"Trump’s assault on US democracy is truly without precedent"

 

A report released on Tuesday by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has found that President Donald Trump and his administration are dismantling democracy in the US at a speed that “is unprecedented in modern history.”

In its report, V-Dem categorizes the first year of Trump’s second term as “a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.” In fact, V-Dem says that the Trump administration has accomplished in just one year what most budding autocracies take a decade to achieve, adding that “the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d´état.”

Of particular concern is the failure of the legislative branch of the US government to apply any kind of oversight or check upon the executive branch, the report explains. “The Republican-controlled Congress seems to have abdicated its constitutional role in favor of the executive branch, ceding significant legislative, fiscal, and oversight powers during 2025,” the report says. “The Trump administration has de facto repeatedly taken over the Congressional ‘power of the purse’—enshrined in the Constitution and in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act—unilaterally cancelling or reallocating federal funding.”

The report also points fingers at the US Senate for repeatedly rolling over and confirming unqualified Trump nominees, which it says is tantamount to letting the White House “sideline” the upper chamber’s authority altogether.

V-Dem goes on to document the administration’s repeated assaults on the judicial branch and the rule of law in general during his second term, starting when Trump issued a mass pardon to more than 1,500 alleged or convicted criminals who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Since then, the administration has waged a pressure campaign against judges who rule against it consisting of “impeachment resolutions and misconduct complaints,” while also using executive orders to punish major law firms simply for representing the president’s political enemies in court.

The lone bright spot in US democracy, says V-Dem, is that the administration has not yet been able to attack states’ powers to administer their own elections, although not for lack of effort. “Actions taken in 2025 raise concerns regarding the integrity of the 2026 midterms,” the report warns. “This primarily concerns attempt to assert federal control over election processes, which must be decentralized and state-run, according to the Constitution.”

The report notes that Trump has issued an executive order that attempts to override states’ election laws by restricting mail-in voting and mandating voter IDs at polling places nationwide but adds that “many provisions of this order have been blocked, and others are still being challenged in federal court.”

In an interview with The Guardian, V-Dem founder Staffan Lindberg used historical context to explain why Trump’s assault on US democracy is truly without precedent. “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.” He also said that other authoritarian leaders have taken much more time in ripping down their states’ democratic institutions than Trump has. “For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years,” Lindberg said, “for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year.”

-Brad Reed, Common Dreams

"He may not have had much of a strategy at all"

 

Trump went to war against Iran without explaining his strategy to the American people or the world. It now appears that he may not have had much of a strategy at all. Almost three weeks into the war, Mr. Trump has no apparent plan for bringing about the demise of the Iranian regime, something he had said he seeks. 

If his goal is more modest, such as the seizure of Iran’s nuclear materials, he has not offered credible ideas for accomplishing it. And he has failed to plan for a predictable side effect of a war in the Middle East: a disruption of oil supplies that causes a price spike and impairs the global economy.

The war has become an exemplar of Mr. Trump’s chaotic, ego-driven approach to the presidency. He has relied for advice on a smaller circle of aides than past presidents did when ordering military action and eschewed the careful process intended to surface objections and potential problems. He has made ridiculous and contradictory public statements, including a claim that the war has nearly achieved its goals. He has tried to mislead the world about the tragic deaths of dozens of Iranian schoolchildren, which were caused by a mistargeted American missile. Almost daily, he demonstrates why he cannot be trusted with the most consequential matters of government.

Despite all this, the war has had some tactical successes, and we believe it is important to acknowledge them even if they remain untethered to a strategy. Mr. Trump’s instincts about Iran were correct in a few ways. Its government is distinctly dangerous, having spent decades oppressing its own people, sponsoring terrorism, trying to destroy Israel, turning Lebanon into a failed state, protecting a horrific regime in Syria and pursuing a nuclear program. Mr. Trump also recognized that Iran’s regime was weaker than it pretended and could be weakened further through confrontation.

Over the past few years, a combination of economic sanctions imposed by the United States and allies and military attacks, mostly by Israel, has left Iran less capable of sowing regional problems. The value of its currency has plunged. Many of Iran’s leaders and nuclear scientists are dead. Its aerial defenses are mostly destroyed, and its missile stockpile is depleted. Two of its terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are degraded. Its client state in Syria has been overthrown by local rebels.

But in launching this war two and a half weeks ago, Mr. Trump asserted larger aims than containing Iran. “To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Mr. Trump said shortly after the first strikes. He has called for the unconditional surrender of Iran’s government and said that he must approve the country’s next leader. He has promised to make Iran great again.

