Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Israeli settlements in the West Bank, legal upsets for the U.S. trade war, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on elite universities.

‘De Facto Annexation’

Israel approved a massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, marking a major win for the far-right lawmakers who back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. The decision sparked international concern that ongoing efforts to secure a cease-fire deal in Gaza could be undermined as a result.

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Israeli settlements in the West Bank, legal upsets for the U.S. trade war, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on elite universities.

‘De Facto Annexation’

Israel approved a massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, marking a major win for the far-right lawmakers who back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. The decision sparked international concern that ongoing efforts to secure a cease-fire deal in Gaza could be undermined as a result.

“All the new communities are being established with a long-term strategic vision, aimed at reinforcing Israeli control of the territory, preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, and securing development reserves for settlement in the coming decades,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a joint statement on Thursday.

The decision will establish 22 settlements across the occupied West Bank. Of those, 12 will be the legalization of outposts previously built without government authorization. This is Israel’s largest such expansion since it signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, which aimed to create a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

More than 100 settlements, home to some 500,000 Israeli settlers, exist in the West Bank. Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights are considered illegal under international law. Last July, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s presence in the occupied territories is unlawful and demanded that all settlement construction halt immediately. Israel denounced the ruling.

The expansion is a “dangerous escalation and a challenge to international legitimacy and international law,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Earlier this week, Abu Rudeineh warned that the move would “perpetuate regional violence and instability.”

Deadly assaults by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank have surged since Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Despite international sanctions against some settlers and internal warnings that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank is out of control, Smotrich and other ultra-nationalist parliamentarians have pushed Netanyahu to expand Israel’s grip on the territory, with the ultimate goal of securing full sovereignty.

“The government is making clear—again and without restraint—that it prefers deepening the occupation and advancing de facto annexation over pursuing peace,” said Peace Now, an Israeli nongovernment organization. “The Israeli government no longer pretends otherwise: the annexation of the Occupied Territories and expansion of settlements is its central goal.”

In February, Katz warned the Israeli military to “prepare for a prolonged presence” in the area, as Israel deployed tanks to the territory for the first time in decades as part of an ongoing operation targeting militant groups in Palestinian refugee camps. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced in recent weeks alone.

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What We’re Following

Trade war setbacks. Two U.S. federal courts ruled this week that U.S. President Donald Trump overstepped his authority when he used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in April to impose sweeping tariffs on virtually every country in the world.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade blocked Trump from imposing duties under the IEEPA, though the president still remains able to temporarily launch some import taxes under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. However, on Thursday, a U.S. federal appeals court temporarily paused the ruling. Also on Thursday, a D.C. District Court judge ordered a preliminary injunction against the administration’s collection of duties on the two plaintiff companies in a separate but related case.

Even with an ordered suspension on one of the cases, the rulings marked a major defeat for a White House that has pushed through its “Liberation Day” trade policies largely unchecked. “[T]here are positives to finally testing the limits of IEEPA, which has always been seen as potentially open to abuse from the executive branch, whether related to economic sanctions or trade barriers,” FP’s Keith Johnson wrote.

Some countries welcomed the decisions, but many foreign leaders, particularly in Europe, were careful to limit their responses or remain silent so as not to jeopardize ongoing trade negotiations with the United States.

College admissions. A U.S. federal judge extended a temporary order on Thursday blocking the Trump administration from preventing Harvard University from enrolling international students. The decision comes a day after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington will begin revoking the visas of some Chinese students with “connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” as part of the White House’s larger crackdown on elite universities and its ongoing trade war with Beijing.

“We continue to reject Harvard’s repeated pattern of endangering its students and spreading American hate—it must change its ways in order to participate in American programs,” U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X on Thursday.

Since taking office, Trump has threatened to or pulled federal funding from elite universities that he claims foster antisemitism or advocate a “woke” liberal agenda, such as by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives or allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports. Now, his target is international students, roughly a quarter (or more than 270,000) of whom came from China during the 2023-2024 academic year.

Many universities rely on foreign students for revenue—the cost of tuition for international students is usually much steeper than for those from the United States—and for research work. FP’s Christina Lu reported earlier this month that Trump’s crusade against elite universities could leave an opening for other countries to poach top U.S. researchers and prospective students.

