Zack Beauchamp | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2026-05-13T20:36:47+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchamp-2/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[Are far-right politics just the new normal?]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=488450 2026-05-13T16:36:47-04:00 2026-05-13T06:00:00-04:00 Buttigieg speaks into a microphone.
Pete Buttigieg, former US secretary of transportation, speaks during the Global Progress Action Summit at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Canada. | Soeren Stache/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

TORONTO — At a conference bookended by speeches from former President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the leading lights of the global center-left gathered to consider their fate. 

The Global Progress Action Summit was billed as a “progressive version of CPAC,” the right-wing conference that has become a premier gathering for populist conservatives from around the world. And indeed, the conference was preoccupied with its right-mirror image — with speakers admitting that the far right had outmaneuvered them in the past, and advancing ideas for how to blunt its seemingly persistent appeal going forward.

Key takeaways

  • Vox attended a recent conference for the international left, featuring people like former President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, to try and understand how liberals are responding to the far right’s persistent political power.
  • We learned that liberals around the world are talking a lot less about the fever breaking and the far right going away, and much more about how to live in a reality where large numbers of voters support those parties.
  • They are increasingly optimistic that they can manage — even succeed — in a political environment where the far right is a leading alternative.

“This is the raison d’être for this work,” as Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (one of the conference’s organizers), put it to me. 

For years, liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic saw figures like President Donald Trump as a blip to be outlasted. The right’s “fever” would, as the last two Democratic presidents suggested, eventually break after electoral rebukes — returning the old establishment to its traditional leadership positions.

The evidence on this theory is in, and it has failed. Joe Biden’s presidency did not mark the end of Trumpism, nor have far-right electoral defeats in countries ranging from France to Poland been Waterloos.

“It’s clear that Democrats can’t just treat this as some random anomaly or self-correcting problem,” Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation under Biden and a rumored 2028 candidate, told me in an interview at the conference. “Look around the world for evidence of that.”

The conference organizers chose to meet in Toronto because Canada was an exception to these trends. Canada’s center-left Liberal party has been in power for 11 unbroken years; its main opposition, the Conservative Party, has grown more populist in recent years but remains considerably more moderate than Trump’s Republicans or the typical European far-right faction.

Yet few attendees had anything like a plan for making their countries more Canadian. In fact, their comments revealed an implicitly opposite approach: Instead of figuring out how to head off the far right entirely, the center-left was learning to live with their presence.

That means redefining victory not as crushing the far right, but defeating it the way they would any other normal political opponent.

“This is not normal” — except it is

The main reason behind the new liberal stance is simple, brute reality: polls and election results show that the far right is simply part of the new normal.

In the US, Trump long ago transformed the Republican Party in his image. The right-wing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, began her political career as a neo-fascist activist and is now a major world leader. The far-right AfD is topping German polls despite frequent accusations of neo-Nazi ties, and France’s National Rally is the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in 2027. Two days before the conference, the United Kingdom’s Reform Party stomped to victory over the ruling Labour Party in local elections so resoundingly that the centrist Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now on resignation watch.

One theory, popular among conference goers, is that this far-right trend could be blunted by economic success. Speaker after speaker touted various policies in this area, on the implicit — and sometimes explicit — assumption they could deliver victory by striking at the heart of the far right’s appeal.

“It’s gotten harder to get and stay in the middle class,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told me. “That economic stress is causing people to head into the arms of someone who will tell them they have an easy solution and they have someone to blame.”

A version of this approach, widely termed “deliverism” at the time, was an animating idea behind the Biden administration’s pursuit of a large stimulus and redistributive policy. But it’s also easier said than done: Biden did deliver low unemployment, high economic growth, and more manufacturing jobs in cutting-edge industries — producing a US economy that The Economist famously termed “the envy of the world” in October 2024. That obviously didn’t work out as planned, as voters revolted against spiking inflation and grew more pessimistic than ever.

Slotkin’s response is that Biden simply delivered in the wrong ways, trumpeting good economic statistics while ignoring the devastating effects of higher prices.

“They tried to tell the American people that they were better off than they felt they were,” she says. “Even while it was happening, I said, ‘If I hear one more Harvard economist tell me people are better off than they really think they are,’ I’m going to lose it.’ Because people know their own pocketbooks.”

Elissa Slotkin speaking

The underlying premise is questionable. The best social science has shown, time and again, that the far right’s base is motivated less by the economic anxiety that Slotkin cites and much more by concerns about cultural and demographic change. The far right persists across different democracies with different economic circumstances and models because all of them are, in one way or another, grappling with changes wrought by mass immigration and shifting cultural roles surrounding race and gender.

But what’s interesting about Slotkin’s approach is just how normal it is. 

Trying to beat the other party by delivering concrete economic goods is perhaps the most traditional of traditional political strategies. “It’s the economy, stupid” was James Carville’s famous tagline back when he was running Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. It is also a necessarily cyclical strategy; eventually, the economy will perform poorly under your watch, and your party will lose. Slotkin’s deliverism isn’t a strategy for vanquishing the far right, but beating it temporarily in the traditional manner of democratic politics. It is how you deal with a rival, not an existential threat.

Of course, the far right can indeed pose a kind of existential threat by attacking democracy. When the Hungarian center-left lost the country’s 2010 election, they did not get another fair shot in 2014. Instead, they were forced to compete on increasingly uneven ground, locking them out of power until this year’s wave election gave Prime Minister Viktor Orbán no choice but to concede defeat.

Center-left politicians are, at this point, acutely aware of the danger. On the American side, Buttigieg suggested that this required fundamental political reform. 

“If return to normal could have been done, could have succeeded, the last administration would have done it,” he says. 

He believes the ultimate goal should be to create a system where moderate Republicans could break with Trump more easily when democracy is on the line. True MAGA, he estimates, represents only 20 percent to 30 percent of the population; perhaps changing the way the system works could bring its political representation more in line with that.

How exactly to get here from there was more fuzzy: the two reforms he floated as examples, ranked-choice voting and California-style jungle primaries, would almost certainly be insufficient. Moreover, even his ideal state concedes a significant role for MAGA — one not far from what we see in many European democracies, where far-right parties are always a visible part of the legislature. In Germany, for example, the AfD has reached a position of significant influence while commanding a small plurality (roughly 27 percent) in the polls. 

Even the most radically ambitious vision, in short, still sees MAGA as a persistent and durable force in American politics.

Maybe normal politics can work

But if liberals now seem to be conceding that the far right won’t simply be vanquished, they also are growing more hopeful as to their ability to contain it.

Even as the far right has risen in power around the world in recent years, it’s also held power in relatively few places — and the closer it gets to governing, the more voters seem to remember why they kept them out of power so long in the first place. 

Trump’s second administration is a case in point. The president followed through on his promises to boost the economy by throwing up protective tariffs, blowing up government agencies, expelling immigrants, and slashing taxes — only to see his approval scraping new lows on issue after issue. Government by the far right and for the far right is so far backfiring on its own terms and producing a doom loop of corruption, infighting, war, and economic uncertainty. 

Elly Schlein — the leader of Italy’s Democrats, the center-left opposition to Meloni’s government — was perhaps the most optimistic in this regard. Coming off of a recent victory in a national referendum, where the opposition defeated a Meloni proposal to increase her control over the judiciary, Schlein saw a far-right whose ascent was finally starting to ebb — primarily as a result of its own governing failures.

“The time of right-wing nationalists is over, because they are not delivering with people,” she said in a panel appearance. 

The strategy for the left must not be “running after them or trying to speak their language” — an implicit rebuke to leaders like the UK’s Starmer, who tacked to the right on immigration and got wiped out. Rather, Schlein suggested, the center-left should try to force the conversation onto “uncomfortable ground” for the right — meaning economic issues like “housing, wages, healthcare, and education.” 

Though Schlein is a leftist, one occasionally termed Italy’s AOC, her advice sounded strikingly similar to the moderate Slotkin’s. Both believed that the center-left can survive periods of far-right government and then, subsequently, return to power by attacking the incumbent’s corruption and unequal governance. The battle will never be over, but losing once doesn’t necessarily mean the setback is permanent. 

Perhaps the most striking piece of evidence that “normal” political rhetoric can work — even in the context of democratic backsliding or outright authoritarianism — came from the success of new Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar.

As it happened, the day of the conference was the day that Magyar was officially sworn into office — and, as such, everyone was talking about him. In our conversation, Slotkin explicitly cited “the Hungarian model” as an inspiration for her own approach to thinking about beating back the far-right tide.

Magyar campaigned both on economic issues and as an agent of structural transformation, while linking the two topics together. Focusing on the Orbán regime’s ostentatious corruption, he argued that the current government’s nature had made its very existence a barrier to prosperity for ordinary Hungarians. He promised not just a change in economic policy, but also the functional demolition of what Orbán had built: transforming politicized institutions and even prosecuting top government officials and allies who committed crimes on the former government’s behalf.

Now, the circumstances in Hungary are different from those in any other Western democracy. Orbán was not just a far-right politician but an authoritarian who had twisted every aspect of the political system to try to maintain power indefinitely. After 16 years of such a regime, and amid an economic disaster, Magyar’s message was unusually likely to hit (especially given his clever tactics for getting around the government’s tight control over information).

But his success at least offers a hint of hope for the otherwise beleaguered liberal movement represented at the conference. If a country that had crossed the line into authoritarianism can come back through the tools of “normal” politics, the thinking goes, then perhaps the world’s oldest democracy and its allies can save themselves the same way.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[Why the latest would-be Trump assassin is so hard to figure out]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=487565 2026-05-07T13:11:12-04:00 2026-05-04T11:35:00-04:00 A photo of law enforcement detaining a suspect
A photo of law enforcement detaining the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting suspect in Washington, DC, on the night of April 25, 2026. | US President Trump via Truth Social/Anadolu via Getty

Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the attempted White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, is unusual among attempted assassins — in his normalcy. 

His political grievances, laid out in a manifesto and social media posts, are not dissimilar from those of an ordinary Democrat. He believed that President Donald Trump was a lawless, corrupt leader who abused immigrants, perpetrated war crimes, and presented an existential threat to American democracy.

Key takeaways

I spoke with five leading experts on political violence in the United States. The picture they painted was complicated; they often didn’t agree on key points. But my best read of the evidence they presented led me to three conclusions.

  • Political violence becomes more likely when people believe that politics takes on existential stakes — that their way of life or cherished values are at risk — and that there is no hope of peaceful resolution to their conflicts.
  • For this reason, it’s not absurd to worry about that existential rhetoric on both sides — that whites are being “replaced,” that the 2020 elections were stolen, or that American democracy is dying — might create an environment where violence becomes more likely.
  • However, this risk can be mitigated significantly by emphasizing the ability to resolve perceived dangers through peaceful political processes. 

But while atypical, he is also not alone. Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago, displayed notably more bizarre behavior — but had writings that echoed similar themes to Allen’s. While primarily preoccupied with Trump, they join the ranks of Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, in what has increasingly been called “normie extremism.” These are people who express grievances in the center-left mainstream — for-profit health insurance is wrong, the right shouldn’t spread “hatred” — yet who apparently act on those beliefs in violent ways typically associated with political extremists.

