“White Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others — and they saw Native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.” — David J. Silverman

 

Was the colonization of North America a genocidal project? That is the delicate question David J. Silverman [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chosen-and-the-damned-9781635578386/] confronts in his powerful new book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chosen-and-the-damned-9781635578386/].

 

Yes, Silverman concludes, there was an American genocide. But with a crucial distinction. Rather than a top-down government-organised “Final Solution,” the fate of Native Americans was what Silverman calls a “structural genocide.” It reflected a complete indifference to Native American life, grounded in a religious and racial ideology that gave white Americans the right to possess the continent and viewed Native Americans as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.

 

The Spanish colonization of Latin America, Silverman notes, intended to subjugate the Native population and keep them as tributaries. The English, and their American successors, in contrast, intended to replace them. It’s the same structural genocide that occurred in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.

 

For all Silverman’s dark take, there is good news. He argues that this structural genocide came to an end in the late 1960s. In an extraordinary and underappreciated transformation, Native American activists convinced a broad majority of Americans that tribes as tribes should be a permanent part of the United States. White supremacy, Silverman concludes, has been a feature of North American history since its colonization. But so has pluralism. American genocide vs American pluralism. Is history once again repeating itself in Trump’s America?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Structural Genocide: Society-Wide Indifference, Not Just Government Policy: Silverman’s central concept: structural genocide. Not the top-down, government-directed campaign to exterminate a people — though there were moments of exactly that across the centuries, when the government decided certain groups of Native people should be exterminated for resisting American rule. What he’s describing is a society-wide and culture-wide indifference to Native American life, grounded in a racial ideology in which white Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and Native Americans indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction. That ideology, combined with the imperative to seize Native American land, led white Americans from the seventeenth century through the twentieth to destroy Native American life through dozens of different forms.

 

•       Anglo vs Spanish Colonialism: Replacement vs Subjugation: The Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean were violent and horrific — but their purpose was to subjugate the Native population and have them subservient, not to replace them. Once the Spanish had defeated Native people, they took their foot off the gas and kept the surviving population as tributaries. The English colonies, and their American successors, intended to replace Native people — to displace them from the land and install new settler societies of men, women, and children. That pattern is also visible in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It is not unique to the United States, but it is particular to English-origin settler colonialism.

 

•       White Americans as “Chosen”: The Theological Foundation of Racial Ideology: Silverman’s most striking argument is the theological one. White Americans did not merely believe they were racially superior — they

Was the Colonization of North America a Genocidal Project? David Silverman on the Tragic Fate of Native Americans

“The pinnacle of capitalism is still flawed. Any idea that it’s perfect — this idea of the perfect union — is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been.” — Keith Teare

 

With July 4 finally done, we can look forward to the next American revolution. Just as AI is revolutionizing the economy, so too are radical ideas about harnessing this disruption for the benefit of all Americans. One idea that is acquiring more and more currency in and out of Silicon Valley is what we might call universal basic capitalism.

 

Six months ago, nobody knew what “universal basic capital” even meant. Now everyone [https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/07/universal-basic-capital-ai/687759/] is talking about it. What if the answer to inequality, AI disruption, and the slow hollowing out of the American economy isn’t a return to socialism — but a new, more distributive kind of capitalism? As That Was The Week’s Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] argues in our weekly tech roundup, universal basic capitalism offers the best way to simultaneously empower all Americans without turning them into the welfare “queens” so disparaged by neo-liberals.

 

Economists agree that AI is going to eliminate vast numbers of jobs, probably within the decade, certainly in time for America’s 300th anniversary. One fix is the democratic socialist strategy of tax and spend through the state. Universal basic capitalism, in contrast, takes the wealth generated by AI companies, puts it into a sovereign wealth fund, and distributes the dividends directly to citizens. Rather than an ever-more-bloated bureaucracy redistributing wealth, the state miraculously shrinks.

 

It’s a neat idea. Instead of welfare queens, we get shareholding kings. But is this really the next American revolution? Or just the trickle-down economics of the DOGE crowd for an AI age of mass unemployment?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       America the Beautiful — and Its Profound Flaws: Keith’s 250th editorial acknowledges America’s extraordinary achievements: the growth in wealth, living standards, and democratic governance over two and a half centuries. The fact that Donald Trump won the presidency, Keith notes, is itself evidence that the people still rule — most intellectuals didn’t want him, but the people voted for him. At the same time: capitalism at its best still has huge swathes of poor people who can barely eat. The perfect union is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been. America has probably peaked in world terms. The next 250 years are not a foregone conclusion.

