This has attracted the attention of President Trump and his Chief Scientific Advisor, Michael Kratsios, who comes from a private-sector background. They see an opportunity to wrest control of science from the bureaucracy — or perhaps even what MAGA loyalists might describe as the “priesthood” of experts who protect the science community at the expense of public well-being.

The travails of Dr Fauci, therefore, are part of a wider struggle. There is a broader, civilization-level conflict going on, one that was best articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1964 when he said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he’s one who asks the right questions.”

Not long ago, anyone who said there was water on the moon was deemed a nutcase. Thanks to data gathered via India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission of 2008, and Nasa’s LCROSS mission of 2009, we know that there are some 600 billion kg of water ice in the moon’s polar regions — a discovery that bodes well for both manned and unmanned missions. In 2020, Nasa’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed the existence of water molecules in the sunlit regions as well.

The heretical discoveries range from space to the mundane matters of daily life. For instance, we used to think that ulcers were caused by spicy food and stress. Then, in 1979, Dr Robin Warren and Dr Barry Marshall, both Australian scientists, showed evidence that ulcers were caused by bacteria. The idea was heavily ridiculed, because almost every other scientist had accepted the dogma that no microorganism could possibly survive in human stomach acid. The opposition was so fierce that, for the sake of humanity, Marshall offered himself up as a rat lab by drinking broth made from a patient’s gastritis. First, he became violently ill from the H. pylori bacteria it contained, as he knew he would; then, he cured himself with antibiotics, proving that a peptic ulcer was the product of the bacterium. This discovery has saved millions from unnecessary surgeries and lifelong peptic ulcer disease. Today we know that the condition of the microbiome, the gut, is fundamental to our overall flourishing, and that our bodies are host to countless microorganisms capable of both inflicting profound illness and sustaining our happiness and health.

Science, in other words, is full of orthodoxies waiting to be overturned — which is exactly what Trump and Kratsios are aiming to do. The White House science strategy is a ruthless overhaul, upending traditional funding models and clearing out the legacy leadership that has long governed the scientific community: not only government bodies, but also institutions, such as universities, that are funded by the government. Naturally, many in the scientific establishment are horrified, given their animus for Trump and their hostility toward government meddling in science. But others are thrilled, because the new strategy released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is the most radical overhaul of the US federal research enterprise since the Second World War. It breaks the old guard’s control over who gets funding, what gets funded, and how science “should” progress.

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Instead, it calls for funding individuals rather than institutions such as universities, no matter how garlanded. In other words, scientific investigators no longer need to be blessed by the scientific bureaucracy to qualify for funding. Marshall would have been funded a lot sooner had this approach been in place.

The OSTP is also gunning for the peer review system, via which scientific work is slowly and ceremoniously reviewed by other scientists. This approach is often inimical to radical new thinkers, but it has been maintained by universities for decades. Now individual agency reviewers can unilaterally advance unconventional and high-risk, high-reward proposals that traditional academic panels, mindful of existing scientific consensus, would probably reject. Federal money will now flow to “Focused Research Organizations”, which address well-defined problems over a deliberately short lifespan. (Note the contrast with the ancient and bloated university sector.) The roadmap will also enable faster delivery of grant money and, when appropriate, longer timeframes for researchers to get on with their work without having to apply for further funding. How much discovery has been blocked, even unconsciously, by an old guard whose livelihood and parent institutions benefited from scientific stasis?

But the government is not the only source of scientific funding. In fact, the private sector funds a significant proportion of university science. The question remains: how much of the science community has ignored ideas because of ego, or because their cash flows from sponsors would have been adversely affected by the new discovery? Peer reviewers are unlikely to admit that a new idea is right if it proves that their own life’s work is wrong. Some say the peer-review system is independent, but in the case of Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health’s massive grant-giving process for 38 years, it seems scientists everywhere believed that publishing anything that ran counter to his views might well cause their funding to dry up.

Kratsios is also coming for the academic journals, another form of gatekeeper. From 1951, Robert Maxwell transformed the old peer-review system, which had been quaint and collaborative, into a multibillion-dollar commercial industry, starting with Pergamon Press. This forced journals and libraries to pay subscription fees to remain up to date. The academics, who had been doing this work for free, were now paid. Peer review prestige thus became commodified and monopolized, and the research itself became expensive to access. Kratsios, in response, is trying to cut the flow of taxpayer dollars to these journals.

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As for Trump, he wants the credit for being the president who tore down those gates and the gatekeepers, and for enabling a new era of scientific discovery, one that will be led by free thinkers rather than bureaucrats. The OSTP is therefore pushing many scientists out of the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. It is also limiting federal funds to the old academic institutions.

Central to the new strategy is the “Genesis Mission”, which is commonly described as the Manhattan Project of our generation. Just as the US, in the Second World War, sought to gain control of the atom and the atom bomb through the Manhattan Project, today the White House seeks to enable artificial intelligence to solve the greatest problems facing humanity, from health to energy. The core of the Genesis Mission is the “American Science and Security Platform”, which aims to consolidate the government’s massive supercomputing resources and its diverse research and experimental facilities. These facilities include the seventeen national labs, like Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. These labs house immense bodies of work that their scientists have quietly accumulated over many decades.

We must remember that much of the research has been so highly classified that scientists could not share data within some of these labs, or across them, let alone with private researchers. The White House says this work is a public good paid for with taxpayer money and that all qualified scientists should be able to access it, especially since the old guard have either been wrong or are holding back innovations that would benefit the public.

The White House is also implying that the old-guard scientists have been using the “Classified” label as a “Keep Out” sign for too long. The Genesis Mission calls for all this data to be digitized, standardized, and made AI-ready so it can be shared and studied by both government and private scientists. By feeding many decades of extraordinarily valuable data to AI, the thinking goes, researchers can break open scientific silos and connect the dots between complex biological, chemical, and physical interactions.

In other words, the White House is saying America will go “open-source” in a controlled environment. The US won’t share everything with the world, but it will share it amongst a much broader pool of scientists. This modern Manhattan Project is designed to create an explosion in collaboration.

The most ambitious aspect of the strategy is to allow AI to run labs directly, testing new hypotheses, generating predictive models, and designing and executing new experiments. Science will thus no longer depend on the views or whims of individual scientists or gatekeepers. Science will become autonomous, self-driving, and continuously iterating, operating at a speed that it is impossible for human researchers to replicate.

The era of scientists pipetting chemicals or adjusting lasers or working directly with lab rats, then, is over. AI and robotics will automate both the decision-making and the physical actions. All this takes energy — and the US has some catching-up to do. A new nuclear power plant for example, used to require $30bn and thirty years of regulatory approvals. In May 2025, the White House gave small American nuclear firms the deadline of 4 July, 2026, America’s 250th anniversary, to “go critical” with small modular reactors using new technologies. Four firms made it. The US is now scaling up the nuclear energy needed to power the data centers and AI essential to the project of a Golden Age. Even now, AI is solving mathematical equations that were hitherto unsolvable — which will make for faster scientific progress. For example, nuclear fusion used to be perennially “50 years away”. It is advancing quickly now that AI and supercomputing are reshaping the boundaries of math and physics. The AlphaFold team won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for unlocking a decades-old puzzle of folding proteins, revolutionizing how scientists approach disease and drug discovery. Today the same AI-led transformation is happening across science.

The White House also seems determined to demonstrate that Dr Fauci was not the only scientist who prioritized cash flow and business interests over health outcomes. Back in April 2025, Kratsios made an intriguing claim while addressing a gathering of technologists. He said: “We are capable of so much more. Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.” It turns out that he was quoting President William McKinley in 1901. That was the era of electricity. What does “annihilating distance and manipulating time“ mean today? What clandestine research, observers wondered, was Kratsios referring to? It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that, at the same time as the administration aggressively declassifies so much material across various agencies, it has also decided to nullify many government non-disclosure agreements — ensuring whistleblowers can come forward without risking their status, pensions, and possibly more.

We need to be prepared for what scientists call “ontological shocks”. These are the profound psychological or cognitive disturbances that can occur when a person or a society encounters new information that breaks their fundamental understanding of reality. All the talk in the AI community is that AI is about to revolutionize both maths and physics. This needn’t be scary: humanity’s worldview has collapsed many times before — be that in the Copernican Revolution, or when Darwin revealed his Theory of Evolution. And each of these collapses has been to our benefit. Of course, it will be different, more difficult this time: humanity has never had to contend with an intelligence that is so much greater than its own. No one knows what AI will optimize for. After all, we’ve programmed it for efficiency and profitability, but not for human connection. It’s been trained on the internet, a place that doesn’t represent the best of human intent or human thinking. Are we ready for the consequences of AI and the new approach to science that it will bring? It took three generations for humanity to adjust to Galileo’s worldview. Can we be sure to adjust any faster? Indeed, should we? Will new truths be more reliable than the old ones?

The White House, however, says humanity is entering a new “Golden Age”.  Science is making extraordinary new discoveries almost daily, rendering old dogma obsolete. Many in the scientific establishment fear obsolescence. Sensing the barbarians at the gate, they fear a scientific dark age brought on by government intervention. But the old order had to end, as it always does — and given the advent of AI, superfast computation, and potentially explosive declassification, its destruction might not take long.

Perez’s pratfall, if Kalshi’s allegations prove true, may seem the consequence of brainless opportunism. But the explosion of such sites portends the creep of betting logic into public life, moving from the bleachers (with sports-betting platforms like DraftKings or FanDuel) to pop culture, global conflicts and the Oval Office. At the time of writing, Polymarket — Kalshi’s cheekier, younger cousin which is crypto-native, decentralized and more regulatorily creative — allows you to bet on how many times Elon Musk will tweet in a week (160 to 179 posts is the most popular guess); whether the US will confirm aliens exist by certain dates (upwards of $63 million has been traded on this, and the odds roughly point to a 2.5% chance that the government will do so by 30 September); and on which dates Trump may “publicly insult someone”. You can bet on the next prime minister of Ethiopia (a de facto dictatorship, as it happens), the front page of The New York Times (“shocking”, “woman” and “rigged” are all popular punts) and the phrases said in the next episode of House of the Dragon (“raven”, “sword” and “wine” are all up there). You can bet on the next Banksy artwork or the end of the Strait of Hormuz blockade; senatorial primaries; Bitcoin prices; Love Island. In other words, every arena of our culture now springs up its own gamified markets, mushrooms in the dank crags of public life.