New COVID threat. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday of a new COVID-19 “variant under monitoring” that is popping up around the world. Cases have been reported in 22 countries, including across the eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, the western Pacific, and several U.S. states. Called NB.1.8.1, the new strain reached nearly 11 percent of samples reported by mid-May. However, the WHO maintains that the variant’s public health risk is low, as current vaccines are expected to remain effective against it.

Yet that could change with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally announcing on Tuesday that annual COVID-19 shots are no longer recommended for healthy people aged 6 months and older, including pregnant women. The ruling blindsided the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it contradicted the advice of many health experts, who argue that regular immunization is the best way to protect against the disease.

Odds and Ends

It might nacho be your thing, but dozens of competitors at Cooper’s Hill risked life and limb on Monday to outrace a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese in the United Kingdom’s annual cheese-rolling competition. It was a gouda day for the cheese, which beat the humans down the 200-yard hill once again. But Tom Kopke of Germany still got a chance to celebrate the centuries-old tradition as the first person to reach the bottom of the hill for a second year in a row. It is unclear if Kopke will brie back for next year’s race.

Tim Miller joins Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to react to the bombshell New York Times report on Elon Musk’s alleged drug use, erratic behavior, and alarming influence over U.S. policy. They also discuss Trump’s dangerous push to dismantle legal checks on executive power and how his tariff chaos is affecting small businesses.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

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Sam Stein and Will Sommer break down the surreal Trump–Elon press conference that covered Elon’s ketamine allegations, strange gifts, DOGE’s “accomplishments,” and an awkward farewell that raised more questions than answers.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left side of the player to toggle to audio.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

The Trump administration is trying to exert ideological control over every knowledge-producing institution in the country. And the assault on colleges is not only about having fewer highly-educated voters, but also depriving Americans of trusted sources of information—much in the way Trump in 2020 wanted to stop counting Covid cases so it looked like he had the pandemic under control. Meanwhile, we’re getting too much information about Elon’s bladder control problems on his way out the door. Plus, The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan and Tennessee’s Justin Jones on courage, conscience, fighting a party drunk with power, and the future of the South.

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod, with a side serving from our live Nashville show.

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Sarah and JVL taped the Secret pod in front of 450 best friends in Nashville and things got . . . a little weird?

There’s the tariff dance, TACO talk, some Trump psychologizing, the Leopard Face-Eating Party, a Bad JVL sighting, and a special guest. It’s a giant, super-sized live show, just for you guys.

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Rarely has a work of televisual art so flummoxed me as Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal, the second season of which just wrapped up. Both a parody of reality shows and comedy-news shows, and a heartfelt examination of the ever-widening bifurcation between our self-perception and the way we choose to identify to others in the world—a split that, ironically, merges fake and real into something like a unifying whole—The Rehearsal is simultaneously steeped in detached irony and deeply genuine. It is a bundle of contradictions about the unreality of our world, which may make it the realest show on TV.

Fielder had already made a name for himself as someone who played with the boundaries of fake and real. For his mid-2010s parody reality series on Comedy Central, Nathan for You, he posed as an MBA from Canada’s finest business school helping revitalize real struggling small businesses. His appearances on late-night shows to promote that show were often exercises in absurdism. With The Rehearsal, he proposed a method to help people overcome having to engage in awkward conversations: rehearsing them. The premiere episode, which debuted in 2022, undersold just how weird this show would be: He found a guy who had lied about having a master’s degree and wanted to confess his sins to his trivia teammate; to help him do this, Fielder hired actors to pretend to be the teammate and run through a variety of scenarios in the hopes of generating a comedy flow chart.

But Fielder did more than that. He built a replica of the trivia team’s bar, down to the wall décor, to ensure the scenario would feel real. He had the actors shadow the real people they’d be playing to gain verisimilitude. And yet, Fielder did more than that. Fielder built a replica of the trivia player’s apartment and hired an actor to mimic the trivia player so his (Fielder’s) own pitch would feel more polished. There was a level of recursion here that felt genuinely insane, something like a reality TV version of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.