It is not fully clear whether “normie extremism” is a coherent category. There have only been a handful of incidents that might qualify, and they differ from each other in important ways: The two would-be Trump assassins had distinct views from those of either Mangione or Robinson, who were also quite different from each other. Moreover, most of these cases still haven’t gone to trial, meaning we have only a fraction of the insight into motives we might eventually get.

Even so, the incidents are raising a real question: Is the mainstream liberal critique of Trump pushing people toward actual violence?

To call this question “real” is not to endorse the White House’s disingenuous efforts to exploit these incidents by turning the government on enemies like Jimmy Kimmel or James Comey or ordinary Americans. Nor does it ignore the bad faith of Republicans leveling complaints about Democratic rhetoric while supporting Trump, a one-of-one outlier in our political system when it comes to inflaming, mocking, and excusing political violence. 

But even if we stipulate all of that, there are still good reasons to take the question seriously. 

Trump’s second term has been an extended exercise in attacking democratic fundamentals. Raids by the unaccountable and growing ICE forces; his obsession with trying to undermine elections; his seemingly unpunished corruption and lying; even his lieutenants’ efforts to shut down comedians he doesn’t like — all of these are serious threats to democracy, and none of them have any real Republican opposition. I’m among the many writers who have been sounding alarm bells, and it requires some unavoidably blunt rhetoric to do so, given the gravity of the situation.

But these valid concerns do not justify assassinating the president or anyone else; all mainstream liberals agree on this point, and that the threat of violence makes things worse rather than better. If there is indeed any legitimate concern about “threat to democracy” talk leading to violence, Trump’s critics have an obligation both to the country and their own cause to figure out how best to minimize it.

So what should we do? If you (very reasonably) believe Trump is actively assaulting our democracy, how can you state these fears clearly while also tamping down the risk of destabilizing violence?

To grapple with these issues, I spoke with five leading experts on political violence in the United States. The picture they painted was complicated; they often didn’t agree on key points. But my best read of the evidence they presented led me to three conclusions:

  1. Political violence becomes more likely when people believe that politics takes on existential stakes — that their way of life or cherished values are at risk — and that there is no hope of peaceful resolution to their conflicts.
  2. For this reason, it’s not absurd to worry about that existential rhetoric on both sides — that whites are being “replaced,” that the 2020 elections were stolen, or that American democracy is dying — might create an environment where violence becomes more likely.
  3. However, this risk can be mitigated significantly by emphasizing the ability to resolve perceived dangers through peaceful political processes. 

There is, in short, a “right way” to talk about existential risks in a democratic society: one that emphasizes the need to respond through that system, either by voting or peaceful activism. 

Trump violates this approach routinely by claiming elections are rigged by shadowy, unaccountable forces and has been deservedly criticized for it. To the extent that Democrats, progressives, and aligned figures stay within the above confines, it is largely unfair to hold them responsible for the actions of people like the WHCD shooter. 

To their credit, they overwhelmingly tend to do so. But there are some worrying currents, floating around the periphery of left-leaning conversation, worth taking more seriously in light of these incidents.

The tricky business of connecting rhetoric to violence

It is important, at the outset, to note that it is extremely difficult to link any specific piece of rhetoric to a specific act of violence. 

Even when you can precisely trace a killer’s information diet — like with Alexandre Bissonnette, a frequent Ben Shapiro and InfoWars consumer who killed six at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017 — you can’t prove that their media consumption caused the shooting. It could be that they were already violent before they started watching or reading a particular news outlet, or that something other than politicians and pundits pushed them to kill.

It’s also important to note that political violence is still very rare, even as it’s been on the rise. While different datasets tally incidents differently, even higher-end estimates put our yearly tally of politically motivated killings of anyone — from politicians to ordinary people — at somewhere in the dozens. In a country of 340 million people, that’s barely a rounding error. It can be very tricky to draw too many broad conclusions from such a small sample size.

Rather, the small number of incidents tells us that the people who commit political violence are highly unusual. We’re not in a civil war with organized factions directing and normalizing violent acts; the people who commit political violence are, quite frequently, dealing with mental health issues or experiencing severe life challenges.

The rarity of political violence does not make it unimportant. Quite the opposite: political violence is unique in that a single successful attack — like a presidential assassination — can have history-changing implications.

“Humans naturally are inclined away from violence — most of the time, when they’re feeling normal in their day,” says Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and co-author of Radical American Partisanship, a book on American attitudes toward political violence. “To convince them that harming another person is good requires you to take some steps.”

For all these reasons, we should be generally skeptical about claims about the direct causes of political violence in the United States. What is more reasonable, instead, is to talk about the background conditions that make it more likely for any one person — most likely, one with mental health issues — to believe that they must play the violent hero in America’s political movie. 

And there is good reason to believe that the rise of a specific kind of inflammatory rhetoric from leaders is one of those conditions. 

The existential roots of political violence in the United States

Research on political violence in America, both historical and contemporary, tells us that individuals who commit political violence tend to feel a specific blend of fear and hopelessness.

Fear, in this context, is not the ordinary partisan trepidation felt about losing an election. Rather, it is a sense that the stakes of politics are existential: that if your side loses, there will be no future for your party, the country, or the planet. When the stakes feel that high, people become more likely to turn to violence.

An example is Klan violence in the post-Civil War South. After slavery’s abolition, the white Southern elite believed that their way of life was on the verge of extinction. In this, they were not wrong: the multicultural democracy that Reconstruction was attempting to construct would indeed mean the end of the South’s hierarchical social structure. In that case, this fear was widespread enough to fuel an extremely bloody, and tragically successful, insurgency.

But fear alone is not always enough. Oftentimes, that fear needs to be combined with a collapse of faith in the political process: a sense that whatever you’re afraid of cannot and never will be resolved through electoral means. It’s this sense of hopelessness, or powerlessness, that makes the turn to violence much more likely.

“Terrorism emerges when people feel like their legitimate political avenues have been exhausted,” says Jacob Ware, an expert on domestic terrorism at Georgetown University.

A recent study led by Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Program at UC-Davis Medical Center, studied how over 9,000 Americans’ attitudes toward political violence changed between 2022 and 2023. Wintemute’s team found that one of the best predictors of radicalization — whether a person expressed an increased willingness to commit political violence — was whether they said they “gave up on politics” during the study period.

“Violence,” Wintemute told me in a phone call, “is politics by other means.”

Take, for example, the wave of white nationalist shootings targeting Jews (Pittsburgh in 2018), Latinos (El Paso in 2019), and Blacks (Buffalo in 2022). Each of those shooters was explicitly motivated by fears of white demographic replacement — a belief that the United States was not just becoming increasingly populated by people of color, but that the browning of America was a plot to destroy the country as they knew it, and one intended to render future democratic action impossible. 

This is a classic existential narrative of politics: If we don’t act now, our way of life will be doomed forever. And it happened at a moment when President Trump was warning of a migrant invasion and stolen elections, and prominent right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson were accusing Democrats of importing minority voters to lock Republicans out of power forever. 

We cannot say, with any confidence, that Trump or Carlson or any other right-wing figure was directly responsible for any one of those instances of political violence. But you can say that they were spreading a narrative of existential political struggle to a wider audience, raising the stakes of politics and making it more likely that such ideas would reach one of the handful of exceptional people who would believe in the Great Replacement enough to see it as justification for violent actions.

Applying the same lens to recent left-coded violence must begin by noting an obvious difference. The “Great Replacement” is a racist conspiracy theory, and liberal claims that Trump is a threat to democracy are straightforwardly true. 

Yet we are not talking about truth at the moment. We are talking about consequences: whether a particular narrative, when mainstreamed and widely broadcast, raises the risk that a mentally unwell individual hears it and sees it as justification for violent action. The recent record suggests some reason for worry.

Allen, the WHCD shooting suspect, had a long history of posting this kind of anti-Trump rhetoric on X and Bluesky (including referring to Trump as “Hitler”). In one recent post, he expressed a collapse in faith in the political system to stop the president and a growing frustration with others for not acting more directly, writing that “waiting for someone else to do something about it is not working.”

Routh, who was recently sentenced to life in prison for the Mar-a-Lago attempt, laid out his grievances in a letter to Politico’s Ankush Khardori. While rambly and at times incoherent, the note described Trump as a “dictator” and warned that “we must limit all Presidential power before Trump seizes our country.”

Now, both of these men failed to kill anyone — unlike the white nationalist killers, who have a collective body count in the dozens. And the shooter who actually did nearly kill Trump in Pennsylvania, Thomas Crooks, had no coherent grievance. His Google search history suggests he was interested in shooting Joe Biden and, as an FBI official put it, saw the Trump event as a “target of opportunity.” 

But Routh and Allen’s rhetoric is enough, for at least among some experts on political violence, to take worries about violence seriously. 

“Does saying ‘Trump is a threat to democracy’ make it more likely that a person with mental distress, or having a mental break, would commit violence against Trump? Yeah, it probably does,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. “But I’m not sure that one can stop saying something that is true against a leader who is posing a threat [for that reason].”

The right way to talk about existential threats

Not every expert shared Kleinfeld’s fears. Mason, the Johns Hopkins professor, pointed out that Thomas’s manifesto and social media tended to cite specific Trump actions — such as boat killings in the Caribbean or ICE raids — as grievances with the president. For Mason, this suggests that he was reacting less to heated Democratic rhetoric than to actual events: that Trump, by acting radically, inspired a radical response.

“Would this individual guy have been less violent if [media and Democrats] hadn’t said anything critical of Trump, and he had just witnessed ICE attacking and murdering people in Minneapolis?” she asks rhetorically. “Would reality not get through to him if you didn’t talk about it? I think it would.”

Surely, there’s something to that. But political violence is poisonous to a democracy. If indeed Trump is a threat to democracy — and I’m certain he is — it’s incumbent on those of us who believe that to calibrate our rhetoric in order to best minimize the risk of inspiring individuals to act violently, however low that risk may be at baseline.

Happily, every expert I spoke to agreed that there’s a way to do that: to emphasize, at every turn, the immorality of violence and the relative efficacy of political solutions to America’s Trump problem.

“People who want a democracy must speak honestly about existential threats to democracy. That is inherently antagonistic,” says Nathan Kalmoe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and Mason’s co-author). “At the same time, we must help people see that the most moral and effective means to defend and build a democracy are usually non-violent.”

Here, I think, there is a categorical difference between left and right — one that makes it less fair to blame mainstream Democrats for violence linked to their ideas than Trump.

When Democrats criticize Trump as an authoritarian, they almost always advocate for change through the political system. They call for people to attend protests, join local activist groups, and (above all else) turn out to vote in the midterm elections. They go out of their way to say the situation isn’t hopeless.

By contrast, Trump and the right’s rhetoric often positions the system as hopelessly broken: compromised by Democrats and the deep state. The clearest example of the dangers here being, of course, January 6. 

That day’s violence was a rare case where violence could be traced directly to political rhetoric: the Capitol rioters convened because they believed Trump’s claim that political change was impossible through the system. If the 2020 elections really were rigged, the only alternative was to “fight, fight, fight.” 

