As China releases ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America’s nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024. Rama Elluru, a senior director at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested to me that Chinese AI models could be used to create “engineered humans,” akin to Marvel’s Captain America.

Perhaps anything is possible. At a moment when AI models are self-directing massive security breaches and designing novel pathogens, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is warning about an “AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare” led by China, the worst-case scenarios can seem closer and closer.

[Read: It may be time to panic about AI]

At the same time, it’s worth taking a breath to consider how much these dire imagined futures are getting ahead of where things actually stand. A struggle really is, of course, playing out among the U.S., China, and any number of other nations over whether democracy or authoritarianism will be the dominant global influence. Both the United States and China have a history of launching propaganda campaigns against each other; the Chinese government is reportedly starting a concerted effort to be the source of more AI training data, in part so that it can embed its views, such as over the status of Taiwan, into chatbots worldwide. But fears about China using AI for swift global domination assume that the technology will advance to a kind of superintelligence: AI models smart enough to develop smarter bots themselves, which would lead whichever country controls them to enter “escape velocity where your adversaries aren’t able to catch up,” David Lin, a senior director at the SCSP who previously covered China and technology at the CIA, told me. It is not clear that such an omniscient digital being can or will be built.

The White House has further muddled matters by taking a series of contradictory stances toward Chinese technology. It has, for example, revised its policy on exports to more easily allow the sale of advanced AI chips to China, while also going back and forth on whether the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies can use the most advanced AI models of Anthropic. How seriously can anyone take the idea that the two nations are locked in a “hot Cold War II,” to quote Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, when the government is arguably enabling China’s own AI ambitions?

The technological race between the U.S. and China is so often discussed as a winner-takes-all competition. But such a narrow framing obscures what’s most at stake for Americans.

China is an obvious rival to the United States, as most former Biden-administration and current Trump-administration officials would agree. But that also makes “China” a convenient boogeyman for AI lobbyists and those with a clear financial interest in the industry, such as the former White House AI adviser David Sacks, who has said that “the AI race is even more important than the Space Race.”

[From the June 2026 issue: The venture-capital populist]

The two countries are not at war, but the most hawkish AI executives and national-security officials nonetheless fear that AI could confer what in military terms is called a “decisive strategic advantage.” Here is where the Cold War analogies come in. Such an advantage would entail the ability to land some sort of crushing blow that your opponent cannot recover from, “as if one country had nuclear weapons and no other country did, or maybe an even more extreme version of that,” Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, told me.

Plenty of reasons exist to be cautious of this framing. For starters, to accept this argument, one has to assume that very soon, bots will exist that are smarter than the pooled expertise of entire nations. That’s total speculation, so the war-gaming can amount to “choose your own adventure,” R. David Edelman, an AI-policy researcher at MIT who previously served on President Obama’s National Security Council, told me.

Some pragmatic issues also exist. Software alone can’t win wars: The Pentagon is reportedly using AI models to speed up its target selection in Iran, but no matter how smart those bots are, America nonetheless is not exactly winning the war. Iran, for its part, seems to be hacking America’s water utilities—but those water systems are small and separate from one another, and have built-in physical redundancies. For similar reasons, a hack of a grid or bank would have serious but, in some ways, limited repercussions. These are all grave threats, to be sure, but they are not civilization-ending.

And translating any future ideas from AI into the physical world could take years. Even if AI cracked the code to create super soldiers, the military would have to figure out how to incubate and grow them, or else edit genes in adults without killing them. An AI system might say, Here’s how to defend against nukes, but that would leave the issue of building thousands or millions of missile interceptors on the table. In part for these reasons, no single AI-conferred advantage is likely to be large enough to permit any country to conquer the world. “It strains credibility that six months of advantage in AI could be the difference between the U.S. winning and losing a war with any adversary,” Edelman said.

In any case, the technology’s military capabilities might matter less than its effects on the economy. AI models are released as products. The top models from Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, are by all accounts almost as good as and far cheaper to use than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Simply put, that makes Chinese AI more economical for many companies looking to adopt the technology. Indeed, relative to the U.S., China’s government and businesses are “moving very fast,” Chan said.

If this is an economic race rather than a war, then it’s one that the United States could very well lose. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any executives or researchers describe their work as part of a national contest against the United States,” Grace Shao, an analyst who covers AI and China and the author of the newsletter AI Proem, told me. Instead, “the more important race in China may be the race to diffuse AI into the real economy.”

China’s biggest advantage in the AI race comes from the physical world. This has little to do with AI itself: Decades of being a manufacturing powerhouse and implementing targeted industrial policy have made the country a leader in producing renewable-energy equipment, electric vehicles, robots, and other complex technologies. The country manufactures some 90 percent of all of the crucial components in solar panels. Last year, nearly 90 percent of humanoid robots sold were Chinese. Meanwhile, the U.S. is failing to meet AI’s electricity demands and has struggled to resupply missiles during the war in Iran.

[Tom Nichols: Iran, not Trump, is in control of this war]

“China has this strategy of exporting its technology globally,” Elluru said. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has helped build highways, ports, power plants, fiber-optic cables, and data centers throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America; AI services are the logical next offering. The concern, for the U.S., is that “this technology sphere of influence congeals into political alignment” with Beijing, Daniel Remler, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who previously led AI policy at the State Department, told me.

For instance, dependence on Chinese technology makes it more likely for a government to support Chinese efforts on the global stage and vote with China at the United Nations. Several nations benefiting from these investments have sided with China in its mission to claim Taiwan. China has been accused of using ports, e-commerce platforms, and telecommunications networks in other countries to hoover up data. Already the nation is using AI to enhance its domestic-surveillance apparatus and further crack down on dissent; the spread of Chinese data centers and AI agents abroad could only expand that authoritarian web. National-security analysts are concerned that, in the case of military conflict, China could threaten to shut off partner nations’ digital communications or power grids—including in countries with a large American-military presence. The greatest threat of Chinese “artificial general intelligence” is not some sudden death blow so much as a hastening of the ongoing decline of American hegemony—and the freedoms, at home and around the globe, that at its best the U.S. seeks to enshrine.

Yet the Trump administration and AI industry’s approach to competing with China has been a mess. The White House spokesperson Liz Huston told me that “the United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way.” The administration’s current policies on AI chips, Chinese-made robot parts, advanced cybersecurity models, and open-weight AI are one big contradictory jumble. At a summit this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stressed “rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup” just weeks after President Trump visited Beijing and said the nations would have a “fantastic future together.” OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and the like can’t seem to agree on what they are lobbying for, either. All of which would seem like a great way to lose a technological race with China, any way you measure it.

There’s a certain déjà vu quality to the AI race. Amid fears over Sputnik and nuclear proliferation, a report prepared at the direction of Henry Kissinger in 1958 declared that “should we ever allow the U.S.S.R. and Communist China to attain strategic superiority, we can be certain that subsequent events will be brutal.” According to a government report on the early years of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, “fervent belief in unending scientific progress” offered a way forward. Those words could have been written today by Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And indeed, this belief propelled America into many decades of technological advancement—in nuclear weapons, space exploration, computer systems, and more. Even back then, that agency, known today as DARPA, was quietly championing an emerging research area called artificial intelligence. J. C. R. Licklider, who championed the use of computer systems at ARPA in the early 1960s following the inspiration of Vannevar Bush, imagined that one day, machines that “will outdo the human brain” could make essentially all decisions of “military significance.” And ARPA developed the precursor to today’s internet.

Today’s AI race also traces back to the 2010s, when Silicon Valley began invoking China as a way to shape regulation. The idea of a technological arms race has “been wielded deliberately as a way to head off any attempts at regulating the tech sector” and, more recently, to champion “favorable industrial policy” for data-center construction, Sarah Myers West, a co–executive director of the AI Now Institute and former senior adviser on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, told me.

In 2018, while testifying before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg said that “if we make it too hard for American companies to innovate in areas like facial recognition, then we will lose to Chinese companies.” A few years later, a dozen former national-security officials wrote a letter to Congress arguing that “antitrust proposals that target specific American technology firms” risked “undermining America’s key advantage vis-à-vis China.” Today Silicon Valley is instead using the specter of China to angle for more and better AI, in more places, and faster.

American officials and tech executives are not wrong to want to compete. But the dominance of an oversimplified U.S.-China AI race, without clarity about who is racing and to where, doesn’t just mangle policy making; it obscures that the ultimate beneficiary of the AI boom ought to be citizens, not military contractors or Silicon Valley’s biggest corporations and investors. Rather than asking what kind of AI we’re building, Myers West said, one could ask, What kind of society are we building? The AI-accelerated spread of authoritarianism, within and outside of China’s borders, should be reason enough to worry. And if American AI executives and White House officials really cared about free-market competition, they might explore enforcing antitrust laws to separate the providers of AI models, data centers, and chips. If they were truly concerned about AI surveillance, they might look into finally passing some sort of federal digital-privacy legislation. And if they cared about spreading democratic AI abroad, they might take a close look at the state of democracy at home.

