The crash was intentional. The maneuver, known as a Precision Immobilization Technique, is regarded as reckless, dangerous and not particularly effective — including by the Chicago Police Department, which severely limits the practice. But this is no longer their town. Donald Trump has vowed to bring order to the city he now describes as a “death trap” — and has called upon the federal officers of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies to make it safe again. Welcome to Chicago under Operation Midway Blitz.

Following the incident in the Southeast Side, a largely Latino neighborhood, a crowd gathered to protest. More federal agents were sent in to calm the situation, which they did by firing tear gas. Chaos ensued. Among those gassed were 13 members of the Chicago Police Department. The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times the next day depicted a federal officer pointing his weapon at a young man who had his hands raised.

Through the smoke and the havoc, it is possible to see the chaos as a win for both sides. For the MAGA Right, the protests are yet more evidence of the Soros-funded malignant forces Trump is trying to subvert. For the Left, here is a city united in a resounding rebuke of the President, the Resistance reborn.

That may help fundraising, and television ratings, but what about ordinary people who have bills to pay and families to feed? The truth, as I see it from reporting on Chicago over the last several years, is that Operation Midway Blitz will change nothing — no matter how aggressive its tactics. Instead, it will only exacerbate our existing divides, making solutions impossible. This is true of every major political issue. Vehemence trumps compromise. Vitriol trumps civility. We are all now living in Chicago.

***

Trump is right in his identifying of a chronic disorder that has plagued American cities since the Covid pandemic. Among big cities, Chicago has the highest per capita murder rate, far above that of a New York City supposedly backsliding into the bad old days. And the number of carjackings has soared in the last decade. But in trying to conflate illegal immigration, violent crime and general urban disorder, Trump has ensured that none of those issues will be resolved. This is the same intersectionality beloved by the Left, only applied to a different set of concerns.

The surge in National Guard troops and immigration officers in Chicago is the same approach the administration took in Washington, DC. There, violent crime dropped by 22%, and a long stretch of August, which can be a turbulent month, went by without a single murder. But this is an unsustainable trend: federal resources in Chicago were not directed toward the largely impoverished, majority-black neighborhoods — Garfield Park, Washington Park, Englewood — where responsible interventions like a gun interdiction task force might make a significant difference.

Similarly, in Chicago, Trump’s zealous lawmen are unsure of what they want to do and where they want to do it: “They’re so afraid to go where the crime is,” an iron worker named Caroline tells me. “They’re picking up the fucking guys trying to make a living at Home Depot. They’re pulling busboys out of fucking restaurants.” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino has thrust himself with rather disconcerting eagerness into the fray, apparently throwing a can of tear gas during one recent encounter with protesters. He now has to report to court daily, as if on parole.

As has been the case in Los Angeles, Washington and Portland, few believe Trump’s forays into Chicago will make much of a difference. But in an age in which politics is entirely performative, perhaps the performance of toughness is all that is required. Bovino may win an Emmy, when all of this is through.

The same, too, could be said about the performance of defiance. The protests by Chicagoans against this invasion of their city have been forceful and impassioned. Yet they will also change little in a lasting sense. American policy — whether it comes to immigration, crime, poverty, or just about anything else — will remain in a state of pervasive constipation. Maybe that explains the growing number of Americans (about a third of those recently surveyed in a recent poll from NPR, PBS News and Marist) who say violence is an acceptable laxative.

***

Outside the ICE processing facility in Broadview, a shabby Chicago ‘burb, I watch protests ebb and flow. Activists have set up a tent nearby. Tracy, a white, middle-aged protester, is all for securing borders. She is not especially political, she tells me, but she can’t square what she is seeing now in Chicago with what she thought Trump had promised.

“If ICE was actually doing what they said they were going to do, which is go after criminals, drug cartel people, I think that would be great,” she says. “But they’re really targeting people of color. They’re targeting brown people, and they’re targeting people that don’t look like they come from here.”

A poster flutters in the wind, bearing the name of a Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer who had allegedly aided in immigrant detention. An American flag also flutters. A pro-Trump counter-protester named Ben had driven to Chicago from Arkansas. He is holding a sign that says: “GOD BLESS ICE.” Some people honk in approval as they drove past. “I want them to know that America supports them and that we are not all crazy liberals,” Ben tells me. “We are not all these democratic socialists.”

At this point, events take a nasty turn. An activist runs up to Ben. A woman in a dinosaur costume has claimed that Ben put his hands on her. Did he put his hands on the woman in the dinosaur costume? Ben denies it. The activists bristle.

Another man, loud and irate, raises the name of Charlie Kirk, recounting the macabre details of the assassination and seeming to suggest that Ben deserves the same fate.

“Guess where he’s at now,” the irate man says ominously.

Ben does not miss a beat. “Heaven,” he replies.

