Friday, December 12, 2025
Trump Confronts His Political Reality - The Atlantic
Trump Confronts His Political Reality
"The president has entered the lame-duck era of his career.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
A force is pulling on Donald Trump that is even more inexorable than the march of time: political mortality.
Sometimes scandal or ineffectiveness is what fells a politician; if they survive those, term limits may get them anyway. But not even the most fearsome and durable leader escapes the eventual decay of their power. The towering Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to drop out of the 1968 presidential race, facing a tough Democratic primary; Margaret Thatcher’s powerful reign ended with a Conservative mutiny; Mitch McConnell, once the wily master of the Senate, now finds himself an ostracized backbencher.
Trump may have imagined he was immune. If so, he wasn’t alone. The rules of political gravity, journalists have often declared, sometimes seem not to apply to him. He defied the Republican Party establishment to win the 2016 nomination. He beat the odds to defeat Hillary Clinton that fall. And although he was written off as finished following the 2020 election and his attempt to steal it, Trump completed the greatest comeback in American political history in 2024, easily eclipsing Richard Nixon’s 1968 election.
One of the secrets to Trump’s success has been his control over other Republican figures, because of either their political and personal affinity or, failing that, the ability to bully them into submission with rhetorical attacks or threats of primary challenges. But as the end of Trump’s political career approaches, his grip over the GOP is showing some cracks.
This afternoon, the Republican-dominated Indiana Senate rejected a plan to redraw the state’s U.S. House districts to benefit the GOP, despite a weeks-long pressure campaign from the president and top allies including Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson. After an initial failure, Trump demanded a second attempt, but this one wasn’t even close: Senators voted it down 19–31.
This is the latest in a string of stumbles. The first was Trump’s inability to quash an effort to force the disclosure of files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump was unable to persuade even his protégées Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene not to sign a House discharge petition, and he eventually had to jump on the bandwagonhimself. The experience permanently broke his relationship with Greene, who announced she would leave the House in January and has given a series of interviews criticizing the president. (The stories she’s told of death threats and harassment from Trump fans show one reason members are retiring at record rates.) On the other side of the Capitol, Trump’s demands that Republican senators kill the filibuster in order to end the government shutdown were met with a cold shoulder.
Now Trump is grappling with brewing unhappiness about his likely illegal military mission in the Caribbean Sea. Even Republicans have been troubled by reports that the U.S. killed survivors of one boat strike as they clung to wreckage, in what appears to be a textbook example of a war crime. (The administration says military leaders acted legally.) In response, Congress is withholding some of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s travel budget to demand he provide relevant videos. This arguably falls short of what the situation calls for—many experts have noted that Trump has no valid legal justification for any of the strikes—but it’s notable because of how hesitant Republicans have been to challenge the administration.
Members of one’s own party starting to draw away is a classic symptom of being a lame duck. Sometimes a president can stave lame-duck status off until after the midterm elections of his second term, but Trump has some particular weaknesses here. First, more than any time in recent history, Congress is dysfunctional—thanks in part to a slim majority and Trump’s efforts to bypass it—and incapable of approving any major legislation except must-pass bills, and even those are touch-and-go. Since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed this summer, lawmakers know that few other initiatives will move. That gives them less incentive to avoid breaking ranks.
That’s especially true because Trump’s popularity is historically low and falling. Members know that Trump can wreck them in a primary, but they may not be convinced that he can save them in a general election—in fact, he may be dragging them toward big losses next November. One ominous sign is that Democrats keep performing well in elections this year. On Tuesday, a Democrat flipped a Georgia state-House district that Trump won by 12 points; another captured the mayorship of Miami for the first time since 1997. This is likely to get worse if Trump continues to angrily dismiss voter concerns about inflation.
Some Trump allies have offered a solution to the lame-duck problem: Simply run for a third term, Constitution be damned. But Trump himself has said, with evident regret, that he does not believe that is possible. (He could still change his mind.) As the indications of political obsolescence accrue, Trump’s public mood has taken a dark turn. During a Cabinet meeting last week, which he appeared to doze through parts of, he called Somali immigrants “garbage.” He reprised that during a speech—ostensibly on affordability—Tuesday, in which he also confirmed that he called several places “shithole countries” in 2018, a statement he had long denied making. Later that night, Trump uncorked a furious, meandering post of nearly 500 words on Truth Social, in which he called for The New York Times to be shut down and said he’d been asked to take three cognitive tests this year, which may not be the positive sign he seems to believe it is.