In a time when an iPhone can be preordered, customized, and on its way to your doorstep all through a touch-screen tap, it’s almost quaint to remember that people used to camp out for smartphone releases. That was once the regular routine of Andrew Erickson, a longtime tech YouTuber, who recalled to me with a mixture of nostalgia and awe the time he braved the rain at 4:30 a.m. to join a line for the newest iPhone. The line snaked through the mall, nearly reaching the parking lot.

[Read: The $10,000 MacBook Pro is here]

Next month, when Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 18 Pro, Erickson has no plans to even buy the phone, let alone fight crowds for it. Instead, along with a growing number of Americans, Erickson is buying used. He’s fed up with incremental improvements in gadgets, he told me, and is more interested in getting an old version of the iPhone 17 Pro when it hits the secondhand market at a discount. Already, almost half of his current devices were acquired secondhand, and as electronics prices soar amid an AI-fueled chip shortage, he expects that portion to grow. “The argument’s just getting weaker and weaker to buy brand-new,” he said.

Based on the numbers, old tech products are indeed being looked at in a new light. Globally, the size of the industry could reach $153.4 billion this year, up from $104.1 billion four years ago. The used-smartphone market alone is expected to grow by more than 12 percent in 2026, according to the International Data Corporation, which forecasts that the market for new smartphones will experience a record drop this year. Growth in secondhand electronics and refurbished gadgets that have been restored to full working condition now outpaces that of new products on eBay, the e-commerce giant reports.

Among a number of shoppers I spoke with, there was a sense that new models are indistinguishable from the old ones, and the hype of securing the latest and greatest has given way to an upgrade cycle driven by practicality. More than ever before, people are eager to buy used.

“We’ve never been here,” Lauren Benton, the U.S. general manager of the refurbished-electronics marketplace Back Market, told me. She said demand ticked up immediately after Apple unveiled price hikes this summer. Back Market’s order values for refurbished MacBooks in the U.S. increased by 37 percent throughout the week following the price increase, while order values for iPads rose 25 percent. Demand for the company’s non-Apple laptops, too, has soared by 74 percent compared with last year. Outside of students and parents, a large portion of the marketplace’s buyers are “people that understand that the newer tech isn’t giving us all that much more,” Benton said.

Regular upgrade cycles were a hallmark of tech gadgets in the 2010s, a trend led by Apple, which has introduced at least one new iPhone model every year since its initial launch. Americans bought into the frenzy: In 2014, the first year Consumer Intelligence Research Partners tracked such figures, about 44 percent of iPhone holders said they replaced their device every one to two years. In those days, lines at Apple stores stretched so long that they were used by analysts to gauge annual demand.

In 2026, the lines that former Apple fanatics once waited in have all but disappeared. Online preorders are partly to blame, but so is dissipating excitement for releases that promise incremental upgrades. People now hold on to their smartphone for three years or longer, fatigued from “buying, effectively, the same device over and over and over again,” Wamsi Mohan, a Bank of America analyst who covers Apple, told me. Those buying new are doing so largely because their phone was broken or stolen, rather than to get their hands on new features. A recent report found that 76 percent of buyers refuse to upgrade until new capabilities feel “worth the cost.”

And those costs are climbing, driven by data centers eating up the world’s inventory of RAM. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11, Sony’s PlayStation 5, and Microsoft’s XBox Series S console were all marked up $100 this year. Apple conceded to “unavoidable” hikes in June, increasing the cost of its MacBooks and iPads by roughly 15 to 25 percent. Even the most ardent tech loyalists have changed their buying habits: A recent poll of thousands of readers of 9to5Mac, a website popular among Apple fans, revealed that 38 percent of them intended to upgrade less frequently because of higher prices.

In tandem, people are warming up to refurbished devices. Google queries for secondhand laptop have jumped by upwards of 5,000 percent over the past year. In an April CNET survey, nearly half of U.S. adults said they’d considered buying refurbished tech within the past year and cited cost-effectiveness and expensive new models as driving factors. Angie Cardona-Nelson, who recycles used electronics on eBay, told me that when she started her business in 2008, selling refurbished devices was tough going—she’d sit on products for months, attempting to drum up business with sales or discounts. “There was no confidence to buy a used item,” she said. Since January 2025, her laptop sales have more than doubled, and new listings are being bought up in a week or two.

The way people are buying secondhand devices has also shifted: Instead of opting for products that are roughly three generations behind, buyers are purchasing last year’s models—an indication that the refurbished industry is now attracting those who were “truly considering new,” according to Back Market’s Benton.

Erik Helgesen, the president of PayMore, a retail chain focused on used electronics, told me that the company had already seen a major uptick in sales preceding Apple’s price hike. But after, it was “just a hockey stick,” he said. Now PayMore can hardly keep some products in stock. Helgesen expects the company to open more stores in the coming year to meet demand.

This new readiness to opt out of the endless treadmill of releases seems to be a sign that people are starting to look for something more practical from their devices: deals. Whether this more utilitarian—and arguably healthier—approach to gadget consumption means that we’ll actually free ourselves from expensive tech, though, remains to be seen. A three-year-old MacBook may be a steal today, but as Nabila Popal, a senior director at the International Data Corporation, reminded me, prices reflect demand: If people keep buying up the used gadgets, those prices are bound to shoot up, too.

Today The Atlantic is announcing four new members of the editorial staff: Gabby Deutch and Ian Bogost as staff writers, and Nick Summers and Talya Zax as senior editors.

Ian is a familiar name to Atlantic readers, having been a contributing writer for the past 15 years; Gabby was an Atlantic editorial fellow in 2018 and 2019, and for the past five years has been a senior correspondent at Jewish Insider; Nick is a senior features editor who has worked at New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times, where he is currently the acting Sunday Business editor; Talya will be a senior editor on the Books desk, and has most recently been the opinion editor at The Forward.

Below is the staff announcement from editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance:

We’re writing to share excellent news: After nearly 15 years as a contributing writer, Ian Bogost is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer; an alumna of the Atlantic fellowship, Gabby Deutch, is returning to us as a staff writer; and Nick Summers and Talya Zax are coming on board as senior editors.

First, Ian. As all of you know by now, Ian is an original—and he has contributed so much to our magazine over the years, with uncommon creativity and range. Ian has produced serious reporting on the cultural and social power of Big Tech, and helped our readers understand the knock-on effects of DOGE under Trump, the chaotic rise of AI in higher education, and the decline of American populist-industrial ambition. He has also analyzed the ontology of slushies, the merits of cow therapy, the delight of toasters, the glory of the 747, the design of carry-on bins, and the strangeness of the McRib sandwich. And he has played with all kinds of formats. (Remember that time he built an old-timey slang generator?) In addition to his reported features and essays, Ian writes the new Ordinary Extraordinary newsletter, which is growing rapidly. When he isn’t writing for us, Ian also serves as the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. And he is the author of 11 books—most recently The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, which was published last month—and is a founding partner of a game and design studio.

Next, Gabby. A member of the 2018–19 fellowship class (along with the previously announced, happily returning Maddy Carlisle), Gabby went on to NewsGuard, where she covered the 2020 election and the proliferation of conspiracies and falsehoods during the coronavirus pandemic as Washington correspondent. Gabby has spent the past five years as a senior correspondent at Jewish Insider, focusing this election cycle on how disputes over anti-Semitism and Israel are affecting both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, Tablet, and Wired. We can’t wait to welcome her back.

In more good news, Nick Summers will be joining us as a features editor. Nick is a talented and experienced editor who comes to us from, among other publications, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times, where he is currently the acting Sunday Business editor. He is a skilled director of business and finance coverage—including investigations and deeply reported profiles of industry leaders—and he’s also assigned and edited stories on topics as varied as the scourge of LED lighting (clearly Nick will have much to discuss with Gilad) and a highly unusual copyright fight.

And finally, Talya Zax is joining us as a senior editor on the Books desk. A sharp, stylish, and omnivorous writer and editor, Talya comes to us from The Forward, where she spent more than a decade at the intersection of news and the arts—including as the publication’s deputy culture editor and, most recently, as its opinion editor. Talya has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, of course, The Atlantic, where she has contributed reviews and reported stories about fiction and theater. We are very happy she’s agreed to join us and can’t wait for her to start.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | press@theatlantic.com

The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium—which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, “you can barely see the sun” through the smoke: “It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.”

In Europe, many of the fires have threatened populated areas, but in the U.S., much of the area burning in the West has been rural. Near the Oregon town of Jordan Valley, the Big Grass Fire has been burning since July 23 and is among the largest fires in the state’s modern history; toward the end of last month, it hopped a canyon and crossed the border to Idaho, where the smoke from this and other fires made the air quality the worst in the country. The complex of fires in Spokane, Washington, flattened entire neighborhoods; three other wildfires 10 times its size are burning elsewhere in the state.

If 2025 was a year of urban fire that destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles, 2026 is a year of rural fire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, told me. “This is an extraordinary fire season in the American West,” Swain said. “It just hasn’t been in California”—which usually accounts for much of the nation’s fire activity and its media attention.

