We got this. That was the Trump administration’s message to European allies in the early days of its war with Iran. Washington hadn’t warned its NATO partners about the military campaign, jointly undertaken with Israel, much less consulted with them about the war’s objectives.
Instead, American officials told Europeans to look after their own interests.
Viktor Orbán’s loss in yesterday’s election is just as much a defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, as it is for the now-toppled Hungarian strongman. Seldom have American leaders intervened so overtly in a foreign election, and seldom has their preferred candidate fared so badly. Trump has a way of distancing himself from people who disappoint him. Last night, when reporters asked him about the outcome in Hungary, he turned and walked away.
This story was updated on Sunday, April 12, at 7:15 p.m. ET.
Friends danced on one another’s shoulders. Fathers embraced their children. A teenage girl wept. Beer flowed. After 16 years, Hungarians had voted their strongman leader, Viktor Orbán, out of office. “I knew it was possible,” Balázs Nagy, a warehouse worker, told me this evening in Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. “Hungarians are stubborn, and we don’t give up on each other.
U.S. presidential campaigns usually get started at the Iowa State Fair or some other exalted arena of Americana. J. D. Vance chose Budapest. The vice president visited Hungary’s capital today to align himself in the most visible way possible with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is fighting to hold on to power in parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday.
The U.S. government’s support for Orbán had already been clear.
Morten Messerschmidt has a gift for theatrics. On Facebook, the far-right politician posts a steady stream of direct-to-camera videos, showing his thatch of blond hair and perennially raised eyebrows that indicate keen interest in his own observations. He uses buzzwords such as Sharia law and writes in all caps for emphasis, especially when promoting his plan to banish Muslim immigrants from Denmark. “GOODBYE AND THANK YOU!” he wrote recently, adding an airplane emoji.
Two months ago, when President Trump was threatening to annex Greenland, I spoke with Danish and other European officials who warned of lasting damage to the system of alliances that the United States created after the Second World War, above all NATO.
At the time, this seemed like a theoretical proposition.
Jonas Gahr Støre, the mild-mannered prime minister of Norway and the scion of a wealthy industrial family, was returning home from a ski outing one Sunday last month when he decided to dash off a text message to Donald Trump. Composing it from the car, he proposed that the leaders talk to find an off-ramp from the looming crisis over Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory that the American president has been publicly threatening to seize.
After World War II, peace-loving Sweden began working on a nuclear bomb to stave off a feared Soviet invasion. But in the 1960s, the Scandinavian nation scrapped the program under pressure from the United States, whose nuclear arsenal has shielded Europe for about 80 years.
Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, reminded me of this history in an interview today.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz worries that the violence in his state could produce a national rupture. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” he mused today in an interview in his office at the state capitol. The island fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, is where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Now it’s federal forces that are risking a breach. “It’s a physical assault,” Walz told me.
The meeting, by the time it convened, seemed pointless. Some joked that it could have been an email.
When European Union leaders agreed to gather yesterday, the plan was to ready their response to President Trump’s tariff threat, an outgrowth of his insistence that the United States take over the territory of one of their members. But the day before they met, Trump backed down, spectacularly.
Benni Schmidt Pedersen lives on a small farm in Denmark, where it’s quiet and he can hear if anyone is coming down the gravel road to his home. He’s stricken with PTSD from his time as a soldier in Afghanistan, where five members of his 130-person company died in the American-led war against the Taliban.
I called him today to read him a quote from President Trump about America’s NATO allies: “We’ve never needed them,” Trump said in a Fox Business interview at the World Economic Forum, in Davos.
It was sunny in southern Afghanistan on June 1, 2010, and the temperature quickly reached 104 degrees. Sophia Bruun was the gunner on a Piranha combat vehicle, guarding two platoons conducting a patrol near the town of Gereshk. They were looking for information from locals about the Taliban.
One of the Piranhas in Sophia’s battle group had hit an IED first thing in the morning, blowing off a wheel, but no one was injured. At the outskirts of a village, they were fired on by the Taliban.
If the U.S. Agency for International Development is a front for the CIA, we’re about to find out all about it. A new official inside the agency is prepared to blow the lid off the whole conspiracy.
That official is Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who popularized the notion that Taylor Swift is a secret NATO asset and once wrote, under a pseudonym, “I want white identity politics to grow like wildfire.
Before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet endorsed the first stage of a peace deal with Hamas, orchestrated by emissaries of President Donald Trump, the hard-line Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir vented his frustration about the agreement. Just a day earlier, Ben-Gvir led a group of Jewish worshippers in prayer on the Temple Mount, the flashpoint site in Jerusalem that also houses the Al Aqsa Mosque, and called for “total victory” in Gaza.
In the days since Donald Trump directed his “Secretary of War” to marshal troops against “domestic terrorists” in Portland, Oregon, encouraging the use of “full force” in a city he likened to a “war zone,” I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I’ve found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat.
By some accounts, this all started back in June, when a group of friends decided to pitch a tent outside an ICE facility in the city.
President Donald Trump’s “golden age of America” has no need for migrant labor. Picking crops? There are 34 million able-bodied American adults on Medicaid who can do that grueling work. Building homes? Native-born Americans will handle those jobs. Meat processing? The country has no use for foreign laborers willing to put in the hours for “slave wages.
Tulsi Gabbard believed she had found her people. The Trump White House would be a place where “America First” isolationism ruled. No one would make the hurtful suggestion that her talking points sounded suspiciously like Kremlin talking points. And her decision to meet with Syria’s now-deposed dictator as he bombed his own cities would not be unfairly judged.
As tanks roll through Washington today to mark the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday—and the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump—Europe is commemorating a different anniversary, not with combat vehicles but with a passenger liner moored near a riverbank.
Dignitaries from across Europe are gathering in Schengen, a riparian village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the creation of an international agreement to abolish controls at their countries’ common borders.
To pull off the most ambitious and sophisticated attack in the long history of antagonism between the Middle East’s preeminent powers, covert Israeli agents set up a drone base deep inside Iranian territory. They recruited disaffected Iranians to aid their cause. They smuggled weapons systems across enemy lines.
Steve Witkoff emptied his backpack on the conference table in his second-floor office, in the West Wing. He wanted to show me a pager given to him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials of the Mossad. The pager commemorates the intricate operation in which Israel detonated handheld devices used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group, killing or maiming thousands of its operatives.
After Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief in a group chat about military attack plans on the Signal messaging app, he found himself on very thin ice with his boss.
But President Donald Trump and his advisers were loath to take a political hit by firing Waltz, especially within the first 100 days of the new administration. The 100-day mark passed yesterday.
The national security adviser seemed at a loss.
It fell to Michael Waltz to explain to handpicked members of his staff this month why the president had ordered their dismissal after a meeting with Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who rose to prominence by making incendiary anti-Muslim claims and who last year shared a video that labeled 9/11 an “inside job.”
“He was upset and couldn’t explain it,” a person familiar with Waltz’s reaction told me.
In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.”
The implication: Nothing to see here.
Last week, when the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison cut a deal with President Donald Trump to break free from an executive order that could have ruined its business, the powerhouse firm framed the concessions as a mere reaffirmation of its principles. Those principles include: “We refuse to be deterred by the unpopularity of a client or his cause.
On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.
The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.
Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”
The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.