Trump remains an exceptionally powerful president—in part because he has seized power for the White House and sidelined Congress. Previous lame-duck presidents have taken some consolation from the freedom to act as they want, knowing they never have to face voters again, and Trump has already begun pursuing policies that he can see are not popular. Still, for a man whose life has been a story of improbable resurrections, the dawning realization that his political career is finite must be bitter."
Obamacare Changed the Politics of Health Care - The Atlantic
Obamacare Changed the Politics of Health Care
"It’s one thing for Republicans to deny hypothetical care. It’s another to take this tangible benefit away.
Here are some data points that Republicans ought to bear in mind as they contemplate their health-care strategy.
Donald Trump is unpopular for many reasons, not least of which is the public perception that he has failed to bring down costs, as promised. Next month, more than 20 million Americans may see their health-insurance premiums spike, some by double or more, when expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire. Also, American support for the 2010 health-care law, otherwise known as Obamacare, has reached a new high of 57 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Despite these facts, Republicans just voted to let ACA subsidies expire. How is the public likely to respond to this between now and the 2026 midterm elections? Probably not by warming up to Republicans.
Fifteen years after its passage, the ACA is a gigantic political pain point for the GOP. You would think Republicans would have made their peace with the law by now and turned their attention to other issues. But unlike pretty much every other conservative party in the industrialized world, where the legitimacy of universal health coverage is largely a given, the GOP seems resigned to bleed out on health care.
A largely unspoken article of faith for Republicans is that access to medical care is a matter of personal responsibility. They don’t generally advertise this belief, because it is not popular—a growing share of Americans believe that it is the government’s duty to ensure all citizens have health-care coverage, according to Gallup. So the party’s strategy instead was to fight proposals to expand coverage. Until the ACA, this proved effective.
Read: ‘We are looking at a massive crisis’
The United States has two features that have made enacting universal health insurance especially difficult. One is its legislative system, which, unlike parliamentary forms of government, requires multiple concurrent majorities, including a Senate that gives conservatives disproportionate representation.
The second is the nature of America’s employer-based insurance, which sprung up during World War II and gave working-age Americans a stake in a privatized status quo. The fear that health-care reform might compromise this insurance complicated the politics, and ensured that Congress cared more about preserving insurance for those who had it (particularly as they tended to be educated and engaged voters) than extending benefits to those who didn’t.
The ACA broke through decades of gridlock by keeping the employer-based system intact and building up coverage options for people who couldn’t access it. Low-income workers, whose jobs mostly didn’t provide health care, would get Medicaid. People with higher incomes who didn’t have access to employer coverage would get subsidized coverage on individual exchanges, which would have to sell plans to customers regardless of health status.
Passing the law proved challenging. Republicans made all sorts of terrifying claims about its effects: The exchanges would collapse; health-care costs would skyrocket; insurers would employ “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of care. None of those things happened. The death panels were imaginary, the health-care-cost curve bent downward, and the exchanges drew millions of willing customers and worked just fine.
Republicans never reckoned with the failure of their doomsaying prognostications to come true. Nor have they fully assimilated how the politics of health insurance have changed since the law’s passage. It was easy enough for Republicans to block health-care reform when a program to expand coverage didn’t exist. Taking insurance away from people who have it, or jacking up the price they pay to get it, is a completely different matter.
Some Republicans recognize that their impulses are unpopular, but they are not interested in accommodating public opinion. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who appears to represent the majority of Republicans on the issue, has called the ACA marketplace “a broken system,” as if the predictions of its collapse had come true, and treats its beneficiaries—who are now at a record high of 24 million people, or 7 percent of the U.S. population—as if their numbers are slight enough to be ignored.
“You’re going to see a package come together that will be on the floor next week,” he told reporters Wednesday, “that will actually reduce premiums for 100 percent of Americans who are on health insurance, not just the 7 percent.” Before the Affordable Care Act, the needs of uninsured people could be brushed aside. Johnson’s dismissive reference to “the 7 percent” seems nostalgic for that political world.
