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a day ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Hollowness of This Juneteenth
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. Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the ' whirlwinds of revolt,' as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this 'racial reckoning,' as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day,' a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades. Along with Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth became one of three federal holidays with explicit roots in Black history. Memorial Day was made a national observance in 1868 to honor soldiers felled during the Civil War, and was preceded by local celebrations organized by newly freed Black residents. The impetus for MLK Day came about with King's assassination exactly a century later, after which civil-rights groups and King's closest associates campaigned for the named holiday. Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day both originated in times when the Black freedom struggle faced its greatest challenges. Juneteenth—an emancipation celebration popularized during Reconstruction—was codified during what purported to be a transformation in America's racial consciousness. But, like its predecessors, Juneteenth joined the federal-holiday ranks just as Americans also decided en masse that they were done with all that. The 1870s saw the radical promise of Reconstruction give way to Jim Crow; the 1960s gave way to the nihilism and race-baiting of the Nixonian and Reaganite years. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump to a second term signaled a national retreat from racial egalitarianism. In his first months as president, he has moved the country in that direction more quickly than many imagined he would. Trump has set fire to billions of dollars of contracts in the name of eliminating 'DEI,' according to the White House. His legislative agenda threatens to strip federal health care and disaster aid for populations that are disproportionately Black. The Department of Defense has defenestrated Black veterans in death, removing their names from government websites and restoring the old names of bases that originally honored Confederate officers. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to spend millions of dollars to investigate whether recruiting Black air-traffic controllers (among other minority groups) has caused more plane crashes. The Smithsonian and its constituents have come under attack for daring to present artifacts about slavery and segregation. Books about Black history are being disappeared from schools and libraries. The secretary of education has suggested that public-school lessons about the truth of slavery and Jim Crow might themselves be illegal. There were, perhaps, other possible outcomes after 2020, but they didn't come to pass. The Democratic Party harnessed King's whirlwinds of revolt to power its mighty machine, promising to transform America and prioritize racial justice. Corporations donned the mask of 'wokeness'; people sent CashApp 'reparations' and listened and learned. But the donations to racial-justice initiatives soon dried up. The party supported a war in Gaza that fundamentally undercut any claim to its moral authority, especially among many young Black folks who felt kinship with the Palestinians in their plight. When DEI emerged as a boogeyman on the far right, many corporate leaders and politicians started to slink away from previous commitments to equity. Democratic Party leadership underestimated the anti-anti-racism movement, and seemed to genuinely believe that earned racial progress would endure on its own. The backlash that anybody who'd studied history said would come came, and the country was unprepared. Trump and his allies spend a lot of time talking about indoctrination and banning DEI. But by and large, the campaign against 'wokeness' has always been a canard. The true quarries of Trump's movement are the actual policies and structures that made progress possible. Affirmative action is done, and Black entrance rates at some selective schools have already plummeted. Our existing federal protections against discrimination in workplaces, housing, health care, and pollution are being peeled back layer by layer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act might be a dead letter, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act is in perpetual danger of losing the last of its teeth. The Fourteenth Amendment itself stands in tatters. Five years after Democratic congresspeople knelt on the floor in kente cloth for nearly nine minutes, the holiday is all that really remains. This puts the oddness of today in stark relief. The purpose of Juneteenth was always a celebration of emancipation, of the Black community's emergence out of our gloomy past. But it was also an implicit warning that what had been done could be done again. Now millions of schoolchildren will enjoy a holiday commemorating parts of our history that the federal government believes might be illegal to teach them about. I once advocated for Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the grounds that the celebration would prompt more people to become familiar with the rich history of emancipation and Black folks' agency in that. But, as it turns out, transforming Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day' against the backdrop of the past few years of retrenchment simply creates another instance of hypocrisy. What we were promised was a reckoning, whatever that meant. What we got was a day off.
