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To be an informed New Yorker, or even an informed human being, you could do a lot worse than tuning into Brian Lehrer’s and Errol Louis’s respective daily broadcasts. Lehrer interviews political newsmakers and takes calls from New Yorkers with all manner of comment and complaint, as the host of “The Brian Lehrer Show,” which airs weekdays at 10A.M.on WNYC, and Louis takes the evening shift, as the host of “Inside City Hall,” a political show that airs at 7P.M.on the local cable channel NY1. Lehrer and Louis take the pulse of the city, playing the roles of municipal policy analyst, therapist, and philosopher—sometimes all three in the course of one episode. Both have engendered a loyalty in their audiences which verges on the religious. “I’ve said on air, Errol Louis is the single best reason to still have cable,” Lehrer said recently.

The pair first met decades ago, when a thirtysomething Louis appeared on Lehrer’s show (then called “On the Line”) to discuss his work running the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, a community bank in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which tried to support low-income residents in a neighborhood where capital was hard to come by. “My one serious detour from journalism after college,” Louis, who also writes a local politics column forNew Yorkmagazine, now calls it. Back then, Lehrer’s show was already a pillar of the city’s local media, listened to by yuppies and yippies and youse guys alike. “You would get in a cab, and maybe thirty, fifty per cent of the time, they would be listening to Brian,” Louis said, sitting beside Lehrer at a restaurant in Chelsea. Lehrer nodded serenely. “We love our cabdrivers,” he said.

Lehrer and Louis are a natural double act, Louis’s assertive bluntness contrasting nicely with Lehrer’s dead-air calm. In the early two-thousands, when Louis was a reporter at the New YorkSun, he started filling in for Lehrer during Lehrer’s summer vacations. “Wayne Barrett would always give him shit about that,” Louis said, referring to the legendary investigative reporter at theVillage Voice. “Because amazing stories would break while he was away, and he actually put himself in a place where you could not reach him. It was a real vacation.” Lehrer rolled his eyes. He has been broadcasting nearly every weekday since 1989. “When my kids were growing up, we would take two full weeks in August,” he said. “Only in the United States would this be considered an unusually long break.”

On Thursday, June 12th, Lehrer and Louis, along with Katie Honan, a reporter atThe City, will moderate a debate between seven of the leading candidates running in the 2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The second of two debates includes Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor and mayoral front-runner, who will appear side by side with Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-three-year-old democratic-socialist assemblyman who has solidified his hold on second place in the polls. Most of the other candidates who will appear onstage—the current city comptroller, Brad Lander; the former city comptroller Scott Stringer; Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council; and Zellnor Myrie, a progressive state senator representing a swath of central Brooklyn—boast long experience in local government, and have detailed policy plans on issues including housing, policing, and mass transit. One candidate, the businessman Whitney Tilson, who ran a hedge fund after helping found Teach for America, is seeking public office for the first time.

At the first televised debate, this past Wednesday, the non-Cuomo candidates spent much of the time criticizing the front-runner’s record and rhetoric (Mamdani suggested he was a stooge for his corporate backers), trying to bait him into a gaffe (Adrienne Adams was incredulous that Cuomo had no personal regrets in his political career), or back him into a corner (Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman, pressed him on whether he’d once acknowledged the validity of arguments for defunding the police). But with so many people onstage, it was hard to sustain any theme or point for more than a few seconds. Cuomo endured the attacks with the good cheer of a man sitting in the dentist’s chair. The challenge for Lehrer, Louis, and Honan is to draw the candidates out further, to lay down markers of policy and temperament to help New Yorkers fill out their ranked-choice ballots by June 24th.

A few days ago, I met Lehrer and Louis for lunch to discuss the state of local news in the largest city in the country, Eric Adams’s adversarial relationship with the local press, and what’s going on with Juan Soto. Thursday’s debate will take place at John Jay College, and will air on NY1, C-SPAN, and WNYC, and in Spanish on Spectrum Noticias. (TheSpanishandEnglishbroadcasts will also stream on YouTube). Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

There used to be this figure called the city columnist. Everybody knew who they were, and their opinion held public attention in a very particular way. Some people say the city columnist is extinct; some people say the job has morphed or evolved. I’m putting the question to you guys, because your work seems related to whatever that role used to be. What do you think happened?

LOUIS: They got a job in TV! I’m not kidding. At theDaily News, I had a column that ran twice a week, including Sunday, which was the biggest day for theDaily News. It was Jimmy Breslin’s old column. I inherited it. Breslin, Pete Hamill, Mike Daly—those guys were legendary. I thought of them as the Irish guys. You know, it’s a gig, you have to develop a personality, you have to develop a voice. You’re telling a big story, the story of a great city, in installments.

LEHRER: Personal stories of individuals.

LOUIS: Exactly. You have to go out and report these things, you’re not just going to sit there and bloviate. But you have to make it look as if you just got up one morning and said, “Oh, here’s what’s been bothering me.” There’s a lot that goes into it.

It’s also part of what changed with the business plan. The old, general-purpose daily, there were some people who only came for the sports, there were some who only came for the comics, or the horoscope, or whatever. But there were a lot of people who came for the columnists. That’s why the papers would pay a bunch of money to a Jimmy Breslin, because there were people who were going to follow him to whatever paper he went to.

LOUIS: I suppose that they have found other ways to make or lose money, depending on what it is these newspapers are up to.

New York City still has this robust group of reporters that cover City Hall and the Mayor every day, fromPolitico, thePost, theDaily News, the local television stations, etc. The current Mayor’s relationship with them is terrible. He’s started bypassing them, the City Hall reporters, in favor of talk podcasts, conservative outlets, and the remaining bits of the ethnic media that still exists in the city. Is this situation good for the Mayor?

LOUIS: The strategy took him from something like sixty-per-cent approval down to twenty-per-cent approval, to the point where he wasn’t viable as a candidate in the Democratic primary. So I think the strategy speaks for itself. I’ve told his people this is a really, really bad idea. Trying to bypass the people whose job it is to know and understand fully and deeply the different policies that you’re trying to enact? We can help you explain it. That’s literally what we want to do.

The podcasters can’t parse them?

LOUIS: No. They’re picking people who have a surface-level understanding of the policy!

LEHRER: I think it’s happening more and more over time, in most of politics, that politicians are choosing their favorite media outlets. I wonder, Errol, if you would agree that if we go back as far as either of us can go back, that each successive mayor has limited their press access more than the last one. I say that even though Bill de Blasio came on both of our shows every week. That was part of his media strategy.

LOUIS: Yep. He decided to meet with each of us once a week as a way of telling almost everybody else, “I may not meet with you at all.”

Bill de Blasio, like Eric Adams, was convinced that the press was out to get him. Bloomberg also fought with and evaded reporters. Is mutual loathing the natural state of affairs between reporters and a mayor?

LOUIS: I think to do our job properly, and by that I mean everybody in the building at City Hall, including Room Nine, there has to be some level of connection and coöperation. There has to be. There is no point in doing a press conference about, you know, what time the beaches will open on Memorial Day if nobody’s there to tell a few million people what time the beaches are going to open on Memorial Day.

This Mayor, he created a podcast that nobody listens to, a newsletter that nobody reads, and he dances around to these entertainment shows, talking to small groups of people. It’s not a reliable way to reach millions of New Yorkers who are busy and distracted. They seem to think it’s a binary thing: either reporters want to help us, or they don’t. Or they say something demonstrably untrue, like the media is just interested in getting clicks. I don’t even know what that means.

LEHRER: I might give them a little more credit than that, in the sense that there is an incentive to come out with hot takes. I kind of hear the Mayor when he says—this isn’t a quote, but this is the gist— “I could tell you that crime is ninety-nine-per-cent down, and your questions would be about, What about the other one per cent?” I get it. But that’s kind of the nature of the business. You don’t do a story about all the airplanes that landed safely.

A couple of days after this runs, you’ll be moderating a debate with the candidates. You’re going to have seven people on that stage. Can you keep all these candidates straight?

LOUIS: We’ve been talking to them all along, and NY1 has reporters assigned to each of them. I have a podcast, and I’ve done a series of individual discussions with candidates.

LEHRER: The trick is to find a way for the listeners and the viewers to feel sufficiently informed. Like Errol, we’ve invited every major candidate in the primary—which is nine—onto the show to answer my questions and listener questions. Eight of them accepted and came on. The exception is Andrew Cuomo, because that’s his campaign strategy. We’ve also started to do segments that are issue by issue. Today we did a segment on the issue of child care: Brad Lander would aim for child care for anybody from two years old, Mamdani wants to start at six weeks, Scott Stringer is emphasizing after-school. But my fear is that there’s just so much detail that people are going to get overwhelmed and not retain that much of it.

This is the second mayoral cycle in a row where New York has had a huge Democratic primary field. Why are we getting so many candidates in these races?

LOUIS: The various election reforms that have been instituted over the last decade and a half have all intentionally made it easier for people to get in, easier for people to stay in, and frankly reduced any incentive for people to drop out. In a ranked-choice voting situation, anyone can convince themselves: “I’ll make a dramatic comeback in the eighth round.” It’s a bit of a problem.

These reforms were intended to make our elections better. Have they?

LOUIS: I have disagreements with some dear friends who are prominent in the reform movement because I have pointed out that some of this is just unrealistic. For example, we decided to come here and have lunch this afternoon, right? That was a difficult enough decision, to get us all here at the same time. But imagine, if he had said, rank your choice of whether we have Indian, Chinese, pizza, vegan, or steakhouse. Put them in ranked order. Who’s got time for that? And what would be the point? I see an upside in picking, say, the top two finishers in the primary, giving us ten days to go through the process again, and then having a follow-up debate, and then another vote—like it used to be done.

LEHRER: I think you can debate ranked choice versus an old-fashioned runoff one way or the other. The real nightmare scenario we’re looking at is in the fall election, where there is not ranked-choice voting, and it’s winner take all, no matter what small percentage of the vote they get. We may be looking at a scenario where Cuomo is the Democratic Party nominee, Zohran Mamdani or Brad Lander is the Working Families Party nominee, Eric Adams is running as an Independent, and Curtis Sliwa is running as a Republican. Which way is that going to fall? I could see at least two ways that don’t elect the Democratic nominee, even in our overwhelming Democratic city. One where Cuomo, Adams, and the Working Families Party candidate could split the roughly Democratic vote, and Curtis Sliwa gets elected mayor, or Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa split the center-to-right vote, and so Mamdani or Lander get a win with, what, twenty-eight per cent of the vote? I don’t think that’s the way to run a railroad.

Cuomo hasn’t gone on either of your programs, but he has done Bari Weiss’s podcast, Stephen A. Smith’s podcast, and the former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine’s radio show. Why do you think he’s not engaging as much with local journalists?

LEHRER: I think it’s the classic Rose Garden strategy. He’s leading. Why take the risk of putting yourself in a public situation where you might stumble in a way that a lot of people will notice and care about? It’s not unique to Cuomo, but I think it’s the strategy that he’s been pursuing ever since the polls started to come out as much in his favor as they have.

LOUIS: You can never explain to these people, like, I didn’t spend forty years as a journalist so that I could sandbag him. I ask questions, we’ll talk, we’ll figure it out. I’m committed to a better New York—just like you, right? But you can’t even have those conversations, because when you’re in campaign season, sometimes there are strategists who see it as, All I have to do is win. I don’t care what damage I’m doing to the truth.