This in itself is nothing to cry about. Religious and moral objections to gambling are a question for another time, and there is little evidence to suggest that these new, diverse markets are roping in scores of new consumers, causing people to lose their homes over a bad roll of the dice on Taylor Swift’s baby names. There will always be “pigeons” to be suckered in. What is rather perplexing is the effect on the subjects of the markets themselves — the national or global events which matter to us and yet also now matter in a new, monetary way. The case of Gabriel Perez will no doubt chasten those looking to cash in on their proximity to public life, but for how long? As prediction markets swell — Kalshi is now valued at $22 billion, and Polymarket at $9 billion — what other “insiders” might spy the opportunity to turn a buck?

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Even in an environment as tightly controlled as the White House, the borders of confidentiality are porous. Think about it: every day, every person of influence is likely to encounter an army of auxiliaries who at any moment could overhear privileged information. Bank tellers, family counselors, pharmacists. For a nice little earner, wedding planners could short a celebrity marriage, security staff have a flutter on which stars will show up, and soldiers gamble on the capture of a Venezuelan strongman — except that’s already (allegedly) happened. Closeness to major events transforms being “in the know” into possessing insider alpha; with these new incentives, secrets become stranded assets. He who dares is not gambling on uncertainty — his privileged access means he knows the direction of travel — but rather on the likelihood of being rumbled. Taking that risk could set him up for life, and could far outstrip baseline salaries for clerical or flunky work. You can see the appeal.

Within the present White House, the temptation would seem to be irresistible. In the spring, administration lawyers probed whether anonymous five-figure Polymarket bets on the Iran war had come from within the Counsel Office; as it happened, the originators were impossible to identify. Three such accounts made more than $600,000 from wagers on the April ceasefire. What is it about this government that seems to be upping the ante of staffer venality? Arguably the problem is top-down; the president himself has, alongside his family, personally profited from the first year of his second term, pocketing upwards of $1 billion in crypto dealings and going so far as to sell high-speed access to his most influential Truth Social posts (the White House denies conflicts of interest). And even Pete Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley looked to make money off the Iran war. Stories like the Perez scandal have created the unfortunate impression that Trump’s underlings are on the make; perhaps the ironically amoral and hyper-online young Republicans wheeling around today’s West Wing are especially suited to the prediction-market boom — or perhaps such (alleged) subterfuge would have gone on under a Harris administration, too, had it coincided with the betting boom. Insiderism is as greasy in Georgetown bars as it is in Westminster pubs, but monetizing access seems likely to put rocket-fuel under the issue — remember Fayed’s cash-for-questions fiasco?

The “Kalshi-fication” of public life introduces new moral hazards. For one thing, the young men who are these markets’ ideal targets — risk-inclined, sports-betting fluent, forever “monitoring the situation” — are likely to bleed money they don’t have. Prediction markets don’t have the same state-by-state restrictions as traditional gambling in the US; they are classed instead as commodity futures trading, more aligned with stock, oil or metal markets than football scores. The polished language of these pinstriped pursuits buffs out the traditional sweaty desperation of your average high-street horse-racing punters, blinking back tears as they stumble skint out of Betfred. Much better to fuss about “positions” and “event contracts” than grunt over vig, kitty or bets on tick. Once, a boxer might have had to have his face turned to mincemeat for the sore promise of “throwing” a match; now, having your hand on the scale is as simple as clicking through an app. No clandestine meetings, no dodgy dealings.

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Yet the grubbiness is the same. These markets shine a blacklight across public life, showing just how many of its constituents have newfound leverage, the satellites to power, the tiny hedge funds. And just as match-fixing ruins sports, betting on outcomes in politics feels undeniably rotten. The halls of power are venal enough; these sites only introduce more moral variables. The inevitable result would seem to be crushing paranoia that the choreography of governments is lashed to profits on an app. How can we be sure it isn’t — especially when dealing with the less accountable, crypto-led regulatory landscape of sites like Polymarket? The Oval Office is not a casino floor; no Caesars Palace should have nuclear codes. And the invisible stagehands who run it should not become market-moving insiders — a state of affairs which is up to both prediction sites and governments themselves to prevent.

Chillingly, too, this shadow economy casts a pall over public trust — of course it does. When we monetize bombings, oil shocks, climate disasters, they transcend their real meaning and must be inspected for peripheral contracts, fingerprints. There’ll be a run on tinfoil hats among a public already nerfed by anti-media paranoia: there’ll be corrosive speculation about things being slipped into speeches, about the blurred lines between prediction, participation and authorship. Citizens watch history and traders watch positions; when these two ways of looking atrophy and combine, the result is suspicion. In Kalshi-fied America, the stakes are not just dignity, sincerity, discretion: they are conspiracy and cold, hard cash.

Right now, President Donald Trump’s policy towards Venezuela is running such a risk, and Trump, the consummate political stage director, knows it. His gun has been on the wall ever since he began his military buildup in the seas around Venezuela in late August. For the past several weeks, he has played for time by conducting a foreign policy reminiscent in its unpredictability of a fraternity hazing ritual. He has periodically threatened military strikes against targets in Venezuela, walked back those threats, claimed that President Nicolás Maduro’s regime needs to fall, and suggested a meeting with Maduro and brokering a deal. All the while, he has conducted periodic open-sea strikes on Venezuelan and Colombian drug boats.

But now, even from the perspective of an American public generally sympathetic to Maduro’s removal, the drama has gone on too long. Trump knows that in order both to save face internationally and to avoid American voters’ perception that he’s jerking them around, he needs to do something, soon. For Maduro, that makes the next few weeks exceptionally dangerous.

Trump’s first instinct is usually to use military threats to compel a deal — a deal that persuades a rogue state to follow a course better aligned with American interests. (In fact, the only case in which Trump has made public military threats and then followed through came this past June in his bombing of Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility.) But if Trump is still holding out for a deal that convinces Maduro to address his main concerns — to take a hard stand against drug and human trafficking — he will be disappointed. There is simply no peace deal that advances US interests to be had with the Maduro government. 

This is not primarily because the Venezuela of onetime bus driver Maduro, and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, is an untrustworthy partner, untrustworthy though it certainly is. The country expropriated ExxonMobil’s Venezuelan oil fields in 2007. A decade later, it compensated Exxon for a tenth of the fields’ worth, and only when compelled to by an international court. Given these circumstances, it would be reasonable for American leaders never to trust a Venezuelan Chavista regime again. But the main reason that no deal with Maduro can help the US is that he lacks the power to deliver on any of the promises Trump will be looking for.

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In today’s Venezuela, significant swaths of the country, including those most involved in the distribution of drugs, are functionally outside government control. In the country’s West, the Colombian National Liberation Army runs cocaine across the Colombian border and distributes it using local airstrips. Much of the country’s South, along the Brazilian border, is held by megabandas — that is, large and armed criminal groups — like El Tren de Aragua, which distribute drugs internationally. Even many territories involved in mining, which is Venezuela’s largest legal industry after oil, are functionally ungoverned. 

None of this means, of course, that government officials are not involved in Venezuela’s illegal commerce. The opposite is true — it’s their lifeblood. But it does mean that the Maduro government is not in a position to put a stop to any of it, even if Trump were to make them a very attractive deal. A government crackdown on drugs would mean pitched military confrontations between the cartels and a Venezuelan army that is undersupplied, underfed, badly commanded, and old. The chances that Maduro would take a chance at being humiliated, whatever he promises Trump, are slim.

There are many in the US government and media who still believe Maduro can effectively address Trump’s concerns over drug trafficking and migration if he chooses to. After all, they say, he has effectively remained in power for almost a decade and a half; he can’t be totally ineffectual. But such optimism displays a confusion between regime stability and regime effectiveness. 

While it is true that stable regimes typically achieve stability through the legitimacy accorded by effective governance, Maduro’s is an exception. His is a regime that is totally ineffective but surprisingly stable. Venezuela’s public safety, order, and social welfare system have broken down almost entirely, to the point that 30% of the country’s population has left during Maduro’s reign– for Colombia and destinations further abroad, including the U.S. Its economy hasn’t been stable enough even to report an annual GDP figure since 2014. And yet, last year Maduro managed quite easily to remain in office despite losing an election, marginalising his opposition while consolidating power.

Why? Because since the mid-2010s, Maduro has been running a criminal enterprise rather than a state government, and he runs that enterprise well. He has achieved stability by tying the fortunes of Venezuela’s military and civil power brokers so tightly to the country’s endemic graft, corruption and drug trade that they know they can only survive as long as Maduro remains in power. Hanging the sword of Damocles over the heads of all one’s rivals can be as powerful a guarantor of regime stability as democratic legitimacy itself. 

In this sense, President Trump is correct to call the Venezuelan government itself a sort of cartel, which the administration did two weeks ago when it designated the Cartel de los Soles (a Venezuelan colloquialism for Maduro’s graft-ridden government) a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO). Maduro’s government is not a cartel in the same sense that El Tren de Aragua is, but it is one insofar as its existence depends upon illegal commerce. 

It might be tempting for Trump to meet with Maduro, receive a grant of oil or mining concessions, and declare victory. But such concessions, as we know from ExxonMobil’s experience, would not be worth the paper they are printed on. Neither would a promise to crack down on the drug trade. The only near-term Trump-Maduro deal that could serve American interests would not be peaceful. It would not involve sanctions relief or a decrease in military pressure. It would be a deal in which the US military has free rein to attack drug distributors in Venezuela, and in exchange for Maduro’s non-interference, we leave him alone. But if that’s going to be the deal, why make a deal at all?

If Maduro had a slim chance of convincing Trump otherwise, he might have bungled it on Sunday. It was then that the Venezuelan National Assembly (controlled by Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela) announced that it would be conducting its own investigation into the Trump administration’s alleged second strike to kill survivors on a drug boat carrying Venezuelan nationals. The war crime allegations, first reported in the Washington Post, have ignited a media firestorm and spurred a US congressional investigation. Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have claimed to have no advance knowledge of the strike and have dismissed the story as a distraction. Further reporting by the New York Times has cast doubt on whether the second strike was intended to kill survivors (which would have been a war crime), as opposed to fully destroying the boat and drugs on board (perfectly legal under the laws of war). 

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By John Masko

It is tempting for foreign adversaries, when the transparency of American democracy brings to light some scandal favourable to their case, to press their advantage by piling on. Those weaker adversaries who know how to negotiate with President Trump, however, do not do this. They know that there is no surer way to provoke the president’s ire than to make him look bad on the world stage. Instead, they garner his sympathy with public shows of flattery, modesty, and deference, even while holding to their own bottom line. No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, whose handling of the American president is usually virtuosic.