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The Three Dramatic Consequences of Israel's Attack on Iran
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. 'Battles are the principal milestones in secular history,' Winston Churchill observed in his magisterial biography of the Duke of Marlborough in 1936. 'Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.' So it was then, and so it is today. Iran's war with Israel is rooted in the Islamic Republic's inveterate hostility to the Jewish state. It has consisted of multiple campaigns, including terror attacks against Jewish communities abroad (Argentina in 1994, for example) and missile salvos aimed at Israel (including from Lebanon and Iran itself last year). But three great events—the smashing of Hezbollah, the Syrian revolution that overthrew the Iranian-aligned regime, and now a climactic battle waged by long-range strikes and Mossad hit teams in Tehran—are changing the Middle East. We are living through the kind of moment that Churchill described. Israel's current campaign is built around two realities often missed by so-called realists: first, that the Iranian government is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and cannot be deterred, bought off, or persuaded to do otherwise, and second, that Israel reasonably believes itself to be facing an existential threat. When I served as counselor of the State Department during the second Bush administration, I had, among other keepsakes on my desk, an Iranian banknote picked up in Dubai. When I held it up to the light, I could see the sign of an atom superimposed over a map of Iran, with its nucleus roughly over Natanz, site of the major Iranian centrifuge hall. The banknote was a symbol of the determination that successive American governments chose to ignore, preferring to negotiate with a regime whose bad faith and malevolence were plain for those willing to see. The Iranian regime was happy to delay and temporize, but its destination was clearly visible in the expanding overt and covert programs to enrich uranium, design warheads, and develop delivery systems. Equally visible was Tehran's desire to destroy Israel. It takes a particular kind of idiocy or bad faith to disregard the speeches, propaganda, and shouts of 'death to Israel.' The Israeli lesson learned from the previous century—and, indeed, the Jewish one learned over a much longer span of time—is that if someone says they want to exterminate you, they mean it. And so Israel has acted in ways that have had three dramatic consequences. The first is the emergence of a distinct mode of warfare, already apparent in some of Ukraine's operations in Russia, that combines special operations with precision long-range strikes. Special operations are nothing new—the British secret services of the time played a role in a nearly successful bomb plot against Napoleon. But the innovation is combining large-scale and systematic use of assassinations and sabotage with nearly simultaneously precision strikes. Similar techniques helped decapitate Hezbollah's leadership and devastate its middle ranks while smashing its arsenals, but Israel's campaign against Iran is on an altogether different scale. This mode of warfare will not work everywhere, but in this case Israeli special operations helped neuter Iran's defenses and kill many of its senior leaders and nuclear scientists. The sobering lesson for the United States is that others can, at some point, do this to us more easily than we might be able to use these methods against a country like China. It is, in any event, part of the new face of war. The second is the way that the wars that began with Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, have reshaped the Middle East. Iran's position had been drastically weakened through the loss of its proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria, and now this current round of attacks has the potential to jeopardize the Iranian regime itself. The Iranian regime has delivered only misery and repression to its people. In return it was once offered religious and revolutionary zeal, which has been largely replaced by cynicism and hatred of the leadership. It had, and has now lost, imperial reach throughout the Middle East and beyond. The very last thing it offered was the prestige of its pursuit of nuclear weapons—weapons that Westerners may view with horror, but that others in the world (think India and Pakistan, for example) value quite differently. After losing all of these achievements to its own brutality and incompetence, as well as Israeli hit squads and fighter-bombers, all that the regime has left are its mechanisms of repression. Ultimately, those will not suffice to sustain it. Israel (and for that matter the United States) does not overtly aim at overthrowing the regime; neither has the intention of invading the country in the manner of Iraq in 2003. But a form of regime change may come—possibly through public upheaval, or just as likely through the rise of some strongman, probably from the military or security services, who will take Iran in a different direction. Perhaps such a strongman will lead Iran to some dark new place. But he could also proceed along the lines of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, denouncing and disposing of some of the current elite on charges of treachery, incompetence, and corruption to consolidate his power, and then acting as a dictatorial