Israel is the mouse that roared. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on US support for his country’s security and his political survival—Israel couldn’t attack Iran without the US military protecting it against Iranian missiles and drones—but he also feels free to ignore President Trump’s demands whenever he fears that going along with Trump would create a political problem for him at home.

On Sunday, after maintaining a calculated silence, Bibi announced that Israel would not accept the 15-point peace plan announced recently by Trump’s Board of Peace, which calls for Hamas to fully disarm in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

All the critics who said Joe Biden should have done more to curb the Israeli assault on Gaza (a point that even some Biden administration veterans now concede) should realize it’s easier said than done. Even Trump has trouble controlling Bibi, despite their close political alliance.

Ultimately all politics is local, and Bibi can’t afford to withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza without blowing up his electoral coalition. His survival in office—and his ability to avoid conviction on corruption charges—depends on the support of far-right parties that, far from wanting to withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza, want to reintroduce Israeli settlers into the enclave.

In fairness, Hamas isn’t really interested in disarmament either, no matter what its leaders may claim. It is intent on maintaining its hold on the population of Gaza crowded into the 30% of the territory which is not controlled by Israel. Not even the full-scale Israeli assault after the barbaric October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel could destroy Hamas or even dislodge it from its control over the Palestinian population, and you can be damn sure the terrorist group is not going to concede at the negotiating table what Israel was unable to achieve on the battlefield.

Both sides are engaged in gamesmanship by insisting that the other go first—Hamas to disarm, Israel to withdraw—with both knowing that it will never happen.

All this was obvious from the beginning, which makes Trump’s boasts about how his Board of Peace is bringing peace to the world laughably hollow. Recall what he wrote on July 7 after the Board of Peace announced its plan for Gaza with Hamas concurrence:

“Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY…. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL ON THIS AMAZING DEVELOPMENT, THAT EVERYBODY SAID COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED!”

That boast is about as credible as Trump’s regular claims to have won the Iran War and reopened the Strait of Hormuz… which also keep blowing up.

I have great respect for Andrew Sullivan as a writer and thinker, and I agree with many of his views. In particular, I agree with him that “the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke” are both an abomination—the former a manifestation of the far-right, the latter a manifestation of the far left. Where he’s lost me is by engaging in what looks like moral equivalence by suggesting, as he does in his latest Weekly Dish, that these twin cults are an equal danger to the republic.

I respectfully disagree, and his newsletter shows why the attempt at equivalency fails on the evidence. The first part of his argument—about the danger of Trumpism—is completely compelling. He cites some of the latest outrages: Trump’s demands to indict innocent people on bogus charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, which was messed up by Trump’s own contractors. Trump’s unjustified and unsuccessful war with Iran, which has led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. “ICE brutality” and “unprecedented corruption.”

Also, Sullivan points out that Trump is obsessed with building monuments to himself in Washington, which he quite rightly describes as “cockamamie—and grotesquely kitsch—construction projects.” As Sullivan notes, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times estimates that such projects take up roughly 70 percent of the president’s attention, which is 70 percent too high.

Where Andrew loses me is in his segue from President Donald J. Trump to Professor Jason Arday. Jason who? Safe to say, this professor of sociology who just quit his job at Cambridge University is not remotely as well-known, or as menacing, as the president of the United States.

Arday’s case is sad and pathetic and riveting. Recent reporting, in The Atlantic among other outlets, suggests that he was a fabulist who came up with increasingly implausible life-challenges that he supposedly overcame—including learning to read and write only as an adult—before becoming the youngest Black professor to win tenure at Cambridge. Now the whole house of cards has come crashing down: Arday has been accused of plagiarism and dishonesty. The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber got his hands on a copy of Arday’s book proposal and discovered that its description of his life differed in significant respects from the version contained in his memoir, which is about to be published in both the UK and the US.