Trump has generally attempted to bluff his way through the problem. In his first term, he repeatedly promised to “repeal and replace” the ACA with a terrific system that would give everybody much better insurance for less money. This worked as a campaign promise but has proved impossible as policy.
In his second term, Trump’s approach to wishing away the trade-off between paying less and getting better care has been to claim that he can bypass the insurance market completely by giving people money directly, thereby allowing them to get more for less. “I want to give the people better health insurance for less money,” Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns on Monday. “The people will get the money and they’re going to buy the health insurance that they want.”
Annie Lowrey: How are we still fighting about Obamacare?
Trump’s plan seems to invoke the hazy concept that people can buy their own medical services like items at a grocery store. That does not work with medical care, because people rely on doctors for advice on what services they need, and because medical costs frequently spike far beyond what anybody can reasonably afford, which is why almost everybody pays for it through insurance.
The president inadvertently confirmed this when he attempted to describe his concept to reporters on Tuesday. “I love the idea of money going directly to the people, not to the insurance companies, going directly to the people. It can be in the health savings account; it can be a number of different ways,” he said. “And the people go out and buy their own insurance, which can be really much better health insurance, health care.”
So Trump’s “plan” is to stop giving money to people to buy insurance, because that enriches insurance companies, and instead give it to people to go buy … insurance. This sort of nonsense talk may work well enough when Trump wants to just get through interviews without admitting a problem. But it isn’t a workable solution to soaring insurance-premium fees come January.
Perhaps the GOP will one day recognize that its aversion to widening access to health-care coverage is just too politically costly, too untenable, to so stubbornly maintain. Until then, Republicans act like they are operating in a world where the ACA hasn’t already given millions of Americans this essential benefit, and where these same Americans won’t be bothered when this benefit is taken away."
Somalia Is What ‘America First’ Looks Like - The Atlantic
So This Is What ‘America First’ Looks Like
"The practical application of Trump’s isolationism is hardly the big break he promised.
Somalia, where two terror groups are locked in a long-standing battle, should have been an ideal place for President Donald Trump to showcase his “America First” commitment to international disengagement. The country is 8,000 miles away, and its conflicts pose no obvious near-term threat to national security. Interventions in Somalia have already cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade—and even so, the security of Mogadishu, the capital, remains tenuous at best.
Trump himself has suggested that now is the time to get out. Speaking in September before hundreds of generals and admirals gathered at Marine Corps Base Quantico, he cited Somalia as a place politicians have wrongly thought they should police “while America is under invasion from within.” Earlier this month, Trump was even more disdainful, saying that Somalia “stinks” and the country is “no good for a reason.”
Yet just one week earlier, according to local media, dozens of U.S. Special Forces soldiers in northeast Somalia killed at least five suspected members of ISIS-Somalia, an Islamic State affiliate, during an hours-long gunfight. (United States Africa Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations on the continent, has not publicly confirmed its forces were there.) That was on top of the more than 100 U.S. missile strikes in Somalia so far this year, a much higher pace of attacks than either the 51 strikes during the entire Biden administration or the 219 strikes over the four years of Trump’s first term, most of which targeted ISIS-Somalia’s rival al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Shabaab. President Barack Obama launched 48 strikes in the country during his two terms, according to statistics from New America, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Trump has said that his “America First” approach to foreign policy includes employing transactional diplomacy to benefit the U.S., stopping other nations from “taking advantage” of American support, and using force to defend the Western Hemisphere. But events in Somalia suggest that “America First” often looks very different in practice, especially when it comes to the use of the military. Trump may have avoided sending large numbers of troops to war in operations oriented around nation-building. But he has aggressively intervened in conflicts around the world, typically with a torrent of expensive air strikes launched from out of harm’s way or with the deployment of small groups of Special Forces.