modernizer. That would be the first step on a much better path for Iran and the rest of the world. The Western world has reason, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said, to be grateful to Israel for doing the 'dirty work' of smashing Iran's nuclear program, because a nuclear-armed Iran would be a menace not just to Israel but to the wider Middle East and to the West. Which brings us to the third great shift in moods and atmospheres, the characteristically over-the-top, bellicose rhetoric of Donald Trump. At first the American government hastened to distance itself from the Israeli attacks, in a swift and now rather embarrassing statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But over time the president, communicating through explosive statements on Truth Social, began using the first-person plural in talking about the Israeli attacks, celebrating the American military hardware used in the attack, threatening worse to come, musing about killing the supreme leader of Iran, and clearly contemplating finishing the job of destroying the Iranian nuclear complex by sending B-2 bombers to deliver 15-ton GBU-57 penetrating bombs on the deeply subterranean Fordow facility. This has aroused consternation among some of his core supporters, such as Tucker Carlson (dismissed by the president as 'kooky') and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and required the dispatch of Vice President J. D. Vance to quiet the protests of the isolationist, and in some cases borderline anti-Semitic, wing of the MAGA movement. Trump's turnaround is less surprising when one considers his political gifts, among them a feral instinct for weakness. He is a politician who is willing to kick opponents when they are down, and enjoys doing just that. He senses, far better than most of his advisers and experts, just how weak Iran is. No doubt as well, he delights in the opportunity to punish the regime that plotted to assassinate him in 2024. And he has aspirations to be not a warlord, much though he delights in military bluster and show, but a kind of peacemaker. He understands that a different kind of Iran—if not a democratic one, then a tamed dictatorship—would be open for deals, and he would gladly make them. He has engaged more with the Persian Gulf in recent years than with any other part of the world, and sees opportunities there. He believes that the price would be low, and although the Israelis have done the heavy lifting, he will get the credit from them and others for the finishing touches. Trump has undoubtedly already authorized various forms of support to Israel's campaign. He may or may not order the dropping of GBU-57s on Fordow. But he has, in any case, supported actions that are doing far more than those of any of his predecessors to eliminate a threat that has already killed American soldiers and civilians as well as many others, and that would be infinitely worse if left unchecked. Much as it may pain his critics to admit it, in this matter he is acting, if not conventionally, then like a statesman of a distinctively Trumpian stamp. Article originally published at The Atlantic
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a day ago
- Politics
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Trump's Trouble With Tulsi
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. 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. Back in March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard delivered a view of Iran to the House Intelligence Committee that was in line with Trump-administration policy: hostile toward Tehran, but also skeptical of the need for American intervention. Unfortunately for her, though, things have changed in the past three months. 'Iran continues to seek to expand its influence in the Middle East,' Gabbard said. Nevertheless, she said, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear-weapons program that he suspended in 2003.' (Presumably she was referring to Ali Khamenei and not his long-dead predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini.) That may have been President Donald Trump's view in March too, but this week, Trump told reporters that Iran is on the verge of getting a nuclear bomb. When asked about Gabbard's testimony, Trump dismissed it. 'I don't care what she said,' he said. 'I think they were very close to having one.' This kind of harsh dismissal of American intelligence was a hallmark of Trump's first term in office. Shortly before his inauguration, he compared intelligence agencies to Nazis, and somehow things got worse from there. He infamously sided with Russia's Vladimir Putin rather than the intelligence community on the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election, accused former officials of treason, and reportedly clashed with DNI Dan Coats over his unwillingness to take his side in political conflicts. That problem was supposed to be solved in his second term. Rather than choose someone like Coats, a former senator who had experience with intelligence, or his successor, John Ratcliffe, who claimed he did, Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who had endorsed him for president. (Ratcliffe, having proved his loyalty to Trump in the first term, was named CIA director.) Gabbard shared a few things with Trump: an odd affinity for Putin's government, and a public stance of opposing American intervention. But above all, her qualification for the