LOUIS: But they’re wrong about that. They’re setting themselves up for future problems. When’s the last time Andrew Cuomo was in a full-throated public debate with anyone? We’ve seen these other candidates, they are turning into pretty fast company. They’re getting to know a lot of nuances and a lot of zingers. If Andrew Cuomo at this debate thinks he’s going to just read off his campaign website and say, “Hey, I plan to hire five thousand cops”—the questions on public safety are much, much more nuanced than that. I hope he’ll be ready.

In the mayoral campaign four years ago, like this year, there are parallel debates going on between the issues of affordability and public safety. They’re both top-of-mind issues for many voters, and they have some kind of relationship to each other. But I think anyone running for mayor right now would tell you that it’s easier to get traction talking about public safety than it is talking about affordability, even if crime and public disorder are dipping, and housing costs keep going way up. What’s happening here? Why’s it easier to talk about one than the other?

LEHRER: I think for one reason, even though crime is down, crime is always a risk, and it’s just about the most concrete risk that many people experience, or at least feel. Look at the history of our victorious mayoral candidates over the decades. We may be blue New York, but we elected Rudy Giuliani twice, Michael Bloomberg three times, and each time against well-known Democrats. And we elected Eric Adams in 2021, when he was running on crime, crime, crime.

Affordability—housing—is more nuanced. There are New Yorkers who feel that there are two burning imperatives when it comes to affordable housing. One is: New York City desperately needs more affordable housing. No. 2 is: Just don’t build any near me. So it becomes a more complicated conversation, and, therefore, harder to run on.

LOUIS: There’s two sides to affordability. You can either try to lower the actual cost, or you can try to help people make more money, but both of those are big and structural and relatively difficult to get to with the powers of the mayor, so you end up with measures like, give people a free bus pass, or something like that. Which, yeah, that’s fine.

Mamdani is getting traction by pledging to freeze rent on rent-stabilized apartments. That’s a big part of how he’s become one of the only non-Cuomo candidates to get something going here. Are there ways to have a better housing debate in the city?

LOUIS: First of all, people have to show up. I moderated a mayoral forum that was put on by the New York Housing Conference in the N.Y.U. Furman Center. They had wonderful charts. They spent dozens of hours putting together every fact you could ever imagine related to this. Most of the candidates didn’t show up. That’s a problem.

You could literally try and establish the Garden of Eden in the middle of New York, and there would be people who would say, There might be snakes in the garden, you know, or there’s poisonous apples. You have to have a public discussion, and somebody has to be an adult in the conversation and say, We can’t have both, we cannot haveNIMBYand low prices. You’re going to have some really hard conversations about trade-offs, which is the whole substance of politics, which is the whole reason you have a mayor to help conduct a discussion. Which is why I think it’s especially inappropriate and galling that there are people who are saying, I’m not going to have that conversation. That sets us up for another few years of not solving the problem.

Four years ago, theTimes’editorial board endorsed former Department of Sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, helping her to overcome the name-recognition problem that a lot of the candidates are dealing with this cycle. If you’re not a celebrity, it’s hard to cut through. TheTimeshas said it will no longer endorse mayoral candidates. Does the newspaper have a duty or responsibility to endorse?

LOUIS: It was a huge mistake. They decided to throw away their influence. There were generations of politicians who would take certain positions knowing, specifically, that someday they might want or need the New YorkTimes’endorsement. They were fulfilling a function, by standing for something. It’s obviously the publisher’s decision, but it’s not a very wise one, and not a responsible one. It’s going to leave the city with one less watchdog.

LEHRER: I agree. There are few enough endorsements of any kind that actually move votes. There’s a body of people in the city who trust a New YorkTimesendorsement, or at least feel significantly influenced by it. I’m sad to see it go.

Cuomo has seemed only too happy to make this election a race between him and Zohran Mamdani, who’s in second place, painting the contest as one between an experienced figure of moderation and a young, potentially dangerous radical. There’s no question democratic socialists have made their mark on New York City politics since [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] broke through in 2018. I’m wondering how different or not you think the left faction in the city is today from the radical factions that existed in the past.

LOUIS: The D.S.A. and Working Families Party candidates of today are nowhere near as radical as the leftists who got elected to office in N.Y.C. in past decades. In the nineteen-forties, Harlem twice elected a city councilman, Ben Davis, who was an avowed, card-carrying member of the Communist Party and ended up serving five years in prison under an anti-Communist law.

As late as the nineteen-eighties, Democrats like David Dinkins and Brooklyn congressman Major Owens routinely ran and won with support from the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a predecessor organization of the D.S.A. So, technically, you could say Dinkins was the last D.S.A. mayor. The question I have for today’s D.S.A. is: “Where, exactly, is the socialism?” They function more like a liberal-leaning political club than the vanguard of revolution.

LEHRER: I’m not an expert on this history, but one thing that comes to mind is the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, maybe similar in philosophy to today’s D.S.A., though not as formalized and developed. In the context of mayoral politics, though, the movement was short-lived, maybe their populist message resonated with many New Yorkers who got caught in the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession, generally, after Wall Street melted the mortgage market. And maybe that sentiment contributed to the election of Bill de Blasio, who did run explicitly on being the most progressive candidate in the crowded 2013 primary. I think that was a moment when concerns about inequality topped concerns about public safety in a mayoral-election year.

I’ve got a historical question. Peter Stuyvesant famously told the residents of New Amsterdam that he would rule over them like “a father.” Michael Bloomberg was accused of “nanny state” stuff. Andrew Cuomo, at his height during the pandemic, presented himself as a father figure, making jokes about his daughter’s boyfriend, etc. Why does New York City so often seem to seek out daddy?

LOUIS: I don’t know if I see it that way. I mean, human primates look for alpha leaders, the same way a pack of dogs finds an alpha to run behind. I think we’re just hardwired to look for leaders, and we just happen to call it democracy. So people do things that try and make themselves look like a leader. If it was silverback gorillas, they’d puff up their chest or whatever the hell those apes do. What we do, some of what good politicians do, is not always what you would think. F.D.R. was seen as the leader of the whole Western world, and couldn’t even walk. There’s ways to pull it off.

LEHRER: I agree. I don’t think it’s New Yorkers. I think it’s human nature. We are electing somebody who’s going to be the top manager, and so we want somebody who we think can preside effectively over the city and all the complicated moving parts. I think a lot of people are experiencing an internal tension about Cuomo. They know about the way that it’s widely perceived that he covered up the nursing-home deaths duringCOVID. But they also know how they felt comforted and affirmed and taken care of at a time when Trump was trying to deny the seriousness of the pandemic at all. I think that that image of him on television at the beginning—being the father figure is one of the biggest factors—is one of the biggest things in people’s minds when they think about him.

I would add: if people really do want a father figure, that might indicate a lot of people remain stuck in traditionally gendered ideas about leadership.

Before you go, what’s wrong with Juan Soto?

LEHRER: There are so many competing theories. I’ll go with the leading theory: he’s feeling the pressure of a big contract. More than the theory that his family pressured him into signing with a team that he didn’t really want to be with. But I’ll throw another theory out there: maybe he’s got a little injury and they’re hiding it, as so often happens with baseball players. But that’s baseball, Suzyn—as they say. ♦

An earlier version of this article misspelled Errol Louis’s last name, misstated when Lehrer’s show launched, and referred to Spectrum Noticias by its former name.

The sugarcane aphid, orMelanaphis sacchari, is an insect barely one-sixteenth of an inch long, the thickness of a penny. Its coloring ranges from beige to yellow, and it has tiny black antennas and tiny black feet. Its life span is only a few weeks, but in that time one female can produce nearly a hundred offspring, peppering sorghum plants with larvae that look like sawdust and suck nutrients from the leaves, stunting the plants. The aphid was carried from Africa by the harmattan wind across the ocean to the Caribbean; it was detected in Florida’s sugarcane fields in the late nineteen-seventies and, in 2013, on sorghum crops farther north. By the fall harvest of 2015, colonies had been detected in seventeen American states, as far north as Illinois, infecting a significant portion of the country’s sorghum crop.

The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.

Scientists at Kansas State University, working with colleagues at Cornell and in Haiti, acquired a resistant variety of sorghum from partners in Ethiopia, and tested it against strains susceptible to the bug. Within a few years, they identified the gene that served as a protective shield against the sugarcane aphid, and shared the news in the public domain. Seed companies combined the science with other control methods, making the American sorghum crop—valued at $1.45 billion last year, $739 million of which was produced in Kansas—largely aphid-free. “And that’s why we worry less about the sugarcane aphid now,” Timothy J. Dalton, an agricultural economist who directs the Climate Resilient Cereals Innovation Lab at Kansas State, told me.

Dalton’s laboratory works in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Senegal to understand the effects of intensifying heat and drought on rice, sorghum, millet, and wheat. Until January, it was one of seventeen agricultural-innovation labs on the campuses of thirteen U.S. universities—twelve of them are land-grant schools—that were supported with tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Four months afterElon Muskand Marco Rubio dismantledU.S.A.I.D., firing thousands of workers and cancelling eighty-three per cent of the agency’s contracts, according to Rubio’s count, Dalton’s lab is the only one left. The work, on chickpeas and poultry, vaccines and irrigation, was an important element of U.S.A.I.D.’s decades-long effort, launched by John F. Kennedy, to build influence and markets through good deeds. The laboratory projects, which started in 1978, also developed expertise and patented improvements in a competitive global agricultural economy. “By killing these programs,” Dalton said, “you’re putting America at a competitive disadvantage. You’re setting farmers up to not have the tools they need to survive in a changing world.”

The casualties include a lab at the University of Georgia that focussed on peanut-seed production and crop management, a potato-disease project at Penn State, a Washington State lab that worked on wheat, and the University of Nebraska’s research into efficient irrigation for small landholders in Africa, Asia, and Central America. The cuts also led to the elimination of an initiative at Purdue that studied how to protect food from illness-producing pathogens, at a time when the United States imports ninety-four per cent of its seafood, fifty-five per cent of its fresh fruit, and thirty-two per cent of its vegetables, according to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration report.

Health experts believe thedestructionof U.S.A.I.D. will havecatastrophic effectson millions of people overseas, owing to the termination of malaria and tuberculosis projects, maternal-health support, clean-water initiatives, and funding for food shipments, which caused the closing of a thousand community kitchens in Sudan alone. At home, the losses are more subtle, but still significant, including the cuts to the innovation labs and the Trump Administration’sattemptto eliminate Food for Peace, a government program that bought about two billion dollars’ worth of food from American farmers annually and shipped it to poor countries, a postwar projection of soft power that generated feel-good vibes.

“I hope the noble cause—spread the love, feed the needy—doesn’t go down the drain with the rest of it,” Gary White, a sorghum farmer in western Kansas, told me. A number of Kansas farmers I spoke with reminded me that Food for Peace began with a bill signed in 1954 by Dwight Eisenhower, a Kansan, and grew into an important foreign policy tool in the sixties amid the United States’ competition with the Soviet Union. “Not only are we supporting U.S. farmers, but the folks who get it are in dire need and it comes with U.S. flags stamped on the side,” Andy Hineman, who farms sorghum, corn, and wheat, in Dighton, told me. “It’s an act of diplomacy that supports our policy and supports our farmers. It’s kind of disheartening that we’re not able to do that anymore.” Or, as Isobel Coleman, who until recently was U.S.A.I.D.’s deputy administrator, put it, “I just feel real sadness that the richest country in history doesn’t feel the importance of being generous with the world’s most vulnerable people.”