Until recently, Maduro seemed to be following Putin’s playbook. He made no attempt to fight the legitimacy of the strikes, and did not even acknowledge that any of the boat’s crews were Venezuelan until last week. But with this most recent strike, the temptation for him to piggyback on the US. Congress’s own investigation seems to have been irresistible. Venezuela’s government has now not only admitted that there were Venezuelans aboard the boat, but launched its own investigation into the US’s purported criminal activity. The presumptuousness of this gesture is likely to infuriate Trump and drive him further away from the negotiating table. 

With no desirable deal on the horizon, Trump faces a strategic quandary. If his opening gambit was to persuade Maduro to leave office peacefully, through an overwhelming show of American force, that effort has clearly failed. With the magnitude of the US military buildup and the FTO designation for the Venezuelan government (an unprecedented move that opens possible legal justifications for regime change), it is hard to imagine any means by which Trump could further turn up the heat without ordering an actual attack. He ran up against the limits of his foreign-policy-by-threat this past weekend, when he attempted to declare, via his social media app Truth Social, that the airspace over Venezuela was closed — an announcement that the Maduro government denounced and then ignored.

Now that Maduro has called his bluff, what is Trump’s next step? Militarily, he has a few options. He could initiate a land strike against cartels operating in Venezuela’s South or West. This would be a logical extension of the drug boat strikes. Such a campaign might compel Maduro into making a deal that provides for continued American anti-drug policing in Venezuela. Alternatively, it could draw Maduro’s army into direct conflict with American troops, giving Trump a pretext for forcible regime change. Trump could also skip the formality of attacking cartels and instead attack Maduro directly with airstrikes or a ground assault, working with opposition leaders to install a post-Maduro government. Either of these options carry some risk of an Iraq-style “forever war”, should Venezuela’s opposition government prove unable to consolidate power.

The other option is a covertly-led coup. This option would likely offer a higher likelihood of post-regime-change stability than a direct American attack, and would demand less future involvement from the US. But given Maduro’s tight control over his inner circle, Trump may have to wait a long time for such a plot to come together. One can’t help but wonder whether, if such a coup had been immediately possible, it would have happened already. Either way, it is Trump’s move. 

Over the last few months, Trump has orchestrated a crescendo worthy of Beethoven’s most powerful symphonic finales. But big crescendos must lead somewhere; they cannot simply peter out. To make narrative sense, Chekhov’s gun must be fired. If Trump acts against Venezuela, either with an attack on Maduro’s regime or on the cartels he protects, he introduces uncertainties. Uncertainty as to what will follow — an orderly restoration under the leadership of dissidents like Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado, civil war, or something in between; and uncertainty over what American resources will be required, and for how long. 

But politically, the consequences of inaction at this late date would be worse. Over recent months, Trump has declared a great reversion in American strategy — from the Wilsonian aspiration of making the world safe for democracy to the Rooseveltian one of making the Western Hemisphere safe for the United States. He chose Venezuela as that strategy’s first proving ground. And if all it takes to stop that strategy is the obstinacy of a single South American crime-boss caudillo, Trump will have shown his administration to be worse than impotent. It will take years, and a new administration, for any foreign adversary to take such American pressure seriously again.

In Chicago, former President Obama’s Presidential Library, has landed in historic Jackson Park: a 225 feet high flat-roofed and granite-clad concrete tower. It has a Sith-Lord-meets-conning-tower aesthetic. Largely bereft of windows and surrounded by lower blocks of precast concrete and glass curtain walls, it is described even by its own architects as “monolithic” and by its critics as “ugly”, “a jail”, “Soviet” and “brutalist”. Based on multiple studies of the types of places people tend to like and why, I can report confidently that it has none of the patterns, natural forms and sensitive handling of scale that most people find attractive and reassuring. It has all of the locational and symbolic sensitivity of the relentless black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Six hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., President Trump is planning to supersize Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original Washington masterplan and out-French the French. To escape the need to host American state dinners in tents on the White House lawn, he has demolished the White House’s 1940s neoclassical East Wing and is replacing it with a $300 million ballroom by the skilled classical architect James McCrery. Three times as big as the original, the outside is replete with a balustrade, string courses, alternating pediments, a piano nobile and a Corinthian portico with all the trimmings. Inside, a double-height hall, with arched niches, fluted pilasters and a coffered ceiling, will adorn the largest classical room built for a century.

On nearby Memorial Circle, the President is planning a giant classical triumphal arch between the National Mall and the Arlington National Cemetery, topped with statues of eagles and a winged lady. At a White House dinner, Trump showed donors three models, informing them that he favored, you guessed, the largest option which, standing at 250 feet, would block symbolic views between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.

Palpably modeled on the French Arc de Triomphe, which was itself inspired by Rome’s Arch of Titus, the new Washington Arch, Trump has told supporters, must be bigger than Jean-François Chalgrin’s Parisian precedent. Predictably, the Washington Arch is already being called the “Arc de Trump”. If the remodeled Oval Office is anything to go by, it will be dripping with gilt swags and festooned with over-ripe fruit in luxuriant cornucopia, though for now, the renderings by Nicholas Charbonneau show welcome restraint.

Which will it be: classical bombast or placeless corporatism? Federal nostalgia or digital civic aesthetics? Nothing about Obama and Trump’s visions for the future of American cities is the same, other than their shared elephantiasis. But in this, both are within the American urban tradition.

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Why our cities should be sacred

By Nicholas Boys Smith

Once upon a time, the United States was an urban civilization and, briefly, the world’s most significant city-maker. The American model was megalomaniacal: consistently taking European technology and precedents, dialing them up from genteel to gigantic and re-exporting them around the world.

Thomas Walter’s gargantuan 1850s dome over Washington’s Capitol may have been inspired by European churches such as Paris’ Les Invalides. However, in turn, it spawned a shoal of European domed civic imitations: Brussels’s Palais de Justice, Budapest’s parliament, and Berlin’s Reichstag.

By the 1890s, American architects could create 200 lavish temporary Beaux Arts buildings out of mere plaster and artificial stone for the 1893 Chicago World Fair, which are better than almost anything subsequently built in the last 80 years. With perfect irony, the World Fair took place on the very site on which Obama’s watchtower library is now being erected. The historically resonant location, precisely where American architecture demonstrated so supremely its classical and city-planning expertise, merely rubs coarse salt into the wound Obama is inflicting upon Chicago.

Ultimately, American urban super-sizing got out of hand. During the long 20th century America de-urbanized as her cities became too big to be urban. Middle classes fled to the hugely expanding suburbs where long commutes and declining neighborly life undermined their residents’ prosperity, connectedness and happiness. Wider and wider freeways cut through city centers, often mysteriously physically segregating majority black neighborhoods. Downtowns were scooped out and offices and homes replaced with parking lots, as Jeff Speck has related. Subtle towns of Lego bricks became cruder towns of Duplo bricks. Humane walking architecture, rich with texture, decoration and patterns was eviscerated and replaced with driving architecture, featureless and faceless. Glories such as Chicago’s Garrick Theatre were demolished for lumpen multi-story car parks. Among the many unseamed downtown neighborhoods were Detroit’s Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, which were sliced up by wide freeways and whose largely black populations were decanted into heartless and over-sized “public housing projects”. All of these failed and have been in turn demolished — a savage flop of “sustainable development”.

After a century in which the United States first defined and then ditched the modern city, we are left with two different presidential visions for the American city: Fifties corporate modernism with a superficial high-tech sheen, or federal classicism on a growth drug.

The Obama Library is beyond redemption: so flawed in its location, conception and execution that it is hard to see it ever becoming a much-loved landmark. The architects, New York-based Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, have form in nominative antiphrasis: a folk art museum which is modernist, a pavilion which has precisely nothing of the form, nature or tone of a pavilion and, now, a Presidential library which is bereft of books. In what has coyly been described as “a break with tradition”, the Obama Library has no research library and will not house the former President’s archives. Jackson Park has been mashed up for an empty box.

There is a good functional case to be made for Trump’s ballroom, however. The world’s superpower should not be hosting state dinners in tents. Nor is the loss of the Forties East Wing quite as shocking as it first seems. The White House, like a Shinto shrine, is old in name only. It is really a modern building pretending to be antique. Though the many Democratic supporters of classical architecture are appalled by Trump’s ballroom — traditional architecture, it should be noted, is the preferred architecture of both Democratic and republican voters — the plans could, in fact, be redeemed, but not if Trump remains actively in charge. The former real estate developer is rumored to be personally deeply involved in the negotiations, planning, fundraising and design, delaying other meetings for development discussion, supposedly insisting on concrete not stone for the super-sized triumphal arch and always asking, “How can it be bigger?”

Trump’s contempt for historic fabric sits within a clear presidential tradition. Harry Truman had the entire White House gutted and rebuilt internally while his family moved next door for three years. Of the original building, only the exterior walls and some re-installed doors, chimney pieces and wood paneling remain. The recently demolished East Wing was a 1942 near-total replacement, by McKim, Mead and White, of the 1902 original. And many of its interiors had also been transformed several times. Trump’s derision for normal consultation and approval via the National Trust for Historic Preservation offends but is not illegal. The White House is exempt from the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act.

Meanwhile, Memorial Circle is a good place for a triumphal arch, even if the probable scale and decorative excess would be obscene to Thomas Jefferson’s and the Founding Fathers’ more reserved aesthetics. Federal classicism’s moderation revealed its underpinning confidence and civility. The new arch needs to calm down. It should be in communion with the history of Washington, D.C.,not with the more brittle dictator gargantuanism of Beijing’s 10,000-seater Great Hall of the People or Pyongyang’s never-completed 105-story “Ryugyong Hotel”.

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Despite the flawed directions being taken by both Presidents Obama and Trump, there is hope for American cities. Increasingly Americans are rejecting towns that could be anywhere and so are nowhere. As long ago as 1955, and haunted by memories of the small town Marceline, Missouri, in which he grew up, America’s most culturally iconic entrepreneur, Walt Disney created a place for Americans to enjoy which rejected all of the emerging traffic-modernist truths of post-war US cities. Main Street, Disneyland is not just pretty and nostalgic. It has no cars, and it is human-scale. That, Disney and his designers realized, was what made people happy.

Over the past generation, a growing number of American researchers, investors, developers and city mayors, from both Left and Right, have reached the same conclusion that Disney did 70 years ago. Many developers have created so-called “new urbanist” towns and urban extensions which ignore most of the development patterns of the last 80 years: Seaside, Celebration and Kentlands and dozens more. All are rewarded with more consumer demand and higher land values, typically between 15% to 100%, as analysis by Chris Leindbeger, me and others has shown. In fact, so successful are they that a consortium of investors is funding the first new American city, California Forever, to be built on walkable pre-modernist principles for over a century.