job was that she, like Trump, bore a huge grudge against the intelligence agencies, making her an ideal pick in his Cabinet of retribution. Now the limits of this approach to appointments are coming into view. Gabbard's beef with the IC was her sense that it was too belligerent and interventionist, especially with regard to her pals in places such as Syria and Russia; she was also angry because she had reportedly been briefly placed on a government watch list for flying. Gabbard opposes foreign wars, and it appears that she doesn't want intelligence to implicate her friends overseas. But when the intelligence points against American intervention, as it does with Iran, she is happy to stand behind it despite her skepticism of the analysts. Trump, by contrast, doesn't want the intelligence to complicate his choices at all. The president was fine with the IC assessment from earlier this year, when his line was that he opposed wars and would keep the United States out. But now that he has made a quick shift from trying to restrain Israel from striking Iran to demanding Iran's 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER'—a baffling demand of a country with which the U.S. is not at war—and contemplating American attacks, the conclusion that Iran isn't that close to a bomb is a real hindrance. Politico reports that Trump was annoyed by a video Gabbard posted earlier this month in which she warned about 'political elite and warmongers' risking nuclear war, and she was reportedly excluded from a Camp David meeting. (The White House has insisted that all principals are on the same page, though Trump's dismissive comments about Gabbard earlier this week are telling.) Cutting out the DNI at a crucial moment like this is an unusual choice, though the role has never been well defined: Although it was created to sit atop the U.S. intelligence agencies and coordinate among them, officials such as the director of the CIA have often wielded more power. Trump's saber-rattling has created rifts within the MAGA coalition, as my colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Isaac Stanley-Becker reported yesterday. In reality, Trump was never the dove that he made himself out to be. He has consistently backed American involvement overseas. During the 2016 election, he claimed that he had been against the Iraq War from the start, placing the idea at the center of his campaign even though there is no evidence for it. As president, he escalated U.S. involvement in Syria, backed the Saudi war in Yemen and vetoed Congress's attempt to curtail it, and—in one of his major foreign-policy successes—assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Throughout his first term, he treated the troops as a political prop. These tendencies have become more pronounced in his second term, though Trump's favorite places to send troops remain within national borders: in the streets of Los Angeles or parading through Washington, D.C. He launched a series of major strikes against Yemen's Houthi rebels, despite the misgivings of his dovish vice president, and then abruptly stopped them when it became clear that no easy victory was forthcoming. This is the crux of the matter with Iran too. Although he may be hesitant about American involvement overseas, Trump loves displays of strength. He sees one in Israel's attacks on Iran, and he wants in on the action. Whether the MAGA doves believed Trump really was one of them or simply hoped they could persuade him in the moment is something only they can answer. But his actions this week show that his real resentment was not toward intervention or even intelligence itself. It was toward anything and anyone who might restrain his caprices. Related: Isn't Trump supposed to be anti-war? The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The Tesla brain drain The David Frum Show: What comes next for Iran? Why would the Trump family want to run a phone company? Today's News The Federal Reserve will hold interest rates steady. Earlier today, President Donald Trump called Fed Chair Jerome Powell 'stupid' and contemplated installing himself at the Reserve. Trump said that he 'may' or 'may not' strike Iran, adding that 'nobody knows' what he's going to do. The Supreme Court upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Evening Read The Dumbest Phone Is Parenting Genius By Rheana Murray When Caron Morse's 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: 'A hard hell no.' Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students' attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. 'I was so sick,' she said, 'of being the middle person in any correspondence.' So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Why isn't Russia defending Iran? The magic realism of Zohran Mamdani The fear coursing through state capitols The new danger in Trump's Washington: honoring federal employees The master of the white-knuckle narrative Culture Break Read. In her new book, Murderland, Caroline Fraser offers a provocative argument about what creates serial killers. Listen. Clifton Chenier changed music history. On the centennial of his birth, musicians from across genres are paying homage to the King of Zydeco, Reya Hart writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. Explore all of our newsletters here. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
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a day ago
- Automotive