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Or maybe “reality” TV. There have been questions since Nathan for You how “real” any of this is, how many of his subjects were actors and how many of his scenarios were contrived. Indeed, one of the first episodes of that earlier series involved Fielder elaborately faking a clip of a pig rescuing a goat from a lake in the hopes of making a petting zoo go viral, only to see the video actually go viral in the real world via a pipeline that took it from Gawker and eBaumsWorld to NBC Nightly News and Fox News. Fielder and his team didn’t do anything to help this spread, but they didn’t do anything to dissuade it either. “We found it interesting that people were sharing it without us saying anything,” Fielder deadpanned to the New York Times at the time.

How much of The Rehearsal is like the pig and goat is an open question, and somewhat controversial. As that initial season continued, the “rehearsal” concept expanded into an entire fake family. Fielder found a woman who said she wanted to have kids but was concerned about how to raise them; the production obtained a house and hired a revolving band of child actors who would age a year every couple of weeks. Fielder, naturally, played the husband. Eventually, she and Fielder “split up,” but Fielder tried to “raise” the kids by himself, which led to an intensely awkward moment in which one of the 6-year-old actors—who was, in real life, being raised by a single mother—called Fielder “Daddy” and refused to leave the set.

As a parent myself, this was a surprisingly distressing sequence of events, at least in part because it was so hard to process how to react to it. Do we take this at face value, with the kid having imprinted so tightly on Fielder because he doesn’t have a dad at home? Is the kid just a child actor, pretending to play out the scenario as Fielder has instructed? If it’s real, is this a condemnation not of reality TV but of the very existence of child actors below a certain age, since the kid was initially hired to pretend to be Fielder’s son? Perhaps most importantly, for our purposes: If it is fake, if it is all an act, will I look like a rube for being upset by this child’s faux-distress?

It’s that tension between perception and reception that The Rehearsal’s second season tackles. At the figurative 30,000-foot level, Fielder is shifting the focus of his parody from reality TV to the genre of comedy news. The Daily Show and John Oliver Tonight, that sort of thing: programs that attempt to effect change while also making people laugh, a combination that, paradoxically, makes the call to action less urgent by rendering it silly. Clown nose on, clown nose off.

Fielder takes a quiet knife to the whole genre, particularly in the second episode. Discovering that one of the episodes of his previous show, Nathan for You, had been censored on Paramount+ over German concerns of antisemitism, he creates an elaborate rehearsal in which he travels to Germany, dresses a hall as a war room, and costumes the German actor portraying the Paramount exec he’d like to question as a Nazi. Graphics show Paramount’s censorship spreading from Germany through the rest of the globe, calling to mind newsreel animations of the Third Reich’s spreading influence. The chattering classes marveled at the audacity—teehee, Fielder is calling Paramount Nazis, can you believe it?—but the real joke was on the whole comedy-news format. When Fielder asks the actor how he feels about the issue in question, the German man vents his frustration: Fielder is not interested in truth, he’s interested in winning an argument. He’s not interested in why Germans might have strict laws about antisemitic speech, given their, ah, history; he just wants to paint the opposition as fascist speech police. Anyone who has ever watched one of the “news” segments on The Daily Show should understand the point being made here.

The specific topic Fielder tackles in this second season concerns the (literal) 30,000-foot view of things. After examining a series of black box recordings from fatal plane crashes, Fielder discerned that the most common problem occurred in the cockpit: a lack of communication between pilot and copilot leading to mistakes made while flying the aircraft. This seems like precisely the sort of problem his so-called Fielder Method could solve. If you could get pilots and copilots to rehearse their interactions beforehand, maybe some of that tension in the cockpit could be resolved, and pilots would be more willing to ask for help and advice in the event of an emergency.

What follows is an increasingly funny series of “rehearsals” to aid in that communicative effort, the apex of which is Fielder’s effort to recreate the life of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. How did Sully land that plane? What in his life gave him the confidence to ask his copilot for his opinion in the final minutes of US Airways Flight 1549? Why did Nathan Fielder construct a nightmare set with a giant maquette mother as he was dressed in a diaper and nestled in a crib? How does the early-2000s rock band Evanescence play into all this?

This all culminates in a revelation in the finale that Fielder himself has learned to fly, that he’s a licensed pilot with hundreds of hours in the air, and that he has, through a loophole of sorts, obtained the ability to fly a 737 with a plane full of people. The final hour is, honestly, kind of harrowing, Fielder first showing that it took him much longer than usual for a student in flight school to learn how to land before piloting a plane full of extras on a two-hour tour of the Mojave. We know they don’t die—that probably would have made the news—but we’re still curious to see how he pulls it off.