Make places better and people like it. Republican mayor Jim Brainard’s transformation of downtown Carmel in Indiana was so popular that he was re-elected seven times becoming one of the longest serving American mayors. Streets with higher “walkscores” tend to be worth more, revealing pent-up demand. The economic, social and political benefits are clear.

Many American cities face huge challenges of discord, infrastructure decay and housing affordability. But to these challenges, the vaulting scale of Obama and Trump’s architectural visions have no answer. So, the message for my American friends is this: if you want your towns and cities to prosper, if you want to help heal the fissures in society, then ignore Trump and Obama. Don’t supersize your towns any further, but reweave them. Help each neighborhood feel enclosed and intimate, with all the concomitant advantages of prosperity, community and public health that brings. Help them feel small again.

With this announcement, the US government indicated its readiness to do whatever was necessary to ensure the success of Milei’s agenda of economic reform. The next day, after his rambling address to the United Nations, Donald Trump met the Argentine President himself. Milei and his government didn’t need a bailout, said Trump, but he promised support. “We’re gonna help them.” 

The effect was instantaneous. Investors who had been fleeing Argentina now began returning, if cautiously. The Argentine stock market rose from the lows it had hit on Monday. The Argentine peso, which hit a low at the end of last week, bounced back strongly this week. Argentine government bonds, whose prices had been nosediving, driving up interest rates, also rebounded — although interest rates still remain well into the double-digits. The White House has given Milei a bit of breather; it now hopes that respite will last until next month’s legislative elections. 

There’s been little evidence of contagion-risk from Argentina’s recent financial travails. Its plunging peso hadn’t dragged any other currencies down with it, and regional stock markets continued rising even as the Buenos Aires market shed a quarter of its value since early August. But Bessent’s stark choice of language was revealing. An awful lot has come to ride on the success or failure of the chainsaw-wielding libertarian in the leather jacket. 

The Trump administration has made Argentina its line in the sand, its Vietnam, the bastion that must hold lest it fall before the Leftist tide sweeping the region. It is a tide that has already washed over Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Chile. The administration may not have intended to invest the Milei experiment with such significance, but the fact is that American Republicans, enthusiastically egged on by Elon Musk and celebrated by conservatives across the Western world, had already lionized the chainsaw-wielding libertarian as a hero. He can’t now be seen to fail.

There was always going to be a lot of risk involved in putting so many eggs in the Milei basket. This is Argentina, after all, a country in which rescue packages repeatedly yield success, only to eventually unravel. It’s often said that Argentina is the most European country in Latin America, a place where Spanish is spoken with an Italian accent, and where the considerable degree of regulation in the country’s economy mirrors that of some European countries. But, like those countries, Argentina can be repeatedly crippled by inconsistent policymaking. It has a long history of boom-and-bust cycles, lancing inflation only to resume business as usual once the worst has passed.

Milei won election as president in 2023 on a platform of slashing the state and taming the country’s runaway inflation. Initially, things went better than hoped. By cutting public spending by the equivalent of 5%, Milei plunged the economy into recession. But that downturn reduced demand sufficiently to take the sting out of inflation, which fell from 300% in 2023 to 30% today. Whereas previously, the price of a cup of coffee could change by the time you finished it, now there is at least a growing predictability in household budgeting. 

After two years of economic contraction, the economy has rebounded strongly. While government spending remained tight, private consumption picked up the slack, and investment took off and exports resumed, growing by 7% this year. Milei’s voters liked what they saw, and his approval rating briefly touched 50% early last year. In Argentina, a country that is deeply divided, this is about as good as it gets. 

But thereafter, things started to sour. While exports have been strong this year, imports have surged past them, rising six times quicker. In no small part, this is due to Milei’s determination to maintain a currency peg. This means that the peso is allowed to trade within a fixed range of valuation. The Central Bank can maintain this valuation by buying or selling foreign exchange whenever the peso moves outside the band. Mindful that a sharp devaluation of the peso could reverse his progress on inflation, Milei has wanted to gradually adjust the band. But in recent months, increasing demand for hard currency has forced the government to dip into its reserves. With the Central Bank burning through cash, the risk of a self-fulfilling run on the peso had risen.

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But the resulting strong peso has enabled middle-class Argentinians to keep holidaying abroad. Meanwhile, imports remain affordable, helping to drive that surge in foreign purchases. By the late summer, pressure on these reserves was becoming acute, and the government ran the risk of running out of money. What made the situation especially delicate was that Argentina’s reserves had been swollen in April by a large disbursement from the IMF. But this use of borrowed money to defend the currency has troubled bondholders, who have begun to worry whether the government will be able to meet its debt payments. After all, Argentina has form here: for fear that bondholders from previous defaults might seize the country’s assets, the government is still reluctant to fly its officials abroad in government airplanes.

Hoping to reduce the appetite for imports and make exports more competitive, Milei wanted to devalue the peso further. Knowing the move would be unpopular, he was holding out until after the legislative elections. But his hand was forced by a shock result in the Buenos Aires provincial election earlier this month, when his La Libertad Avanza coalition was soundly defeated. Although Buenos Aires is a bastion of the opposition Peronists, the province also holds 40% of the country’s people, so it’s a good bellwether of what to expect next month. Currency traders, pondering the possibility that Milei would suffer a setback and lose authority, started dumping their pesos.

Milei does not currently have a parliamentary majority. Because only half the legislature is up for election next month, there is no prospect of that changing, but he hoped to secure enough seats that he could govern in coalition with centrist parties. Thus the poor showing earlier this month raised the prospect that Milei could end up weaker than expected. Compounding matters is that Argentina’s federal system means the president must get provincial buy-in for many of his measures to be effective. Absent a strong mandate, Milei could find himself struggling to govern effectively.

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And that could impede his plans for further reform. In addition to liberalizing trade and allowing the currency to float, there are structural reforms Milei must implement if he’s to improve productivity. These reforms include a reduction in labor market regulation and social security taxes; reforming the tax system; reforming the rules by which revenue collected in Buenos Aires is transferred to provinces; and lowering the obstacles to new business formation. Yet all these existing barriers to economic activity have powerful constituencies behind them, from unions and business groups to political lobbies. Though Milei has made more progress on business deregulation, the road ahead is getting bumpier. Austerity eliminated many subsidies, on items such as gas, water, transport and electricity, all of which have hurt ordinary people. 

To top it all off, Milei’s brand — that of a fiercely new kind of politician — was tarnished by the news last month that his sister and close adviser was under investigation for corruption. Leaked audio recordings caught a former government official revealing a kickback scheme that Karina Milei was running on government contracts. Outrage erupted. Following the revelation, Milei found himself pelted with stones when he attended a party rally late in August.

He has a narrow course ahead. A collapse in the peso now would jeopardize his hopes for gains in next month’s elections, and could thus be the death knell for his government. The White House’s rescue may therefore enable him to make it to election day, but it’s a gamble for Washington. If all the White House needs to do is offer the “whatever-it-takes” reassurance it has given Argentina, and it doesn’t actually have to bail the country out in any way, it will have been a well-judged intervention. But the US administration will have to hope that investors don’t call its bluff. If the run on Argentine markets resumes, Trump will have to decide whether he is prepared to back up words with money. And bailing out a foreign government at a time the US is cutting its spending on domestic programs could go down badly with American voters. 

As for Milei, he still has his date with the electorate next month. Endorsement and backing from the Trump administration may be all he needs to get his reform program back on track. Equally, in a country where nationalism runs strong, it could backfire. Javier Milei can breathe easier today, but only for long enough to resume the race.

In this remark, Sullivan displayed far more lucidity regarding AI than did other members of the Democratic establishment. (Take Kamala Harris’ bewildering characterization of bias and misinformation as “existential” threats.) Their successors in the White House, though, see AI as central to their plans for American dominance. Last week, the Trump administration slapped strict export controls on Nvidia’s H20 chip. And on Monday, the president’s science and technology policy chief, Michael Kratsios, told an audience of technologists that AI would be central to the new “Golden Age of America”. 

It is easy enough to say that a new technology will power prosperity. The reality, though, is that AI is more challenging a topic for the White House than Kratsios let on. There were some clues in JD Vance’s speech on artificial intelligence in Paris in February. It was his first major policy address as vice president, and it revealed an understanding of AI that befits him as a former tech investor. 

But it was also a careful political balancing act. Vance promised that the Trump administration’s AI policy would, simultaneously, be highly deregulatory, cripple American adversaries, and “center American workers”. These wide-ranging undertakings hint at the underlying reality of Vance’s speech: that the Trump administration’s emerging AI policy is being shaped by distinct factions with different priorities and worldviews.

As AI capabilities improve, the ideological divisions have only sharpened. Silicon Valley accelerationists push for unfettered development while invoking Chinese competition as a shield against regulation. Meanwhile, the populist elements of Trump’s base remain deeply skeptical of coastal elites building “machine gods” that could displace American workers. 

These contradictions explain Vance’s rhetorical tightrope: promising deregulation to please potential big tech donors, while assuring workers that they will have “a seat at the table” in a future that may not require their labor. It is what you would expect from an administration being pulled in three directions.

The strongest pull comes from the “accelerationists”. This is a group that includes venture capitalists, such as Marc Andreessen, and their venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and tech giants interested in AI like Meta and Nvidia. 

They spend hundreds of millions in lobbying and political spending. After pharmaceuticals, tech giants are DC’s largest lobbyists. They have one lobbyist for every two Congress members, spending a record $61.5 million in reported federal lobbying in 2024, not including unreported think tank donations and direct political fundraising. It is commonly recognized in Silicon Valley that when a senator visits, the first dinner stop they make is a fundraiser hosted by Marc Andreessen or David Sacks, now the White House’s AI and crypto czar. 

The group has said again and again that technological advancement should not be hampered by over-regulation or a fear of hypothetical future risks. It is a group that has been scarred by the crippling environmental regulation of the late 20th century — particularly for nuclear power, where environmentalist groups made similarly “existential” arguments about nuclear safety. Accelerationists liken such thinking to that of the Effective Altruists, who have long called for caution in the development of AI, and whose lobbying influenced the Biden administration.

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Much of Andreessen’s writing about AI is an implicit rebuke to Effective Altruism. In his manifesto “Why AI Will Save The World”, he positions AI as “quite possibly the most important — and best — thing our civilization has ever created”. He rejects concerns about AI killing humanity (calling this a “category error”, since AI is “math — code — computers”); ruining society through harmful outputs (dismissing objections as “thought police”); eliminating jobs (Andreessen counters this with economic theories on productivity growth); or causing inequality (arguing technology democratization benefits everyone).