A State Department official said, without offering specifics, that the Administration will “prioritize resources made and grown by our American farmers. They are the best at what they do and we look forward to partnering with them in this new phase of America First foreign funding.” Supporters ofFood for Peacein Congress are trying to salvage the program by restoring some funding and moving it under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Dalton developed a passion for hardscrabble rural agriculture in his first job, teaching biology and chemistry in a secondary school in Kenya. After earning a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Purdue, he studied rice farming in Côte d’Ivoire, a position that led him to travel to the sands of Mauritania and the varied climate zones of Nigeria. Later, he became an expert on dairy and berry farming, with an interest in irrigation. He has been at Kansas State since 2007, most recently working in hot and dry areas in Africa and Latin America.

Dalton is insistent that Americans will become more vulnerable without research partnerships abroad. “Insects travel around the world—diseases travel around the world,” he told me. “The work that we are doing is trying to get out ahead of these diseases and insects before they get to the United States.” He also worries about intangible costs as labs pull back or shut down. “We’re beginning to lose our advanced edge in leadership. The Chinese are investing far more money,” Dalton said. “It is about sacrificing our strategic position in global agricultural research in the same way that thecrisis with the N.I.H.will critically affect our ability to provide leadership in biomedical and biotechnology research.”

By Dalton’s count, U.S.A.I.D. channelled $1.24 billion to American universities between 1978 and 2018 for international agricultural research. He calculated that the funds yielded more than eight dollars in benefits abroad for each dollar spent, with nearly eighty per cent going to people who earned less than five dollars and fifty cents a day. He estimated that the elimination of the threat to U.S. crops from two types of aphids saved American farmers more than a billion dollars in 2025. Dalton’s lab was granted a reprieve following an appeal by the Republican senator Jerry Moran, of Kansas, to the State Department, which now runs the remnants of U.S.A.I.D., but a lab run by a colleague, the agronomist Vara Prasad, lost a fifty-million-dollar grant devoted to climate resilience.

In April, Prasad laid off most of his small staff in Kansas; more than two hundred and fifty students and scholars also lost scholarships or research funding. The largest groups were in Cambodia and Haiti, where they researched poultry and swine, peanuts and sorghum. One project studied whether border plantings of marigold or basil could deter pests from reaching fields of main food crops. “I suppose it was disbelief,” Prasad said, when I asked about his initial reaction. “This was coming from the Global Food Security Act, which has bipartisan support. It’s rooted in America First. All the extremism happening around the world? The major cause is food insecurity.” Furthermore, he said, the lessons of his lab’s work are, like Dalton’s, relevant to farmers in Kansas, where the majority of American sorghum—and a significant portion of the U.S. wheat crop—is grown.

“There is absolutely no good that can come out of the shortsighted decisions to terminate the U.S.A.I.D. program,” Vance Ehmke, a farmer who grows wheat, rye, triticale, and grain sorghum on fourteen thousand acres in western Kansas, told me. “Anything new in terms of research or technology—we quickly identify those things and put them to work on the farm.” Ehmke mentioned new developments in disease resistance and high-yield wheat varieties. “You’ve got to go on to the next thing, but, if that next thing is no longer there, you’re just progressively stuck in the past,” he said.

Bob Zeigler, a plant pathologist and the former director general of the International Rice Research Institute, spoke about what he called the “spillover benefits” of research partnerships among scientists from far-flung regions of the world. He mentioned the international collaboration that led to development of the semidwarf rice gene, which was instrumental to the Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties. The U.S.A.I.D. funding, by developing partnerships, “prepares for the ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, when you make that scientific breakthrough, thanks to smart minds across the globe working together. “It’s not very expensive and you buy tremendous good will. It’s heartbreaking when we see the loss of our reputation as honest brokers and reliable partners.”

For the past ten years, David Tschirley, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Michigan State, has run research projects in Africa and Asia, working at any given time with twenty or so faculty members and graduate students at home and countless scientists and technicians abroad. U.S.A.I.D. routed around a hundred and ninety million dollars to the university’s Food Security Group between 1983 and 2023, he said. Tschirley is also the chair of the committee that oversaw the American innovation labs funded by U.S.A.I.D., giving him a view of the researchers’ work in understanding and responding to a warming planet. Climate change, he pointed out, enables the survival and spread of foodborne pathogens, making Purdue’s work on food safety particularly valuable. Similarly, the market-resilience work performed by a lab at the University of California, Davis, offers solutions to farmers and agricultural communities that are vulnerable to intensifying weather disasters.

Beyond the immediate benefits of the labs’ work, Tschirley offered an argument that he described as “esoteric, but actually quite important,” about a long-term boost to the U.S. economy. As impoverished farmers abroad produce more food and earn more money, much of that income is spent on food for their families. “One of the big things that we see in Africa and Asia is, as the demand for food rises, the demand for grain and processed food rises even faster—and that creates huge opportunities for American companies. Those are the growth markets for us,” he told me. He added, with an eye to the America First proclamations of the Trump Administration, “The work we do is very much in the national interest. It directly helps America.” ♦

On Friday and Saturday, federal officers descended on streets and workplaces across Los Angeles County to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. There was a large raid at Ambiance Apparel, in the fashion district, and a showdown, thick with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, between protesters and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Paramount, in southeast L.A. Some immigrants who appeared for check-in appointments at the federal courthouse in Little Tokyo were taken to the basement, then removed, by van, to unknown locations. Homeland Security had recently confirmed that a nine-year-old elementary-school student in Torrance, who’d been detained after a hearing in late May and relocated to a prison in rural Texas, would now be deported. These were not the first immigration-enforcement actions taken by President Trump, who has struggled to fulfill his campaign promise to conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” But these tactics were, as Oscar Zarate, of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told me, “lawless, just not normal.” Lawyers were being denied access to detainees; workers were being picked up on the basis of their racial appearance, he said. “There are rules of engagement that are not being followed. It’s incredibly dangerous, not just for immigrants but for citizens.”

Los Angeles is, of course, an immigrant town. A third of the county’s residents were born outside the U.S., and more than half speak a language other than English at home. L.A. is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state: local authorities are not permitted to coöperate with federal immigration enforcers. And so, as word of the recent detentions—described to me by immigrant advocates as “kidnappings” or “abductions” or “disappearances”—spread through text messages and social media, thousands of people showed up to confront an influx of federal law-enforcement personnel from various agencies. Protesters marched and chanted and put their bodies in the way of vehicles and arresting officers; some lit trash on fire, threw rocks, and sprayed graffiti (“Fuck ICE”; “Can’t Stop da Raza!”). Officers responded with drones, batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. At Ambiance Apparel, they arrested David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union. They also blocked a delegation of elected officials and immigration advocates from seeing detainees at the courthouse, a previously routine form of oversight.

Federal agents captured some two hundred immigrants in two days, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which helps to run a hotline and legal-services network. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the arrest of a hundred and eighteen people. Yet Trump apparently could not tolerate—or maybe saw an opportunity in—the friction caused by the community’s efforts to intervene. Late Saturday night, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he would deploy two thousand members of the California National Guard to quell what Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, was calling a “violent insurrection.” Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, objected to the order; they could handle the situation on their own, they said. Nevertheless, three hundred National Guard members were in place by early Sunday, as a number of marches and rallies were held in various parts of the county.

I encountered around twenty National Guard members—in camouflage, armed, helmeted, clutching shields—outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. on Sunday afternoon. Behind them were a half-dozen tactical vehicles. The scene did more to provoke than soothe. Hundreds of activists filled the surrounding streets and sidewalks, demanding an end to raids and deportations. The crowd had not assembled at the instruction of any particular group. They wore Pride rainbows, kaffiyehs, and Mexican and Salvadoran flags. (Miller wrote on X: “Foreign flags flying in American cities to defend the invasion.”) Prisoners in the jail rising above us participated from behind their tiny windows by flicking the lights on and off.

A woman who asked to be called Xiomara, because she feared reprisal if she used her real name, and her partner, both social workers and native Angelenos from immigrant families, held signs reading “What if it was your family? You don’t need to be undocumented to stand w/ us” and “BASTA CON LA MIGRA! STOP DEPORTATION.” Xiomara told me that she was close to many people who had voted for Trump and now regretted that decision. “The Administration originally said that deportations were to remove people with a violent criminal history,” she explained. “That’s not what we’ve been seeing. We’ve seen them target kids and people in manual-labor jobs. We’re ripping families apart.” (Homeland Security has claimed that at least some of those arrested are “gang members” and “murderers”—“the worst of the worst.”)

Despite the warlike stance of the National Guard, it was the Los Angeles Police Department that did all the work. There looked to be more than a hundred officers from the L.A.P.D., all outfitted in black riot gear. For hours, they positioned themselves as human cordons, shot off tear gas, and gave confusing instructions to protesters. “Move south!” “Leave the area!” “You can’t go there!” “You can’t leave!”A pair of officers shoved me repeatedly and pushed me forward on the sidewalk with their batons. (When I identified as press, one said, “I don’t care.”) Helicopters and surveillance drones flew low. There were L.A.P.D. cars, S.U.V.s (including one that accelerated dangerously through the crowd), trucks, motorcycles, and, later, horses.

In the early evening, the confrontation heated up. A message blared from a helicopter, threatening the crowd with arrest and “serious bodily injury” unless the area was cleared within one minute. (Nothing happened after a minute.) Protesters threw stones and plastic water bottles at police cruisers and onto the 101 Freeway, temporarily stopping traffic, and members of the crowd set several driverless Waymo cars on fire, producing a funnel of black smoke. Officers began shooting rubber bullets and corralled the protesters near City Hall. Xiomara witnessed officers on horseback “trampling over people,” she said. Aimee Zavala, a twenty-nine-year-old who left the area around this time, believed that the police response was unmerited. “People are going to be passionate,” she told me, “but I didn’t see any protesters with any weapons. I didn’t see anybody causing physical harm.” On one stretch of sidewalk, I watched a volunteer medic administer gauze and aspirin to three young men with round, bloody wounds. The L.A.P.D. arrested ten protesters, bringing the weekend total to thirty-nine, and used X to declare all of downtown “an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY.”

Not all of the weekend’s demonstrations corresponded to a specific raid or deportation. Some were more elemental: expressions of rage at the Administration’s casual, spectacular cruelty. Just days after Trump’s Inauguration, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, had taken part in a videotaped series of immigration raids in New York City, also a sanctuary jurisdiction. Now it was Los Angeles’s turn, and it was as if immigrant workers, children, and families had been cast in a film made for Fox News. Local officials weren’t entirely blameless; the chief of the L.A.P.D., Jim McDonnell, pointed out over the weekend that, technically, the department “is not involved in civil immigration enforcement.” The sheriff of L.A. County, Robert Luna, said the same. “But there’s a loophole,” Anthony Bryson, an activist with the group SoCal Uprising, told me. “If they assist with traffic, that’s not immigration enforcement.” The police were present at raids and protests; they willingly backed up their federal peers. “The police were there instigating, creating a militarized boundary,” Bryson went on. “The belief that Los Angeles is a sanctuary city is a myth.” ♦

On Monday afternoon, news broke that seven hundred Marines were being deployed from their base in Twentynine Palms. The 2nd Battalion 7th Marines—known for their battles in Guadalcanal, during the Second World War; Incheon, in Korea; and Helmand Province, in Afghanistan—were now coming to support two thousand members of the California National Guard who had been activated by President Trump last week to respond to Los Angeles protests against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Shortly after one in the afternoon, a small group of demonstrators, objecting to the Administration’srecent immigration raidsacross their city, began gathering outside of the Federal Building, in downtown L.A. Earlier that day, a large rally had been held in nearby Grant Park, in protest of the arrest of David Huerta, a Los Angeles labor leader who was being held in federal custody for conspiracy to impede an officer during an immigration raid on a Los Angeles business on Friday. (He has since been charged with a felony.) Now, as older people wearing Service Employees International Union and Writer’s Guild of America T-shirts headed home, a younger crowd arrived mostly on foot, a few pulling up in cars. (The head of the S.E.I.U. released a statement that said the organization was proud of Huerta’s actions but clarified that he was a “community observer.”)