The missions are couched as defending the homeland, but their precise goals and results are rarely explained. Starting in April, the U.S. stopped releasing initial estimates of casualties in Somalia, either saying that no civilians were killed or not addressing the issue at all. The military has not announced the death of any top leader of ISIS-Somalia or al-Shabaab, the more powerful of the two groups, since the first strike of the second Trump administration, on February 1. Instead, the targets receive vague descriptions—“weapons dealer,” “terrorist network,” “ISIS terrorist”—or have no identifying characteristics. More often, the press releases about these missions say only which of the two Islamist groups was targeted.
The administration also has not been consistent in limiting its application of “America First” to either imminent or potential threats. Before its Somalia campaign, the U.S. military struck hundreds of Houthi-rebel targets in Yemen in operations costing more than $1 billion. Top administration officials in a Signal group chat questioned whether the United States should be trying to liberate a commercial-shipping channel from persistent Houthi attacks, a bigger issue for Europe than for America. “I just hate bailing out Europe again,” Vice President J. D. Vance wrote in the chat, which also inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic. The strikes were inconclusive at best: Houthis remain in control in parts of Yemen, and commercial ships continue to avoid the Red Sea.
The U.S. now is also considering strikes that could lead to the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The administration claims that drug smuggling from Venezuela poses a threat to the U.S.—hence the more than 20 strikes launched on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September 2, which have killed more than 80, even though Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl, the leading cause of drug overdoses in the U.S.
During a December 2 Pentagon briefing, the spokesperson Kingsley Wilson defended the mission in Somalia and said that the administration does not want to focus solely on imminent threats to U.S. borders and in its hemisphere. “We’re not seeking regime change, or, you know, we’re not nation-building,” she said. “We’re not isolationists. We’re also not neocons. We’re realists.”
American interest in Somalia has followed the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy writ large over the past three decades. In the early 1990s, the mission there was largely humanitarian. But in 1993, the United States participated in a military operation to capture the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had been blamed for the death of dozens of United Nations forces. Local militia shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters, leading to the death of 18 U.S. troops, and the operation became widely known by the title of the book, and later the movie, it inspired, Black Hawk Down. After 9/11, the U.S. began conducting the counterterrorism strikes that continue under Trump.
Previous administrations, including Trump’s first, frequently targeted al-Shabaab, which controls about one-third of Somalia and threatens to overthrow the federal government. Trump’s second administration splits its missile targets between al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia, which has a few hundred members in the country’s north.
In September, Trump’s top general for military operations in Africa, General Dagvin R. M. Anderson, made one of his first trips to Somalia, a sign that the nation of 19 million would be a priority. During his July confirmation hearing, Anderson said that he would focus on al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia because, if they built capacity, they could threaten U.S. interests and eventually the homeland. He didn’t say why he was so certain. Neither group has said it has designs on the U.S., only that each aims to control Somalia.
The missile strikes have met the legal standard for use of military force under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution, which allows the president to strike groups associated with terror forces that were involved with 9/11. But the strikes don’t appear to comply with Trump’s professed approach of limiting U.S. intervention to imminent threats—a threshold that presidents often cite to justify the use of force without their consulting Congress or engaging in diplomacy beforehand.
Read: Trump says he decides what ‘America First’ means
The U.S. military in the past has said that its strikes in Somalia aimed to improve regional security. Today, military commanders typically couch the strikes in the language of “America First,” saying they have targeted groups that “threaten the U.S. Homeland, our forces, and our citizens abroad.”
Whether this has been the case is not always clear, however. On September 13, U.S. missiles landed in Badhan, which sits at the front line of contested territory between the Puntlund region of Somalia and the breakaway republic of Somaliland, eliminating what a subsequent press release termed an al-Shabaab “weapons dealer.”
Local reports said the target was Omar Abdullahi Abdi Ibrahim, a tribal leader and influential elder who had maintained relations with al-Shabaab but was not involved in terrorism. Ibrahim was driving when three missiles struck his car, leaving nothing but metal shards and bone fragments, according to local reports, which quoted herders who had been nearby. Residents across the region staged protests. They claimed that Ibrahim had been meeting with government leaders and expressing his opposition to a proposed deal that would allow the United Arab Emirates access to mineral deposits in the nearby Cal Madow Mountains. The U.A.E. along with Kenya, Ethiopia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt are all seeking influence in the Horn of Africa.