Just as things seem like they could escalate, several state troopers step in. The ICE detention facility stands in the distance, a hulking symbol of whatever you want it to mean: fascism, law and order, something else altogether. The protester in the dinosaur costume remains near the fence, alone.

***

MAGA-friendly commentators have used videos of confrontations between ICE agents and local activists to depict Chicago as a war zone in desperate need of even more forceful intervention. Anti-Trump outlets have shown Chicago rising up in unison to offer the White House a resounding rebuke.

The truth is less satisfying. Chicago seems to be largely indifferent, as is much of the rest of the country — not just to the immigration raids but to, well, pretty much anything short of a nuclear strike. While there are a few stirrings of vigor in America — New York, for example, seems about to elect a socialist mayor — a strange passivity appears to have settled over much of the land.

Trump has used this moment to his advantage, while his opponents, motivated as they may be, have not found a way to attract the voters whom they lost in 2024. Having given up a huge share of the black and Hispanic vote, Democrats could now be losing the educated, city-dwelling whites who are their lifeblood.

“We’re completely fucked,” confessed an actor named Seth who was having a drink at Hemingway’s Bistro in Oak Park, a much nicer suburb than Broadview where no one would dare put an ICE facility. He voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, but was furious that the Democrats could do no better than her or the enfeebled incumbent. He would go to the large anti-Trump protest organized for the upcoming weekend (which would turn out to be huge, as it would be in many cities), but he was not sure if the protest would do any good. Apathy could set in. Maybe it has already. If it does, MAGA will doubtlessly benefit.

***

People are surprised to learn that there is a Trump Tower in Chicago. Perhaps they shouldn’t be. It is a graceless building on the Chicago River whose defining quality is that it is tall, and that its proprietor’s name can be seen from many blocks away. But the President seems to have an uncanny understanding of the unspoken grievances that motivate people to vote. His immigration raids have been needlessly provocative and disruptive, but they give off the sense that something is being done.

In 2016, Chicago resoundingly repudiated Trump. That year, he earned only 12.4% of the vote. But by 2024, that share had jumped to 22%. To understand why his support almost doubled here, you need only look at how the city has handled immigration over the past few generations — and how MAGA has learned to exploit those failures.

In 1985, Chicago became a sanctuary city — with a policy of not asking people about their immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration agencies. The current Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, supports the policy. “We’re not going to help federal officials just drag them away,” he said of undocumented immigrants earlier this year.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, feels the same. Three years ago, after the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, decided to bus Mexican migrants across to liberal cities such as Chicago — presumably to show big city mayors what Texas had been experiencing for years — Johnson seemed initially upbeat about the development. “We are going to do everything we can to make this home for you,” he told a group of migrants who were sleeping in a Chicago police station. Johnson further argued that these convoys did not constitute “a crisis” — even though the migrants had nowhere to live and no means to make a living and had not asked to be sent to Chicago.

The fact that Abbott was moving people like political pawns did not seem to feature in Johnson’s thinking. Overall, some 40,000 migrants ended up in Chicago, the vast majority of them desperate families wanting a better life. Many of the migrants Abbott met in the police station had fled deteriorating political and economic conditions in Venezuela. However, the visible presence of these new incomers — and evident lack of solutions — only reinforced the sense that Chicago’s leaders had lost control of the city they were supposed to lead. These highly unpopular progressives have proved easy foils for the MAGA Right.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, migrant women sat with their children on many corners in the downtown Chicago district known as the Loop, with desultory boxes of candy for sale on the pavement before them. Some of the women coddled infants. Sometimes, toys were scattered on the ground. They looked helpless and you, passing by, were helpless in your own way. The nature of the modern American city is such that the comfortable are too comfortable, and the afflicted too afflicted, for things to ever really change.

At a City Hall hearing in the summer of 2023, I watched a man in a baseball cap with the motto “Power Pussy Peace” berate legislators for what he saw as their hypocrisy. “On every corner there’s an undocumented immigrant,” he told the members of the subcommittee on fire and police, who surely knew as much. “Single mother, with two to three kids, with a box of candy, all downtown.”

The man in the Power Pussy Peace hat pointed out that the migrants were generally not harassed by the cops. This also bothered him. “If this would be us,” he said, referring to black people, “all our kids would have been taken, they would’ve been arrested, they would be going through family court.” The migrants got a free pass. He couldn’t understand why.

Undergirding all this is the resentment of downwardly mobile whites who reasonably expected to enjoy the same lifestyle as their parents — only to see job security, affordable home ownership and a pension vanish. When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, in what most serious people thought was a joke, he appealed to them directly in his speech from the lobby of the original Trump Tower, in Manhattan: “The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

***

It is not too hard to find Chicago residents who feel the same way about their own city — and perhaps understandably so, given the Texan migrant-bussing “experiment”. One local poll from 2024 found Chicago residents less favorable towards immigration than the general US public. Where only about a third of the general US population wanted to see “immigration reduced”, half of Chicagoans did.

