry with an increasingly transactional administration that’s wielding tariff threats in new ways. That explains why Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, to go back to an earlier point, is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to the demand that she stop Mexico’s own oil shipments to Cuba. And I don’t think the Cuban government can count on the kind of regional support that it might have in prior moments. 

If you go back 10 years ago, part of the reason that Obama does what he does on Cuban normalization is because he’s hearing an earful every time he goes to a regional summit that the path to improving U.S. relations with Latin America as a whole coming out the George W. Bush years is to get away from sort of unilateralism and interventionism or the threat of that. And that the way to signal to the region that you’re turning the page is to fix your problem with Cuba and get policy on a more normal, practical footing. And guess what? The Cubans are also reforming and there’s a path here. The regional landscape right now is very, very, very different — very different politically. And so Cuba is much more isolated than it has been in a long time.

You hear voices on the center-left also saying, you know, the Cuban government here, yes, what the United States is doing is horrible and using Cuban people as cannon fodder for this policy that increases humanitarian suffering with the goal of getting the Cuban government to cede or come to the table. But man, the Cubans have had a decade or more — 30 years since the end of the Cold War — to get their economy on at least a little bit stabler footing. And they’ve kind of opened themselves up to this in a way, right? Which is not to blame the victim per se, but it is a complicated story. And I think Cuba’s more isolated on the regional front than it’s been in a while because of it.

AP: There’s a reason that the United States just didn’t really do what the Trump administration is doing anymore, right? Like that really in your face, just do it, break some things on our way to fixing it solution or approach to Latin America. There’s a reason we moved past that.

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And I think that a return to that is going to create a backlash. The exact way that this backlash is going to take form we won’t see it for a while. He’s going to cow various governments into obeisance for a bit, but you don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear. You get them to temporarily cooperate while they now figure out a backdoor, other guarantors.

So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America; I think it’s going to further weaken it. Not least because I mean, if you look at who is the main trade partner of a lot of Latin America, it’s not the U.S. anymore, it’s China. China’s investing. This is not the USSR, where the USSR even at peak was a fraction of the U.S.’s GDP and had real trouble exporting their economic model. This is a country that can compete with the U.S. on its own terms, and in fact can excel because like they, oftentimes the Chinese don’t really care as much about, is this country a dictatorship? Is this country going to be able to pay us back reliably? They’ll just do it.

So, I don’t even think that purely in a Machiavellian sense, this is going to create a coherent policy or an effective policy. And another way that I think this is going to create a likely backlash and actually strengthen authoritarian tendencies among the left, is look at the overthrow Jacobo Guzmán in 1954 in Guatemala, which was a seminal moment for many Latin Americans during that period, not at least many of those who created the Cuban Revolution, but also look at [Salvador] Allende in 1973. And I understand that’s more complicated. It wasn’t just a foreign coup. It was like a lot of domestic factors. But what I’m trying to say is, the lesson that a lot of people on the left took was, a democratic path to policies that we want is impossible, ergo realism dictates that we take a different road. And does that mean that we’re going to see guerrillas pop up tomorrow? Probably not. This seems to be set to supercharge that tendency, even if we can’t exactly foresee what direction or manifestation it will have in practice.

AL: I want to thank you both for helping me and our listeners understand this even a tiny bit better. Michael and Andrés, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with us on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thanks a lot. 

AP: Thank you.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it really helps other listeners to find us.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post What Does Trump Want With Cuba? appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2020, I ran to be a Florida delegate to the Democratic National Committee after helping co-found the Miami-Dade Democratic Progressive Caucus in early 2017. I had just wrapped up a stint in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and in spite of the tension created by the primary, volunteers and former staffers decided to continue to engage with the structures of the Democratic Party in order to democratize the party and push it in a more progressive direction. 

My fellow progressive delegates and I were able to reform party rules in Florida, including ending something called the “weighted vote”: two positions from each Florida county had been able to vote in elections with a vote share proportional to the number of Democrats in that county, allowing a small number of operatives and consultants to have outsized control of the party. We were finally able to change that and move to a one-person, one-vote system.