Andrew is surely right that it’s an indictment of Cambridge University that someone who was so markedly unqualified to be a professor was nevertheless granted a coveted professorship. “Like Ibram X Kendi,” Sullivan writes, “his ‘work’ is on its face embarrassing, identitarian drivel.” I agree with Sullivan on that score. He may even be right that Arday’s case, even though it occurred in the UK, not the US, shows that “our current academic establishment—which underpins the entire rancid edifice of wokeness—is as big a farce and massive a fraud as Trump is.”

But let’s keep a sense of proportion here. Even if there are more Ardays in academia—and he seems a pretty extreme case—all of them collectively do not represent one-tenth of one percent of the threat that the president of the United States poses to America and the world. The woke ideologues may have influence in academic settings, which is unfortunate, but their influence in the “real world” is decidedly more limited.

The Republican Party has been entirely taken over by what Andrew calls “the cult of Trump.” But the “cult of woke” has not taken over the Democratic Party. Certainly the last two Democratic presidents (Barack Obama, Joe Biden) or the current Democratic leaders in Congress (Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries) or the leading contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination (Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Jon Ossoff, Mark Kelly, Pete Buttigieg, Andy Beshear) cannot be accused of being “wokesters.” One partial exception is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and I will stand corrected if AOC is the Democratic nominee in 2028, but I very much doubt she will be.

It’s true that Democratic Socialists like Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York are having a moment in the Democratic Party. And not just in a handful of safe blue seats and cities. A very left-wing, very anti-Israel candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, who could plausibly be described as a manifestation of the Woke movement, has just narrowly won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan. It’s also true that Kamala Harris lost a winnable race against Trump in 2024 in part because her ultra-woke statements from 2020—e.g., about paying for gender transitions for prison inmates—came back to haunt her despite her own background as a prosecutor.

But last year also saw the election of very centrist Democratic candidates for governor in Virginia (Abigail Spanberger) and New Jersey (Mikie Sherrill). Democrats are competitive in multiple Senate races this year not only because Trump is so unpopular but also because they have chosen moderate candidates in such states as North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and Texas.

There is no doubt that the far-left, “woke” faction of the Democratic Party is growing, and that it presents a threat to the centrist direction the party needs to follow if it is to win in 2026, 2028 and beyond. But the far-left is far from taking over the Democratic Party the way the far-right Trumpist cult has taken over the Republican Party, and, for all of the ideological blind spots of the far left, it has not evinced a MAGA-like hostility to American democracy. That doesn’t meant that centrist Democrats should ignore the challenge from the far left; they need to be careful to learn the lessons of mainstream Republicans who have been rendered irrelevant by the unexpected triumph of the MAGA movement.

But to say there is a battle for the future of the Democratic Party now underway is very different from saying that the “woke” movement has taken it over. It clearly hasn’t, and it would be a mistake to suggest that it has, because this has become the excuse for some people to support Trump on the specious grounds that he’s better than the alternative. It’s also became a fallacious justification for right-wing attacks on academic freedom, including the Trump administration’s funding cuts targeting leading research universities, which fall hardest on STEM programs that are the least “woke” and the most important for U.S. economic competitiveness. By all means, battle the twin cults of Trump and woke, but don’t suggest they present an equal danger to the republic.

There are many appalling spectacles in Washington these days but, for sheer grotesquerie, it is hard to beat yesterday’s Senate hearings in which one Republican senator after another competed to see who could make the most far-fetched and offensive allegations against Dr. Anthony Fauci.

He is a true American hero who has been on the frontlines combatting every major epidemic since AIDS. Presidents of both parties once lined up to praise him. Yet Republicans want to make him out to be a criminal as part of their effort to scapegoat him for all the problems associated with Covid-19, a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Of course he didn’t get everything right; nobody would, in dealing with an unknown and deadly disease. But it is risible to see Republicans blaming for all the inconveniences we all endured in coping with this pandemic, as if he were the dictator of America.

In fact, guess who was president when Covid-19 broke out? Yup: Donald J. Trump. Fauci was only an adviser who had no power to order anything. He did his best to share scientific advice with Trump and the governors, but Trump and many of the governors (Republicans in particular) weren’t listening. Did lockdowns go too far? Was some of the initial advice wrong? No doubt, but that’s second-guessing with the benefit of hindsight. Again, Dr. Fauci did not order the lockdowns; he couldn’t have even if he wanted to. All he could offer was his best advice.