Many of the biggest fires this year started because of back-to-back lightning strikes and have grown because of extreme heat, drought, and dry fuel left behind after an unusually warm winter. They’ve destroyed grazing land and crops, killed livestock, and incinerated fruit that was just shy of harvest. Many of the ranchers and government employees I spoke with compared 2026 to Oregon’s devastating fire season two years ago, when 1.9 million acres burned across the state; already this year, residents have lost hundreds of thousands more acres than that. When I spoke with Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, he was driving from the fires in Spokane to one near Walla Walla that was threatening the town’s water supply; the week before, he’d visited the burn area of the 150,000-acre Sinlahekin Fire. Firefighters there had used a road as a fire line, he said, and on one side of it, all was flat and black. On the other side, crops were wilting from the fire’s heat.

Because so many of the fires this year are burning on rugged terrain without many roads, the elite firefighters who rappel from helicopters and hike through miles of forest to reach a fire line have been in high demand, Upthegrove said. But these hotshot crews cannot hit every fire, and in many cases, ranchers are the first to get there. Silas Skinner, a sixth-generation cattle rancher, told me that when the Big Grass Fire broke out, three government trucks were there; the rest were rigs from the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association. RFPAs—about 40 of which are spread across Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada—are independent, volunteer firefighting nonprofits composed of local ranchers and farmers who are trained by state and federal agencies to help fill the firefighting gap in rural areas. Their equipment comes largely from military surplus—literally, in some cases, bulldozers that didn’t get sent to Vietnam, “and some that did,” Rayburn, who is one of the RFPAs’ main contacts in the Oregon government, said. In the weeks since lightning struck and started the fire, Skinner and about 100 other volunteers have been using military trucks, outfitted with water tanks and sprayers, to help government agencies fight the Big Grass Fire. It is currently burning an expanse of sagebrush and juniper trees nearly the size of Luxembourg.

Federal agencies have also been sending in thousands of employees to fight the fires. But with so many fires burning simultaneously, government resources have been stretched thin and diverted to those in more populated places such as Spokane. The volunteer firefighters, then, have taken on more of a share of the work than they have in the past, they told me. (Both the Forest Service and Wildland Fire Service said that it’s standard for RFPAs to take on more work during a fire season this active.) When I spoke with Morgan Kromm, a rancher and the secretary of the RFPA in Crane, Oregon, and Tom Doman, the association’s chairman, they’d just come off a 10-day stretch of back-to-back firefighting. They told me they’d been working in 36-hour shifts, and when I asked where they’d catch naps during those stretches—in their trucks?—Doman clarified: “We were not sleeping.” The Crane RFPA has already handled 18 fires this year—normally the total they’d have seen by about October—and “we still have 90 more days of fire season,” Doman said.

Fire seasons vary by region, but in general, they have been getting longer and less predictable. Both RFPAs and state officials told me that this has made it difficult to get resources when and where they’re needed. Typically, Oregon enters into mutual-aid agreements with states in the Southwest and along the East Coast that have different fire seasons and can help one another out. But the whole country has been so dry that “they’re busy with their own fires,” Michael Curran, the chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me. RFPAs provide mutual aid to one another too, while members also try to manage their own ranches and farms alongside firefighting. “Yesterday, we were moving cows, and the fire was burning right above us,” Skinner said. “So everybody kind of had an eyeball on it.”

Some of his grazing land has already burned. Other ranchers have found that their cattle died in the fire. In Jordan Valley, community members have been donating hay to those whose land burned, so their cattle will have something to eat. Rayburn told me that since that terrible 2024 fire season, she has watched landowners “for two years rebuilding fences and reestablishing water holes and reestablishing their cattle herds.” Now the fires are burning those same places—land where families have lived for generations, and land upon which their livelihoods still depend.

Here it is, August on Martha’s Vineyard, and Alan Dershowitz has barely been heard from.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He has been heard from on many topics—because Dershowitz is who he is, and pretty much anyone can join Substack, and TV bookers can be hard to resist. Still, he has said little publicly about the maddening injustice he’s faced in recent years: his annual summer shunning at the hands of the island’s liberal social gentry. Has this perennial comedy of ill manners—the Vineyard cancellation of Alan Dershowitz—finally run its course?

The story has become a familiar seasonal menace; as pernicious as ticks, and as hard to kill. Its particulars are known. Dershowitz, the inexhaustible Harvard Law professor who represented a gallery of notorious clients over several decades, was once a kibitzing dynamo here. But that was before the blacklists and the badgering.

In his telling (and retelling), Dershowitz became socially radioactive during Donald Trump’s first term, when he began speaking out on the president’s behalf, and then joined his first impeachment defense team. Although he did not personally support Trump—he’d been a lifelong Democrat who’d voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and would support Joe Biden in 2020—his stock explanation was that everyone is entitled to legal representation. It was the same basic principle he had applied when representing the likes of Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein. It was no different, in fact, than the occasion of Dershowitz’s first-ever visit to Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, when he was enlisted to help in the defense of Ted Kennedy after his late-night accident at Chappaquiddick.

Yet defending Trump was apparently too noxious for Dershowitz’s reputation. “I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard,” he lamented in a column in The Hill in 2018. According to Dershowitz, locals have urged his exclusion from various Vineyard businesses and institutions. Every summer, it seems, has brought a new episode in ostracism, cold shoulders in the hot sun.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The right is changing the rules of the culture war]

There was the Great Pierogi Incident last year at the West Tisbury farmers’ market, in which a vendor refused to sell half a dozen dumplings to Dershowitz, citing his representation of “several sexual predators and abusers, including Jeffrey Epstein.” Dershowitz claimed that he was being discriminated against over his vocal support for Israel and initiated a follow-up spectacle a week later in which the vendor, Krem Miskevich, refused to accept a signed copy of one of Dershowitz’s books (The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies) as a peace offering.

In 2022, Dershowitz said he’d received a fan email from a reader who alleged that he’d been beaten up at the beach (he did not specify where) just for carrying a copy of a book written by Dershowitz. “Without warning, I was slugged and punched in the face,” the man wrote to Dershowitz, who reprinted the unverified email on Substack in a post titled “Email From a Man Who Got Beaten Up for Reading My Book.”

And then there was the infamous clash at the Chilmark General Store with Dershowitz’s now very-much-ex-friend Larry David. In the annals of Dershowitz’s social spiral on the Vineyard, this conflagration has taken on almost-mythic dimensions, like his own personal Stalingrad. Dershowitz was sitting on the porch of the store with another friend, “who happened to be a very kind of radical woke lefty from New York, but very tolerant,” he told me. David was not very tolerant, at least of Dershowitz. He walked onto the porch, refused to shake Dershowitz’s hand, called him “disgusting,” and stormed off. Dershowitz said at the time that David was so irate, Dershowitz worried that the comedian might suffer a stroke.

That unpleasantness on the porch, memorialized on Page Six, took place five summers ago. But Dershowitz talks about it as if it were yesterday.

On a recent Saturday, I ventured north from Washington for a little hardship duty in Chilmark, the preciously pastoral town on the western side of the island where Dershowitz has owned a home since 1991. I approached him first by email, telling Dershowitz that I was curious about his current social standing on the Vineyard and how things were going for him this summer. The subject matter could be freshly topical, I figured, because his two most prominent clients—Trump and Epstein—are more toxic than ever. To my surprise, Dershowitz agreed to speak with me.

Actually, I was not surprised.

“We can meet on the porch for a slice,” he proposed.

Dershowitz, who turns 88 next month, has been presiding from the rocking chairs of the Chilmark General Store for decades, juggling pizza and discourse. When I arrived, I found him wearing a bright-red T-shirt with the words Proud American over an Israeli flag and an American one, each in the shape of a heart. He told me that he’d asked his wife, Carolyn Cohen, to join us but she had no interest. “She said, ‘I’m so sick and tired of this subject,’” he told me. Dershowitz conceded that he, too, is weary of it. “But, you know, it’s important that people get the whole context,” he said.

The whole context, in 2026, is basically this: Dershowitz says he has started a new life on the Vineyard. But just because his persecution tale has become an island eye-roll does not mean that it has subsided. Especially, according to Dershowitz, in his own, bucolic neighborhood. “Here in Chilmark, it’s 90 percent negative,” Dershowitz reported to me. That reception contrasts with what he gets in Miami Beach, where he spends his winters and where, he said, he is treated “wonderfully.” He is “treated very well” even in the more heavily trafficked Vineyard towns on the other side of the island. “In Edgartown and even Oak Bluffs, the African American community, I’m treated very well,” he said. “It’s all Chilmark. And it’s all Jewish, anti-Zionist.”

I noted that he can at least still hold court at the Chilmark General Store. But he argued with my choice of the term holding court.

“I used to—not anymore,” he said.

“You don’t hold court anymore?” I asked, as he arguably held court. “What is this?”

“You’re interviewing me,” he said. In the past, it would have been a high-end conclave. “Normally, we would have this whole area,” he said, motioning to a group of rocking chairs on one side of the porch. “I would have Larry David here,” he said. “Ted Danson was here sometimes,” he added. “The guy who did Ghostbusters—he died a few years ago—he was here.” (This was Harold Ramis, who died in 2014.)