Similarly, it would make sense that there’s been less right-wing violence recently: Trump won the election, pardoned January 6 convicts, began mass deportations, and generally governed without restraint. This gave the likeliest perpetrators more confidence that the system is working for them: Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, recently told The Atlantic, “we’ve got what we wanted” in Trump’s second term, and that they’ve been a less visible street presence as a result.

Yet the fact that there is a categorical difference between Democrats and Republicans here does not mean the left should be complacent.

To see why, it’s useful to look at two different left-wing movements: the New Left student radicals of the 1960s and ’70s, and the climate movement of today.

Both movements saw politics in existential terms: if they failed, the country (and perhaps even the world) was doomed. Yet while ’60s and ’70s radicals produced one of the most sustained terrorism campaigns in American history, with groups like the Weather Underground bombing government offices and murdering police officers, comparable ecoterrorism in contemporary America is basically unheard of.

That’s because the two movements had fundamentally different views about democracy.

The Weather Underground saw American democracy as a bourgeois, racist, fundamentally irredeemable system; the only redemption could come with its destruction and replacement with some radical left alternative. The climate change movement, by contrast, has been resolutely democratic: seeing hope in policies ranging from market-friendly cap-and-trade proposals to a more expansive Green New Deal. This faith in the political process helps explain why the movement’s existential warnings of human extinction have not, to date, produced meaningful amounts of political violence.

Maintaining this faith takes work, though. That means liberals need to be especially vigilant about doomsaying: pushing back hard on false viral claims that Trump will cancel or invalidate the midterm elections, for example, or posts that mock the value of voting, even as they confront his real threats to election integrity. And it also means guarding against rhetoric that rationalizes or trivializes violence — turning Charlie Kirk’s murder into an edgy meme, say, or treating preventable deaths from a flawed health care system the same as cold-blooded murder. 

When I observed the No Kings protests in Washington, DC, earlier this year, I was struck by the signs I saw depicting guillotines or other violent anti-Trump imagery. It was only a small fraction — consistent with surveys showing No Kings protesters generally reject violence — but enough to be uncomfortable.

When I logged onto Bluesky afterward, I saw a lot of posters treating the signs as kind of a curiosity, or even a joke. Isn’t it funny how radicalized the normie grandmas are getting?

The assumption behind the joke is that these people are too normie to ever be violent. We now know that’s not necessarily the case. And going forward, as Trump’s anti-democratic behavior is likely to escalate, his opponents need to maintain the rhetorical high ground. 

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[This billionaire could be California’s next governor — and he wants to arrest Stephen Miller]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=487199 2026-04-28T16:00:34-04:00 2026-04-29T07:30:00-04:00 Tom Steyer at a debate
Tom Steyer is trying to solidify himself as the most progressive candidate in the California gubernatorial race. The state will hold its primary election on June 2, where the top two finishers advance to the general election in November regardless of party affiliation. | Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images

The California governor’s race isn’t just important for Californians. At a moment where the federal government is sabotaging American democracy from within, the question of how the leader of the union’s wealthiest and most populous state responds — and the ways they use their powers to challenge federal authority — has major implications for the country.

The current governor, Gavin Newsom, has (at least rhetorically) positioned himself as a leader of the national anti-Trump resistance. But Newsom is on his way out, gearing up for an all-but-assured White House run in 2028. The real policy action will likely be up to his successor — a race that’s currently a toss-up between a handful of plausible candidates, all competing to make it to the runoff round after the June 2 “jungle primary” eliminates all but the two best polling candidates.

Tom Steyer has emerged as a favorite to make it to that final round. Steyer, a billionaire funder of liberal causes — including both an early effort to impeach Donald Trump in the first term and California’s recent gerrymandering to favor Democrats — is trying to solidify himself as the most progressive candidate in the race; he’s won an endorsement from Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution group for his efforts and has promised to take on the administration, including by investigating ICE agents and even White House leaders for potential crimes. 

But I wanted to understand more about how Steyer understands his role at this moment in American history. What does he think the role of states are in pushing back against the Trump administration? And how does he think about the risks here, either of breaking Americans’ civic trust or pushing the boundaries of law in ways that provoke a dangerous conflict with the federal government?

Steyer took some time to talk to us about all of this on Monday. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Do you think the state of American politics right now can be reasonably described as an authoritarian emergency?

I think that we are under absolutely authoritarian threat. It is absolutely a crisis. There is a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to take away Americans’ democratic rights, including free and fair elections.

There is, this is a model, and we’ve seen it around the world, of authoritarian, anti-democratic parties trying to use the processes of democracy to destroy democracy. Is that going on? Absolutely that is going on. And so, is that a crisis? If you believe in democracy, which I fervently do, then it’s a crisis and it requires people to stand up and oppose it.

And I’ve been very disappointed in the establishment of the United States — however you want to define that — in its unwillingness to take those principled stands.

Obviously I agree with all that. But in the past day or so, I have been thinking about how we talk about these sorts of issues.

What happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was an ordinary American — a Caltech grad, as it happens — who seems to go from seeing real abuses by the government to justify an action that both of us, I’m certain, think is totally indefensible and immoral. So how do you think about talking about democratic emergency in a world where some people take related worries in such directions?

Well, I don’t think there’s any way to describe that except the deep emotional divides in our country, the deep sense that democracy isn’t working, a strong belief that there’s no other choice, and obviously a terrible decision. I think it’s a symbol of how emotional and upset Americans are on both sides of this. I mean yes, what this guy did, but [also] the elected official who was killed in Minnesota with her husband. 

We are in a situation — well, you described it as an authoritarian crisis. Clearly Americans see this as a crisis on both sides and there is a vilification on both sides. And people are resorting to what can only be described as political violence. The whole point of democracy is that we make decisions together and if you don’t like it, you get to go back and sort of lobby your fellow citizens to make a different decision and that’s the way we avoid political violence.

Regime change has happened here for 250 years, mostly peacefully — overwhelmingly peacefully — because we have a system that allows the voice of the people to be heard, and if you don’t like it go back and change the opinions of your fellow citizens.

There’s a way in which violence is an attack on the democratic system itself, right? Attacking the very notion that we resolve political disagreements through democratic mechanisms — voting, discussion, debate — rather than, you know, going shooting people. 

But that does raise a question: You’re running for governor, to make one of those peaceful political changes. How do you think about the role as a governor differently under this administration than you would at any other time in recent US history?

We have policy platforms that are much more specific, much more detailed than anybody else who’s running for governor. But it’s also about explaining the world to people so we have a shared sense of what we’re trying to do and who we are. That is called leadership, and it is going to be really necessary for the next governor of California. Not just to say that the Trump administration is doing bad things, [but to ask] what are you doing? what do we stand for?

I always say to people, “When we fight back, we should be looking at the people who’ve done it well,” — and the people who I look to are the civil rights movement. It’s not just that [our opponents] are terrible; it’s that we’re good. That we stand for democracy and nonviolence and the rule of law and productive citizenship and success. 

I always say to people: Do you want to be on the side of the people who kill four little girls in church or do you want to be on the side of the four little girls in church? In Minnesota, they basically went out in the street and said: Do you want to be on the side of these masked men with assault rifles, shooting Americans with impunity? Or do you want to be on the side of organized nonviolent Americans who believe in democracy and liberty?

I get the analogy, but there’s a fundamental difference in power, right? The civil rights movement was a group of individual citizens who organized against an oppressive system. You’re going to be in political office in the most important state in the country, right? So you’ll have powers available to you that they didn’t, formal ones. How would you plan to use those specifically?

In terms of ICE — I’ve said I’m in favor of abolishing ICE. I consider it a criminal organization. That it is, there’s no point in reforming it. We need immigration services, but you can’t reform an organization like that. You should abolish it and put in a new one. 

“We need immigration services, but you can’t reform an organization like that. You should abolish it and put in a new one.”

And I have a policy about ICE where we will prosecute people for racial profiling, because it’s illegal. We will prosecute people for violence against Californians and the people who send them to do the violence, their supervisors, because it’s illegal. We will have a legal defense fund for people who have been kidnapped or who are under threat of deportation so that the system can be fair. We will insist on inspecting detention centers because they’re within our borders. We have a right to do that. No one can hide that. And lastly, we will have a PR campaign about know your rights so that, in effect, everybody understands that the state of California is standing between the threat of ICE, the terror of ICE, and the people of California.

But I want to push back a little bit on what you said. Because it’s true that the governor of California has powers, and it’s true that those powers need to be used effectively. And we do need to have policies like the one I described. But let me say this to you, when the United States or when the state of California is in crisis, which you described, the other thing that someone needs to do is give people the framework for understanding why we have that policy.

FDR: Was he an executive who put in all those programs and pushed back? Yes, he was. He also re-changed the way people think about the relationship with the government and their fellow citizens. We need someone who can get back to the idea of not just what we aren’t, but who we are and why that works.

I take the point about moral leadership, but I want to go back to ICE for a second. In the plan you have on your website, there’s a very interesting line about not just arresting ICE agents but imposing criminal liability on “their leaders.” 

So do you think if you were governor and your policy were enacted that it would be right for California state agents to arrest, say, Stephen Miller if he showed up there and was shown to be responsible for some of these things that you believe to be illegal actions by ICE agents?

Obviously that’s really hard to do on a legal basis because there’s so many steps in terms of that chain. But do I think that what he’s doing is illegal in terms of inciting criminal behavior in the state of California? Yes. 

I understand how hard it is to make that case. But the point I’m making is these guys aren’t acting on their own — ICE is an organization which is fundamentally set up to break the law. And there’s an assumption, made very clear in Minnesota, [that] we will do what we want. And if that involves shooting innocent Americans, so be it.  And that is not something [ICE thinks] people should be punished for. 

Just so I’m clear: You think that Stephen Miller is engaged in criminal activity right now through his role in directing ICE.

I think that if you set up an organization that racially profiles Americans and uses violence indiscriminately to control them and involves actually killing innocent people for no reason other than your desire to control them, that sounds like the definition of illegal to me. Which part am I missing?

So would you order California state police or the attorney general’s office to open up an investigation into a potential Miller arrest if you were to win office?

We would pursue it. 

And Zack, it’s funny: In this campaign, the first week of the campaign, we talked about breaking the electric monopolies’ power. And this reporter said to me, “Well, do you have a white paper on that, a 50-pager?” And I was like, “This is the first week of the campaign, man.” 

And I would say to you: Dude, this is the primary. Would we in fact pursue this? Of course we would. But how exactly will it work out? You’re asking me, Tom, 59 steps down the road, where are you going to be? And it’s like, well, give me a chance. 

But I am saying — wait, let me ask you a question, Zack. Do you believe that a federal officer has the right to murder an American in cold blood and for no reason, no discernible acceptable reason, and walk away with impunity?

“We are trying to stand up against somebody who is trying to deliberately, intentionally powerfully attack democracy, who has in fact tried to steal an election overtly.”

No, I definitely don’t. The reason I’m pushing this is not because I expect you to have the answer to every problem or to tell me how this investigation will work out, but more as a way of getting into a really hard question about how to deal with an authoritarian federal government at the state level.