Fewer than twenty members of the California National Guard, whose role is to protect federal property, stood at the entrance to the Federal Building, holding large plastic shields. Legally forbidden from carrying out domestic law-enforcement duties, they could not do much to block the protesters on their own. They were thus accompanied by black-uniformed members of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose job seemed to be to protect the Guard from protesters while the Guard ostensibly protected the building.

The sweeps byICEthat had provoked the protests were sporadic and difficult to predict, so those wishing to demonstrate chose to do so in front of the Feds, and this consistently meant gathering at the Federal Building, which was the only place in downtown L.A. they could be seen. The soldiers brought in to put down the protests were drawing new ones around them. As the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, questioned the federal presence in news conferences, it was unclear whether the soldiers were playing the role of an ordering force or an occupying one.

As of early afternoon, the standoff was relatively casual. The demonstrators—maybe two hundred in total—remained in the street, chanting, “Chinga la migra.” One stood up through the sunroof of a car with “VIVA LA RAZA” written on it and waved the Mexican flag. Another played rap music on a bicycle speaker. The demographics may have skewed young, but the flags and slogans on view reflected pride in the makeup of Los Angeles County, where thirty-three per cent of the population was born in another country, nearly fifty per cent identifies as Hispanic or Latino, and fifty-five per cent speaks a language other than English at home.

The Federal Building is one of several government buildings at the northeastern end of downtown, a cluster that includes federal and county courthouses, Los Angeles City Hall, the federal Metropolitan Detention Center, and a Veterans Affairs clinic, with the 101 Freeway marking the area’s informal northern boundary. It’s a part of downtown with few residential homes, shops, or restaurants, and lots of urban plazas, concrete planters, and public art. Since last week, when the protests began, demonstrators had blanketed the marble steps and late-modernist office blocks of the government buildings in graffiti. “TRUMP LOVES COCK” and “DEATH TO FASCISM” had been painted on the stone walls of City Hall, “WHEN TYRANNY BECOMES LAW, REBELLION BECOMES DUTY” was scrawled on the Federal Building, and “FUCK ICE” appeared virtually everywhere. On Monday, more slogans were being added in real time. I watched as a young woman spray-painted“FUCK TRUMP” over a “Mission Impossible” poster in a bus stop; another person, masked, wrote “VALUE HUMAN RIGHTS!!!” on a wall.

As the afternoon went on, and the golden California sun cast longer shadows, the crowd grew more agitated. Their signs indicated a sense of betrayal: “BUILT the country that HATES US,” said one.

“I don’t think it’s right howICEis targeting specifically my Hispanic people,” a thirty-year-old protester named Stephanie Gonzalez told me. She held a small American flag and a sign that said “Por Mi Familia RAZA UNIDA!” “My family came from Mexico; I’m first generation; my parents didn’t come here with papers. We have the opportunities we have now because of the sacrifices my parents did.” She pointed out that Homeland Security agents have arrested immigrants as they’ve come to court to try to follow the law. “We’re here now, and we just need to handle things humanely, because what they did was not humane.”

The protest had a distinctly California feeling. At the periphery, a Honda Civic painted with racing stripes started doing doughnuts; another car, with covered plates, a dented fender, and a person in the passenger seat wearing a Halloween mask from the movie “Scream,” performed a tire burnout; a motorcyclist took a moment to deafen everyone with some backfiring. A group of guys on minibikes—homemade motorcycles with the engines of power washers and what looked like go-kart tires—wove their way around, one driver wearing a furry, wolf-shaped helmet. There were lots of skateboards.

The demonstrators nearest the soldiers began shouting “Shame on you!” Many of the protesters had covered their faces and wore long sleeves; one wore a sombrero. Around five, a black pickup truck pulled up to the crowd and began unloading boxes containing face shields and other protective gear. The police ordered the crowd to disperse. Some protesters started making their way to the fringes; the L.A.P.D. began forcing out the others by using flash-bang grenades and shooting projectiles.

I stood a ways up a slope with several dozen other observers, watching this play out. One man was sermonizing through a loudspeaker. “This will not go down on the right side of history,” he said. Just out of range from the nonlethal weapons, a vender was selling aguas frescas for five dollars apiece. A protester ambled up and asked if I needed a mask. His name was Brandon and he had taken the train into town from the Inland Empire, as the suburbs of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties are known. He wore Vans and a Snoop Dogg-branded shirt in the purple and yellow of the L.A. Lakers that said “Dogg Supply” on it. It was his first time at a protest, he told me. He was white, and, he said, he “had a lot of Mexican co-workers, friends, just a lot of people in my life.” The scene had made him sad, he continued, showing me a photo of a woman’s ankle that had been hit by a rubber bullet earlier that day. “The city’s fucked up, the cops are pissed off, the people are pissed off, everybody’s just mad.”

Shortly after he said goodbye, the police finally succeeded in clearing the area in front of the Federal Building. The protesters started marching west, then south, past City Hall. Confrontations continued into the night, as the police chased a shrinking group of people around a few blocks downtown. Around midnight, several people broke into and looted an Apple Store, an Adidas store, and a weed dispensary on Broadway. By the end of the night, the L.A.P.D. had arrested more than a hundred people, according to the Mayor’s office; on the same day,ICEhad conducted another five raids in the L.A. metropolitan area, including one at a Home Depot in Huntington Park and another at a Home Depot in Whittier.

Donald Trump signed the memorandum activating the California National Guard last Saturday, posting on Truth Social, “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!” (Governor Newsom filed an emergency motion to block the deployment, on Monday, charging that the takeover violated federal law; hearings in the case will begin on Thursday.) The President’s claims that, as one of his posts put it, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated” without the National Guard appeared to be bluster. As I followed protesters around downtown L.A., I watched local police corral and disperse protesters using armored trucks, flash-bangs, rubber bullets, batons, and shields. The only members of the California National Guard I saw were the dozen or so standing in front of the Federal Building. Physical confrontations seemed to have been carried out almost entirely by the L.A.P.D., the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and other coöordinated state and local law-enforcement agencies.

On Monday, the President announced the deployment of an additional two thousand members of the California National Guard, meaning that, as a local news station pointed out, there were now more military personnel deployed to L.A. than in Iraq and Syria combined. At a press conference that night, Mayor Bass said that theICEraids had set off a city that on Thursday, before federal agents began raiding car washes and Home Depots, had been peaceful. Questioning the deployment of the Marines, she asked, “What are they going to do? Do you know what the National Guard is doing now? They are guarding two buildings. So they need Marines on top of it?”

The next morning, Tuesday, downtown L.A. was quiet. The jacaranda trees glowed purple in the morning sun and the power washers were out tackling the graffiti. The National Guard was now standing outside some federal buildings on Alameda Street, on the other side of the same block. When I walked by, only five or so of the two thousand soldiers deployed were outside, but the tripods of the news media had set up there, and a little while later protesters would gather there, too.

Bass spent much of a press conference that morning condemning the rowdier protesters. “I do not believe that individuals that commit vandalism and violence in our city really are in support of immigrants,” she said. “They have another agenda.” She called on business owners to help clean up the extensive graffiti. “We are one year away from the World Cup,” she reminded us.

Bass emphasized that the Department of Homeland Security was not coördinating with city government about the raids, which the city tends to learn about as they happen. The previous day, she had learned of the Whittier raid while in a meeting with immigration-rights activists—“their cell phones started blowing up,” she said. “But the real solution of all of this is for the Administration to stop the raids,” she continued. “We have heard that these raids might take place for the next thirty days. We don’t know how many are going to take place in a given day. And you just think about the disruption to families and the disruption to our local economy.”

She noted that Trump had congratulated the National Guard on Saturday for stopping the violence. “The National Guard didn’t arrive in the city until Sunday,” she said. “I don’t know how he could say that the National Guard is who saved the day. Who saved the day are our local law-enforcement agencies.” She seemed to acknowledge that Los Angeles had been enveloped in a spectacle-making machine. “They are talking about spending over a hundred million dollars with this deployment, which is why I say that I feel like we’ve all been, in Los Angeles, a part of a grand experiment to see what happens when the federal government decides they want to roll up on a state or roll up on the city and take over.”

It would be reported over the course of the day that the Marines had indeed arrived and were waiting for orders at the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, a coastal city in Orange County. The local news channels aired video of the soldiers training there: moving in an arrow-shaped phalanx around a field while holding their plastic shields; practicing what appeared to be a skirmish line. If and when they join the National Guard at the Federal Building, or some other federal building, they, too, will be unable to make arrests unless Trump successfully invokes the Insurrection Act.

Despite the fact that the Marines were still in Orange County, Trump asserted later on Tuesday that “L.A. would be burning if the Marines had not arrived.” Reality doesn’t figure much in the social-media circus around the protests, which has relied heavily on the public’s misunderstanding of L.A. geography, a mistaken impression that the National Guard took over the streets, and looping footage of two Waymos on fire downtown. Even Gavin Newsom exaggerated the military’s impact thus far, implying, in a televised address he gave on Tuesday evening, that it was the National Guard and not the L.A.P.D. that had escalated confrontations with the protesters to the point that tear gas and rubber bullets were used.

By Tuesday afternoon, anti-ICEdemonstrators had again gathered where the National Guard soldiers stood, in front of a federal building on Alameda Street. As the L.A.P.D. cordoned off the area, a small group temporarily shut down the southbound lanes of the nearby 101 Freeway, and then was arrested. Other protesters continued moving through the streets. I saw one man on a skateboard with a full balloon of nitrous in one hand and a whip-it container in the other. Another person, perhaps responding to online criticism that the demonstrators were waving Mexican, Honduran, and Salvadoran flags, carried a pink-striped flag featuring a photo of the Bronx-born rapper Ice Spice.

That evening, Bass announced that one square mile of the city’s center, an area shaped by the major freeways that surround downtown L.A., would be under a curfew, from eight in the evening until six o’clock in the morning. As I walked south of where the protests had been concentrated, businesses were boarding up their windows with plywood and restaurants were shuttering early. The Whole Foods was thronged with people rushing to get their shopping done; some local residents, however, seemed unhurried, such as the woman I saw wearing Hello Kitty headphones and taking her hairless kitten for a walk in a pink stroller.