“The whole crew of Chilmark friends, I would say, 20 or so, no longer talk to me,” Dershowitz said.

He pointed next door to the Chilmark Tavern, one of his favorite restaurants on the Vineyard, where he claims that some of his vacation nemeses are trying to get him banned. “A bunch of people went to the Chilmark Tavern and said If you continue to serve Dershowitz, we’re not coming here,” he insisted.

I was skeptical of this. “Ask her; you can check with her,” he said. “Jenny.” When I contacted Jenna Petersiel, the proprietor of the Chilmark Tavern, she told me that she’d assumed that The Atlantic wanted to speak with her about the challenges of running a restaurant, or ticks. “A discussion of Alan Dershowitz had not crossed my mind,” she said, declining to comment otherwise. Dershowitz also told me of an event he had attended on the Chilmark Tavern deck not long ago. A woman got out of her car, he claimed, “saw I was up there, turned around, and went back to her car.”

He appears to have a limitless supply of such stories, in part because it seems as if Dershowitz initiates a fair number of confrontations himself. The week before our conversation, he had returned to the hallowed cultural battleground of the Pierogi Wars, the West Tisbury farmers’ market. He was wearing his U.S.-Israel shirt (or “my Zionist T-shirt,” of which he has two—one red, one blue) and saw a guy wearing a Free Palestine shirt. “I walked up to him. I said, ‘Can we take a picture together?’” The man refused. “He said, ‘No, no, no Israel,’ and he walked away.”

Dershowitz believes that many of his old Vineyard friends revile him for calling out the “anti-Zionist” and “radical” bent of the progressive left. He showed me his phone and cued up what he calls “my daily love note.” This one was an unsolicited email he’d just received, with “GENOCIDAL ZIONIST ISRAEL!” in the subject line; he kindly forwarded the note to me. “They always combine Zionism with pedophilia,” Dershowitz observed of his correspondents.

A few times during our conversation, I questioned Dershowitz about whether people really reject him because of his Zionist views or whether it might involve something more comprehensive: him being Alan Dershowitz. His position on the Middle East seems farther down the list of reasons that people might not like him than his affiliations with Trump and Epstein and his overall reputation, accrued over decades.

But Dershowitz claims, for instance, that he’s no longer asked to speak at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival because “they censor anybody they disagree with.” (A spokesperson for the book festival told me in an email that Dershowitz’s claim is “completely false” and that “the festival line up over the past two decades hardly reflects a narrow or excluding agenda.”)

“I personify what the woke hates,” Dershowitz said. Before I could ask him what, exactly, “the woke” is, he explained that he is now seen as a “traitor” to the Democratic Party. The enmity is mutual. In September, he has a new book coming out called Why I Quit the Dems: And So Should You! The subtitle is Confessions of a Reluctant Republican.

I asked Dershowitz directly whether he had voted for Trump in 2024.

“You’re allowed to ask it,” he said. “And my wife does not allow me to answer it.”

“Okay, so you’re going to hide behind your wife,” I said.

“I’m going to hide behind my wife,” he confirmed.

For the record, Dershowitz added that he always votes, and said that he had not voted for Kamala Harris. Also, his new book includes a blurb from President Trump (who obviously read every word).

Despite all of this, Dershowitz has arrived at a nuanced take on his snubbing. “I think it’s selective cancellation,” he told me. “We decided, basically, to change our life on the Vineyard.”

He said that he keeps busy by writing and doing regular paid appearances on Newsmax, occasional hits on Fox News, Piers Morgan’s show on YouTube, and other outlets. (He used to be on CNN all the time, but no more—“CNN has canceled me.”) He said that he does not lack social options. He has become very active in a Vineyard Chabad that he helped start. He told me at one point about all of the new friends he’s made. “Most of them are more supportive of Israel than the other group was,” he said. “And I often ask myself, How did I allow myself to become part of that other group?”

When I asked Dershowitz who his new friends are, we wound up talking about someone who is definitely in the “other group”: Larry David.

They used to speak all the time, Dershowitz told me. They would have dinner, share jokes. “I allowed him to use my gym to work out,” Dershowitz said. “I helped him on a number of occasions.”

“Larry David doesn’t talk to me anymore,” Dershowitz said at another point. “He screams and yells at me when he sees me.” He told me that he used to be a fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm but can no longer bring himself to watch it. When discussing David, Dershowitz often spoke in the present tense, describing their breach as if it were an active feud and a still-fresh wound.

Predictably, David had minimal enthusiasm for discussing any of this when I reached out to him.

“I don’t know why he’s still thinking and talking about me,” he told me by email.  

As for the five-year-old confrontation at the Chilmark store, David added this: “I have lots of confrontations on my show but rarely in life,” he said. “And then only if I think I can take them in a fight. Hence the Dershowitz dust-up.”

While Dershowitz and I spoke on the porch, a woman sitting in a rocking chair next to him kept leaning in, almost certainly eavesdropping. She confirmed this about half an hour into our conversation.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the woman said to Dershowitz. “I was just sitting here. And I just wanted to say, you sound super fascinating. And I hope nobody’s ever mean to you. Ever.”

Dershowitz kvelled.

“Did you plant her there or something?” I joked (sort of).

“I only paid her 10 dollars,” he joked (I think).

During our conversation, Dershowitz told me about a less cordial episode that had taken place last month in front of the Chilmark store, just a few feet from where we were sitting. The incident was not covered in the media, but Dershowitz had filmed a portion of it on his phone and shared the video with me. A guy in a Yankees cap had spotted Dershowitz at the store and promptly launched a barrage of Bronx cheers his way from the parking lot.

The man showed exemplary message discipline.

“Do you defend pedophiles? Do you defend pedophiles?” he repeated. “Yes, he does.”

Dershowitz demanded that his tormentor identify himself.

“My name is Jeffrey Epstein Jr., great friend to Alan Dershowitz,” the man replied.

Dershowitz kept demanding that the man state his name.

“What are you going to do?” the man asked.

“I’m going to sue you if you give your name,” Dershowitz said. (Surprisingly, the man continued to withhold his name.)

“Why? What are you going to sue me for?” he asked.

“For defamation.”

The heckler also mocked Dershowitz for, among other things, claiming to a TV reporter that, although he’d once received a massage from an adult woman at Epstein’s house, he’d kept his underwear on during the experience.

“He was on the plane, and he kept his underwear on,” the man taunted, while retreating across the street. There was some more hollering back and forth.

“You’re still a schmuck,” Dershowitz shouted.

In the pantheon of rogues and sleazeballs that Dershowitz has represented, Epstein stands out. Dershowitz helped orchestrate the late sex offender’s controversial plea deal in 2008; Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to state prostitution crimes in Florida, but he avoided federal trafficking charges and wound up serving just 13 months in jail. (At the time of his death, in 2019, he was awaiting trial on federal charges of child sex trafficking, by which point Dershowitz had fallen out with him and was no longer representing him.) Earlier in their relationship, they were frequent companions. Dershowitz was a visitor to Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach and New York, and went once with his wife and daughter to Epstein’s infamous island. (“No young women there,” Dershowitz wrote to me by email. “No one there except staff and ghislaine Maxwell.”)

I asked Dershowitz whether he’d ever been a passenger on Epstein’s plane.

“Oh, 20 times,” he said. As Epstein’s attorney, he explained, when he had to travel to Florida, his client would fly him down. However, the heckler’s claim that Dershowitz had received a massage on the plane was incorrect. That had taken place at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach. “This was a shoulder-and-neck massage, from an older woman,” Dershowitz told me. He said that this was “the only massage I’ve ever had in Epstein’s situation.”

“I’ve never in my life had an erotic massage. Not even from my wife,” he added, excruciatingly.

Dershowitz has said repeatedly that he never witnessed or participated in any unlawful sexual impropriety related to Epstein. In 2014, the Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre alleged in court documents that the financier had trafficked her to multiple men while she was a minor. This included Dershowitz, who vehemently denied the charges. Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation, and Dershowitz countersued, claiming that she had made up the accusations. Giuffre withdrew her suit against Dershowitz in 2022, acknowledging that she might have made a mistake in identifying him. She died by suicide last year.

[Gilad Edelman: What everyone assumes about Jeffrey Epstein]

“I wish I never met him,” Dershowitz told me, speaking of Epstein. “But I don’t regret my representation of him.” This struck me as a classic bit of Dershowitz hairsplitting, and I was not quite sure what to make of it. Regardless, Dershowitz conveyed far more remorse over representing Epstein than I heard him express about any of his other clients. And he told me that he is resigned to Epstein being a lasting stain on his reputation and legacy.

“I’ve been already told I will have a bad obituary in The New York Times,” he volunteered.

“Who told you that?” I asked. “Do they work at The New York Times?”

“No,” Dershowitz said. He claimed to have heard it “from a guy who does obituaries for another newspaper.” (Apparently, all obit writers swap notes.) He added that an obituary writer for the Times did call him.

