Building Back the Bidens

 

The urgent, embarrassing, and occasionally convincing campaign to salvage their legacy.

By Ben Terris, New York’s Washington correspondent

June 13, 2026. 

New York Magazine.

Joe Biden wanted the crowd to know he couldn’t stay long. As he stood at the lectern at the Best Western in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on June 5, he told the audience of some 1,200 Democrats munching on their first course of iceberg lettuce and ranch that he had to leave early to make it to his goddaughter’s wedding. “So when I run off the stage it’s not because I’m afraid to hear the response,” he said. He needn’t have worried about the reception. He spoke quietly, with sudden bursts of yelling, and occasionally lost his train of thought, yet the crowd ate up his attacks on Donald Trump as “the most corrupt president in the history of the United States.” He got a standing ovation, treated not as the man who gave the country Trump but as a kind of conquering hero.

Before the speech, Biden had stood for almost two hours in a back room greeting hundreds of VIP guests and posing for photos. I watched one of them, a slight 81-year-old woman in a glittering green dress, approach the former president and kiss him directly on the lips. “He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and I was like, ‘I just want to kiss you,’” Sharon Stroschein told me later. “He was willing! He participated! He joined in the kiss.” Her husband, Larry, was standing right beside her. How did he feel about all this? “Well,” he said, twisting his handlebar mustache with a finger, “I’d rather have had Jill there.”

The photo line gave people the chance to see the old Joe Biden — not just the old Joe Biden. When he learned it was one supporter’s birthday, he stopped the line and made everyone sing to him. He put on another fan’s aviators and posed with his arms crossed. He held a toddler and calmed a crying baby. Only one protester had made it to the event, standing outside holding a sign that read, simply, WORST EVER!

The Sioux Falls speech was part of an aggressive effort — ramped up in recent weeks by Biden’s family and inner circle — to remind people that Biden is more than just the loser of the 2024 election. His trip to South Dakota came during a media storm kicked up by the publication of Jill Biden’s memoir View From the East Wing. She told interviewers that her husband would have beaten Trump had he not been pushed out of the race. (Really?) She writes that she’d wondered whether Biden might have been drugged before his disastrous, slack-jawed debate performance in the summer of 2024 and thought he had perhaps had a stroke. (But said nothing at the time?) On June 3, she brought her traveling circus to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., where she was asked about former Biden spokesman Andrew Bates, a fierce defender of the president, who had wondered aloud in the New York Post why “that painful conversation for the party needed to be publicly reopened right now.”

“I want to say to Andrew, ‘Call me up and say it to my face,’” she said.

Her stepson, Hunter, a constant side-plot from the last administration, has also reentered the chat. He’s surfaced on X to post about his sobriety and fan the flames of a possible 2028 run. “LFG,” he replied to one fan urging him on. He told me that Washington insiders had thoroughly misread his father. “They never truly understood Joe Biden. They’re saying he was a fixture of D.C.? You clearly know nothing about him and his 50 years of service if you think he was part of the D.C. elite,” he said.

It can often seem like the Bidens are divorced from reality, exemplified by their ability to claim with a straight face that the former president was not a Washington insider. But they believe they can make a case for his legacy — as long as they can somehow disentangle it from Biden’s ruinous decision to run for a second term. “I think it is very hard to ever get over the fact that he is responsible for the hellscape that we live in now,” said one former campaign staffer. “It is undeniable that his hubris cost us. He was an extremely impactful president who was successful in delivering tangible wins for Americans, but all of that is washed away.”

Biden’s team is split between outright denial that his age was an issue and asserting that time has a way of working its magic. “Without a doubt, every day, there is less of a ’24 hangover,” said Rufus Gifford, who was the finance chair of the Biden campaign and now serves as the chairman of the board for Biden’s presidential library. “It’s not solved, but there’s less of a hangover and more of a nostalgia for normal times.” His presidency may have ended ignominiously, but something like 80 percent of Democrats held him in high regard when he left office.

For now, Trump occupies the White House, where he has built a UFC octagon on the lawn to mark the nation’s 250th birthday, while Biden is speaking at a three-star hotel by the airport in an attempt to salvage his reputation. And unfortunately for the 83-year-old Biden, he doesn’t have the luxury of time, which means this is not the last we are going to see of him and his family. At the end of his speech in Sioux Falls, over a swell of applause, Biden said, “Okay. I have to go.” The cheering continued, and when it died down, Biden was still onstage. He lingered a beat longer, waving and saluting. He had to go, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave.

