I also have been reading, and finally found the time to read 1861 by Adam Goodheart. To be more precise I listened to it on long drives or while doing dishes; it’s poetically written, a beautiful story to hear. I’m not sure I would have experienced it as richly and fully through a conventional read. It’s a long book, and someone or something would have distracted me. It’s worth every word.

The book is about the United States’ moral awakening at the start of the Civil War—the decision of many ordinary people, after a period of great confusion, to stand with their country, which also turned them against slavery. There is only a little combat in the book. It’s more about society, democracy, parades, public meetings, private debates, dinners and walks through gardens, even a conversation in a rowboat.

Sometimes the most awful people did wonderful things. Benjamin F. Butler, a race-baiting politician before the war, worked his way into the expanding U.S. Army and got in a situation that called upon him to take an important step against slavery. Butler liked the reaction he received, did more of it, and emerged as a radical antislavery man. This aspect of the war in particular and humanity in general is often on my mind, the amazing results that sometimes come from people we would be tempted to write off.

This reality about people seems also to apply to certain moments in history. The year 1861 was a terrible period, the whole country coming apart, unspeakable death and destruction just over the horizon—yet Goodheart quotes several people saying in their letters and journals, What an incredible time to be alive, or How lucky we are to be alive at this moment.

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Goodheart’s book comes to mind when watching Jonathan Martin’s recent video interview with Pete Buttigieg. It’s part of Martin’s Politico series of interviews with leaders over lunch. Martin asks: Do you ever reflect that you were born too late? That maybe your politics would have worked better in an earlier time, a “less pugilistic moment” of greater consensus?

Martin notes how Buttigieg did all the right things, went to Harvard, served in the military, only to emerge at a moment when all the old standards seemed to unravel.

Buttigieg gives two replies. First, he says, I am a gay man from Indiana. Had I been born even two years earlier I might have had trouble winning an election.

More to the point, he says that he might have been bored in a more placid time. “There are different seasons in the history of this country,” he says. “It’s precisely when the house is on fire that you wind up having the most interesting and exciting changes.”

At another moment, Buttigieg tips his hat to Stephen Miller, President Trump’s advisor. Buttigieg considers his politics abhorrent, but says of Miler, “At least he understands what the stakes are.” At stake are many of the principles that have guided civilization for hundreds of years since the Enlightenment. Now we fight them out. Surely not everyone is happy to be here; but there can be no doubt that it’s a compelling time to be alive.

Wilson speaks in favor of an American theocracy—still under the Constitution, which he says he admires, but with dramatic amendments and equally dramatic re-interpretations by the Supreme Court. He would require all officeholders to swear to uphold a Christian Constitution, meaning in effect that they would only be Christian. He would prevent non-Christians from voting unless an individual state favored it. He would outlaw abortion, eliminate same-sex marriage and end protections for LGBTQ people. He would bar many, or even most, women from voting—preferring one vote for each household, typically the husband. He says his church is run this way. A few women vote if they are the head of the household.

Here’s the video on YouTube from the NPR program Newsmakers:

Why talk all this through? Because Wilson is not the only person who dreams of such things; some are close to power; and their ideas say something about the range of thought in this country. The household vote, or banning women from voting, seems particularly trendy. We can say there is no chance of any of this becoming law—there is the matter of the Constitution in its current form; Wilson himself thinks his vision is far off—but a lot of other thigs have happened that seemed impossible.

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Wilson’s interview provoked me to think through the household vote a bit more than I had. What it highlights for religious conservatives is the feeling that the family is more important than the individual. Also that the husband should make decisions, not the wife. But I’m not sure it would have the political effect of giving the traditional family more power.

Right now, a traditional husband and wife have two votes, and as their children reach the age of 18 they have even more votes. A single person, or a single parent, has one vote. In Wilson’s utopia the single person and the family would each have one vote. In relative terms, the single person would become more powerful and the family less so! The electorate would inevitably end up voting more often for the interests and concerns of single people. It’s hard not to believe that such results would prompt further tweaks and revisions to the household vote to arrive at the desired outcome. Where would that end?

I also thought of Wilson’s idea that public spaces should be restricted to Christianity—as he told Leila, “Church bells, yes. Minarets, no.” It made me wonder who would decide who gets to count as Christian. What about Mormons around Wilson’s home in Idaho? I have met Protestant conservatives who do not regard Catholics as Christian. My own research has shown me that in the early years of this country, some Protestants seemed to assume that the First Amendment protected the right to join any Protestant denomination! And of course, a leader who was of one particular branch of faith would have difficulty even allowing that much freedom, convinced as he must be that he knows the one true path. Where would that end?

For the moment this is all an intellectual exercise. Wilson’s views are not shared by some other social conservatives. In a recent interview I asked former Vice President Mike Pence about the household vote and he actually laughed. “It’s one person, one vote in this country, and people have bled and died for that principle,” Pence said. Pence argues that many on the “populist right” have ideas for social engineering families in ways that he considers unwise.

But the pastor in Leila’s interview says it is his genuine view of the world, and the only thing that would stop people who agree with him from imposing it is a lack of power to do it. That seems useful to know.

The United States Congress formally declared war on Britain for a variety of causes. Britain’s nonstop wars against Napoleonic France disrupted American trade. British naval vessels in need of sailors routinely stopped American ships and “impressed,” or seized, as many Americans as they needed. Aside from those complaints, Americans had foggy ideas of invading and conquering Britain’s possessions in Canada. As a historian of the period puts it, some Americans felt that attacking Canada was the only way available to strike at the British Empire, while others had longstanding dreams of conquering the provinces to make them “the Scotland of America.”

Whatever the exact war aims—and the cloudiness of those aims was surely part of the problem—the war didn’t achieve them. American troops fought, sometimes well and often badly. The conquest of Canada didn’t work out: One of the invading American armies retreated back into Michigan and actually surrendered Detroit. By 1814, an invading British force burned Washington. The Treaty of Ghent, concluded through negotiations in Belgium in December 1814, explicitly said that everything was to be put back the way it was before: “All territory, places, and possessions whatsoever taken by either party from the other… shall be restored without delay.” The British made no commitment to stop the impressment of American sailors or to allow freedom of the seas, although the end of the Napoleonic wars made both issues moot.

The treaty at least got both sides out of a pointless conflict. The Americans could say they had survived a second war against the world’s greatest empire, and the British could rid themselves of a war that was far less important to them than events in Europe.