But immigrants — including the 257,000 undocumented immigrants living in and around Chicago — know that Trump Tower cannot function without them. Nor could just about any of the city’s services or businesses. And while they are scared, they are also indignant.

I meet Esmeraldo at an ice-cream shop in the North Austin neighborhood, close to where there have been ugly confrontations between ICE and immigrants. Tables are packed, but nobody is eating ice cream. They are here for a WhistleMania event, making kits that included whistles which could be used to issue an alert when immigration officials were approaching.

Esmeraldo is a student at DePaul University and a native of the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of the city. Her parents are undocumented. “I’m doing this event for them,” she tells me. “They are fearful. They can’t go outside to work.”

Migrants helped power the great American urbanization that started to take place around the turn of the millennium. They are, to use a pandemic phrase, essential workers in the truest sense. Without their contribution, the American economy could sputter. The signs are already there, at least here in Chicago. When I checked in at my hotel, a makeshift notice had been pasted up in the lobby: “Due to a staffing shortage, Housekeeping service will be limited,” that sign partly said. Enjoy your stay.

There are signs everywhere, and not just pasted angrily on the streets. Some restaurants have started posting notices on their doors prohibiting immigration officers from entering without a judicial warrant. Meanwhile, inside federal buildings, there are signs addressed to “illegal aliens” printed in both English and Spanish advising them to self-deport. “Self-deportation is safe,” these say. “Leave on your own terms by picking your departure flight.” If you leave it up to Trump, is the unspoken implication, you might end up in Uganda.

***

On a miserable afternoon, in a windowless room with a blue wire carpet, I witness Chicago’s administrative machine in action. A young judge named Craig Defoe is here at the courthouse to hear 19 immigration cases. There are three rows of hard wooden benches. A baby cries, grows silent, then cries again.

While the cinematic scenes of ICE encounters shared on social media make it seem like deportations are happening all the time, in the courthouse, deferral remains the order of the day. The cases I hear center on the question of whether a person, or people, deserves to stay in the United States, after having entered the country without doing all of the paperwork and waiting their turn.

These people had crossed jungles and deserts. They had forded rivers and sat in locked vans like cargo, not knowing where they were headed. This was brave, but it was also illegal, because other people had filled out their paperwork and waited. My family, for example, waited for a decade, though on the whole, emigrating from the Soviet Union was a lot easier than emigrating from Latin America.

Now a judge in his 30s would decide their fate. Defoe seems bored and morose, but he frequently surprises me with his shows of empathy. The third case that afternoon is of a Cuban woman who had entered illegally from Mexico. She was apprehended, sent back to Mexico, then crossed back again. Defoe and her attorney spar through a complicated exchange full of acronyms that no ordinary human being could be expected to understand. The upshot seems to be that there were several things the Cuban woman could have done to make her status here more secure, only she had failed to take those steps and was now at risk of deportation.

“That was not smart,” Defoe says. I imagine that he is going to let this woman really have it, ordering her sent back to Cuba at once. Instead, he simply schedules another hearing.

It is more or less the same with a Nicaraguan couple who had been delinquent with their paperwork. Their lawyer tries to explain that they could not file the necessary papers because the husband had been in prison. “The excuses don’t sound very compelling to me,” Defoe says. He grants the couple a month to file whatever had not been filed before.

The sixth case is an East Asian couple and it involves a protracted debate about whether they need a Korean or a Mandarin translator. Finally, Defoe sets a new hearing date for the couple: 27 June, 2028.

By then, we will be in the midst of electing a new president. Perhaps, by that time, artificial intelligence will have divined an answer to our immigration morass. But it seems more likely that things will remain as they are.

I certainly see little enthusiasm for Trump’s heavy-handed approach here. The afternoon is, to the people who actually work in the tangled guts of the immigration system, just one more performance in a country that has come to treat politics as entertainment. After it was done, there would be a new show — and another after that.

***

When I emerge from the courthouse, the rain has stopped but the weather is still raw. I go to Wicker Park, home to the Chicago Bath House, one of the last true Eastern European steam rooms in Chicago. Once, every city in the Northeast and Midwest had many steam rooms, because that is where Russians and Poles and Hungarians and Jews bathed and socialized. But then the Russians and Poles became Americans, and the steam rooms closed. The Eastern Europeans moved to the suburbs, where they bought houses with lawns and voted for Republicans.

Inside, I slip easily back into my native language of Russian with both patrons and staff. Everyone else here is speaking Russian, too, or another Slavic language. This would earn no dirty looks, no questions about legal status. Nobody here is worried about having to sit in Defoe’s courtroom anytime soon, or having to sit in a communal cell in the Broadview processing facility. Ensconced in an underground steam room, we are safe. No tear gas here, just purifying steam, salty snacks and beer.

