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news · the day's top 10 · june 13th
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Jun 13, 2026 · 33 min listen
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news · the day's top 10 · june 13th
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The author shared a video that pairs with a reading they previously sent out, noting that the video is essential for understanding the material. They’ve now posted almost all of the related recordings, leaving only two pending: a cognitive‑warfare symposium and a conversation with the Cohens, father and daughter.
Those final two videos are being held back while the author experiments with AI‑driven editing tools. The goal is to transform the raw Zoom footage into something that feels more like a polished documentary—clearer audio, more engaging visuals, and a professional look that moves beyond the “COVID‑era” feel of typical online meetings.
The author believes the content deserves high‑quality production and is optimistic that current AI advancements can deliver that slick aesthetic. They’re still figuring out the right prompts and may need a few more weeks before the final edits are ready.
In the meantime, listeners are encouraged to enjoy the discussion that’s already available, and to stay tuned for the upcoming, upgraded videos.
On Thursday, Donald Trump belatedly reacted to the revolt (which included several key Republicans) over his preposterous installation of uber-loyalist Bill Pulte, who has not a shred of national security experience, as acting director of national intelligence, by nominating Jay Clayton for the position. But he has no such experience either. Clayton, SEC chair in Trump’s first term, was a longtime Wall Street lawyer at the power-law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. He now serves as U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Some Democrats were quick to take the bait, which matters at a time when the party is allowing a key warrantless wiretapping provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to expire today, because of the Pulte appointment. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Clayton’s “intelligence, temperament and deep commitment to public service will make him a terrific DNI.” Presumably, Himes would vote for a FISA extension if Clayton were confirmed, and drag many Democrats along. But only by comparison with the thuggish Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has used confidential mortgage records to create failed trumped-up cases against Fed governor Lisa Cook and other perceived political enemies, does Clayton seem qualified. He is not quite as clumsily loyal to Trump, but he has made public comments that are odd for a U.S. attorney. This week, he appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and alleged that there were major problems with recent elections in California, which he has no jurisdiction over, after Trump baselessly suggested there had been fraud. The deeper problem with Clayton is his history as a Wall Street lawyer, often on deals that intermingle financial interests with potential national security questions. At Sullivan & Cromwell, he handled the IPO of China’s Alibaba Group, at the time the largest IPO in history. Clayton represented the underwriting banks in the offering. In June 2026, the Department of Defense added Alibaba to a list of companies it considers linked to China’s military. Clayton also represented Chinese retailer Suning Commerce Group in its cross-investment with Alibaba. Alibaba invested roughly $4.6 billion for a 19.99 percent stake in Suning, while Suning invested about $2.3 billion in Alibaba. Clayton often represented major global investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Bank of America, in securities offerings. Chinese companies typically access U.S. capital markets via these banks. This story first appeared in our free Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson. So Clayton comes to his knowledge of U.S.-China national security issues via work as a lawyer on deals designed to ease Chinese penetration of U.S. capital markets. He has never worked on the government side of issues that address concerns about China’s threat to U.S. security. The cross-fertilization of top intelligence jobs with top investment banking jobs is an old story and not a happy one. The Dulles brothers, who served respectively as President Eisenhower’s secretary of state (John Foster Dulles) and as longtime CIA director (Allen Dulles) both had been longtime partners at, you guessed it, Sullivan & Cromwell. John Foster Dulles became a partner on the eve of World War I, and Allen Dulles in 1926. Both spent their entire pre-government careers at Sullivan & Cromwell. When the Dulles brothers presided over U.S.-sponsored coups against foreign leaders who threatened corporate or financial interests, the cross-fertilization and multiple contacts served them well, though the coups ultimately backfired, most notably in Iran. Given that the heights of American financial capitalism involve the intermingling of corporate and national intelligence issues, what could be more natural (and perverse) than yet another top intelligence official coming from Sullivan & Cromwell? Trump represents the weird alliance of MAGA pseudo-populism with Wall Street domination. Though Jay Clayton is more reassuringly polished than the crude Bill Pulte, in key respects he is worse. It would be useful, and overdue, if key Democrats in Congress connected the dots. The post Trump’s Bait and Switch on the Top Intelligence Job appeared first on The American Prospect.