As we get closer to powerful AI systems beyond “math — code — computers”, and public and political concerns grow, the accelerationist faction will likely double down on their framing of regulations as capitulation to China. They will reframe the debate around American dominance. Ted Cruz summed things up on his podcast: “If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese.” 

Soon enough, national security risks will become clear. These will include AI-assisted bioweapon development, or clear evidence that systems are misaligned with the intent of their operators. At this point, the accelerationists will call for guardrails, but only those of the superficial kind. 

In that event, the accelerationists might sound like they are in line with the China hawks, but will quietly continue business as usual. Meta continues to open-source its latest models, despite reports of their use by China’s military. Nvidia has lobbied against, and blatantly violated, export controls. These companies’ political capital comes not only from their willingness to spend money on lobbying, but from their availability as “experts”. Much policymaking is based on available “expertise”, which often means corporate lobbyists.

The accelerationists, then, now have the most power over the White House’s AI policy. But they might understand the least about what’s coming.

The national security hawks have a clearer view of the future. This is a group whose origins can be traced, at least in part, to the first Trump administration. In 2019, the president presciently signed the first ever executive order on AI, recognizing “the paramount importance of American AI leadership to the economic and national security of the United States”. 

This view persisted among select members of the Biden administration, including Sullivan and Ben Buchanan. Sullivan and Buchanan have been succeeded in the White House by a faction that includes traditional Republican “China Hawks” such as the new National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, who view AI as the defining front in a new cold war. The faction has allies in AI lab leaders, like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have publicly advocated for the US to maintain leadership in the development of AI, even if it involves means such as export controls.

To the national security hawks, it is an undeniable fact that China must not achieve superintelligence first. There are two distinct ways to ensure victory: Accelerate America or Obstruct China.

The choice of approach depends on the perceived risks of AI beyond the China competition. It’s no good beating Beijing if, by winning, the US loses control of advanced systems. The greater the perceived existential risk from advanced AI itself, the more inclined officials become toward obstruction over acceleration.

The “Accelerate America” hawks believe that the US must be ahead in AI development at all costs. As such, President Trump’s recent executive order calls for “American Dominance” in AI. At minimum, this means streamlining permitting, removing regulatory barriers, and avoiding hindrances to American progress. And, encouraged by the recent tariffs, reshoring efforts are gaining momentum: Nvidia announced on Monday that it will manufacture its latest Blackwell AI chips in the US, as part of a broader $500 billion investment in the next four years. Hindrances to accelerationists include things like creator copyright enforcement. Accelerate America hawks view any government interference that slows American labs as ultimately benefiting Chinese competitors, who operate without such constraints.

Moving further along the spectrum, mid-level hawkish interventions would see the military and government industries not merely adopting advanced AI systems, but actively co-developing them. The most aggressively hawkish iteration of the Trump administration would designate AGI as a national priority, overseeing a “Manhattan Project” for superintelligent AI, and giving unprecedented access to resources. One such resource would be the NSA’s reams of high quality data.

This policy would entail large government involvement, which could trigger a nation-state arms race. China, we can imagine, would perceive American government-led AI development as an existential threat requiring matching countermeasures. Another problem with the plan is that it would transfer development authority away from technical experts and toward bureaucrats and military planners. As a result, it would decrease the competence of those overseeing the potential intelligence explosion.

The other group of hawks, the “Chinese Obstruction” camp, focuses less on winning and more on ensuring that China loses. If empowered, this faction would enact rigorous national security evaluations of AI systems, the idea being to build up state capacity and defensive expertise within AI. (This is the current mandate of the US AI Safety Institute.) The obstructionists could extend to federally-backed intervention. This strategy would recognize that open-sourcing AI significantly benefits China, which has strong technical talent but weaker computational resources. With this in mind, note Sam Altman’s recent announcement that OpenAI will open-source one of its leading models. He is trying to get the beating of DeepSeek, a Chinese rival, perhaps to the detriment of national security.

By keeping model weights private, as well as restricting knowledge of training methodologies, America might be able to maintain its lead. This strategy rests on information asymmetry. As such, it might include export controls on both hardware and knowledge. There could be criminal penalties for sharing restricted AI information with Chinese entities, and policymakers could classify certain AI techniques as controlled defense technologies. There are already signs of this attitude. Senator Tom Cotton recently proposed barring citizens from foreign adversaries like China from working in the national laboratories.

The obstructionist hawks borrow from nuclear deterrence theory. As a result, they understand that the creation of transparent thresholds for AI development (such as the size of a training run), and the imposition of consequences for those who violate those thresholds, might make the development of superintelligence less economically and politically attractive. (That was the argument of a well-circulated paper whose three authors included a former Google CEO and an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI company). Under such a strategy, the US would publicly commit to specific countermeasures triggered by Chinese advancement toward superintelligence. These countermeasures could range from economic sanctions to targeted cyber operations against research infrastructure to more aggressive interventions.

Finally, the most extreme obstructionist approach recognizes that the AI arms race itself might be destabilizing, regardless of who wins. This strategy would involve America voluntarily restraining its own superintelligence development in exchange for verifiable international agreements — perhaps the “Deal of the Century” (or Anthropocene) for President Trump. It would require sophisticated verification mechanisms, potentially including international inspection regimes similar to nuclear non-proliferation treaties. The fundamental premise is that the prospect of Chinese superintelligence is so troubling that America should sacrifice its own in order to avoid it.

The populist Right is the third major faction likely to influence the administration’s approach to AI. This is a group that is dormant in formal policy circles but vocal in the cultural landscape that elected Trump.

Take the comments made by Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Joe Rogan regarding superintelligence and the Trump administration’s official policies. Carlson has characterized AI as a “threat to human civilization”. On his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Carlson went further, declaring: “If it’s bad for people we should strangle it in its crib. Why not just blow up the data centers?” Steve Bannon predicts “artificial superintelligence that is far more intelligent, far more creative, far more powerful than human beings”. Joe Rogan doesn’t think we are ready for it.

This faction splits into two sociologically distinct but overlapping groups. The religious traditionalists — Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals — fundamentally reject Silicon Valley’s quest to create “machine gods”. To them, this represents not merely technological hubris but potential heresy. They question whether humans should attempt to construct intelligences exceeding our own capabilities — a modern Tower of Babel disconnected from Biblical values.

The second group — workers traumatized by globalization and the ramifications of the NAFTA trade deal — seeks a better vision for automation than the previous waves, which devastated manufacturing communities. Trump’s base won’t tolerate another generation of workers discarded by technological change. Groups like American Compass represent their interests, demanding AI deployment that strengthens rather than displaces the middle class. Even so, we’ll only see these effects later: AI will affect cognitive work before it affects physical work. As a recent analysis puts it, AI will first come for “films, finance and programming” — not exactly blue-collar labor. 

These two factions find common ground in the New Right’s broader opposition to war and global entanglements. If superintelligence development continues unchecked, the populists will fear a Cold War with China, potentially triggering a Taiwan invasion and disrupting peaceful American life — precisely the scenario Trump promised to avoid.

From a sociological perspective, they see AI’s development as being driven by young, well-paid, liberal Californian engineers racing to build machine gods — while risking both American lives and livelihoods. And after witnessing existing technology’s destruction of family values and youth culture, they fear that AI will do further damage, constraining freedoms while concentrating power in government and tech firms.

As we get more powerful AI systems, the populist Right is likely to become more comfortable with government intervention to protect their lives and livelihoods. The populists will push for law and order policies — “AI agents must follow the law” — while advocating for populist measures to limit automation’s impact. Such measures might include requirements of human oversight; taxation of computational activity; and pro-union regulations.

Most importantly, this group embraces America First principles — rejecting both unnecessary military escalation with China and trade policies that sacrifice American workers. And they offer a third path beyond hawkish-libertarian binary that dominates Washington. 

For the time being, it appears that the Effective Altruists are an afterthought and that the accelerationists and the more aggressive hawks together have the upper hand. Shortly after Michael Kratsios was confirmed as the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, President Trump urged him to “blaze a trail to the next frontiers of science” and make America an “unrivaled” global leader in emerging technologies. Kratios’ speech this week expressed an almost identical spirit.

But the arrival of powerful AI will fracture both domestic and international politics. It is a fundamentally destabilizing technology — socially, economically, and geopolitically. Increasingly realistic chatbots will support, and then substitute, human friendships and relationships. Autonomous AI agents will replace cognitive labor, then robots will take care of the rest. And the development of this technology might herald the beginning of a new geopolitical Cold War with China — where a Taiwan invasion becomes ever more enticing, data centers become strategic missile targets, and cyberweapons make it onto the escalation ladder. 

It is rarely prudent to second-guess Trump. Elon Musk, for a few weeks the “first buddy”, appears now to be on his way out of the White House. Musk, having said on a recent podcast that AI has a “10-20% chance of killing everyone”, might have been one of the more moderating influences on the president, if only with regard to AI.

Where things go from here, therefore, is anyone’s guess. But despite the prospective exit of Musk, Trump is uniquely placed to achieve what others thought impossible: meaningful coordination domestically and internationally. In short, he has an opportunity to strike the “Deal of the Century” with China. His foreign policy successes — the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, historic summit with Kim Jong Un, pressuring European allies to pay up for defense — show his deftness in using US leverage for American, and global, interests.

In this spirit, he could avoid war, or worse, by adopting the containment strategy of the obstructionist hawks; protecting his white-collar-voting base; and making a deal with China that mimics nuclear arms deals. The more aggressive hawks might object to it, but it’s worth remembering how quickly Trump has normalized, at least among Republicans, the idea of pragmatic engagement with Russia. Norms are out, negotiations are in, and with AI moving at lightning speed, it is negotiations that are the appropriate course of action.

Or maybe that’s just me. Despite her many years in the public eye as elite arm candy, including her four years as first lady, we still don’t really know who she is. In 2012, Melania tweeted a photo of a Beluga whale with the question, “what is she thinking?” Twelve years on, it is still difficult to ascertain. Years of relentless press scrutiny and a new memoir have supplied us only with hints. This impenetrability is part of what makes her such a perfect site for our projections. We see what we want to see.

Liberals love to hate her. She has been mocked for her accent, for being multilingual, and has been the victim of xenophobia and sexist barbs. “I can say ‘anal costs extra’ in six languages,” was one viral meme. News that she was going to make changes to the White House rose garden in 2020 was met with a xenophobic tweet storm by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, expressing fury that a “foreigner” had “the audacity to … pull up history dating back a lifetime…These trashy, evil, stupid people need to get out of our house. What GALL she has.” American comedian Rosie O’Donnell has tweeted a video suggesting that Melania’s beloved only son, Barron, had autism. And feminists described her delightedly as “the only first lady to pose naked”. With Melania, the rigid dictates about how we use language to talk about identity no longer apply. We can say what we like.