Not every ISIS or al-Qaeda affiliate operates in the same way or for the same aims—or even has its sights set on the United States. Both al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia are local insurgencies.
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department group funded by Congress, says that al-Shabaab aims to be a “totalitarian theocracy in Somalia.” ISIS-Somalia, in contrast, has struggled to gain territory and expand its army of fighters as it battles al-Shabaab and the Somali federal government. “We simplistically hear the name ISIS and immediately assume that the group is a threat to the U.S.,” Will Walldorf, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, told me. “Some have gravitated to the name to raise funds and recruit, but they are not comparable to the ISIS we knew in Iraq and Syria at the height of the caliphate.”
The U.S. strikes are having some effect. ISIS-Somalia, in particular, is worse off, J. Peter Pham, who served as a special envoy for Africa during Trump’s first term, told me. “Is the world a better place without them? Yes. Are they worth the price of whatever munition is dropped on them? Maybe not,” Pham told me.
Leaving terror groups alone is hard to politically defend, however remote their threat might be. The aims of al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia are akin to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which arguably posed no direct threat to the U.S. yet hosted Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11 attacks. But the groups in Somalia are not close to reaching their goal of controlling the country.
Sebastian Gorka, who heads U.S. counterterrorism operations at the White House, told the Hudson Institute in August that when he returned to government he was surprised by ISIS’s expansion across Africa, which he described as the group’s new base of operations after it lost havens in the Middle East. Because of that, he said, the U.S. needed to embrace a hawkish strategy to keep terror groups from metastasizing. Gorka declined to comment for this story. (“Atlantic are scum. No thanks,” he wrote in response to my request.)
U.S. Africa Command, in a statement, didn’t address why the U.S. should be worried about al-Shabaab or ISIS-Somalia, or articulate the specific aims of the U.S. strike campaign. “Our strategic approach to countering terrorism in Africa relies on trusted partnerships and collaboration grounded in and through shared security interests,” the statement said. “The cadence in conducting airstrikes in Somalia reflects that strategy.”
The administration’s National Security Strategy, released December 5, specifies the major threats against the United States. The document says that the U.S. “must remain wary of resurgent Islamist terrorist activity in parts of Africa while avoiding any long-term American presence or commitments.” It also says that the U.S. should “partner with select countries to ameliorate conflict” and “foster mutually beneficial trade relationships” to harness “Africa’s abundant natural resources and latent economic potential.” The document, which also calls for the U.S. to turn away from the Middle East and Europe, cites Somalia once, as an example of where the U.S. could prevent the rise of new regional conflicts.
No one group controls Somalia now. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud holds Mogadishu, but clan militias, al-Shabaab, and, to a lesser degree, ISIS-Somalia control much of the countryside. The autonomous Somaliland region controls the country’s northwest. There are also several federal member states that operate semiautonomously.
Read: The boat strikes are just the beginning
During his first term, Trump withdrew all 700 troops who were based in Somalia. President Joe Biden brought back roughly 500, a level that the second Trump administration has maintained. The deployments have helped train Somali special forces and support local troops, but not enough for them to stabilize the country.
“The Somali National Army (SNA) is still incapable of sustained clearing and holding operations,” according to a report last month by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, and “suffers from a host of troubles, including poor leadership, corruption, uneven training standards, and a reliance on clans deemed loyal to a sitting president rather than being a force having a genuinely national character.”
If Somalia is on the brink of collapse—politically, economically, and constitutionally—air strikes alone cannot fix that, Pham said. Training security forces is not enough. What the U.S. needs is a comprehensive review of its policy. Maybe supporting the government in Mogadishu is not worth it for the U.S., Pham explained. Different investments—for example, in the government of Somaliland, which holds elections and has kept terror groups at bay—might provide the U.S. with a better strategic return on its investment.
Without international follow-up on the ground that tackles governance issues and a stronger national Somali military, U.S. missile strikes won’t address the root causes that create the conditions for civil war, such as poor governance and corruption. Rather, Walldorf said, they “could create conditions for the kind of animosity and anger that could lead to the next generation of jihadists.”
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed research for this article.
Trump Isn’t Interested in Fighting a New Cold War. He Wants a New Civilizational War.