Could you count to a trillion? Oh, hell no. I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds. The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let’s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds. That’s 12,050 years. How high could a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama’s vagina and kept at it for 100 years—before dying abruptly, because I hadn’t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years. I would have only made it to 8.3 billion. A trillion is 1,000 billion. It’s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they’ll stretch to the moon and back—twice. Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot, about runaway wealth in America and its effects on those who come into it, and on society at large. One question that came up a lot was, well, should billionaires exist? Even some of my very wealthy sources felt there should perhaps be some upper limits placed on wealth accumulation. Should billionaires exist? How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks—ever. It’s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it’s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess—not to mention that Musk didn’t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice—a bad one, and also dangerous. I will elaborate, but first let’s have a little fun. I did some calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world’s richest guy was—and that was at a time when Musk’s net worth was only $200 billion. Here’s my update: Suppose we wanted to have a game of Monopoly in which the amount of money each player starts with reflects their relative wealth in real life. And suppose we want it to be Elon Musk vs. some guy with the average middle-class wealth of $453,300. (Economists define middle class as the 50th through 90th wealth percentiles—the “middle 40″—and this number comes from RealTimeInequality.org.) So, normally, each player starts a Monopoly game with $1,500. In our rigged version, we want our middle-class player to have at least enough to buy a property or two, so we’ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get? He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he’s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes, but I’ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.) You couldn’t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime. So now we’ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today’s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn’t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets. And also, where would you put the boxes? Each set comes in a box 0.19 cubic feet in volume. All told, they would consume 10,183 cubic feet. Assuming you have standard 9-foot ceilings, they would completely fill a 1,131-square-foot room from floor to ceiling. Our middle-class player doesn’t have any rooms that big in his house—which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets. Suppose you took all Musk’s Monopoly money and spread it out on the ground? Turns out, it would paper over roughly 11 football fields, including the end zones. But as those bills are small and multiple denominations, let’s try this with real-life currency. If you were to convert Musk’s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we’re talking about 10 billion Franklins. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet—just under 40 square miles—enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk’s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed. Far more important than the physical magnitude of $1 trillion, of course, is the power it musters. With his ridiculous trove, Musk, already unaccountable, becomes even more so. Tax expert Bob Lord—who wrote for Mother Jones in 2024 on the coming of the world’s first trillionaire—had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote: No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered. Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.
You probably don’t have time to read every investigation, every breakdown, every file we’ve opened this week. We get that. So, here’s our weekly recap of our deep dives. We are Front Page Detectives, and this is where the story actually is. The killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman exposed fame, violence, race, policing, and a country ready to turn tragedy into spectacle. The O.J. Simpson case began with a blood-covered dog wandering through Brentwood and led police back to one of the most infamous crime scenes in American history. Outside Nicole Brown Simpson’s townhouse, investigators found the bodies of Nicole and 25-year-old waiter Ronald Goldman, who had come to return a forgotten pair of glasses while Nicole’s children slept upstairs. Suspicion quickly turned to O.J. Simpson, the Hall of Fame football star turned actor, broadcaster, and pitchman America thought it knew. Prosecutors argued the murders were the culmination of years of jealousy, control, domestic violence, and rage, pointing to blood evidence, a missing Bronco timeline, gloves, shoe prints, and Simpson’s behavior in the days after the