The terms of the Treaty of Ghent don’t look any worse, and arguably were better, than the initial reports of the tentative terms

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What’s unusual is that the administration calmly said it would comply. From my colleague Ryan Lucas:

The Justice Department on Monday said it will abide by a federal court ruling that puts the Trump administration’s controversial $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund on hold while a legal challenge plays out in court.

The Trump administration had said the fund would be available to those who alleged the federal government had been weaponized against them, a refrain popularized by some Trump supporters particularly during the Biden administration. Democratic lawmakers had called it a “slush fund” for Trump supporters, and even some Republican lawmakers were reluctant to support it.

The administration statement resembled those of past administrations: In short, we strongly disagree with this ruling but we will follow it.

The statement did not resemble the words and deeds of this administration over the past year: openly insulting judges, ignoring judges, maneuvering around judges, accusing even Republican appointees of political bias, and going to the furthest extreme to appeal to the Supreme Court while expressing open confidence that its conservative supermajority would back the president.

Throughout the past year the president said he would comply with court rulings, but arguably didn’t in some cases, pushed the very idea of compliance in others, and always politicized rulings he didn’t like.

The $1.776 billion fund itself began with an end run around the court overseeing Trump’s lawsuit against himself. Trump dropped his suit and made his settlement without consulting the judge, who is now investigating the case.

Now, suddenly, the administration says it will comply. What changed?

This time, the administration faced skepticism from the courts and Congress.

NPR’s Eric McDaniel reported that lawmakers found the fund so repulsive that as many as 30 Republicans were ready to vote to block it, attaching the bill to immigration funding Trump badly wants.

And this time—at least for now—the administration has backed down.

The Constitution establishes three branches of government, not one or two; and the framers of that document assumed that each branch would jealously guard its power and interests. We now know it takes two branches to restrain the third. The courts do not do it very well on their own.

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When Trump was raising and lowering taxes on an almost daily basis, it took a long time for the courts to catch up. Lower courts swiftly ruled that the president usurped the taxing power of Congress, claiming authority under a law that never even mentioned tariffs. But the Supreme Court deferred to the president for almost a year while it considered a final judgment. During all that time he raised, lowered, and collected billions of dollars in taxes, changing federal policy anytime he had an opinion or didn’t like some court case in Brazil.

My friend Sarah Isgur, a veteran Court watcher, has reminded me that the Court often defers to the executive. It deferred to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness for months before making a final judgment against it. But in any case, nobody stopped the president for many months.

Trump was able to seize the power of Congress, even while lower courts ruled against him, because only one branch questioned him. Republicans in Congress obeyed. Trump openly treated Congress with contempt and lawmakers did nothing. Steve Bannon, Trump’s longtime adviser, compared them to the Duma, the Russian parliament that does whatever Vladimir Putin wants.

Lawmakers actively neutered themselves, finding a mechanism to short-circuit a law that called on them to vote Trump’s tariffs up or down.

In the case of the $1.776 billion fund, Democrats said Trump again seized the power of Congress, this time the power of the purse. Trump could argue that a Congressional statute authorized funds to settle lawsuits, but Democrats said this grossly exceeded the scale and isn’t really a “settlement.”

If Republicans again obeyed, Trump might again have ignored, bullied or defied the two courts now pushing back on the $1.776 billion. But an election is coming, Trump is unpopular, and many Republicans seemed unwilling to go along. Suddenly the White House discovered the traditional deference to Court rulings.

My colleague Elena Moore noted this morning that the fight isn’t over. Trump has not fully abandoned his fund. Democrat Tom Suozzi told us this morning he still wants a vote against it. That would be an uncomfortable vote for many Republicans, some of whom want the president to spare them by abandoning his idea. If he pushes forward, it may again take two branches to stop him.

His statement brings to mind the old saying that war is too important to be left to the generals. Other people have an interest too.

Leo used a word loaded with historical meaning, colonialism.

Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions… are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new “rare earths” of power.

The American Pope went on to mention one of the great wrongs of colonialism: slavery. “New forms of slavery are fueled by economic chains and digital infrastructures,” he said. The mention of this history bore so much weight that it apparently prompted the Pope, in the name of the Vatican, to “ask for pardon” for the Church’s own long history of condoning slavery.

Why refer to the European colonial empires that dominated much of the world from the 1500’s until their collapse after World War II? It turns out there’s a lot in that word.

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The commentary has come from people (or at least, from accounts) unhappy with an exchange in which I asked the UFC chief about the issue. The accounts seem uncomfortable hearing that the Trump administration has targeted people who are in the U.S. with legal status.

This doesn’t poll as well as targeting criminals who crossed the border illegally. But it’s true.

Some context: Our talk with White was fascinating. There is nobody quite like him. He has built his sport from a disreputable sideshow into a multi-billion dollar business that says a lot about America. Now, at the invitation of his friend President Trump, White’s UFC will celebrate America’s 250th birthday with fights on the White House lawn June 14.

During a good part of the interview we discussed the way that many UFC fighters come from the bottom of society, including immigrants and refugees.

INSKEEP: Is that representative of the UFC, people who maybe in some way are on the bottom in society, and they’re using sports to fight their way up?

WHITE: A hundred percent. Like most sports… people that are this tough come from some tough backgrounds.

INSKEEP: Immigrants, people who don’t speak English as their first language.

WHITE: Right.

INSKEEP: On and on.

WHITE: Well, one of the things that I, you know, believed about the UFC in the early days was no matter what country you come from, what color you are, what language you speak, we’re all human beings. Fighting is in our DNA. We get it and we like it.

There’s a dramatic story here about American opportunity—and also about the risk of head injuries, which we discussed. People on the political left may not realize how the story of the UFC speaks to certain realities of this country. Democrats also might not realize they should reflect on the likes of White, who suggests he might be a little to the left on certain issues. Maybe they won’t win over a friend of Trump, but they at least might reflect on the young men who watch UFC fights. In 2024, Trump did far better with young men than Republicans usually do with younger voters, and Democrats would like those voters back.

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But this was not the part of the interview that triggered the social media response. Rather, a different exchange upset some on the political right. It’s where we discussed a fact: The Trump administration has extended its reach on immigration. It’s not merely targeting serious criminals, which most voters would approve. Nor is the administration solely targeting people without legal status who are otherwise law-abiding.

The administration is also canceling the legal status of people who believed they had come here according to the rules. Among other steps, the administration has canceled “temporary protected status” for hundreds of thousands of people from troubled countries like Venezuela. They had legal status and many now have lost it or are at risk of losing it. This is not a secret: A TPS case is currently before the Supreme Court concerning people from Syria and Haiti.

