Latest news with #Machiavelli
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Israel's war against Iran is a gamble - and to pay off it can't afford to miss
"You come at the king, you best not miss," says Omar Little, channelling Machiavelli, in the US crime series The Wire. But the same principle applies to Israel's decision to attack Iran. Its war is a gamble - to pay off, it must be entirely successful. It cannot afford to miss. That may seem a strange thing to say as things stand. seems to be hitting its targets with devastating accuracy. Live updates: Trump says Iran 'want to talk' Take the stunning campaign of decapitation: Israeli intelligence correspondent Ronen Bergman reports that Israel has developed the ability to monitor 's top officials "in real time". That fearsome power is being wielded with awesome effect. Iran's military and intelligence commanders are being traced and eliminated one by one - 20 of them in the first night alone. The destruction of Iran's air defences is also on the mark. It has left Iran's skies open to Israeli jets to destroy target after target with pinpoint accuracy. The mission is to destroy Iran's nuclear programme, but also it seems the regime's means of repression and control. Read more: To be absolutely sure of success, Israel needs the regime to fall. It must destroy both Iran's ability to develop the bomb, but more importantly, its will to do so. Fail on either front, and Iran's leaders will prioritise building a nuclear weapon. They will have to, so they can defend themselves better next time. Their ability to build the bomb will be impossible to destroy completely, however massive the munitions Israel puts into the centrifuge halls of Natanz and Fordow. The Iranian nuclear programme is too far developed. They have the knowledge and expertise. For as many nuclear scientists Israel kills, there are their students to replace them. And the technology is in their favour. As one western source told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper over the weekend: "They have knowledge about the plant centrifuges. "They don't need as many centrifuges as they used to. They can build a small plant somewhere, heavily fortified underground, maybe even in less than three years." At some point, the Israelis will need to end their campaign. The Iranians' desire to build the bomb will then be redoubled among what's left of their regime. The capacity to do so will have been degraded, but the know-how will remain. Toppling the regime will be the surest way of achieving Israel's aims if it ushers in a replacement not determined to go nuclear. Israel knows that and has been going after people and places essential to the regime's apparatus of internal control and repression. Read more: It has been attacking energy infrastructure, too, knowing soaring energy prices may fuel social unrest and dissent. Expect those efforts to bring down the ayatollahs to intensify - Israel has come for the king and cannot afford to miss.
Sky News
6 days ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Israel's war against Iran is a gamble - and to pay off it can't afford to miss
"You come at the king, you best not miss," says Omar Little, channelling Machiavelli, in the US crime series The Wire. But the same principle applies to Israel's decision to attack Iran. It's war is a gamble - to pay off, it must be entirely successful. It cannot afford to miss. That may seem a strange thing to say as things stand. Israel seems to be hitting its targets with devastating accuracy. Take the stunning campaign of decapitation: Israeli intelligence correspondent Ronen Bergman reports that Israel has developed the ability to monitor Iran 's top officials "in real time". That fearsome power is being wielded with awesome effect. Iran's military and intelligence commanders are being traced and eliminated one by one - 20 of them in the first night alone. The destruction of Iran's air defences is also on the mark. It has left Iran's skies open to Israeli jets to destroy target after target with pinpoint accuracy. The mission is to destroy Iran's nuclear programme, but also it seems the regime's means of repression and control. 3:47 To be absolutely sure of success, Israel needs the regime to fall. It must destroy both Iran's ability to develop the bomb, but more importantly, its will to do so. Fail on either front, and Iran's leaders will prioritise building a nuclear weapon. They will have to, so they can defend themselves better next time. 2:12 Their ability to build the bomb will be impossible to destroy completely, however massive the munitions Israel puts into the centrifuge halls of Natanz and Fordow. The Iranian nuclear programme is too far developed. They have the knowledge and expertise. For as many nuclear scientists Israel kills, there are their students to replace them. 0:24 And the technology is in their favour. As one western source told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper over the weekend: "They have knowledge about the plant centrifuges. "They don't need as many centrifuges as they used to. They can build a small plant somewhere, heavily fortified underground, maybe even in less than three years." 1:36 At some point, the Israelis will need to end their campaign. The Iranians' desire to build the bomb will then be redoubled among what's left of their regime. The capacity to do so will have been degraded, but the know-how will remain. Toppling the regime will be the surest way of achieving Israel's aims if it ushers in a replacement not determined to go nuclear. Israel knows that and has been going after people and places essential to the regime's apparatus of internal control and repression. It has been attacking energy infrastructure, too, knowing soaring energy prices may fuel social unrest and dissent.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, , is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word 'astutia' — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Vox
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like The Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgements into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, The Prince, is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word astutia — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in The Prince about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them.