Mr. Trump has not even begun to explain how he will accomplish any of these goals. His defenders have claimed that his coyness is a strategic gambit, to preserve his options and keep his enemy guessing. Increasingly, the truth appears to be that the president of the United States has started a war without any idea of how to end it.

Three strategic problems have become clear since the war began.

First, Mr. Trump repeated a mistake that American presidents have made for decades — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and even Iran itself, in the 1950s — and imagined that regime change would be easier to accomplish and maintain than it was. In this instance, Mr. Trump’s hubris has been stunning. Air power alone almost never topples a government. Only troops on the ground can seize the instruments of state power and install a new leader.

In defiance of this history, Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have conjured dreams of regime change. Sometimes there is loose talk of arming Iran’s Kurdish minority or hastening the return of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late deposed shah, who now lives in an affluent suburb of Washington. Other times, Mr. Trump encourages Iran’s security forces to defect or its people to “take over” their government. There is no evidence that any of this is working. After Mr. Trump encouraged street protests in January, Iran’s regime massacred thousands of demonstrators and remained securely in charge of the country. Since then, protests have largely ended.

Second, it remains unclear how the United States will achieve a crucial goal: assuring that Iran’s murderous regime does not become a nuclear power. Its stockpile of highly enriched uranium is believed to be intact, in a tunnel complex under mountains near the city of Isfahan. If the war ends with Iran maintaining that stockpile, it will have a path to building a bomb. The military humiliations it has endured over the past few years give it an incentive to take the final steps toward a weapon that it has not previously taken.

When this war began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that ground troops might be the only way to capture the uranium. “People are going to have to go and get it,” he said. Yet when a Fox News Radio host asked Mr. Trump about uranium last week, he replied, “We’re not focused on that.” There are no easy answers here. But the scattered approach to war planning does not inspire confidence.

The third problem involves the global economy. Middle Eastern wars are notorious for causing economic turmoil by raising the price of oil. Iran had a clear way to repeat the pattern by throttling the traffic of ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Yet Mr. Trump tried to wish away this situation.

Before the war, his top military adviser, Gen. Dan Caine, warned him that Iran would likely respond by attacking ships in the strait and effectively closing it. Mr. Trump replied by suggesting that Iran’s government would capitulate before it could close the strait or that the U.S. military could keep the strait open, according to The Wall Street Journal. He was wrong, as should have been obvious. The price of oil has since jumped more than 40 percent.

His responses have had an air of desperation. He temporarily lifted oil sanctions on Russia, which is a gift to an enemy. Over the weekend, he resorted to pleading with Britain, France, Japan, South Korea — allies he has spent years disdaining — and even China to send naval forces to protect the strait.

War is uncertain, and it remains possible that any of these problems will begin to look less serious in the coming weeks. Perhaps an Iranian opposition will somehow emerge, and the current regime will fold as quickly as the Assad government in Syria did in late 2024. Perhaps special forces will remove the enriched uranium without casualties. Perhaps the U.S. military, whose performance continues to be mostly impressive, will work with allies to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, we would welcome any of these outcomes.

The first weeks of this war do not inspire confidence, however. They instead suggest that the behind-the-scenes planning in the White House may have been as reckless as its public behavior. It did not seek congressional approval for the war, as the Constitution requires. It did not plan ahead with allies in Europe or East Asia. It offered the American people only superficial rationales for the war.

Throughout his business and political career, Mr. Trump has often sought to create his own reality. When the truth is inconvenient, he ignores it and tells self-serving falsehoods. It has often worked out for him. But war tends to be less amenable to spin than politics or marketing. The early reality of the Iran war is not cooperating with Mr. Trump’s bluster.

-Editorial Board, NY Times

 

A Malignant Narcissistic Abuser

For years, mental health professionals have argued that President Donald Trump’s behaviors, which some have called “malignant narcissism,” are a detriment to the nation. Much has been written about the president’s tendency to gaslight ― a form of psychological manipulation weaponized by narcissists to make victims question their own reality, memory and perceptions.

Most recently, some have said that Trump has tried to gaslight the American people into believing that there is no real affordability crisis (he’s called it a “hoax” cooked up by the Democrats), despite widespread concerns about the rising cost of living and his running on a platform heavily focused on bringing down prices. (In spite of that, energy bills have increased as much as 13% since Trump took office.)