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Now Melania is returning to the White House, and she is already signalling that she’ll be charting an independent course. She has refused the traditional tea meeting with outgoing First Lady, Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s alleged role in the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022. And she is not the least bit approachable, unlike Michelle Obama who did folksy Q&As on Vine, or Jill Biden, who once tweeted “you can take the girl out of Philly” after physically blocking protesters with her own body, prompting Vox to applaud her “relatable toughness”. Melania is restrained and unknowable — a cipher in an era of garish American confessionalism.

Admittedly, her protectiveness is hard-earned. A former friend, confidante and advisor, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, recorded their private conversations and wrote a tell-all book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of my Friendship with the First Lady. Most salaciously, the book details the tensions between Melania and her daughter-in-law, Ivanka. Wolkoff describes her efforts to sideline Ivanka at the inauguration and keep her out of official portraits, while Melania privately refers to her daughter-in-law as “Princess”.

The announcement of her memoir, Melania, was treated as yet another violation of decorum, a departure from sanctified democratic tradition, and therefore suspect. Her patriotic immigrant story, a fairy tale about becoming American, was described as a last-ditch cash grab before the election: another tawdry consumer item for sale alongside the Trump coins, the trading cards, and the $100,000 Trump Victory Tourbillion watch. (There is also an 18K “First Lady” watch in rose gold, which retails for a more modest sum of $799). But while the Trumps’ tacky profiteering is undeniable, she was hardly the First Lady to monetise her position. Michelle Obama’s own memoir, Becoming, received a soft-focus rock star treatment: it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and was accompanied by a stadium tour and soundtrack by Questlove. In 2018, the Obamas signed a multi-year deal with Netflix, a corporate partnership that was never subjected to similar criticism by the liberal commentariat.

Melania was born in 1970 in Slovenia, the wealthiest republic of what was then socialist Yugoslavia. She describes an idyllic life full of foreign travel, sports cars, and fashion — hardly the drab, walled-off hell of many Cold War propagandists’ fantasies. Her upbringing in the republic of Slovenia during the Seventies and Eighties was happy, she insists; she wanted for nothing. Young Melania Knaus ran on the cobblestone streets of the UNESCO World Heritage city Dubrovnik in Croatia; she went shopping in Italy, and walked in her mother’s fashion shows in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. She is therefore very much a child of the socialism of leader Josip Broz Tito, himself a lover of luxury cars, yachts, and fine cigars. Tito also cultivated an image of elite glamour.

Around the time of Melania’s birth, Tito was photographed driving Sophia Loren around in a golf cart and hosting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the Croatian coast. An entry from Burton’s diary in 1971 notes that Tito and his wife lived in “remarkable luxury unmatched by anything else I’ve seen”. The very next year, bronzed Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione opened the opulent Penthouse Adriatic Club on the Croatian island of Krk, which included a luxury hotel and casino, and was staffed by female “pets” in skimpy French maid uniforms. There were even rumours that one of the swimming pools was filled with champagne. When it flopped and closed the very next year, Guccione attempted a similarly inspired hotel and casino project in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But misfortune struck again and he ran out of money. The project was soon rescued by none other than Donald Trump, who purchased the half-finished Guccione property, opening the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in 1984. Melania’s image can therefore easily be situated within the Yugoslav tradition, and she herself can be seen as an extension of the golden age of Seventies Titoist luxury and glamour.

But nothing in the book answers the question always lurking: “What is she thinking?” Written in superficial, thank you-note politesse, Melania, in typical fashion, recedes from view. The delivers the stiff immigrant narrative, light on personal details but heavy on easy moralising. “Life’s circumstances shape you in many ways, often entirely beyond your control,” she writes. “Your birth, parental influences, and the world in which you grow up. As an adult, there comes a moment when you become solely responsible for the life you lead. You must take charge, embrace that responsibility, and become the architect of your own future.”

It is standard pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps fare, Americana imbued with the usual veneration of hard work and self-reliance. But Melania is aligning herself with a particular kind of immigrant, the kind that is part of her husband’s flock: the “good”, Trump-supporting foreigner who is patriotic, embraces American values, and does not feel victimised by their adopted country. In Melania’s world, we can surmise, immigrants of her kind stand in contrast to those who resent their country, reject its values, and call it racist. The latter see structural racism and xenophobia as the forces that have ultimately shaped their lives: responsibility is mostly external to oneself. In contrast, for the Trumpian immigrant, responsibility lies within. Despite years of Democratic Party courting, the recent presidential election has made clear that a great number of foreign-born Americans now identify more closely with Melania’s immigration narrative.

While she takes great care to depict her early years in sunny terms, there are indications that all was not easy. “As a child, I was somewhat shielded from the darker aspects of the system, but its presence loomed in the back of our minds,” she says. We know from other sources that her father, Viktor Knavs, was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and appears in the police files of UDBA, the Directorate for State Security. Identified as a travelling salesman. He is thought to have violated Yugoslavia’s criminal code, supposedly through tax evasion. Though some American have suggested that Knavs should have been denied US citizenship on the basis of the alleged criminal record, it is possible that UDBA’s interest in Knavs was purely political. As someone who frequently travelled abroad and owned a fleet of cars, Knavs would have likely drawn the attention of the Yugoslav authorities.

None of that is interrogated in her glossy and unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of Yugoslavia in in the last decades before the country began to fall apart. Her story is as sleek and immaculate as the woman herself. And yet, the tiny Alpine country of just over two million has a complex relationship with its native daughter. “The Melania effect” boosted tourism to Slovenia when the Trumps were last in the White House, and Balkan media is already anticipating renewed interest in the country, with enterprising restaurants and artisans already mass producing Melania-themed dishes and products. But not everyone is happy: in 2019, a wood carving of Melania was erected in Rozno, in south-eastern Slovenia, not far from her hometown of Sevnica. A year later, the wooden carving was burned in a “politically motivated” arson attack, and swiftly replaced with a more durable bronze statue in September 2020.

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Back in her adopted country, the attitude is similarly mixed. The continued fascination with her is rooted in her stubborn adherence to traditional modes of gender expression, and her total disinterest in the current imperative of female emancipation. In Melania, she doubles down on her utter fidelity to her wifely duties –infidelities go unmentioned – and to her motherly obligations, her “protection” of Barron first and foremost. She presents, with echoes of Jackie O and Diana, as the betrayed but faithful wife, the princess trapped in a tower, the fiercely devoted mother. She is playing a role of exaggerated femininity, which, in an era of diminished sexual dimorphism in the West, seems almost drag-like.

When asked, in 1999, the year after they first met, if she could picture herself as first lady one day, she demurred: “I would be very traditional, like Jackie Kennedy.” And she was ready to abandon her modelling career in the event that Trump ever became president. “I would stand by him,” she insists, true to form. During a 2005 interview on Larry King Live as newlyweds, Trump claimed that they’d never had a single fight, calling Melania “the rock”. In that interview, she admitted that to be with a man like Donald, “you have to know who you are” and “be smart and strong”. Both insist that theirs is a relationship of equals. But as with other aspects of Melania’s life, much about their marriage — her feelings about her husband’s infidelities, for one — remains an enigma.

It’s easy for women to paint their own opinions on to this blank canvas. A certain cohort are determined that she is the powerless victim of her husband and his politics. The princess in the tower of so many fairy tales, beautiful and trapped. The “free Melania” mania of the first Trump administration, speaks to this inability to understand why she might have chosen to be with this “monster’. And yet, there is very little evidence that Melania is dreaming of freedom. In fact, her memoir offers a glimpse of a very different side of Melania. After the Trumps have left the White House, the FBI raids their home in Mar-a-Lago, and Melania describes a sense of violation. Here her narrative shifts from a studious avoidance of victimisation rhetoric to one of victimhood. After taking so much care to reiterate the need to take responsibility for one’s life, one’s choices, and one’s destiny, she embraces the role of the embittered, wronged victim. Blame is never hers or her husband’s; it is assigned untrustworthy assistants, chiefs of staff, speechwriters, political opponents, and the liberal media. We even get the sense that her much-maligned anti-cyberbullying initiative, Be Best, is actually about herself.

And yet, in other moments, Melania appears sincere. Certainly when she’s talking about “a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health”, which she did in her book. The revelation that Melania is pro-choice came a few weeks before the election, when the Democrats were attempting to use the Trump-Vance ticket’s anti-abortion stance as a means of cajoling the undecided or uninspired into voting for them. Whether she was being used to appeal to women voters, or if she was sincere, it’s hard to tell. Inevitably, feminist activists refused to take it at face value. “They’re not embracing it at all,” she said in an interview shortly after her book came out. “They’re saying it was a scam, that it was a lie.”This, then, is the price you pay for being unknowable. Everyone simply believes what they want.

Melania shrugs it all off. And her public statements since her husband’s victory have emphasised unity. “I anticipate the citizens of our nation rejoining in commitment to each other and rising above ideology for the sake of individual liberty, economic prosperity, and security,” she wrote on November 7. In her first post-election interview on Fox & Friends last week, Melania dismissed the importance of Vogue covers and flattering press coverage. “We have more important things to do,” she says. Perhaps she has fooled us all. Perhaps there is a more complex, mature first lady about to move into the White House. There have been indications of that complexity before. When the interviewer in 1999 suggested that she might be with Trump for his money, noting that there weren’t too many 20-something supermodels on the arms of car mechanics, she responded with a rare flicker of depth. “You can’t sleep and you can’t hug with beautiful things, with a beautiful apartment, with a beautiful plane, beautiful cars, beautiful houses. You can’t do that. You can feel very empty… and if somebody said, ‘you know, you’re with a man because he’s rich and famous’, they don’t know me.”

And after all these years, we still don’t.

Weinberger was a Right-wing Republican who worked for another, Ronald Reagan, and even in those days Right-wing Republicans were automatically written off as racists. But I never detected the slightest bit of discomfort in Powell’s demeanour, perhaps because neither Weinberger nor Reagan had any doubts about his ability: after leaving the Pentagon for a career-required Corps command once he was promoted to Lieutenant-General, Powell was summoned back to Washington by Reagan to serve as his National Security Advisor. That Powell was the first black man to run the “inter-agency” National Security Council was not much mentioned at the time, as far as I can recall, except perhaps in the vernacular press that I do not read.