We discussed this matter in the Dana White interview. It begins at 8:43:

INSKEEP: Some people are going to be listening to this and think there may be a bit of a contradiction because we’ve been talking about how your fighters are often immigrants, even a refugee, in the case of your champion fighter who’s going to be at the White House. These are people, not universally, but in large measure, the president wants out of the country.

WHITE: And that’s not necessarily true either. What the president wants is what everybody has talked about, including the Democrats back in the day. You have to get documented the right way. I don’t think the president has ever said he doesn’t want...

INSKEEP: Well...

WHITE: ...People from other countries coming in.

INSKEEP: He has said...

WHITE: If you do it the wrong way, yes.

INSKEEP: In his first term, he did talk about legal immigration and being in favor of legal immigrants. But in the second term, they’ve actually canceled a lot of people’s legal status. They’ve taken refugees and said it’s time to go.

There’s really no doubt about this. But some Trump supporters seem to have trouble accepting it, as shown by posts such as this:

That’s a post from this holiday weekend. In case you’re interested, here is a news article that is also from this holiday weekend.

This New York Times article is not the first story to track such a trend. Again: not a secret. It’s being done in the open. The administration’s concern is not only illegal immigration or Joe Biden’s open borders. In many cases, the concern is immigration.

Some people on the political right make a case for limiting legal immigration. In its simplest form, their case is that too many people have come here with different languages, cultures and religions, which is bad for social cohesion. But many people—including, it seems, some who voted for Trump—are not comfortable going that far.

The full interview with Dana White is worth your time, and you can find it here.

UFC fighters will punch, wrestle and kick while fenced inside an octagon. It will take place on the birthday of his friend President Trump, who has given White his opinion about who should be on the fight card.

White talked about this on the NPR program Newsmakers. We spoke May 8 at the Prudential Center, a sports arena in Newark, New Jersey where White was preparing for a different UFC event.

“We’re celebrating America’s 250th birthday on the lawn of the White House,” White said. “Everybody thought that I was going to build a card, America versus the world, where we did the exact opposite. America is a country of immigrants that all came from somewhere else and they’re all going to be represented.”

He said he rejected building a fight card that would pit Americans against foreigners, feeling it would misrepresent both the country and the UFC. “We are a global sport,” he said.

Here is the video, and below that are highlights of our conversation:

White is a onetime boxer who had an epiphany

“I realized that I wasn’t the guy,” he said. “You wouldn’t have seen me fighting in a title fight.” He became a fight manager instead, and eventually met the investors who helped him acquire the UFC.

He elevated the UFC beyond sports

Decades ago, the UFC’s mixed martial arts fighting was considered so disreputable that Senator John McCain called it “human cockfighting.” The sport’s fortunes changed thanks partly to Donald Trump, who welcomed White to stage fights in one of his Atlantic City casinos.

Today, White’s UFC occupies a sizable place in the culture. Its latest streaming deal, with Paramount+, is worth $7.7 billion over seven years. Joe Rogan, a former UFC color commentator, has become one of the nation’s top podcasters. The fighting itself expresses something about America in the age of Trump. It promotes a particular idea of masculinity. In 2024 White delivered a Republican convention speech for Trump, who performed well among young men—the demographic that forms the UFC’s core audience.

He also extended the UFC beyond America

The league’s fighters come from around the world, and also travel around the world to fight. The UFC event on May 30, immediately prior the White House spectacle, is to be held in Macau.

He oversees a combat sport with long-term hazards

White says with pride that the UFC has had “never a death or serious injury in 30 years,” but he knows that fighters risk long-term brain injury. Recently the UFC settled an antitrust lawsuit by fighters, one of whom said he needed the money to care for himself while suffering from CTE, a degenerative brain disease. “When you get punched in the head, it’s not good for you. And everybody going into this knows it’s not,” White said.

Some UFC fighters are immigrants and refugees

People who take that risk are often at the bottom of society—as is also true for many boxers, football players and other athletes. “People that are this tough come from tough backgrounds,” White said.

At a press conference before the Newark event, fighters spoke multiple languages while promotional videos showed their distinctive stories. On June 14, the headline fight will feature Ilia Topuria, the UFC lightweight champion, whose family were refugees from the republic of Georgia. His challenger is a former copper miner.

White dismissed any contradiction between his sport and the Trump administration, which has made a top priority of removing people without legal status from the country and has also canceled the legal status for many people who had it. White views his friend in the White House as opposed only to illegal immigration.

He’s selling a story

White said the hardscrabble backgrounds of his fighters draw fans to the sport. “Who are you and where do you come from?” he said. “That’s what I sell every Saturday night.”

It’s also what he will sell on Sunday, June 14—when the White House event will go on for a few thousand in-person spectators while many more can watch on screens from the National Mall.

Many people attended the funeral at a Catholic church down the street from Brian’s house—people representing his various worlds. His wife Caroline and their children, Alex and Anna Maria. His parents who lived to bury him just short of his fifty-fifth birthday, and other members of his family. Friends and neighbors in Cheverly, Md. People who knew and loved his skill as a musician. Also his colleagues from NPR, where he had been technical director for programs including Morning Edition. Two NPR hosts, Michel Martin and Scott Simon, took part in the service.

Many times over the years, Brian and I shared ridiculously early hours while producing NPR’s leading program from its headquarters in Washington, DC. I’d sit behind a microphone on one side of a window. He’d sit on the other side at a control board, monitoring my voice and every other sound we played from around the world. If the sound was less than perfect he would apply his skill to equalize or improve it. If something went wrong in the live program he would instantly adjust. He had to meet an exacting standard, playing sound so subtle and evocative that it could transport listeners to another place, but that also could be heard clearly inside a noisy car.

Millions of people heard his work on NPR for decades, though they only occasionally would have heard his name, as when he filed this beautiful story. He did his job so seamlessly that I’m sure most listeners were not conscious of his existence.

I don’t mean to give you a full account of Brian’s life; an obituary is here. But during the service, the priest said something striking enough that I pulled out a notebook and wrote down the quote. “Brian was a just man,” the priest said, and gave a definition of people who are just: “They understand they have a responsibility to everyone they encounter.”

This captured him well. Brian took responsibility. He took his job seriously. If anything went wrong on the air he felt terrible, even when it was something so slight that listeners would not notice. A true error almost never happened on his watch. He was on top of things, always attentive. Often he’d save me from some mistake. He was one of those people in life—I have had many, and I hope you have—who think about you and look after you, even when you don’t realize it until later.

