Photographs by Dina Litovsky
The purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general—internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government—received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments—the U.S.

A few years ago, I visited my childhood home and heard a surprising sound: the bright and bouncy music of the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. My parents are white Baby Boomers who speak no Spanish and have never shown a taste for hip-hop, but they’d somehow gotten into Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, whose sex-and-rum-drenched lyrics they couldn’t begin to decipher. The vector of transmission appeared to be the streaming service hooked to their smart speakers.

In November 1999, Havana’s Latinoamericano stadium sold out for a baseball game that was billed as a friendly rivalry between Latin America’s oldest and newest revolutionary leaders. Hugo Chávez had been Venezuela’s president for fewer than nine months when he took the field opposite Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had led his country’s revolution 40 years earlier, when Chávez was just 4 years old.

Scott Wiener has an unusual distinction in American politics: He upsets almost everybody. In the months before I met the California state senator—who is now running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat—he had been harangued at one public meeting after another. In October, pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted his campaign’s pumpkin-carving event to shout: “Wiener, Wiener, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide.” (This was not an isolated incident.

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Following the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela, Donald Trump and his senior aide Stephen Miller have escalated threats to seize Greenland.

Forty-seven years ago, Iran had a revolution that replaced a U.S.-allied monarchy with an anti-American theocracy. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran may be on the verge of a counterrevolution.
History suggests that regimes collapse not from single failures but from a fatal confluence of stressors.

So, about all that Venezuelan oil. Although President Trump has declared that America’s oil companies will soon “go in” to Venezuela and “spend billions of dollars” to rebuild that country’s petroleum industry, the administration is making two huge assumptions. First, that unleashing Venezuelan oil would yield lower energy prices for American consumers and giant profits for American companies.