By the time I leave, day has gone and darkness has fallen over Chicago. What fresh provocations and foul surprises will tomorrow bring? America is exhausted, and its exhaustion is especially evident in this city. Last year, Democrats asked voters to save democracy and the oceans and Obamacare. They may have simply misjudged our collective stamina, the reach of our moral imagination. People mostly just want to save themselves. In the zero-sum contest that is American life, you can’t fault them for that.

The project was back on in May, thanks to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has somewhat improbably emerged as a savvy dealmaker. Hochul allegedly agreed to allow a natural-gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to the Empire State in exchange for approval for the project. (Her office denies a quid pro quo.) All of which raised obvious questions about why the Empire Wind project was halted, at great expense to its Norwegian developer, Equinor. Beyond slogans ready-made for Fox News, does this administration have an energy policy? 

Trump’s approach to wind power resembles his approach to, well, pretty much everything: universities, Ukraine, tariffs. For all the talk of a second term more professional than the first, things have reverted to the mean, a kind of chaotic ambling that seems to lack purpose other than personal whim.  

Empire Wind turns out to have been an exception. Citing vague national security and environmental concerns, Trump has canceled $679 million for a dozen offshore wind-farm projects in various states of completion. In addition to cutting off funding, his administration ordered work to be stopped at the giant Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, which has cost more than $6.2 billion to build and was close to completion. According to The New York Times, he is also planning to shut down work on a 114-turbine wind farm off the Maryland coast. New England 1 and 2, off the Nantucket coast, are also in trouble. 

“Under this administration, there is no future for offshore wind,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said recently at a natural gas conference in Milan.

It is true that some scientists have concerns about how marine life will be impacted by wind farms in the long run. Energy analysts also worry about the consistency of renewable sources like wind and sunlight, though those concerns have been mitigated as of late. As is the case with vaccines, Trump is aware of these anxieties, and that some share of his opponents harbor them, whether they be NIMBY homeowners or MAHA parents. That gives him just enough room to push his agenda through. 

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It does not help that the pro-science crowd can all too easily fall into climate doomerism or dismiss concerns about wind farms and solar arrays as ignorant recalcitrance. This, too, unwittingly plays into Trump’s hands. “It’s a hard time to be working in offshore wind,” policy analyst Mariel Lutz of the Left-leaning Center for American Progress told me.

Wind farms can be unsightly — if you are fortunate enough to have ocean sightlines to begin with. When it comes to his anti-wind campaign, some of Trump’s backers can be found in liberal enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard, where you will see yard signs opposing a wind farm off the coast next to fading Harris-Walz placards. The still-formidable Kennedy clan helped scotch a Cape Cod wind farm in 2017, lest the views from their Hyannis compound suffer.

Nor is it just the rich. There is also opposition in rural communities, where there are people, not just cormorants and dolphins, to consider. Wind farms can be loud, but a recent epidemiological study found no correlation to other illnesses. Still, people have concerns about enormous turbines in their backyards (well, fields). And no one is savvier at playing on people’s fears than Trump.

Yet the helter-skelter approach has significant downsides. According a brief Lutz co-authored, various offshore wind projects along the northeastern seaboard that are now stalled were to provide some 12,000 direct and 1,500 indirect jobs. 

There will also be an impact on the business climate. Of Revolution Wind, energy analyst Leon Stille wrote in a trade publication that “to pull the plug so late in the process… sends a chilling signal to investors: no matter how advanced a project may be, no matter how rigorous the permitting process, politics can still override economics at the final stage.”

In response to my request for an explanation, a White House spokesman emailed a statement claiming that “Under Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, offshore wind projects benefited from preferential treatment, rushed reviews, and haphazard vetting, while the rest of the energy industry was put on pause”. The Department of the Interior will, it said, restore “basic evaluations of national security, commercial fishing, and environmental concerns” and has “unshackled traditional American energy sources such as domestic oil, gas, and nuclear power”.  

It is true that Biden preferred a much quicker transition to renewables than most conservatives, but does anyone really believe he “rushed” the regulatory process? That is, to put it mildly, not a sin of which most Democrats stand guilty. Undoubtedly, Biden sought to discourage the extraction and use of fossil fuel, but the United States is still the largest producer of crude oil in the world. 

Trump is engaging in the kind of heavy-handed socialist-style government control conservatives supposedly abhor.

“It just seems crazy to stop these projects at this point,” Richard L. Sweeney, an energy economist at Boston College, told me in an interview. According to the latest iteration of Lazard’s annual report on the energy sector, “utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis”. That report found that the cost of building gas combustion engines has reached a 10-year high.

“Natural gas is insanely expensive where I live,” Sweeney said. He points out that building out liquid-gas infrastructure in the northeast (terminals, pipelines) is simply unrealistic. 

And the dream of a resurgent coal industry will remain just that. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Trump’s beloved coal plants are closing, their total energy generation projected to fall to 145 megawatts in 2028, down from 172 megawatts this year. Analysts expect that decline to continue. Some of that has to do with the profusion of cheap natural gas, along with the rise of renewables and new environmental regulations — but whatever the reasons, it is happening, and it is not likely to be reversed. 

