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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granting treatment privileges to new V.A. doctors; hiring was frozen and a number of job offers for doctors had been rescinded, so there was no one to bring on board.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.” ♦

Orange County Rapid Response Network is a loose association of volunteers—organizers and lawyers and hundreds of concerned residents—who help immigrants fight detention and deportation. On Monday morning, a hotline run by the group received an unusually high number of calls. Uniformed agents from the Department of Homeland Security had been spotted at various locations just west of Santa Ana, the county seat. They had streamed out of a maroon truck in the parking lot of a Home Depot and chased down a day laborer waiting to be hired outside. They had raided a car wash and apprehended someone at a bus stop. “We got a bunch of hits, and we mobilized our first responders to go and confirm the sightings,” Casey Conway, one of two full-time staffers at O.C. Rapid Response, told me. The network circulated warnings on social media, reached out to immigration lawyers, and guided family members through a kit on the “immediate steps to support your loved ones.”

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O.C. Rapid Response was founded by a group of advocates and lawyers at the start ofDonald Trump’sfirst term. Sandra De Anda, the other staffer, joined as a volunteer that year. De Anda is from a Latino and Cambodian neighborhood in Santa Ana, whereICEwas often present. “We were seeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement target people at their homes,” she said. Orange County sits just below Los Angeles and has a population of 3.2 million people, thirty per cent of whom were born outside of the United States. Parts of the county have a strong immigrant identity, while others are proudly nativist. The surfing town of Huntington Beach, for instance, passed an ordinance earlier this year declaring itself a “Non-Sanctuary City for Illegal Immigration for the Prevention of Crime.”

WhereasICEfocussed on home arrests during Trump’s first term, President Joe Biden’s policy was to get people “straight from prison into detention,” Conway told me. Such targeted enforcement, which requires paperwork and time, seems to be over, De Anda explained. “Now it’s about numbers.” As soon as Trump returned to office, he issued an executive order that aimed to “significantly increase” the number of immigration officers and make expedited removal, a sped-up deportation process that had previously been used only at the border, a default policy. In February, Homeland Security launched a series of raids in L.A. Last month,ICEagents started to arrest and detain asylum seekers and other new arrivals at the immigration courthouse in Santa Ana, despite city and state sanctuary policies. A reporter named Ben Camacho found that the Santa Ana police had known on more than forty occasions since Trump’s Inauguration that immigration police would be conducting operations in the city. (Spokespeople for the city of Santa Ana and its police department declined to speak with me.ICEdid not respond to my requests for comment.)

Last Friday,ICEled an operation at Ambiance Apparel, a garment wholesaler in Los Angeles, detaining workers and sparking daily protests. At least a few of those workers have already been deported. “We saw what was happening in L.A., and we were, like, it’s maybe a matter of time before they get to Orange County,” De Anda said.

On Monday, the Administration announced that it would deploy four thousand National Guardsmen and seven hundred marines to greater Los Angeles, claiming that they were needed “to enable federal law-enforcement officers to safely conduct their duties.” O.C. Rapid Response received reports of at least seven raids in the county that morning. The network posted an immediate “call to action” outside Santa Ana’s Civic Center Plaza, a government complex where arrested immigrants are processed:

NOW!MASS ICE RAIDSAROUND ORANGECOUNTY ARE BEINGPROCESSED HERE.Lets show them howOC keeps its peoplesafe.

Detained immigrants were being transported to and from a government building in big white vans with tinted windows. Members of the network lined a driveway leading to the building and swarmed every van that came through. Conway counted fifteen vans in a matter of hours. O.C. Rapid Response could not free people from detention, but they could slow the process down and try to prevent deportation by getting people lawyers. Around noon, federal agents in riot gear pushed through to clear the way for a van. They shoved an older woman, fired rubber bullets, and used pepper spray on the protesters, including Conway. The liquid caught on his glasses and dripped into his eyes.

By the time I arrived, it was sunny and hot, and the demonstration had grown far beyond the network’s direct contacts. A couple hundred people filled the driveway. Every passing car seemed to honk and cheer in support. Vicente Sarmiento, an Orange County supervisor, was in attendance. “I was at Home Depot this morning, and it broke my heart to see six people being taken away,” he told the crowd. An organizer instructed them to write “Grabate y llama este # 9233#” (“Record yourself and call this number”) on their signs and hold them up when a van came through. The number would connect detainees to legal aid. Fernando, a thirty-one year-old delivery driver, told me that he had come becauseICEwas “just abducting people.” He continued, “I’m Mexican, and I have family that’s scared. I don’t even want my mom to go out.” Down the street, about a dozen armed and helmeted federal agents stood at the main entrance to the building.

A phalanx of Santa Ana police officers appeared at the opposite end of the street in the late afternoon. The protesters moved away from them, in the direction of the federal agents. People threw plastic water bottles, and the agents responded with pepper balls and tear gas. People ran. Amid the chaos, two white vans drove through a gap created by the Santa Ana police and into theICEprocessing center.

