The Racket

Hey there. Remember me? Back when I last posted in April, before my book-finishing break, the U.S. was at war in Iran — a war I warned was going to be antisemitism fuel — and the Supreme Court looked poised to overturn Trump’s order gutting birthright citizenship. Today, the U.S. is at war with Iran, the GOP is fracturing between philosemites and antisemites, and the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s birthright citizenship order (albeit far more narrowly than I and many others had hoped).

Donald Trump made history today by being the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court. He also made history by being the first president to run away from the Supreme Court building as soon as it seemed he was losing. His solicitor general and former personal lawyer, D.

If you want to remember why you subscribe to this newsletter (or if you don’t, why you should), hark back to what I wrote in November 2024. That was when then-President-Elect Trump — still being billed elsewhere as the peace candidate — announced his nomination of Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense: ❝ Hegseth may want to pull the Pentagon out of the war in Ukraine … [b]ut he, like Marco Rubio, is a booster for war with Iran and a dogged supporter of Israel.

Contrary to popular belief, goldfish do retain long-term memories. The same can’t be said of Peter Baker: ❝ What the Donald Trump of 2016 would think of the Donald Trump of 2026 will never be known. But they are starkly different figures when it comes to overseas intervention. A decade after propelling himself to the highest office by promising to focus on “America first,” Mr. Trump has become increasingly willing to assert power overseas.

(Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images) “In his first State of the Union address of his second term, President Trump offered a rosy portrait of a United States that has lost confidence in his leadership,” the New York Times wrote today. And I suppose that is technically accurate. Rosy is one way to describe the color of a torrent of blood. It is difficult to convey the sheer luridity of what the president unleashed last night. But I’ll try.

Yesterday, while Trump’sgolfing buddy and fellow Epstein confederate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was hauled off to the clink, and his South Korean admirer, ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol, was being sent away for life for his version of January 6, our unincarcerated president was throwing a party for himself. The party was billed as the first meeting of the “Board of Peace” — his ersatz pay-for-play version of the United Nations.

For the Super Bowl X halftime show, back in 1976, members of a cult took the field in color-block turtlenecks and danced around a giant wheeled birthday cake. The group was Up With People; the theme of both the cake and the aggressively clean-cut rock medley was the bicentennial of American independence.

Donald Trump was in trouble. Millions of Americans watched the torture and murder of Alex Pretti, and they didn’t like what they saw: Instead of the promised campaign against the “worst of the worst,” Trump’s federal goons had been caught on camera unloading their clips into a defenseless U.S. citizen observer whom they had already disarmed. Support for abolishing ICE grew while the president’s already-dismal approval ratings sank. The NRA turned on Trump.

The public execution of Alex Pretti by federal agents on a Minneapolis street is a watershed moment. I don't say that because it is unprecedented in either recent or American history—Pretti is at least the seventh person killed by federal agents since Trump returned to power one year ago. But this killing is different. The victim was, by all accounts, a beloved veterans’ intensive-care nurse.

Things somehow keep getting stupider. Donald Trump went to Davos this week, where he nursed his wound from his Great Paperclip Scare and told an audience in Switzerland that if it wasn’t for the United States, they would be speaking German. The trip started with everyone gearing up for a U.S.-European trade war over his threats to annex Greenland—a wildly unpopular idea, even in the States, from which he promptly backed down in exchange for more or less the same deal we’ve had since 1951.