Trump campaigned on slashing inflation, but energy prices have proved especially intractable. Such increases can sometimes be attributed to short-term shocks, but that does not appear to be the case. Instead, energy experts point to longer-term, steady increases in the cost of transmission and distribution, partly due to new energy demands stemming from the need to build power-hungry data centers, which Trump has signaled he very much wants to do. 

Republicans used to say they were for an all-of-the-above energy policy that doesn’t hamper the fossil-fuel sector but also encourages, if only lukewarmly, the build-out of renewable energy. But as is the case with so much else (foreign policy, free speech, immigration), Trump considers it a merit to move away from conciliatory Mitt Romney-style conservatism. 

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Still, basic economics dictate that Trump’s war on wind is a terrible idea. And it seems more personal than ideological, driven by his desire to avenge the loss in Aberdeen. Notably, he is not waging a similar campaign against solar energy. 

“Let the market decide,” Sweeney says. That used to broadly reflect the conservative approach, whether it came to the value of a Harvard education or the wisdom of building a wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. It’s disturbing to see policy undertaken in such a slipshod and biased fashion, and to see obeisant executive-branch officials, including Burgum, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin parroting Trump’s claims. 

In something of a surprise, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who is usually deferential to a fault, came out in support of a wind project off the coast of Virginia, where energy needs are spiking because of the heavy concentration of data centers. And while the President’s campaign against offshore wind is mostly going to harm coastal blue states, the three states with the highest amount of energy generated by wind are Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa — about as red as they get.

To be sure, there are legitimate debates between conservatives and progressives about how urgently we need to transition away from fossil fuels (and there are, of course, people who don’t think we need to do so at all, though their ranks are dwindling). But it is hard to think of anyone whose political fortunes aren’t directly dependent on Trump who thinks letting his personal grievances dictate our energy policy is a good idea. Nevertheless, here we are. Lutz, the policy analyst, conceded that the future of the sector is uncertain. “We will keep fighting,” she said. 

That name comes from “béton brut,” French for “pure concrete.” To detractors, though, the name is all too apt: Brutalist buildings, with their imposing, inscrutable facades, can appear, well, brutish. The style is often associated with authoritarian movements, but incorrectly; it is a fundamentally humanist enterprise, one informed by, and suspicious of, the atrocities committed in the name of higher ideals throughout the 20th century. 

There is no accounting for taste, they say, but much of the dislike for Brutalism — which is hardly confined to Trump and his supporters — seems reflexive. You’re supposed to dislike it way you’re supposed to dislike anchovies. It doesn’t matter if you ever actually eat them.

Brutalism is “today associated with exactly the opposite values in which it was envisioned,” Mark Pasnik, who teaches architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, told me. That may explain why, as Trump lashes out at Brutalism, few are speaking up in its defense.

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Brutalist buildings line downtown Washington, DC, in particular the southwestern waterfront. Many of those buildings are functionally empty, as Trump has been cutting and relocating segments of the federal bureaucracy, and some could be torn down. Doing so would be an aesthetic mistake and an affront to history. Trump has the right to shape construction of new federal buildings while he remains in office, but any tinkering with the nation’s architectural treasures should elicit bipartisan outrage. 

There’s not much time left. In an executive order issued last month, the White House stipulated that “Federal public buildings, such as courthouses and government office buildings,” need to “embrace classical architecture to honor tradition, foster civic pride, and inspire the citizenry.” Public buildings are to be “constructed in a style that uplifts and beautifies public spaces, ennobles our Nation, and commands respect from the general public.”

That likely translates to a return to neoclassical forms: white marble columns, sweeping staircases, Greco-Roman statuary. The move is supposed to compensate for the influence of modern architecture, which was particularly strong during the federal government’s expansion under the administrations of  John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and happened to coincide with Brutalism’s peak.

“The drive toward monumentality was seen as being appropriate to a civic building that would represent the people,” Pasnik told me. “It dialed into the era of big, growing government — government that was doing things in a positive light.”

Now that government is evil — according to the people who run it — so is every building that symbolizes its power, or at least, does so without reference to Ancient Rome. “In the 1960s, the Federal government largely replaced traditional designs with modernist and Brutalist ones — a move that was deeply unpopular,” the executive order says, arguing that “a majority of American taxpayers want classical, regionally inspired public buildings that beautify public spaces.”

The order could imperil Brutalist classics around Washington: Marcel Breuer’s towering Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, the James V. Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, the opaque donut that is the Hirschhorn Museum on the National Mall. This is the closest DC comes to the grandness of one of the world’s great capitals. But these and other Brutalist exemplars have unfairly been rebranded as “lumbering” representatives of a bloated government bureaucracy, Pasnik says.