 

•       1,200 New Millionaires a Day: The American Prosperity Machine: The stat of the week: the United States added 1,200 new millionaires a day last year, bringing its total to nearly 24 million. China has just over 5 million; Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Australia, France, and the UK are all under 3 million. The math: US GDP per capita is around $85,000 a year; China’s is around $20,000-something. In California in particular, where house prices routinely exceed $1 million and there are 50–60 million residents, the numbers are doing a lot of work disguising a highly skewed distribution concentrated in coastal cities.

 

•       Universal Basic Capital vs Democratic Socialism: The State Shrinks: Keith draws a sharp distinction between UBC — the sovereign wealth fund model — and democratic socialism as practised by Mamdani, Sanders, and AOC. In the socialist tradition, you seize the state through elections and use taxes and spending for good ends. Under UBC, the sovereign wealth fund becomes the distribution mechanism and the state shrinks to an administrative function: roads, health, education, defence. The actual AI companies don’t become the state. The state becomes a shareholder in the fund. Money flows to c

Universal Basic Capitalism: The Next American Revolution Or More Trickle Down Economics?

“What is happening today in America is part of a global political turn — and what’s odd is how little the American people seem to realize it.” — Madeleine Schwartz

 

So we’ve finally arrived. America is 250 today. But where, exactly, have we come? How should we think about the United States of America on July 4, 2026?

 

Rather than peering inwards, Madeleine Schwartz [https://thenewpress.com/books/how-we-see-it] — the Paris-based founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial [https://www.thedial.world/] — reverses the lens. Her anthology, How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump [https://thenewpress.com/books/how-we-see-it] (The New Press), gathers twelve essays from writers in India, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Argentina, Italy, and Ireland. The result might be the most honest birthday message that America will receive today.

 

What these writers all observe is the same extraordinary ambivalence about the United States. They describe a country that defines itself as the democratic purveyor of justice, while operating as a vast imperial and economic power that shapes the lives of the rest of the world. What’s odd — and Schwartz uses that word carefully — is how few Americans seem to realise this is how the world sees them.

 

“The question of America is vast. It is unrelenting and unanswerable and will not be silenced,” the Gaza poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq notes in his essay. Happy birthday, odd America. You might not know it, but the rest of the world is watching. And they won’t forget what they’ve seen.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The World’s Ambivalence: Purveyor of Hope, Imperial Power: Schwartz’s central finding from twelve countries of essays: the world does not simply hate or love America. It holds a profound ambivalence — between the country that presents itself as the beacon of hope and democracy, and the country that is a vast imperial and economic power that shapes the lives of billions who have no vote in its elections. This ambivalence is, she argues, almost impossible to fully understand from inside the United States, where the assumption of benign intent is so deep. The essays collectively diagnose what the US’s retreat from that self-image means for the world’s ability to find alternative frameworks.

 

•       Turkey and America: Erdoğan and Trump Have Learned From Each Other: Kaya Genç’s essay from Turkey is one of the collection’s most original: the Turkish right has long admired the vast powers of the American presidency as a model to follow, even as that same right has been characterised by American commentators as anti-American or Islamist. The admiration was never for American values — for free speech or civil liberties — but for the structural power of the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, has learned from Erdoğan’s playbook of media control, legal intimidation, and institutional capture. The learning has gone in both directions. What is happening in America, Genç argues, is not exceptional — it is part of a global turn.

 

•       Taiwan: Self-Defence Classes and Going It Alone: Michelle Kuo’s essay from Taiwan describes a country that has fundamentally revised its relationship with the United States. For decades, many Taiwanese believed that by adhering to certain principles — upholding liberal values, supporting LGBTQ rights, maintaining civil liberties — they would gain American favour and the protection that came with it. That thinking is now gone. People in Taiwan are taking self-defence classes, preparing for a possible Chinese invasion without the expectation of outside help. And the values they uphold — civil liberties, LGBTQ rights — are upheld now because they actually want them, not to please Washington.