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The Tesla Brain Drain
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. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Before DOGE, there was Twitter. In 2023, Elon Musk seemed too distracted by his latest venture to run the world's most valuable car company. Tesla was faltering as he focused on remaking (and renaming) the social-media network. So at Tesla's investor-day event in Austin that March, Musk responded with a rare show of force. He was joined onstage by a cadre of more than a dozen of the company's top executives, all to signal that even if he was extremely busy, Tesla was run by a world-class team: 'We've obviously got significant bench strength here,' Musk said. Sure enough, Tesla closed out 2023 with the best sales it's ever had. Musk is in bad need of a similar comeback right now as he returns from Washington to focus on his struggling car company. In recent months, Tesla sales have plummeted as the chain-saw-wielding, far-right centibillionaire has turned off traditionally liberal electric-car buyers. The MAGA faithful never stepped up to take their place, and they're less likely to do so now that the Trump-Musk bromance is over. Musk has other problems: Tesla created the modern electric car as we know it, but now the automaker is falling behind the competition while Musk is more focused on AI and robots than selling cars. And on top of everything else, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act working its way through Congress could cost Tesla billions each year. This time around, however, Musk can't lean on that aforementioned bench even if he wants to. Something similar to DOGE's steep staffing cuts has been playing out at Tesla. About a third of the executives who stood onstage with him two years ago have left Tesla or been ousted. Many other high-profile company leaders have resigned. Just since April, Tesla has lost its head of software engineering, head of battery technology, and head of humanoid robotics. Tens of thousands of rank-and-file employees left last year amid waves of mass layoffs. At the end of the day, Tesla is the Musk show: The company is the biggest source of his wealth, and is core to his reputation as a tech genius. Now, after all of the pivots and attrition, the future of Tesla rests singularly on Musk more than it ever has. [Read: The Tesla revolt] To longtime Tesla chroniclers such as myself, the chaotic, rapid-fire cuts that defined Musk's tenure at DOGE felt familiar from the very beginning. The playbook was pioneered at Tesla. When Musk took over as CEO in 2008, Tesla was a start-up struggling to build its first car. His early infusions of personal cash, ruthless approach to cost cutting, and, in his words, 'hardcore' work environment are widely credited with getting the automaker up and running. He has a famous approach to any type of problem: Get rid of preconceived notions, tear everything down, and rebuild from there. If things break, so be it. They can probably be repaired later on. At one point, the company got rid of the traditional turn-signal switch on some cars before later putting them back. (Tesla and Musk did not respond to my requests for comment.) For a long time, the strategy worked. In the span of a decade, Tesla rose from a start-up to an auto giant worth more than Ford, Toyota, and GM combined—despite selling just a fraction of the cars its rivals did. That's why investors still back Musk today. He's made them a lot of money before, so if things get bad, he's the man to figure it out, right? Musk himself has helped promulgate the idea that he has all the answers. At one point, he said he would personally start approving some of his employees' expenses amid a 'hardcore' round of cost cutting. 'He has always been the kind of person who says, 'I am the only one who can do this,'' Sam Abuelsamid, an auto-industry analyst at the research firm Telemetry, told me. In 2018, when I was the editor in chief of the auto publication Jalopnik, Tesla's now-defunct communications team frantically admonished us for reporting that Doug Field, the company's top engineer, had left the company. He was merely the top vehicle engineer, a spokesperson said. Musk—despite not being trained as an engineer—was the top engineer. [Read: Elon and the genius trap] In 2019, an analysis from the financial firm Bernstein put Tesla's executive-turnover rate at nearly double the average of comparable Silicon Valley companies; the number was 'dramatically higher' among Musk's direct reports as well. Layoffs and firings have sometimes felt more mercurial than anything else. Consider the team behind Tesla's charging network. In June 2023, I wrote that Tesla's fast and reliable 'Superchargers' were its secret weapon; other automakers had begun building cars using Tesla's proprietary charging port to give their customers Supercharger access. About a year later, Tesla laid off the entire 500-person team. Many of the staffers were later rehired and returned, but not all: Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla's head of charging, left for good. The Supercharger network has grown since then, though not without a period of chaos for the automaker and the entire car industry that bet on it. The cuts to Tesla's charging workforce were part of a bigger reduction in headcount last year: Within the first six months of 2024, Tesla had shed nearly 20,000 employees, according