“With his deep obituary voice,” he noted, affecting a stentorian baritone. “I have to tell you that your obituary will include the allegations against you from Jeffrey Epstein,” the Times reporter said, according to the deep-voiced Dershowitz. He said that he’d urged the obit guy to “put it in perspective.” (Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, declined to comment on any specific obituaries but told me by email, “We don’t write ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ obituaries, but strive for fair, comprehensive and accurate accounts of a person’s full life.”)

Dershowitz wanted to make clear to me how unfair he believes the Epstein-related allegations against him are. He and his wife have been married for 40 years, he said: “I have never cheated. I have never hugged—I don’t hug people. I don’t like hugging.” He also told me that he is “not a big massage person.”

“And by the way, nobody on the Vineyard believed this, even the people who hated me,” Dershowitz added. “Because they all see me with my wife.”

He went further. “In fact, the lawyer for Virginia Giuffre, he came over to me one day”—it was during a deposition—“and said, ‘Alan, I’ve seen you with your wife. I can’t believe you would ever have done anything.’”

I said I was dubious that the opposing lawyer would say something like this.

“I’ll give you his name—his name is Chuck Cooper.”

Reached by phone for comment, Charles Cooper, Giuffre’s lawyer, told me the exchange that Dershowitz had described had never taken place.

“This event that he’s reporting and this comment that he’s attributing to me are both categorically untrue,” Cooper said. He added that he remembers seeing Dershowitz with his wife on only one occasion, and that it was enough for him to make only a “fleeting observation.” Either way, “I did not say and I would never have said what he’s attributed to me,” Cooper said. “Give me a break.”

In the course of my discussion with Dershowitz, I learned of another fundamental change to his life, one that filled me with something I did not expect to feel: pathos.

Last year, Dershowitz’s son Elon died at 64, after suffering a stroke. He had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor when he was 10 and had been told that he’d be lucky to make it to his bar mitzvah. “We took extraordinary steps,” Dershowitz said, “all over the world.”

Elon had been his father’s sidekick. A film producer, he was the prime mover behind Reversal of Fortune, the 1990 legal thriller based on Dershowitz’s book about his successful defense of the British socialite Claus von Bülow in his trial for the attempted murder of his wife. The film solidified the status of Dershowitz (played by Ron Silver) as one of the “super lawyers” of his generation. “We went to the Oscars together,” Dershowitz said of him and Elon. Jeremy Irons won Best Actor for his portrayal of von Bülow. They went to an after-party. “I sat next to Gregory Peck, and it was a great moment,” Dershowitz said.

When Dershowitz spoke about Elon, I detected a note of anguish in his voice. On the Vineyard, they’d been pretty much inseparable. Dershowitz’s son used to join him at the Chilmark store, when he still held court. “He would come to the porch with me every day,” Dershowitz said. If anyone came up and started giving him trouble, Elon would get after them. “He was my guy.”

[Read: Nantucket doesn’t belong to the preppies]

Everybody on the Vineyard liked Elon, Dershowitz said: “Even when they turned against me, they generally didn’t turn against Elon.”

“Although Larry David did.”

“Even when my son died—and Larry knew him very well—he never sent me a card,” Dershowitz said. “Never called me, never did anything to acknowledge it.”

After I returned from the Vineyard, I spoke with Dershowitz by phone. Since my visit, he’d suffered a fractured rib. When I asked how it had happened, he lamented that the cause was nothing dramatic. “I mean, I’d love to have a great story,” he said. “Passionate lovemaking, you know?” (Although definitely not an erotic massage.)

Alas. “I sneezed too hard,” he said. “My doctor told me at my age, a sneeze or a hard cough can fracture a rib.”

Despite being in pain, Dershowitz said that he was planning to go that night to a Chabad event at the home of the billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a big Republican donor and supporter of Israel. In a few days, Dershowitz was scheduled to be honored at the Chabad to mark the 75th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. We briefly revisited the Pierogi Incident; he sent me a link to a Facebook post from someone marking “the anniversary of Pierogigate” and vowing to “have a potato pierogi later today in honor of Dershowitz.”

When I mentioned Larry David’s name again, Dershowitz sounded freshly pained—as if I’d elbowed him in his bad rib. They had been really good friends, he reiterated. I asked whether he’d had any interaction with David since the Chilmark-store episode in 2021. Not really, Dershowitz said, except for one chance meeting at a restaurant, in which David had again blown him off. Later, Dershowitz wanted to know whether I’d spoken with David for this story.

After our initial email exchange, I finally did speak with David by phone late last week. He was on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and I expected him to be cantankerous and annoyed—which he was at first. When I brought up the matter of Elon’s death, however, David’s tone shifted. “He’s 100 percent right,” David told me, referring to Dershowitz. “I should have reached out, and I certainly regret not doing so. As I said on Curb once, ‘I think of nice things. I just don’t act on them.’”

David, who turned 79 last month, said that he has been “softening” and might be open to some kind of rapprochement with Dershowitz, if only to extinguish their one-way feud once and for all. “I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him, actually,” David told me. “Certainly because of his son.”

It was a touching moment, and seemed sincere. But something also felt off, as if the network had enlisted focus groups and then ordered up a feel-good ending.

Then David sent me an email the next morning.

“I’m loath to say anything mean because he’s been so ostracized,” he wrote of Dershowitz. A reversion to sarcasm! “But he only has himself to blame. He made a deal with the devil. Literally. And I’d bet the devil hasn’t said a word to him since the impeachment.”

Every July, I take my boys back to my hometown in Indiana so we can watch the Independence Day parade. They run around in American-flag shirts and devour far too many rocket pops as vintage cars, tractors, and an Abraham Lincoln in shorts make their way down Main Street.

I’ve always loved that parade, but it’s not the same one I recall watching as a girl. In recent years—in between the marching bands and Girl Scouts—comes a camouflage military Humvee, a papier-mâché bald eagle flying at a jumbo-size Bible, and a tribute to “Indiana’s fallen heroes,” during which photos of so many, too many, young Hoosiers who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq are carried out on banners. It’s a somber scene. The shadow of September 11, the wars that followed, and the culture that shaped us all hangs over the parade.

I’m not usually one to read much into the symbolism of anniversaries, but this year marks both 250 years since the founding of the United States and 25 years since 9/11. I can’t think of one without the other, because September 11 not only transformed how the United States interacted with Muslims abroad and at home; it also changed our collective view of American values around citizenship, identity, and civil liberties.

In my earliest memories, we didn’t have a hometown mosque—there wasn’t enough money or enough Muslims to build one. But by the early 1990s, the community had raised the funds. We were excited to celebrate our newly constructed mosque amid the cornfields, but not everyone felt the same way. During the official ground-breaking, one of the neighbors blasted music aggressively. Then one day, a mountain of dirt appeared along that neighbor’s property line—a berm to, presumably, hide the mosque from sight. We children were warned to stay away. If someone accidentally kicked a soccer ball into the neighbor’s lawn, we were not to chase it. It’s disorienting, as a kid, to feel unwelcome in your own hometown.

[Steven B. Smith: How to love the U.S.A.]

I was a teenager on September 11, and mourned with all Americans the terrible loss of 2,977 lives on that awful day. Three months later, bullet holes were discovered in a window at the mosque, though no one saw the culprit and no one was hurt. Muslim communities in other parts of the country faced more threats in the days, weeks, and years that followed. It became routine for women in hijabs to be harassed and for mosques to be vandalized. In Ohio, a man plowed his Ford Mustang into the front door of a mosque. In Texas, a man threw a Molotov cocktail toward a mosque; children fled as it shattered. In Seattle, a man attempted to set fire to cars in a mosque parking lot and then fired a gun at worshippers. I’m not sure how much I knew of these episodes at the time, but I was well aware that some Americans were deeply distrustful of Muslims, and I worried about the rumblings of government surveillance.

But in my hometown, such threats were not the norm. The Indiana I grew up in was friendly, known for its “Hoosier hospitality.” Sure, it wasn’t always particularly attuned to difference. When I was in middle school, our class learned about Islam by watching Not Without My Daughter—the 1991 East-versus-West saga about an American woman, played by Sally Field, who was trapped in Iran by her husband.  

One of the benefits of growing up in a fairly tight-knit city with a small-town feel, though, was that a lot of folks had known me—and my siblings and parents—for most of my life. Despite the bad guys who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, to most locals we were just “the Khalids.” I was fortunate to have a relatively normal high-school experience. For homecoming I tie-dyed my hijab red and white—our school colors—and classmates complimented the look. It sounds so much like a cheesy Hallmark movie that I’ve asked friends and family to confirm, so I can make sure I’m not misremembering it all.

But as 9/11 retreats further into the past, strangely, anti-Muslim rhetoric has grown—no longer veiled or marginalized but actively celebrated by those in power. Prominent lawmakers have made it clear that they don’t see people like me as Americans. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee wrote on social media in March, the same month that Representative Randy Fine of Florida wrote, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.”  

“Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina recently posted.

But the messages that are the most difficult for me to reconcile are the voices of my own people: Hoosiers.

In May, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, went on a conservative Christian talk show and declared: “I hate Islam. It’s a demonic death cult.” (He added that he actually loves Muslims because we make “great Christians” once we find Jesus.)