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Or if he pulled it off, I guess. Is he flying and landing the plane? Would HBO allow that? Or is it an elaborate magic trick of sorts, misdirection and sleight of hand alluded to by an earlier sequence in which Fielder confesses a childhood love of magic? The question, ultimately is this: Does it matter if he actually flew the plane because he gained the confidence necessary to do so or if he just makes us think he flew the plane because he gained the confidence necessary to do so? If we perceive him to have done it, isn’t that as good as him actually having done it? Here are the season’s closing lines of dialogue: “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size, and it feels good to know that. No one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them. So if you’re here, you must be fine.”

And while some may wrinkle their nose at the decision to simply state the season’s theme aloud, Fielder did something similar at the end of The Rehearsal’s first season, telling a child actor, “Life’s better with surprises. I mean, some things you want to be prepared for, but you know what I mean.” Both finales are blunt, but I can’t dismiss them as disingenuous; there’s an honesty here that’s missing from similarly self-aware productions about the recursive, modern era of screen-mediated living like Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Ultimately, The Rehearsal is less about convincing the Federal Aviation Administration to do anything about pilot/copilot relations, and more about convincing people to trust themselves and their instincts, to be assertive. Whether or not you feel the need to practice with a scene partner to achieve that assertiveness, well, I leave that up to you.

Though an excruciating movie to watch, even by cringe comedy standards, Friendship is a popular indie film that’s gone into wide release.

The feature debut of writer-director Andrew DeYoung, who’s mainly worked in television (Our Flag Means Death, Pen15), Friendship is surprisingly well-done, sustaining a limited conceit long enough to make you consider the oddities of friendship between men in particular, and the increasingly common phenomenon of the isolated male. Recent studies have made much of the paucity of adult male friendships, with 15 percent of men in the United States and an astounding 28 percent of men in the UK reporting the lack of even one close friend.

The dark laughs generated by Friendship all strike the same nerve of social embarrassment, intensifying rapidly to a point of mortification that continues through the film’s ninety-seven minutes. It features Tim Robinson of the Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave playing Craig Waterman, a perpetually awkward and self-involved manchild who’s achieved an amazing level of upper-middle-class success. Like Homer Simpson as seen through the eyes of Frank Grimes in the immortal Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy,” Craig can only amaze us by having somehow managed to become a marketing executive who’s acquired a beautiful wife Tami (Kate Mara) and son Stephen (Jack Dylan Grazer) and a nice house in the suburbs.

Though how long he can keep them is another question. Tami is introduced in the first scene in a group therapy session for people recovering from cancer. As she worries poignantly about a recurrence of the disease, Craig leans in to intone in a strange mock-humorous voice, “It’s not coming baaaaaaaack.”

This is presumably his attempt to act as a consoling husband, but Craig’s version of expected behaviors is always way off. His entire wardrobe is oversized and in shades of tan, yet he boasts about the great clothes he buys exclusively from a company called Ocean View Dining. (“They do food, too.”)

He spends most of the movie facing people who are staring at him, silently appalled at what they see. His level of success at work can be attributed to the reliable creepiness of the corporate world — his team’s job is to make computer apps more addictive. Presumably he was able to appeal to Tami because her dysfunctional family life in childhood made her vulnerable — she reveals that her own father was a narcissist whom her suffering mother never did divorce. And as for his son, Stephen, he adores his mother to an intense mouth-kissing degree, while he’s at best polite to Craig.

For all his success, Craig is so isolated, in fact, that he brags about having achieved an enclosed office where the big perk for him is he can eat his lunch alone. He sometimes stares out his office window, practically steaming up the glass with his breath, as he watches several male cronies at his company take their smoke breaks together, laughing and talking with an ease he can’t achieve.

In short, Craig desperately needs a friend. And one day the miracle happens, when he takes a wrongly delivered package over to the new neighbors and the door opens to reveal Austin Carmichael (a perfectly cast Paul Rudd). A glamor bro with an impressively tousled head of hair and big mustache, Austin is a local TV weatherman who plays in a band and likes to go “adventuring.” He also collects cool ancient weaponry, and when he passes Craig a crude spearhead, we get a shot of his hand irradiated by light against a midnight sky full of stars — such is Craig’s transcendent joy.