Trump Isn’t Interested in Fighting a New Cold War. He Wants a New Civilizational War.
“The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released last week, focuses on the perceived threat of uncontrolled immigration and the erosion of traditional values in Europe and the United States. This strategy reflects a broader civilizational war over the definition of “home” and who belongs, prioritizing race and Christian-Judeo faith over traditional geopolitical rivalries with Russia and China. The author argues that this shift in focus away from democracy and allyship towards a defense of Western civilization has significant implications for U.S. foreign policy and its relationships with European allies.
Every few years I am reminded of one of my cardinal rules of journalism: Whenever you see elephants flying, don’t laugh, take notes. Because if you see elephants flying, something very different is going on that you don’t understand but you and your readers need to.
I bring that up today in response to the Trump administration’s 33-page National Security Strategy, released last week. It has been widely noted that at a time when our geopolitical rivalry with Russia and China is more heated than at any other time since the Cold War — and Moscow and Beijing are more and more closely aligned against America — the Trump 2025 national security doctrine barely mentions these two geopolitical challengers.
While the report surveys U.S. interests across the globe, what intrigues me most about it is how it talks about our European allies and the European Union. It cites activities by our sister European democracies that “undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
“Should present trends continue,” it goes on, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Indeed, the strategy paper warns, unless our European allies elect more “patriotic” nationalist parties, committed to stemming immigration, Europe will face “civilizational erasure.” Unstated but implied is that we will judge you not by the quality of your democracy but by the stringency by which you stem the migration flow from Muslim countries to Europe’s south.
That is a flying elephant no one should ignore. It is language unlike any previous U.S. national security survey, and to my mind it reveals a deep truth about this second Trump administration: how much it came to Washington to fight America’s third civil war, not to fight the West’s new cold war.
Yes, in my view, we are in a new civil war over a place called home.
First, I need to make a quick detour to “home.” These days there is a tendency to reduce every crisis to the dry metrics of economics, to the chessboard machinations of political or military campaigns, or to ideological manifestoes. All, of course, have their relevance, but the longer I have worked as a journalist, the more I have found that the better starting place for unlocking a story is with the disciplines of psychology and anthropology. They are often much better at revealing the primal energies, anxieties and aspirations that animate our national politics — and global geopolitics — because they uncover and illuminate not just what people say they want, but also what they fear and what they privately pray for, and why.
I was not here for the Civil War of the 1860s, and I was still a boy during our second great civil struggle, the 1960s civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But I am definitely on duty for America’s third civil war. This one, like the first two, is over the questions “Whose country is this anyway?” and “Who gets to feel at home in our national house?” This civil war has been less violent than the first two — but it is early.
Humans have an enduring, structural need for home, not only as a physical shelter, but as a psychological anchor and moral compass, too. That is why Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” (my favorite movie) got it exactly right: “There’s no place like home.” And when people lose that sense of home — whether by war, rapid economic change, cultural change, demographic change, climate change or technological change — they tend to lose their center of gravity. They may feel as though they are being hurtled around in a tornado, grabbing desperately for anything stable enough to hold onto — and that can include any leader who seems strong enough to reattach them to that place called home, however fraudulent that leader is or unrealistic the prospect.
With that as background, I cannot remember another time in the last 40 years when I have traveled around America, and the world, and found more people asking the same question: “Whose country is this anyway?” Or as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right nationalist Israeli minister, put it, in Hebrew, in his political banner ads during Israel’s 2022 election: “Who is the landlord here?”
And that is not an accident. Today, more people are living outside their country of birth than at any point in recorded history. There are approximately 304 million global migrants — some seeking work, some seeking education, some seeking safety from internal conflicts, some fleeing droughts and floods and deforestation. In our own hemisphere, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office reports that migrant encounters at our southern border hit historical highs in 2023, while estimates from the Pew Research Center suggest that the total unauthorized population in America grew to 14 million in the same year, breaking a decade-long period of relative stability.
But this is not just about immigrants. America’s third civil war is being fought on multiple fronts. On one front it is white, predominantly Christian Americans resisting the emergence of the minority-dominated America that is now baked into our future sometime in the 2040s, driven by lower birthrates among white Americans and growth in Hispanic, Asian and multiracial American populations.