killings. Then came the white Bronco chase, the Trial of the Century, Mark Fuhrman’s collapse on the stand, and Johnnie Cochran’s unforgettable line: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Simpson was found not guilty in criminal court, but later held liable for the deaths in a civil trial — leaving America with two legal outcomes and no real closure. Three decades later, the case still haunts the culture because it was never just about one murder trial. It became a mirror for celebrity worship, domestic abuse, race, policing, media spectacle, and a justice system millions either distrusted or believed had failed. Two people died on a quiet walkway in Brentwood — and the country has been arguing over what happened ever since. Full file The killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh exposed one family’s power, fraud, and secrets — and the case is still not over. The Murdaugh dynasty collapsed near the dog kennels of Moselle on June 7, 2021, when Maggie Murdaugh and her 22-year-old son Paul were found shot to death on the family’s sprawling South Carolina estate. The man who called 911 was Alex Murdaugh, a powerful attorney from a legal family that had dominated the Lowcountry for nearly a century. Prosecutors said Murdaugh’s life was imploding under years of theft, opioid addiction, and financial fraud, and argued he killed his wife and son to create sympathy and delay exposure. The case soon widened far beyond the murders, pulling in millions in stolen client money, a bizarre roadside shooting scheme, and renewed scrutiny of other deaths tied to the family’s orbit. At trial, jurors heard the now-famous kennel video recorded by Paul minutes before the killings, which appeared to place Alex at the scene despite his earlier denials. Murdaugh admitted lying about his movements but insisted he never killed Maggie or Paul. In 2023, he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms — while continuing to deny the murders. Then came the shock twist. In May 2026, South Carolina’s Supreme Court overturned the murder convictions, citing improper jury influence by a court clerk, and ordered a new trial. Murdaugh remains imprisoned on financial convictions, but the murder case that seemed closed is heading back to court — and one of America’s darkest true crime sagas has a second act. Full file A remote Arkansas runway, a cartel super-smuggler, and Cold War secrets created one of America’s most enduring conspiracy cases. Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport looked like an ordinary rural runway tucked into the Arkansas mountains, but investigators later believed it had become a key base for one of the biggest cocaine-smuggling operations in U.S. history. At the center was Barry Seal, a former commercial pilot turned Medellín Cartel transporter who used the remote airport while moving enormous quantities of drugs into the country. Seal eventually flipped, becoming a DEA informant and helping gather explosive evidence against the cartel, including the famous 1984 Nicaragua sting that captured drug-loading images later used by the Reagan administration. But his cooperation made him a marked man. In 1986, he was gunned down in Baton Rouge by cartel assassins before he could answer many of the questions swirling around Mena. The scandal only deepened after his death. Arkansas investigator Russell Welch and others claimed their probes into the airport repeatedly hit walls, while allegations grew that Mena may have intersected with gunrunning, covert operations, Iran-Contra politics, and anti-communist activity in Central America. Official inquiries confirmed parts of Seal’s smuggling operation but never proved the grandest conspiracy claims. Four decades later, Mena remains a shadowy American obsession because the confirmed facts are wild enough on their own.
For nearly eleven years the family of a young German woman known only as Michele has lived in uncertainty. In September 2015 the 22‑year‑old aspiring model left her mother’s apartment with a suitcase and passport and vanished without a trace, sparking a painful, unanswered search.
Recent releases from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation have re‑opened the case. Documents examined by journalists show that Michele was linked to one of Epstein’s alleged recruiters, suggesting she may have been drawn into a network that promised international modeling opportunities. The connection is indirect, and there is no proof that she ever met Epstein or traveled on his behalf.
The new material has revived public interest and given the family a mix of hope and fresh anguish. Investigators are re‑examining the evidence, but the trail remains thin, and no definitive answers have emerged about what happened to Michele or whether she became a victim of trafficking.
The story underscores how promises of glamour can mask darker realities, and how a disappearance can linger in limbo for a decade. As journalists and authorities continue to probe, Michele’s family remains caught between the desire for closure and the stark reality that the truth may remain elusive.