Three years later, that project has become untenable for me. I can no longer morally engage with that kind of tinkering in the service of reform. I am submitting my resignation in large part because of the Biden administration’s inexcusable support of Israeli war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza — and the DNC’s role in protecting President Joe Biden from a democratic process that could check that complicity.

More than 23,000 people have been killed in retaliation against Hamas’s attack on October 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. An estimated 57,000 have been injured, and thousands more are missing and presumed dead. At least 9,600 of those killed are children. The Biden administration gives occasional lip service to the need for limiting civilian casualties while continuing to greenlight billions in military support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. (I’ve been outspoken in my criticism of this assault and on Tuesday was caught up in the Twitter purge of critics of Israel. My account has since been restored.)

As this mass killing continues unabated and the Biden administration circumvents congressional authority to greenlight more weapons sales to Israel, and the Democratic Party is actively kicking off his primary opponents from the ballot in several states, I’ve decided the proper thing to do is submit my resignation. I will not be part of a structure of power that seems committed to support war crimes and undermine voters’ choices. 

The destruction in Gaza is so widespread that it already qualifies as one of this century’s most destructive wars, according to the Washington Post. The bombardment has flattened buildings and civilian infrastructure and has included attacks against hospitals that are supposed to be off-limits under laws governing warfare but are nevertheless targeted by Israeli forces claiming that they serve as Hamas operation centers. These claims have been proven to be unsubstantiated, as was the case of Al-Shifa Hospital, which was raided last month. A subsequent investigation also conducted by the Washington Post found that evidence did not support Israeli claims that the hospital was a Hamas command center.

The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. The United Nations says that more than 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and that severe water shortages are creating a deadly risk for children, with the looming threat of large-scale disease outbreaks. Unlawful weapons like incendiary white phosphorus have been used indiscriminately against civilians, according to Amnesty International, which constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

One of the things I found most concerning is that Biden is willing to trade human rights for more war funding — telling Republicans in ongoing talks over funding for Ukraine and Israel that the White House is willing to gut asylum protections and aid in mass deportations in exchange for those funds.

Biden and Democrats are looking to resurrect, and in many cases expand, the worst policies of the Trump administration. Immigrant families who have been here for years, even decades, could be rounded up and deported — calling this “expedited removal” rather than mass deportation. Also on the table is a beefed-up version of Title 42, the Trump-era emergency authority enacted under the pretense of pandemic-related health concerns that speed deportations at the southern border. The “Safe Third Country” restrictions being proposed by Democrats are Trump’s asylum ban creeping up under some centrist think-tank rebranding. 

These extreme, permanent changes to the immigration system will severely harm immigrants in our country and completely demolish what little credibility this administration has when claiming to be a bulwark against Trump-era policies. To do so in service of sending more money to a country committing war crimes is completely indefensible.

I was an undocumented person. I came here with my parents on tourist visas from Argentina and overstayed them hoping for a better life. I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life to help other immigrants navigate an unforgiving and broken process meant to keep them in the shadows while they labor away with no prospects for a proper retirement or social benefits. I can’t rationalize an effort to fund wars that create more destabilization and refugees while also destroying the asylum system that would provide some relief to those refugees. 

Modern asylum laws were created after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the public with the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces. They stemmed from the deep shame felt after World War II, knowing more could have been done to help desperate people fleeing desperate conditions. 

Throughout most of the war, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees, fearing that they were Nazi spies and also motivated by ever-present antisemitism. In one of the most horrific instances of our country turning its back on desperate people, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 mostly Jewish passengers were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe where more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

The context is different, but the same is true today. The Biden administration threatens to turn back progress by negotiating with bad-faith actors and betraying their core supporters, all while throwing truly vulnerable people under the bus. 