On another front are Black Americans still struggling against those who would raise new walls to keep them from a place called home. Then there are Americans of every background trying to steady themselves amid cultural currents that seem to shift by the week: new expectations about issues like identity, bathrooms and even a typeface, as well as how we acknowledge one another in the public square.
On yet another front, the gale-force winds of technological change, propelled now by artificial intelligence, are sweeping through workplaces faster than people can plant their feet. And on a fifth front, young Americans of every race, creed and color are straining to afford even a modest home — the physical and psychological harbor that has long anchored the American dream.
My sense is that we now have millions of Americans waking up each morning unsure of the social script, the economic ladder or the cultural norms that are OK to practice in their home. They are psychologically homeless.
When Donald Trump made building a wall along the Mexican border the central motif of his first campaign, he instinctively chose a word that did double duty for millions of Americans. “Wall” meant a physical barrier against uncontrolled immigration that was accelerating our transition to a minority-majority-led America. But it also meant a wall against the pace and scope of change: the cultural, digital and generational whirlwinds reshaping daily life.
That, to me, is the deep backdrop to Trump’s National Security Strategy. He is not interested in refighting the Cold War to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy. He is, in my view, interested in fighting the civilizational war over what is the American “home” and what is the European “home,” with an emphasis on race and Christian-Judeo faith — and who is an ally in that war and who is not.
The economics writer Noah Smith argued in his Substack this week that this was the key reason the MAGA movement began to turn away from Western Europe and draw closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia — because Trump’s devotees saw Putin as more of a defender of white Christian nationalism and traditional values than the nations of the European Union.
Historically, “in the American mind,” Smith wrote, “Europe stood across the sea as a place of timeless homogeneity, where the native white population had always been and would always remain.” However, “in the 2010s, it dawned on those Americans that this hallowed image of Europe was no longer accurate. With their working population dwindling, European countries took in millions of Muslim refugees and other immigrants from the Middle East and Central and South Asia — many of whom didn’t assimilate nearly as well as their peers in the U.S. You’d hear people say things like ‘Paris isn’t Paris anymore.’”
Today’s MAGA-led American right, Smith added, does “not care intrinsically about democracy, or about allyship, or about NATO, or about the European project. They care about ‘Western civilization.’ Unless Europe expels Muslim immigrants en masse and starts talking about its Christian heritage, the Republican Party is unlikely to lift a hand to help Europe with any of its problems.”
In other words, when protecting “Western civilization” — with a focus on race and faith — become the centerpiece of U.S. national security, the biggest threat becomes uncontrolled immigration into America and Western Europe — not Russia or China. And “protecting American culture, ‘spiritual health’ and ‘traditional families’ are framed as core national security requirements,” as the defense analyst Rick Landgraf pointed out on the defense website “War on the Rocks.”
And that’s why the Trump National Security Strategy paper is no accident or the work of a few low-level ideologues. It is, in fact, the Rosetta Stone explaining what really animates this administration at home and abroad.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook“
Thursday, December 11, 2025
U.S. Steps Up Campaign Against Maduro in Seizing Tanker Off Venezuela
U.S. Steps Up Campaign Against Maduro in Seizing Tanker Off Venezuela
The United States seized an oil tanker carrying Venezuelan oil, escalating President Trump’s campaign against Nicolás Maduro. The seizure, announced by Trump, was part of a broader effort to pressure Maduro’s government, which the U.S. accuses of drug trafficking and supporting terrorism. The tanker, previously linked to Iranian oil smuggling, was seized for violating sanctions, though the administration provided few details about the operation.
The seizure comes as the United States builds up its forces in the Caribbean as part of a campaign against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
The United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, a dramatic escalation in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
Speaking at the White House before an event on a new luxury visa program, Mr. Trump announced the operation and said it was “a large tanker, very large,” adding, without elaboration, that “other things are happening.”
When asked about the ship’s oil, Mr. Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.” He declined to say who owned the tanker. “It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a law enforcement operation, said the ship was carrying Venezuelan oil. They said there was no resistance from the crew and no casualties.
In a statement, Venezuela’s government called the seizure a “barefaced robbery and an act of international piracy” aimed at stripping the country of its oil wealth.