I would certainly take his advice over that of the crackpot White House trade adviser Peter Navarro who, with no medical credentials at all, was eager to send out hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, to treat Covid-19, even though it had not been approved for that purpose by the FDA.

To repeat, Dr. Fauci did not always get it right, but he got an awful lot right. No less than Trump himself awarded Fauci, among other administration officials, a presidential commendation for his work on Operation Warp Speed, the administration initiative to develop Covid vaccines in record time. That was the best thing that Trump ever did, but now he has disowned his own achievement because vaccines have become so unpopular with his base.

And sure, as revealed by the malicious release of Fauci’s diaries, he has an ego and enjoys publicity; who doesn’t? Certainly the Republican senators castigating him would kill to have the kind of adulation that Fauci enjoyed before the MAGA wing of the party turned on him.

Fauci is 85 years old. He should enjoy his retirement and look back with satisfaction on a lifetime of public service. He should not need to hire bodyguards to protect himself against death threats, and he should not be forced to plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid falling into some perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul and other Senate Republicans who have made no secret of their desire to put him in prison. He should not be subjected to all the abuse he receives.

The MAGA attempt to demonize Fauci is, unfortunately, part of a larger MAGA attack on science and expertise. How else to explain how a kooky anti-vaxxer like RFK Jr., with no medical credentials at all, could wind up running HHS? Just a couple of days ago, at the White House, RFK was claiming, without an iota of evidence, that “children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism.” Apparently Republicans are fine with that kind of quackery, but they want to throw in jail a distinguished physician and medical researcher who has spent decades battling to protect American health.

Captain Bryan Adam speaks about the incident.

Last week, a Blue Angels jet buzzed a crowded beach in Pensacola, Florida. Typically the Navy’s elite flight-demonstration squadron does not fly lower than 500 feet over people on the ground. In this case, the jet was probably less than 100 feet from the beachgoers.

Normally the leadership of the Defense Department would have nothing to say about a breach of flight rules, leaving the handling of the incident to the Navy chain of command. But for the frat-boys running the Defense Department—which they insist on referring to as, heh-heh, the War Department—it has become a point of pride to allow dangerous flyovers.

Pete Hegseth & Co. somehow see these stunts as a sign of support for MAGA, probably because the first such incident occurred when two Army AH-64 Apache helicopters hovered over the Tennessee mansion of Trump supporter Kid Rock. Then on July 4, South Carolina National Guard helicopters flew low over a beach in that state.

In both cases, the military chain of command tried to suspend the pilots, and in both cases Hegseth foolishly overruled them, writing on social media, “Carry on Patriots”—“patriots” being a synonym in this administration for “Trump supporters.” (Administration critics are routinely derided as traitors or Communists.)

The Blue Angels mishap followed the familiar pattern. Just one day after the incident occurred—i.e., not enough time to conduct a serious investigation—Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao posted on X: “Flight debrief complete. No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom! Semper fi and Hooyah.” Hegseth’s spokesman Sean Parnell weighed in: “Carry on Patriots.” Hegseth himself joined the rah-rah chorus, writing on X, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.” Naturally various MAGA cheerleaders offered their dittos.

So far, nothing surprising. But what has been heartening to see is that the Blue Angels themselves don’t take this blasé attitude. The unit commander, Captain Adam Bryan, told reporters: "The pilot found himself, unfortunately, in a situation that we would deem unsafe over the beach. We never intend to fly over the crowd that low, and we'll heavily debrief it to ensure that, one, we continue on with safe flight demonstrations, and that we learn from those different things that happen."

The pilot who made the low-level pass reportedly told Florida State Representative Michelle Salzman, a Republican and Army veteran, that the maneuver was not deliberate and that he was “shaken by what happened.” He said he “didn’t make excuses” or “try to shift blame,” and that he’s been carrying a “weight” since it happened.