More important was the impossible job at hand: in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan’s entire presidency was in question. To outsiders who did not know any better, senility seemed the most charitable explanation for the President’s active support for an insane caper that ended at Tehran’s airport — and which could have left a very senior US official in Iranian custody.

His predecessor Carlucci, under Chief of Staff  Howard Baker, ex Senate Majority Leader no less, stopped the shipwreck, but it was Powell who righted the ship along with Reagan himself, and to such good effect that the faithful Reaganauts who had been plotting a backdoor exit from the White House for their hero when the scandal exploded suddenly found themselves discussing the possibility of the first third-term President since Roosevelt: Reagan’s ascent in the public opinion polls was astounding.

The famous Powell doctrine enunciated in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, weas that if the US goes to war, it must not play “controlled escalation” games as it did, disastrously, in Vietnam. If force had to be used, it was best used on the largest possible scale, to quickly end the war rather than start it.

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But there was also an undeclared Powell doctrine, not for the nation but for himself: prejudice exists; but if it can only be inferred because it is not visibly enacted, just ignore it. Do not sacrifice your own advancement to try to re-educate the malevolent and the ignorant; do not start a scandal that will only exacerbate the problem.

When his boss, Caspar Weinberger, complained in a Senate Hearing that the Senators were ignoring his own Secretarial advice and listening instead to the strategic lucubrations of a “PhD with a foreign accent” — he was referring to me, testifying about my book The Pentagon and the Art of War in a debate about the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act the book called for — Powell told me not to kvetch (he grew up with Yiddish speakers in the Bronx). Just be happy that the Senators are listening to you, he said, and that we will finally be able to re-organise the Pentagon.

But it was not until decades later, in a chance meeting aboard a transatlantic flight, that he told me why he was so little agitated by the subtle racial tensions of the Reagan years. As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was recruited on a number of occasions by more senior officers to avert racial tensions among the troops, to avoid violence not with fists or even handguns but with fragmentation grenades or even M.16s.

For him, that was the end result of McNamara’s political science: a war not only endless but nonsensical, in which the same village might be flooded with economic aid, propagandised by a provincial team, bombed with napalm to destruction and then rebuilt. Hence his personal approval of Col. Warden’s “Instant Thunder” plan for the 1991 Iraq war: bomb every military target day after day to break up Iraq’s logistics, knock out bases and destroy as many armoured vehicles as possible. Then launch an all-out armoured offensive, force Saddam Hussein’s surrender and retreat from Kuwait — and bring the troops back home.

As a result of the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act, Powell was the first Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff who was in the actual chain of command. And although he was too tactful to order the Army and Marine field commanders about as the subordinates they were, when the Marines started nibbling at Kuwait before the two weeks of bombing was done, he made sure that it was no more than a photo-op. Ignoring the majority view in Washington that air power always disappoints (because it did in Vietnam) he understood that it was best to hollow out an enemy before moving the tanks forward. That was the Powell “first” that really matters: not that he was the first black US military chief, but the first and so far only US military chief since 1945 to win a war.

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The last thing that Powell thought would happen was the disastrous repudiation two decades later of all that was learned in Vietnam and all that was demonstrated in the 1991 war: that American military power can destroy high-contrast targets anywhere and can defeat enemies that assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations — but cannot defeat insurgents. As Powell well knew, the “counterinsurgency warfare” peddled by generals with PhDs was never more than military malpractice, as Afghanistan 2021 showed yet again.

Over the past week, every obituary of Powell has interrupted its praise to condemn his tenure as Secretary of State (another first for a black man that Powell himself hardly celebrated) because it was his approval that made the 2003 invasion of Iraq politically feasible.

As usual, the media criticises the intelligence malfeasance that trapped Powell — the failure to recognise that Saddam was only pretending to be developing nuclear weapons — as opposed to the inability of the over-staffed, over-funded intelligence community to recognise that if Saddam Hussein and his regime were removed, what would ensue was not “democracy” but a Hobbesian war of all against all as different factions killed each other. (When I testified accordingly before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just before the war, the pro-war witness call me a “racist” who denied that Iraqis could sustain a democracy, just as the Germans and Japanese did after 1945…)

Then there was the fact that an Iraq in civil war would not be able to resist Iran. So there were ultimately two choices: stay out of Iraq, or convert the US Army into a 700,000-strong Mesopotamian constabulary forever. When Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said exactly that in a Congressional Hearing, he received zero support from the Intelligence Community, so Rumsfeld & Co ridiculed him with impunity for something he emphatically did not say — that 700,000 American soldiers were necessary to defeat the Iraqi Army — and denied him the customary extra year.

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That was Colin Powell’s world on the eve of the 2003 war that would tarnish his reputation. As a Secretary of State, he could not apply the Powell doctrine to flood Iraq with troops. What he should have done — as he was the first to recognise in the aftermath — was to give a simple choice to Bush: Mr President, either give up the dream of a US-made democracy in Iraq or send in 700,000 troops, which cannot be done.

If the intelligence community had realised and transmitted what was happening in Iraq, Powell could have calmed the war fever with a phone call. Without that support, Powell couldn’t turn harshly against Bush, who was not only the President but also in effect a family friend, from the days of his father’s vice-presidency.

As it was, the second Iraqi war became an agony for him that never actually ended — very poor recompense for a life well-lived from the time that he packed boxes in a Bronx shop as a teenager. Characteristically, Powell kept in touch with the fatherly owner (who urged him to study on at all costs) and then with his sons, all through the years.

I only met Powell now and again over years, and it was only early on, and then in 2003, that those meetings were charged with much significance. But his death is still a real blow. I miss him already.

All of this is to say, a Joe Biden administration will be a marked improvement on the politics of the past four years precisely because it’ll be a return to business as usual — and because the 78-year-old Biden’s extra-long tenure in public life makes him an especially predictable president, even before he’s signed a single bill into law. Whatever he might do in office, he will certainly not surprise us! Indeed, he hasn’t yet: from his campaign promises to the scandal that briefly threatened to sink his candidacy back in the spring of 2020, the twists and turns of Biden’s path to the White House could be seen coming a mile off.

We know, too, all the ways in which a Biden presidency will be a negative — and they’re worth taking note of, before we’re put to sleep by the blissfully boring politics. For there is at least one policy issue on which Biden might well be worse, not better, than Trump —it’s precisely because Biden has long styled himself as a champion for women that we know how lacking his feminist credentials truly are.

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Back in the 1990s, Biden was a tough-on-crime Democrat and a leading proponent of the legislation that would eventually become the Violence Against Women Act. His statements and positions then followed what would become a familiar pattern: what women needed was not liberation, but protection. Not rights or respect, but rules and regulations — for their own good, of course. And if one of these damsels in distress rejected the state’s attempts to save her? Well, then she was part of the problem.

Biden was an early advocate of no-drop prosecutions and mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases — policies that punish female victims who don’t go along with the state’s preferences vis-a-vis how to resolve such conflicts. That a woman might have good reasons for not wanting her partner arrested, or not wanting to be mired in the criminal justice system herself, was immaterial: those who refused to testify in domestic violence cases against their partners were subject to arrest or imprisonment. Sometimes, their children were, too.

Long after data had emerged to suggest that mandatory arrest policies made America’s domestic violence problem worse, not better — and that they diminished battered women’s trust in the system supposedly designed to help them — Biden continued to push them as a solution. When the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law in 1994, it cemented the role of the state as saviour — and the notion of women as too hapless and helpless to act in their own best interests.

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Biden is proud of this legislation; he’s touted it repeatedly as an indicator of how good his presidency would be for women, how long he’s been fighting on their behalf. Of course, under the circumstances, it made for a persuasive contrast: who wouldn’t prefer a president who protects women over Mr. Grab-em-by-the-pussy? You could almost overlook the fact that Biden’s care for women seemed to always take the form of chivalrous head-patting, that it was insulting in its own way. As Barack Obama’s Vice President, Biden toured colleges around the country to promote the administration’s commitment to combatting campus assault. His vision of female empowerment always had a funny way of sounding a lot like benevolent sexism: “The greatest sin is the abuse of power,” he would tell the assembled crowds of students. “And the cardinal sin of them all is for a man to raise his hand to a woman.”

In practice, the result of all this state-sanctioned white-knighting is not the woman-saving panacea it claims to be. Since the passage of VAWA, countless victims have ended up unwittingly ensnared in the criminal justice system when they didn’t agree with the state’s desire to prosecute. And on campus, third-party reporting mandates mean that women are labelled victims whether they agree or not, forced to have their sex lives dissected by Title IX tribunals who are highly motivated to expel alleged offenders lest they lose federal funding. (One exasperated accuser told authorities, “I’m fine and wasn’t raped”; administrators disagreed, and expelled her boyfriend anyway.)

This morally panicked approach to campus sexual assault has made a mockery of both due process and women’s agency; the Obama-era strategy, with its focus on continual consent-seeking at every stage of intimacy, seem founded in the rather Victorian conviction that no woman ever really wants to have sex at all. And with Biden vowing to reinstate these policies — the rolling-back of which might have been the one good thing to come out of a Trump administration — women can expect more unwanted, “for your own good” intrusions into their private lives over the next four years.

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All of this is complicated by Biden’s own woman problem, which once presented the greatest threat to his chances to occupy the White House. In March 2019, a report surfaced of the former Vice President’s extensive history of cheek-smooching, hair-sniffing, and other instances of inappropriate touching, calling into question whether he was really the right man to represent a Democratic Party trying to position itself as the anti-Trump. A year later, this same history worked against him when Tara Reade alleged that he had assaulted her while she was working in his office as a Senate aide.

On both occasions, it was Biden’s huggy paternalism that opened him up to controversy; but it was also this — that special brand of intimacy with a whiff of protective condescension — that ultimately saved him. In a world primed to conflate “inappropriate touching” with “sexual misconduct”, Biden’s behaviour was odd, but also oddly sexless, in a way that made it difficult to pinpoint as a violation. And while his accusers were all woman, he himself did not discriminate on the basis of sex; Biden would bestow a grandfatherly hug and forehead-kiss on anyone, of any persuasion, who he perceived as vulnerable and in need of comfort. Inappropriate? Come on, man! It’s a public service!

Between the raunchy anti-feminism of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement that positioned sexual misconduct as the only misconduct that matters, it is hard to make the argument that our next president will be bad for women — and indeed, this is not that argument. But Joe Biden’s brand of feminism ultimately does not do enough to grapple with the radical notion that women are people, with all the agency and complexity that this implies. Instead, his administration seems poised to continue protecting women, rather than respecting them, and failing to recognise that these two things are not always one and the same. Is he bad? No. Worse than Trump? Not by a long shot. But when it comes to women, his presidency should serve mostly as a reminder that we could, someday, do better.