Sending military funding to Israel as it engages in the mass killing of Palestinians is increasingly unpopular in the United States. Polling released on December 5 from Data for Progress shows over 70 percent of Democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza. Hell, 61 percent of all voters support the call for a ceasefire. Instead of listening to public pressure and the polls, the administration is moving in the opposite direction of a ceasefire and is instead planning for a wider war.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. has historically thrown Palestinians under the bus, but past presidents have at times stepped in to curtail violence. Ronald Reagan, who I am not a fan of, famously called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the 1982 Lebanon War and told him that the symbol of that war was becoming a “picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.” When Reagan, infamous for supporting Central American death squads, is more critical of Israeli war crimes than Biden, we are in serious trouble.

For those of you who, like me, find the actions of the current administration unacceptable and would support an alternative candidate in the 2024 Democratic primary, your options are being limited. The Florida Democratic Party has joined several other states in barring any other candidate aside from Biden from appearing in this year’s primary ballot despite challengers like Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson polling between 5 and 10 percent each. Democrats should be given the option to vote for whichever candidate they want to support.

My time trying to navigate the hypocrisy and groupthink of party politics has come to an end. My only hope is that people continue speaking out, challenging the current status quo, and pressuring this administration and politicians in both parties to stop this senseless and intolerable bloodshed before more people die and this spirals into a broader and more destructive conflict.

The post I Resigned From the DNC in Protest of Biden’s Backing of Palestinian Slaughter appeared first on The Intercept.

At first, the new engineer, Richard Ngo, got along well with Speed. They sometimes went out to lunch together and socialized away from the office. “Speed was my mentor at Novetta as the software lead,” Ngo later said in court testimony. “We worked together every day.”

But after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Ngo noticed that Speed, a longtime Navy reservist who had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst and held other sensitive cyber and intelligence posts in connection with Naval Special Warfare units, seemed to be changing. Ngo had always known that Speed was a gun enthusiast, but after the Capitol riot, he became more openly anti-government than he had ever been before. “He was just frustrated with just how everything was going,” Ngo testified, adding that Speed was “panic-buying” guns.

What Ngo didn’t realize was that Speed, who had legally changed his first name from Daniel to Hatchet in 2007, according to Utah court records, had been an apocalyptic far-right extremist long before January 6.

No investigation has been conducted to determine whether Hatched Speed compromised classified information.

In fact, Hatchet Speed was a self-described member of the Proud Boys working deep inside the U.S. intelligence community. He joined other Proud Boys members to storm the Capitol on January 6, but he got away undetected and continued to work in sensitive jobs in the months after the insurrection, even as he amassed a huge arsenal of weapons and began to think about kidnapping Jewish leaders and others he considered an existential threat. He wasn’t arrested until 18 months after the insurrection, and no investigation has been conducted to determine whether he compromised classified information, a Navy spokesperson said. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on any possible damage to U.S. intelligence resulting from Speed’s decadeslong access to classified information.

A spokesperson for Accenture Federal Services, which now owns Speed’s former employer, Novetta, and which has classified contracts with the Defense Department and the intelligence community, including U.S. Cyber Command, did not respond to requests for comment.

Finally, more than a year after the Capitol riot, the FBI launched an investigation of Speed. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was also involved, which suggests that records of Speed’s massive weapons purchases and his efforts to acquire unregistered silencers in the immediate aftermath of January 6 may have prompted the inquiry. In February 2022, an undercover FBI agent posing as a like-minded, right-wing gun enthusiast began meeting with Speed. That March, the Navy, aware of the FBI investigation, removed Speed’s access to sensitive Navy facilities and gave him what amounted to a fake job with Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that develops America’s spy satellites. Speed, who previously held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance, was not given access to NRO’s buildings nor its systems, a spokesperson for the NRO said. In addition to the FBI probe, Speed was also under investigation for two personnel-related cases within the Navy, a spokesperson said.