to internal data viewed by CNBC. And Tesla's latest quarterly SEC filing, released in April, boasts of 'a $52 million decrease in employee and labor costs' compared with last year. (In reporting this story, I reached out to roughly a dozen current and former Tesla staffers. None would talk with me on the record.) Last year's layoffs, Musk said, were designed to position the company for its 'next phase of growth.' Based on everything he's said so far, that means AI. He has promised that robots and driverless cars will eventually deliver 'a trillion dollars of profit a year.' Several top executives and engineers have resigned after they reportedly clashed with Musk on his pivot. This month, Tesla is tentatively set to launch its long-awaited robotaxi service in Austin, starting with what Musk has said will be '10 to 12' self-driving Teslas that can also be remotely operated by humans if needed. In other words, the company has a long way to go before it's anywhere close to something like a driverless Uber. For now, the company still makes its money from selling cars, and Tesla has lost many of the smart people who helped create what was once an innovative automotive juggernaut. Musk still does have several long-standing deputies at the company, including Tom Zhu, a senior vice president who previously led Tesla's operations in China, and Lars Moravy, who leads vehicle engineering. But the departures put more pressure on Musk: He doesn't have the workforce he once did to build to make groundbreaking electric vehicles. The silver lining for the future of electric vehicles is that these former Tesla staffers are fanning out to the rest of the car industry. Take Field, the former head Tesla engineer (or 'head vehicle engineer,' in Tesla's telling). He now leads advanced vehicle software at Ford, as well as a program tasked with making an affordable EV. Tinucci, the former head of Tesla's charging team, is now overseeing Uber's shift to electric vehicles. 'I think we'll see kind of a Tesla diaspora,' Kristin Hull, the founder of Nia Impact Capital, an investment firm with a stake in Tesla, told me. 'The rest of the world is catching up. And I think that's also playing a part in why the talent is moving on.' (Field and Tinucci didn't respond to requests for comment.) Musk's detractors might easily fall into schadenfreude. His actions might finally be catching up with him. But if Tesla continues to slide, there will be ramifications beyond Musk and his investors simply losing money. Tesla remains one of the very few companies outside of China that is making money by selling electric cars, which makes it uniquely capable of making a super-affordable EV. Every day that goes by without cheaper options, Americans who might be inclined to go electric are instead buying gas-burning cars that could be on the road for a decade or more. Meanwhile, other carmakers have spent years racing to build cleaner cars in large part to keep up with Tesla. Without the company's continued dominance, it's easy to see a heavily polluting industry fall back on old habits. The risk is particularly high right now as the Trump administration is betting big on fossil fuels. Whether Tesla can rebound will test something truly scarce—not Musk's wealth but the faith that others have in him. Musk has already alienated people on the left and right, but many people still fiercely believe in his ability to make them rich. At some point, even they might start to vanish. Article originally published at The Atlantic
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a day ago
- Politics
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The MAGA Coalition Has Turned on Itself
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. Sign up for Trump's Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency. The MAGA movement usually displays remarkable unity in attacking the left. But Israel's military assault on Iran has splintered President Donald Trump's coalition, as rival factions fight over the true meaning of an 'America First' foreign policy. Right-wing figures have descended into vicious debate over whether the White House should take a more active role in Israel's bombardment of Iran—one that, with American help, could dismantle Tehran's nuclear program or even lead to regime change. Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other isolationist voices are demanding that Trump stay out of another Middle Eastern war. Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and other more hawkish conservatives are making the case that there has never been—and may never again be—a better time to take on Iran. That same split has surfaced among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Senator Lindsey Graham and others are pushing Trump to help Israel destroy Tehran's nuclear program, a goal of American presidents dating back decades. Meanwhile, MAGA luminaries such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have declared that further U.S. involvement would betray the president's 'America First' ideals. Both sides in MAGA world have furiously lobbied Trump in recent days, and the president is very aware of the competing interests in his base, a White House official and an outside adviser told us. Trump initially opposed Israel's plan to strike Iran last week. But after briefings from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Trump's own staff, the president came around to