Indeed, a crucial part of this fantasy was that Trump wouldn’t be leaving alone. A return to normalcy meant that the various and sundry Trumplets who’d been littered across the public landscape since their father first announced his candidacy would be swept offstage in the bargain, forced out of the spotlight by Donald’s ignominious defeat. Where would they go? Who knew? Who cared?! You don’t have to go home, kids, but you can’t stay here. (Except you, Tiffany. You’re cool.)

With hindsight, we should have known better. The idea that Trump might go quietly into the night was always a delusional one. But where we truly lost the plot was in imagining that the entire family would simply step out of the spotlight, rather than taking their place in a new American political dynasty in the making. The large adult Trumps are here to stay, a Succession spin-off made for reality TV.

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The boys, of course, have been waiting their whole lives for this. Donald Jr, particularly, has come a long way since he was photographed sitting on a tree stump for a 2017 New York Times profile, gazing wistfully into the distance like the world’s saddest L.L. Bean catalogue model. Once lost, but now found: by all accounts, Don Jr. spent his life up until the campaign desperately seeking his father’s approval, only to become an unlikely asset to the family for all the ways in which he didn’t quite fit in. Don Jr. was an outdoorsman, a hunter, an avid wearer of camouflage and flannel — things which once mystified his father, but made him uniquely capable of connecting on the campaign trail with rural voters who might have otherwise balked at voting for a rich, pampered reality-TV star with a permanent spray tan and soft, ladylike little hands.

Never mind the money, the fame, the influence: Don Jr. has found his purpose, and he isn’t going anywhere. With a flattering pandemic beard, an Instagram account stocked with owning-the-libs memes, and a fresh collection of loony conspiracy theories about Chinese spies inside the Biden administration, he’s ready to claim his legacy in a Republican party permanently reshaped by his father’s presidency.

As for Eric, well, he’s trying — but neither his beard nor his conspiracy theory meme game are as strong as his brother’s, which is probably why everyone is more excited about his wife’s political future than his own. (Lara Trump is reportedly considering a senatorial run in her home state of North Carolina.) He could, however, open up a whole new path for the husbands of female elected officials within the Republican party, securing the crucial Wife Guy voting bloc in future elections.

But when it comes to the greatest hopes for a Trump dynasty, the future, as they say, is female.

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It is baffling that nobody took Ivanka more seriously from the get-go. It’s even more baffling that the preferred approach by press and public alike was to try and shame her into submission, as if she weren’t the immediate progeny of a man notoriously, and probably genetically, incapable of feeling that particular sensation. But at first, Ivanka was seen as a pressure point within the administration, one of few people who might hold some sway over the President’s policies. We pleaded with her, scolded her, booed and boycotted her in the hopes that she’d do the right thing (not that anyone could quite agree on what the right thing was.) When that didn’t work, the mood changed.

If Ivanka wouldn’t reject her father, or the role in his administration for which she was clearly unqualified, then we’d reject her: celebrating her failures, memeing her awkward intrusions onto the world stage, even blaming her when possible for the more disastrous moments in her father’s presidency. When Donald Trump tear-gassed protesters to clear the way for a Bible-brandishing photo op in front of Lafayette Church this past summer, media outlets made sure we knew that it was Ivanka who carried the book — in “her $1,540 MaxMara bag”, no less!

And when the election was over, some parts of the Left seemed more excited about punishing Ivanka for her complicity than about welcoming her father’s successor. Even as Trump himself launched a hopeless but disturbing campaign to invalidate the election results, people clung gleefully to the vision of Ivanka coming home with her tail between her legs, only to see herself shunned and abandoned by the New York social elite who was only ever barely tolerating her to begin with.

Texts would go unreturned; invitations would not be extended; restaurants where she wanted to dine would be inexplicably unable to accommodate her. In Vanity Fair, Ivanka’s high school best friend crowed over her old pal’s impending ruination, noting smugly that Ivanka, with her new money and gold-plated jewellery and bad opinions on Palestine, was always too gauche, too Trumpy, to really belong. Plus, she once farted and blamed it on somebody else. You know who else refuses to take responsibility for their farts? Peasants.

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Was this fun? Well, yes. But was it wise? Almost certainly not, considering what now seems not just rumored but inevitable: not only will New York’s upper crust not have the pleasure of rebuffing Ivanka from polite society, they won’t even get the chance. She’s off to Florida to plan the next step in her political career, perhaps a senate run in her new home state where the Trump name still has a certain panache. After all those articles about how she daren’t show her face in Manhattan ever again, why not? What else?

Frustrated liberals have grumbled in jest for years that the first woman President will probably be a Republican, owing to the Left’s unfortunate tendency to eat its allies alive. But with Ivanka Trump on the scene, the grumbling suddenly seems more prescient than joking, because here she is. Beautiful, capable, unabashedly ambitious, and better-liked than her father — who managed to win the U.S. Presidency despite the fact that more than half the country didn’t like him at all. It’s not hard to imagine what might come next. Let the snooty old-money heiresses keep their fortunes: Ivanka is about to inherit a nation.

The witnesses on the first day were George Kent, a senior State Department official, and William Taylor, a former ambassador to Ukraine, and currently charge d’affaires. They emerged as exemplary foreign service professionals: considered, scrupulously factual and non-partisan — which only made the picture that emerged from their testimony all the more extraordinary.

What it revealed was the extent and depth of US involvement in Ukraine, going back well into the Obama presidency. To describe it as meddling in another country’s internal affairs would be an understatement. The actual trigger for the impeachment hearings — a whistleblower’s charge that Trump had put pressure on the Ukrainian President to help him potentially slur a rival before the 2020 election — came across as just one aspect, if a particularly murky one — of a longer and continuing saga.

The single most striking point to emerge was that the United States regards Ukraine as “vital to its national interest”; not to Europe’s interest, nor to Nato’s, but to its own national interest — despite the Cold War being over and Ukraine being rather a long way from the US.

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A second point, which might come as news to a lot of people and not just in the United States, was the extent of military assistance being supplied by the Washington to a country that is in no sense a formal ally, and whose prospects of even starting the process of joining Nato in the foreseeable future are pretty slim. With Russia — and China — designated enemies of the United States, Taylor said, Ukraine was a “strategic partner” and at the “front-line” of US defences.

In fact, as can be learned from other sources, both the US and the UK have what amounts to a permanent military presence in western Ukraine, which is where the Javelin missiles — controversially denied to Kyiv by Obama, but supplied early in Trump’s presidency — are kept. Their location suggests that they are under US, or Nato, rather than Ukrainian, control. What does this say about Ukraine’s sovereignty?

A third point to emerge was how casually US officials and others seem to have approached what was potentially another big violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. In the overheard phone call whose contents triggered the impeachment hearings, the US President broached the possibility of Kyiv opening an inquiry into the affairs of a Ukrainian company that had previously appointed Hunter Biden to its board — Biden being the son of Joe Biden, then US Vice President and latterly a prospective Democratic rival to Trump for the presidency.

The question on which impeachment hinges is whether Trump tried to pressure, even “bribe”, his Ukrainian counterpart to agree; was there, in the now celebrated phrase, a “quid pro quo”? Specifically, did Trump make the resumption of US military aid — then suspended — conditional on Ukraine looking for dirt that could compromise a potential rival?

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But look what is revealed almost in passing. The son of the then US Vice President joined the board of a Ukrainian company, Burisma, operating in the notoriously corrupt energy sector. If you wanted to defend Trump, you could almost argue that an investigation into this alone was warranted as a matter of US public interest — but surely in the US, not Ukraine.

In fact, Biden junior was just one of many American businesspeople drawn to the honeypot of Ukraine during its lurches towards a free market economy. Paul Manafort, briefly Trump’s campaign adviser in 2015, now in jail for tax evasion and money laundering, was another.

In essence, what emerged from the first days of the hearings was that the Obama and the Trump administrations both treated Ukraine almost as an extension of US territory and a bastion of its security and other interests. In that context, whether or not Trump was withholding military aid for a particular purpose, hardly matters. For a long time before then, favours seemed to be advanced and withdrawn almost at will, even as a lot of Americans made a lot of money in what was, and remains, a poor country.

Some have hazarded that Donald Trump deliberately set out to exploit the naïveté of the Ukraine’s president, a complete political novice who had been in office barely three months, when he placed the fateful phone call on 25 July. If so, this would have been nothing new, merely the continuation of the US interfering almost unhindered in Ukraine’s affairs on the assumption that it could bend key individuals in Kyiv to its will.

In fact, though, if Trump had hoped to take advantage of a new President, he was very badly informed on two counts. Any linkage he might have insinuated between the resumption of military aid and Ukraine launching an investigation into Hunter Biden, would have meant little, because Zelensky, it seems, was still unaware that the aid had ceased. Even if he had had any inkling, he might well have put it down to uncertainty in Washington about how to deal with Zelensky’s unexpected victory — unexpected, that is, to most of Ukraine’s Western patrons, who had banked on continuing their cosy relationship with his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko.

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He would also have been gravely underestimating Zelensky. Contrary to a widespread Western view, Zelensky is not “just” an actor who rode his television celebrity to the presidency. He has a law degree and was highly successful in the production business, alongside his acting career. Both as a candidate and in office, he has also exhibited several qualities rare in a political novice: one is patience; another is an awareness of potential pitfalls, and another is his judgement of people.

In his testimony to the impeachment hearings, Bill Taylor noted that Zelensky had been concerned from an early stage not to become embroiled in another country’s domestic politics. He also said that another US diplomat (Kurt Volker, the US special envoy on Ukraine) had warned him about giving any impression that Ukraine was a US “plaything”. In some ways, Zelensky seems to have been more aware than either his predecessor, Poroshenko, or the US President of the lopsided reality of US-Ukraine relations.

Whether it was Zelensky’s innate savvy that kept him out of trouble or whether, for whatever reason, he never became aware of any linkage between US military aid and a Biden investigation may be clarified in the hearings that follow. US military aid resumed in September, without any evidence of Ukraine having ceded anything in return.

Then again, Zelensky’s has still not been received for a full-dress summit at the White House, despite reportedly angling hard for such a meeting to demonstrate his own, and Ukraine’s, standing, especially to Russia. Zelensky did meet Trump one-on-one in September at the UN General Assembly, but an invitation to Washington remains elusive. Whether this is a mark of Trump’s displeasure is unclear, but William Taylor in his testimony clearly inferred that it was something the US might use as a bargaining chip. “It is one thing to leverage a White House meeting,” he told a questioner; “another to hold up military aid.”