Speed was thus kept away from sensitive work while the FBI investigation was underway, until his arrest in June 2022. Yet Speed’s participation in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and his ability to avoid detection for so long despite a series of red flags, are part of a disturbing pattern. Three active-duty Marines were given new intelligence assignments even after they were involved in the January 6 mob, The Intercept reported in February, including one who was reassigned to work inside the headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. The three Marines were finally arrested two years after they stormed the Capitol.

Speed, 41, has been convicted in two separate trials on charges stemming from his extremism. In January, a federal jury in Virginia found him guilty on weapons charges for illegally purchasing three silencers as part of a $50,000 weapons-buying spree in the months after January 6. And last week, in a bench trial in federal court in Washington, Judge Trevor McFadden found Speed guilty of charges stemming from his activities on January 6. He will be sentenced later this spring.

In a brief phone interview, Speed’s father, Thaddeus Speed, defended him, saying: “He’s always been a very reasonable fellow.” He declined to comment further on his son’s activities or the court rulings.

Speed is the longest-serving official in the intelligence community to be charged so far in connection with January 6.

Speed’s case is significant because he is the longest-serving official in the intelligence community to be charged so far in connection with January 6. A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, with a bachelor’s degree in applied physics with an emphasis in computer science from Brigham Young University, Speed served as a cryptologic technician and intelligence analyst in the Navy reserves. He deployed to Iraq in 2009 and Afghanistan in 2011, and held other sensitive cyber and intelligence posts in connection with Naval Special Warfare units, which include the Navy SEALs. His last role before being sent to the dead-end position at the NRO was with the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, where he was assigned in October 2021. Prior to that, he had been assigned to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service headquarters in Washington. The Navy says that Speed was cut off from access to classified information beginning in August 2021, when he was unable to perform his duties because he had refused to comply with the U.S. military’s Covid-19 vaccination mandate. His enlistment contract expired in November 2022, and he is now being processed out of the Navy reserves, according to a Navy spokesperson. In a public statement, the Navy said that it “does not and will not tolerate supremacist or extremist conduct.”

Meanwhile, Speed’s job at Novetta placed him in the northern Virginia hub of the U.S. intelligence community; when Speed worked there, the company had offices near the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, the NRO, and the Pentagon. When it acquired Novetta in 2021, Accenture described it as a firm that “applies disruptive technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, cyber, cloud and information exploitation to transform how defense, intelligence and law enforcement organizations use data to better meet their missions.”

Speed’s ability to build a career in the intelligence community while aligning himself with the Proud Boys raises questions about whether military and intelligence officials are continuing to turn a blind eye to far-right extremism in their ranks, despite Pentagon orders to root it out.

Speed joined with “100 of us Proud Boys” at a pro-Trump rally in Washington in November 2020 to protest the outcome of the presidential election, he told the undercover FBI agent. On January 6, he went to the Capitol with other Proud Boys, noting that doing so “was always the plan,” but he only decided to enter the building when he heard from others outside that Vice President Mike Pence was certifying Joe Biden’s election, which Speed saw as a betrayal. “It was like, I’m going in there,” he told the undercover agent, according to court records. “Like, I have no respect for people in this building. They have no respect for me, I have no respect for them.” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four other top members of the group have been charged with seditious conspiracy and are currently on trial in Washington.

Speed met eight times with the FBI undercover agent, who secretly recorded their conversations. Beginning at a Starbucks near his home in Vienna, Virginia, in February 2022, Speed expressed such virulently antisemitic, racist, and genocidal views that it is difficult to understand how he could have remained in the intelligence community for so long without drawing more scrutiny. Speed expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, even after Putin invaded Ukraine. He told the FBI agent that he “would love to see [Putin] just really be the leader that the world needs right now,” but that might not happen because “he has a lot of Jews around him who advise him,” according to court records.

Speed spoke forthrightly about his belief that violence would be required to retake America from the control of Jews and liberals. He told the FBI agent that he wanted to kidnap Jewish leaders, including billionaire philanthropist George Soros and leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, who he blamed for creating the Black Lives Matter movement. During one conversation, Speed said, “Jews for some reason love gang raping people. It doesn’t matter what they are doing, they always have time to gang rape … white girls.” He described Hitler as “one of the best people that’s ever been on this earth,” according to court documents, adding that he wanted “somebody like Hitler to stand up and say we’re going to stand against this moral incineration.”