That night, De Anda and Conway led a training session for people interested in becoming “ICEwatchers.” The network held such events every month or so and, ordinarily, attracted twenty or thirty people. This time, more than three hundred had R.S.V.P.’d, requiring a last-minute scramble for a larger venue. Those who came were of every race, age, and gender. They filled the seats and floorspace of a lecture hall, then two overflow rooms, at Santa Ana College. De Anda went through a series of wonky slides but kept things lively; she writes fiction and does standup comedy on the side. She explained that, becauseICEhadn’t had much luck gaining access to people’s homes, they now seemed to prioritize outdoor areas. She referenced a recent court decision holding that immigration police cannot enter the areas surrounding a residence—a covered porch, a carport, or a back yard—without a judicial warrant. (I learned a new word: “curtilage.”) Conway was exhausted from the protest and the pepper spray; he played a supporting role and ordered pizzas for the crowd.

O.C. Rapid Response is one of two dozen similar networks in California, including Ventura County Defensa and Stand Together Contra Costa. Several members of partner groups were at the training, including Amina Fields, an immigration lawyer at the Council on American-Islamic Relations of California. Earlier in the day, she had held a “NO HATE / NO BAN” sign at Los Angeles International Airport, to oppose Trump’s new travel restrictions on citizens of nineteen countries, in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. Now Fields was trying to figure out how to support the immigrants who had been taken intoICEcustody. “O.C. Rapid Response has created a list of who was recorded being detained, and now we’re going through it,” she told me. “From the legal side, it’s much harder once they’re detained.” Like De Anda and Conway, who is the child of a Vietnamese refugee, Fields has personal connections to these efforts. When she was young, she emigrated from Vietnam by way of a Thai refugee camp, and she spent a decade in the U.S. Air Force before going to law school. She was angered by Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and the Marines. “To put them against their own community members, their own family members—there is no need to have the military here,” she said.

On Tuesday morning, the O.C. Rapid Response hotline was still buzzy. Hundreds gathered again outside the building where detainees were taken—and were met by a frightening display of tactical vehicles and National Guardsmen. “It feels like an occupation,” De Anda told me. “They are doing as they have been directed, to destabilize our communities, our economy.” Reports ofICEraids spread. On Instagram, the network distributed whatever information it could verify on the movements of Homeland Security. “We received an anonymous tip thatICEis going to be present at the Orange County Social Services building on South Grand Avenue, Santa Ana either today or tomorrow,” one post read in English and Spanish.

That day,Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, told a House Subcommittee that the National Guard members and Marines could be in greater L.A. for two more months. The estimated cost was a hundred and thirty-four million dollars, just to cover food, transportation, and lodging. “I think we’re entering another phase, especially under President Trump, with his focus on the homeland,” he said. The National Guard would be a “critical component.” (A federal appeals court will soon consider whether to uphold a lower court’s decision to temporarily block the mobilization.)

Military convoys sped down Interstate 5; anICEcheckpoint went up at an exit near a school. GovernorGavin Newsomgave a speech after Hegseth testified, saying, “Other states are next. Democracy is next.” There were marches in Austin, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. In Southern California, rapid response became the strategy of the moment. Every union and nonprofit seemed to be advertising a help hotline and know-your-rights materials. Community group chats, focussed on particular neighborhoods, proliferated on Signal. In Arcadia, northeast of L.A., protesters yelled and banged on instruments for twelve hours outside a Hilton Garden Inn that was housingICEofficers; by Tuesday night, the officers packed up and left. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, admitted that demonstrations were making enforcement “more difficult.” He told the right-wing activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk thatICErequired more resources to carry out mass deportations: “We need more officers. Need more beds. Need more planes.”

O.C. Rapid Response tried to celebrate a small win. In the course of tracking down a community member who had been arrested, usingICE’s “online detainee locator system,” the network discovered that the city of Glendale, in L.A. County, had an active federal contract to hold immigrants in its jail. The contract apparently predated the state’s 2017 sanctuary law, and was permitted as an exception. A few days after O.C. Rapid Response members and the lawyer representing the community member publicized the issue, Glendale cancelled the contract. The decision was “not politically driven,” the city said.

That meant one less way station, but the community member still ended up detained. As of this month, more than fifty-one thousand immigrants are inICEdetention, the highest number since 2019. And California’s largest private facility, the Adelanto Detention Center, owned by the GEO Group, recently resumed business, after the settlement of a class-action lawsuit over unsafe conditions during the pandemic. Late last year, because of that litigation, the facility held just three inmates; it can now house up to nineteen hundred. “In this work, you have to accept the David role, as in David and Goliath,” Conway told me. “A lot of victories will feel like losses, but it’s still resistance.”♦

At three o’clock on Friday morning, sirens blared across Israel, and my family in Tel Aviv sprang awake. As I shuffled my groggy children to the stairwell of our apartment building, I noticed that a garbage truck outside was carrying on as usual: loading a bin, unloading an empty one, beeping in reverse. Sirens have become so frequent in the past eighteen months that some Israelis have become inured to the threat.

