Trump, Who Calls Mail-in Voting ‘Cheating,’ Just Voted by Mail

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“President Trump, who has criticized mail-in voting, voted by mail in a Florida special election. Despite his claims of widespread voter fraud, Trump has used mail-in voting himself and supports exceptions for illness, disability, military service, or travel. The SAVE Act, which Trump supports, aims to restrict mail-in voting and increase voter identification requirements.

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President Trump has long fixated on mail-in voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. But he recently used the method in a Florida special election.

March 24, 2026Updated 7:14 a.m. ET

President Trump at Palm Beach International Airport on Monday.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

President Trump, who has long railed against mail-in voting — including on Monday, when he called it “mail-in-cheating” — used the method himself in a Florida special election scheduled to take place on Tuesday.

According to voter records on the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website, Mr. Trump voted by mail in Palm Beach County, home to his Mar-a-Lago Club. Records show he has been registered to vote there since 2019 — and that he mailed his ballot at least one other time, in 2020.

The website noted that Mr. Trump’s voter status was “by mail ballot” and that it had been counted in the special election that will determine whether Democrat Emily Gregory or Republican Jon Maples, whom Mr. Trump endorsed, will represent Mr. Trump’s district in the Florida state house.

Mr. Trump’s most recent vote, reported earlier by The Washington Post, comes as the president torpedoed negotiations to end the partial government shutdownto demand Republican lawmakers pass legislation called the SAVE Act that would stiffen voter identification requirements and make mail-in voting significantly more difficult.

The White House said in a statement that the legislation was not designed to eliminate mail-in voting. “The SAVE America Act has common-sense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel — but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed,” the statement said. “As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C.”

During an appearance in Memphis, Tenn., on Monday, he argued that the voter identification bill was essential to national security. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.”

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court appeared poised to reject Mississippi’s mail-in ballot law, a decision that could upend mail-in voting throughout the country. A decision in the case, brought by the Republican Party, is expected by late June or early July. It could affect hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots for hotly contested congressional races in November.

Mr. Trump has long fixated on mail-in-voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, and has called the SAVE Act one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the country’s history. During his State of the Union address, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that “cheating is rampant in our elections” and called for “no more crooked mail-in ballots,” though states that vote entirely by mail see very little fraud.

Mr. Trump has called for some exceptions for mail-in voting, such as when voters are ill, disabled, traveling or in the military. But it is unclear why Mr. Trump chose to mail his ballot for this week’s Florida’s special election. He has spent the last two weekends in West Palm Beach during the early voting period, which started on March 14 and ended on Sunday.

According to the elections website, his polling location is within a 15-minute drive of both his residence and his golf club.

Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.“

Trump Bulls**ts About Iran Negotiations & Throws ICE Into Airport Chaos Mix | The Daily Show

 

HISTORY-MAKING protests anticipated at Saturday's 'No Kings' events to push back on Trump policies

 

 

Trump Faces Blowback on Easing Iran Oil Sanctions

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“The Trump administration is facing backlash for temporarily lifting sanctions on Iranian oil, potentially giving Iran a $14 billion windfall. This move, intended to boost global oil supplies and ease energy prices, contradicts Trump’s past criticism of the Obama administration’s sanctions relief for Iran. While Treasury Secretary Bessent argues this will reduce Iran’s ability to profit from restricted oil sales, critics question the effectiveness of the plan and its implications for U.S. foreign policy.

​

President Trump once assailed the Obama administration for making cash payments to Iran. Now he supports sanctions relief that could give the country a $14 billion windfall.

March 23, 2026

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Trump administration officials are struggling to explain the logic of lifting sanctions on Iranian oil.Eric Lee for The New York Times

An agreement by the Obama administration to send $1.7 billion to Tehran around the same time that it reached a sweeping deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program drew fierce backlash from Republicans, including Donald J. Trump.

A decade later, the Trump administration is on the defensive as it tries to justify temporarily lifting sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that is currently sitting at sea. With oil prices hovering around $100 a barrel, the sanctions relief, which is intended to boost global supplies of crude to ease energy prices, could give Iran a $14 billion windfall at the same time the United States is waging a war on the country.

“The result of all of this is they are conceding the fact that the Iranians have leverage over whether the U.S. can continue to prosecute the war,” said Richard Nephew, a former State Department and National Security Council official in the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement. “You have gone to the Iranians and told them, ‘You have our Achilles’ heel.’”