But psychologists say there’s another classic narcissist tactic that Trump appears to employ with alarming frequency that’s less talked about: DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. DARVO is a manipulative tactic often used by narcissistic abusers to evade accountability: They deny the abuse, attack the person confronting them and then reverse the roles to portray themselves as the victim. And because most of us are unfamiliar with DARVO, we’re not well equipped to counter the tactic.

Jennifer Freyd, a pioneer in the field of trauma psychology who coined DARVO, said it’s a strategy that Trump and his team have weaponized for years to distort reality. In an opinion piece that ran in The Hill last spring, she and her co-researcher pointed to how Trump made the case for imposing steep tariffs on other countries by arguing that America had been humiliated and exploited by foreign nations (both critics and friendly trade partners) for decades. We were the victims, not the countries facing steep new tariffs.

Whether he knows the term or not, Trump is well versed in DARVO, Freyd wrote: It’s helped him to discredit women who’ve accused him of sexual assault, deflect blame during “Signalgate,” and blame Ukraine for Russia’s invasion.

“Because DARVO has been a central strategy in Trump’s political playbook for years, it has undoubtedly contributed to distorted perceptions of what is true and what is ‘fake news,’” her op-ed read. “When leaders like Trump weaponize DARVO, the public becomes more disengaged and confused.” For some people ― namely narcissists ― acknowledging wrongdoing threatens their sense of power or control and brings them closer to facing accountability for harmful conduct. 

In a bind ― when they’re being forced to take responsibility ― the DARVO user cleverly shifts attention away from their original wrongdoing, said Sarah Harsey, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University-Cascades and the co-author of the Hill op-ed. “This technique injects a misleading or fictitious counter-narrative that can be compelling for people to believe. It can also be confusing: Who’s telling the truth, what really happened?” Harsey told HuffPost.

DARVO is a tactic often used by sexual abusers to deflect accountability by reversing the roles of victim and offender, she added. Harsey and Freyd’s research shows that DARVO is associated with higher rates of sexual harassment perpetration and greater acceptance of rape myths. But run-of-the-mill narcissists use it, too, because of how effective it is: The person employing DARVO doesn’t need to convince everyone that the counter-narrative they’re offering is true, Harsey said. They just need to muddy the waters enough that people feel the truth is hard to determine.

DARVO puts the other person ― the real victim ― on the defensive and makes them feel like they need to explain themselves, defend themselves or question themselves, said Avigail Lev, a psychologist in San Francisco. Lev offered an everyday example to show how convincing DARVO can be: Imagine a spouse is confronting their partner about why they’re home so late. The DARVO-using spouse will deny it and attack their partner, saying something like, “Why are you so insecure? We never agreed that I had to be home at 10 p.m. That didn’t happen. You’re so jealous.”

In doing so, the deflecting spouse discredits their partner and flips the situation, allowing them to claim the moral high ground while leaving their partner confused, Lev said. “They become the victim,” she said. “This allows the actual perpetrator to continue harmful behavior while still feeling justified, because they now see themselves as wronged or victimized.” As Freyd and Harsey wrote in The Hill, Trump has been using DARVO from the start.

“Even before his inauguration in 2017, he said that the voice heard in the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape wasn’t his,” Harsey told HuffPost. A few years later, she said, “he used DARVO against E. Jean Carroll, who described being sexually assaulted by Trump in her memoir. He denied ever meeting her, he made repeated attacks against her, like calling her a ‘nut job’ and a ‘whack job,’ and, in Carroll’s defamation case against him, he argued he was the victim of a ‘witch hunt.’”

Harsey thinks DARVO is harmful when any government official uses it. She pointed to how former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo used it when confronted with sexual harassment allegations, denying he’d harassed anyone and calling himself a victim of “cancel culture.”

But Trump’s use of it is “exceptionally blatant,” the professor said. He consistently denies, attacks and plays the victim, almost to an absurd degree, she said. And it appears he’s enabled those in his inner circle to follow suit: Harsey pointed to how Vice President JD Vance used DARVO pretty unabashedly in January when talking about Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two Minneapolis residents who were killed by federal agents amid protests over the administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration. Vance called Good a “domestic terrorist” and reposted a social media post that described Pretti as an “assassin.”

Just a few weeks ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi extensively used DARVO tactics during her House Judiciary Committee hearing, Harsey said. “She seems to have favored the ‘attack’ aspect of DARVO, given the way she repeatedly insulted the lawmakers questioning her,” Harsey said. “There are ways the president and his officials could refute claims without using DARVO, yet they choose this tactic that inflicts as much harm as possible.”