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“Brother!” someone shouted from a nearby window. “It’s Iran!”

The truck driver reconsidered. He stopped in the middle of the street, got out, and ducked inside our building to wait it out.

Across the Persian Gulf, Israel was carrying out a sophisticated attack against Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon. Warplanes struck the Natanz nuclear facility, while other operations killed Iran’s top military general, the leader of its Revolutionary Guards, the head of its Air Force, and at least six nuclear scientists. News images showed apartment buildings in Tehran with smoke billowing from specific rooms, indicating precisely targeted attacks (though Iran said that eighty civilians were also killed). An unnamed security source told Channel 12 that the Mossad intelligence services had recently established bases inside Iran, where they kept precision missiles and suicide drones. The news aired grainy black-and-white footage of masked Mossad agents on the ground there, delicately setting down what were reportedly explosive drones, aimed at destroying the country’s air defenses. For twenty years, Israel had threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Seemingly within minutes, it suddenly had. On Israeli television, military reporters warned of “complicated days ahead.” Yonit Levi, the anchorwoman of the leading news network on Channel 12, declared, “We are entering an entirely new situation.”

The attack left many analysts asking: why now? The preceding days had been eventful. A dispute over the prospect of subjecting ultra-Orthodox men to the military draft had threatened to topple the Israeli government, as the opposition tried to dissolve the parliament. Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahumanaged to scuttle the attempt, but his coalition emerged scathed and fractious. A U.N. watchdog had also declared that Iran was in violation of nuclear safeguards. Israeli intelligence has long warned that Iran was on the brink of having “breakout” capabilities—the ability to transform its weapons-grade uranium into a bomb—but the new declaration was seen as unusually damning.

Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran over its nuclear program have been under way in recent weeks and were set to resume next week in Oman. Some speculated that the attacks were intended to disrupt the talks. Raz Zimmt, the director of the Iran program at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, acknowledged to reporters on Friday that Israel clearly “did not want a bad deal with Iran.” But when I asked him if this explained the timing of the strikes, he demurred. “I certainly don’t think Israel will be displeased that it managed to stop negotiations between Iran and the U.S.,” he said, but added that Israel’s real aim was to degrade Iranian capabilities.

Nadav Eyal, a well-sourced columnist for Israel’sYediot Ahronotnewspaper, went further, arguing that the attacks had been planned to occur between rounds of talks in order to deceive Iran’s leadership. He wrote on X that the Israelis had “planted the idea that nothing could happen” before the negotiations resumed in Oman in order to lull top Iranian commanders into a sense of “false security” before they were targeted.

Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general and a former national-security adviser to Netanyahu, insisted that Mossad—which he said had conducted three separate operations in Iran—worked on its own timeline. “A military operation you can postpone—you tell the pilots to go home,” he said. “But when you have what the Mossad had inside Iran, you cannot postpone and renew whenever you want. So the pressure came from the Mossad side. The longer that you are inside Iran, you are in danger of being exposed.” He also noted that it made tactical sense to strike while Iran was weak. Its proxies in Lebanon and Syria, once a potent force in the region, had sustained immense damage in recent fighting. A covert Israeli operation in October had left its air defenses gravely compromised. As Netanyahu weighed the threat of a response, Amidror said, he didn’t have to “take into consideration a hundred thousand missiles from Lebanon.”

Israel continued the attacks on Friday, including a second strike on Natanz, the uranium-enrichment site; there were some indications that it also had its sights on Iran’s most fortified site, in Fordo. An argument festered over whether there had been help from America. Eyal, theYediotcolumnist, said in his post that “without a green light from the U.S., none of this would have happened.” He added, “A strike like this requires American coordination—over Middle East airspace, over shared intelligence, over ammunition supply chains.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed in a statement that the attacks were “unilateral action” by Israel and that the U.S. was “not involved in the strikes.” But PresidentDonald Trumpseemed to almost relish them, telling an ABC reporter, “They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there’s more to come. A lot more.”

The full extent of the damage will likely not be known for a long time, though Iran acknowledged that “several parts” of its facility in Natanz had been damaged. Amidror, the former general, argued that the exact results of the strikes were beside the point. “Israel showed its capabilities to deter,” he said. “Philosophically, it doesn’t matter by how much Israel succeeded in postponing the actual plan.” He suggested that, for Israel, the scientists had been even more important targets than the military and Revolutionary Guards leaders were.

In Israel, there was widespread pride that the country had succeeded in a complex intelligence operation, especially after its spectacular failure to prevent the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. But questions swirled. Did this constitute a new war? Or an escalation of the twenty months of conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza? Hezbollah announced that it would not instigate an attack against Israel. But even without the aid of Hezbollah, Iran’s leaders felt intense pressure to mount an aggressive response.