The reaction of the pilot and his commander are what you would expect from responsible military officers who understand the imperatives of maintaining flight safety and following regulations. The reaction of Hegseth & Co., by contrast, is a disgrace. It shows that at the top of the Defense Department are leaders who prioritize social media “hits” and “owning the libs” over maintaining the apolitical professionalism that has made the U.S. military the envy the of the world.

Hegseth is sending the worst possible signal to pilots who are always prone to hot-dog stunts anyway. One of these days, one of these unsafe maneuvers will result in an accident and possible loss of life. When that happens, who will Hegseth blame? Antifa infiltrators? If only the leader of the Defense Department had a tenth of the humility, self-awareness, and professionalism of the Blue Angels.

President Trump announced at 9:03 p.m. on Friday night: “At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua.”

Since when are U.S. forces allowed to “execute” criminal suspects without trial? Trump makes no pretense that the military tried to arrest Guerrero (real name: Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores), who was indicted by a federal court in New York, and that he died resisting arrest. Nor did he claim that Venezuelan forces killed him with intelligence support from the U.S. The president is proudly presenting this as an execution carried out by the U.S. military. He claims it’s revenge for murders committed in the U.S. by undocumented immigrants even though there is no proof that Guerrero was responsible for any these crimes.

The killing would presumably be proper if Guerrero were actually an enemy leader, like Osama bin Laden, waging war on the United States. But that’s not true, and this raid shows why.

Tren de Aragua is a criminal cartel whose business is smuggling drugs. It has not declared war on the U.S. like Al Qaeda or ISIS did. The designation of Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization was made by the Trump administration on the spurious grounds that it was being used by Venezuela under the Nicolas Maduro regime to wage war on the U.S.

This was cited as an excuse to deport undocumented Venezuelan immigrants without due process under the Alien Enemies Act, even though the U.S. intelligence community said there was no evidence to show that Tren de Aragua was being directed by Maduro. There was also no evidence that the Venezuelans the administration deported to El Salvador were actually Tren de Aragua members.

The argument that Tren de Aragua is waging war on the US on behalf of the Venezuela government is also part of the justification for the administration to blow up suspected drug boats. The administration claims that they are full of “narco-terrorists” who are affiliated with Tren de Aragua and other drug cartels. That campaign has claimed more than 200 lives—all lost in what legal experts say are extrajudicial killings (i.e. murder) carried out by US forces.

Yet now the new government of Venezuela, installed by Trump, has cooperated with US forces to kill Guerrero. Clearly the justification that Tren de Aragua is part of a Venezuelan attack on the US (false to begin with) no longer applies. It’s good to see Caracas and Washington cooperating on a law enforcement operation, even if many members of the Maduro regime complicit in drug smuggling remain in place, raising the possibility that the killing of Guerrero may be a move by other cartel leaders to eliminate a rival.

But what, then, is the legal justification for this killing? If the government of Venezuela is cooperating with the U.S. to battle Tren de Aragua, it’s nonsensical to claim that Tren de Aragua is waging war on the U.S. at the best of the government of Venezuela. I’m sure the administration will eventually produce some kind of legal rationale, but it will be as unconvincing as past efforts to justify its boat strikes or its deportations without due process.

This seems like another extrajudicial killing carried out by U.S. Special Operations Command on Trump and Hegseth’s orders. Nobody will mourn for a gangster like Guerrero, but I do mourn the rule of law, which is being flouted by Trump. The U.S. military has long seen itself as a force that abides by the laws of war. That is, sadly, no longer the case, given all the killings of noncombatants that U.S. military personnel are carrying out.

Almost every day, Pete Hegseth offers fresh proof of why he should never have been appointed secretary of defense (or, as he prefers to call it, secretary of war). The latest example came on what should have been a solemn and sacred occasion: the commemoration of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

This was one of the turning points of World War II. The courage and sacrifice of the American, British and Canadian troops who landed on the beaches of Normandy made possible the liberation of Europe. It was a signal victory for democracy and a massive defeat for Nazi tyranny.