That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for the Manosphere. One day you’re heiling at a post-inauguration celebration, cutting aid to starving children, supporting racist far right politics, amplifying hateful and violent messages, and allowing deep fake nudes to spread on your social network, and the next day you’re the world’s first trillionaire, proving, yet again, that it’s never been a better time to be bad. This is like the Make-A-Wish era for evil Bond villains. Of course, it helps if they’re talented, business savvy, market makers, politically astute, future-focused, and in the AI industry. And thus, this message just in from Ground Control to Major Elon: Rocket Man just became Deep Pocket Man. “SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, blasted through records as it began trading on the stock market on Friday, making the world’s richest man its first trillionaire and signaling a new era of ultra-affluence and widening wealth inequality. The stock opened at $150 per share, more than the price finalized in its initial public offering Thursday at $135 a share. It rose to $165 in the first 30 minutes of trading.” NYT (Gift Article): Live Updates: Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading. “Musk was worth around $350 billion in November 2024 shortly after he helped elect Donald J. Trump as president. His net worth has more than tripled in less than two years.” At this point, the only thing that had a faster exit velocity than a SpaceX rocket is the puke that just hit my laptop screen. + “The streets of black-and-white houses are blocked off by electronic access gates that encircle the city like a medieval moat. I watched a man who made the mistake of wandering inside the minimart get escorted out by armed guards in tactical gear. In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.” Amy Gamerman in the NYT (Gift Article) on Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border. Elon Musk Is Colonizing Earth. “Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out.” (In retrospect, ET got out just in time...) + Reuters: SpaceX demolishes IPO records. Of course, we’ve got some big competition on the IPO horizon. And some investors have stakes in all of them. WSJ (Gift Article): See the VCs and Family Offices at the Core of the Mega IPO Wave. + With those kinds of returns, these folks might even be able to afford the new VIP membership package at Erewhon. The memorandum of understanding that provides the framework for a peace deal appears to be really happening this time. “Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif has said that a final, agreed text of a peace deal between the United States and Iran had been reached. Islamabad is working with both sides to finalise next steps.” Here’s the latest from The Guardian and CNN. “The specific incidents themselves are local, and related to a national issue, or even something to do with the city or the region that they take place in. What’s changed over the last five to ten years is that the international dimension has become much more significant. Particularly when there is video footage, an event in one country will be taken up by international far-right influencers and networks. And then that feeds far-right narratives and ideas in other countries, but also feeds back into the country where the narrative originated.” The New Yorker: How the Dangerous Rise in Anti-Immigration Politics Went Mainstream. (Today’s top story provides one clue.) What to Eggers: Leave it to Dave Eggers to write an excellent and perfectly timed novel. His latest, Contrapposto, about art and artists, hits with particular force at this moment when we’re willingly handing our creativity over to machines. You can’t beat a human when it comes to art and storytelling, and that’s particularly true of this writer and this novel, which Andrew Sean Greer calls “a book of profundity, humanity, and ravishing beauty.” While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, check out this interview with Dave on NPR’s Wild Card. Through 826 Valencia and other orgs, Dave has been working with young writers for decades. He has a message: “This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them. You are one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There’s only one of you. So to give your voice to a machine to say speak for me, I’m going to be silent, is such a crime against yourself.
I’m in Feed Me (along with a number of other newsletter writers) this morning explaining why I missed a letter this week. it’s behind a paywall, so I’ll give you the TL;DR: I’ll be scaling letters back to once a week for the summer and inviting my favorite LA people to guest edit the newsletter when I’m really on vacation. This isn’t just about taking a break; it’s about slowing down to really focus on the quality of each letter. I’m sure you find the typos charming, but it would be nice if they weren’t so prolific. Anyway, starting tomorrow, you’ll get newsletters on Wednesdays. We’ll (hopefully) be back to our regularly scheduled programming in September. Send me tips, pitches, etc to [email redacted] or DM on the platform this newsletter is hosted on. In this newsletter: I talked to Matt Barreto, the faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project and a professor of political science about voter fraud. Scroll to the bottom for events if that’s not your cup of tea. Next week, I’m talking to John Early about his critically acclaimed directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret. Let me know if there’s