On Friday, Iran threatened to retaliate, saying that the “end of the story will be written by Iran’s hand.” Israeli schools and workplaces closed, along with all the synagogues. The public was ordered not to congregate and to stay close to bomb shelters. Typically, when there are incoming rockets, Israelis are advised to seek cover and wait for ten minutes. This time, the head of Israel’s Home Front Command said, at the sound of a siren, “we go into our protected spaces and we don’t leave.”

Amos Harel, a military reporter forHaaretz,suspected that Iran would attempt to strike not just military assets but also civilian targets inside Israel. Last April, when Iran launched more than three hundred drones and missiles across the border, an international coalition led by Israel destroyed ninety-nine per cent of them. But Iran still had some two thousand ballistic missiles in its arsenal, with the capability to produce about fifty more each month. It was unclear how much of this capacity remained after Thursday night’s attack, but on Israeli television the alarm was still palpable. Would Iran manage to overwhelm Israel this time around? And how far backdidthe attack set Iran? Months? Years?

Our building has a windowless stairwell, but not the kind of protected space required by the Home Front Command, so we hustled the kids to my in-laws’ place to wait out the threat. As we drove, the streets filled with people buying groceries and lugging six-packs of water bottles. One man bought flowers. On the radio, a newscaster advised drivers, “Leave your window open a little, so you can hear if something is happening.” Helicopters circled above. My son, staring up, asked how come they were allowed to fly, when the news said that Israel’s airspace had been shut down completely.

As the hours ticked by on Friday, reactions in Israel vacillated between extremes. A contingent of triumphant-sounding analysts suggested that the military was eliminating the Iranian threat, centrifuge by centrifuge. Ben Caspit, a longtime Netanyahu biographer and critic, quoted from private conversations in which the Prime Minister reportedly boasted of an imminent “end to the age of wars.” Some predicted that the strikes could collapse the Iranian regime.

On the other side were those who cautioned that, even if the regime does collapse, the fall won’t be quick, and no one can be sure what will succeed it. Their unease was exacerbated by Israel’s profound leadership crisis. Most residents are already distrustful of Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza, which has devastated the Palestinian enclave and its two million residents. Fifty-three per cent of Israelis believe that he is driven to prolong the war for his own political survival. “His actions and statements over the past two and a half years have proven that the man no longer has any red lines,” Harel, theHaaretzreporter, wrote on Friday. Even Bibi’s partisans acknowledged that the country must, as Israel’s chief military spokesman put it, “brace for a prolonged operation,” in which the threat of Iranian retaliation was constant.

On Friday evening, the sirens sounded again, and my family rushed back to the secure room. Somewhere overhead, the Iranian response had begun: about a hundred drones, according to the I.D.F., and waves of missiles. Most were intercepted, but a building near us was destroyed. Six other buildings in the city were hit, and there were reports of blasts in Jerusalem. After two hours in the shelter, my children were sprawled in exhaustion on the floor, but my eighteen-month-old kept pointing at the ceiling, unsettled. Israel’s defense minister had vowed that “the Ayatollah regime would pay a very heavy price.” Perhaps we all will. ♦

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. ♦

After the first cycle of attacks between Israel and Iran, on Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a direct appeal to Iranians to rise up against theocratic rule. Operation Rising Lion—the code name for Israel’s sweeping assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders—was “clearing the path” for them, he said, in a video released by his administration. “The time has come,” he said, “to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime.” That regime, he added, has “never been weaker.” Then, in Farsi, with Israel’s flag behind him, Netanyahu invoked the rallying cry that mobilized tens of thousands of Iranians during the nationwide“Woman, Life, Freedom” protestsin 2022. “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” he said. On Saturday, he claimed, in another video, that senior Iranian leaders were already “packing their bags” and preparing to flee.

Israel’s campaign, militarily and rhetorically, has quickly evolved beyond its initial targets. Over the weekend, it hit Iran’s energy facilities, including a gas depot and an oil refinery, triggering huge fires and spewing smoke across the sprawling capital of about ten million people. “Tehran is burning,” the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, boasted on X. Energy resources were struck in other cities, too, sabotaging Iran’s main sources of revenue. Israeli officials also began telling local and foreign media outlets that assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader since 1989, was “not off limits.” (President Donald Trump reportedly vetoed the idea, but the fact that Israeli leaders even discussed it with their counterparts in Washington reflects how far they’re willing to go.)

Israel has long had military superiority over Iran. In the past two years, it has conducted brazen air strikes and novel covert operations against the Islamic Republic’s allies across the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. It has assassinated senior political leaders and killed thousands of fighters. Israel has even more momentum now. But achieving conclusive results will be tough—whether that’s obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its sophisticated arsenal of missiles, crippling its economy, or spurring a counter-revolution.