We worked in tandem, each on our side of the glass. Sometimes I could press a button to talk with him, and he could talk in my ear; other times we’d communicate with a gesture or a glance. I recall one interview in particular. A political spokesman called in. He wasn’t answering the question and also wouldn’t stop talking. Several times I tried to break in, and he kept going. Finally I signaled to Brian, holdng out my left hand, palm up. Then I turned the palm down. Brian understood: He lowered the guest’s volume and I was able to get the conversation back on track.

In 2023 Brian suffered a spinal injury and other crises that, with shocking abruptness, left him unable to walk and in doubt about his future. One day he was a healthy man and the next day he wasn’t, forever. Then he kept suffering more crises. Things never really stabilized. He kept going in and out of hospitals, in and out of surgery, in and out of rehab and then back to the ER. Month after month, year after year.

His family installed a ramp and made other changes to their house to accommodate a person in a wheelchair. Friends and colleagues provided constant support. They started a GoFundMe to help with expenses, and even staged a benefit concert. For a time he hoped to return to work, but that wasn’t possible; he finally retired from NPR, though his colleagues, especially his fellow engineers, kept in close touch. At the funeral I learned that even newly hired engineers who had never worked with him would go to pay their respects.

Several times I visited Brian, or tried. More than once I would schedule a time to come to the house, only to learn he had gone back into the hospital. It’s hard to grasp how he and his family could have endured so many setbacks. Once I went to the hospital to find him asleep, so I sat silently with him for an hour.

Another time we had a long talk. He was thinking about whether they should amuptate his useless legs. That was how little hope he had of ever getting better. Though his hands worked, he struggled to focus enough to play his guitar or other instruments that once had brought him such pleasure. But he wanted to go on. He told me he had things to do. His children needed a father and he wanted to be a good one. He felt a responsibility to every person he encountered.

After the funeral, Brian was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. The funeral procession brought his body across town from the church, but the priest took a wrong turn on the way and was delayed. We stood around the wooden coffin at the gravesite, silently waiting. In radio, this is what’s known as dead air, and broadcasters consider dead air intolerable.

And then Brian’s son Alex stepped in. He’s in his early twenties, and without any preparation he explained the delay and filled some of the time with simple and gracious remarks about his father and the people who had come to remember him. He took responsibility. He did it perfectly. Soon after that the priest arrived, and we said our last goodbyes.

He is also 47 and charismatic, with a rising national profile that would position him for 2028 or some later election cycle if he should change his mind, which at least some people around the state capital in Annapolis, Maryland are waiting for him to do.

When I spoke with Moore just outside his office for the new NPR video series Newsmakers, it became clear that he has thought a lot about the presidency as it will stand in January 2029. He said the next president will have to review the institutions wrecked by President Trump and decide what is worth rebuilding and what is not.

He acknowledged that some parts of the government don’t deserve rebuilding: Trump was elected twice, Moore says, because government wasn’t working for people.

He talked of limiting the presidential power that Trump has asserted and expanded so aggressively. He said Trump has so abused his pardon power that Moore would like to abolish it.

Moore spoke with our team in the Maryland State House—an ancient and ornate building that was begun in colonial times, in 1772. It briefly served as the national capital in the 1780’s. Slavery was legal in Maryland then. Until Moore’s election in 2022, every Maryland governor was a white man. Portraits of his most recent predecessors lined the walls of the reception room where we positioned our cameras for the interview.

Click here for our talk with Wes Moore:

Our talk was the premiere of Newsmakers—big interviews for every NPR platform, from YouTube to Spotify to the radio—but that program builds on a series of earlier NPR video interviews, including several with Democratic leaders and presidential contenders.

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It’s compelling to contrast Moore with other Democrats we have interviewed: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg, JB Pritzker, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Rahm Emanuel, and Gavin Newsom.

Like several, Moore says the political system was broken before Trump, and he would not return every federal agency to the way it was, even if he could.

Moore is also critical of what you could call the “nonprofit industrial complex,” liberal charities that work on behalf of the poor. He once served as the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, and says he pushed it to lobby the government for big policy changes, rather than doling out a little money to make donors feel good (“philanthropy for philanthropists,” as he called it).

Unlike Emanuel or Buttigeig, he did not say Democrats have leaned too hard into social issues, especially those involving transgender children. When asked, he said he wanted to make his state safe for everyone.

Like many Democrats, Moore insisted that voters expect practical results from their political leaders. This statement would seem to be self-evidently true. But is it entirely true? It will be tested again in 2028.

Trump prevailed in two elections by pushing policies that Republicans favored—but also by telling a story, a particular narrative of America. Before him, Barack Obama built a movement on his own narrative of what America was and could be.

What we don’t know yet is who has a story to tell that may resonate with the country in 2028.

He’s married with three children, including a son who is 14. “And he feels like he needs a dad for a little while longer,” Sasse told me. “So I want to knock him upside the head and wrestle with him and tell him how much I love him and tell him stuff I wish I had done differently in my life.”

The Republican lawmaker and university president approached his public life with a sense of humor, and he seems not to have lost it in this grave situation. He chose to take up a long-delayed idea to start a podcast with a friend, the journalist Chris Stirewalt, and in the opening episode they discussed possible names for the program, such as I’d Rather Die than Do a Podcast, or Dead Man Talking. They settled on Not Dead Yet, which is a line drawn from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“Because we don’t know how many episodes we’re gonna get,” Sasse said.

In the same episode, the hosts had this exchange:

Sasse: The hard part for the post-production staff is how often I vomit while we record.

Stirewalt: Yes. Prior to beginning this recording, I said that I’ve had a lot of people who I’ve interviewed who have wanted to throw up while I was talking to them, but never this frequency and never with this kind of enthusiasm.

Sasse: And this one’s not because of you, which is fresh for you.

In our conversation, Sasse talked about this approach.

We decided to go ahead and embrace some of the humor of the fact that I need to run from the room a lot. I don’t want to throw up. But if you throw up, you kind of want to check a box of getting the laugh out of it.

But I need to laugh at death because death is terrible—but death doesn’t get the final word. I think laughing at the suffering is a way to make it communal, but it’s also a way to to tell a bigger truth.

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This perspective applies to all manner of bad news.

As a journalist, it’s generally my job to keep my opinions out of the story. The news is the news. It’s intelligence information for citizens. I should bring it to you regardless of my personal opinion, and I should cite my sources and prove my case with facts so that you can see for yourself that the story was impartial. It’s not my place to tell you who to vote for, and it most certainly is not my place to tell you to embrace this or that faith.

But I am comfortable sharing opinions about journalism, one of which is the value of a sense of humor. Even when covering wars, disasters, economic calamities, political division, laughter helps. Even if it’s gallows humor. There is a lot of that kind of laughter in a newsroom! And also in war-torn nations and disaster zones.