If you need statues and colonnades, you can see those in London and Paris — and, for that matter, all over Washington. But the bold, angular structures of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, across from the White House? That is pure midcentury cool, America at the height of its aesthetic and geopolitical influence. As the recent film The Brutalist pointed out, Brutalism was partly the style of European immigrants who had seen the horrors of World War II. The film stars Adrien Brody as a Jewish émigré from Hungary, who is seemingly based on Breuer. The members of this architectural cohort found comfort in concrete and simplicity, and they left Washington a grander and, yes, more beautiful than it had been in its staid, prewar days, when it was a small, Southern town.  

It is true that these buildings have been allowed to deteriorate, but that is a problem across the entirety of the federal government. And while federal workers have complained about working in them, I doubt that Trump is especially concerned with the comfort of his bureaucrats. Rather, in a complexly perverse move, any architecture that isn’t strictly neoclassical now seems to be identified as “woke.” Yet wokeness, whatever that is, was the last thing the Brutalists had in mind.

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“As classical architecture is the physical expression of the American regime, modern architecture is the physical expression of the woke regime,” one conservative intellectual wrote in 2023. He identified Madison Square Garden, built in 1980, as an example of woke-ism run amok. In fact, MSG is neither Brutalist nor woke. It’s just bad architecture, a sop to corporate interests.

At the same time as Trump is waging war on Brutalism, the newly minted Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense) is preparing to reinstall a Confederate statue in Arlington National Cemetery, under the guise of wanting to showcase all of history, the bad along with the good. I personally oppose displays of Confederate iconography, but many members of the Trump administration feel differently. Consistency demands that they protect our Brutalist history, as well. 

Hope comes from an unlikely source: Mike Solana, editor of the influential and MAGA-adjacent website Pirate Wires, recently called Brutalism an abomination in a social-media post. But in a twist, that same post contained images of Brutalist buildings that have been rehabilitated with trees and plants — a new movement known as “eco-Brutalism.”

“This is acceptable,” Solana said of those images.

I may be grasping at straws here. Trump is no more a fan of environmentalism than he is of Brutalism. But maybe two (perceived) wrongs make a right? Trump wants to make Washington beautiful again. If he can resist his impulse towards the ersatz, he has a real chance of doing so by preserving and polishing the capital city’s Brutalist gems — and if that means a few trees sprouting from the concrete, so be it.

Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.

When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organization unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.

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But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine. 

Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t canceled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.

Well, how’s that working out?

We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.

I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.

Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.

People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarized then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.

When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralizers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralizing spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.

The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.

Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.

So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.

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The truth about the Woke Right

By Kathleen Stock

You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.

Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.

Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.

Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.

Perhaps the pace at which President Trump has opened his second term will put them on notice. Trump opened the week with an Office of Budget and Management guidance that would freeze some $3 trillion in federal grants across executive-branch agencies. He also offered federal employees a buyout, in keeping with his plan to downsize the bureaucracy. He used the threat of tariffs to pressure Colombia over deportation flights. He mused about relocating the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza.

You may not agree with these moves — I certainly don’t — but on some level, you do have to admire the relentless focus of this new administration. The same can’t be said for its opponents. Tangled in legal arguments, mentalities, and procedures, Democrats have forgotten how to fight. Worse yet, they have forgotten what and whom they are fighting for.

It was that lawyerly frame of mind that compelled Democrats to expend an enormous amount of time and energy over the past decade trying to get Donald Trump through various avenues of lawfare: from the #Russiagate craziness to the first impeachment over his “beautiful” phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, from Jack Smith’s classified-documents probe to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s hush-money case. And what do they have to show for it all? The satisfaction of calling Trump a “convicted felon” on cable news, and not much else.

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The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser

By Niall Gooch

Not all of these cases lacked merit. Just because one party wages lawfare doesn’t mean the other is innocent as a lamb. From the commander-in-chief down to the local councilor, when people in power break the law, the law can and should be used to hold them accountable. But establishment Democrats became so obsessed with this single element of our system that they all but ignored that democratic politics is about contestation: about trying to win over voters at the ballot box with an attractive vision. Sometimes by cajoling, sometimes by compromising. And sometimes by mixing it up — hard.

“Lawyers don’t lead — they tell you why you can’t do things, what to be scared of,” one disgusted House Democrat told me recently (he asked to remain anonymous out of concern for offending party leaders, many of whom are lawyers, too).

Consider the contrast. During the first Trump term, I spoke regularly with Steve Bannon, his chief campaign strategist and, for a little while, a senior West Wing adviser. But Bannon was best understood as Trump’s wartime consigliere. Everything was war with him, every day a battle. Bannon was always rallying MAGA out of the trenches, into the minefields of Washington.