“The initial attack was so spectacularly successful that it’s hard not to raise your goals,” General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., who led U.S. Central Command from 2019 to 2022, told me. But, he cautioned, “You’ve got to know what’s feasible.” Israel can “significantly” degrade Iran’s nuclear program, “but I don’t think it’s possible to completely eliminate it.” In 2020, McKenzie carried out President Trump’s order to killGeneral Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, who masterminded dozens of attacks on U.S. targets. The Quds Force has continued to orchestrate attacks on U.S. personnel in the region, however.

Ehud Barak, a former Israeli Prime Minister and a retired general, estimated that Israel could delay Iran’s nuclear program only by several weeks. “Even the U.S. cannot delay them by more than a few months,” Barak said, on Friday, on CNN. Iran has dispersed its nuclear program—which Tehran claims is only for peaceful energy production—among different parts of the country. One of its primary facilities is at Fordow, which is buried more than two hundred feet under the Zagros Mountains, near the holy city of Qom.

Israel and the international community have long worried that Iran’s program could be expanded to build a bomb. In Washington, the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group led by nuclear experts and former U.S. officials, warned that Operation Rising Lion could backfire by “strengthening Tehran’s resolve to advance its sensitive nuclear activities and possibly proceed to weaponization, a step it has not taken up to this point.”

Israel’s elimination of Iran’s military brass may be a setback, “but it is not a strategy for ending Iran’s program,” Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. team that negotiated the nuclear deal signed by Iran and the world’s six major powers, in 2015, told me. (Trump unilaterally withdrew from that deal, which placed limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for economic-sanctions relief, in 2018.) In just two days, Israel assassinated the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, the top commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the head of the country’s aerospace-and-missile program. “The Supreme Leader will just replace them with their deputies, and then their deputies, and their deputies after that,” Sherman said.

The odds of Israeli-inspired regime change also seem small right now. On X, Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of Iran analysis for Israeli military intelligence, warned that Netanyahu’s government has embarked on a war based on the “illusion” that it can suck in the U.S. for the “hidden goal” of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. “The bigger problem,” he wrote, is “how exactly . . . Israel intend[s] to end the war and preserve its achievements without entering a war of attrition” that becomes open-ended, like itswar in Gaza, with no clear exit strategy.

In 2003, President George W. Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to destroy Baghdad’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The implicit goal was also to topple then President Saddam Hussein. However, Iraq turned out not to have any weapons of mass destruction—and the U.S. was stuck there for eight turbulent years, an occupation that generated the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which was led by prisoners detained by American forces. Israel’s opening salvos in the current conflict are “reminiscent of our shock and awe going into Iraq, when everyone thought we were so powerful,” Sherman noted. “And then shock and awe became mired down.” In any country under attack, people tend to rally around the flag. Persian nationalism dates back some five thousand years, when tribes united to create the world’s first major empire. “I don’t think that dies easily,” Sherman said. “And you don’t know what you’re creating when you try to destroy.”

For more than three decades, I’ve had a running dialogue with Nasser Hadian, a U.S.-educated political scientist who has taught at both Columbia and the University of Tehran. We spoke again—I in Washington, he in Tehran—this weekend, via WhatsApp. About eighty per cent of Iran’s ninety-two million people oppose the country’s hard-line leadership, he said, but only a “very small number” would embrace Netanyahu’s call for regime change. Israel’s onslaught makes any “attempt to replace the government” less likely, at least for now. Even with possible unrest among minorities on the geographic and political periphery of Iran, such as the Baloch and the Kurds, the Iranian state still “has enough support to survive,” he said.

Jonathan Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer, recently wrote that many Israelis once thought political change in Iran would “prompt a new and better day,” because “nothing could be worse than the current theocratic regime.” But, he cautioned, history proves the alternatives can “always be worse”; the more likely outcome, Panikoff argued, in a piece for the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, is not a democracy but a “Revolutionary Guard Corps–istan” that is even more radical. “In such a case, Israel might find itself in a perpetual, ongoing, and far more intense war that is no longer in the shadows, as it has been for years.” Or, other experts are warning, Iran could devolve into a failing state bogged down in internal chaos, as happened in Iraq, with unintended consequences that rippled throughout the region.

There is, as yet, no organized or disciplined opposition group—either in Iran or in exile—capable of marching into Tehran and seizing power, Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, told me. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, who was overthrown in the 1979 Revolution, has lived outside Washington, D.C., for more than four decades. I once asked him at a Washington dinner party what language he dreamed in. “English or French,” he replied. He couldn’t remember dreaming in Farsi.

Now under siege, Tehran has few options. Its only “good strategy” is not to appear willing to back down, Vaez said. Its vast energy resources and geostrategic position in the Persian Gulf do provide some leverage, and oil prices have surged since hostilities erupted. The price of U.S. crude jumped seven per cent in the first twenty-four hours. Iran has the world’s third-largest oil reserves; it also controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of global energy supplies pass each day. If the war spills beyond the Middle East, Vaez said, Tehran may be hoping that international energy markets become even more rattled and that “Trump would blink first and get Israel to stop.”