The operation was the latest tactic in an expanding effort to squeeze Venezuela and pressure Mr. Maduro. The Trump administration has accused him of running a “narcoterrorist” cartel sending drugs to the United States, although many current and former officials in Washington say the campaign is ultimately aimed at regime change.
Since September, the United States has launched more than 22 known strikesagainst boats in the region, killing more than 80 people. The Trump administration insists, without publicly providing evidence, that the boats are smuggling drugs. Legal experts say the strikes may violate international law.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video on Wednesday evening on social media showing armed U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of the tanker. The video could not be independently verified.
Ms. Bondi said the operation included the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard, supported by the Pentagon. She said the tanker had been used to transport “sanctioned oil” from Venezuela and Iran.
The U.S. officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks as part of the administration’s efforts to weaken Mr. Maduro’s government by undermining its oil market.
One of the officials identified the tanker as a vessel called the Skipper, and said it was carrying Venezuelan oil from Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company known as PDVSA. The official said the ship had been previously linked to the smuggling of Iranian oil — a global black market that the Justice Department has been investigating for years. The vessel was sailing under the flag of another Latin American nation in which it was not registered, the official said, and its ultimate destination was Asia.
A federal judge issued a seizure warrant roughly two weeks ago because of the ship’s past activities smuggling Iranian oil, not because of links to the Maduro government, the official said. Prosecutors have said that Iran uses money generated from oil sales to finance its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has designated a terrorist entity.
The administration did not address many details about the operation, including what happened to the crew and what ultimately will happen to the ship. It was not clear whether the seizure warrant — which is sealed — was for the ship or the oil or both. The White House did not immediately respond when asked whether the United States had the legal authority to keep the oil.
The ship, under a different name, had been put under sanctions by the Treasury Department in 2022. U.S. officials said it was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support Hezbollah and Iran’s revolutionary guard force.
The tanker may have been trying to conceal its whereabouts by broadcasting falsified location data before the seizure, according to an analysis of satellite imagery and photographs by The New York Times.
The Navy, the Coast Guard, Southern Command and the Pentagon all declined to discuss the episode, referring questions to the White House.
Venezuela is exceptionally dependent on oil, which makes these kinds of seizures potentially damaging to the country’s fragile economy. Oil accounts for the bulk of the country’s export revenues. In turn, Venezuela’s government spends much of the proceeds from oil exports to import basic necessities like food and medicine.
Although Venezuela is believed to have colossal untapped oil reserves, the country produces far less oil than it did at the start of the century, after mismanagement, U.S. sanctions and corruption at PDVSA hobbled output.
The United States was long the largest buyer of Venezuela’s oil, but political tensions have eroded those ties. China now buys roughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s overall oil exports.
Smaller amounts of Venezuelan oil are exported to the United States, often to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and to Cuba, where the island nation’s Communist leaders have long relied on such cargoes to provide a semblance of economic stability.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has ordered a huge buildup of U.S. forces in the region, with more than 15,000 troops and a dozen ships in the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Trump has authorized covert action against Venezuela and has warned that the United States could “very soon” expand its attacks from boats off the Venezuelan coast to targets inside the country. But Mr. Trump has also recently spoken by phone with Mr. Maduro about a possible meeting. The president said on Wednesday that he had not spoken to Mr. Maduro since their last conversation.
The administration has developed a range of options for military action in the country, including targeting Mr. Maduro and seizing control of the country’s oil fields. The president has repeatedly expressed reservations about an operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power, aides say, in part because of a fear that the operation could fail. Mr. Trump has been in no rush to make a decision, though he has shown a particular interest in extracting some of the value of Venezuela’s oil for the United States.
The oil tanker operation came on the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was formally bestowed on a Venezuelan dissident, María Corina Machado. She was not at the ceremony on Wednesday in Oslo, where her daughter received the prize on her behalf, but the Nobel Peace Prize committee said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo.
Reporting was contributed by Simon Romero and Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá, Colombia; Charlie Savage from Washington; Anushka Patil, Christiaan Triebert, Riley Mellen and Rebecca F. Elliott from New York; and Carol Rosenbergfrom Miami.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.”