anything I should ask him! The Macarthur Park project is running out of money. It’s a direct aid operation run by Eva Woods, who is one of the best people in Los Angeles, I say without hyperbole. She cooks a lot of the meals and runs logistics from her apartment. A couple of months ago, a stranger attacked her with a pipe, destroying her jaw and crushing her teeth, and Eva continued to lead the project from her hospital bed. Every week, because of her, 600 people get fed. When I say she is literally saving lives every week, I mean it. You could help her out by sending a little money to Catherine-Schetina on Venmo. Macarthur Park is a lightning rod in the conversations about homelessness in Los Angeles. During his campaign, Spencer Pratt frequently referred to the people who live there as “zombies”. Fox News is down there every day taking photos of homeless people in distress, as evidence of LA’s decline. It’s not without consequence: the city is now moving forward with a plan to fence off the park, making it inaccessible to the hundreds of people who have nowhere else to go. (They did this to Echo Park Lake in 2021, and didn’t take the fence down for two years.) Related: “Homicides are on decline in LA but shooting deaths of unhoused people remain disproportionately high.” An analysis of LAPD data by the LAist found that 278 of the city’s unhoused residents have been shot and killed since 2015. The Church of Scientology bought the Mama Shelter hotel in Hollywood for $16 million. The Church of Scientology, as we all know, is a real estate portfolio pretending to be a religious organization. What are they going to do with the hotel??? York Blvd. is getting totally transformed by the tsunami of private equity investment. A friend who moved out of LA during the pandemic was visiting this week and noted the number of DTC and corporate brands that now occupy all of Sunset Blvd in Silverlake. The same seems to be happening in NELA. Why is proud Valley girl Alana Haim making Knicks t-shirts? called Alana up to get to the bottom of it. (It’s been fun watching Knicks fever hit Los Angeles. I drove past 33 Taps during a game and the crowd spilled out onto the driveway.) I was pretty bummed about Faizah Malik’s loss in CD11. , who worked on her campaign, wrote an interesting autopsy of the campaign and assessment of the landscape in CD11, showing how Traci was able to retain her seat: The district saw a shocking 16,494 evictions between 2023 and 2025 as COVID-19 eviction protections expired. This level of displacement demonstrates that many lower-income communities were pushed out of the district during Traci’s first term, further solidifying her homeowner base and displacing working-class people who might otherwise have turned out to support Faizah. Last year, as an April Fool’s joke, LA Taco became the IE Taco (that’s the Inland Empire to those of you who are new here). But that April Fool’s joke is now becoming a reality, thanks to some support from the CIELO Fund at the Inland Empire Community Foundation. Gourmet Magazine is getting sued by Conde Nast. They need your help. Go gift a subscription! Michelin-recognized Khan Saab Desi Craft Kitchen, which is based in Fullerton, is opening another location in Santa Monica this week. They’ll be taking over the old Tumbi spot. I wasn’t really interested in Bad Roman until I saw this review of their desert from . LA restaurants tend to neglect their dessert menus, for whatever reason.
Donald Trump turns 80 this weekend. He’s preparing to celebrate with a bash that’s gobbled up resources from seven different agencies and adorned the White House lawn with a towering octagon arena and a “cage” where, as the New York Times put it, grown men will soon “beat one another to a pulp.” If that doesn’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ to a U.S. president in the throes of trying to get a deal to end an unpopular (and illegal) war with Iran, contending with a near-record low approval rating, and raging over a soon-to-be-released book that’s already produced embarrassing details about his time back in office – most recently about the ‘White House freakout over the Epstein Files – we’re not sure what would. Happy Birthday, King Trump. Happy 250th, America. But even his birthday bash prep hasn’t kept Trump and his cronies from continuing their efforts to destroy U.S. democracy, undermine the Constitution, and hurt societies worldwide. From new corruption revelations to fresh lashings of the media to a report that Trump and his allies may seek to expunge his first-term impeachments, here’s ‘This Week in Democracy – Week 73’: Mother Jones reported that the only refugees admitted to the U.S. under the Trump administration this year, through the end of May, are white South Africans. Since Oct. 1, 2025, all but three of the 6,668 refugees accepted by the U.S. are white South Africans. The three, who were admitted in November, were from Afghanistan. Trump stormed off the set of an interview with NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ after host Kristen Welker asked the president to provide evidence for his baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California primary elections were “rigged.” Trump accused Welker of being either “crooked” or “stupid,” and said she has “no credibility.” Trump also called ‘Meet the Press,’ ABC, CBS, and CNN “one-sided” and “crooked,” and told Welker she “oughta straighten out your press” as he took off his microphone and walked away. On Truth Social, Trump urged Senate Majority Leader John Thune to “immediately fire” and replace Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough in order to pass the party’s voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. MacDonough, who Trump called a “nasty holdover from Mitch McConnell” and a “Radical Left Lunatic,” had previously ruled that the legislation didn’t comply with the Senate’s Byrd Rule and wouldn’t be eligible to be included in a budget reconciliation package, which can be passed with a simple-majority vote. ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire, whose family’s energy empire was targeted by Trump, “secured major policy wins from the Trump administration” after pouring at least $100 million into a Texas start-up that Donald Trump Jr. had secretly acquired a stake in. CNN reported that newly proposed rules could result in the U.S. Postal Service refusing to deliver mail-in ballots in states that refuse to turn over lists of all voters who are set to receive mail ballots to the agency. The proposed rules seek to comply with Trump’s March executive order targeting mail-in voting, which is currently being challenged in the courts. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump and his allies have talked about urging Republican lawmakers to pass a resolution “expunging” the president’s two impeachments from his first term. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the move, which would only be symbolic and carry no legal weight, is a “priority,” though the Journal noted that a measure to void the impeachments likely wouldn’t be considered until after the midterm elections. ABC News reported that just 3% of people detained by ICE during the first 14 months of Trump’s second term had been convicted of a violent felony, despite the president promising he would target the “worst of the worst.” During the same period, ICE apprehended the parents of about 14,450 children who were born in the U.S., roughly half of whom were later deported. The reporting comes days after MS Now and the Marshall Project revealed that at least 500 babies and toddlers have been in ICE custody at some point during the second Trump administration, 10 times more than during the previous year under the Biden administration. Did you miss previous weeks of ‘This Week in Democracy’? Catch up here. And check out more of Zeteo’s reporting from this week below:
Donald Trump has been framing the ongoing conflict with Iran as a timeless struggle, suggesting it stretches back thousands of years or at least several decades, depending on the lens. He dismissed recent Iranian missile strikes on Tel Aviv as minor, arguing that any Israeli retaliation would simply prolong a war that has supposedly endured for millennia. By invoking such a sweeping historical narrative, Trump is attempting to recast the current hostilities as part of a larger civilizational clash rather than a discrete geopolitical episode.
The war, initially projected to last only a few weeks, has already entered its fourth month, contradicting early expectations and highlighting the difficulty of containing regional escalations. Trump’s comments, made while urging Israel to hold back from responding, reveal a strategy that seeks to normalize perpetual conflict. He positions the United States as a guardian of a broader cultural battle, implying that any action against Iran would merely extend a conflict that has been ongoing for generations.
This rhetorical approach serves a political purpose for Trump’s base, particularly among MAGA supporters who are receptive to narratives of an existential struggle against perceived enemies. By portraying the conflict as a civilizational war, he taps into a sense of historical destiny and justifies continued aggression. The framing also downplays the immediate humanitarian and diplomatic costs, shifting focus to a mythic timeline that resonates with a constituency that values a perpetual stance against adversaries.
Critics argue that such a perspective distorts reality, ignoring the specific triggers and diplomatic opportunities that could de‑escalate the situation. The emphasis on a “forever war” risks entrenching a cycle of retaliation, making it harder for moderate voices to advocate for ceasefires or negotiations. As the conflict drags on, the narrative of an endless, centuries‑long battle may become a self‑fulfilling prophecy, cementing a war that was never intended to last beyond a few weeks.
As tech billionaires build out massive, energy-hungry infrastructure to power artificial intelligence, a surprising bottom-up resistance is uniting communities across the country. Astra Taylor—documentary filmmaker, Debt Collective co-founder, and co-author of an upcoming book on fascism with Naomi Klein—joins the show to explain why the fight against hyperscale data centers is fundamentally about political economy and democratic control. We discuss how these multi-billion-dollar developments drain local water and power supplies while offering little more than a handful of low-wage jobs, why the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is missing a major winning issue by running away from anti-monopoly politics and student debt cancellation, and how localized, collective organizing remains our best defense against a rising oligarchy. Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America. View the Right Now vault on TNR’s website: https://newrepublic.com/video/right-now-with-perry-bacon Follow The New Republic on Substack to watch Right Now LIVE: https://newrepublic.substack.com/s/right-now-with-perry-bacon
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