Laughter is human. And it shows we are not defeated. For many years, I have explained this perspective by quoting the Langston Hughes poem Laughing to Keep from Crying. I will leave you with a part of it:

Laugh,

in the face of death.

Live,

with no regret.

Laugh,

with every step.

Let,

laughter become.

Our final breath.

Trump is far from the first chief executive to commit military force without seeking a Congressional declaration. But the strikes on Iran are a particularly stark case. Past presidents have at least gestured toward that constitutional requirement.

The Constitution says, “The Congress shall have Power… to declare war.” It also says the President is the commander in chief. Presidents have repeatedly used that command authority to circumvent the Congressional power.

As a non-lawyer, the law seems pretty clear to me. Congress decides when to start a war and who is the enemy. Once that is decided, the president takes command of the army. If another nation attacks first, this becomes moot and the commander in chief will respond in any way necessary until Congress can make decisions.

Very few presidents have fully conceded this reading. They have taken the position that they will do whatever they need to do. They construe military action—especially airstrikes—as mere tools of foreign policy. They don’t want to be constrained. And in truth, many lawmakers have not wanted the responsibility of being asked first.

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Our Constitutional system envisions a wise, statesmanlike, prudent Congress who would not needlessly constrain the president—who would pay attention to events, do their jobs, authorize action when it made sense and restrain it otherwise.

You can doubt whether Congress is capable of this! But occasionally Congress has done it, as with the U.S. entry into both World Wars. World War I in 1917 is a pertinent example, as it was something of a war of choice. German attacks on American shipping made it vital to do something, but the timing was up to the United States. Congress debated and voted.

In other cases, Congress did not insist on its full war power but went on record in various ways. Both wars on Iraq were preceded by votes in Congress to authorize force if necessary. A vote in Congress authorized military action after 9/11 (also that authorization was put to more and more elastic purposes as the years went on). These votes had the effect of sparking debate, putting political leaders on the record, and engaging the public in the process. It also ensured that the president was not out on a limb without Congress or the public behind him.

The Constitution is designed so that big decisions are rarely supposed to be in the hands of one person. Many people should weigh in, which is appropriate in a republic with self-government.

President Trump did not consult Congress. It seems that Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave some kind of notification to the Gang of Eight, the four top Congressional leaders and the leaders of the intelligence committees. Some of the Democrats emerged from that meeting on Tuesday urging Trump to make his case to the people in his State of the Union address that night. He did not. That is why some Democrats have labeled this an illegal war.

If Iran’s government collapses easily, this may have little practical effect, except the further erosion of the power of Congress. Iran’s government is a longstanding enemy of the United States and it seems few in the U.S. government would mourn it.

If the regime change operation becomes protracted or difficult, or leads to unforeseen consequences, that would be a different case. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were required to weigh in on the value or the risks of this operation. Nor was the public really engaged, although Trump’s action has been anticipated for some weeks. And that is significant, because the public was committed without being asked—neither directly nor through its representatives. If things go wrong, nobody will feel bound to defend the war, as many lawmakers felt bound to defend the war in Iraq.

The title of this post is borrowed from On War, a nineteenth-century book by military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who said that war is not an isolated act. It is the continuation of politics by other means. Because war is a form of politics, a form of policy, it matters whether and how a president engages the body politic.

Her many writers include Ron Chernow. In the 1990’s, she persuaded him to overcome his doubts and write a biography of John D. Rockefeller. It became a bestseller. They went on to publish other books together, one of which was Hamilton.

In addition to Chernow, the Times notes, “her more celebrated authors” included “E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Brokaw, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Alice Waters.” Many others come to mind.

One of Ann’s less celebrated authors would be me. In buying my first book and all that have followed, she gave me the opportunity to work with a great publisher, and now the opportunity to tell you a little of what a great publisher was like.

When I first encountered Ann in 2009, she was in the last job of her career: publisher of The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She took an interest in my first proposal, for a book about Karachi, Pakistan.

Gail Ross, my agent, had connected me with several publishers who made bids for the book. I chose Ann even though she said my approach to the book was all wrong. She seemed to have an idea of what it could be. She assigned my project to a talented editor, Laura Stickney, who helped me to shape it. When it was finished, Ann sent a handwritten note saying what she thought of it and that she would prefer from then on to edit me herself.

In publishing that first book, Ann and I had a disagreement. She generously allowed me to prevail. Eventually I concluded that she had been right all along, and resolved that from then on I would just do what she said.

That I ever made such a resolution about any editor would probably astonish every other editor I’ve had in my writing life. But for sixteen years or so, I nearly always just did what she said.

Here is what a great publisher brought to the table.

She had power. She bought my second book, Jacksonland, over breakfast in Manhattan. I told her the idea. She said I should send her a letter to memorialize it and that would be it. I’d have a couple of years to write it. She didn’t ask me for an extended book proposal, as is common. She didn’t consult any committee, ask any boss, order up market research or conduct user testing. She believed in the idea and in me.

I had not expected to sell a book over breakfast, and was so taken aback that I chose to write a proposal anyway to make sure I knew what I was doing. She waited for it. She said that some of the most important work of a book was at the front end: What are you really doing, what is this about?

She was a strategic editor, somehow both gentle and ruthless. I’ve heard that many books are barely edited, but nobody could say that of Ann’s. She gave a book thought and she said what she thought. When she was editing Jacksonland, I sent her a chapter that ended with what I considered to be a lyrical scene, which I had refined for days. She came on the phone and told me the chapter ended 600 words before I had ended it. The entire closing scene went out, every word. It didn’t advance the story.

Jacksonland was a story of Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee chief John Ross, a tragic tale that usually had been told from one perspective or the other. In telling it from both, she said, I must remain evenhanded. The power in the story would come from the reader reaching a judgment, not from me proclaiming that I knew who was right.

Once published, the book was embraced both by the Cherokee Nation and by the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s historic site in Tennessee. A week or so ago—more than a decade after publication—I received a handwritten letter from a reader who appreciated the book’s evenhandedness.

She was patient. When I turned in a manuscript, she took at least a year to publish. This has always baffled people—why wait a whole year when you can publish a Substack instantly?—but she wanted the time. After her big-picture editing she would turn me over to a colleague, Casey Denis, for the most rigorous of line edits. Casey would all but re-research the book. Everything must be right. Meanwhile Ann would oversee creation of the perfect cover, prepare the company sales reps to market the book, make sure bookstores heard of it, and brainstorm with Gail Brussel, who would promote it.