He added: “This is asking them to please, please, please sell oil because the market is going haywire.”

Oil prices have surged since the United States and Israel attacked Iran, posing an economic and political liability for Mr. Trump ahead of the midterm elections. As a result, his administration has been pursuing every option to mitigate the fallout. According to AAA, average U.S. gas prices are $3.95 per gallon, up from $2.94 a month ago.

But the Trump administration has struggled to articulate the logic of the “general license” that the Treasury Department issued late Friday. The sanctions exemption allows Iranian oil to be sold to most countries, including the United States, for the next month. The sanctions relief for Iran followed a similar reprieve this month allowing Russian oil that is currently at sea to be sold.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who announced the Iran exemption, described the move as an act of martial artistry.

“In essence, we are jiujitsuing the Iranians,” Mr. Bessent said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program on Sunday. “We are using their own oil against them.”

If freeing up Iranian oil successfully lowers global crude prices and buys the United States more time to topple the Iranian government, Mr. Bessent’s plan could prove to be fruitful. However, it is not clear that easing Iran oil sanctions will lower prices or how expanding the pool of potential buyers of its oil will prevent Iran from profiting from the volatility caused by the war.

Mr. Bessent appeared to argue that by infusing global markets with more Iranian oil, it will reduce the amount of money that Iran could get by selling restricted oil to countries such as China at a discounted price if global prices climb even higher. He also said the United States would be able to track those transactions and block the money from reaching Iranian accounts.

“At Treasury when this oil goes to — if it goes to Indonesia, if it goes to Japan, if it goes to Korea, we have a much better line of sight and are able to block accounts that the oil goes into,” Mr. Bessent said.

However, the license that Treasury issued did not appear to indicate that the transactions could be blocked by the United States. The sanctions exemptions continue to forbid Iranian oil to be sold to North Korea, Cuba or parts of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia. It applies to oil loaded on vessels as of March 20 and extends until April 19.

Iran exports most of its oil to China, and much of it is transported on its “shadow fleet” of tankers that seek to evade U.S. sanctions. Because Iranian oil exports operate largely in a gray market, it is not clear how much of its crude that is at sea is available to be diverted to other countries.

If the Treasury Department plans to ultimately block the transactions, it could deter Iran from selling oil to other nations and undercut Mr. Bessent’s argument that the plan will boost oil supplies.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a group that urges a close U.S. partnership with Israel and confrontation with Iran, noted that the licensecontained “no escrow mechanism and no obvious restrictions on payment channels.”

Asked on NBC about the ultimate effect of the sanctions relief on oil prices, Mr. Bessent called the question “terrible framing.”

The Treasury Department and the White House had no comment on Mr. Bessent’s remarks.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he did not believe Iran would get much money from additional oil sales and that he wanted as much oil as possible to be available.

“Any small amount of money that Iran gets is not going to have any difference in this war,” Mr. Trump said as he left the White House. “But I want to have the system be lubricated.”

Democrats have been quick to point out the irony of Mr. Trump’s offering Iran what could amount to billions of dollars’ worth of sanctions relief while the fighting continues.

In 2016, when Mr. Trump was a presidential candidate, he called the first $400 million installment of the $1.7 billion payment to Iran a “scandal” and blamed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for supporting it. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who was then a Republican senator from Florida, described transfer of funds as an “outrage.” On social media, “pallets of cash” trended as an attack on Democrats.

“I remember when my Republican colleagues blasted Barack Obama over $400m tied to hostages and an old debt with Iran,” Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, wrote on X. “Where’s the outrage now?”

The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat who has been sharply critical of the Trump administration, posted a photo of Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unloading a truck full of cash. The caption read: “Remember when MAGA melted down over Obama’s imaginary ‘pallets of cash’ to Iran? Now Trump’s doing it for real — and not a peep.”

Mr. Trump’s attacks on former President Barack Obama over the payments to Iran were fresh in his mind last week. Recalling his decision to terminate the nuclear deal with Iran during his first term, Mr. Trump likened the payments made by the Obama administration to a “ransom” and revived his criticism that cash was drawn from U.S. banks and flown to Iran on Boeing 757 planes.

The payments to Iran at that time were intended to put to rest a dispute over a $400 million arms deal that Washington had reached with Iran when the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was still in power. When he was overthrown in 1979, the United States stopped delivery of the weapons but never returned the money.