Craig is infatuated at once, and soon the instant pals are breaking into the sewer system and navigating its labyrinthian tunnels together, going mushroom-hunting, and gathering for a guys-night beer-bust.

And it’s then, when Craig is surrounded by Austin’s other male friends, that his weirdness, which had only made Austin laugh fondly, is suddenly revealed as just too weird for ordinary consumption. It happens while sparring in an impromptu boxing session, wearing headgear and gloves. Austin punches Craig in the face two separate times, which is still within the lines of acceptable behavior even after Craig asks him not to do it. But when Craig sucker-punches Austin before he’s ready, that’s over the line, and Craig only seals his fate when he puts soap in his mouth and acts out a bizarre lugubrious apology, moaning, “I’m sowwy! I’m such a bad boy!”

Austin breaks up with Craig. And Craig, having been lured in by too much “free self-expression,” is devastated and can’t get past it. Obsessed with either winning Austin back or somehow getting revenge, Craig’s mania spreads to the point that his entire surprisingly fortunate life unravels around him.

But so strict are the “rules” of male friendship, it’s established that Austin is also maintaining a front, keeping his group of male friends from knowing about his main vulnerability. In fact, the besotted Craig takes extreme measures to protect Austin’s secret too. But whereas Austin can “pass” indefinitely as a societal ideal of the “guy,” and maintain his male friendships on that basis, Craig can never pass for long.

The film ends on a surprisingly disturbing image, which is just a close-up of Craig’s smile, a ghastly, abject smile in spite of all that’s happened, because he sees Austin wink at him.

At that point you’re unhappily taken beyond the narrower topic of male friendship to consider the overwhelming loneliness of the whole human race. Even as we continuously refine the technology that guarantees it’ll be ever easier to stay in contact with each other, somehow the experience of isolation rises. Maybe it’s because the perception of human need repels so many people that faking a “play it cool” vibe — while in a state of aching misery — can be the best way to attract companionship.

It makes sense. If you’re dealing with your own crushing loneliness and anxiety, why take on more from someone else? As Groucho Marx once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

As political alliances break down, embarrassing leaks to the press start to speed up. So as Elon Musk exits the government, badmouthing Republican budget efforts on his way out the door, it’s little surprise the New York Times is suddenly getting the gory details on his campaign-trail drug use:

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstacy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

You know what they say: It’s always the ones you least suspect. Happy Friday.

by Andrew Egger

Firing and sheepishly rehiring the nation’s top nuclear safety scientists. Accidentally adding a journalist to an illicit war-plans group chat.

Yesterday, we got another addition to the pantheon of too-dumb-to-believe Trump administration controversies: As NOTUS first reported, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s much-ballyhooed “Make America Healthy Again” report, among a host of other errors, cited a number of studies that simply didn’t exist.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” one researcher cited in the report told NOTUS.

Whoops! This kind of sloppiness would create major embarrassment and a credibility-ruining scandal for researchers anywhere. For a MAHA movement that trumpeted its report as pulling back the curtain on unsettling truths they didn’t want you to see, it’s an inauspicious faceplant right out of the gate.

And if anything, the White House’s attempts at damage control have only made the scandal worse.

White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt waved off the blockbuster story yesterday, acknowledging only some “formatting issues” in the report that “will be updated.”

“But it does not negate the substance of the report,” Leavitt went on, “which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.” She added that she did not know whether AI had been used to research or write the report.

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon made a similar argument in a statement to reporters yesterday. “Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same.”

To understand exactly how ridiculous these defenses are, it’s helpful to dig into one of the passages in question. Here’s how the initial MAHA report made the argument that pharmaceutical ad campaigns are distorting drug prescription rates for American children:

While many more studies exist on drugs used by adults, two specific studies on children are broadly illustrative of the problem:

• Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising for ADHD drugs in children were found to use vague symptom lists including typical childhood behaviors; the ads led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.

• Similarly, DTC advertising for antidepressants in teenagers were found to employ vague symptom lists that overlap with typical adolescent behaviors; this was also associated with inappropriate parental requests for antidepressants.