One way to fight back against DARVO is to simply understand that it is a manipulative tactic and to learn how to recognize it when it happens, Harsey said. “Because DARVO follows a predictable pattern (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender), it becomes fairly easy to spot when it’s used,” she explained. “We’ve conducted research that shows how educating people about DARVO renders it a little less convincing.”

To defend yourself against DARVO in the moment, it’s important to name the manipulative strategy and label the behavior as soon as you sense it’s happening. But for Americans experiencing DARVO from the president, the obvious dilemma is that they’re not in direct conversation with him. Normally you can hold firm to facts and call them out rather than engaging in defensive arguments. “If you were calling someone out directly for DARVO in a personal interaction, the response would look very different than when an entire society is experiencing it from a political leader,” Lev said.

Some of us do have some power, though. Reporters in the White House press corps should ― and sometimes do ― call it out directly: Look at how CNN’s Kaitlan Collins called out press secretary Karoline Leavitt last week, when the latter claimed the reporter was mischaracterizing something Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had said. Calmly, Collins read Hegseth’s quote back verbatim.

When we experience DARVO collectively, our role is to continue speaking the truth and articulating facts so that we’re not further gaslit and can maintain some shared understanding of reality, Lev said.

At the same time, the psychologist thinks we should be cautious about getting pulled into identity politics and instead focus more on cultivating critical and discerning thinking. “This allows people to examine the facts and form their own values-based opinions grounded in their moral judgments, rather than simply adopting what one side tells them they should believe,” she said. Once you’re able to spot DARVO, it’s important to help others recognize instances of it, too.

“We should encourage people to use critical thinking and deductive reasoning and to notice cognitive distortions and manipulations so that we can maintain a shared sense of reality rather than falling for propaganda,” she said.

-Brittany Wong, HuffPost

 

Iran's new leader is keeping a list for revenge

It’s been two weeks since President Donald Trump ordered a bolt-from-the-blue missile strike to assassinate Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. Now, the murdered man’s son has taken over. That’s convenient for those of us struggling to follow this unwanted insanity, because at least the new boss has the same name.

The new Ayatollah Khamenei — full name Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, age 56 — was badly injured in the same sneak attack that blew apart his father. He reportedly suffered wounds to both legs and one arm and has not been seen in public since. In addition to recuperating, he’s no doubt mourning: We murdered not only his father, but also his wife, his teenage son, his mother, his sister and his 14-month-old niece.

Iran has lashed out in response against our bases and forces throughout the Middle East. So far, the Pentagon says, 14 U.S. soldiers have been killed and more than 150 wounded, some of them severely. Of those 150 wounded, how many have had life-wrecking injuries — loss of vision, loss of limbs, severe traumatic brain injuries? Why did we even provoke this mess?

Now, the murdered man’s son has taken over. Expect worse to come. The new ayatollah has promised more revenge against us (i.e., “the enemy”) for the suffering we’ve chosen to inflict upon Iran. “Every member of the nation who is killed by the enemy becomes a separate case in the file of retaliation,” he said.

Sounds ominous, especially when Khamenei particularly singled out the way we Tomahawk’d a bunch of elementary schoolgirls, leaving more than 175 dead, as holding “a special status in the process of accountability.” Until retribution has been had for these murdered children, ages 7 to 12, he said, “this file will remain open above other cases.”

Already our two weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombing have killed more than 1,200 civilians (including more than 200 children). We’ve destroyed more than 17,000 homes and, per the United Nations, displaced more than 3.2 million people (many of whom have fled areas like Tehran that are being heavily bombed).

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” Truthsocial’d our gleeful president going into the weekend. He says the Iranians have “been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years,” and went on, “and now I, as the 47th President … am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”

Yes, the president has been in fine form. It is his great honor to be killing them. These deranged scumbags. The ones whom he sneak-attacked and murdered, with a couple of hundred children caught up in his wild crossfire.

On Sunday, the president was boasting about how we just demolished infrastructure at Kharg Island, an oil transport hub in the Persian Gulf just off Iran’s coast. “We may hit it a few more times just for fun,” Trump told NBC News.

I picture him saying these things with a thick, vaguely European accent, maybe while wearing a monocle. Is he even aware how he sounds? Is he putzing around the White House in a motorized wheelchair with a blue-eyed Persian cat on his lap?

His jaunty Truth Social posts feel like the equivalent of the scene in a bad movie where the evil mastermind offers his unforced confession — where he lays out the entire dastardly scheme to a captured audience. If only we could walk out of this movie.