Much of Hegseth’s speech at the American cemetery in Normandy was appropriate to the occasion. “We remember the losses,” he said. “We celebrate the victories. We rededicate ourselves to the fight for liberty, security, and peace.” Sounds good. But Hegseth felt compelled to inject noxious MAGA ideology into what should have been a feel-good moment celebrating the trans-Atlantic alliance.

First, he took a veiled shot at our NATO allies. He said:

“The men buried here fought in a war-fighting alliance where every partner brought a full measure of industry, courage and sacrifice. Not empty slogans, not lavish summits, not communiqués. Real allies doing real things, taking real losses, for a shared loss worth fighting and dying for. Each nation pulled its weight. Each nation bled… In the years since these beaches, much of the West, in some places, in some quarters, and in some capitals, grew comfortable. We forgot that freedom is not free. We forgot that peace is not wished into being. It is bought with purpose, with honor, and with strength.”

This will be seen in Europe—and rightly so—as another in a long line of attacks by the Trump administration on the most successful alliance in history. The obvious message is that today’s European allies are freeloaders who are not willing to shed their blood for freedom, as Americans are doing. Hegseth is echoing what his boss, Donald Trump, said in January about NATO soldiers: “We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the frontlines.”

His comments sparked outrage in Europe, and rightly so, given that more than 1,100 European soldiers lost their lives in the war in Afghanistan, and they were fighting because America was attacked on 9/11. Yet now Trump and his minions routinely trash the Europeans and denigrate their sacrifice, while praising Putin, Xi, and other enemies of freedom. More than that, Trump and Hegseth are reducing the U.S. troop presence in Europe, blocking additional aid to Ukraine, and cozying up to Putin, thereby placing our allies in greater danger.

But what made Hegseth’s comments truly disgusting is what he said after he implicitly attacked NATO. He said:

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

This is xenophobic, far-right nonsense that unfortunately has become the conventional wisdom of the Trump administration. Hegseth was somehow equating the Nazis with impoverished immigrants from the Global South who are seeking a better life in Europe. He was implicitly echoing white supremacists who (as in the 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints) try to suggest that non-white immigrants are invaders who pose a mortal threat to European civilization.

This is gross and offensive at any time, and doubly so when he is speaking about the heroes who defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps. He is trying to rhetorically enlist the enemies of fascism in the 1940s on the side of fascism today. The real threat to Europe comes not from immigrants but from far-right parties that, with the Trump administration’s support, seek to undermine European democracy and cozy up to a revanchist Russia.

If you want to know what Hegseth should and could have said, go back to Ronald Reagan’s memorable address at Normandy on June 6, 1984 (written by Peggy Noonan, now a Wall Street Journal columnist). After paying tribute to the Rangers who stormed the cliffs where he stood—”the boys of Pointe du Hoc”—Reagan paid tribute to the trans-Atlantic alliance forged in World War II:

“The strength of America’s allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe’s democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.”

That’s how you talk about allies. That’s how you stand up for the values that the heroes of D-Day fought for. Hegseth, as usual, is clueless and offensive. Like the president he works for, he is doing great damage to the trans-Atlantic alliance and the world’s perceptions of the United States and thereby undermining U.S. security.

There are few sensations more pleasurable than having one’s prior assumptions confirmed with new evidence. It has always seemed to me that a prime imperative behind revolutionary regimes is the desire of marginalized individuals who were not succeeding in the ancien regime to find better career prospects by defenestrating the old elites (sometimes literally so).

I certainly felt vindicated reading a New York Times article with the infelicitous headline: “Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.” It reports primarily on research by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, who studied the military officers who carried out repression on behalf of the Argentinean military junta in the 1970s-1980s. I’m not particularly interested in the Argentinean regime, per se, but these findings apply to many autocracies, actual or aspiring—including more recent regimes such as Trump’s America, Chavez’s Venezuela, Putin’s Russia, and Orban’s Hungary (before Orban lost office).