I can understand the impulse behind your policy. But at the same time, if you were to really go down that route and follow this logic to its endpoint, you’d end up in this pretty massive confrontation with the federal government.

Well, that is true. That is true. And how to do it really matters. God is in the details. I get that. 

But let me put back to you your initial question. Your initial question is, are we an authoritarian crisis? And you were clearly implying, Tom, you dolt, of course we’re in an authoritarian crisis. 

That was you, not me.

I then say to you: You think you’re getting out of an authoritarian crisis without standing up for something? That’s the whole point of why I said I was disappointed in so many American leaders: They’ve been unwilling to stand up and tell the truth. They’ve been unwilling to tell the truth if it’s going to mean a confrontation or they’re going to be hurt in any way.

You were a big supporter of the California redistricting effort. And I do think there’s a distinction between gerrymandering and counter-gerrymandering — a significant moral one.  On the other hand, I mean, the new California maps really do disadvantage Republican voters living in California.

How do you make the case for that as being worth it?

Look, California had a thing that was a nonpartisan districting [process] designed to be as impartial and fair as possible. And everybody in California supported it. Everybody, that’s what we wanted. That’s who we are.

And they [red states] said, Okay, here’s the deal. You play by the rules, we’re going to cheat. See how that works for you. And it’s like, okay, they are using the processes of democracy to destroy democracy. We’re playing a new game entirely.

If you said to me at this second, Zack, every state will do exactly what California was doing — we’ll have a nonpartisan, fair districting to make it as objective — that’s fine. Done. If we get back to a place where democracy’s not under threat, will I push very hard for that? Done. 

But right now, there’s somebody who is trying to break the rules, who is trying to cheat, and we need to stand up for a good outcome. And are we doing something illegal? No, we are trying to stand up for democracy. That is what we are trying to do. And we are trying to stand up against somebody who is trying to deliberately, intentionally powerfully attack democracy, who has in fact tried to steal an election overtly.

There are many problems with democracy in the United States. I think you and I agree that Donald Trump’s at the forefront of them. But the concentration of wealth seems like it is part of it too. So how do you reconcile the tension here between your personal financial involvement in politics and your own criticism of inequality?

Am I for complete change of the system? Yes. Am I absolutely in favor of getting corporate money out of it? Am I in favor of changing the whole system? I certainly am, but Zack, I’m dealing with the real world right now. I’m the only person running for governor who’s taking them on. I’m the only person they’re worried about. I’m the only person they’re spending a nickel against and they’re spending tens of millions of dollars to stop because they think they run the state. 

And so when you say to me, Tom, doesn’t that seem like a distortion? I’m like, it’s absolutely a distortion. But you know something, that’s the world we’re living in. And if we’re going to stand up and get to the place we need to get to and that working people are going to be represented, and we’re going to take away the privilege of these corporate special interests, someone has to do it — not just talk about it, do it. 

A lot of the arguments you’re making here revolve around the idea of fighting fire with fire, right? It’s that there’s unfairness built into the system right now. 

You think?

And so the thing you got to do about that is you have to respond in kind. There’s no way to remain pure in such a situation.

I think what we’re doing absolutely stands up for what’s right.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[How MAGA’s favorite strongman finally lost]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=485521 2026-04-13T09:33:31-04:00 2026-04-13T09:30:00-04:00 Victor Orban
Supporters wave Hungarian flags as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks to voters at an election campaign rally two days before parliamentary elections on April 10, 2026, in Székesfehérvár, Hungary. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Viktor Orbán, the European Union’s only autocrat, has fallen.

Results from Sunday’s election in Hungary show that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has defeated Orbán’s Fidesz party — the first election the party has lost in 20 years. Orbán called Magyar to concede the race within hours of the polls closing.

There is a reason for Fidesz’s longevity: After winning the 2010 election, they had so thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field in their favor that it became nearly impossible for them to lose. That Magyar has beaten them is a testament both to his skills as a politician and the overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population with life under Fidesz.

His victory also required overcoming an extraordinary last-minute campaign by President Donald Trump to save MAGA’s favorite European leader, which included sending Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to rally with Orbán last week. On the eve of the election, Trump promised to devote the “full economic might” of the US to boosting Hungary’s economy if Orbán asked.

But Magyar didn’t just win the election: He won by a massive margin, potentially enough to secure a two-thirds majority of seats in Hungary’s parliament. This would be a magic number: enough, per Hungarian law, for Tisza to amend the constitution at will.

With such a majority, Magyar would have the power to begin unwinding the authoritarian regime that Orbán has spent his tenure in power building — and potentially restore true democracy to Hungary. 

Without it, Tisza will hold nominal power but ultimately be limited in how to wield it. Fidesz’s influence over institutions like the court and presidency would constrain their ability to undo much of what Fidesz already did. The most likely scenario: Tisza has four frustrating years in power, accomplishes relatively little, and then hands power back to Fidesz.

So much depends on the exact ways that the votes are tallied. But now, for the first time in a very long time, there is genuine hope for Hungarian democracy.

How to win an authoritarian election

To understand how astonishing Magyar’s victory is, you need to understand just how much Orbán had stacked the deck against him.

After Orbán’s first term in office, from 1998 to 2002, his party claimed they were cheated — and he became dedicated to never losing again. For the next eight years, he and his allies in Fidesz developed a series of complex and precise schemes for changing Hungarian law to build what Orbán termed “a political forcefield” that could hold on to power for decades. 

When they won a two-thirds majority in the 2010 election, they were able to put these ideas into action.

Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate.

Fidesz reworked Hungary’s election system, gerrymandering districts to give its rural base vastly more representation than urban opposition supporters. It turned public media into propaganda, and strong-armed independent media into selling to the government or its private-sector allies. It created ballot access rules that forced the several opposition parties to compete against each other. It imposed unequal campaign finance rules that put Fidesz on a structurally superior footing.

The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.

“The state became a party state, in which there is no border between the government, the governing party, [and] state institutions,” says Dániel Döbrentey, the Voting Rights Project Coordinator at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. “Sources, databases, and everything which should serve the public interest are sometimes not just handled but misused by the governing majority for their campaigning purposes.”

Recent evidence shows the Hungarian regime also employed more classically authoritarian tactics. A new documentary compiled damning evidence of widespread voter blackmail: where local Fidesz officials threaten voters in remote areas, perhaps with job loss or cutting them off from public benefits, if they do not vote for the party. Döbrentey estimates that this has affected somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Hungarians — a significant number in a country where the number of eligible voters tops out at around 8 million.

The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.

“The rules are so seriously rigged that Orbán can probably make up a 10-, maybe even 15-point difference” in underlying public opinion, says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian election law at Princeton University.

And yet Fidesz just lost resoundingly. How?

For one thing, Magyar was an excellent candidate. A regime defector — his ex-wife served as Orbán’s Minister of Justice — he shared many of its conservative views on social policy and immigration, making it difficult for the government to rally its base by painting him as a left-globalist plant. 

Despite this, the entire opposition — including left-wing parties — threw their weight behind his new Tisza party, understanding that the only thing that mattered was ousting Fidesz. This allowed for the creation of a pan-ideological coalition, one united primarily by frustration with the current government and a desire to return to real democracy.

And this frustration ran deep — very deep.

Orbán had badly mismanaged the Hungarian economy, falling well behind other former Communist states like Poland and Czechia to become one of the European Union’s poorest states (if not the poorest). This economic underperformance was inextricably intertwined with his governance model: Fidesz secured its hold on power by empowering a handful of regime-friendly oligarchs to dominate the commercial sector. This system gave Orbán significant power to fend off political challenges and make himself wealthy, but it produced a stagnant and corrupt private sector where connections with the state were more important than having a high-quality business model.

Fidesz’s control over the flow of information, while powerful, simply could not compete with the reality that ordinary Hungarians experienced with their eyes and ears.

Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate. But the conjunction of all three created a kind of electoral perfect storm, one powerful enough to overcome one of the most potent election-rigging machines in the world.

Can Péter Magyar save Hungarian democracy?

When autocrats lose elections, the immediate fear is that they’ll try to annul or overturn them — à la Trump in 2020. Orbán’s concession suggests Hungary may be avoiding the worst-case scenario.

Yet Orbán could still make use of his remaining time with a two-thirds majority to try and protect the system he built on the way out. There are a number of different ways to do so, most of which involve a rapid convening of parliament to pass new constitutional amendments. Perhaps the most discussed one among Hungary watchers is one in which Fidesz amends the constitution to change Hungary from a parliamentary system to a presidential one.

Hungary already has a president — a Fidesz loyalist with little to do given his party’s control over parliament. But Orbán may attempt to turn the office into Hungary’s chief executive, thus stripping Magyar of key powers before he even has a chance to wield them. Orbán might even figure out a way to appoint himself president, a maneuver pioneered by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

But even assuming none of that happens, the future of Hungarian democracy will still be precarious — hinging, in significant part, on exactly how many seats Tisza has won in parliament.

For the past 16 years, Orbán has not just corrupted Hungarian elections: He has corrupted everything about the Hungarian state. The judiciary, regulatory agencies, bureaucracy, even seemingly apolitical institutions in areas like the arts — nearly everything has, in one way or another, become part of the Fidesz machine, either a vehicle for political control or a means of Fidesz leaders profiting off of power. 

Restoring Hungarian democracy is thus not a simple matter of redrawing electoral maps. They will need to kick Orbán’s cronies off the courts, break up the government’s near-monopoly on the press, rebuild safeguards against corruption, create a truly nonpartisan tax agency, and on down the line — all while trying to manage the nearby war in Ukraine, rebuild a relationship with the European Union, and deal with a United States that nakedly campaigned on Orbán’s behalf.

This amounts to a need for something like constitutional regime change —  a transformation almost certainly impossible to accomplish without a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Absent the power to amend the constitution, Fidesz’s structural entrenchment in areas like the courts will hamstring the Tisza majority’s ability to make real change. A failed Magyar government, and Fidesz restoration in the next elections, would be the most likely outcome: the authoritarian system reasserting itself even after what might seem, on the outside, like a fatal defeat. For this reason, the size of the Tisza majority may matter as much as the sheer fact of them winning.

But if he does get two-thirds, then Péter Magyar and his allies have accomplished the near-impossible: beating an entrenched autocrat in elections that he had spent nearly two decades attempting to rig.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[MAGA’s favorite strongman might be on the brink of defeat]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=485058 2026-04-07T17:37:59-04:00 2026-04-08T11:00:00-04:00
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (right) and US Vice President JD Vance shake hands after a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary, April 7, 2026. | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images

Under normal circumstances, an election in Hungary — a landlocked Central European country of less than 10 million — would not be a major world event. But for the past 16 years, Hungary has not been a normal country.

After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a massive victory in Hungary’s 2010 election, he almost immediately began changing the country’s system of government to ensure he would never lose again. He has rigged the electoral rules to favor his Fidesz party, consolidated control over 80 percent to 90 percent of the country’s media, and packed the courts with yes-men. By the mid-2010s, Hungarian elections were so thoroughly tilted in his favor that it became extraordinarily difficult for the opposition to win.

But this time around, they might just hit the jackpot.