The Obama administration determined that it had to repay the money in cash because banks were concerned about violating sanctions by executing a wire transfer.

“Remember when they sent Boeing 757s over there, loaded with cash?” Mr. Trump said, three days before lifting sanctions on Iran. “That’s not going to happen with Trump.”

Tony Romm contributed reporting.

Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.“

U.S. ally prepares to defend itself against ...the United States

 

 

The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement

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“Staten Island, New York City’s most isolated borough, is considering secession again, driven by dissatisfaction with city policies and a desire for local control. The island, which has a history of secession attempts, is wealthier, more conservative, and suburban compared to the rest of the city. While secession could offer more autonomy, it also presents challenges, including financial implications and the need to establish independent services.

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For more than a hundred years, the city’s most isolated borough has threatened to leave. After the election of Zohran Mamdani, some on the island think it’s time.

By Naaman ZhouMarch 23, 2026

Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty

The largest dump in the world, the Fresh Kills landfill, used to sit on Staten Island, the least populated borough of New York City, from 1948 to 2001. Each day, rubbish from the other four boroughs was collected and ferried to the island’s western shore, through a marshy inlet—a bit like the island’s armpit—where it was unloaded, compacted, arranged in layers, and left to rot. The piles were taller than the Great Sphinx in Egypt; the smell floated across highways and through house windows. Vito Fossella, who was born on the island in the sixties, remembered how the odor would hit him like a wall. When he went to the mall as a child, Fossella would sprint from the car to get inside and escape the air. “Every day, it was a stench,” he said. “There were seagulls flying everywhere.”

It made a few people bitter. “We had five per cent of the city’s population and we got a hundred per cent of the garbage,” Fossella, who is now the Staten Island borough president, told me recently. “Staten Island was dumped on, literally and figuratively, and the rest of the city said, ‘Too bad.’ ” The dump was eventually closed in 2001 under Rudy Giuliani, who had narrowly won the 1993 mayoral election against David Dinkins, a vote largely swung by Staten Islanders. (Giuliani also made the Staten Island ferry free.) That same year, the island’s residents also considered, in a nonbinding plebiscite, whether they even wanted to be a part of New York City anymore. Sixty-five per cent voted no.

Lately, the fever to secede has descended again. Shortly before Christmas, Sam Pirozzolo, a Republican state assemblyman who represents parts of western and central Staten Island, wrote a declaration of independence for the island—modelled after the national one—and read it out loud at the former site of a tavern where, in 1776, British soldiers first heard the original. Andrew Lanza, a Republican state senator, has also drafted legislation that would make secession possible.

Notionally, this push was prompted by the election of Zohran Mamdani, whom Pirozzolo has said epitomizes the way that New York City doesn’t reflect Staten Island’s values. But the discontent runs deeper. Staten Islanders have tried to secede from the rest of the city at least a half-dozen times. In 1900, two years after the modern City of New York was consolidated, two hundred Staten Islanders gathered at a public hearing to say they were “ready to cede.” (Staten Island, one man told the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune, “is the Ireland of Greater New York. We want home rule.”)

The island is richer, more suburban, more conservative, more car-dependent, less dense, and cut off from the rest of the city by the deep water of New York Harbor. There is a sense on the island that the rest of the city doesn’t listen to them, and that they pay for city initiatives they don’t want.

In 2024, the island voted for Donald Trump by thirty points. And, in recent years, Staten Islanders have protested the opening of a migrant shelter, speed cameras, marijuana dispensaries, and the placement of a battery-storage site too close to homes, all of which they say have been foisted on them by the city. (Worst of all, Fossella told me an anecdote about an ugly metal fence that suddenly appeared on a “beautiful” stone wall in Clove Lakes Park, because the Department of Transportation claimed that it was near a waterway. “If Staten Island were a separate city, that would never have happened.”) Another indignity? “Staten Island is the only borough in the city without a high school for performing arts,” Fossella said. “It’s almost like that movie—they’re just not into us anymore. They keep doing things that we don’t support.” In the nineties, the city clung to the island through a legal principle known as home rule, which would require the mayor and City Council to sign off on Staten Island leaving.