Both of these bullets pointed to studies that never existed. Once that awkward little fact was brought to light, the report was updated to read as follows (emphasis mine):

While many more studies exist on drugs used by adults, the impact of Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising on children is also highly concerning:

• DTC advertising for ADHD drugs in children have been suggested to use vague symptom lists including typical childhood behaviors, potentially leading parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.

• Similarly, DTC advertising is believed to encourage greater use of psychotropic medications in adolescents, including antianxiety, antipsychotic, and antidepressant classes.

As Leavitt and Nixon suggest, the “substance” of these paragraphs remain the same—if by “substance” all you mean is the rhetorical point at which the report’s authors are driving. But all the evidence supposedly underpinning the argument has vanished. Where the authors previously asserted a science-backed causal link between pharmaceutical advertising and overprescription—“the ads led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately”—the authors now rely on weasel-word, passive-voice correlation to try to make the same point: The ads “have been suggested” to “potentially” lead parents to request drugs inappropriately and are “believed” to encourage greater medication use.

Now, is it plausible that pharmaceutical advertisements have led to drug overprescriptions? Of course! The report’s authors plainly believe this has taken place. For that matter, so do I! But the point is that this link has been hypothesized, but not yet demonstrated in hard research. For researchers devoted to following the data, this is a massive difference. Only ideologues determined to work backward, dressing their own preexisting conclusions up in sciency-sounding language, would describe it as a mere error of “formatting.”

This is precisely the danger that RFK Jr. has presented all along. We know that on issue after issue, from COVID to chemtrails, the man now helming our entire public health apparatus is an unreconstructed crank. We know he’s committed to a wildly distorted view of the scientific process, as when he pledged earlier this year that the government would uncover “what has caused the autism epidemic” “by September.” The man plans to use the authority of the federal government and its health agencies to launder his own crackpot beliefs into official policy. How grim is it that the best we can hope for is that he does so as carelessly as he did with this report?

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by William Kristol

Yesterday I dropped by a gathering here in D.C. of organizers of Our Republican Legacy. The group, chaired by the admirable former Sen. Jack Danforth (R-Mo.), consists of Never Trumpers seeking to take back the Republican party from Trump.

My friends asked me to say a few words. I wished them well, and agreed heartily with the sentiment that it would be great to have a responsible Republican party again, and that there is much that’s admirable in the Republican legacy that could help point the way to such a party.

But I also felt I should briefly explain why I don’t expect to see such a party, and why I’d stopped thinking of myself as a Republican, even a Never Trump Republican. It’s not just that the current Republican party is indefensible. It’s that after a decade of ever-more radicalized and complete Trumpist domination, there’s little realistic hope, I think, for a return soon to decency and responsibility by the GOP. The Republican party would need to be thoroughly trounced, probably more than once, at the polls before there can be any prospect of that. And even that hope is tenuous, because, sadly, the rot now goes very deep.

And so, I explained, some of us are instead trying to do our bit to help the Democratic party prevail electorally and govern responsibly.

Who knows? History is unpredictable, especially these days, and I could be wrong. The Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, of George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney—all the GOP presidential nominees from 1980 through 2012—could make a comeback.

But it’s awfully unlikely. Later yesterday, I happened across a recent report of a dinner put on a couple of months ago by the Republican Women of Baltimore County. At the function, several recently pardoned January 6th convicts from Maryland were honored.

“I whacked these officers,” 26-year-old honoree Steven Cook told the audience, according to a recording of the event. I can’t lie about it. I was one of the ones who started the, what they call, insurrection.”

The article continues:

The banquet audience wasn’t disturbed by Cook’s revelation of violence or his actions afterward. Instead, they warmly welcomed him and the others as new celebrities.

“He heard the call of God on that day . . . and answered,” Louise Baker, the women’s club president, told members, according to the video.

“I call them my J-Sixers,” Baker said in a later interview. “They were ready, willing, able, excited, enthusiastic and grateful” to share their stories with the club, she said.

If you go to the website of the Republican Women of Baltimore County , the group doesn’t seem to have been taken over by some kind of fringe element. Its leadership looks to be middle-class long-time Republican voters, normie Republicans of the sort you’d expect to find in a place like suburban Baltimore.