Her patience allowed me time to reflect on my writing. When I turned in Imperfect Union, she sent a note saying the story really flew—once it got going, after the first 150 manuscript pages. It was such a nice note that I had to read it a few times before realizing that I should radically shorten the setup.

She thought a lot about a book’s structure and how it conveyed meaning. She got me to revise early chapters of Differ We Must again and again, and if anything is original about that book, it is the structure that emerged.

I had the general shape of it from the first. In fact the structure is what sold her; she bought the idea almost instantly in a phone call. But when I sent her chapters, she felt I wasn’t executing it properly. Nor did the revisions work. This went on for so long that I specifically recall her kicking back chapters that I had labeled “Version 14.”

Whatever was published was many versions beyond that. A few of those opening chapters that I repeatedly rewrote are not even in the book. I chose to take them out.

Shortly after publication I was at dinner in Atlanta when my phone rang. I excused myself, went off into a corner, and Ann told me the book was a New York Times bestseller.

She lived to work. She had health difficulties in recent years, but was very private about them and continued working through them. She was alive to current events, mixing histories and novels with investigative journalism. When one of her books was about to break news, she would compress her one-year publishing process to a few weeks. She labored to the end of her life, almost never visible in the national culture but constantly shaping the culture.

In later years she mostly worked from home, and the last time I was able to see her in person was in the summer of 2024. I took a train to the town where she lived in New York’s Hudson Valley, and she picked me up at the station. We had lunch in the window of a restaurant on a sunny day, and we batted around ideas. We talked about history, and also talked about our times. She foresaw dark days ahead, and said that in that darkness there would be a lot of work for writers to do. She was right about that too.

It concerned the NPR interview with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt. It’s another of our “all-platform” interviews—radio, podcast, video and more. The all-platforms have been so successful they are evolving into a separate program.

Stitt elaborated on his concerns with Trump’s immigration enforcement. He sees the heavy-handed federal operation in Minnesota—thousands of agents deployed, sparking protest and killing two Americans—as an infringement on state rights. He also wants to know how many residents of Oklahoma the government really plans to deport.

"The president needs to tell us what's the endgame. Is it truly to deport every single person here in the country? I don't think that's what America wants," Stitt said. He advocates issuing work permits to people without legal status who have jobs. He asserts that even Trump-voting areas have residents without status whom they consider to be valuable workers, neighbors, friends.

Here’s the video - and below that is an incredible detail of the story that underlines what this means for Trump.

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The stunning detail came back to me by chance tonight while searching for something else. It’s a news article from not so long ago: December 2024, just after President Trump’s second election. Have a look at this headline from KGOU, and consider the contrast with the video above.

That was just fourteen months ago!

Gov. Stitt has gone from a Day One supporter to a critic. And yet—I don’t read him as having really changed his mind about immigration. Rather, he is not getting the enforcement he wanted all along.

I understand the 2024 article, and the 2026 video, to express the same view: Stitt wants people without status who have committed crimes to be removed.

From 2024:

“That’s why I put Operation Guardian in place,” Stitt said. “To work with President Trump so day one in office, we can get on these illegals that have committed criminal activity out of the state of Oklahoma.”

In the 2026 video, he also says he favors removing criminals and he thinks Trump voters do too. What he doesn’t approve is massive sweeps of every migrant the government can find. Anecdotally, at least, he thinks he represents the electorate in his state, which voted 66% for Trump.

Trump’s 2024 campaign talked about immigration in a way that allowed people to believe what they wanted. Trump, Vance and others talked of deporting millions of people—often coming up with numbers far higher than the verified numbers of people without legal status. People in crowds held up signs that said MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW!

But other, more measured Trump supporters would say words to the effect of, “First, we will round up the criminals.”

According to surveys, many Americans were on board for deporting criminals. It was a matter of argument as to who was a criminal. (How serious a crime? Deport someone who is convicted or only charged? Etc.) What they didn’t expect was armed and masked agents rounding up people seemingly at random, even including some who were legal residents and citizens.

Stitt’s disapproval of Trump’s chosen course matches a lot of polling. A lot of people voted for Trump but do not think they voted for this.

Takht-Ravanchi expects to attend Thursday’s talks with the United States in Geneva. He expects the talks to follow the same format as an earlier round: Indirect negotiations with messages passed through Oman’s foreign minister, followed by a face to face handshake at the end.

Q. Are you close to an agreement?

“We are ready to reach an agreement as soon as possible. We want to do whatever is necessary to make it happen.” He adds, “I believe the deal can be reached as soon as possible.” Independent analysts have cast doubt on the possibility of successful talks. Iran has been notably more optimistic in its public statements, leading to some speculation as to why. Skeptics have suggested Iran may be seeking to appear reasonable so that any U.S. attack would appear unjustified.

Q. Iran is making a proposal. Does it concern anything other than Iran’s nuclear program?

“No, the subject of negotiations is the nuclear issue, and this is agreed by all sides.” Nothing on missiles or other Iranian assets. Talkht-Ravanchi describes talks much narrower than hardliners in the US and Israel would like. They want Iran to give up its whole nuclear program, its ballistic missiles, and its partnerships with groups such as Hezbollah. Here’s one such voice, Mark Dubowitz, as heard on NPR.

Q. How would Iran respond to a limited attack?

“You cannot contain the war which is going to be started. How can one... end the war with just one strike?” He added, “The whole region will suffer as a result of aggression against Iran.” Asked directly if this means Iran would attack its oil-producing neighbors, Takht-Ravanchi denied it but added, “If the US attacks Iran, how can anybody expect Iran to be silent? We have to respond to US assets in the region.”

There is a reason that I asked about a “limited” attack. Reporting out of the US suggests that one of President Trump’s options would be a limited strike to push Iran to concede more in negotiations. Iran has insisted that it would regard any attack, even a small one, as an existential threat. That implies they might make a massive response, unlike with prior strikes by the U.S. and Israel. Analysts are divided as to whether Iran would do that.

We also asked the vice foreign minister about the aftermath of Iran’s protests, in which thousands of people were killed. An Iranian told NPR of a move to search students in schools for pellet wounds or other signs they had been present for protests. Here is the underlying story.

We’ll continue listening to all sides as the U.S. prepares for negotiations—and also deploys assets that could launch a major war that, so far, has spurred no formal debate in Congress nor received that much public attention.