There appears to be no off-ramp yet, as the destruction and death toll mount in both countries. In Iran, more than two hundred people have been killed, and thousands more injured. Israel, in turn, has been deeply shaken by retaliatory missile attacks, which have killed at least twenty and injured hundreds. On Saturday, Iran pulled out of nuclear negotiations that had been scheduled to take place in Oman the next day. The Trump Administration is insisting that diplomacy is not dead, however. On Sunday, the President said, “Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal.” Many calls and meetings were happening behind the scenes, he claimed, on Truth Social. “I do a lot, and never get credit for anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand. MAKE THE MIDDLE EAST GREAT AGAIN!”

On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, charged that Israel is undermining attempts at diplomacy on nuclear issues. Tehran has been willing to limit its controversial program, but also does not want to lose its right to enrich uranium at low levels for peaceful applications, he told foreign diplomats. (As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to produce civilian nuclear energy.) Iran needs nuclear energy to meet the demands of its growing population; sporadic blackouts are already commonplace.

In April, the Trump Administration set a sixty-day limit on negotiations for a new nuclear deal. (The 2015 pact took two years of tortured diplomacy and ended up as a hundred-and-fifty-nine-page document, plus annexes.) Israel’s attack on Friday happened on day sixty-one, Trump noted. Hadian, the political scientist, told me that many Iranians now believe that the U.S. engaged in “coördinated deception” with Israel. Just getting back to the table will be hard. Reaching a new deal will almost certainly be even harder, despite Iran’s losses. Revolutionary regimes are inherently paranoid. Like Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza, the President is unlikely to be able to end the new hostilities—in an enduring way—quickly. ♦

When a “purchasing group” won a ninety-five-million-dollar jackpot, the victory caused a scandal in a state where opposition to legal gambling remains widespread.

On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the Lotto Texas jackpot was seventy-three million dollars. There was no winner that night—there hadn’t been a winner for the past ninety-one drawings—and so the pool of money rolled over. By the next drawing, that Saturday, it had reached ninety-five million. Dawn Nettles started getting worried. For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me. “Somebody was buying all the combinations.”

Nettles is seventy-four, with cropped copper hair and the bearing of a gently exasperated elementary-school teacher. She lives in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, with her husband, a flight instructor, and she devotes her days to theLotto Report, a publication closely tracking the Texas Lottery. In the three decades since she started theReport, Nettles has evolved from being an enthusiast of the lottery to perhaps its most biting critic.

There are nearly twenty-six million possible combinations for Lotto Texas; Powerball, in comparison, has nearly three hundred million. A player, or a group of players, with the financial and logistical resources can effectively guarantee a win—and, if the prize pool is big enough, a hefty profit. This idea struck Nettles as immensely unfair. That week, she bought more tickets than she had in years. “I kept saying, ‘God, come on, let me hold the winning ticket so these people don’t come out ahead,’ ” she said.

That Saturday, the Texas Lottery Commission put out a press release celebrating the “rare and very exciting opportunity for our players”: the biggest Lotto Texas jackpot in more than a decade. “Players are turning out in droves to have the exclusive chance at winning the largest jackpot prize on the continent,” Gary Grief, the lottery’s executive director, said. Nettles posted an update to theLotto Reportwebsite. “I fear tonight will be a very sad night for Texas Lottery players,” shewrote. “Now the Texas Lottery is probably going to be successful in screwing every player and retailer that resides in Texas.”

There are plenty of Texans who oppose the lottery for moral reasons. Nettles is not one of them. Some of her earliest memories involve accompanying her grandmother to a bingo hall in Wichita Falls; at one point, she told me, she considered Las Vegas her “home away from home.” She became interested in small-scale publishing, and went on to run a real-estate magazine calledUnexaggerated Homes of Dallas, in which, she said, “builders could not use adjectives—what you see is what you get.” Shortly after Texas launched its lottery, in 1992, Nettles began producing theLotto Report, a print newsletter that she likened to the racing forms sold at racetracks. Gamblers are mystics at heart, and lottery players see all sorts of patterns in the supposedly random sequences of winning numbers. TheLotto Reportprovided fodder for their scrying. “It was basically telling a story about all the numbers, what’s been drawn with what, what’s overdue, what the good pairs are,” she said. “Just a complete, thorough deal on the numbers.”

Nettles came to feel that the Texas Lottery was being badly run, and was perhaps even corrupt. TheLotto Reportbecame something of a watchdog publication, railing against rule changes and the lottery commission’s wasteful spending. The website version launched in 1998, and its look hasn’t changed much in the intervening decades. Its aesthetic could be summed up as “crank-adjacent”: there is an overwhelming amount of erratically capitalized and bolded text, punctuated with exclamations like “Unreal!” and “Unbelievable!” and “If you have high blood pressure, don’t read any further!” In 2014, NettlestoldtheTexasTribunethat she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery. She showed up at commission meetings, made public-records requests, and scrutinized the director’s spending. She lobbied against a rule revision that allowed winners to remain anonymous and accused the commission of not paying winners their full share. (After an internal investigation, the lottery commission concluded that it had followed policy.) At one point, she says, the lottery removed her from its media list, so she no longer got official results via fax. “I thought, Fine, I’ll show you. So I got me a satellite feed so I could watch the drawings in real time,” she said. Rob Kohler, a former employee of the Texas Lottery, told me that, early in his career, he’d planned a conference for the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. He got word that a group of protesters had shown up. “I was, like, Good Lord,whocould be protesting this conference?” he said. “And there was Dawn Nettles.”