staying out of Israel's way while helping it defend itself from Tehran's counterattack. Now that Israel's initial wave of strikes has proved a remarkable success, Trump has embraced the attacks, offering more support. He cut short his time at the G7 summit in Canada to return to Washington last night and ominously suggested that Tehran, a city of 10 million people, be evacuated immediately, sparking rumors that the U.S. was about to decisively enter the conflict. The White House denied those reports and said that the U.S. military was remaining in a defensive posture. But part of Trump's thinking is that such threats may scare Iran back to the negotiating table, the White House official and two other administration officials told us. (We granted them and others interviewed for this story anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.) The president now believes that Israel's bombardment could push the Iranian regime, fearful for its survival, to re-engage with a U.S. proposal to abandon its nuclear-enrichment program, the officials said. Trump will have to decide whether to fully join the conflict by authorizing the use of massive American bunker-buster bombs, of the sort needed to destroy Iran's underground facilities. One of the officials told us that the weapons are 'leverage' for Trump, who hopes to revive talks in the days ahead. Another person familiar with the discussions surrounding Trump's hasty return from the G7 said defense officials were preparing options for the president. 'I'm not looking for a cease-fire. We're looking at better than a cease-fire,' Trump told reporters on Air Force One on the flight back to Washington last night, adding that he wanted 'a real end' to the conflict between Iran and Israel and a 'complete give-up' by Iran of its nuclear ambitions. Trump has grown frustrated that the Iranians did not accept his administration's most recent offer for a deal. 'But remember, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,' Trump said. 'It's very simple. We don't have to go too deep into it.' [Read: What Trump knew about the attack against Iran] Vice President J. D. Vance, part of the GOP's isolationist wing, published a long post on X today that praised Trump's reluctance to commit American troops to combat and said, 'People are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.' But the post read like a justification for potential military involvement, noting that Trump 'may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president.' Trump has pulled back from striking Iran before. In June 2019, after Iran's military shot down an American surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump authorized a retaliatory attack. But military officials were blindsided when, just minutes before the attack was to begin, the president called it off, citing potential Iranian casualties. A few months later, after Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, the MAGA movement's fracture over Iran began to show. When Carlson hosted the 8 p.m. hour on Fox News, he advocated restraint in dealing with Iran and warned about the dangers of escalation. An hour later on the same network, Hannity struck a wildly different tone, reveling in Trump's strike and suggesting that Tehran could be hit with the full power of the American military. Trump was close to both men, who each knew that often the best way to deliver a message to the commander in chief was through the televisions that he faithfully watched in the White House residence or in the private dining area off the Oval Office. That time around, in January 2020, Carlson's messaging on Fox over several days—and a private phone call with the president—won out: Trump decided not to ratchet up the standoff with Iran. Just before Israel's attack last week, Carlson, who was terminated from Fox in 2023, went on social media and blamed conservative voices—including former colleagues and employers—for trying to stoke a war. 'Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who's calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran,' Carlson wrote in a post on X. 'On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.' Carlson then appeared yesterday on Bannon's podcast to urge Trump to stay away from the conflict and 'drop' Netanyahu. Carlson also suggested that the president was 'complicit' in Israel's attacks, a charge that did not sit well with Trump when he was asked about it yesterday at the G7 summit. 'I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying,' Trump said in response to a reporter's question. 'Let him go get a television network and say it so people listen.' Carlson in particular has targeted Levin, who met with Trump last week and made the case that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, one of the administration officials told us. After Carlson accused Levin on X of agitating for Trump to bomb Iran, the radio host hit back on his Friday show, saying, 'You're a reckless and deceitful propagandist, and that's the best I can say. You promote anti-Semitism and conspiracy nuts. You slobber all over some of the most evil people on earth.' (Levin also responded to Carlson on social media: 'Hey thug. I never said to the President that American forces should bomb Iran. The leaker who is feeding you is a liar.') [Read: Iran's stunning incompetence] In Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene used similar language to attack