 

•

The United States of Oddity: Madeleine Schwartz on How the World Sees America at 250

Tomorrow, America will celebrate its birth. But the decisive moment, even the real birth of modern America, argues Alexander Mikaberidze [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-louisiana-purchase-9780197548141] in his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-louisiana-purchase-9780197548141], may not have been 1776 at all. It was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. The year Thomas Jefferson bought the future from Napoleon Bonaparte. This was the moment the young American republic doubled its size in a single transaction, absorbed the heart of a continent and set itself on the path to becoming a global superpower.

 

The numbers associated with the Louisiana Purchase are staggering. 828,000 square miles. Thirteen states. Fifteen million dollars — four cents an acre, so the mythology tells us. But Mikaberidze reminds us that the deal Jefferson signed did not actually grant the United States the land. Instead, it merely authorised the republic to negotiate the acquisition of land still owned by Native Americans. So it became the founding event of the US-Indian Treaty System that produced over 200 Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970, and cost the Republic billions of dollars.

 

The Louisiana Purchase was America’s grand Faustian bargain. It was a deal that not only enabled America’s eventual rise as a 20th century superpower, but also the expansion of slavery, the destruction of Native peoples, and the 19th century imperial reach of the Monroe Doctrine. So forget 1776 and save the fireworks to remember 1803. And celebrate with croissants rather than hot dogs. Without Napoleon Bonaparte’s generosity, the United States might be just another regional power like France.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Louisiana Purchase: Arguably the Decisive Moment in American History: Mikaberidze’s opening argument: if you had to pick the single most important moment in American history, 1803 has a stronger claim than 1776. Independence established the republic. The Louisiana Purchase made it a continental power. 828,000 square miles. Thirteen states. The heart of the continent. Securing the Mississippi for American commerce. Laying the groundwork for the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, and America’s eventual emergence as a global superpower. The revolution created the nation. The purchase created its destiny.

 

•       Four Cents an Acre? The Real Price Was Billions: The famous number: $15 million, or four cents an acre. The less famous fact: the agreement Jefferson signed did not grant the United States the land. It merely authorised the republic to negotiate the acquisition of the land, which was still owned by Native Americans. The Louisiana Purchase was the founding event of the US-Indian Treaty System — which produced over 200 Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970, and cost the United States not $15 million but billions of dollars. What appeared to be the greatest real estate deal in history was actually an authorisation to conduct the most expensive series of land negotiations in history.

 

•       The Grand Faustian Bargain: Slavery, Native Peoples, and the Monroe Doctrine: Andrew’s formulation — the Grand Faustian Bargain, the deal with the devil — is one Mikaberidze accepts. The purchase did three things simultaneously: it made America a continental power and a future superpower; it enabled the expansion of slavery into the vast new territory (the Missouri crisis of 1820 was a direct consequence); and it set in motion the dispossession of Native peoples at a scale and speed that would otherwise have been impossible. The Monroe Doctrine — America’s declaration that the Western Hemisphere was its sphere of influence — would not have been conceivable

America's Grand Faustian Bargain: Alexander Mikaberidze on How the Louisiana Purchase Made the United States

“There’s a kind of exhaustion and resentment — maybe sometimes feeling a little foolish about still feeling attached to some idea of this country that seems like it’s maybe not holding that strong or that healthy anymore.” — Christopher Hooks

 

Happy fucking birthday, [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/07/happy-fucking-birthday-christopher-hooks-semiquincentennial/] America. No, not my tasteless language. These words adorn the cover of the July 2026 issue of the 175-year-old Harper’s, America’s oldest monthly publication. From one alter kocker to another. It’s no fun getting old.

 

The Harper’s piece, written by the Texas-based journalist Christopher Hooks [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/07/happy-fucking-birthday-christopher-hooks-semiquincentennial/], is a funereal essay about his travels around an exhausted America. It began as a reported account of America250 — the bipartisan commission set up in 2015–2016, at the end of the Obama era, to organise the semiquincentennial celebrations. Bipartisan? Internal bureaucratic dysfunction. Disagreements about purpose. Trumpian lawsuits. NDAs. Blah, blah, blah. Hooks found it demoralising. The landscape of Washington DC, he writes mournfully, is didactic and insistent. Some alter kocker is always trying to teach you something.

 

But some people do, indeed, have something to teach us. Hooks’ piece ends with Thaddeus Stevens — the club-footed, cranky, ugly radical Republican congressman who was born a few years after the Constitution was ratified. Stevens spent most of his long life believing in perfect racial and ethnic equality, helped frame the 14th Amendment as a second founding father, and died deeply disappointed. And, of course, that disappointment would only be compounded if he could see what Christopher Hooks saw in his recent trip around the contemporary United States.