When I told one former administration official that I was planning on writing a story about Joe Biden, they offered a dry reply: “An obituary?” Biden began his post-presidency with prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones. “We’re doing fine,” Jill Biden said at Sixth & I. “But are we doing great? We’re not doing great.” Biden will, she has said, live with the cancer for the rest of his life, a punctuation mark on the notion that he was way too old to be president.

For now, he’s doing things elderly men do: surrounding himself with family and friends, eating ice cream, and burying grievances, which included extending a lunch invitation to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who worked behind and in front of the scenes to push him out of the 2024 race. “He famously, probably to his disservice politically, has never held a grudge,” Hunter told me. “He leaves that to me and my sister.”

He’s also dipping his toes back into the political waters. One Democratic operative working for a potential 2028 contender told me that candidates would be smart not to bash Biden too hard. Yes, they said, there’s plenty of anger about him staying in the race, but in general Democrats think fondly of the job he did in office. You can see evidence of that goodwill in Washington, where lefty think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute are trying to rebrand popular aspects of his policy agenda. Out: “Bidenomics.” In: “The Good Life Agenda.” “They are basically taking a lot of ideas from Build Back Better, things that got negotiated away like child care, union-friendly things like sectoral bargaining, and freshening it up,” the operative said. At least one potential 2028 contender, California governor Gavin Newsom, appears to think Biden could be an asset in the Democratic primary and has praised him as “one of the most successful presidents in the last century.”

Biden received applause when spotted at dinner with Senator Alex Padilla of California, then again when he was dining with Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. “There were literally gasps,” Coons said. He’s been inviting members of his old White House crew to his home in Delaware and to long Zoom bull sessions to help him write his own memoir. In June, Biden surprised everyone — including his publisher — when he made a comment about his own book landing in September, which would have really rattled swing-state Democrats had a spokesman not quickly clarified that the date is still TBD.

Biden recently endorsed two veterans of his administration currently running campaigns. “The response has been universally positive,” said Dan Koh, who got Biden’s endorsement for his congressional run in Massachusetts. “People told me, ‘We really miss this guy. And when someone of that stature endorsed you, it says a lot about you.’” Biden’s endorsement was also apparently helpful in Keisha Lance Bottoms’s run for governor in Georgia. Her internal polling a month before the primary, according to a person familiar, had her running at 43 percent with a large number of undecideds. After Biden weighed in, she ended up winning with nearly 57 percent of the vote. Her campaign says the Biden endorsement was a factor. “Joe Biden will never be sidelined,” Koh told me.

The irony is that Biden in the flesh viscerally evokes his greatest failing. “Putting him front and center will remind people why he was forced to leave the stage,” argued David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s longtime campaign guru. Tommy Vietor, the former Obama spokesman and current co-host of normie Democrats’ favorite podcast, Pod Save America, said he found details from Jill’s memoir “enraging.” “Joe Biden is only a victim of what others did to him,” Vietor told me. “He never views the country as the victim of what he did to us.”

Worse for the Bidens, their return encourages new stories to be told about his health when he was in office. Republican congressman Mike Lawler, for one, recalled the time then-President Biden came to his district in May 2023 to give a speech about ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations. In a private meeting beforehand, Lawler told me, Biden couldn’t hold a conversation about border policy without reading from a note card he’d pulled from his pocket. It wasn’t complicated stuff, Lawler insisted. “He was going, ‘We need more Border Patrol agents. We need more court personnel. I spoke with the president of, um, Mexico.’” Lawler said he found the experience “shocking” and “sad.” “He was reading it to me and losing his train of thought, getting confused in the middle of it,” he told me. “I felt bad; honestly, I felt empathy for him. I thought of him like a grandfather and was like, What the fuck? Why are they putting him out here like that?” (A spokesman for Biden denied this account.)

These days at least, the Bidens don’t have much of a choice. “He’s not getting any younger, he’s ill, and it feels financially driven,” said a Biden alum. Biden has been laying the groundwork for a presidential library foundation. So far, it’s been a slog. Late last year, the New York Times reported that the Biden Foundation had brought in a “small fraction” of what it needed, raising questions about whether a stand-alone library was even viable. According to the report, the team had told the IRS it expected to bring in only $11.3 million by the end of 2027. “We are making slow but good progress on the money front,” said Gifford, the foundation chairman, who swears that things weren’t nearly as dire as the Times suggested. “Everything will be made easier when we have a specific location and programs to discuss. That is all coming in the near future.” In June, he added, the foundation held a luncheon where it was privately announced that two donors had made recent commitments for a total of $10 million.