“I’m looking for people who are willing to say how do we do something more than just complaining on Telegram, which I’m guilty of. I scroll through Telegram way too much. But you know, what do we do in the real world to make something really happen?” Speed asked the undercover agent at one point.

The leaders of the Anti-Defamation League drew Speed’s ire because “they spend all their time pushing for laws like this anti-lynching law that Biden just signed,” he said. The ADL was pushing anti-lynching legislation because “they know things are going to get bad enough that people like us are going to band together and straight up start lynching people.”

When it came to choosing kidnapping targets, Speed told the undercover agent, he planned to go after “people that are actually reachable by someone like me. People who don’t have bodyguards.”

At about the same time he began meeting with the undercover agent in early 2022, Speed quit his job at Novetta. He had always thought of himself as a good patriot because he worked for the government, he told the undercover agent, but he no longer saw it that way and had come to believe that he was “lending his skill set to evil.” In March 2022, Speed admitted to the undercover agent that he had gone to the Capitol on January 6 with other Proud Boys and then entered the building, making it to the Rotunda.

But the intense undercover investigation by the FBI — during which Speed revealed his apocalyptic views, his willingness to engage in antisemitic carnage, and his ties to the Proud Boys — did not lead to expansive charges against him. The weapons case in Virginia was limited to straightforward charges related to his purchase of unregistered silencers; the January 6 charges were similar to those brought against many other rank-and-file intruders in the Capitol attack. He was found guilty of felony and misdemeanor charges including obstruction of an official proceeding; entering and remaining in a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. The fact that the government gathered so much evidence of Speed’s interest in becoming a domestic terrorist but then only brought relatively modest charges against him contrasts starkly with the much more aggressive prosecutions faced by Muslim American defendants caught up in similar undercover operations in counterterrorism cases brought in the years after September 11.

But perhaps the greatest irony in Speed’s case came during the trial on the January 6 charges. In the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Speed was represented by public defenders: two Black women.

The post Pentagon Analyst Kept Intel Job After Joining Jan. 6 Mob, Planned to Kidnap Jewish Leaders appeared first on The Intercept.

You might like to believe that Americans across the political spectrum repudiate fascism in general, and the Nazis specifically. This is not the case, however. There’s always been a significant faction on the U.S. right that’s been, let’s say, fascism-curious.

For most of them, it’s not that they see Nazism as a great idea, exactly. It’s more that they see Hitler as having gotten a little out of hand, thereby sadly discrediting some concepts that make a lot of sense. Their perspective is, let’s not throw out the fascism baby with the Holocaust bathwater. Also, “joking” about being fascists is fun, because it makes the libs so mad!

This tendency could be observed in 1939, when huge numbers of New Yorkers filled Madison Square Garden for a jolly American-style fascist rally. Then over 20 members of the House and Senate collaborated with a Nazi propagandist to discourage the U.S. from entering World War II. Up to Pearl Harbor and beyond, Prescott Bush — father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush — was in lucrative business with Nazi Germany.

Of course, it wasn’t clear then exactly where fascism was headed. But little changed after World War II. The Central Intelligence Agency eagerly recruited a plethora of Nazis when they came on the market after V-E Day. Prominent Republican and diplomat Allen Dulles even escorted Reinhard Gehlen, architect of some of Nazi Germany’s most spectacular atrocities, to the 1951 World Series. (In fairness, when Dwight Eisenhower became president two years later he did punish Dulles for this — by making him director of the CIA.)

This peculiar tilt in the psychology of the U.S. right continued for decades, up through the present day. One key U.S. ally in South Vietnam, Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, said that he had only one hero: Hitler. In 1985 Ronald Reagan famously laid a wreath at a cemetery in Germany filled with German war dead, including dozens of members of the Waffen-SS. Reagan defended his actions by saying that the dead German soldiers “were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

Most recently, of course, former President Donald Trump had dinner with Kanye West, who speaks vociferously about his admiration for Hitler, and for the Republican Party this is fine.