 

Dear America — happy fucking birthday. Love, uncle Thaddeus.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Happy Fucking Birthday: The Title, the Feeling, and the Cover of Harper’s: Hooks’ editor at Harper’s came up with the title. Hooks is glad they did. It matches the feeling: exhaustion, resentment, and a kind of embarrassment at still feeling attached to an idea of America that seems like it’s not holding together. His father — a Republican for most of his life until 2016 — wakes up every morning and has to deal with the fact that America is maybe not the thing he thought it was. He feels humiliated. His son does too. Nobody likes to be fooled. And part of the unique indignity of the Trump era is the delight Trump and his people take in rubbing the noses of liberals in the abuse of American symbols.

 

•       The America250 Commission: Dysfunction, Lawsuits, and a Startup Fund: America250 was a bipartisan commission set up at the end of the Obama era to organise the semiquincentennial celebrations. By the time Hooks arrived at their press briefing, they had survived internal dysfunction, disagreements about purpose, lawsuits, and NDAs. Trump’s people had been brought in; fighting followed. Their proudest achievement: a venture capital seed fund to help American college students start companies, as a way of repairing the lack of patriotism polling says younger Americans feel. It felt to Hooks like it came from a past political moment — discredited and distant. He came out of the briefing dispirited.

 

•       The History of Semiquincentennials: 1876 Had Juice, 1976 Had Amnesia: Milestone commemorations have usually been emotionally complicated. 1926 was a disaster. 1976 — at the end of Vietnam and after Watergate — surprised many by producing an unexpected wave of patriotic sentiment that washed away, at least for a day, the gnawing doubts. That amnesia helped make possible b

Dear America — Happy Fucking Birthday: Christopher Hooks on an Exhausted United States at 250

“The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney

 

The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324020783] addresses in his intriguing new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324020783].

 

How We Disappear is triggered by grief. Mullaney’s father — a man he never fully understood, an exile in an estranged household — died unexpectedly in 2017. Sitting in his father’s office surrounded by the “paperwork of death,” Mullaney’s training as a historian crystallised into an all-too-personal project of disappearance. It’s a book about what Mullaney calls “intransitive disappearance” — not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind of traditional historiography (wars, book burnings, genocide) but the everyday, uneventful ways things fall apart. Like Thomas Mullaney’s dad. Existence as obsolescence, erosion, sinescence and the slow drift of the unremarkable into nothing.

 

History, in Mullaney’s account, is a Sisyphean fight against this nothingness. We tell stories to survive and maintain the polite appearance of coherence. If you actually tried to reconstruct experience — the thing-in-itself — you would need an infinite library of trillion-page books. Existence, for Mullaney, is a swirl of stimuli and daydream. History tries to domesticate this Borgesian swirl. So does consciousness itself. That’s why, as Mullaney memorably puts it, “historians do the dirty work of necromancers.” Which is to say they try to negotiate with the second law of thermodynamics.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Intransitive Disappearance: The Everyday Way Things Fall Apart: Mullaney’s central concept: intransitive disappearance. Not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind — book burnings, genocide, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria — but the everyday, drifty, uneventful ways things disintegrate. Obsolescence. Erosion. Sinescence. The unremarkable drift of the unremarkable into nothing. He became obsessed with these forms of disappearance — a pack rat across every discipline he could think of — for twenty-five years. His father’s unexpected death in 2017, sitting in his father’s office amid the paperwork of death, crystallised what had been inchoate into a book.

 

•       History as Domesticated Experience: The Trillion-Page Book: If you tried to actually reconstruct experience — the actual thing, unfiltered — you would need a trillion-page book that would make Naked Lunch look like a kindergarten primer. You’d have to say how many hairs were on his head; whether he favoured his left foot over his right; the scent of his aftershave. Experience, unfiltered, is an n-dimensional vortex of stimuli and daydream. Anytime you read a work of history, you are reading experience that has been domesticated into narrative — with turning points, main characters, thematic arguments. Historians know this. Every practising historian knows that the ideal of reconstructing human experience can never be reached.