As Nettles had predicted, on April 22nd, someone won the ninety-five-million-dollar jackpot. Grief, the Texas Lottery director, soon acknowledged that “purchasing groups” had been involved. The bulk buy was recognized as unfair but legal; the lottery paid out the prize money, which, after taxes, amounted to nearly fifty-eight million dollars. (The HoustonChronicleeventuallyreportedthat a London-based gambling syndicate had bankrolled the operation.) Two years later, it has become a full-blown scandal. The Texas Rangers have been called in to investigate what Dan Patrick, Texas’s lieutenant governor, has called “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” (No criminal charges have been filed; the lawyer that represents Rook TX, the Delaware L.L.C. that claimed the jackpot, has said that “all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed.”)

At least some of the credit for the recent scrutiny of the Texas Lottery is due to Nettles’s persistence. As she saw it, if she had figured out before the drawing that a bulk buy was in the works, how could the Texas Lottery not have known? And, if the commissioners had known, why had they let it happen? She kept calling Kohler, who, after leaving the Texas Lottery, became the state’s top anti-gambling lobbyist, working for the Baptist-affiliated Christian Life Commission. “Bless her heart, she was just busting my chops,” Kohler told me. “If folks would have taken the time to listen to her, instead of taking her suggestions as an affront, well, I tell you, we’d never be where we’re at right now.”

The most consequential political battles in Texas happen not between Democrats and Republicans—there’s not much suspense in a state so thoroughly dominated by one party—but within Republican factions. Gambling is one of the subjects that reveals ideological fault lines: pro-business Republicans frame it as a “freedom and liberty issue,” as one lawmaker hasput it, and moralizers see it as state-subsidized sin.

Nearly forty states have legalized some form of sports gambling, most of them having done so after 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had restricted sports betting to Nevada. The interest has spilled over into other forms of gambling. Casino attendance is up, and the average age of visitors has dropped from fifty to forty-two. So far, though, Texas has resisted many forms of gambling. It has long prohibited non-tribal casinos and sports betting, despite lobbying from powerful figures, including Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate who also owns the Dallas Mavericks. For the past few legislative sessions, armies of lobbyists have descended on the state capitol, in Austin, trying to push for various forms of gambling.

Until recently, the lottery had been something of an afterthought. “There’s a concern in the lottery space about the aging customer base, especially as you have all these new gambling options in a lot of states,” Matt Carey, a reporter who covers the gambling industry forVIXIO, told me. In recent years, a new kind of company has been targeting a younger demographic, countering this concern. Lottery couriers, as they are known, pitch themselves as Uber or DoorDash for lottery players, providing an easy-to-use interface that allows users to buy tickets on their phones. “The couriers are trying to attract a player that isn’t, you know, my dad—somebody in their twenties or thirties who’s used to doing everything on their phone and hasn’t traditionally been a lottery player,” Carey said.

Nettles became aware of the courier companies around 2019, when she noticed that a handful of stores seemed to be selling an inordinate number of winning tickets. She went to visit one, Winner’s Corner, in a nondescript building in North Austin. Texas law mandates that lottery venders be open to the public and sell things other than lottery tickets. At Winners Corner, which is owned by a courier company called Jackpocket, a table by the register was stacked with board games. The real business took place in a back room, where dozens of lottery terminals churned out tickets for online customers and machines removed the surfaces from scratch-offs. In 2024, Winners Corner was by far the most popular lottery retailer in the state, selling a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, more than the next twenty-five retailers combined; 99.9 per cent of those sales were made to online customers,accordingto theTexasTribune. Jackpocket, which was founded in a SoHo WeWork space in 2013, has since been acquired by the sports-betting juggernaut DraftKings, for some seven hundred and fifty million dollars.

The legal status of lottery couriers is still evolving. New York and New Jersey have established processes to license them, and a handful of other states have banned them. A Texas law from the early nineties prohibits lottery sales from happening “over the phone,” to discourage underage or out-of-state buyers. A state audit later concluded that Grief “seemed quite comfortable operating in the gray areas of the State Lottery Act,” particularly when it came to courier companies. Grief maintained that his agency had no ability to regulate couriers, but his approach was hardly hands-off. “The lottery openly welcomed couriers,” said Thomas Metzger, the C.E.O. and founder of Lotto.com, a courier company, who told me that he spoke with Grief or his deputies on a weekly basis. Operating in a regulation-free environment made some courier companies uneasy. “We actually drafted and proposed regulations several times,” Metzger claimed, but, he said, the Texas Lottery didn’t take them up on the suggestions. (Grief’s attorney has said that his client “adamantly denies being part of any dishonest, fraudulent, or illegal scheme.”)