His comments came just days after three people were killed in a shooting at a mosque in San Diego. Beckwith didn’t mention that shooting, or any of the concerns that Muslims have for their safety—the need, for example, to hire guards or install security gates, as my old hometown mosque did. He wore a polo shirt with the insignia of the state of Indiana when he said that Americans need “permission to hate again,” and singled out Islam for that hatred.

After a group of religious leaders including Jews condemned Beckwith’s comments, he called them “deeply misguided” on X and wrote, “One need not look far into history to see what happens when the sheep are persuaded they can safely coexist with the wolf.”

To me, it was all a depressing sign of how much my homeland has changed in the past 25 years.

I first started noticing the shift in the run-up to the 2016 election, as a reporter for NPR. I covered American politics, interviewing voters during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent politics, and an era in which being Muslim became seen as antithetical to being American.

In 2015, I was at a resort in Orlando for the Florida Republican Party’s major political summit. By the time Donald Trump took the stage, the crowd was hearing murmurs of a tragedy unfolding in Paris—coordinated shootings and bombings by ISIS militants in what would become one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in French history.

A Muslim woman in a hijab spotted me in the audience, and excitedly introduced herself, thinking I was a fellow Republican in this unwelcoming crowd. “Sorry, I’m a reporter,” I said. But good luck, I thought.

Roughly a week later, Trump was proclaiming—falsely—that when the Twin Towers fell, “thousands and thousands” of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey.

Soon after, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

In Florida, I met a man named Jared at an event for Trump-campaign volunteers. As I was about to leave, he stopped me. He wanted to share something that had been on his mind: why Trump’s “Muslim ban” would be beneficial for a Muslim such as me. “True believers” of Islam, he warned, have a mission: to come to the U.S. and do “heinous things.” And if they did, that would be a liability for me—I could even end up in an internment camp. A “Muslim ban,” he said, was just “risk mitigation.” I didn’t bother telling him that I had always thought of myself as a true believer: someone who prays, fasts, and believes deeply and personally in God.

Shortly after that conversation, Trump casually told Anderson Cooper on CNN, “I think Islam hates us.” It was a flippant comment made by a man known for hyperbole and bombast, but one that is seared into my memory. Who exactly was “us”?

Trump didn’t create suspicion of Muslims; he merely tapped into fears and distrust that had been bubbling up since 9/11. But his comments started permeating into our broader culture.

In late 2018, I went to the Mahoning Valley in eastern Ohio. I’ve visited that region many times, in part because it’s a place that tells a story of changing American politics—one of the counties that voted for Barack Obama before turning redder—and in part because it reminds me of home. These are the former steel hubs, old manufacturing towns and cities where many people tell me how much better life used to be.

One of my first stops was the local Republican Party headquarters, in an ordinary strip mall. Connie, one of the club’s volunteers, had told me to swing by because they were having their Christmas party that evening.

Before the festivities kicked off, we were chatting, and she told me how absurd it seemed to her that classic songs like “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” had become offensive to some people.

“You don’t want to hear it, go away. Get out of our country,” she said.

I initially thought she was complaining in a general sense about liberals, but then the conversation turned personal.

“You’re probably a Muslim?” she asked. (Probably the hijab was a giveaway.)

“I don’t care for them, I’m sorry,” she continued. “First of all, take that scarf off.”

“Me?” I asked, suddenly confused.

“When I see girls with those headscarves on, it just irritates me,” she said.

I tried to explain that I wear the scarf because I want to, that not all my sisters do, and that, frankly, my dad’s never been a big fan.

“You’re so pretty,” she said—a backhanded compliment, I assumed, to convey that she just thought I’d look better without a scarf. “I mean you have a pretty face.”

Connie was a former hairdresser, the kind of woman who, well into her 70s, still manicured her nails and had a blond pixie cut. I had interviewed her twice before, so perhaps that familiarity allowed her to feel that she could be candid. And I wanted to hear that candor—I was curious. So I asked her why she didn’t “care for” Muslims.

“Because they want to take over America,” she said.

Personally, I’d never met a Muslim who came to America to “take it over,” so I was baffled.

“ Why can’t they just come here and live like us?” she went on. “If you want to be an American, be an American. Or be a Muslim.” She said it as if the two were incompatible.

“Do what we do,” she continued. “We were here first, okay? You’re second.”

That comment has haunted me for years: We were here first, and you’re second.

The story of Islam in America is not a foreign story; it began long before September 11—before, even, our nation’s founding. Thousands of Muslims were present in the colonies, captured in West Africa and brought to the shores of North America in chains. Historians estimate that 10 to 15 percent—possibly even 30 percent—of enslaved people transported to North America were Muslim.

One of those people, Yarrow Mamout, was brought to Annapolis, Maryland, in the summer of 1752, where he was put up for sale. He spent decades enslaved on plantations in Maryland, before gaining his freedom and building a home on a plot of land he bought on what is now Georgetown. I live near where his house once stood, and to my shame knew little about Yarrow’s story, though he was so well known in his time that he was painted by the famous Revolutionary War–era portrait artist Charles Willson Peale. That portrait is now preserved at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Peale was fascinated by Yarrow and wrote about him in his diary: “Yarrow has been noted for sobriety & a chearfull conduct, he professes to be a mahometan, and is often seen & heard in the Streets singing Praises to God—and conversing with him he said man is no good unless his religion comes from the heart.”

When Yarrow died in 1823, an obituary was published on him in more than 38 papers. His house is now gone, but at the site you’ll find a plaque—a reminder not just of Yarrow but of the tens of thousands of Muslims already here at the nation’s founding.

When the Founders first enunciated their commitment to religious freedom, they were thinking about Muslims. The protections of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson wrote, extended to “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” He invoked Islam to demonstrate the theoretical reach of religious freedom in America—even as tens of thousands of enslaved African Muslims were denied that freedom themselves.

For the past three years, I’ve been working on a PBS documentary series tied to America’s 250th anniversary called American Muslims: A History Revealed that tells these and other stories. I wanted my sons to have a fuller vision of American, and Muslim, history. The 9/11 era shaped so much of my adult life. It changed not just how we deal with one another—domestic surveillance laws, TSA checks, a political shift in American partisan politics—but also how we interact with the rest of the world. I had hoped that the era of the U.S. fighting in the Middle East wouldn’t be a patriotic inheritance for my boys.

But if anything, we seem to be stuck in an even worse version of 9/12—one governed less by fear than by outright hate.

This unease with Islam isn’t an issue only on the right. For all of the Biden administration’s talk about diversity, few Muslims had any role in foreign-policy decisions. Many Muslim Democrats remain angry about Joe Biden’s approach to the war in Gaza, and feel that his attitude toward Palestinians abroad was so dehumanizing that it has exacerbated hostility and harassment at home. But on the right, Islamophobia has been much more direct.

[Read: What the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani reveal]

This summer, Beckwith, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, told the podcast Conservative Review that Islam is “a more dangerous ideology than even Nazism.” I had been wondering whether he might ever apologize for saying “I hate Islam.” Eventually I emailed his office to ask. An aide replied that “Lieutenant Governor Beckwith does not regret his comments and has not had a change of heart.”

Since 9/11, the Muslims of my hometown have grown in number. The mosque has expanded. I’m told that relations with the neighbor have improved, though the mound of dirt remains—now covered in grass and trees, but still a warning to stay on our side of the property line. I tried calling and texting the neighbor, but she declined to talk—replying “do I want to speak to you NO” and “you need to research your information a lot better.”

Growing up, I had thought of our mosque’s neighbor as a bit of an odd character—an uncharacteristically unfriendly midwesterner, her attitude not particularly indicative of how Muslims were seen in the city or the state.

But in the past decade, politicians have amplified and normalized that animosity toward Muslims, even when it has no basis in reality. This summer, Beckwith advocated for banning the Muslim call to prayer on loudspeakers—though there are no reports of any mosques in Indiana publicly broadcasting it.

Most dramas about murderous women save the revelations of deviance for the end, after parceling out uncertainty and complication. Furious does things exactly backwards. Here is a monster, the Hulu series announces with its very first scene, during which an unblinking blonde in a Halloween cat mask kills a man by forcibly injecting him with fentanyl, which she keeps in a bedazzled silver tin. “I don’t really like listening to you,” she whispers, as he gasps for breath. “I don’t like the sounds you’re making. But I love your smile.” After he dies, she reaches for a bowl of candy corn, which she eats slowly and with care, piece by piece.

The scene felt confrontational to me at first watch, as though it were daring me to switch it off in discomfort. But why? Crime shows begin with violated women all the time—the naked, bloodied female corpse is such a staple in the genre’s visual language that viewers hardly notice it. Why is a scene of a young woman luxuriating in her sadistic treatment of a man so unsettling? As Furious goes on, it offers up more murders, but also more context for why this woman, Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew), is doing what she’s doing—and although she remains monstrous, the show shades in her full, horrifying humanity.