I was in town for an annual event at the University of Indianapolis. For almost half a century, they have held a symposium on global affairs for high school students from across the state. Of course they take the occasion as an opportunity to recruit students! It is also a very cool event. For more than forty years Richard Lugar, a much-admired Republican senator, delivered the keynote address. Since his illness and death in 2019, they have asked me to give that talk. It’s one of my favorite things to do. Between 150-200 high school students turn up and it’s inspiring to meet them and hear their sharp questions.

The theme of my talk was how to be an informed citizen when we are flooded with contradictory information and, above all, distractions. I expanded on some of the thoughts I have shared with you in this space about our post-information age.

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This same weekend I have been focused on a news story that serves as an example of the problem and how to address it. It relates to the federal immigration surge in Minneapolis.

The story is a mystery: Federal authorities keep demanding that Minnesota turn over people without legal status who turn up in local prisons and jails. But Minnesota says they already do this. What?

This mystery was on my mind on Friday morning when I was co-hosting NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First. My colleague Sergio Martinez-Beltran was reporting from Minneapolis on the new federal official overseeing the immigration raids there. Tom Homan had talked of scaling down the military-style presence on the streets.

MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: But the big headline, Steve, is that all of these plans are dependent on the cooperation of state and local officials. Homan said that means more access to prisons and jails, which would mean fewer agents on the streets Homan also said the administration will prioritize the arrest of migrants with criminal records or who pose a public safety threat. And it’s important to know that the administration has said this all along and yet has arrested a bunch of undocumented immigrants who have not committed crimes…

INSKEEP: I want a little bit of clarity, if you’ve got it. He says he wants more access to jails. I think Minnesota officials have said they give some access to jails. Is that right?

MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Yes, and that’s something that Homan acknowledged yesterday in his press conference as well, and something that the administration of Governor Tim Walz has maintained all along as well.

Wait. What?

Homan himself admits that he is already getting what he is demanding? I really needed further explanation. Fortunately, some was forthcoming.

Read more

As you would expect, Whitmer and Emanuel both have sharp words for President Trump. They also face some of the divides among Democrats about where their party goes next. It’s worth watching at the links below, because both are veteran politicos who have lived through their party’s highest and lowest points across the first quarter of the century.

This makes them perfect guests for the NPR all-platform interview. It’s evolving into a forum where prominent people can have a real conversation about hard topics. Parts of the interview reach a mass audience on NPR’s Morning Edition. A longer cut drops on video platforms, and as a special edition of NPR’s Up First, for people to hear the guests in depth.

In these interviews I’m asking questions because I genuinely want to know the answers. That sounds simple—but experience has taught me how hard it can be for reporters to conduct interviews that way. Any journalist will face pressure to ask the questions they imagine they should ask, or that they’ll be criticized for asking. They may ask a question hoping to look tough, or refrain from asking because an interest group does not want that question asked. And of course there is the compulsion to ask a question for clicks.

My job is to let go of all that, reflect on the guest and the story, and just ask what’s on my mind. The results are all in public and you can judge how well I do. One of the best compliments I ever hear is from a listener who says, “You asked my questions.”

Whitmer, the popular governor of the swing state of Michigan, is often talked of as a presidential (or vice presidential) contender, though she has not signaled that she’s running for anything. Emanuel is thinking of running in 2028. He has served in almost every part of government—as a Congressional leader, President Obama’s chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, and ambassador to Japan.

Whitmer made news this week for a courteous disagreement with her fellow Democrat Michelle Obama. The former First Lady said she did not think Americans were “ready” to elect a woman president, and pointed to the 2024 election results as evidence. Whitmer said she hated to differ with Obama but that America is ready.

She also was extremely interesting, as a woman in power, discussing why Democrats have lost support among men, and why many men seem to be losing ground in society.

The discussion of men begins at 14:38, and this link will take you there.

The discussion of a woman as president begins at 19:35.

Or just watch the whole thing here!

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Rahm Emanuel faces a different set of challenges: He wants to shift his party’s longstanding priorities. He has focused on education and reading—an issue he says is nowhere in the headlines. “Republicans have walked away from public education,” he said, “and Democrats have abandoned accountability and standards.”

He asserts that his party spent too much time on who goes in which bathroom. “We… engaged in cultural wars in schools, and then found out we were on the losing side.”

In our conversation, Emanuel heaped scorn on the business community for, in his view, being “timid souls” who accept the Trump administration’s destruction of the rule of law.

Of course this raises a question. If Trump is so bad, why did the business community make its peace with him before the 2024 election? What did Democrats do to drive them away?

“I’m saying this in shorthand,” Emanuel replied. “But the Republican party’s dominated by a monopolist mindset. And our party started to get dominated by a bunch of Marxists.”

Emanuel also took questions on a tricky social issue: What did he mean on Megyn Kelly’s podcast when he answered a series of questions about trans issues, and concluded by saying a man cannot become a woman?

The discussion on education starts at 27:30.

His explanation on trans issues begins at 32:15.

You can find the discussion of corporate America at 37:55.

Or watch the whole video here:

We’ll hear from more contenders in the days ahead. My colleague Scott Detrow just sat with Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, and that video may be out by the time you read this.

We know that there will be efforts to compromise the election or to dissuade people from showing up, to scare people away, to threaten people. We cannot let that stand.

Whitmer’s presumption does not mean the administration will take action at election time, but it offered a window into senior Democrats’ thinking. She declined to give specifics about Democratic plans to respond but said, “We’ve got smart, sophisticated, savvy people around the table top.”

She even said it was not “paranoia” to think that the government would use Homeland Security officials to influence voting. She asserted that the administration is already abusing its power as it surges DHS personnel to Minnesota and elsewhere while promising them immunity from prosecution.

The perceived link between immigration and voting is well established. Democrats and progressives once believed that an increasingly diverse country would deliver them a permanent electoral majority. That hasn’t happened, but President Trump and his supporters have invested deeply in the opposite idea: that Democrats were deliberately importing voters, and that “illegals” were voting in vast numbers. Trump himself talked of “millions” of illegal votes against him in 2016, a conspiracy theory backed by no evidence that allowed him to shift blame for losing the popular vote.

Even more interesting was Whitmer’s discussion of men and women. Michigan’s second female governor (the first was Jennifer Granholm) said she believes America is “ready for a woman president,” even if some read the 2024 election as evidence to the contrary.

She also is thinking about male voters, a demographic that Democrats in 2024 lost even more decisively than usual.

In her State of the State speech in early 2025, Whitmer warned of “ a generation of men falling behind their fathers and their grandfathers.” She told me about her reasons, and the response.