-Matt Bivens, Truthdig, the following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

"Trump was wrong — monumentally, predictably, and inexcusably wrong"

 

(Dan Scavino, via Wikimedia Commons)

General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Donald Trump that an attack on Iran would provoke its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Every president contemplating war in the Middle East has known this and therefore avoided a full regional war. 

But Trump said he knew better and plunged into war. Of course, Trump was wrong — monumentally, predictably, and inexcusably wrong. Now, the Strait is mined and closed, the war rages out of control, oil prices have spiked, and the economy is teetering.

This catastrophic blunder stems from Trump’s delusion that a forty-seven-year-old Islamic regime insulated by layers of bureaucracy, an enormous military, an entrenched ideology, and a fervent national identity could be bombed out of existence. He convinced himself and his cult that — without adverse consequences — he could replace the mullahs with a friendlier regime (who, exactly, he never said). This madness, enabled by the phalanx of yes-men afraid to tell Trump he is wrong (even about their shoe size), was not unique to Trump.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another regime change fabulist, frequently insisted, as he did at the war’s start, that full-scale war would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.”

Netanyahu is now back-pedaling furiously. “I can’t tell you with certainty that the Iranian people will bring down the regime,” Netanyahu said at his first wartime press conference last week. “If it doesn’t fall, it will be much weaker.” Oh, now he tells us.

The realization that regime change is a pipe dream, which U.S. presidents have learned repeatedly, has swamped Trump’s megalomania and Netanyahu’s dream of “forever” removing an Iranian threat. (The latter requires forever war.) By Friday, even Trump figured out that toppling the regime is a “very big hurdle.” He sounds as if he just discovered his goal’s impossibility: “Who’s going to do that? They literally have people in the streets with machine guns, machine gunning people down if they want to protest.” What did he think would happen?

On the American side, sane voices consistently have derided labeled regime change as a fantasy. The U.S. intelligence community reiterated its view that the Iranian government “is not at risk of collapse,” Reuters reported. It turns out that Trump’s “feeling” he could pull it off was baseless, perhaps a function of untreated malignant narcissism.

The reasons other presidents avoided war against Iran — economic cost to the U.S., bombardment of our Gulf allies, closure of the Strait of Hormuz and soaring oil prices, high civilian casualties, a vengeful regime still in place but more determined to pursue a nuclear weapon, and Russia’s economic bonanza — all have surprised Trump and his regime of lickspittles. 

“When past presidents balked at the possibility of war with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral,” Franklin Foer wrote recently. “Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.” Except the least competent president ever.

The annals of regime change are not littered with success stories. Wherever attempted (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), it begat endless, bloody war and an inconclusive outcome, at best. While we may wish for a better Iran regime, Phil Gordon at Brookings wrote early in the war: 

“By thinking he can defy deep historical lessons from the region, and by launching a war with no congressional mandate or significant public support, Trump is taking a massive and unnecessary gamble—not just with his presidency but with the lives of countless Americans, Iranians and others.” He is losing his gamble, with others to pay the price.

Atrocious economic news (“Fourth-quarter GDP revised down to just 0.7% growth; January core inflation was 3.1%”) makes the added economic pain that much harder to tolerate. Moreover, in past wars, the U.S. has restrained Israel; in this war, Netanyahu and Trump have egged each other on with no plan for when to stop or evident consideration of what happens afterward.

The war reminds us that the current right-wing Israeli government and the U.S. do not have identical interests, although Netanyahu and Trump personally are two peas in the autocrat pod (e.g., corrupt, contemptuous of the press, law, and public opinion; antagonistic toward democracy). Netanyahu, in search of his white whale of regime change/redemption for the October 7 catastrophe, might be content with perpetual war. 

The U.S. public and sane bipartisan foreign policy voices have limited appetite for casualties, soaring oil prices, and long-term strain on our other alliances. Israel’s right-wing government may want to turn Iran into a failed state. From the U.S. perspective, a failed state of 90M people will likely become a hotbed of terrorism, a source of mass migration and violence, a spur to regional instability, and an elevated risk of nuclear proliferation.

The two powers now differ even on targeting. Yousef Munayyer wrote for The Guardian: “Israel struck oil facilities in Tehran that led to apocalyptic scenes in the Iranian capital, heightened Iran’s resolve to target oil infrastructure in neighboring US allies, sent shockwaves into the oil market that puts the greatest pressure on Trump and poisoned the environment in a city of 10 million people.” 