So it’s worth remembering a little-known story from the 2003 national convention of the College Republican National Committee. The CRNC is a key path to power within the grown-up GOP. Former members include onetime Speaker of the House Paul Ryan; top Republican strategist Karl Rove; another top strategist, the late Lee Atwater; and assorted representatives and senators. (Amusingly, Hillary Clinton was president of the CRNC chapter when she attended Wellesley.)

As the Washington Post reported at the time, the convention was attended by about 1,000 students. The speakers were Republican heavy hitters of the day, such as Tom DeLay (then House majority leader), Ellen Chao (then secretary of labor, later to be secretary of transportation for Donald Trump, and always the wife of current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky). Rove was there to get the Lee Atwater Leadership Award.

At the end of the evening, some of the students sang a song in celebration of the CRNC’s outgoing president, Scott G. Stewart. The name of this song was “Stomping Out the Reds.” Let’s take a look at the lyrics:

Stomping Out the Reds

To the tune of “Bringing in the Sheaves”

Meet the Left in action, put them all in traction,
Get great satisfaction, bashing in their heads!
Hear each girl and boy sing, triumph loudly voicing,
We’ll advance rejoicing, stomping out the Reds!

Stomping out the Reds, stomping out the Reds,
We’ll advance rejoicing, stomping out the Reds!

Lib’rals who pooh-pooh them, radicals who woo them,
Pinkoes who debut them, all are dunderheads!
Gladly we’ll embrue them, hew and barbecue them,
Passing bullets through them, stomping out the Reds!

Stomping out the Reds, stomping out the Reds,
Passing Bullets through them, stomping out the Reds!

Bayonets bright gleaming, panzers forward steaming,
Hear the Commies screaming, underneath our treads!
Scorn their masses teeming, and their traitors’ scheming,
We’re the West redeeming, stomping out the Reds!

Stomping out the Reds, stomping out the Reds,
We’re the west redeeming, stomping out the Reds!

Look, you can’t deny that’s funny! It’s the future leaders of the Republican Party, joyously singing about massacring “the Left.” But what makes it truly hilarious is that it’s performed from the perspective of Nazi Germany — i.e., the guys with the panzers. They’re the West redeeming! If you’d like to witness this for yourself, it’s possible to watch their performance in grainy 2003-style internet video here.

It’s also notable how well-written these lyrics are, even as they exult in barbarism. It turns out they were penned by the unusually-named Tiomoid of Angle, who graduated from Yale in 1978. He was the editor of the songbook of Yale’s Party of the Right, or POR, founded by William F. Buckley and one of the seven parties within Yale’s political union.

Doug Henwood, the progressive economics writer, was a member of the Party of the Right during this period as part of a youthful indiscretion. He recalls “when I was first at Yale, hanging with my new POR comrades, one senior member was paging through The Old Campus, which is what Yale called its freshman facebook, looking at the pics of women and judging their character and intelligence by their skull shapes and hairlines.”

When I mentioned “Stomping Out the Reds” years ago on my defunct blog, I received an unhappy email from Mr. of Angle. He informed me the POR had many songs that “would melt your humor-challenged soul faster than the Wicked Witch of the East.” Also “The term ‘panzer’ was chosen (as was the term ‘barbecue’) solely for reasons of assonance and scansion.” In other words, identifying themselves with the Nazis was for the POR a mere coincidence, demanded by the needs of poetic rhyming and rhythm.

In any case, this general perspective endures at the upper reaches of the Republican Party to this day. Of Angle closed by reminding me that the Federalist Society, possibly the most powerful organization on the right — six current Supreme Court justices are current or former members — was founded by three alumni from the POR.

The post Remember When Bush-Era College Republicans Sang About Slaughtering “the Left”? appeared first on The Intercept.