Giuliani never did. The reaction veered to extremes. In 1995, an angry resident of Oakwood, in the borough’s southwest, wrote to the Staten Island Advance, “We no longer are in a mutually agreed upon union with the other four boroughs. It is now more reminiscent of the Anschluss that joined Austria to Germany in 1938, with some overtones of the later occupation of Czechoslovakia.” Pirozolo told me, “If we vote to leave, keeping us would be indentured servitude or slavery. You pick.”

Do the secessionists have a point? Recently, I spoke to Howard Husock, an academic at the American Enterprise Institute who studies secession movements. There’s a strong theoretical basis to secession, he told me. “Geographically, it’s really part of New Jersey.” As he described it, the reason to leave is less about Mamdani and more about local control. If Staten Island were to part ways, the proposal is that it would become an independent city within New York State. It would determine its own zoning and oversee its own school boards, meaning residents could control the curriculum, something Husock said Staten Islanders would probably value.

Other nearby cities and counties that orbit New York City—such as Montclair and Bergen, in New Jersey; or Manhasset, on Long Island; or Westchester, above the Bronx—are demographically similar to Staten Island, and run themselves. “They look out over the water and see them,” Husock said. “They see the suburban Montclairs of the world, and they say, ‘Wait a minute, they get to call the shots in their own communities, and we don’t.’ ”

But what would actually happen? If the City of Staten Island were created tomorrow, it would immediately become the second-largest city in New York State. (Population: nearly half a million.) It would keep a lot of its bus routes, because the M.T.A. is managed by the state, and Staten Island still falls in the Metropolitan Transit District. (“They’re not seceding from that,” Husock said.) The ferry, though, is operated by New York City. It would probably still run, but it may not be free.

It’s possible that Staten Islanders would individually pay more taxes, but they might like that. The voters of an independent Staten, Husock said, could choose to pay more for the bundle of services that they want. A report from the Independent Budget Office, from 2024, estimated that secessionists would need to fill a budget gap of at least a hundred and seventy million dollars. It also warned that the island would lose out on New York’s economies of scale. Staten Island would, for example, have to renegotiate its deal with Spectrum and Verizon.

In addition to handling schools, Staten Island would have to run its own fire department, trash collection, hospitals, and snow removal. But so do other cities. “Buffalo is a city!” Fosella said. “It’s smaller than Staten Island. So clearly it can be done. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Sam Pirozzolo, a New York State assemblyman for the Sixty-third District of Staten Island.Photograph by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty

The police would be a big sticking point. On an independent Staten Island, the politics of policing seem to flip. Paul Costello, a lifelong resident, who was one of the field leads for Staten Island for the Mamdani campaign, told me that the Republicans who are pushing to secede would miss the N.Y.P.D. “As a person who is hypercritical of the N.Y.P.D., it is the best-funded police force probably on the planet,” he said. The department’s annual budget last year was $5.8 billion. “For a pro-police person, they have everything they want right now,” he said. “They’re basically saying they want to kneecap them, which, hey, I’m all for. But it doesn’t really make sense.”

There’s a utopian model for what Staten Island could be, and it’s Yonkers. Yonkers, Husock explained, is a predominantly white, working-class community, of two hundred thousand people, connected to New York City by the Metro-North and buses, and governed by center-right Democrats. It runs its own police, fire, and schools. “I think they have Yonkers envy,” Husock said. “They’re not going to become Scarsdale, obviously, but they would become Yonkers.”

Not everybody agrees. “It’s not a good idea,” Costello told me. Being a part of New York City, he said, means that “we get literally the best services available to anyone in the country.” “It’s an old feeling,” he said, of secession, “but it’s not founded in financial literacy.”

Costello, who is thirty-one, grew up on Staten Island’s north shore, went to high school and college on the island, and now lives in St. George, near the ferry. “I love Staten Island with all my heart,” he said. But every time secession rolls around it can feel like living through the Civil War. “It’s like I’m a guy on the border between the Union and the Confederacy. And I’m like, ‘No, I’m part of the fringe that lives here that actually agrees with the North.’ ”

I asked Husock, the advocate of local control, why every borough couldn’t make the same argument as Staten Island. “I would make that argument for every neighborhood,” he said. “The logical policy extension of Staten Island secession is deconsolidation of New York City.” Even the boroughs could be sliced further into smaller neighborhoods, Husock said. “In my ideal configuration, it would be a patchwork of smaller municipalities that had certain shared metropolitan services. It’s really a thought experiment,” he added. “But Staten Island is forcing the thought experiment.”

