Tom Nichols

I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away
The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.

American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic.

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy.

President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death.

Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multi-billionaire to enforce his executive orders.

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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset.

Dear Mr. Secretary,
Tradition dictates that I begin by congratulating you on your confirmation. You seem like a man who appreciates frankness, and so I will spare you empty decorum: It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have been opposed to your nomination to lead the Department of Defense from the moment it was announced. But the Senate has voted, and you are now the leader of the most powerful military on the planet.

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been.

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Not long after Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth read his opening statement and began fielding questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, I began thinking: I hope neither America’s allies nor its enemies are watching this. The hope was, of course, completely unreasonable.

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Last week, I pronounced unequivocal judgment—as I tend to do regarding many things—on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I think it’s a contrived and embarrassing idea driven by nostalgia and capitalism, and antithetical to the youthful rebelliousness that drives rock-and-roll music.

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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other.

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I retired from a long teaching career a few years ago, but during my later years in the classroom, I offered a course on the Cold War and American pop culture, to try to help younger students understand the fears that dominated so much of American life in the 20th century.

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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power.

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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power.

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Dictatorships seem stable and almost invulnerable, until the day they fall. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime crumbled in days in the face of an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a group that the United States considers a terrorist organization.

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President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter is a done deal. The president has not only obviated the existing cases against Hunter; the sweep of the pardon effectively immunizes his son against prosecution for all federal crimes he may have committed over the course of more than a decade.

Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span.

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements.

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As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.

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Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat.

I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to pantomime the act of giving fellatio.
I could have put it differently.

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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.

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Yesterday, The Atlantic published another astonishing story by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s hatred of the military.

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You know the expression and what it means, but I will use only the abbreviation: WTF. In military circles, it is rendered as “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” On the show The Good Place, it is “What the fork.

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In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.

Over the past week, Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp. At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home.

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It’s Friday, and in the world of politics, it’s been a week that—to me, anyway—seems like a year. Monday was the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.