Bass’s announcement was made as a group of interfaith leaders gathered for a prayer vigil in Grant Park, a few blocks west of the Federal Building. As the curfew approached, the attendees—an older, explicitly nonviolent crowd, many of them in religious dress—made their way, singing, back to the Federal Building, where they stood holding candles and flowers in front of the unmoving National Guard soldiers until the hour of the curfew arrived. Then the police began moving in, and the crowd dispersed. That night, the news showed video ofICEagents chasing farmworkers through the fields of Ventura County, to the north; a late-afternoon protest on Wednesday in downtown’s Pershing Square had already been announced. ♦

On March 5, 2025, Samantha Crowder sat in a corner of her bedroom which she’d turned into a home office, staring in disbelief at a leaked memo. The chief of staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs, where she’d worked for nearly a decade, had notified agency leaders that the V.A. would “aggressively” shrink its footprint. In partnership with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the memo said, the V.A. would “identify and eliminate waste” and “reduce management and bureaucracy.” This apparently meant firing about eighty thousand of the agency’s four hundred and eighty thousand workers.

After that, Crowder told me, meetings frequently devolved into discussions about the looming cuts. Her office paused work on a project to speed up the process for granting treatment privileges to new V.A. doctors; hiring was frozen and a number of job offers for doctors had been rescinded, so there was no one to bring on board. (Even after the Trump Administration reversed course on the offers, some doctors declined them.) Meanwhile, a stream of executive orders were affecting federal workers. A return-to-office mandate felt, to Crowder, like an accusation that she wasn’t doing her job from home. The V.A. had hired many people specifically to be remote workers, and the agency was short on desks. One of her colleagues was assigned to the back room of a local post office, and another was placed in the break room of a courthouse. Crowder was a data analyst based in Orlando, Florida; in her view, the downsizing was not being driven by any data. Several meetings discussed an executive order that, among other things, prohibited the word “gender” in any federal document, policy, or system. An application that helped veterans request doctors had to be updated so that it used the word “sex” instead.

The last straw, for Crowder, was a questionnaire from the Office of Personnel Management that asked, among other things, “If [this] position is eliminated, “what (if any) are the direct negative impact(s) to veterans?” Supervisors in her office allowed employees to fill out their own forms. “We want you guys to be able to fight for your own jobs,” a manager told them. There was one day to respond. When Crowder told me all this, she sounded incredulous: “They wanted a review of a half million employees, with a turnaround of less than twenty-four hours?”

In April, Crowder quit her job. “That was honestly one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made,” she told me. She came from a family of V.A. workers that included her father. She’d started from the “bottom of the bottom,” as a certified nursing assistant, and worked her way up to administrative roles. She decided to forgo several months of pay by refusing a “deferred resignation” plan that Doug Collins, the Trump Administration’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, had offered employees. “I just wanted to detach myself from the V.A. fast, because I feel like it was important to get information out there as soon as possible,” she said. Then she Googled “How to make a YouTube video.”

The resulting YouTube videos are rudimentary efforts, but they offer an insider’s view. In her first upload, “Let’s Fix the VA by Firing Everyone! (What Could Go Wrong?),” she argues that everyone should care about what’s happening at the V.A. “What’s one way a woman might tell if a man will treat her right? How he treats his mom,” she said. “So let me ask you this: if we can’t get this right for veterans, who can we get this right for?” Elsewhere, she dissected video clips of Collins, such as a Fox News interview that asked him how firing workers would affect V.A. care. Collins said that for the past decade, a “high-risk list” from the Government Accountability Office had included the V.A., and that changes were overdue. But Crowder revealed that among the specific problems cited by the G.A.O. were staffing shortages in mental-health care, workload mismanagement, and a failure to develop a staffing strategy. (The V.A. doesn’t know how many doctors it employs, for example.) “Let’s fix the fire hazards by firing the firefighters,” Crowder said sarcastically. “Then maybe we’ll read the inspection report.”

When I surveyed other V.A. employees about the state of the agency, they shared similar concerns. After speaking with Crowder, I received an unprompted e-mail from a tipster who’d read my reporting on the Trump Administration. The person introduced me to a V.A. clinical psychologist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Collins had promised that medical care for veterans would not be affected by any downsizing—and, so far, little downsizing has taken place. But, the psychologist told me, “Veterans are losing access to care because their clinicians are leaving.”

Trump’s gender-related executive order was a particular frustration. “Speaking with veterans directly, I know everything related to transgender veterans’ health was cut instantaneously,” the psychologist said, explaining that support groups were eliminated and access to hormone therapy was reduced. “We’re basically erasing an entire group of veterans.” And, in clinical research, psychologists could no longer mention gender. “We can only use biological birth sex in any of our descriptions,” the psychologist said. “I’m a women’s-health researcher, but I can’t talk about women veterans. I have to talk about females, which is strange, and also not how I collected my data.” When I contacted the V.A. press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, for comment, he told me, “VA is faithfully and thoughtfully incorporating President Trump’s executive order.”

The psychologist said that employees were worried about surveillance—they were notified in writing, on a slide that I reviewed, that virtual meetings on Microsoft Teams were being transcribed and archived—and were afraid to let their computer mouses stop moving, for fear that they’d be seen as unproductive. (“VA has issued no directive to transcribe and save Teams meetings,” Kasperowicz said.) Although she didn’t think that clinical jobs like hers were in immediate danger, she worried about staffers who don’t see patients. “You can’t run a hospital or health-care system without non-clinical administrative support,” she said. When I asked about over-all morale, the word that came to her mind was “miserable.”

I first started looking into the situation at the V.A. after hearing the story of a patient, William Guild, who was being treated for an aggressive brain cancer. Guild’s wife, Katie Morgan, who has published fiction inThe New Yorkerunder the byline C. E. Morgan, is convinced that her husband’s care has deteriorated since Trump’s Inauguration.

Guild’s three-decade career included nine years onSEALTeam Six, a secretive unit that carries out some of the U.S. military’s most difficult operations, often underwater. He developed claustrophobia, sleeplessness, depression, and P.T.S.D. Upon his retirement from the military, in 2010, he moved to the woods of New Hampshire for a Thoreauvian reassessment of his life. The first time he met Morgan, at a meditation retreat in 2015, they debated Aristotle. By the end of the week, she sensed that they would marry.

Morgan said that her marriage sometimes felt like one long conversation about politics, art, and philosophy. (Guild earned a master’s in theology from Harvard Divinity School, a degree she also held.) Late one night in April, 2024, however, Guild paused midsentence, confused. He stood and paced, repeating the word “this.” Morgan touched his arm. “I don’t think you’re searching for a word anymore,” she said. “Can you nod your head if you think something is wrong with you?” He nodded.

Within days, Guild had had brain surgery and was diagnosed with glioblastoma. The tumor’s location left Guild with full cognitive function, but a slight speech delay. “Now you’re gonna win every argument,” he told Morgan. Days later, doctors ordered an MRI, and Guild, whose muscular frame barely fit in the machine, feared an attack of claustrophobia. He emerged from the scanner unresponsive; he’d experienced a severe brain bleed. Another operation followed. Morgan learned that her husband was effectively paralyzed and unable to speak.

Some studies suggest a correlation between military service and glioblastoma, perhaps owing to carcinogen exposure or traumatic brain injuries. Morgan learned that a frogman on Guild’sSEALTeam Six boat crew had developed the cancer as well. In April, however, the Trump Administration reduced Defense Department glioblastoma research from the ten million dollars it received in 2024 to zero. Only about fourteen thousand Americans are given that particular cancer diagnosis annually. “It’s an orphan disease,” Henry S. Friedman, a neuro-oncologist at Duke University who is leading Guild’s treatment, told me. “It’s a very difficult tumor to treat, because it’s invasive when it’s diagnosed—all over the brain.” Doctors generally remove as much of it as possible with surgery and then administer radiation, chemotherapy, and other therapies.

The special-operations community quickly mobilized to support Guild and Morgan. “SEALs take care ofSEALs, I’ll tell you that,” Jennifer Brusstar, who leads the Tug McGraw Foundation, which is devoted to helping people with brain conditions, observed to me. She connected the couple with a patient-advocacy group for élite service members, which helped get Guild transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a preëminent hospital about three hours from their home. “Once we got settled into care, we had a smooth-running machine,” Morgan told me. Guild’s next MRIs looked good, he began speech and physical therapy, and doctors discharged him in the summer of 2024. Then Donald Trump took office for a second time.

The V.A. encompasses the Veterans Health Administration, which treats nine million former military service members across fourteen hundred clinics and hospitals. The system easily outperforms private hospitals in cleanliness, communication, and patient satisfaction; last spring, its outpatient clinics had a ninety-two-per-cent trust rating. Still, its referral processes and eligibility criteria can be opaque. (I’ve been receiving V.A. care for almost twenty years, and the best way I can explain it is: eventually, somehow, you tend to get the help you need.) Historically, veterans have struggled to prove that conditions with multiple causes, such as chronic diseases and cancers, were related to their military service. How do you know that a particular tumor was caused by polluted water, heavy metals, or waste-disposal burn pits, and not genetics or random chance? The V.A. frequently denied disability claims, limiting potential medical coverage and compensation payments. But in 2021 Congress introduced thePACTAct, which aimed to establish a “presumptive” link between certain diagnoses and military service.

Not everyone supported thePACTAct. Some Republicans in Congress attempted to block it over procedural issues and budget concerns, which led to a public outcry. It passed in 2022. The next year, the conservative Heritage Foundation publishedProject 2025, a policy guidebook that President Trump publicly disavowed but has followed in many of its particulars. It argued that the growing number of veterans with access to expanded health benefits “have the potential to overwhelm the VA’s ability to process new disability claims and adjudicate appeals,” potentially causing backlogs and delays. Project 2025 argued that the government could achieve “significant cost savings” by changing its approval criteria, and by preserving benefits (“fully or partially”) only for existing claimants. The basic agreement between the United States and members of the military, at least in theory, is that those who enlist will be cared for if they suffer harm. Project 2025’s architects, some of whom now hold power in the Trump Administration, seemed ready to change the terms of the deal.

Under President Biden, the V.A. hired tens of thousands of workers to treat veterans and handle new claims. But on January 20th the Trump Administration laid the groundwork for firing many federal employees, and weeks later the V.A. dismissed its first thousand workers. Eleven days after that, it fired another fourteen hundred. When the V.A. memo leaked, in March, Doug Collins clarified that he sought to fire seventy-two thousand workers, not eighty. That would still amount to fifteen per cent of the agency.

When Guild developed glioblastoma, the V.A. rated him as a hundred per cent disabled under thePACTAct, assuring him monthly compensation and priority access to medical care. Guild depended on constant home-based occupational and physical therapy. But, after the initial firings, his numerous rehab appointments suddenly stopped being scheduled. Morgan made calls and sent countless e-mails. She described herself as a self-appointed intermediary between the V.A. system in Richmond, Virginia, where Guild receives care, and its affiliates. To schedule appointments, she had to find and connect people who worked at different offices and remind them about her husband’s needs. Still, from February 27th to March 19th, Guild did not receive therapy because an extension of his treatments needed to be approved by the V.A.

Morgan watched, enraged, as Collins defended the V.A. cuts. “The federal government does not exist to employ people,” he said. “We’ll be making major changes—so get used to it.” In her near-daily conversations with V.A. workers, some told her that they feared for their jobs. After several weeks of this, on March 18th, the V.A. finally approved continuation of her husband’s therapy.

According to Morgan’s notes, on May 2nd, a V.A. worker told her that the Richmond system had lost a lot of schedulers and added, “It’s been a nightmare.” Another told her that schedulers had left voluntarily because of the situation “being like it is,” and that “things have gone belly-up.” (In February, the Richmond V.A., driven byDOGEmandates, had terminated several dozen employees, in areas ranging from housekeeping to surgical services. No schedulers were among them, and a federal judge subsequently ordered that they be rehired.)