At one point, much of Brooklyn didn’t want to be a part of New York City, either. In the nineteenth century, Brooklyn and Manhattan were independent, competing cities that often squabbled over shipping lanes in the East River. Consolidation was put to a popular vote in 1894. In Brooklyn, it passed by only about two hundred and fifty votes, and then a consortium of politicians from the borough went to Albany and filibustered it for years. In that same election, Staten Island voted for consolidation by a huge margin—seventy-eight per cent said yes. (Yonkers voted no, while Queens voted sixty-two per cent to join and the Bronx had already been fully annexed in 1895.)

Who would win the breakup—Staten Island or New York? Nobody really knows. The 2024 report from the I.B.O. relied mostly on studies from the nineties. Fossella, the borough president, announced in 2023 that he was commissioning his own economic report, but there has been no progress. “We’ve put out feelers for entities that could do it,” he said. “They have to get back to us.”

The other day, I met Pirozzolo, the drafter of the Staten Island declaration of independence, in a quiet room with shag carpets in the archive of the College of Staten Island. He wore a blue suit and a snazzy tie patterned with green and blue diamonds. A stack of boxes was wheeled in by James Kaser, a soft-spoken librarian in glasses, a blue polo, and green slacks. The college is home to one of the largest collections of documents—financials, committee reports, white papers—from the 1993 secession push. “We typically go one box at a time,” Kaser said.

Pirozzolo was focussed. “I’m looking for something that says, ‘New York City Police Department. Costs a million dollars, and that includes ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D,’ ” he said. His chief of staff, Nick Robbins, who was wearing a bright-blue New York Giants jersey, pulled out an overstuffed folder of files. Records included “Staten Island Secession: The Price of Independence” and the original secession bill. “Bingo!” Pirozzolo said. In another trove, they found a table that listed city budgets in 1991 from across the country—Atlanta, Austin, Denver. “This one is awesome,” Pirozzolo said. Another page had an itemized list of Staten Island’s on-island expenditures, in the nineties, from various departments: education, health, the library, sanitation—everything that a stand-alone city would need. Pirozzolo traced his hand down the page, quietly reading them out. “Mental health, parks. This is gold,” he said.

Kaser came in, balancing a new pile of booklets. “Now that I know what you’re looking for, there are stacks of this,” he said. “That looks like ancient stuff!” Pirozzolo said. “I don’t know if I want to touch it.” Kaser said, “It’s not ancient. It’s from the nineties.” Pirozzolo waggled “The Price of Independence.” “Can I slip this in a briefcase or something?”

A spokesman for the Fiscal Policy Institute told me that it was unlikely that Staten Island gives more money to the city than the city gives it. He estimated that the island contributes 3.4 per cent of the city’s revenue and receives 5.2 per cent of its spending.

Despite his digging, Pirozzolo is still nowhere closer to knowing what the price of independence, in modern terms, would be. But, he told me, “Now when I go to the city budget, and I say, ‘I need these numbers,’ at least I know what I’m asking for.”

Until 1975, the official name of Staten Island was Richmond, after the title of the youngest illegitimate son of King Charles II. (He had at least twelve.) The sense of estrangement has lingered. “There’s always been the forgotten-borough trope,” Costello, the Mamdani campaigner, told me.

During the final debate of the mayoral primary, in June of last year, the various Democratic candidates were asked which borough they had spent the least time in. In succession, Adrienne Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, and Whitney Tilson all answered—to escalating laughs—“Staten Island.” Costello was watching the debate at a bar with friends. I asked how it made him feel. “I would have been surprised if any of them answered differently,” he said. “It’s kind of expected. But, of course, it takes a little hit. You’re, like, ‘Ah, come on.’ ”

When Costello was growing up, his high school was right next to the dump. As he got off the school bus and walked to class, he could see it in the background. But he also saw it changing. For the past twenty years, the dump has been slowly beautified, rewilded, and converted into parkland. Now known as Freshkills Park, it will be one of the biggest stretches of nature in the five boroughs—nearly three times the size of Central Park—when it’s completed in 2036. One of Costello’s friends works there as a field educator and gives guided tours. Birds have started returning. Maybe because of this, Costello doesn’t feel the burn of the metaphor like older residents do. “If anything, it’s funny that I went to high school next to a dump,” he said. “As they fixed it, it was kind of pretty.”