In brief, Scharpf and Glassel studied one particular Argentinean secret police unit—Battalion 601 of Army Intelligence—which did much of the dirty work in the “Dirty War” against liberals, leftists, socialists, trade unionists, and a few actual Communists. (The generals claimed all of their critics were “terrorists”—sound familiar?) Because the Argentinian army kept meticulous personnel records, it was possible to determine the graduation ranks and other data of the battalion’s personnel.

The Times sums up the findings:

“For the most part, the Argentine military operated under a meritocratic ‘up or out’ system. Officers who underperformed early would fall behind their peers, and eventually be forced into retirement. But Battalion 601 offered a detour around that meritocracy: Low performers could transfer into the secret police, spend a few years earning promotions there and then return to the regular army, often leapfrogging over peers who had stayed with the regular forces. Men who took the detour ended up with longer careers, higher salaries and better pensions than similar individuals who stayed in the mainstream military units.

“The worse an officer’s academic record had been at the military academy, the more likely he was to join Battalion 601. And once inside, the lowest performers were assigned to the most brutal units, carrying out the day-to-day tasks of torture and murder, work that was so morally repugnant that it carried a serious risk of both social stigma and psychological trauma. But that meant that the career rewards for doing it were the most valuable. A stint as a monster could rehabilitate the most disastrous underperformer.”

The article quotes another political scientist, Erica Frantz of Michigan State University, who describes these individuals as “loyal losers.” What a perfect label! These were people who were not necessarily fanatics. They were simply interested in getting ahead, and had no scruples or compunctions about how to do so. Actually they might have had a few scruples to begin with, but their qualms disappeared as they got deeper and deeper into the dirty work—the assassinations, the torture—they were committing. Before long, they were too complicit to stop and had convinced themselves that whatever they were doing was exactly the right thing to do to save the country from some secret threat.

This resonates with what I have read about regimes such as Soviet Russia, Communist China and Nazi Germany. Even their leaders—Stalin, Mao, and Hitler—were outcasts under the old regime. But the overthrow of the previous political system allowed them, and countless henchmen, to gain power and to reap the rewards—as well as to often suffer the dire consequences of losing a power struggle or a war.

We are seeing a milder version of the same phenomenon in MAGA America. While the first Trump administration had a number of well-qualified appointees, they soon fell out of favor with Trump and either left or were fired. In the second Trump term, the president has been careful to appoint people who are chosen not on merit but on willingness to do whatever he wants, no matter how unwise or even illegal. In other words, “loyal losers.”

Few of the individuals in senior positions in this administration would have had comparable jobs—or any jobs—in any prior administration. Kash Patel, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Seb Gorka, Peter Navarro, et al., would never have gotten close to power under any normal president. (The most obvious exceptions—Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—are, relatively speaking, moderating forces.) But obviously we are not living in normal times.

The Trump administration is very bad for America and for the world, but it’s very good for its loyalists—until, of course the president tires of them and they find themselves out of a job. (Where are Kristi Noem, Cory Lewandowski or Greg Bovino today?) Often having the president turn against them involves being on the receiving end of his social media abuse—or even facing criminal investigation (as with, e.g., Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who was one of those well-qualified first-term appointees). But for those who are willing to take the risk, the rewards are high. Some of his supporters who engaged in outright illegality, such as storming the Capitol, might even be rewarded under a brazenly corrupt $1.776 billion fund designed to compensate supposed victims of weaponized justice.

No doubt some of Trump’s aides are sincere in their beliefs, however crackpot they may be, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that many of them are opportunists who are taking advantage of the MAGA movement to advance themselves and to line their own pockets. That cynical generalization, incidentally, may apply to Trump himself.

The president has repeatedly shown that he is bound by very few fixed convictions other than a desire to massage his ego and enrich himself and his family. (Exhibit A: Trump, after campaigning against more Middle East wars, started a Middle East war.) Trump was wealthy before he ran for president, but he was a marginal figure—the gauche developer from Queens—who was not taken seriously by mainstream New York-DC elites. In the 1980s, the late, lamented Spy magazine mocked him as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” and President Obama even, notoriously, cracked some jokes at Trump’s expense at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner while Trump sat there apparently seething. Many speculate that a desire for revenge was part of Trump’s impetus for his initial presidential campaign.