Today, Morgan is Guild’s full-time caregiver. She estimated that she spends about twenty-five hours a week on health-related administrative tasks, and she teaches half time, “on top of the physicality of caregiving, preparing all the meals, taking care of nutritional needs, cancer needs, handling chemo five days a month, taking care of dogs, and trying to be a parent.” Their son, Liam, who recently celebrated his eighth birthday, is “largely stuck at home with us,” she said. “He’s learning early lessons from this about what marriage means.”

Meanwhile, Guild is working “ferociously” on his recovery, Morgan said, hoping to build some independence. Glioblastoma tumors usually recur in six to nine months; he lives MRI to MRI, in two-month increments. Morgan worries that her husband could lose some of his benefits, which depend in part on thePACTAct, and that if she is unable to return to her professorship full time, they could lose their house. They still encounter occasional scheduling problems. “We’re a really good test case, because we use the V.A. constantly,” she told me. “All this with just, what, twenty-five hundred firings? There are still seventy grand more to go.”

When I approached the V.A. for comment on the state of the agency, Kasperowicz, its press secretary, blamed “nearly all of the department’s most serious problems, such as rising health care wait times, growing backlogs of Veterans waiting for disability compensation, and major issues with survivor benefits,” on the Biden Administration. In response to questions about how downsizing and restructuring might have contributed to Guild’s experience, I received a statement attributed to a local public-affairs officer. “The premise of your inquiry is false,” the statement read. When I asked why the V.A. took so long to approve the request to extend Guild’s therapy, I was told, “No such request was ever made to VA, and VA believes that the request was accidentally sent to a non-VA office.” I checked; someone who works with many V.A. patients, and who is familiar with Guild’s request for an extension of his treatment, confirmed that daily faxes were sent to the Richmond V.A. system.

One of Samantha Crowder’s projects at the V.A. examined problems in the scheduling departments, so I ran Guild’s experience by her. Scheduling departments have been “super understaffed” in recent years, she said, and her research revealed high turnover and low morale. “Good schedulers get burned out, and there’s no way to track productivity,” Crowder told me. “Of course, the threat of being fired has made things worse.”

In the same conversation, she told me that a V.A. center in Florida had to implement weekly town halls after employees expressed suicidal thoughts. A congressional staffer who works with the V.A. confirmed this to me. The suicide rate for veterans is fifty per cent higher than that of the general population, and a quarter of V.A. workers are veterans. Nonetheless, Veterans Crisis Line employees were among the V.A. workers targeted for termination by the Trump Administration. (“A small number of VCL support staff were laid off as part of the probationary dismissals in February, but all of them were offered their positions back within weeks,” Kasperowicz said.)

The last person I spoke to was a V.A. social worker on the West Coast. “I had a colleague that left their position this week,” he said, in May. “A dedicated civil servant. A wealth of knowledge and talent. . . . This is a person who is gay and feels particularly targeted by these new policies.” The social worker was particularly unsettled by an e-mail that Collins sent to the entire agency. Under the subject line “Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias,” Collins directed all employees to report “policies, procedures, or unofficial understandings hostile to Christian views.” The social worker called the e-mail “a bellwether—an indicator of an emboldened point of view with power in the federal system.”

The social worker feared that the V.A. would suffer long-term damage. Employees tend to have a personal connection to the military, he pointed out. “They’ve chosen to do this work out of a sense of service,” he said. Lately, in job interviews, people have been asking him whether, if they’re hired, they’ll have to worry about losing their jobs. “The answer is I don’t know,” he told me. “There’s a prevailing feeling, from my perspective, of the system turning on the people that we serve—and on us.” ♦

On May 15th, from our home in Syracuse, New York, my wife, Maram, and I video-called her family in Beit Lahia, the city in northern Gaza where we both grew up. They were eating a small meal of plain white rice. “That’s the only type of food we’ve had for weeks,” her father, whom I call Uncle Jaleel, said. On a normal day, a similar quantity of rice would have fed about two people, but, for seventy-five days, Israel had not allowed any trucks of food into Gaza. This meal would have to feed Maram’s parents and four of her adult siblings. I could see some plates and a bowl nearby. “They have nothing in them,” Uncle Jaleel said. “We let ourselves imagine there is salad and some chicken and pickles as we chew the rice.”

Often in the past nineteen months, a situation that could hardly get any worse has gotten worse. Late that night, one of my relatives called me and said that explosions in northern Gaza sounded like the end of the world. My relatives could hear screaming, followed by more blasts. Meanwhile, my friend Sabir, who has been sheltering in southern Gaza since October, 2023, missed about ten calls because his phone had been charging. “I felt panic,” he told me. I know the feeling, because I experience it whenever my relatives call me from Gaza. When Sabir returned the calls, he learned that air strikes on his family home had killed his four-year-old nephew and his five-year-old niece. (A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces said that the I.D.F. was not aware of this strike. When asked about the bombings of my relative’s neighbor’s house, the spokesperson said that the I.D.F. had conducted a strike on “terror infrastructure,” but was unaware of subsequent bombings.)

The final death toll on May 15th was a hundred and forty-three, bringing the total since October 7th to more than fifty-three thousand, according to health officials in Gaza. I can usually tell how bad the violence is based on how many of my loved ones are affected. This time, a former colleague and a friend’s father were among the dead. Many families, including some of my relatives, were forced to flee southward.

About a week later, Israel finally allowed about a hundred trucks of aid to enter Gaza. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed on X that, since October 7th, Israel had sent ninety-two thousand aid trucks into Gaza. Much of the aid actually came from the international community, not Israel. But, even if Netanyahu’s figures were correct, that would still be less than two hundred trucks per day—far below what humanitarian organizations have said that hungry Gazans need. Before October 7th, several hundred trucks a day carried all manner of goods into Gaza. Since then, most of Gaza’s cattle have been killed, and most of its farmland has been damaged or destroyed.

Then the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is staffed by private security contractors and backed by the United States and Israel, started distributing food in southern and central Gaza. Because the G.H.F. bypasses other aid organizations and coördinates with the Israeli military, much of the international community, including the United Nations, has condemned and boycotted these efforts. Earlier, on CNN, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel had said, “If you really care about feeding people, why do you care about what kind of truck takes it in there?” I could not help but ask myself, If the Ambassador and Israel really cared about feeding people, why would Israel block aid in the first place? Gazans in the north were now forced to run away from death and run toward food.

The next time Maram and I called our families, we heard more bad news. My family was subsisting on flour and white rice left over from the last ceasefire, in January, 2025. Sometimes they ate only a single meal per day. The flour had gone rancid, my sister Aya told me, so she wore a mask when making bread. But the taste of it was even worse than the smell.

The husband of one of my sisters told me that two nephews, Abdullah and Mostafa, had recently set out with their friend Fadi for Beit Lahia. Israel had previously issued evacuation orders for much of northern Gaza. My brother-in-law said that Abdullah, twenty-four, was gathering mint and zucchini in the back yard of their house when an Israeli quadcopter dropped a bomb and killed him. Another bomb killed Fadi, who was sixteen. Mostafa, twenty-one, survived to tell his story only because he went into a neighbor’s house, where a third bomb knocked him out and nearly severed his leg. When he woke up, he dragged himself out of the rubble and crawled to al-Tayyeb Wedding Hall—the place where I got married eleven years ago. Finally, bystanders brought him to al-Shifa Hospital. (The I.D.F. again said that it had destroyed “terror infrastructure” that day.)

When we reached Maram’s mother, whom I call Aunt Iman, via video call, she looked tired and thin. She was now in Gaza City, living in a tent on the street with Maram’s siblings. We could hear digging in the background. “Your Uncle Jaleel is hammering at the asphalt,” she told us. I was shocked when she explained why: they were burning it to cook food. “We ran out of wood and paper,” Aunt Iman said. “The asphalt contains petroleum.” Her skin looked dark from exposure to heat and soot.

I asked her if they had received any food recently. “Nothing at all,” she told me.

“Not even from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?”

Soon, Palestinians started to be killed near the G.H.F.’s aid-distribution sites. On May 27th, thousands of starved people stormed one such site in Rafah, near Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, leading G.H.F. workers to withdraw. Israeli soldiers and tanks, stationed nearby, opened fire. Days later, on June 1st, my neighbor Saleem al-Ghandour told me that he’d seen Israeli forces open fire on aid seekers again, this time at another aid site in the Netzarim Corridor. “It looked like all of Gaza was there,” he told me. “Death was very close to us, because of the intense shelling around us and the gunfire from Israeli soldiers.” No one received food that day, he said.

Videos of the aftermath began to appear online. I came across one that featured another neighbor, a thirty-five-year-old father of five named Mohammad Salem, in a hospital bed. In the video, he describes how, on the morning of June 1st, Israeli forces also shot aid seekers near the Rafah site. “If I had any food in my tent, I would never have left for Rafah,” he says. “But I have two babies, who were born during the war.” When I called him at the hospital, he told me that he was recovering from a bullet wound in his foot.

A twenty-four-year-old with a law degree, who asked me not to use his full name, wrote to me on social media, saying that he had witnessed the gunfire in Rafah. “It was coming from more than one direction,” he later told me, over the phone. He’d arrived at the distribution site at 6A.M.—too late to receive any aid. When the shooting started, he said, the crowd was so large that not everyone could drop to the ground, and many were shot in their upper bodies. Yet some of his fellow-Gazans were so desperate that they still wanted to advance toward the distribution center and search for food.

During the past two weeks, Gazan authorities and medical workers have reported that dozens of Palestinians have been killed, and many more injured, at G.H.F. sites. A spokesperson for the foundation disputed the way that the events of May 27th have been reported, but did not go into further detail; the I.D.F. spokesperson said that “I.D.F. troops fired warning shots in the area outside the compound.” Regarding the incidents on June 1st, the I.D.F. toldThe New Yorkerthat it “did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian distribution site,” but added that about a kilometre away, “warning shots were fired toward several suspects who advanced toward the troops.” It did not specify whether this was in reference to the site in Rafah or the one in the Netzarim Corridor.

When I read the news and watch videos of aid seekers being killed, I think about what some Israeli leaders have said about the future of Gaza. In November, 2024, Brigadier General Itzik Cohen remarked that his unit would not bring humanitarian aid to the northernmost part of Gaza, since, according to him, there were not that many people in the region anymore. “No one is returning to the northern area,” Cohen said. (The I.D.F. later distanced itself from his remarks, but appointed him to the head of the Operations Directorate and announced that he was being promoted.) The following month, Moshe Ya’alon, a decorated former defense minister, accused Israel of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza. More recently, Israel’s far-right national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said that “the only aid that ought to enter Gaza should be for voluntary migration.” Its culture minister, Miki Zohar, has talked about annexing land there, unless Hamas cedes power and releases its remaining hostages. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

I worry that Israel’s latest escalation, as well as the G.H.F.’s approach to aid distribution, serves these ends. James Elder, aUNICEFspokesperson, said that if aid hubs are available only in southern Gaza, they will force Gazans to make a choice between displacement and death. “Humanitarian aid should never be used as a bargaining chip,” Elder told journalists in Geneva. To reach a G.H.F. distribution center, my own family in Gaza might need to walk seven miles to the Netzarim Corridor or thirty miles to Rafah, after weeks of eating very little. And how would they ever carry the supplies back? For the G.H.F.’s efforts to be called humanitarian, they would need to reach every city, town, and refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. They would need to deliver nutritious food to mothers, children, and sick people every day. They would need to take place far from any soldiers and weapons.