Furious—created by the writer Liz Meriwether and executive-produced by the actor Emmy Rossum, who also stars in it—is preoccupied with elemental ideas about violence and transformation, which juxtapose nicely with the more conventional framework of a police procedural. Rossum plays Alice, a former detective turned FBI grunt who’s dragged into investigating Catherine’s latest victim by her former partner Danny (Scoot McNairy). Like Catherine, Alice has been warped by trauma; her previous boyfriend, also a police officer (Jake Lacy), beat her, and all of her colleagues except Danny froze her out when she finally reported him. She uses apps to find sexual partners who will agree to beat her, role-playing her own abuse. In one episode, she outright refuses to shower, a tendency that seems off-putting until her sister reveals to Danny that her ex used to drag her from the shower to hit her, sometimes leaving her passed out under the running water.

[Read: Everything we know about rape is wrong]

Early on, the show evokes Medusa—whose rape at the hands of Poseidon saw her turned into a hideous Gorgon with snakes for hair—in reference to Catherine, whose own history is at least as cruel; there are also multiple references to the Furies, winged goddesses of retribution. Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who runs the FBI sex-crimes division that Alice is trying to get assigned to, describes the room that agents use to review child-sexual-abuse material as “the darkest pit of Hades down deep in the bottom of the Earth.” Washington’s perpetual rage, and her attempts to quash it with emotional detachment and tequila, suffuses every scene she’s in.

Watching the show, I remembered the moment, almost a decade ago, when women’s anger became the subject of countless books and news stories—when many people expressed hope that it might have a revolutionary power. Instead, during a period when women have lost fundamental rights and have been confronted with the apparent futility of their protests, cultural narratives about women’s rage no longer have the luxury of optimism. Instead, anger has metastasized into vengeance, inflamed and out for blood.

While watching Furious, I happened to read Honey, by Imani Thompson: a wry and erudite take on the dark-academia genre about a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge named Yrsa (derived from an Old Norse word for “furious”) who—almost accidentally—becomes a serial killer. Yrsa’s journey toward murder begins casually one day, when she tips a bee into the lemonade of an older male colleague who has betrayed Yrsa’s friend and stolen credit for the research project they were working on together. When the bee stings the man, who’s allergic to them, Yrsa watches while he chokes to death, observing “the theatrics of the wheezing man. The red-hot raspberry of his face.” When he falls to the ground, she gets onto her knees and strokes his hair. Afterward, she eats ice cream. Murder in the book becomes associated with sweetness and satiation. In dull moments after the man’s death, Yrsa replays the scene in her mind, and it fills her up.

Thompson wanted to write about a female serial killer, she said in one interview, because “we always see the woman as a victim,” in ways that are often glamorized. But Yrsa is also working on a Ph.D. about “Afropessimism and Black women’s discourses on their liberation,” and the book is studded with references to academics and writers who consider the heritage of violence. Yrsa often uses critical theory to try to justify what she’s doing: She cites thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, and Saidiya Hartman, and fixates particularly on Hartman’s essay Venus in Two Acts, about all of the nameless murdered Black girls obliterated by history. How, Hartman wonders, can she “revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” In Yrsa’s mind, this question becomes twisted into the idea that punishing abusive men might redress some of the imbalance.

Yrsa does so in part by tracking down men outed on a site where sex workers name their most vicious clients. She injects one with a fatal dose of heroin and enjoys doing it, much like Catherine, savoring the memory of “that moment when she realized he was vulnerable only to her. That moment when she could do anything.” Late in Furious, Catherine tells Alice about how her brutal actions feel to her: “It’s power, watching someone die.” She adds, “When I’m killing someone, it’s like I’m eating him, like I’m swallowing him, like everything he’s ever done is disappearing inside me.” She is, it turns out, pursuing and murdering the men who hurt her when she was an underage teenager being trafficked for sex, starting with the pimp who beat, raped, and starved her. Her pleasure in killing, unlike Yrsa’s, is derived not from the act itself but from neutralizing what these men did to her.

[Read: When women are accused of complicity]

The show is a fascinating pivot for Meriwether, who previously created the beloved offbeat Fox comedy New Girl and who most recently co-created the FX series Dying for Sex, about a woman who receives a fatal cancer diagnosis and decides to pursue sexual pleasure in her final months. There are moments in Furious that come off as morbidly comic—an FBI agent played by Rob Yang shouts “Boom!” at inopportune moments, and a witness with muscular dystrophy (Steve Way) needles police officers with his wheelchair—but more often, the series is pitch-dark. The show was shot with anamorphic lenses to foster a moody, surveillant feeling, evoking David Fincher more than Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The point seems to be to use the visual language of neo-noir while shifting the focus to characters who don’t usually draw the camera’s attention.

Furious has been referred to as a “crime drama for a post-Epstein world,” and one of the characters—a billionaire with similar proclivities who seems to operate with impunity—seems modeled after the serial sex offender. “The ones who are really to blame don’t get caught, never, never,” Nora tells Alice. “You think you’re ever gonna catch anyone who matters?” But Meriwether, in an interview with Vulture, noted that she was “much more interested in the experience of the women than I am with the experience of the perpetrator,” and the show is especially curious regarding women who become compelled to victimize others. What does living with that kind of trauma and injustice do to a person’s psyche? “My memory sucks,” Catherine says in one scene, trying to piece together fragments of her past life into a coherent shape. “It’s ’cause I got strangled so much.”

The actors in Furious are uniformly brilliant: Bernstine’s achingly blasé Nora; McNairy’s frowsy, compassionate Danny; Rossum’s magnetic and volatile Alice. Petticrew turns Catherine’s postured immaturity into something vividly repulsive—she’s constantly restaging the girlhood she never got to have, but in an unavoidably corrupted way. By the show’s end, we can better understand her, even if we’re lucky enough not to have her tolerance for cruelty. What happens to anger when it can’t be absorbed? We can only consider whether there’s truth in Nora’s assertion that only evil can really fight evil, and that in order to defend humanity, you occasionally have to sacrifice your own.

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In the Henrik Ibsen play The Wild Duck, Dr. Relling dispenses a drug that soothes the most profound self-loathing: livsløgn, a “life-lie,” a form of grandiose self-delusion that lets the pathetic figures who take it believe that they are geniuses and noble romantics. The life-lie, it turns out, is a hell of a drug—perhaps the most potent Scandinavian pharmaceutical invention before Ozempic—and keeps the play’s fragile characters from succumbing to “self-contempt and despair.” Against Relling’s advice, another character, Gregers, decides to free these losers from their life-lies and expose them. The play ends with a suicide.

On Friday, the former Cambridge professor Jason Arday died at the age of 41. British police said his death was “unexpected” but not “suspicious.” This classification, unexpected but not suspicious, includes the possibility that he died accidentally. But reports of Arday’s delicate emotional state at the time have led most to assume that he killed himself after weeks of accumulating revelations that he had lied compulsively for personal and professional gain. One of his last public statements was an interview with The Times of London in which he affirmed that he was “not a liar,” a line itself so blatantly false that any Ibsen fan would have recognized symptoms of a livsløgn overdose. He gave no George Santos–like, impish shrug at having been finally caught. (What took you so long?) He did not prepare to switch careers to pursue reality-TV stardom or write a Catch Me if You Can–style memoir about the dupes he met along the way. Instead, his response suggested—it is painful to notice this now, when nothing can be done—that he felt he had to stick with his story. That way led to a catastrophic end: narcissistic collapse, in which the lies stop working on others and finally on the liar himself. Arday appears to have convinced himself, wrongly, that the last remaining option was suicide, which was, of course, his final self-delusion. His lies won him undeserved praise and status, and they gave (unforgivably) false hope to people whose loved ones have severe developmental delays. But the only lie that ever killed anyone was the last one.

Some are now suggesting that Arday was the victim, and the people who drew attention to his lies, the villains. Ibram X. Kendi suggests that Arday might even be vindicated after a full accounting of the allegations against him. (Keep in mind that in addition to his straightforward acts of fabrication and plagiarism, always of less powerful academics, he claimed to have taken part in a British documentary series that preceded his birth.) And the hapless Good Law Project, which persuaded dozens of Cambridge bigwigs to rally behind Arday and dismiss his critics as racists, has issued an open letter calling for an investigation of “the press.” The media’s alleged crime: writing about this extraordinary case of a habitual liar’s appointment to a distinguished academic post, rather than letting the liar keep embarrassing himself and his institution. “Reasonable public interest” in the case had dissipated, the letter says, yet the press kept digging. Arday’s death was, it says, the “direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment.”

A Buddhist proverb says that when a wise man points at the moon, the fool stares at his finger. The media were unrelenting, but con-man stories are always popular, and the bigger the victim, the better. The press’s obsession was in proportion with the outlandishness of the lies told by Arday and on his behalf, and with public interest in the failures they revealed. Those failures were intellectual, institutional, and even legal. Arday called the cops on an academic who had asked him hostile questions, and he instructed a law firm to send a threatening letter to a reporter who did the same. The focus on those who pointed out Arday’s shortcomings, rather than on Arday himself and those who abetted his rise, is a clear sign that lessons from this miserable episode remain unlearned. The people responsible for it may repeat their errors and, in some cases, commit appalling new ones. (Kendi compares Arday’s treatment to a “lynching.” This analogy is tenable only if you think lynching means harshly criticizing people for actual transgressions, rather than summarily murdering them for no reason at all.)