Trump, in short, may turn out to be the ultimate example of the self-interested imperatives that are often the true driving forces of political revolutions, regardless of what platform they espouse.

This is not a kinder, gentler Iranian regime. The Iran that is emerging from Trump’s war is a bigger threat than ever to its own people and to the region.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court recently issued a 6-3 ruling rolling back the Voting Rights Act, ruling that Louisiana had engaged in an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That will now allow Republican-dominated legislatures in the South, and other regions, to engage in political gerrymanders that will erase districts currently represented by African American Democrats.

It still won’t be enough to save Republicans in this year’s midterm elections, given President Trump’s historic unpopularity and the limited amount of time to redraw districts before November. But experts warn that in the future Democrats could lose a dozen seats in the South, making it much harder for the party to retain control of the House.

But demographics doesn’t have to be destiny. Recall that, up until a few decades ago, the South was solidly Democratic because Democrats in that region were far more liberal than their counterparts from other parts of the country. At one time, the Democratic Party had room for both civil-rights advocate Hubert Humphrey and arch-segregationist George Wallace. That was, in fact, the basis of the New Deal coalition that governed the country from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Today, however, the Democratic Party tends to be uniformly liberal across the country, while the Republican Party tends to be uniformly conservative. Conservative Democrats today are as rare as liberal Republicans. How many pro-choice Republicans are there in Congress or pro-life Democrats? Not many. Rockefeller Republicans and Boll Weevil Democrats have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

There is, of course, some ideological diversity in a Democratic Party that runs from Zohran Mamdani to Mikie Sherrill, just as there is some diversity in a Republican Party that runs from JD Vance to Lisa Murkowski. Just not as much diversity as there used to be, which helps to explain why I’m no longer a Republican—and I haven’t become a Democrat either.

The saga of John Fetterman is now testing how much ideological diversity the Democrats can tolerate. The Pennsylvania senator has alienated his Democratic constituents and colleagues with stances such as his support for Israel and for the war against Iran, voting for Trump nominees (most recently, Markwayne Mullin for DHS Secretary), backing Republican plans to reopen the government, and supporting Trump’s illegal “boat strikes” and many of his Draconian anti-immigration policies.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Pennsylvania) calls Fetterman “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” and he’s probably right. That’s why Trump and the Republican Party are mounting a full-court press to convince Fetterman to switch parties. Of course, it’s debatable how welcome Fetterman would be in the GOP, given his liberal social views (he’s pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights). But it’s obvious that he doesn’t feel very welcome in the Democratic Party , either, which is why he hangs out more with Republicans in the Senate.

Democratic pique with Fetterman is understandable; heck, I disagree with him on many issues myself. But it’s also misguided, because Democrats cannot afford to enforce ideological conformity if they have any hope of winning in more conservative states—a description that applies to the entire South and a great deal of the Midwest and Mountain West.

Sure, Democrats can try to appeal to appeal to working-class voters by nominating working-class, populist candidates (such as former Marine Graham Platner in Maine or firefighter Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania) , but there should also be room in the party for more culturally conservative candidates on issues such as guns, abortion, and trans-rights.

Maybe such diversity is impossible in the social media age where prominent influencers on both the left and right stand ready to torch any candidate that deviates from their views. But if Democrats try to enforce tests of ideological purity, they are in danger of losing the redrawn seats in the South and thereby making it much harder to win a House majority in the future.

Of course the GOP faces a similar danger from the opposite direction: the party is not going to win the California governor’s office, for example, by fielding candidates who refuse to concede that Trump lost the 2020 election. But America’s political system hands disproportionate power to conservative states, so, like it or not, it’s more important for Democrats to appeal to the right than for Republicans to appeal to the left.

That means—painful as it will be for many party stalwarts-- Democrats will need more candidates who are at least as conservative as John Fetterman to compete in the newly gerrymandered districts of the South.