those pushing for U.S. involvement: 'Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA,' she wrote on X, adding that staying out of foreign entanglements is 'what many Americans voted for in 2024.' Trump, in an interview with The Atlantic last week, made clear he believes that he 'decides' what 'America First' means. Some in Trump's orbit have pushed him to take advantage of Tehran's weakness at the moment; Tehran proxies Hamas and Hezbollah are badly diminished, and Israel managed to wipe out much of Iran's senior military leadership in its attacks over the past several days. Lindsey Graham, a longtime Iran hawk, has called on the president to aid Israel in recent days, and made a similar pitch on television last night. 'Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat. If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations,' Graham said during an appearance—where else?—on Hannity's show. 'But here's the bigger question: Wouldn't the world be better off if the Ayatollahs went away and were replaced by something better?' Other members of the MAGA movement have taken sides, and not always predictably. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who has advised Trump on national security in the past, backed Levin. Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec have pushed diplomacy. A former U.S. official close to members of the current administration played down the war of words: 'This is the battle of the podcast hosts.' This person predicted that the competing influence efforts would ultimately have little sway on the president. 'What Trump said is, 'It's my decision,'' the former official said. 'I think that's right.' In a social-media post yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that he had ordered additional military assets sent to the Middle East, a move he said was intended to strengthen America's 'defensive posture' and protect U.S. troops in the region. In recent days, the U.S. has moved guided missile destroyers closer to Israel and accelerated the previously planned movement of the aircraft carrier Nimitz from Asia to the Middle East. The Air Force has also dispatched a fleet of refueling aircraft to Europe, positioning them closer to the region. Trump posted on social media today, 'We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran'—the word we seemingly claiming partial ownership of an operation conducted by Israeli forces using some American-made equipment. For months, Trump has been pushing for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear-enrichment crisis—a problem his critics believe he caused when, in 2018, he backed out of the agreement that had been brokered by Barack Obama. Trump's diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, told confidants this spring he believed that a deal was possible; the administration's latest proposal would allow Iran to procure enriched nuclear fuel from outside the country but not to enrich it on Iranian soil. And Trump blocked Netanyahu from a strike on Iran in April. But the president's top advisers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, briefed him last week that Israel believed Iran was on the brink of developing a weapon and was determined to strike. Netanyahu delivered the same message in a call with Trump early last week, and Trump grew resigned to the strike, offering Israel limited military support—intelligence sharing, as well as American air-defense systems and a Navy destroyer to help shoot down incoming ballistic missiles—even as he still hoped for a diplomatic solution. The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, and that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has not lifted the suspension he placed on the weapons program in 2003. But pressure from hard-line elements in the regime has built on him to change course so that Iran is better able to deter Israel and the United States. Khamenei has the final say on whether Iran builds a weapon. In congressional testimony in March, Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, shared the intelligence community's analysis, which has remained essentially the same for years. Experts have debated how quickly Iran could construct a nuclear device able to be delivered to a target of its choice. This morning, CNN reported that Iran is up to three years away from achieving that goal, according to U.S. intelligence analysis, a stark contrast with Israeli estimates. [Read: Israel's bold, risky attack] In his remarks aboard Air Force One after leaving the G7 meeting, Trump dismissed Gabbard's position altogether: 'I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having them,' he said. Instead, Trump has suggested that he might look elsewhere for guidance. This morning he posted a lengthy text he'd received from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who said that God had spared Trump from last summer's assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, so he could become the 'most consequential President in a century—maybe ever.' Huckabee wrote that no president in his lifetime 'has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945,' an apparent reference to Harry Truman's decision to drop a pair of atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. 'You did not seek this moment,' Huckabee wrote. 'This moment sought YOU!' Shane Harris and Missy Ryan contributed reporting. Article originally published at The Atlantic