San Francisco Chronicle
18-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
The Tijuana River stinks. Let's rename it after Trump
'It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.' — M achiavelli The Tijuana River stinks. So, what could be more fitting than renaming it in honor of Donald Trump? Turning the sewage-filled Tijuana into the River Trump would be far more than commentary on a corrupt and lawless American dictator. It would be the best way for California and Mexico to win international attention for a critically endangered waterway. It also would swipe a page from the playbook of President Trump, who loves renaming things. He's declared the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America (sparking anger and litigation from our neighbors). He is turning the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Gulf (who cares if that might risk war with Iran?). And since Trump doesn't ask permission before renaming, California and Mexico could justify giving the Tijuana a new moniker without U.S. government sign-off. Of course, the Tijuana needs more than a name. The river flows for 120 miles through Baja California, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into San Diego County and running through Southern California's largest natural coastal wetland before ending in the Pacific Ocean, near a surf break called the Sloughs. The Tijuana should be a natural treasure, but the river is so polluted that the beaches and waters near its mouth are currently closed. For more than 100 years, trash, toxic materials and sewage from communities and their failing treatment plants on both sides of the border have fouled the river. Neither the U.S. nor Mexico has built or maintained treatment facilities with the capacity to clean the Tijuana's water, especially when it rains. Tens of thousands of people have been sickened by the pollution, which also sullies the air when the water aerosolizes as sea spray. The pollution exceeds legal standards in the U.S., Mexico and California — but the violations haven't yet inspired a comprehensive cleanup. Community groups have devised solutions, but have struggled to find funding. Indeed, a big reason why the Tijuana remains dirty is that it crosses too many jurisdictions — nations, states, localities and the Kumeyaay Nation — no single government is responsible for it. President Joe Biden's administration and Gov. Gavin Newsom took modest steps and added funding to encourage a clean-up. In recent weeks, Trump's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, visited the river and promised to tackle the project, too. But there is little reason to believe this promise is made in good faith. The EPA has reduced its staff and authority so aggressively that it's likely the agency no longer has the capacity to help clean up the river. What the EPA pledge does present is an opening to rename the river, draw attention to it and make Trump responsible for its condition. Maybe the occupier of the White House will take the bait. Trump can't resist talking about the border, and this is a cross-border river. He loves to blast away at America's very nice neighbors, and addressing the Tijuana is an opportunity to take shots at Mexico. Trump loves to declare emergencies — and a border emergency here would be an actual crisis, unlike his bogus imaginings of nonexistent immigrant 'invaders' crossing into the U.S. There are risks to drawing Trump into the Tijuana's problems. When he has taken an interest in California waterways, he's done dangerous and irresponsible things, like emptying water behind a dam at a speed that threatened lives. It's not hard to imagine Trump ordering a pointless dam to block the Tijuana River at the border, too. Also, naming anything in California or Mexico for Trump, no matter how pointed the intended insult, could trigger a backlash from Trump critics and others on the left. Something like that happened in 2008 after San Francisco activists proposed a ballot measure to rename a city sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush. The stunt was meant to embarrass Bush, but San Francisco's progressive electorate rejected the idea overwhelmingly. Even lending Bush's name to a building full of crap was too high an honor for that president, apparently. Ultimately, the real-world risks posed by the polluted river are far greater than the downsides of any resulting political drama. 'An entire generation of children is growing up in South San Diego County having only experienced polluted beaches,' Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre wrote Biden last year. That missive didn't produce much action. And Mexico's previous president (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and current president (Claudia Sheinbaum) haven't done nearly enough, either. One could argue for adding their names to the rechristened river as well. If the Tijuana is ever going to get the urgent clean-up it needs, the best bet, right now, is to make the river Trump's namesake, and thus his problem.