[Read: The truths that failed Jason Arday]

Some lies are so preposterous that intelligent people who believe them bear some responsibility for being taken in. And they are outright guilty for repeating the lies and urging others to believe them. This is obviously so in Arday’s case. The lies depended on willful credulity, as well as amplification by other professors, including Cambridge’s Hilary Cremin, who went on the BBC and told Arday that “you are the best in the world, in terms of the research that you do.” Reviewers gushed over his books and pronounced them moving, “brave,” and “insightful.” Defenders did begin to distance themselves when the lies became even more lurid and inexplicable, as with the claims that a masked man invisible to security cameras had menaced Arday with a knife and that someone had sent him the head of a pig, which he disposed of rather than preserved as evidence. The trajectory of his deception seems to have been from tragedy (a man carried away with lies and too compulsive to stop telling them) to farce (once the lies became ridiculous enough that only a complicit person could believe them) and finally back to tragedy on Friday. Arday’s colleagues, his editors, and the people who knew he was a fraud but said nothing have absorbed some ridicule for their role in hiring and publishing him. But to date, I have seen no evidence that they have considered their complicity, let alone repaired the damage to their institutions by explaining their error or, better yet, just resigning.

They elevated Arday, a fragile and disturbed person, into a position where his fragility would be tested and he would be shattered. Even if the Cambridge Faculty of Education’s standards were so low that his inadequacies would remain unremarked there, he was a fellow of a Cambridge college with real scholars who would eventually be indignant upon realizing that their new colleague’s scholarship consisted of copy-paste jobs, semiliterate nonsense, and fan notes on his favorite 1990s Brit-pop. Did Arday’s allies think no one would notice? That those who noticed would be forever intimidated into polite silence? That drinking sherry in the common room of Jesus College would be a pleasant experience for Arday himself as he waited to be found out? Those who placed Arday in that situation were cruel and heartless. They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon. The journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse. They were gravity.

In The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s main villain is Gregers, the crusading moralist who makes it his mission to “rescue” the characters from their sustaining life-lies and help them and those who respect them see their deficiencies. The Gregers in this case is Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher with an abiding interest in race and a particular curiosity about the supposed mental deficiencies of Black people. Cofnas’s views on race science (he believes that very few Black people are cognitively equipped to be employed at a “meritocratic” university) led him to be run out of Cambridge in 2024, just as Arday was being appointed to one of the university’s most prestigious chairs. Cambridge’s failure to vet this appointment left an opening for Cofnas, smarting from his own dismissal, to take on the unsavory task of assembling a dossier on Arday’s work. The results were so galling that morbid curiosity drove others to scrutinize everything else about Arday, including his implausible claims that he secretly raised large sums for charity and was among the world’s greatest long-distance runners.

[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]

Dr. Relling calls Gregers’s urge to disabuse and expose “an acute attack of integrity,” and he warns that going cold turkey off livsløgn will not end well for patients or others. (Other Ibsen plays are relevant here too: In some, the collapse of illusions afflicts whole towns, not just a few of their members.) The difference between Gregers and Cofnas seems to be that the latter, perhaps as a result of his being scorned by Cambridge, has no affection for the people whose life-lies he methodically destroyed. Cofnas recently told the podcaster Winston Marshall that “talking about” race “makes people feel bad, and there are a lot of things that are true that make people feel bad that we don’t need to talk about.” But the subversion of academic standards, at what Cofnas perceives as his own expense, demanded action. The result will be good for academia, Cofnas insists, a far better outcome than preserving the good feelings that went along with silence.

In Ibsen, when Gregers forces integrity on a self-deluded character, that character’s daughter decides to kill herself. Gregers sounds most like Cofnas in the final scene. He is confident that her death, however horrible, will “set free all that is noble” in those who partook in the life-lie as they see life for what it is. Life sustained by delusion “is not worth living,” Gregers says. But he knows the cost of being an odious truth teller. “I am glad that my destiny is what it is,” he tells Relling: “to be the thirteenth at table,” the guest who everyone wishes would stop showing up, because he brings misfortune to any dinner he attends.

Arday was hired to teach social science. A terminal irony is that his main contribution to that body of knowledge will be as a case study, about a community that elevated a flawed man to a position exalted beyond his ability, without knowing or caring that they were actually offering him as a human sacrifice.

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A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.

Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.

In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.

The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.

The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.

With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally is still shocking.

This kind of public conflict with allies has become typical. Over the weekend, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—who has no official government post—met with Hamas officials in an attempt to revitalize an administration plan to disarm the group and rebuild Gaza. That plan is struggling for several reasons, including a flat rejection from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been close to Trump and reportedly talked him into the Iran war.

Meanwhile, Trump announced yesterday that he was curtailing joint military exercises with South Korea, “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” This supposed friendship has produced a splashy 2018 summit and flattering correspondence that Trump purloined from the White House after he lost the 2020 election, but it has done nothing to advance American interests. Most important, it has done nothing to curtail North Korea’s nuclear program. At the same time that Trump is fighting a war in Iran that he claims will prevent nuclear proliferation, he’s bestowing a favor on North Korea, which has offered no concessions and many threats. But Trump also gave another reason for his snub, noting that South Korea—like every other major U.S. ally—has declined to get involved in the Iran quagmire.

Throughout Trump’s two terms, many analysts have sought to discern some sort of guiding doctrine to his foreign policy. The incoherence of his actions in the past week alone should provide further evidence that looking for a framework is futile. Earlier this year, my colleagues Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker reported that the White House’s foreign-affairs philosophy was “Fuck around and find out.” Administration officials meant this as a warning to the leaders of other countries. But as the current crisis festers, they, too, are finding out.

Related:

• The fuck-around-and-find-out presidency
• Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Julia Curlee: “The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.”
• Jonathan Chait on what Trump officials mean by “never”
• Even college students have stopped hanging out.
• NATO’s nightmare

Today’s News

1. A 60-day window for the United States and Iran to negotiate an end to the war expired today without a final agreement. The June framework laid out terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, easing some financial restrictions on Iran, and addressing its nuclear program, but talks have stalled as both sides have traded attacks and accusations of violations.
2. Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss President Trump’s plan for Gaza after Israel said it refuses to pull back its military from Gaza until Hamas fully disarms.
3. The Supreme Court declined for a second time to review Trump’s appeal of a $5 million civil judgment awarded to E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll; Trump paid the $5 million award last month.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores what the last weeks of summer can offer.

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Evening Read

The Problem With Child-Led Potty Training

By Stephanie H. Murray

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue …

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time.

Read the full article.

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• Radio Atlantic: The Trump administration wanted her expertise, just not her.
• Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail
• Why learn something that a machine can do for you?
• How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks
• David Frum on Trump’s last loyal constituency

Culture Break

Watch. The masked web-slinger has been setting box-office records for decades, even as the popularity of superhero movies wanes, David Sims writes. And this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel (out now in theaters) has broken nearly every record imaginable.

Explore. Poetry critics didn’t always think much of Mary Oliver, whose work could sometimes read like self-help—but they didn’t give her enough credit, Hillary Kelly argues.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

This particular formulation—never has, never will—has become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica reported in December that Trump had personally used the same mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative guardrails against his abuses of power.

[Read: Does Todd Blanche have a red line?]

In some circumstances, to state that you never have and never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a helicopter to his private island.

To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies, having been asked to bring new charges against David Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been caused by faulty installation.

Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made numerous decisions that benefited it directly.

The same holds true for the assertion that he has never violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it) through delaying tactics and questionable decisions by a sympathetic judge he’d appointed.

The power of the “never has, never will” defense lies in its brazenness. The administration is not attempting to defend the specifics of any particular acts. Instead, it broadly declares that all of its actions are outside the realm of plausible scrutiny.

During the first Trump term, the president pushed against or sought to flout long-standing norms. His first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation because he was a potential subject of it, a standard application of traditional ethics for which the president has never forgiven him. Another attorney general, William Barr, begged Trump not to publicly direct his work for fear that doing so would taint the process. Trump scaled back some of his business activity, taking comparatively small profits (for instance, foreign countries could book blocks of rooms in his hotels).

[Quinta Jurecic: DOJ enters a new, even more aggressive phase]

During his second term, he has abandoned all restraint. He won’t bother trying to argue that the Justice Department is not a personal weapon of vengeance or that his business interests do not overlap with his public conduct. Instead, his appointees declare that such behavior will continue and is perfectly legal.

Just as Trump took the term fake news, which originally described deliberately falsified stories on social media, and applied it to news outlets that attempt to report objectively, his administration now casts his own unethical conduct as being ethical. Any Trump demand upon the justice system is, by definition, proper. Any Trump business activity is, by definition, not a conflict of interest. Any action Trump takes is, by definition, legal. This latter doctrine is one Trump arrived at early in his presidency, when he wrote on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Blanche is saying, as clearly as he can, that this administration deems the very concept of Trump doing something unethical to be self-evidently absurd. When he says that Trump never has and never will make an immoral demand, he is actually telling us that he himself never has and never will resist such a demand.