 

•       The Vocal Defence of History: Why Do It If You Know It’s Impossible? Mullaney’s answer to the subversive question: history is just the professional counterpart of what every human being does every second of their existence. You, right now, telling yourself the story of your experience, are already well into postproduction. Your experience of being a person in a chair talking to another person on a couch — that is already domesticated. Human beings need to tell stories to live, to maintain continuity, to maintai

How We Disappear: Thomas Mullaney’s All-Too-Personal History of Information

“If I perish, I perish.” — the chant Katie Gaddini heard from Esther’s Army at the National Mall, weeks before the 2024 election

 

Back in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Margaret Atwood came on [https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-democracy-citizenship-and-dystopian-fiction/] the show to talk about The Handmaid’s Tale — her warning of how trad wives, to borrow a contemporary phrase, could be exploited by an evangelical patriarchy. Five years later, the Stanford fellow Katie Gaddini [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324123767] offers a strikingly different vision. Her new book, Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324123767] (out today), is the product of nine years of research and over 100 interviews with conservative Christian women across 28 states.

 

These women, this army of Esthers, are not handmaidens, Gaddini concludes. “They are very much in charge. They are politically engaged. They, in many cases, hold political positions of power.”

 

Gaddini grew up as an evangelical — her father a pastor, with four more pastors in her extended family. She voted for George Bush “naturally,” before discovering she could be a Christian and not a Republican. But she is less a rebel against her upbringing as much as a sociologist with a Cambridge doctorate.

 

She was living in London when Trump won the 2016 nomination and wondered how it was that Christian women were planning to vote for this most imperfect of men? Nine years and 100 interviews later, the answer turns out to be more complicated than the standard liberal media exploitation tale about handmaids.

 

The book’s title comes from the women themselves. At a 250,000-person rally on the National Mall weeks before the 2024 election, Gaddini saw women wearing gold-plated Esther necklaces, chanting “If I perish, I perish” from the Book of Esther. Gaddini interprets this as a striking theological shift — away from the forgiveness of the New Testament toward the Manichaean Old Testament narrative of violence, destruction, and an imperfect male figure designed by God to redeem the rest of us. Donald Trump, in this telling, is King David. Or Jehu.

 

Margaret Atwood better watch out. This Army of Esthers are warriors, not handmaidens, and they are preparing for an apocalyptical war. If you perish, you perish. Another Old Testament-style pandemic.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Not Handmaids: Trad Wives Are a Tiny, Overhyped Fringe: Gaddini went into nine years of research expecting to find Atwood-style oppression. Instead: only one of her hundred-plus interviewees follows a trad wife on social media. Trad wives are overpopulated in media attention but represent a much smaller political force than coverage suggests. The women Gaddini actually studied span homeschool moms involved in local politics to Heritage Foundation lawyers to women working at the top echelons of power in Washington DC. They are diehard MAGA supporters and politically engaged — the opposite of passive.

 

•       The Hidden History: Women Built the Conservative Movement Since the 1970s: Gaddini’s archival research into the Reagan administration found women — never household names — who drafted legislation that still shapes policy today, including the squashing of federal child care. Phyllis Schlafly was not an aberration but part of coordinated networks of women who strategised together at national conventions, even as Schlafly took the spotlight while others worked behind the scenes. Books about the Christian right’s formation in the 1980s have largely written women out of the story. Gaddini is writing them back in.

 

•       Conservative Feminism: A More Complicated Relationship Than Expected: Gaddi

If I Perish, I Perish: Katie Gaddini on the Army of Esthers Powering the American Right

“My brothers always think: what would Jesus do? And they do that. I think: what would dad do? And I do the opposite.” — Jamison Firestone

 

What do you do if your dad was a multimillionaire conman, crack addict, and owner of New York’s most expensive brothel? If you’re Jamison Firestone [https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/rule-of-lies-my-wild-ride-through-chaos-corruption-and-murder-in-putins-russia-jamison-r-firestone], you transform yourself into his antithesis. You go to law school. You go to post-Soviet Russia and establish the country’s first independent foreign law firm. You employ Sergei Magnitsky and befriend Alexei Navalny. You transform yourself into one of Vladimir Putin’s most vocal foreign critics.

 

It’s quite a story. His memoir, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia [https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/rule-of-lies-my-wild-ride-through-chaos-corruption-and-murder-in-putins-russia-jamison-r-firestone] (HarperCollins, June 4, 2026), is both a Russian and American confession. As an old friend of the show, Peter Pomerantsev, says: “This book is NUTS! — in the best possible way.”