Uncle Jaleel, who is fifty-five, is losing his hearing. He developed a serious ear infection in December, 2024, when he was besieged inside Kamal Adwan Hospital, and he was bedridden for ten days with fever last month. His family now needs to use sign language to communicate with him. Aunt Iman, who is forty-eight, is having respiratory issues from breathing in fumes from burning asphalt and plastic. Yet they are both staying away from G.H.F. distribution sites. “We don’t want to see our children killed while they try to get food,” Aunt Iman told me.

On June 3rd, she described life in their white plastic tent, which is stabilized with pieces of concrete. “A day feels like a year,” she told me. “Uncle Jaleel goes out mainly to look for nylon and cloth to make fire and cook food. The children go out to fill up buckets of water, when there is a water truck, and to search for soup kitchens.” They had not found any, she said.

During a recent call with my friend Sabir, he asked me how I was able to spend so much time on the phone with him. I explained that my phone plan allowed me to make unlimited international calls. “Please, Mosab, call me every day,” he told me.

I first met Sabir at a barbecue in the fall of 2021. At the time, I taught English at a school in Beit Hanoun. Sabir taught Arabic at a school in Jabalia camp. He loved to read, and I loved to write. Sometimes I read him my work over the phone. We also liked to play Uno together. Not long ago, I reminded him of our games, and he told me that he’d forgotten how to play. But he said that maybe, if he could find an hour of internet access, he would download the Uno app, refresh his memory, and play with me.

Sabir has two children, a three-year-old boy and an eight-month-old girl. His daughter is suffering from amoebic dysentery, but for four months she has had no medication. Sabir also struggles to find diapers, and he told me that the food shortages are worse than he’s ever seen. In the past, he said, “those who were in the north starved more than us . . . but now everyone is starved.” During another call, he told me that he was so weak that he’d fallen twice while trying to carry a bucket of water.

I asked him what I could do to help. Nothing, he said—unless the U.S. wanted to fly an F-16 to Gaza, bomb his tent, and end his suffering.

I had to hang up before I started crying. I did not want Sabir to hear me cry. He should be the one crying.

On June 4th, the U.N. Security Council voted on a draft resolution calling for an end to restrictions on aid, the release of all hostages, and a ceasefire in Gaza.The United States vetoed it even though every other member state—including Russia, China, France, and the U.K.—voted in favor. That same day, I reached out to Sabir. At first, he missed my call because he was in a crowd, running after a truck of flour on Salah al-Din Road. “By the time I arrived, the truck was empty,” he said, after he called back. In the stampede, someone fell and was crushed to death. “It happens every time,” Sabir told me.

When we spoke the next day, it was 12:30A.M.in Gaza. Sabir’s wife and kids were sleeping next to him, but he could not close his eyes. I asked him if he’d ever slept while hungry. “For a month,” he told me. “I slept, and my stomach wanted food.”

He and his wife had denied themselves food so that the kids could eat, he said. That was why he wanted me to call him every day. He wanted to speak out and express his anguish and hunger. Maybe this would lessen the pain. This was also why I wrote—because of the pain of my family, of my wife’s family, of my friend Sabir. I’m compelled to share these injustices, because they need to stop.

What Sabir wants is food, medicine, diapers, and a decent home rather than a tent. He wants what all Palestinians want—not to line up for aid packages, not to fight over flour, but to eat the foods that our own hands grow. Uncle Jaleel is a farmer. He used to bring us strawberries, corn, and onions. My parents would give him oranges, peaches, and mangoes from our yard. It is time for Palestinians to enjoy self-determination, and to live safely in our homeland.

Earlier this year, during the ceasefire, Sabir collected ninety cans of fava beans. His family was now down to the last one, he told me. Before we spoke, Sabir had gone searching for fuel to warm it up. “While I was looking for nylon to make fire, I found that some people were cooking lentil soup for anyone who came by,” he told me. That small gift had helped his family extend their rations by one day.

The next day was Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holiday that is typically marked by feasting. Sabir asked me what I was doing to celebrate. “I do not think I should tell you,” I said. “I know it will make you sad, hearing my plans.”

“Everyone is sad,” Sabir told me. “I see that in people’s faces.” He and his neighbors just wanted to have a normal day, a normal Eid, for the first time in more than a year and a half. Instead, his family would share their last can of fava beans. ♦

Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani are leading the Democratic field. Even they seem nervous.

This year’s mayoral race has so far been a strange, frustrating exercise. The Democratic primary, usually definitive, is looking like a two-man race between candidates who are not guaranteed to win in November: Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, and Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has served four years in the State Assembly. One is only a few years removed from resigning amid an enormous sexual-harassment and abuse-of-powerscandal. The other is a decade removed from college. The political trajectory of the city is genuinely up for grabs. And no one’s feeling too confident about it.

On Thursday evening—two days before the start of early voting—Cuomo, Mamdani, and five of the nine remaining candidates in the primary faced off in a televised debate at the campus of John Jay College, near Columbus Circle. For two hours, just a few blocks from the gleaming towers of Billionaires’ Row, the field discussed the city’s housing and affordability crisis, policing and its effect on crime, New York’s relationship with Donald Trump, Israel and Palestine, e-bikes, and myriad other issues. The candidates, by and large, are serious people, with serious things to say about the city’s overlapping crises, though no one onstage could ignore the modern political demand for clip-ready zingers. “Truth be told, experience matters, and Andrew Cuomo has experience,” the former comptroller Scott Stringer said, delivering the truest-sounding canned line of the night. “But vision matters, and Mamdani . . . you have the vision, and you have articulated that during the campaign.” Stringer turned from his competitors to face the audience, and added, “The problem is, we need someone who can do both.”

After a recent run of polls showed Mamdani in second place, and gaining on Cuomo, his opponents have started treating him as a front-runner. Mamdani’s campaign, which even hereportedlyhad doubts about when it began last year, has caught fire with committed liberals and leftists of various stripes. He has proposed raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and corporations to pay for new public programs including free buses, and freezing the rent in the city’s rent-regulated apartments. “The name is Mamdani, M-A-M-D-A-N-I,” he said sharply on Thursday, after Cuomo mispronounced it, a tic that has sounded increasingly deliberate as the polls have tightened in the past few weeks. In the first question at Thursday’s debate, one of the moderators, the Spectrum NY1 hostErrol Louis, asked Mamdani how, with his youth and relative lack of experience, he could assure New Yorkers he was up to the job of overseeing a hundred-billion-dollar public budget and three-hundred-thousand-person public workforce. “I have never had to resign in disgrace,” Mamdani said at one point in his answer, turning the question back to his principal opponent. “I have never hounded the thirteen women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment.”

Since getting into the race, Cuomo’s evasions, gaslighting, and refusal to take responsibility for the bad acts that led to his downfall four years ago have made for a brazen performance. “Five district attorneys looked at this,” Cuomo said, repeating a practiced line. “Absolutely nothing has come.” His contention seems to be that thirteen women independently came up with the idea of accusing him of sexual harassment, for little to no personal gain. (As Cuomo likes to point out, none of the civil lawsuits brought against him has succeeded, either.) And yet the former governor’s political skills and power have also been on display these past few weeks. He has secured the endorsements of many elected officials who not so long ago agitated for his resignation, as well as influential Black pastors, prominent Jewish community leaders, and the leaders of many of the city’s big labor unions. During a discussion of education funding in the city, Cuomo broke in to say that the other candidates’ arguments about a new and costly state-imposed public-school-class-size limit was all wrong. “The state has to pay,” Cuomo said, arguing that, if Albany wanted to impose a mandate on the city, it needed to be backed with dollars. “Let’s be realistic.” It was a good answer: New York State should cough up more money to make sure working-class city kids aren’t consigned to packed schoolrooms. But no one doubts Cuomo’s knowledge of the workings of government. The questions are about motive, comportment, and why he should be trusted after making such a mess of the governorship.

Of all the candidates onstage, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller and a Brooklyn progressive, seemed happiest to be there. Earlier in the day, theTimes, which had previously announced its intention to break long-held practice and not endorse in local elections this year, published a quasi-endorsement of Lander,the product of a surveyof notable New Yorkers conducted by the paper’s Opinion section. Seven of fifteen respondents—who included a political scientist, a conservative think-tank president, a party strategist, and the restaurateur Danny Meyer—said that Lander was the best candidate in the field; no other candidate got more than two respondents to back them. “His record as a consensus builder and his responsible approach to leadership make him the top choice in an imperfect Democratic field,” the Opinion section’s editors wrote. At the previous televised debate, Lander had got a bit lost. Onstage at John Jay, glowing from theTimes’praise, he seemed to step into himself a little bit more, landing a couple of direct shots on Cuomo, who was standing at a podium to his right.

“Andrew, this is Peter Arbeeny,” Lander said, pointing at a man seated in the audience, during a “cross-examination” portion of the debate, when each candidate was allowed to ask a direct question of one opponent. Peter Arbeeny’s father, Norman Arbeeny, died ofCOVID-19 early in the pandemic. Peter and other members of the Arbeeny family have been vocal critics of Cuomo’s controversial order forcingnursing homesto acceptCOVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals. Lander’s question to Cuomo: “Will you finally apologize to Peter?” Cuomo looked down at his podium as Lander said this, avoiding eye contact with the audience. He grimaced like he couldn’t believe Lander’s gall. “Maybe where you come from in St. Louis, facts don’t matter, but here they do,” Cuomo said, arguing that when compared with other states, New York’s pandemic nursing-home numbers weren’t disproportionately “horrendous.” Then he seemed to remember Arbeeny. “Mr. Arbeeny lost a father. I am very, very sorry for that,” Cuomo said. “He brought a legal case against the state. The legal case was dismissed.”

The acrimony in the race is real. A bunch of the candidates clearly dislike Cuomo from personal experience, or feel bitter about Mamdani’s precociousness and talent for social media. When the candidates and moderators on Thursday took a short break about halfway through, Cuomo turned to his right and approached Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council, and patted her on the back as she smiled tightly. Cuomo spun away and approached Mamdani. The two men shook hands, and Mamdani slipped away looking grim. Earlier in the day, it was reported that a superPACbacking Cuomo had prepared an attack mailer that used a photo filter to make Mamdani’s beard look darker and bushier—which Mamdani denounced as inflammatory and Islamophobic. Cuomo eventually wandered to the front of the stage and spent the rest of the break waving at someone in the audience. (Presumably not Arbeeny.)

No one in the race can claim to be a juggernaut, and each candidate has flaws that not only limit their electoral appeal but suggest some deep problems they might face if they do end up in City Hall. Cuomo, for much of the campaign, has held himself forward as inevitable, the familiar and steady choice, though he’s never topped much more than forty per cent of first-round votes in any poll of the primary. He’s clearly feeling cautious in the campaign’s closing days. After the debate, in the “spin room,” while other candidates made themselves available for one-on-one conversations, Cuomo sent a brash surrogate out to address reporters. Meanwhile, in Mamdani’s best ranked-choice voting poll—which includes a simulation of the city’s new instant-runoff system, where every voter ranks up to five candidates on their ballot—he still loses to Cuomo in the last round by two points, losing Black voters to Cuomo by more than forty points, and Hispanic voters by ten. Mamdani seeks to speak for the city’s working class, yet his voters appear to trend not just younger but whiter, richer, and more male than Cuomo’s. (In the poll where he loses by two, Mamdani loses to Cuomo among women voters by eight points.) Some of his opponents like to paint him as a dangerous radical who will bend the city to his will if he’s elected mayor; he seems just as likely to get squeezed by the political complexities of the job. Five years ago, he supported calls to cut the city’s police budget in the wake ofGeorge Floyd’s murder. On Thursday night, he said, tersely, “I will not defund the police. I will work with the police.”