Since the campaign, Mamdani has stopped by the island more often: he ate at a local soul-food restaurant, Shaw-naé’s House, and attended evening prayer at a mosque in Dongan Hills during Ramadan. In early March, he made a major child-care announcement, about the expansion of 3-K, at a pre-K center on the island’s north shore. (Staten Island had been excluded from an earlier 2-K announcement.) That same month, a new Democratic candidate, Allison Ziogas said that she would challenge the island’s sitting Republican congresswoman, Nicole Malliotakis, from a pro-labor, economic-populist angle. Generations of Democrats and Republicans, Ziogas said, in her campaign launch, had failed in representing the island. “People talk about Staten Island like we have nothing to offer,” she said. Ziogas, who is originally from Connecticut, added, “I like to say that I’m a Staten Islander by love.”

“I’m one of the biggest evangelists for the island,” Costello told me. “There are some amazing restaurants, some amazing people, and the most parks anywhere in the city.” (Staten Island has some of New York’s best Sri Lankan food.) The only way he’d abandon the island is if the rest of its residents actually quit New York City. “It takes a lot to think about leaving,” he said. “The reason I would ever leave here is because of how many other people don’t want to be here. It’s not because it isn’t a good place to live.” ♦

Atlanta airport frustration: Travelers waiting for hours in TSA security lines are missing flights

 

Is Netanyahu Dead?’ Senate Intel Committee member Chris Van Hollen responds. - YouTube

 

Is Netanyahu Dead?’ Senate Intel Committee member Chris Van Hollen responds. - YouTube

Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death | Jan-Werner Müller | The Guardian

What a savage!

"It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.

Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice – it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.

Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists.

Hegseth and company are promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death

During his first administration, an “axis of adults” mostly held his worst impulses in check; after the Venezuela “excursion” and the realization that people on small boats can be killed with impunity, Hegseth, and perhaps even Rubio, seem drunk on the idea that special military operations could be quick and costless in American lives – and make for great TV. Trump’s fixation on visuals and props – if I show a pile of paper on TV, it means I really have divested from my companies, or I really have a great healthcare plan – is now shared across his administration.

Trump himself appears to treat a global decapitation campaign as if it were a version of The Apprentice that includes firing live ammunition – as if he gets to remove other leaders, and as if he should get to choose the successors of whoever gets kidnapped or killed.

Historically, there is an ideology that made the glorification of violence central to their propaganda. “Long live death” was a fascist slogan; Mussolini’s movement started with veterans and celebrated them as a “trenchocracy” – an aristocracy of men hardened by battle in the trenches.

Gigantic ossuaries for the war dead – some holding the bones of as many as 100,000 dead soldiers – were meant to encourage future sacrifice; the Nazis in turn presented their youth with slogans like “We are born to die for Germany”.

It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.

Simultaneously, faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and destruction, Hegseth announces future war crimes on live TV (“no quarter”) and encourages gratuitous cruelty: “We are punching them while they’re down.” The obscene focus on “lethality” is part of this shift towards war understood as inflicting maximum destruction and pain (as opposed to achieving strategic objectives – which the administration has of course been utterly incapable of articulating).

The reality of war itself recedes because the airwaves are filled with an endless series of entertaining images and empty talk. Hegseth, fond of laughably overwrought language and alliterations in particular (“warriors, not wokesters”), seems unable to articulate anything other than cliches (“unbreakable will”) or snippets of a Christian nationalism which flies in the face of the first amendment’s prohibiting an established religion: one cannot make it a litmus test of patriotism that citizens pray for the troops on bended knees and in the name of Jesus.

The point is not to equate the two men, but one cannot help but remember how Hannah Arendt, in her highly controversial book on the Eichmann trial, described the Nazi bureaucrat: someone utterly incapable of thinking, someone who instead just produced an endless stream of hollow phrases.

Will all this have an effect in legitimizing an illegal war? Hegseth has also created a fantasy world inside the Pentagon itself; instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, as Congress has not authorized changing the department’s name – and figures from the Epoch Times and LindellTV (the world according to “the MyPillow guy”).

Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran. Like with many Maga men performing puerile stunts for the manosphere, the fragile ego inside seems incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly.

• Jan-Werner Mueller is a Guardian US columnist"

Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death | Jan-Werner Müller | The Guardian