Orbán’s opponents have united around a new party, Tisza, led by a charismatic defector from his regime named Péter Magyar. His message, focused on the regime’s catastrophic economic record and extreme corruption, has resonated with many Hungarians; his deft use of social media and in-person campaigning has helped him escape a severe cash disadvantage and the government’s hammerlock on the media. 

Polls show Tisza leading Fidesz by a considerable margin; there is a very serious chance that Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister, though he will need a supermajority in parliament to undo some of the most damaging changes Orbán has made. 

The stakes are enormous: not just for Hungarians, but for the United States and even the world.

Under Orbán’s far-right rule, Hungary has been Trump’s most reliable ally in Europe. But for many in the broader MAGA movement, it is more than that: it is a blueprint for the American future, the rough equivalent of what Nordic countries represent to Bernie Sanders. 

Were Orbán to truly fall, their dreams might be shattered — which is why Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to all-but-openly campaign for Orbán’s reelection. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at a Fidesz campaign rally, calling President Donald Trump on the phone from the stage to get his thoughts on Hungary. “Go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you,” Vance said in closing.

The Hungarian prime minister is also a close Russian ally, recently describing himself as a “mouse” helping the “lion” Putin. Hungary’s membership in the European Union and NATO has allowed Orbán to disrupt the West’s pro-Ukraine efforts from within, including by blocking aid. Were Orbán to be ousted, it would be a considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.

Hungary’s 2026 election, in short, is not just like any other vote. It is one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade. 

How Orbán could actually lose

Under Orbán, Hungary has become a paradigmatic example of a very modern kind of autocracy: one political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

In such a system, voters are (mostly) free to cast ballots for the candidate of their choosing: Hungary isn’t like Russia under Putin. But Hungarian elections are decidedly unfair, in that the system is structured to give the incumbent government so many advantages that the opposition should be almost incapable of winning. It is a system based around plausible deniability: retaining just enough democratic features that Hungary can claim to still be a democracy, while doing its best to give the voters as little meaningful choice as possible.

The government’s advantage begins with the very structure of elections. Hungarian parliamentary elections operate under mixed electoral rules: A little over half of all parliamentarians are elected in US-style single district contests, while the remainder are determined by national proportional votes.

The single districts are gerrymandered beyond all recognition to overweight Fidesz’s rural base and steal seats from the opposition’s heavily urban constituency. Moreover, Orbán put in place rules that allow his party to transfer over excess votes from gerrymandered districts they win to the proportional contest — effectively allowing them to run up the score in an already-rigged game.

But even beyond the formal rules, the background conditions of elections are profoundly unfair. There are a million different ways this is true — ranging from the government’s hammerlock over media to an unfair campaign finance system to a two-tiered voting system for Hungarians abroad that favors government supporters over critics. There are widespread allegations of voter intimidation, like local officials threatening to cut off a poor constituent’s access to health care unless they vote for Fidesz.

Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University, estimates that the opposition would need to win by roughly 10 to 15 points in the national vote to overcome the structural advantages the government has given itself. 

And currently, Magyar and Tisza are 10 points ahead in Politico EU’s poll of polls.

This is a remarkable accomplishment: a testament to both Magyar’s skills as a politician and to the serial failures of the Fidesz government.

Magyar used to be a high-ranking member of Fidesz: His ex-wife was Orbán’s justice minister. In 2024, he resigned in protest of a child sexual abuse scandal and began attacking the regime as a corrupt “feudalistic” oligarchy. This is largely true: The Orbán system depends on abusing regulatory and fiscal powers to funnel money into a handful of friendly oligarchs, who depend on government largesse and favor to maintain their wealth.

This has made the prime minister and his friends very wealthy men, but also done real damage to Hungary’s economy: the country is currently one of the poorest in the European Union, if not the poorest. As the Fidesz-aligned rich get richer, the quality of public services degrades. Hungary is experiencing population decline thanks to its low birth rate and unusually high levels of outmigration.

These are things ordinary Hungarians can see and feel in their everyday lives. As a socially conservative former regime insider, Magyar is a credible messenger for former Fidesz supporters disenchanted by Orbán’s serial failures. He has criss-crossed the country, using in-person events to overcome the government’s financial advantage and control over information, and become a fixture in the handful of independent media outlets that remain.

This perfect storm is what it takes to give the opposition even a chance to overcome the structural advantages Fidesz has put in place to remain in power. Even then, there is a real chance Orbán tries to cheat: declaring the election null due to alleged fraud, à la Trump in 2020, or installing himself in the country’s presidency (and expanding its powers) rather than leaving.

Whether he could pull this off is a different question. And right now, observers are bullish on Tisza’s chances: betting markets put Magyar’s odds of becoming prime minister at 66 percent.

What Orbánism’s defeat would mean for the global authoritarian right 

If Magyar does win, restoring democracy will not be easy. Much of the architecture of Orbánism is enshrined in the Hungarian constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in parliament to amend. A full Tisza victory, then, requires more than merely winning a rigged game — it requires doing so resoundingly.

But even if domestic reform proves hard, Sunday’s results will matter to millions beyond Hungary’s borders.

Under Orbán, Hungary has become more than just a symbol of the far-right’s rising political fortunes: It has become an active player in extending its global reach and an intellectual leader in shaping its agenda. Budapest has spent an enormous amount of money and political effort helping support sister parties across the democratic world. There is a reason why far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have all visited Budapest to campaign with Orbán during the late stages of the 2026 campaign.

The greatest success, however, has been the Hungarian capture of the American right’s imagination. Beginning around the late 2010s, Trump-aligned intellectuals and political operatives began citing Hungary as a model for what the right should aim to do in the United States. They describe it not as an impoverished authoritarian outpost, but a conservative Christian democracy that took the difficult-but-necessary steps to destroy the pathological influence of cultural leftism on a society. 

Adherents to this view can be found throughout the Trump administration, with Vance himself perhaps the most prominent. In a 2024 interview with Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer who decamped to Budapest to take a job at a government-backed think tank, the future vice president praised Orbán’s crackdown on academic freedom — which included forcing an entire university out of the country — as an example for the American right.

“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said. “I think his way has to be the model for us.”

Top conservative intellectuals share a similar view: Dreher is not the only one who moved to Hungary to work with a government-aligned outfit. Were Hungary’s regime to well and truly fall, it would represent a significant ideological defeat for this movement, one that would raise questions about its political durability in Europe, America, and elsewhere. 

A defeat for Orbán is a defeat for Putin

The contest in Hungary also has huge stakes for the still-brutal war in Ukraine.

Since the 2022 Russian invasion, Orbán has emerged as the country’s greatest opponent in the Western alliance. He has repeatedly blocked European and NATO support for Ukraine — he is currently holding up a roughly $100 million EU loan to the country — and has stoked conflict with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently reported that some European leaders no longer talk about the war in front of Orbán, as there is an expectation that anything said will get back to Putin.

This isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is longstanding suspicion of Ukraine in Hungary, owing largely to the treatment of the Hungarian ethnic minority in that country. Orbán’s central reelection argument has been that Magyar would be a pro-Ukraine puppet; he has repurposed against Zelenskyy the same conspiratorial attack lines, at times word-for-word, he once used against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros (both men are Jewish).

Perhaps for this reason, the nationalistic Magyar has been cool toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the campaign — adopting a more adversarial stance than any other center-right party in Europe. But at the same time, he has no love for the Kremlin, which is currently busy trying to get Orbán reelected. So while Hungary under Magyar may not be a pro-Ukrainian nation, it will certainly be far more anti-Russian than it is under Orbán. 

A Magyar victory — even a simple majority — would at very least mean that Russia loses its mole in Europe. At most, it could lead to Ukraine receiving significantly greater amounts of European support. 

You can thus say this for Viktor Orbán: He has made Hungary into an outsize player on the global stage, though far more for ill than for good. His fall would have shockwaves in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow — weakening the financial foundations of the European far-right, the ideological foundations of the MAGA movement, and the political foundations of Putin’s effort to split Europe from Ukraine.

But if Orbán wins, none of this will come to pass. And the fate of Hungarian democracy could be sealed.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[A top Trump aide resigned over Iran. Liberals should stay away from him.]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=482918 2026-03-17T17:14:32-04:00 2026-03-17T14:25:00-04:00 Joe Kent, a middle-aged man with short, dark curly hair and a navy suit with red tie, sits behind a nameplate and microphone.
Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on December 11, 2025. | Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This morning, Joe Kent — the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — resigned in protest over the war in Iran. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war,” he said in a resignation letter addressed to Trump and published on X.

You’d think that a war critic like myself should welcome this development. The war in Iran is a catastrophic mistake, and it seems like a good thing that such a high-ranking national official is taking a stance against it. Indeed, plenty of prominent Trump critics and war opponents have praised Kent for these reasons.

“I didn’t support Kent’s nomination. Yet I’m glad he is willing to acknowledge the truth — there was NO imminent threat to the United States, and this war was a terrible idea,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X.

But the actual text of Kent’s resignation letter suggests a very different conclusion: that he is not taking an admirable antiwar stance, but laying the groundwork for an antisemitic conspiracy theory that could define the future of the GOP. 

Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.

Joe Kent’s thinly veiled antisemitism

In the letter, Kent lays responsibility for the war not at Trump’s feet, but Israel’s. In his telling, the president was helpless in the face of an Israeli “misinformation” campaign, an unwitting dupe for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to drag America into a war not in its interests.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he writes.

There is some truth here: Netanyahu did indeed lobby Trump to go to war, as did pro-Israel members of the broader Republican coalition. The administration’s attempt to justify its dubious claims of an “imminent threat” from Iran by citing an impending attack on Israel also reinforced the perception that Israel forced America into war.

But Kent’s letter is carefully crafted to paint Trump as an empty vessel, a person with no beliefs or agency other than what the Israelis and their allies implant there. 

“High-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media…[served as] an echo chamber used to deceive you,” he writes to Trump. 

In fact, Trump has been hawkish on Iran for decades. Back in the 1980s, he called for troop deployments to the country and a US-led campaign to seize control over Iranian oil. In his first term, he tore up a nuclear deal designed to prevent war and assassinated a top Iranian military leader.

Moreover, Israeli leaders have lobbied every president in the 21st century to go to war in Iran; Trump is the only one who said yes. This suggests the key variable is less Israeli power over US foreign policy generally than the specific preference set and worldview of this president.

But Kent’s letter paints a picture of US foreign policy in the Middle East as being one giant Israeli conspiracy. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was, in his telling, not the result of US intelligence failures or post-9/11 rage or even neoconservative hubris; rather, he says, it was the result of an Israeli “lie” (what exactly that lie was is never explained).

Even more bizarrely, he describes the tragic death of his wife Shannon in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing as part of “a war manufactured by Israel.” Shannon Kent was a Navy intelligence officer deployed to Syria under then-President Trump to support US operations against the Islamic State; it is unclear how the US mission to destroy ISIS, which Kent praises elsewhere in the letter, was in any way conducted at Israel’s behest.

The utter implausibility of these claims gives the game away. Kent is not merely expressing opposition to the Iran war or even the US-Israel alliance, but rather developing a broader conspiracy theory in which the true and just “America First” foreign policy was derailed by the nefarious influence of “Israel and its powerful American lobby,” aided by unspecified elements of “the media.” 

Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark  forces represent.

How Kent’s arguments could define the future of the GOP

That Kent’s position veered into antisemitism is unsurprising.

In 2021, when he was running for Congress in Washington, Kent called the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes to get advice on social media strategy. In 2022, he did an interview with neo-Nazi blogger Greyson Arnold and hired a member of the Proud Boys as a campaign consultant.

Given these demonstrable ties to GOP’s rising antisemitic wing, it’s not surprising that Kent would see the Iran war in the way that he does. One of the leading voices in that camp — the podcaster Candace Owens — immediately clocked what Kent was doing, writing a post on X that turned the antisemitic subtext of his letter into text.

“May American troops take his lead and look into conscientious objection to Bibi’s Red Heifer War. Goyim stand down,” she tweeted, using a Hebrew word for non-Jews that antisemites have increasingly adopted as part of their lexicon.

This is not merely horrible social media chatter, but the earliest glimmers of an extremely dangerous development for the Republican party.

At present, Republican dissent over the Iran war is mostly limited to influencers like Owens and Tucker Carlson: polls show that roughly 85 percent of actual Republican voters are on board. This is largely a product of the base’s faith in Trump personally; it is vanishingly unlikely that MAGA voters will trust Kent over the president, and turn their back on a war he is leading.

But if this war continues to go poorly, public opinion will turn — much in the same way as many Republicans now view President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as an obvious mistake.

In such a future, Republican voters will be looking for someone to tell them why their president led them astray. Kent’s letter is setting up an obvious scapegoat: the Jews.

You can imagine a future, after dozens of American soldiers are dead and an oil shock throws the economy into recession, in which right-wing figures like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson promote a narrative of Jewish perfidy with the “Kent letter” as proof — and find an audience in a party increasingly open to antisemitic views. “Stabbed in the back” narratives are a hallmark of fascist movements past, and this is how they tend to get started.

Kent’s letter, then, is not really a sign of rising Republican resistance to the Iran war that could augur its premature end. Rather, it is an opening salvo in a future political war over how the war’s (likely) failure should be interpreted — and an extremely ugly one at that.

War critics who do not want to legitimize antisemitic conspiracism need to see this for what it is — and distance themselves from it accordingly.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[The Iran war is not a video game]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=482361 2026-03-16T17:59:02-04:00 2026-03-13T06:00:00-04:00 Pete Hegseth points
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during the inaugural Americas Counter Cartel Conference at the US Southern Command Headquarters in Doral, Florida, on March 5, 2026. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

On Wednesday, the New York Times published the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the recent airstrike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, an elementary school for girls in the Iranian city of Minab. The investigation confirmed what all public evidence had pointed to: that an American Tomahawk missile destroyed the school, killing roughly 175 people per Iranian estimates — most of whom were children.

Alongside the article, the Times posted a verified video from the school in the hours following the bombing. You can see, on the remains of the building’s outer wall, a light blue mural depicting a child playing with a butterfly. You can hear, in the video’s audio, the inhuman wails of someone who had just lost a child dear to them.

The day after this damning news report, the White House released a video depicting the Iran war as a Nintendo game.

The video, set to jaunty childlike music, depicts the United States as a player in various Wii Sports games — tennis, golf, bowling, etc. When the player character hits a hole in one, or bowls a strike, it cuts to real-life footage of a US bomb hitting an Iranian target. “Hole in one!” the Nintendo announcer declares, as we watch human lives being erased.

The video’s overtly childish imagery would be appalling at any point. In the wake of the news about Sharajah Tayyebeh, it approximates a form of moral horror. Yet it is what we have come to expect from the Trump administration, which has been releasing this sort of trivializing propaganda throughout the war. 

Various official X accounts have posted videos intercutting real bombings in Iran with clips from more violent video games, war films like Braveheart, sports highlights, and speeches from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth set to movie-trailer-style epic music. 

War is not hell, for this White House — it is fun.

In some ways, this is not a surprise. The Trump administration is staffed, from top to bottom, by inveterate posters. They have turned everything — from the end of foreign aid to ICE raids — into memes. Why treat war any differently?

But war, and the school attack in particular, illustrate the pernicious function of this method of governance. Living online becomes a vehicle of moral trivialization, where tangible consequences of stakes of policy become secondary to the more immediately accessible world of likes and reposts. They are doing war for the chat.

In this world of Content, the meaning of a bombing raid is not the lives lost or strategic gains won but how good it looks when repackaged into a sizzle reel featuring Master Chief from Halo. Dozens of dead girls matter less to the White House than how Hegseth sounds when he says “lethality.”

This online war, lacking in any clear real-world justification, creates its own. And in doing so, it turns atrocity into afterthought: killing not with a clean conscience, but with no consciousness at all.

The origins of online war

Historically, American wartime propaganda follows a fairly predictable script.

The president deliberately builds a case that war is a terrible necessary: that some grave American interest, or noble moral cause, requires the spilling of blood. Once the war begins, official government propaganda remains relatively restrained; the vicious stuff, like the racist depictions of Japanese during World War II, tends to come after some major event inciting the public against the enemy (like Pearl Harbor). And even then, the most lurid content gets outsourced to the press and or popular culture.

Nick Cull, a scholar of propaganda at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication, sees the current Iran war as a break with this pattern. The Trump administration not only failed to convince the public that the war is necessary, but it scarcely even tried. Once the war began, the administration almost immediately began publishing death and destruction fancams.

Previous administrations used “to talk carefully and regretfully about military actions,” Cull says. Under Trump the US “reduces American military activity to team talk — high school football cheering.” 

This is, Cull theorizes, a function of the administration’s preoccupation with media imagery — for reasons that had been theorized about 35 years prior.

In 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a famous essay series arguing that the Gulf War was, in essence, a kind of media fiction. Baudrillard was not denying that the United States was dropping bombs on Iraq, but rather that the visual spectacle of the war created on then-novel 24-hour cable news networks had constructed a public narrative that bore only questionable resemblance to the war actually being waged.

“All those journalists who set themselves up as bearers of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images,” Baudrillard wrote.

In this synthetic reality, war was imagined as a fireworks show of high-tech precision weapons over night-vision skies, and not the bodies piled up where they landed. While he was pessimistic about observers’ ability to establish the truth behind the broadcast — “we do not have the means,” he wrote —  Baudrillard believed it was nonetheless  important to “not be duped” by the “virtuality” of the war.

Much of this seemed overheated at the time — even paranoid. Coverage of the Gulf War was hardly perfect, but responsible journalists at outlets like CNN had strong professional incentives to avoid brazenly detaching their broadcasts from reality. 

But by the time the second Iraq War rolled around, a moment when post-9/11 fear and jingoism pushed media in a more openly chauvinistic direction, Baudrillard’s critique of cable news stung harder. And in today’s social media environment — where responsible gatekeepers have been dethroned, our feeds are a continuous tide of unverified images and contextless short videos, and attention is a currency that spends regardless of underlying accuracy — it feels uncomfortably prescient. 

Killing without thought

As Baudrillard’s essay suggests, the US has been accused for decades of presenting its citizens a videogame version of war. What’s perhaps most different this time is the degree to which the government takes this criticism as a compliment: You’re damn right it’s a video game. Come over and let’s play!

Their motives for doing so are not as simple as conscious manipulation. The relevant policymakers are enthusiastic consumers of this type of propaganda just as much as they are producers. 

The president is a former reality TV host and social media addict. The defense secretary is a former Fox News personality, as were at least 20 other high-level hires. The vice president is a poster, the FBI director a podcaster. The administration’s most influential private sector ally is, of course, Elon Musk — a near-trillionaire who owns the right’s leading social media outlet.

With this class of person calling the shots, there is a persistent tendency to treat the online as the real zone of political conflict — almost more real than actual reality. The line between lying, confusion, and performance becomes blurred, almost indistinguishable. What matters is not only whether the American military is truly beating Iran, but the extent to which they can convince themselves and their online supporters that they are.

The wartime sizzle reels fail as actual propaganda: No one who doesn’t already support the administration will be impressed by grainy bombing footage paired with a clip of Walter White growling, “I am the danger.” Yet if the audience is understood to be the right’s very online cadres, which now include the top policymakers in American government, it makes perfect sense: They believe they can meme the war they want into existence.

This reduction of real-world issues of life and death into a quest for likes has infected the White House at every turn. And the further away from people’s daily lives and experience the damage, the more thoughtless and triumphant the memes. 

Consider roughly a year ago, back when Musk was in charge of DOGE. His signature accomplishment during that time was not making government more efficient or even reducing spending, which has since gone up. Rather, he and his team succeeded in one key objective: destroying USAID, the agency dedicated to providing lifesaving aid to the world’s poorest people.

The real human stakes of this decision were absolutely enormous: One estimate suggests that roughly 800,000 people may have already died as a result of Musk’s actions. Yet he destroyed USAID not based on any kind of serious evaluation of its policy, but rather on his social media obsessions. 

DOGE agents first began scrutinizing the agency not because of its budget, which was tiny, but in order to find examples of “viral waste” they could easily mock on social media. In the hours before the agency’s destruction, Musk was chatting with right-wing influencers on X about how USAID was a “criminal organization” that needed to “die” based on a web of conspiracy theories shared back and forth between them. And after his precipitous decision to cut off its funds, which caused medicine and food supplies to literally rot in warehouses, he joked about the whole thing being an imposition on his social calendar.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties [sic]. Did that instead,” he wrote on X.

That post got 21,000 reposts and 159,000 likes. And there is no doubt that Musk experienced each and every one of those accolades as more meaningful than the life of every child who died from preventable cases of malaria or AIDS. The online world is more immediate to him, the polluted water in which he swims, what happens there shapes his actions and sense of self more than the ultimate consequences of his behavior. 

The Trump administration’s communication strategy seems designed to cultivate this incuriosity among themselves as much as anyone else. The real-world pain of ICE deportations, communities upended and families ripped apart, is replaced with stylized footage of teched-out federal agents and AI-generated Miyazaki memes of crying migrants. The officials involved bathe in the online accolades from their supporters, immersing them in a cocoon where they do not truly have to consider what they have done.

And now, we are seeing what it looks like to run a war on these principles.

The mass murder at the Minab girls’ was, it appears, a targeting accident: Years ago, the school used to be part of a nearby Iranian navy facility. Yet this accident may well have been preventable; the Pentagon used to have dedicated offices designed to assess intelligence and targeting decisions that might lead to undue civilian casualties. Hegseth spent the past year demolishing them, describing military lawyers as “jagoffs” who got in the way of the “lethality” of America’s “warfighters.”

There is, in short, a plausible straight line between Hegseth’s bluster and atrocity. Yet the bluster will continue, with no self-reflection: A thoroughly mediated creation, Hegseth is nothing but his persona. He will not give it up.

Nor will Trump make him. The president has responded to the news in Minab with a mix of disinterest and risible lies — at one point, claiming that an Iranian Tomahawk missile blew the school (Iran does not have these American made-weapons). The actuality of events has not penetrated his bubble; he is dancing to YMCA as oil tankers burn and bodies cool.