“We look at this as political warfare,” he told me of his War Room podcast that he started out of his Capitol Hill townhouse, now a top clearinghouse for MAGA opinion. “This for me is a life or death struggle,” he said. The impeachment inquiry then taking place was “highly sophisticated political warfare.” Looking over my notes from that day, I see references to “war horses,” “Bloody Kansas” and the like. This is how Bannon talks. This is how Mike Davis, another top Trump affiliate, talks. This is not how a single Democrat talks.

It is worth noting that every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has been a lawyer. There have been plenty of Republican lawyers, too, but Gerald Ford was the last of them to have been president. The legal mindset is now endemic in the Democratic Party: not just the rule of law, but its language, the endless legalese that allows for no certitude, the constant evasion that prevents the rendering of a plain-spoken verdict or decision, the exhausting evaluation of risk, the excuses not to do something because the attorney general in Texas might file a suit.

“Of the hundreds of Democratic [elected officials] in Congress and in high state offices across America there may not be five of them who relish, enjoy, and are comfortable with fighting Republicans,” a Capitol Hill staffer, who works for a liberal Northeastern congresswoman, told me. “The modern Democratic official’s favored posture is a legal citation, a grammatical correction, and a fetal position. I’m disgusted with it.”

Trump can be positively deranged, but at least he is confident in his derangements: No, I said the hurricane went that way. Former President Joe Biden and his top advisers, by contrast, seemed to always be parsing their way to victory. This was especially true when it came to the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, which may explain why the majority of Americans ended up disenchanted with Biden’s foreign policy, which was supposed to be one of his areas of expertise.

There was always some cleverness at work, some assertion qualified just so, fuzzed up by those who did not want to be pinned down. It was never clear what victory would look like in Ukraine, or in Israel’s war against Hamas. We gave the two allies billions of dollars worth of weapons, then called for the end of war. How many Ukrainian counteroffensives went by without the battlefield advances Washington promised and expected?

“With clear introspection and accountability, Democrats will rebound,” Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic strategist, told me. She may well be correct, but that rebound sure is taking its time.

Shortly after Trump won last November, he joked to House Republicans that he may stay in the White House for a third term. In response, Rep. Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York, rushed out a news release calling on the House to pass a resolution he planned to introduce that “would reaffirm that the 22nd Amendment is explicit in prohibiting presidents who have served two full terms from running for the presidency again and condemn President-elect Donald Trump’s frequent statements suggesting he could serve past the end of his most recent term.”

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By Ashley Rinsberg

If the Democrats are going to take this path every single time, it is going to be a very long four years. After Trump pardoned all of the Jan 6 rioters — some of whom were sent to prison for committing outrageously violent acts — progressive Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner said he was looking for ways to bring charges of his own. I understand the impulse, but that’s not the battle Krasner’s constituents elected him to wage, not with crime and drug overdoses continuing to plague the city.

In other words, Democrats need to not only learn how to fight, but also which fights to pick. To be sure, Trump doesn’t get a pass when it comes to following the law, but the Democrats’ sustained lawfare makes it seem like they have an anti-Trump agenda that is removed from the concerns of everyday people.

There have been a few signs of the recalibration Brazile says is necessary, though not nearly enough to make anyone to the left of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the arch-centrist Republican, especially optimistic. Democrats keep fretting about needing to win Waukesha County without having any seeming idea what Waukesha County actually wants from its elected leaders.

I can tell you what Waukesha County doesn’t want: vague talking points; incessant triangulation; strategic ambiguity; rhetorical sleight of hand; endless legal hedging and attempts to win politics by lawfare. But a Democrat who knows how to throw a punch on behalf of working people just might punch his or her ticket to Washington. So let’s see those uppercuts, liberals.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

After each mass shooting or terror attack, we begin the collective actuarial task of apportioning cultural and political blame. After the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, Salon published an article under the remarkable headline: “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” The author, David Sirota, is no fool: He was trying to make a point about how Muslims are unfairly blamed en masse after paroxysms of Islamic fundamentalism. And, yes, his outlet was going for clicks. But he and his editors were also playing the game we always play.

In Jabbar’s case, the blame game is deceptively straightforward. He was a convert to Islam and adorned his truck with an ISIS flag. To commentators on the political right, this was the “globalized intifada” that the most ardent pro-Palestinian activists have been calling for. It’s notable, though, that he seems to have turned to jihadism only recently, as personal disappointments and financial obligations piled up. Islamism was the last, deadly stop on his journey to all-American loserdom.

It is, of course, of paramount importance to investigate Jabbar’s ties to extremist groups. But those determined to tether him to radical Islam miss the point. Jabbar had far more in common with Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, than with Osama bin Laden: A quiet rage builds over the years. Marriages fail. Ventures collapse. 

Just watch the 2020 video Jabbar recorded to promote his real-estate business. He is crisply dressed and uses all the right corporate lingo. His office is neat, with a poster touting “discipline” behind his right shoulder. But there is no enthusiasm to his voice, no light in his eyes.