In the aftermath of the 2023 bulk buy, Texas politicians put much of the blame on the couriers. The couriers, for their part, have argued that they’re being scapegoated to deflect attention away from broader issues within the Texas Lottery Commission. In any event, the freewheeling atmosphere in Texas seems to have attracted businesses with questionable pedigrees. Lottery.com, which ended up managing the on-the-ground logistics for the 2023 lottery plan, relocated from California to Texas in 2017. One founding executive, who identified himself as a “crypto thought leader,” was involved in a plan, after Hurricane Maria, to transform Puerto Rico into a Bitcoin utopia.

Lottery.com seems to have struggled, initially. One potential investor, who visited the Lottery.com’s offices in Austin,toldBloomberg Tax, “I said, this isn’t a corporate office; this is a failed 7-Eleven with three goddamn machines.” In 2022, an investigation found that the company had sold more than half a million tickets to out-of-state players, which is illegal. Three top executives left the company. Two of them, Ryan Dickinson and Matt Clemenson, have since pleaded guilty to separate securities-fraud charges. That same year, the company stopped selling lottery tickets, its license as a lottery retailer in Texas was suspended, and its app was removed from the Apple and Google stores.

Texas Lottery executives initially portrayed the 2023 bulk buy as having caught them by surprise, but later testimony and reporting has called this into question. That April, Lottery.com’s retailer license was reinstated, and shortly thereafter the Texas Lottery Commission fielded an urgent request for dozens of ticket-printing terminals. Such a request was “very unusual,” Texas Lottery’s then deputy director, Ryan Mindell, later admitted. Metzger, of Lotto.com, got word that a bulk-buying operation was in the works—“let’s put it this way, the lottery industry is a small place,” he said—and reached out to Grief around a week before the drawing, cautioning him against providing the terminals. “Regardless of whether it was legal, I knew the optics were going to be terrible if someone outside of Texas won a local game,” he told me. But, according to a lawsuit filed by Lotto.com against the Texas Lottery Commission, Grief dismissed his concerns and “responded by saying that he thought Metzger was a ‘free market guy.’ ” IGT, the company that runs lottery operations in the state, delivered and installed the terminals to four locations; in short order, they were being used to generate millions of tickets. (Although courier companies were central to planning the bulk buy, the ticket purchases took place within the state, and not via their apps.)

It remains to be determined how much of this, if any, was illegal. In any case, the fallout has been dramatic, and much of the negative publicity has fallen on the courier companies. Grief retired abruptly last year. Mindell, his deputy, took over and promptly banned couriers. (A newly formed advocacy group, the Coalition of Texas Lottery Couriers, which includes representatives from Jackpocket, Jackpot.com, and Lotto.com, argued that the Texas Lottery Commission “ignored the warning, bent the rules, and provided the terminals necessary for an international syndicate to game the system” and “allowed lottery couriers to become the scapegoat for its own questionable activities.”) Then, this past April, Mindell resigned. TheTexasScorecard, an influential far-right news site, has been unrelenting in its criticism of pro-lottery Republicans. It seemed, briefly, that state lawmakers might vote to end the lottery entirely. At the last minute, they elected to disband it in its current form and reformulate it under a different state agency. The prospect of expanding gambling in Texas seems highly unlikely.

Nettles is still getting used to being taken seriously by powerful people. In February, at a legislative hearing about the Texas Lottery’s future, she put her name on the list to give public testimony, as she had many times before. Once her allotted three minutes were up, she grabbed her purse and began to walk away. The lawmakers called her back. “Ma’am, before you go, you’ve made some very good, specific suggestions,” one said. “Do you have some others that need to be made?”

I recently met Nettles at a Starbucks in Waco, the midway point between our homes, where she ordered her vanilla latte without a lid so that there was room for extra whipped cream on top. She had brought her laptop to update theLotto Reportwith the most recent numbers. “There are a hundred and twenty-seven drawings a week,” she grumbled. “It’s ridiculous.” When she started the publication, there were fewer than a dozen.

She seemed nostalgic for the early days. The jackpots weren’t enormous, but they were big enough to change your life. At some point, however, thelottery got addicted to growth: Powerball, Mega Millions, additional drawings, ballooning jackpots, convoluted games, fifty-dollar scratch-offs, hundred-dollar scratch-offs.

“I like to play. I like to play cards, and dominoes, and that sort of thing. It was just fun,” she said. “Before the lottery was voted in, people kept saying, ‘You don’t want that.’ ‘That’s corruption.’ ‘That’s bad.’ I didn’t listen to them, because I thought, That just can’t be. But it turns out all those people were right. We shouldn’t have it, because money is evil. I’ve always known that money is evil—it was just the fact that I like to play. I’m a player, yeah. But I don’t play like I did.” ♦

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. ♦