The wartime sizzle reels are another manifestation of this ethos. Built not to persuade a neutral audience, but rather to appeal to those already-bought in, their primary service is thought-deadening: replacing any serious consideration of consequences with collective reveling in memes. “When you didn’t want the US involved with Iran but the submarine kill videos are sick,” one popular right-wing X account tweeted, with a GIF of an ambivalent Larry David posted below the text.

It thus is not just collective self-deception at work for the administration and its very online supporters: It is collective exculpation. The crimes at Minab, and anywhere else, pale in comparison to sick kills.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[How does the Iran war end?]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=481377 2026-03-03T14:20:36-05:00 2026-03-03T14:10:00-05:00
An Iranian flag is planted in the rubble of a police station, damaged in airstrikes yesterday, on March 3, 2026, in Tehran, Iran. | Getty Images

The United States went to war with Iran for reasons that remain unclear. 

At various points, the president and his allies have argued that this was a war of preemptive self-defense, an effort to prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program, and even an attempt at regime change. The justification seems to change based on who is speaking and who they are speaking to, making it difficult to divine what the president seeks to get out of all of this — or if he even has a coherent end goal in mind.

Given this mess, is there any way to predict how it might end?

Key takeaways

  • America’s war in Iran was started for unclear reasons, but could end in a number of ways — some more likely and predictable than others.
  • President Donald Trump’s oft-stated hope that the Iranian people will rise up against the regime in protest is very unlikely; there is no historical precedent for such an event, and the regime is too well entrenched for it to seem plausible in this case.
  • There is a real-but-remote possibility that the war does escalate to something closer to the 2003 Iraq war, but the most likely scenarios involve more modest outcomes.

To find out, we spoke with eight leading experts on Iran, the Middle East, and US military policy. The clear consensus is that the best-case scenario offered by the Trump administration — that US bombs inspire Iranian people to rise up and topple the regime — is extremely unlikely. Nothing like that has happened in the history of air warfare, and Iran experts do not think this will be the exception to the rule.

“It’s a fantasy to think that aerial bombardment is going to open such a gap that there will be a new regime,” says Hussein Banai, a professor at the University of Indiana-Bloomington who studies Iranian politics.

If this analysis is right, there are two broad categories: some kind of settlement, where the US stops short of its maximalist aims, or escalation.

Of the two, the former is generally seen as more likely. A settlement could follow something like the “Venezuela model,” where President Donald Trump receives some policy concessions in exchange for leaving the regime broadly intact, or the US simply declaring victory based on some lesser accomplishment (say, doing more damage to nuclear program sites).

But either way, the war ends without the regime change that many in the White House (and Israel) desperately want.

In the second scenario, the US gets dragged deeper into a conflict — moving beyond bombing into some kind of ground campaign to topple the regime. This is widely seen as unlikely; most observers believe Trump is eager to avoid his presidency becoming defined by an Iraq-style disaster. 

But unlikely is not impossible. And given the opaque goals of this war, and the nature of the many stakeholders involved, the range of possible outcomes is wider than perhaps anyone is able to predict — including the top decision-makers in Washington.

“No world leader has ever launched a military operation expecting a quagmire,” says Caitlin Talmadge, a political scientist who studies war at MIT. “What you’ve essentially heard our leaders saying is denying that these risks exist, and that they’re effectively in control of the tempo and outcomes — and that’s antithetical to everything we know about how war works.”

Why bombing is unlikely to change the regime 

Trump launched this war, at least in part, because his prior attacks on Iran went better than expected. Neither the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani nor last summer’s attack on the nuclear program produced the kind of wider conflagration that many (including myself) feared at the time.

Now, however, we are seeing the long-predicted escalation. Iran has, among other things, bombed surrounding Gulf nations and announced a kind of blockade on the Straits of Hormuz, a key international shipping lane. 

Moreover, the prior rounds of attacks have deepened Iran’s fears about a potential regime change operation — leading the Islamic Republic to take steps to ensure continuity against any kind of regime change. Worried in particular about the decapitation strikes Israel used so effectively against its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, the government took steps to create institutions, like the new Iranian Defense Council, that could ensure continuity in the event that a top leader would be killed. 

The regime’s bureaucratic structure is a big reason why the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has seemingly done little to destabilize Iran. The aging cleric was not a Putin figure, the indispensable man on whom the regime depended. Both top generals in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and high-ranking civilians, like national security council leader Ali Larijani, were positioned to continue guiding policy in the event of Khamenei’s death.

“Everything…that we’re seeing indicates that the leadership is still fully in control, and there are no particular signs that a revolt if the people took to the streets right now that they would be able to overthrow the government,” says Ken Pollack, the vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute think tank. “Hopefully the Iranian military will figure out that sticking with this regime is a loser of a proposition and won’t fight on their behalf. It’s just that we’ve not seen any evidence of that.”

Indeed, most experts say it’s unlikely that the bombing will ever inspire a coup that topples the regime: The military already plays a major role in political decisions, so they would effectively be toppling themselves. And while it remains possible that the bombing inspires a popular uprising, it is vanishingly unlikely.

When Iranians took to the streets to protest en masse this January, the regime crushed them: slaughtering as many as 30,000 people in a horrifyingly short span of time. For the bombing to prompt another uprising, people would need to have some reason to believe the outcome would be different. Yet no aerial campaign has ever so thoroughly decimated an authoritarian government’s ground forces that a popular movement successfully rose up against them.

When US-led regime change from the air does work, as in Libya in 2011, it is because American airpower is backing armed forces on the ground. But Iran is not in a state of civil war: there is no well-armed opposition to speak of, nor is there evidence of fracture inside its uniformed forces.

“We see no indications that security forces hesitated to crack down in the past several months,” says Marie Harf, the executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House (where I am currently a fellow).

The more likely scenarios are more modest

While regime change appears unlikely to the experts, the more plausible scenario is that the war ends short of that. 

“It almost seems inevitable to me that President Trump is going to dial back whatever his more maximalist vision is and settle for something less,” says Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum think tank.

There are a range of possibilities for what that might look like. The most obvious one, even bandied about by Trump himself, is the “Venezuela model”: where Trump strikes some kind of deal with a post-Khamenei Iranian leader that he believes constitutes a real gain for the United States (and him personally).

Such a deal might look quite literally like one in Venezuela, in the sense that Iran provides concessions on oil production and sales that privilege the United States. Trump has been interested in seizing control of Iranian oil since the 1980s, so some agreement on that era might be enough for him to back off.

It also might relate to the more typical grievances the US has with Iran: Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile production, or (less likely) its support for militias abroad like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis. Were Trump to get major concessions in those areas, he could claim that force achieved what diplomacy could not — and thus have a decent justification for ending the war.

It would likely take time for any such negotiations to produce an acceptable outcome. “I think these guys will immediately not make a deal, because they need to show they are not pushovers. But then they ultimately will,” says Arash Azizi, an Iran expert at Yale University.

It’s possible, as the war rages, that political pressure mounts on the Trump administration to back down before an agreement could be struck. There have already been six US deaths during the conflict, and there could be more. Nearby Gulf states are taking a lot of damage, and so too could the global economy if hostilities last too long.

If negotiations look to be dragging, there is a chance that Trump declares victory and goes home. Killing Khamenei, and doing more physical damage to Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile sites, might provide a plausible enough fig leaf for the US to simply say it has accomplished what it wanted to and end the war.

“It almost seems inevitable to me that President Trump is going to dial back whatever his more maximalist vision is and settle for something less.”

Michael Koplow

This would likely change very little on the ground — and is probably Iran’s best-case scenario. But it’s in keeping with Trump’s typical approach, especially when markets start to panic.

Either outcome, a Venezuela-style negotiation or unilateral US withdrawal, would infuriate a key stakeholder: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But while Netanyahu reportedly played an important role in convincing the Trump administration to go to war, his influence over its duration is relatively limited.

“Israel is not built for long wars in general, definitely not a long war as it comes to Iran. So I think in many ways, what will determine the length of this war will be more decisions made in Washington than in Jerusalem,” says Eyal Hulata, the former head of Israel’s national security council. “If I try to understand how the Americans are looking at it, the ball is in the Iranian court as it comes to how long this will end and what kind of concessions Iran will be willing to make.”

The tail risk: Iraq 2.0

The last outcome, and the most dangerous, is that the United States decides that it will not stop until regime change happens.

The consensus is that this is unlikely. Most observers, both in Washington and Tehran, believe that the Americans do not have the stomach for another major ground war in the Middle East. Trump has publicly left the door open to ground troops, but this is widely seen as something of a bluff.

But what if it isn’t?

Michael Hanna, the director of the US program at the International Crisis Group, floated a scenario where Iran pulls off a major attack on US assets: killing dozens of American soldiers in a single strike, or taking down an American warship in the Gulf.

In such a situation, he argues, the Trump administration would feel the need to respond more aggressively, likely encouraged by Netanyahu. The more the US escalates, the more likely Iran is to respond in a way that produces further US casualties — creating an escalatory cycle militating towards deeper and deeper American involvement inside Iran.

Once such a cycle begins, Hanna says, “all bets are off”; events take on their own logic. A ground deployment that nobody at present wants or really can even imagine would enter the realm of possibility. Such a deployment could lead to an extended US ground occupation, an Iranian civil war, or any number of (almost certainly) catastrophic outcomes.

This is what statisticians call a “tail risk”: an extreme outcome that is at the very end of the probability distribution. The most likely outcomes remain in the more restrained range: some kind of negotiated settlement or a unilateral US declaration of victory.

But escalation is not impossible: War is extremely unpredictable, especially a conflict that has already spread to an entire region. What Trump has begun is not fully under his control; the president’s skepticism about big ground wars does not guarantee that he will dodge one.

George W. Bush ran as an intervention skeptic in the 2000 presidential election. An unforeseen tail risk, the 9/11 attacks, changed his presidency. There is a distant-but-real chance the US is on the cusp of something similar.

Josh Keating contributed reporting to this piece.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[The incoherence at the heart of Trump’s latest, biggest war]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=481028 2026-02-28T19:15:54-05:00 2026-02-28T11:07:43-05:00 Trump behind the podium announcing strikes on Iran
A screen grab from a video released on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account shows him making statements regarding combat operations on Iran on February 28, 2026, in Palm Beach, Florida. | Anadolu via Getty Images

Editor’s note, February 28, 5:30 pm ET: President Donald Trump announced on Saturday afternoon that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the airstrikes. The following story was published earlier on February 28, before the news of Khamenei’s death.

Early Saturday, the United States launched an open-ended war on Iran. And nobody really knows why.

For the past several weeks, the United States has been amassing forces in the area — with an estimated 40 to 50 percent of its entire deployable air fleet in the region. Throughout this time, the Trump administration has refused to give any kind of straightforward public justification for the buildup: a clear accounting of why they were considering war with Iran, what such a war would entail, or what victory would look like.

After the war began, President Donald Trump gave an eight-minute speech explaining why the war had begun. The speech ran through a series of grievances with the Iranian government: its anti-Americanism, its history of supporting terrorist groups, and its nuclear program (which he had previously claimed to have “completely obliterated” after airstrikes last year). 