There was a time when the military was a route into a decent life, especially if followed by a college degree. Jabbar was a veteran and college graduate, but these institutions didn’t provide him with stability — or a sense of community. And if his social-media feed is anything like yours, or mine, it was full of glamorous people living their best lives, shifting the paradigm, crushing it, leaning in. It isn’t difficult to imagine the widening gulf between the real and the digital becoming intolerable.

His military service is a notable and alarming indicator, one he shares with another recent attack. Shortly after the carnage in New Orleans, a man later identified as Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, killing only himself while wounding at least seven. Both Jabber and Livelsberger served in the US Army and had received multiple commendations. They served their country before turning sharply against it. And though we all think we know why — Palestine, the manosphere, guns, Trump, video games, Soros, vaccines — the truth is that the breakdown is more complicated, and more perniciously institutional, than such narratives permit.

Abandoned by elites over Vietnam — a war engineered by so many of our best and brightest that they should have held the 1965 Yale-Harvard football game in Saigon — the armed forces have never really recovered their standing. Nor, it’s worth noting, has the US military won a major conflict outright in nearly a century. Today, the military reflects American pathologies instead of expunging them—and those issues are far deeper than whatever “wokeness” exercises Trump and his nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Other cases are even harder to fathom. Just hours before the slaughter in New Orleans, the FBI arrested a Virginia man who was in the possession of “the largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’ ever found in the FBI’s history.” According to The New York Times, the suspect, Brad Spafford, had a #NoLivesMatter insignia on his backpack. He wasn’t a social-justice activist (#BlackLivesMatter), nor a pro-police conservative (#BlueLivesMatter). Spafford was a nihilist. He simply wanted to kill. 

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Should you watch footage of terrorist attacks?

By Simon Cottee

The loss of institutional integrity is everywhere, and you can plainly see it. A few years ago, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse wrote an essay headlined “Everything Is Broken,” in which she advised readers to “give up on our current institutions,” since “they already gave up on us.” That is perhaps possible if you have sufficient social capital, as well as capital in the bank account. But if you are Jabbar, already living on the margins, dragging failed businesses and failed marriages behind you, giving up isn’t going to look quite so easy. 

What I mean to say is that Jabbar didn’t “fall through the cracks,” as the cliché goes. The cracks have widened into canyons spanning entire sectors of society. Sure, maybe a social worker missed obvious warning signs. But what ails the people, no social worker can fix. That is not to malign programs that help veterans suffering from PTSD, women escaping abusive relationships, or those struggling to pay their mortgages. These are necessary in a country that makes mere existence into a savage free-market contest. But perhaps we should think about what it is that we exist for, other than mere animal survival. 

It takes no great leader to condemn a killer like Jabbar. But it will take an exceptional figure to name, let alone address, the societal ills that he and Livelsberger and Spafford embody. Doing so will not be politically expedient. But it is also necessary. We can’t go on much longer treating the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the true index of our collective health.

After the attack in New Orleans, there was some discussion among the relevant parties over whether the Sugar Bowl — a high-stakes football game — should still take place at the Superdome. The decision was made to postpone until Thursday night, whereupon fifth-ranked Notre Dame blunted second-ranked Georgia’s formidable air assault, the Fighting Irish beating the Bulldogs, 23 to 10.

The question of whether a football game is to be played after a national tragedy is truly one of the great modern quandaries of our time. Two days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland. It wasn’t a happy contest. “This was a game that nobody was interested in playing, coaching, watching, or writing about,” a columnist observed.

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By Mary Harrington

And yet the show must always go on. There is a relentlessness to American life that foreigners perceive more readily than those born here. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence observed. “It has never yet melted.” In the decades since that observation, it has only become more true, not less. When, in 2001, the NFL cancelled a weekend of games in the wake of 9/11, Brian Billick, who coached the Baltimore Ravens, disagreed with the decision. “I don’t want cowards to dictate what we do in this country,” he said, “That’s where my anguish is right now.” 

If we had real public intellectuals, perhaps they could help make sense of the moment. But they ceased to matter long ago. Now, you head to X (the app formerly known as Twitter), which will give you the take you already had, just a few notches angrier. The same huge and impersonal forces that ripple through all of us can crack some. If you have the material and psychic armaments needed to survive a moment such as ours, consider yourself lucky. Fewer and fewer people do.

And yet, the show goes on. Before the rescheduled game, NPR ran a segment about the Sugar Bowl and the people who attended despite the attack. An on-the-ground correspondent spoke with a man from Cincinnati who had come with his son, both “decked out in Fighting Irish gear.” The fan said that he had been watching the news and had come to the conclusion that it was safe to be there. “So, I have no issues,” he said, failing to understand that he was being asked a moral question that went beyond his own safety.

As if to help him along, the correspondent explained that the fan had been “a senior at Notre Dame back in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, when the Fighting Irish played Georgia and lost big time.” Back in the studio, the host chuckled. “OK, so he’s looking for payback,” she said.