The debate had a round of questions dedicated to Israel and rising antisemitism—a segment that inevitably put Mamdani, the only Muslim candidate, who has calledIsrael’s war in Gazaa genocide, in the spotlight. Mamdani, whose supporters resent how often he is asked for his opinion on Israel’s right to exist, maneuvered around a question about his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and emphasized his commitment to nonviolence. Cuomo, who has made his support for Israel central to his campaign, was asked to account for why he never made a public visit to a mosque during his terms as governor. He stumbled. “I believe I have, I would have to check the record,” he said, before going back to suggesting that Mamdani is an antisemite. But Cuomo may have seen something in the polling, because he focussed less on his ideological differences with Mamdani and more on questions of age and experience. “Inexperience is dangerous,” he said at one point. “To put a person in this seat, at this time, with no experience is reckless.”

No matter who wins on June 24th, New York City could be in line for a competitive general election for the first time in more than two decades. If Cuomo wins, Mamdani may still appear on the ballot in November, on the progressive Working Families Party line. Eric Adams, the beleaguered incumbent, has announced his intention to appear on the ballot as an Independent. If Cuomo ends up losing the primary, he has pledged to do the same. The Republican nominee, the longtime political gadfly Curtis Sliwa, who, in the late seventies, founded the red-beret-clad vigilante group the Guardian Angels,ran four years agoand garnered twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a head-to-head matchup with Adams. This year, some think Sliwa’s twenty-seven per cent, or something like it, could be enough to win a four-way race. Meanwhile, the city’s housing crisis is worsening, immigration agents are visiting public schools, and the President is looking to destroy Columbia University and other large city institutions. The scale of issues confronting the city is making everyone running look small. No debate, even a surprisingly substantive and lively one, will change that. ♦

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

In 2017, when the United States, Canada, and Mexico jointly applied to host the 2026 edition of the men’s soccer World Cup—the biggest sporting event on earth—their bid led with three buzzwords: “UNITY. CERTAINTY. OPPORTUNITY.” The World Cup, their official “bid book” said, is “the greatest celebration of human togetherness in sport anywhere on the planet”; the three would-be hosts were demonstrating that they were “more than neighbors”—they were “partners.” They also promised “integrity, transparency, responsibility, and full support for fair play,” and pledged to champion “respect for human rights and respect for fundamental freedoms and values.” At the time,Donald Trumphad just taken office. His Muslim travel ban was at odds with the gauzy rhetoric; he also appeared to threaten reprisals against any countries that stood in the way of the bid. In a section titled “Political Information,” the bid book acknowledged that the U.S. was “polarized” and that its image may have “suffered” overseas, but insisted that “the majority of the world” still viewed it positively. And, owing to term limits, it said, Trump could not be President in 2026.

The bid was successful—but the soccer officials behind it, as the PhiladelphiaInquirer’s Will Bunchput itrecently, had clearly never heard of Grover Cleveland. Last month, during Trump’s Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, he said that, in some ways, he’s glad that he didn’t serve his second term consecutively, from 2021 to 2025, because he wouldn’t have been in office for the World Cup, among other important events. “Now look what I have,” he said. “I have everything.” A few weeks earlier, at a public meeting of Trump’s World Cup-planning task force, Gianni Infantino, the Swiss-Italian president ofFIFA, soccer’s global governing body, said, “America will welcome the world.” Vice-PresidentJ. D. Vancepredicted that the tournament would demonstrate “the very best of the United States of America, both in athletic competition but also in hospitality.”

These sunny statements were included as clips in a promotionalvideoof the meeting that Trump posted on social media, but the video didn’t show what Vance said next: “Everybody is welcome to come and see this incredible event,” but, “when the time is up, they’ll have to go home,” otherwise they’d have to contend with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Nor did the video show a later moment, when Trump warned that, if any protesters failed to behave in a “reasonable manner,” they would have to answer to Pam Bondi, the Attorney General—comments that feel even more menacing in light of Trump’smilitarized responsetoprotests this weekin Los Angeles, which is set to host the first World Cup match in the U.S. and seven other games, including a quarterfinal.

The crackdown added to a growing list of potential complications that observers foresee bedevilling the tournament, from the far-fetched, such as the idea that Trump might rename the trophy the “Roy Cohn Cup,” to the highly plausible or already pertinent: long wait times for visas, exacerbated by theDOGEcuts (so much for “CERTAINTY”); the horror stories from the border that are leading tourism to falter; Trump’swider crackdownon immigration, including, effective this week, his new, far-reaching travel ban (so much for “OPPORTUNITY”); and tariff-induced price uncertainty that has contributed to deeply troubled relations between the U.S. and its co-hosts (so much for “UNITY”). During the planning meeting, Infantino seemed to speak the words “Canada” and “Mexico” as if they were an afterthought; Trump noticed and said, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Human-rights groups have expressed fears about the treatment of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and the press; there have been calls for a boycott. Already, the tournament has acquired various unflattering monikers: the “Trade War World Cup”; the “ ‘America First’ World Cup”; the “MAGAWorld Cup”; the “Donald Trump World Cup.”

The tournament could easily become a disaster. But it also seems plausible that Trump will blitz through all the concerns, or at least find ways to sweep them under the rug. (Many autocratic regimes have used sporting events to perform functionality to the world.) Either way, soccer is about to become a much bigger news story in the U.S. The one-year countdown started this week, and a U.S.-hosted “World Cup” for club sides—a trial run, of sorts, for the main event—kicks off tomorrow, amid reports of confusion about the travel rights of visitors, and of undocumented U.S.-based fans opting to stay away from matches for fear of making themselves a target of immigration enforcement. Whatever happens next, the World Cup is a fitting lens through which to understand Trump’s approach to the world, as a second-term Trump doctrine takes shape. And, if the country he runs has strayed from the idealistic language of the bid book on paper, that may make itmoresimilar to other modern-day World Cup hosts, rather than less.

In March, during a different meeting with Infantino at the White House, Trump suggested that the U.S. had never hosted the World Cup before. But it has, back in 1994. I don’t remember the tournament—I was a year old at the time—but, as best as I can tell, the main source of controversy beforehand was soccer’s lack of popularity in the U.S. The event itself was perhaps most memorable for Diana Ross fluffing a noveltypenalty kickduring the opening ceremony—though that was overshadowed by the O. J. Simpson Bronco chase, which took place later on the same day—and the fading Argentinean superstar Diego Maradona being sent home after failing a drug test. By far its darkest moment occurred not on U.S. soil but in Colombia, where Andrés Escobar was murdered after returning home from scoring an own goal that helped eliminate his country.

In the buildup to the next World Cup, Trump’s immigration policies have sometimes clashed very directly with the world of soccer. After the Administration deportedhundreds of Venezuelansto a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador, it emerged that one of them, Jerce Reyes Barrios, had been a professional goalkeeper before moving to the U.S.; a tattoo that officials apparently interpreted as evidence of his membership in a brutal gang was actually a motif representing the top Spanish soccer team Real Madrid. In April, women’s players from Venezuela and Zambia who play for club sides in the U.S. did not leave the country to represent their national teams, amid uncertainty about whether they would be able to get back in. Then, last week, in an executive order, Trump announced full or partial travel restrictions on citizens of nineteen countries, several of which could feasibly qualify for the 2026 World Cup. (Iran has qualified already.) The measure contained an explicit exemption for players, staff, and “immediate relatives” of World Cup teams. But there didn’t appear to be any such exceptions for supporters. Whatever the specifics, the order plainly conflicted with the promise of an open, welcoming tournament. Its representation of Trump’s America First priorities brought to my mind a question that Aaron Timmsposedin theGuardianearlier this year, when he asked whether soccer can “continue to be a globalizing force in a deglobalizing world.”

Aggressive nativism is a core plank of Trump’s world view, but his approach to foreign affairs is more complicated than this alone. Although his instincts might be more isolationist than those of his recent predecessors, he nonetheless seems to see himself as the main character of the world, standing astride a competition of nations that runs mostly on the basis of self-interest, but that also, because this is Trump, has a reality-TV sheen to it, with winnersgetting his favorand losers getting performativelythrashedin front of the cameras. The World Cup shines a light on this dynamic, too, and might even be a useful metaphor for it. Asked, in March, how U.S. tensions with Canada and Mexico might affect the tournament, Trump suggested that they would make it “more exciting,” adding, “Tension’s a good thing”; in May, upon learning that Russia is prohibited from taking part, Trump said that reversing the ban could be a “good incentive” to encourage the country to make peace with Ukraine. And, whereas no one remembers the 1994 World Cup for Bill Clinton, Trump is already claiming ownership of the 2026 edition; Leander Schaerlaeckens,writingin theGuardian, went so far as to predict that it would be “leveraged for the glorification of a leader to a degree not seen since Benito Mussolini dominated the 1934 World Cup in Italy.”

Trump’s foreign policy is guided not only by his exaltation but by financial interests. During his first foreign trip since returning to office, to the Gulf, he announced astronomical investment deals and was dogged by the news that he’d agreed to accept a luxury plane from Qatar, which even some of his diehard supporters seemed to see as a brazenly corrupt act. Among those who joined the trip was Infantino, who, beyond direct World Cup-related business, has reportedly struck up a warm friendship with Trump. (He also attended the Inauguration in January.) Infantino was late to aFIFAcongress in Paraguay because he attended the Gulf junket, leading European soccer officials to accuse him of prioritizing his “private political interests,” but there were some soccer-related matters to attend to, including a ceremony to transfer the World Cup to the U.S. from Qatar, the previous host. Indeed, if the U.S. has pivoted toward the Gulf under Trump,FIFAhas done something strikingly similar; Qatar was awarded the tournament in 2022, and Saudi Arabia will host it in 2034, the logical culmination of the country’s aggressive push to conquer the globalsportingscene. It’s a far cry from the nineties, when the countries to host the World Cup, apart from the U.S., were Italy and France. There’s a metaphor in that, too.

In recent weeks, various foreign-policy commentators have tried to articulate a Trump doctrine. I think that it’s still hazy—and that Trump might not be coherent enough to deserve such schematic treatment—but something he said in Saudi Arabia last month might be the best distillation so far. “In recent years, far too many American Presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” he said. “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment. My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.” Much has changed since the early days of Trump’s first term, but buzzwords still come in threes.

On Trump’s first foreign trip to the Gulf, in 2017, he spoke in similar terms. Back then,FIFA, for all its talk of core values, was already facing loud criticism for awarding the rights to host the World Cup to Qatar, which has persecuted dissidents and L.G.B.T.Q. people, and where migrant laborers died in the process of getting the venues ready. In 2022, whenthat tournamentfinally rolled around, Infantino lashed out at the critics, in remarks that are best remembered for baffling gestures of solidarity—“Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”—that were quickly mocked and memed. But something Infantino said after was perhaps more telling: “For what we Europeans have been doing in the last three thousand years around the world, we should be apologizing for thenextthree thousand years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” Call it the Infantino doctrine. ♦