“For these reasons,” Trump said, “the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.” 

This looks, from Trump’s description, to be a more open-ended military operation than his previous attacks on Iran. There is no specific defined singular objective, like setting back the nuclear program or killing an individual general. Instead, he speaks of a “massive” campaign dedicated to the broad goal of preventing Iran “from threatening America.”

But what does that mean? What is the real objective here, and how far is he willing to go to get there?

At first, Trump seemed to suggest that the war will focus on Iran’s military capabilities: that the US would “raze their missile industry to the ground,” “annihilate their navy,” and “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”

But later in the speech, he said the ultimate goal was regime change. 

“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” 

These objectives are fundamentally different.

Iran’s missile industry and nuclear program are not tools of domestic repression. If the goal is for the Iranian people to rise up, as Trump said, that would require a much more expansive military operation targeting Iran’s ground forces, including police and the Basij paramilitary involved in slaughtering thousands of peaceful protestors earlier this year. Most likely, a full toppling of the regime could not happen without some kind of ground invasion — and a significant one at that.

So which is it: a major bombing campaign targeting Iran’s military capabilities, or an even more expansive war of regime change? Or is Trump blustering, and a few days of bombing will give way to a climb down in which little ultimately changes?

It is literally impossible to say from Trump’s speech, or any other official communication from the US government. 

All we know for sure is that Trump has announced what he described as a “massive” war for no clear reason — the result of a warmaking process that no longer follows constitutional procedure, and instead more closely resembles the way dictators make war on whims.

The autocrat’s war

In the past, when the United States launched a large-scale military operation, presidents felt obligated to explain what they were doing. Even the 2003 Iraq war, one of the most confused and disastrously planned in US history, began with months of discussion of Iraq’s alleged WMD program and a congressional vote authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Nothing like this has happened with Trump’s Iran war.

It’s not just that his speech was confusing and contradictory: it’s that the administration had not, at any point in 2026, articulated a straightforward justification for its military buildup and threats of war against Iran. 

That’s true both in public-facing communications and in private consultations with Congress. Just yesterday, Jack Reed — the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee — said the White House’s thinking was a mystery.

“I have yet to see the administration define a very clear-cut objective of what they are trying to do by massing all these naval forces, and other forces, in the area,” Reed told my colleague Josh Keating during a Q&A at the Brookings Institution.

On one level, this is not a new problem. For the past two decades, presidents have amassed more and more power to use military force unilaterally. This began with George W. Bush’s expansive vision of the war on terror, but every subsequent president built on what he had started. Congress, stymied by partisan divisions, did little to try and claw its power back.

The only constraint on the 21st-century presidency’s warmaking powers, it appears, is the president’s own judgment. When undertaking military actions, Bush, Obama, and Biden all made the case publicly, arguing that major hostilities were within the president’s legal powers.

In Trump’s second term, though, the remaining few informal checks on the president’s warmaking powers have fallen by the wayside. Several second actions, ranging from the boat bombings in the Caribbean to the attack on Iran’s nuclear program last summer to the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro in January, illustrate that the current approach to using force is basically “if we feel like it.”

Now, it appears, they feel like engaging in something much bigger than raids or small-scale bombing: an open-ended war against a country of 90 million, one that might be “merely” focused on destroying its military or could really be about regime change.

“This war is nothing short of a chaotic lashing out of an aimless administration that doesn’t know or care what it wants for Iran,” writes Hussein Banai, an expert on US-Iran relations at the University of Indiana-Bloomington.

The closest analogy to this kind of decisionmaking is not any previous American war. Rather, it recalls the Russian invasion of Ukraine back in 2022.

Before that war started, many credible observers thought that it wasn’t going to happen. Invading Ukraine made no sense for Russia; there was no obvious security or economic interest that could justify the enormous risks associated with trying to annex an entire country. How could Putin, a calculating operative, possibly be so stupid?

The answer, we’ve learned since, is that the Russian president was exactly that stupid. Animated by a series of bizarre historic grievances, Putin had convinced himself that Ukraine was a fake country populated by people best understood as Russians stolen from their motherland. Such a country would, he thought, be a pushover — and the yes-men serving below him were incapable of contradicting the leader. With no constraints on his power, Putin was free to launch a war that has since proven to be a catastrophic quagmire.

The Russian invasion is an object lesson in why authoritarian states built around a charismatic or all-powerful leader  tend to make bad decisions. But what we’ve done in the United States, seemingly by accident, is create a presidency imbued with the same warmaking powers.

And this is how the United States end up in an open-ended conflict with no clearly defined objective or exit strategy — and a million different ways it could go wrong.

]]> Zack Beauchamp <![CDATA[Why India switched sides on Israel-Palestine — and why it matters]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=480941 2026-03-01T10:29:51-05:00 2026-02-28T07:28:21-05:00
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu in New Delhi, India, on February 25, 2026. | Press Information Bureau (PIB)/Anadolu via Getty Images

Editor’s note, February 28, 7:20 am ET: Israel joined the US-led assault on Iran early Saturday. For more on that story, read Vox’s latest coverage.

This past week, we got a vision of what the future of world politics might look like. And it wasn’t pretty.

The glimpse came during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel, in which he signed an expansive defense cooperation agreement and gave a speech to Israel’s parliament (called the Knesset). This kind of thing may seem like the routine stuff of international politics, but it’s actually highly unusual: Historically, India has kept its distance from Israel and has often acted as a prominent international supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Such a country should, in theory, be moving away from Israel, given the past several years of brutality in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also been aggressively attacking the foundations of Israeli democracy, which you’d think would be a problem for the leader of a country frequently described as the world’s largest democracy.

But the opposite is true. It is quite likely that Israel’s assault on Gaza and ongoing democratic backsliding are, for India’s current leadership, not vices but virtues.

India under Modi is strikingly similar to Israel under Netanyahu. Modi, a deep believer in the chauvinist Hindutva ideology, has worked to undermine the basic idea of the Indian state — replacing its historic secular democracy with a state by and for the Hindu majority, particularly targeting the Muslim minority for exclusion. In order to accomplish this agenda, Modi has worked to consolidate power in his own hands — and undermine the fairness of the Indian electoral system in the process.

Growing security cooperation between India and Israel doesn’t just make sense on a material level: It’s also because these countries, with these particular governments, feel a genuine ideological affinity.

And in a post-Trump world, where old rules about human rights and international law continue to weaken, these kinds of ties between human rights-abusing authoritarians may become an increasingly important part of the global landscape — even in countries that claim, on the surface, to be democracies.

The India-Israel ideological alignment, explained

India and Israel, both formerly British possessions, became independent within a year of each other (August 1947 and May 1948, respectively). And at first, the two countries appeared to be traveling in opposite directions.

The early Indian state was defined by its partition with Pakistan. While India aimed to be a secular liberal democracy for all of its citizens, Pakistan’s leaders believed that its citizens could only be secure in a Muslim-majority state. The process of splitting the two states was violent and massively disruptive, causing one of the largest episodes of human migration in recorded history as Hindus and Muslims uprooted their lives to fit the new national boundaries. 

For India’s early leaders, the bloodiness of partition — and enduring hostilities with Pakistan — proved the folly of ethno-nationalism.

Israel, by contrast, was more like a Middle Eastern Pakistan. Believing that the Jews of Palestine could only be safe in an avowedly Jewish state, the Zionist movement pushed for post-colonial political separation from surrounding Arab states — and fought its first war to enforce it.

Thus, the Indian political elite long viewed Israel and Zionism suspiciously, its sympathies aligning with the Palestinian refugees displaced in the Nakba. This approach was, as leading India expert Christophe Jaffrelot recently wrote in The Wire, a driving force in India’s Middle East policy.

“India has long been a leader in the Palestinian cause,” he writes. “Historically, it opposed the creation of the State of Israel, with [first prime minister Jawaharlal] Nehru advocating for the creation of a secular state where the Jewish minority would enjoy protections.”

This changed, in Jaffrelot’s telling, because of Modi. Since becoming prime minister in 2014, he has gradually worked to strengthen ties between New Delhi and Jerusalem — focusing, in particular, on their shared interests and experience in combating jihadist terrorism.

The decisive break came after October 7, 2023. “India tried hard not to take sides in Israel’s war on Gaza, but by abstaining [in UN votes] as civilian casualties — and international outrage — continued to mount, it effectively sided with Israel,” Jaffrelot writes, adding that India also sent weapons to Israel and deepened economic ties as the Gaza war grew more vicious.

Today, there’s little doubt where India lies. 

Not only does New Delhi explicitly cite Israel as a source of inspiration for its counterterrorism policies, but it has begun paying into them — making up roughly half (46 percent) of all foreign purchases of Israeli arms.

Modi’s trip this past week was, on top of any tangible agreements, an all-but-official confirmation that India has switched sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Modi’s speech to the Knesset spent a lot of time lavishing praise on Israel — and confined its discussion of the Palestinians to a thin, barely noticeable aside.

Why the Israel-India alignment matters

Modi sees Israel differently from his predecessors because his worldview is fundamentally opposed to theirs. 

Unlike secularists like Nehru, Hindutva devotees see a spiritual twin in the hardline versions of Zionism embraced by Netanyahu and his allies on the Israeli right.

Both Modi and Netanyahu see the nation in ethno-national terms: There is only one people who has a legitimate claim on belonging and ownership. Both share a special antipathy for Muslims living on land they see as rightfully theirs, seeing them as interlopers at best and invaders at worst. 

“After October 7, 2023, leaders of the Hindutva movement — including ministers and members of parliament — expressed their unreserved solidarity with Israel, denouncing not only terrorists but Muslims in general,” Jaffrelot writes. “This pro-Israel bias was so widespread that the judiciary once again echoed it by banning demonstrations in support of the Palestinians.”

Growing India-Israel partnership is not just the result of strategic interests: It reflects a new development in the rise of the so-called nationalist international. This is, in essence, the concept that far-right movements are increasingly sharing knowledge and coordinating their activities to advance a shared struggle against the existing liberal order. 

Originating from Western politics, in reference to things like the ties between the Republican party and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz group, the term “nationalist international” is often deployed semi-ironically — in the sense that nationalist movements are, by their nature, unlikely to be able to be stable partners with each other for very long.

But unlike, say, Eastern European nationalist movements, the Israeli and Indian far-right nationalisms have few points of geographical or historical conflict. Separated by geography and history, they are free to prioritize their shared ideological interests — and are, increasingly, doing so.

This is a glimpse into a possible future for global politics: one in which the “might makes right” ethos championed by the current US administration wins the day.

In this future, countries will no longer feel burdened by the need to even pay lip service to human rights concerns. 

Leaders of ascendant powers like Modi, who might once have at least had political reservations about being too closely linked to an Israeli prime minister under ICC indictment, will act on their unrestrained impulses. A network of far-right movements, united in large part by shared hostility to Muslims, will unite a group of governments ranging from Western Europe to South Asia — maybe even North America.

This is not an inevitable future. But it is an increasingly possible one — enabled both by the Biden administration’s fecklessness in the face of Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the Trump administration’s bulldozing of the current international order.

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