I was addressing a need. When I said, that some people kind of pushed back and said—Oh, are you abandoning your plans to help women get ahead? And I said, no, of course not. I’m recognizing that there’s a unique vulnerability here, though. When we look at the efforts that we undertook to make college or skill sets more affordable, women were signing up to two to one [compared with men]. When we announced opportunities that bring down the cost of a first home payment. Women were signing up two to one… We were not reaching men. So did we design a bunch of programs for men? No. But we do more outreach to make sure that we are meeting men where they are, so they understand what’s available to them too. Because we want an opportunity for every person.

There’s a wide-ranging debate about men in society. Men still dominate in CEO offices, boardrooms and the presidency, but many older as well as younger men are seen as drifting in a stew of problems. The debate assumes many flavors: Far-right efforts to assert traditional male authority; articles like this one asserting that diversity efforts have squeezed younger white men out of prominent fields; and scholarly efforts like that of Richard Reeves to address the statistical evidence of men falling behind and to identify a range of causes.

The woman in charge of Michigan’s government admitted she is still working to grasp the roots of the problem. “I’m listening to, probably, a lot of the same podcasts that you are to understand: What can we do? How do we bridge this gap? It is real. And I think that’s the first step. And the second is really reaching out and listening and making sure that every part of our society can make can take advantage of opportunities that are available.”

With Leila Fadel, Kelley Dickens, Jay Shaylor and A Martinez, standing.

Had NPR won, I would have said something like the text below. Honestly, the sentiments apply just as much to being nominated.

Thank you Golden Globes voters…

Thanks to all of you in this room for welcoming podcasts into your world.

A special thanks to Only Murders in the Building for not entering the podcast category.

Michel Martin, Leila Fadel, A Martinez and I are the voices of this show with Scott Simon and Ayesha Rascoe… but we represent the work of hundreds of journalists—from Ziad Buchh, who produces this podcast in the middle of the night, to our correspondents on the border of Venezuela.

NPR executives and producers take heat for what we say - Katherine Maher, Tommy Evans, Eric Marrapodi, Jay Shaylor, Evie Stone, Irene Noguchi.

We accept this award on behalf of the First Amendment.

If we’re going to have self-government, we need informed citizens.

We help with that through firsthand reporting from around the world.

So we also accept this award on behalf of journalists, especially those attacked by their governments.

Finally we accept this award on behalf of many Americans, including some in this room, who have done their part to make sure that NPR is still on.

One way to interpret this is:

The U.S. does not intend to run Venezuela, in the sense of setting up a government.

Nor does it expect the opposition to take power. The party that the U.S. says won the 2024 election is to be left on its own for now.

The existing government is expected to do what the U.S. tells it to do, on the issues the U.S. cares about, while managing on its own everything that the U.S. doesn’t care about.

Since we seem to be, almost explicitly, re-running the McKinley presidency, a look at the colonial history of that period is useful.

What Rubio, Trump et al are sketching out does not sound like the Philippines plan, where the United States took over a country in 1898, crushed an independence movement, and not only governed but built its own capital city.

Nor, for that matter, are they describing Iraq-style nation building.

What they describe sounds closer to a classic British colonial model. In the 1800’s, the British controlled some countries directly. But many others had notionally independent governments, to which the British sent an ambassador (or high commissioner) who would be high-handed in saying what his government expected of the local prince or ruler.

Occasionally, a new ruler would be installed. Sometimes troops were required.

And sometimes, as in Afghanistan, the arrangement would be resisted, go horribly wrong, and lead to bloody wars.

That is an aspect to be realistic about. The U.S. is describing a low-cost, high-reward intervention. But they are not the only player in the game. Sometimes events take their own direction; there was a brief phase when the plan for Iraq also seemed to be installing a friendly chieftain and moving on to other adventures. Didn’t work out that way.

The U.S. has its own long history of military interventions in Latin America, and almost always commands great influence. But I can’t think of any intervention in a country as populous as Venezuela - about 28 million. This is not Grenada or Panama, nor Haiti, nor even Cuba. It’s a big move and the story is just beginning.

Note: This story was published at 9:01am E.T. An updated version is now available at NPR at this link.

This is a day for gathering facts. My colleague Carrie Kahn is leading NPR coverage this morning and I encourage you to check npr.org or turn on the radio for what we know.

Anyone who tells you today that they know where this is heading loses credibility. It’s better to pose questions. Here are some initial ones on my mind.

Who is in charge of Venezuela today?

The answer seems to be Venezuela’s vice president and interior minister, both of whom made statements overnight. In the U.S., Senator Mike Lee quotes Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the U.S. strikes are over, which would imply leaving the current government in place for now.

Who will be in charge in a month?

President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, suggested in a recent Vanity Fair article that Trump was focused on regime change. Trump has made various statements in public. Even if this particular operation is over, how much farther does the U.S. intend to go?

What do the Venezuelan people do?

Many opponents of the long-running socialist government have fled the country. Edmundo González, the opposition candidate who the U.S. says won the 2024 election, is in exile. Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader, had long been in hiding and was recently seen in Norway.

Do Venezuelans inside the country rise up—or do more of them head for the borders? Colombia is already preparing for more refugees, sending troops to its border with Venezuela.

My visits to Venezuela were in 2013, when I witnessed Nicolas Maduro’s first election campaign. It was just after the death of his long-serving predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets clamoring for change, and didn’t get it. They have endured more than a decade of additional suffering since then; a middle-income country has become a wreck, but a full-blown uprising has not yet come.

How do Russia and China use this example?

Other nations are condemning the U.S. strike, but some governments may not mind the precedent. Russia may see a double standard: If the U.S. can take out Maduro, why can’t Russia take out Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or the inconvenient leader of any other former Soviet republic? Why can’t China capture the president of Taiwan? We can say that these situations are different, of course, that Maduro was indicted in the U.S. and so forth, but others will overlook this.

The U.S. may not worry about the precedent too much, simply because few other nations have the ability to swoop in and capture a president. Russia tried a lightning capture of Kyiv in 2022 and utterly failed. China has spent an enormous amount on its military, but they have not been seriously tested in years.

Does this signal a new focus for the United States?

Some foreign policy analysts worry about a U.S. administration that would assert a supercharged Monroe Doctrine—insisting on a United States that dominates the Western Hemisphere while leaving other regions to other powers. This would imply even less interest than Trump has already shown in defending Europe, and raises questions for the whole constellation of U.S. allies in East Asia and the Pacific.

China and Russia would certainly welcome that rebalancing—and China can also contest the Western Hemisphere, having invested heavily throughout Latin America. But we don’t know to what extent President Trump’s policy goals point in that direction. What’s certain is that Trump’s overseas actions remain far more complex than campaign slogans.