 

Yes, Rule of Lies is nuts. But it’s also the best kind of contemporary history. Firestone arrived in Russia in 1991, at the very moment the KGB hardliners rolled tanks into the streets and kidnapped Gorbachev. He watched, within days, as the Russian people confronted the tanks. He saw Yeltsin emerge as the hero, the Soviet Union dissolve, and the promise of a free-market democracy consumed by mafia groups, corrupt officials, and the structural lawlessness of the transition. In 1993, Yeltsin shelled his own congress. In 1999, on New Year’s Eve, he got on television, wished everyone a happy new year, and resigned — handing the country to Vladimir Putin in exchange for a pardon. That, says Firestone, is how we got to Putinism’s kleptocratic rule of lies.

 

Firestone’s Russian memoir is also the Magnitsky story. He employed an accountant called Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered the largest tax theft in Russian history, was arrested on fabricated charges, and died in pre-trial detention — probably murdered by the same corrupt officials he had exposed. The Magnitsky Act, the Magnitsky sanctions, the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign — all of it connects back to Jamison Firestone. And, in a way, back to his dad, Richard, the New York City crook who schooled his rebellious son in the value of obeying the law and telling the truth.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Criminal Father Who Taught Him Everything He Needed for Russia: Firestone’s father was a brilliant, charming man who turned out, when Firestone was 15, to be a multimillionaire fraudster defrauding investors and the IRS. Indicted, his father went a little crazy: became a crack addict, bought New York’s most expensive brothel, started hanging out with loan sharks and contract killers. Firestone spent his late high school years learning to talk to contract killers — respectfully, to make them laugh, to say no and not get killed. That skill, he says, turned out to be exactly what he needed in Russia in the 1990s, when everyone was mafia. His father taught him crime doesn’t pay. He believed it.

 

•       Arriving in Russia at the Moment of the Coup: Firestone arrived in Russia in 1991, at the very end of the Gorbachev era, during the opening of the Soviet Union. Within days, KGB hardliners rolled tanks into the streets, kidnapped Gorbachev, and declared the reforms over. Then — the extraordinary thing — the Russian people stood up. The tanks backed down. Gorbachev was released. But the hero of the day was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev. The Soviet Union dissolved within months. What followed was a chaotic, disorderly transition in which democracy got lost: every

Russian-American Confessions: Jamison Firestone on Putin’s Russia and a Criminal American Dad

“His descent is in a sense our descent.” — Peter Wehner on Trump at 80

 

Donald Trump turned 80 two weeks ago. But Peter Wehner [https://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-wehner/]’s timely Atlantic piece [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-decline-ufc-fight/687582/], “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” isn’t much of a birthday present. Wehner even suggests that for all Trump’s madness, mayhem and malevolence, the orange octogenarian eludes Shakespearean tragedy. So no historic hall of infamy for Donald. He’s too sad for that.

 

Trump is a man, Wehner says, of borderless corruption — malicious, totally corrupt, without any visible redeeming qualities. But he isn’t King Lear. Trump lacks Lear’s complexity, Wehner says. Lear was a figure with whom you could have some empathy. Trump is not. He is, as Wehner notes, “a flatter figure in that sense” — but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous.

 

For the DC-based Wehner, what makes Trump more dangerous, as an octogenarian, is his decomposition. The signs are everywhere: the disinhibition intensifying, the impulsivity more easily triggered, the volatility producing a foreign policy that no ally can track or trust. His descent, Wehner warns, might be our descent. Peak Trump. The apotheosis of a pathetically malevolent madman. Just in time for the semiquincentennial, which Wehner will “celebrate” at Monticello.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Trump at 80: The Apotheosis and the Decomposition: Wehner’s Atlantic piece, written to mark Trump’s 80th birthday, argues that what we are seeing is not just the decline of an old man but a visible decomposition in his mental and physical capacities that is making him more, not less, dangerous. The disinhibition is more intense. The impulsivity is more easily triggered. The volatility is producing a foreign policy that no ally can track or trust. Trump 2.0 is more dangerous than Trump 1.0 — and Trump 1.0 was not a walk in the park. The question is not whether this ends well. The question is how badly it ends.

