Essays

The title of this essay is a statement of record, not of opinion. Donald J. Trump is a convicted felon. A jury of twelve New Yorkers found him guilty on all thirty-four counts of a felony indictment, and no court has reversed that verdict. He is also a man against whom two further federal indictments, one state indictment, and a series of civil judgments were brought, with outcomes ranging from dismissal to final judgment. The purpose of this essay is to set down that record precisely: what was charged, what was proven, what was dismissed, and what stands today. The record is long, and it is public. It deserves to be read whole. ...

Danger and uselessness are usually treated as opposites. A dangerous president is one who is too effective, too capable, too determined; a useless one is merely a disappointment, a man who fails without consequence. The alarming possibility, and the one the record now supports, is that the two are the same fact. The danger of Donald Trump is not that he is powerful. It is that he is powerful and incompetent, and the combination does not cancel out. It compounds. The incompetent exercise of vast power is how wars are started, economies are damaged, and institutions are broken. This essay sets down the evidence for both claims, because they are one claim: a president who cannot govern is not a harmless president. He is the most dangerous kind. ...

The year 2075 is forty-nine years away. That is the same distance as 1977 is from today, and it is worth pausing on what that means. A person born in 1977 has lived through the end of the Cold War, the rise of the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the smartphone, the first decade of artificial intelligence, and a pandemic. Forty-nine years is a lifetime, and it is also the span in which the world’s population will grow by two billion people, the global temperature will rise past thresholds that have never been crossed in human history, and the political order that emerged after 1945 will either be repaired or replaced. This essay is an attempt to look at that year soberly, without panic and without comfort, and to set down the two paths that are actually available. They are not predictions. They are the two futures that the evidence says are possible, and the difference between them is being decided now. ...

Carl Sagan died in December 1996. He never saw a smartphone. He never saw social media. He never saw a large language model generate a confident lie on demand. He never saw a calendar year pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial level, because that year, 2024, was still twenty-eight years away. And yet the question of what he would say about today’s world is not idle curiosity. It is a way of asking what the evidence demands of us, and he spent his life teaching us how to ask exactly that question. He would recognize this moment. He spent thirty years warning that it was coming. The most useful thing we can do is listen to what he said, because he said it all before, and he said it with the evidence in his hand. ...

The premise of this article is that the United States and the People’s Republic of China are at war in 2030. Not a trade war, not a technology contest, not a proxy conflict: a shooting war, with American and Chinese forces engaging each other directly in the western Pacific, and with nuclear weapons on both sides operational enough to shape the outcome. The premise is counterfactual, but it is not exotic. Every serious wargame of the last decade has run this scenario, and the analytic community has converged on expectations specific enough to summarize. This article assembles them: how such a war would begin, what the first weeks would look like, where it would break, and how it would end. ...

Kansas Senate 2026: The Case for Adam Hamilton Question: Why would anyone in Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, support a first-time candidate who is a Methodist pastor? Answer: Because I attended his church before COVID-19, and I know what he is capable of. Because the man running against him has spent five years voting with the president 98% of the time and answering to Washington instead of Kansas. And because this race, against every expectation, is suddenly competitive. ...

Question: How do Democrats get from 47 seats to a Senate majority in 2026, and who would be the Majority Leader if they do? Answer: They need a net gain of four seats, because a 50-50 tie belongs to the vice president, and the vice president is a Republican. The map gives them a real shot: one likely pickup in North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench of competitive races from Maine to Alaska. If the defense holds and the flips land, the Majority Leader is almost certainly Chuck Schumer, and the real fight is over who succeeds him. ...

There is a version of MacKenzie Scott’s life that reads like a fable about the wrong kind of ambition. She studied creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison, who called her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.”1 She spent ten years writing her first novel while helping her husband build a company that would become the most valuable retailer on earth. The novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, won an American Book Award. Morrison reviewed it as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”2 And almost nobody read it. By NPD BookScan’s count, her books sold modestly.3 ...

The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was written to be a leash. Congress, tired of four decades of unexamined emergency powers, demanded that every declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to the legislature, and lapse unless renewed each year. The whole design assumed that emergencies would be rare, and that rarity would be the check. Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, the leash has become a rubber stamp. Twelve new national emergencies have been declared since January 2025: for the border, for cartels, for energy, for tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, Brazil, and the world, for the ICC, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for the bulk-power grid. Twelve emergencies, and not one of them was an emergency in any ordinary sense of the word. They were vehicles. ...

The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was supposed to be a leash. Congress, alarmed by four decades of unexamined emergency powers, required that every future declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to Congress, and lapse automatically unless renewed each year.1 Fifty years later, the leash has stretched into something closer to a routine: as of late October 2025, 48 national emergencies were active in the United States, and President Trump was responsible for 11 of them.2 By the end of August 2026, the number of new declarations from his second term alone had reached twelve, with two more carried over from his first term still on the books.3 ...