(Of course, the Gaza War already demonstrated the countries’ divergent interests: Netanyahu’s one-state fantasy to completely subjugate the Palestinians without regard for civilians’ well-being is both unattainable and, to most Americans, reprehensible.)

Polls, oil prices, and/or casualties may force Trump to find an off-ramp. But after the fighting, the region will be more volatile, the human cost breathtaking, and the need for an agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear program that much more essential. To both allies and foes, the U.S. will appear unreliable and disingenuous.

This war may be an even greater strategic disaster than the Iraq War. “[I]t is really incredible malpractice that they have launched this war, created the set of circumstances in the region that has long-term economic and strategic consequences without fully thinking through the potential outcomes,” Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney observed.

Democrats need a different Middle East vision, one grounded in four principles:

1.) The U.S. does not unconditionally arm Israel or approve every Israeli action (as is true with all allies).

2.) The U.S, needs regional stability, which requires containing Iran, preventing more failed states, and protecting Israel’s legitimate security needs but restraining its regional aggression and working toward resolving the Palestinian crisis.

3.) A robust clean energy policy must weaken dependence on fossil fuel (while a net energy exporter, the U.S. is in a global oil market), and

4.) Wars (whether labeled “excursions” or without the malapropism, “incursions”) must be a last resort, never undertaken without public and congressional support.

In sum, only public pressure will force Trump to end his war. Going forward, policymakers should remember Trump’s blunders and do the opposite. Finally, voters must remember that regardless of what they say, Republicans cannot resist a Middle East war and invariably underestimate its cost in blood and treasure.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, enable our work, help with litigation, and celebrate those unafraid to call out senseless wars, please join the fight as a paid subscriber.

 

A brief update on some of the key events in Ukraine this week

🔥 Large-Scale Missile and Drone Attacks
Russia carried out another massive wave of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine this week. According to Ukrainian officials, around 430 drones and dozens of missiles were launched toward multiple regions, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro. Many were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses, but some strikes damaged homes, schools, and energy infrastructure, causing casualties and power outages in several regions.

🛡️ Ukrainian Forces Strike Key Russian Military Facility
Ukraine also carried out a significant strike on a microelectronics plant in Russia’s Bryansk region that produces critical components used in Russian missile systems. The facility reportedly supplies parts for weapons such as the Iskander missile system, which has been used in attacks on Ukrainian cities. The strike was intended to weaken Russia’s ability to produce new missiles.

⚔️ Progress on the Front Lines
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in parts of southern Ukraine, pushing back Russian positions and reclaiming territory in some areas after weeks of fighting. Military leaders say these operations are aimed at disrupting Russian supply lines and preventing new offensives.

🌍 Ukraine’s Experience Helping Allies
Ukraine’s expertise in defending against drone attacks is now helping partners abroad. Ukrainian defense specialists have been sharing their experience with countries in the Middle East that are facing similar drone threats — demonstrating how the knowledge gained from defending Ukraine is contributing to global security.

Through every challenge, Ukrainians continue to stand strong — defending their country, rebuilding communities, and supporting one another. Thank you for standing with Ukraine. When you wear Ukrainian Apparel, you turn solidarity into action — helping support humanitarian aid, essential equipment, and relief for those who need it most.

Slava Ukraini!
— The Ukrainian Apparel Team

 

How to Feel Whole in a Broken World: An Astronaut’s Antidote to Despair

 

Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. 

As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer — the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light — recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment.

The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut’s eyes may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian.

View from inside the ISS. (Image: NASA)

While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:

"I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I’ve done and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism — it is your life to tinker with, learn from, live and love."

This ongoingness of creation — the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten — is nowhere more visible, life’s ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective:

"It’s endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths."

A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster’s astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and it is with a poet’s sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair — the Bahamas, seen from space in all their “huge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists.”

The Bahamas seen from the ISS. (Image: NASA)

Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself — the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century. Many died to know the unknown. Many sank into “soul-despairing depression” during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime. Over and over, they were saved by wonder.

Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.

In the first year of the twentieth century — that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration — the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis — that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun’s corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth’s magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic.

Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.

Harald Moltke (left) with his companions.

Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth’s most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. (“I realized that it had to be oil paint,” he wrote, “that could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.”) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter.

Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these “huge, luminous beams with folds… now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere… like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth.” He writes in his memoir:

"The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like 'supernatural, divine, miraculous.' I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that… I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding."

-Maria Popova, Marginalian