 

•       Not King Lear: A Man of Borderless Corruption: Wehner uses a King Lear allusion in his Atlantic essay but hesitates to lean on it. Lear was a complicated figure — someone you could have empathy with, who saw things at the end he hadn’t seen earlier. Trump is not like that. He is, as best Wehner can tell, a man of borderless corruption, malicious from head to toe, with no visible redeeming qualities — a flatter figure in the Shakespearean sense. That flatness makes the Lear parallel partial. But it does not diminish the danger. His descent is in a sense our descent.

 

•       European Mystification: When It Happens Twice, That Breaks Trust: Andrew has just returned from Europe, where every prominent journalist and historian he met was mystified by Trump. Wehner agrees: Trump is sui generis, unlike any leader the post-war world has produced. What he says is particularly disturbing is the second election. If it had happened once, Europe could have told itself it was a parenthesis. When it happens twice, that breaks trust. Even if the next president is sane and rational, there is no guarantee the following one will be. That uncertainty, Wehner says, is a real inflection point in the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.

 

•       The Crack-Up of MAGA World: The cult-like grip Trump had on the Republican Party and the MAGA base is no longer there. His approval among Republicans has dropped from the nineties to the seventies — still high, but significant. And the fissures in MAGA world are, in Wehner’s word, extraordinary: Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens have broken from the movement or turned on its leadership. Marjorie Taylor Greene too. The crack-up has b

The Apotheosis of Donald Trump? Peter Wehner on Madness, Mayhem and How Trump Eludes Shakespearean Tragedy

“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare

 

Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at least) more interesting than the real one.

 

The bad news is that I’m back. The good news is it’s been an interesting week in tech. That was the week in which the US Commerce Department told both OpenAI and Anthropic that they now need government approval for whom they can sell their frontier AI models. This is supposedly “voluntary” — for now, at least.

 

Keith’s TWTW editorial argues that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have spent over a year crying wolf about the dangers of their own technology, supposedly deliberately seeking government involvement as a regulatory moat against competitors. And now the government has walked through the door that Sam and Dario left ajar. Now, Keith argues, the US government is behaving as if it owns not just the door and the guest list, but the entire product roadmap. “Payback’s a bitch,” Keith bristles in his editorial.

 

The other major news this week is the rumour (via David Sacks) that OpenAI has offered the US government a 50% stake in a sovereign wealth fund. If true, this would change everything — not just in Silicon Valley, but in the political debate about public ownership of our AI economy. It’s not just tech insiders like Sacks and Altman who are on board the sovereign wealth fund express, but also Bernie Sanders and other leftist critics of Big Tech. So maybe payback, at least when it comes to public investment in AI, isn’t always such a bitch.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Fake Andrew Keen: An Hour of Work on a Local Nvidia Card: Keith ran last week’s show solo with an AI-generated Andrew Keen: trained on a few episodes of the show, animated from a YouTube still, scripted from Keith’s newsletter. No third-party service. Just a local PC with an Nvidia GPU, about an hour of work, three attempts. Andrew, listening back, second-guessed whether he was actually there. The result was “pretty bad compared to our normal actual live shows,” Keith says. But also: really good. The question hanging over this episode and every future one: which Andrew are you listening to?

 

•       Payback’s a Bitch: How AI Companies Created Their Own Regulatory Trap: The US Commerce Department has told OpenAI and Anthropic they need government permission for who gets to use their latest models. Voluntary, for now. Keith’s diagnosis: AI leadership spent more than a year crying wolf about existential risk — not because they believed it, but because government regulation creates a moat against competitors. Now the government has taken them at their word. Dario and Sam Altman wanted to be wrapped in government clothing. They are. The government now owns the door. They asked for this. They got it.

 

•       American and Chinese State Capitalism: Converging Models: Andrew raises the macro argument: what we’re watching is the convergence of American and Chinese models of capitalism toward a more state-centric model. China has always been explicit about state control. America has prided itself on free enterprise — even when the internet, atomic technology, and now AI were all substantially government-funded or government-shaped. Keith agrees at this level: all governments seek to control things they frame as dangerous. The difference is the framing. The direction of travel is the same.

 

•       OpenAI’s Rumoured 50% Stake Offer to the Government: Keith has heard — fro

Payback’s a Bitch: AI Sovereign Wealth Funds, the Fake Andrew Keen, and America’s Inevitable Decline

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Keen.

Keen On