But they’re pro-January 6th. And a quick look at the rest of the website suggests they’re also pro-conspiracy and anti-vaccine and anti-immigrant. They’re comfortably part of Trump’s GOP.

I have little doubt most of these individual Marylanders are personally honest and decent and kind. They’re surely not like the Stephen Millers and Kristi Noems of the world, or for that matter the JD Vances and Donald Trumps, about whom one could say no such thing. But these normie Republicans have become the willing enablers of the cruelty and autocracy, the destructiveness and lawlessness, coming from the Republican administration they support in Washington, D.C.

Which is why some of us are no longer Republicans, and are unlikely to become Republicans again.

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TARIFFS RE-UNPAUSED, FOR NOW: As quickly as the trade war was gone yesterday, it’s back on today. An appellate court has temporarily unfrozen Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, one day after the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that Trump lacked the authority to impose them. The tariffs can go back into effect while the federal appeals court evaluates the lower court’s ruling.

Team Trump declared the short-term decision a victory, with Trump’s protectionism-happy trade czar Peter Navarro telling reporters that “the Trump tariff agenda is alive, well, healthy, and will be implemented to protect you, to save your jobs and your factories and to stop shipping foreign wealth, our wealth, into foreign lands.” What a relief! Meanwhile, the Liberty Justice Center, which had brought the suit challenging the tariffs’ constitutionality, shrugged off the pause (or the un-pause, depending how you slice it) as “merely a procedural step.”

Whatever it portends, the immediate impact of the decision has been to throw economic relations with other countries into—if it were possible—still more chaos than before. It was bad enough for tariff rates to go up and down at Trump’s mercurial whim. Now they’ve also started to flicker in and out of existence from day to day. Our hearts go out to anyone trying to make supply-chain decisions this year.

MD-BE-GONE: Here’s a grim headline for grim times. NPR and KFF Health News report that American doctors are packing their bags for Canada in record numbers:

In the month since Trump was reelected and returned to the White House, American doctors have shown skyrocketing interest in becoming licensed in Canada, where dozens more than normal have already been cleared to practice, according to Canadian licensing officials and recruiting businesses.

The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is “typically the first step” to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year—from 71 applicants to 615. Separately, medical licensing organizations in Canada’s most populous provinces reported a rise in Americans either applying for or receiving Canadian licenses, with at least some doctors disclosing they were moving specifically because of Trump.

One expat doctor who talked to the reporters asked that he remain anonymous “because of fears he might face reprisal from the Trump administration if he returns to the U.S.” Which might strike some as paranoid—except that it seems completely justified in light of the administration’s response. A spokesperson for the White House didn’t comment on the story except to ask the reporters whether they “knew the precise number of doctors and their ‘citizenship status.’” The reporters noted that they “did not have or provide this information” to the administration.

CHIEF OF HACKS: Apparently someone—federal law enforcement is still trying to figure out who—hacked into White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’s phone and sent all kinds of messages impersonating her to all kinds of powerful people. WSJ reports:

Federal authorities are investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, according to people familiar with the matter, after an unknown individual reached out to prominent Republicans and business executives pretending to be her.

In recent weeks, senators, governors, top U.S. business executives and other well-known figures have received text messages and phone calls from a person who claimed to be the chief of staff, the people familiar with the messages said. . . .

FBI officials have told the White House they don’t believe a foreign nation is involved.

It should go without saying that this is a massive security breach—but then again, Wiles’s boss hid nuclear secrets in a bathroom, so what were we expecting?

There’s tons to be concerned about here: Did Wiles do anything to secure her phone when she became chief of staff? If someone presumably less sophisticated than a major adversary’s intelligence service could get on Wiles’s phone, who else could? What did the impersonator ask of the senators, governors, and business executives they contacted?

As with almost every story out of the Trump administration, this one also reflects poorly on Pete Hegseth. After all, how can he be sure the Susie Wiles in the infamous Houthi PC Small Group was really Susie Wiles?

—Ben Parker

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On this week’s episode, I strayed a bit from Hollywood to talk to David C. Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven about his new album, Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. You can check out the album here and peruse the accompanying Substack here. We had a fascinating chat about how the industry has changed over the last 40 years (for better and worse), how folks discover new music, and how his experiences growing up helped shape his musical tastes and self-conception as an American. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you check out his album and his Substack. And please share this with a friend!

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