Obama’s foundation, in contrast, is swimming in cash. His behemoth center in Chicago, known as “the Obamalisk,” threatens to make Biden’s building look like a Little Free Library box in Delaware. It’s an unfair comparison, argues Gifford, because Obama could spend his second term planning for his library. Gifford, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Denmark, recalled being invited to the White House, along with other deep-pocketed diplomats, where the words foundation or library were never uttered but everyone understood the game. Biden got bounced from his second campaign before he got the chance to play. “He didn’t have the same luxury,” Gifford said.

Obama’s alleged role in Biden’s downfall is a particularly sore point in Bidenworld, even if Biden claims to hold no grudges. At an event in November billed as an “informal Biden-Harris White House reunion” at Kelly’s Irish Times, a low-key pub near Capitol Hill, people were grousing that they had to pay for the drinks themselves. “When the Obamas or Clintons have their reunions, it’s like a three-day all-expenses conference,” a Biden alum told me. “And we got a cash happy hour at an Irish bar by the train station.” The event’s organizer, former counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, was “basically frothing at the mouth,” according to the alum, and holding forth on how people close to the Obamas had “betrayed Biden” and cost Democrats the election. “He maybe needed a vacation, or a therapist,” the alum said.

It didn’t help when Jill surprised everyone by showing up with two close aides. “Seeing them was like going back to your hometown Arby’s and seeing your high-school bully working behind the counter,” the Biden alum told me. “I’d moved on in my life, but they hadn’t.”

For some in the Bidenworld diaspora, the post-Biden years have meant reinvention. Rob Flaherty, the former head of digital for the White House and deputy campaign manager on Biden’s second presidential run, has tried to chart a path as a thought leader within the Democratic Party, starting a podcast and writing a viral “autopsy” of what went wrong in the last election. He is neither running away nor leaning into his time as a Biden Guy. “I’m not of the Biden inner sanctum,” he told me. “But I obviously care about the president and loved the work we did, and also we’ve got to figure out how to move forward.”

The office of Michael LaRosa, the former spokesman for the First Lady, is a museum for all things Jill Biden. He has more than a dozen photos of “Dr. B,” as he still calls her, hanging from his walls at Ballard Partners, a top Trump-aligned lobby shop in Washington, D.C. There’s a framed Philadelphia Inquirer front page behind his desk reading BIDEN WINS and a First Lady luggage tag clipped to a bag on the floor. When I met him in late May, he was wearing a forest-green Patagonia sweater with the words CAMP DAVID stitched on the breast. He is not, in other words, a man who has moved on. “She told me she loved me and I told her I loved her the last time I saw her,” LaRosa said. And now? “On a personal level,” he said, “I’m really disappointed in her.” He blamed Bidenworld’s insular bunker mentality: “It boggles my mind that the people they depend on and rely on the most are the same people that have embarrassed them and humiliated them for years.”

Some of the people closest to the Bidens have chosen a permanent state of grievance. “It’s a bunch of people going up to Wilmington just shaking their hands at the clouds,” a former campaign aide said. Mike Donilon, the campaign manager who stood to gain a $4 million bonus if Biden were reelected, made headlines last year when he trashed his party for pushing Biden out of the 2024 election. “I thought the Democratic Party lost its mind,” he said, arguing that Biden could have won had he stayed in. “I think Mike Donilon really loves Biden,” said Axelrod. “He’s as smart as anybody I’ve worked with in politics, but he couldn’t see past that devotion and still can’t, apparently.” He added, “It’s sad. Because of his devotion, he betrayed the guy he loved.”

In May, Flaherty hosted his own version of a Biden reunion party, inviting former colleagues, friends, and journalists to a downtown office building to celebrate the launch of his political podcast, Nobody Knows Anything. The Biden crowd, more mid-level than managerial, mingled in the poorly air-conditioned office, sipping on cans of cheap beer and chilled white wine. Some discussed Hunter Biden’s recent appearance on Candace Owens’s podcast and how glad they were not to have to deal with the fallout.

A weird thing has happened with Hunter’s reemergence: People actually seem to enjoy it. He managed to charm Owens, getting her to apologize for her past comments about his drug addiction. She seemed to praise Hunter’s “normal” relationship with his father. He has proven himself to be an expert troll on X, making jokes about his past drug use and the risqué photos that had been found on his laptop. “I am not posing nude,” he replied to a reporter from Playboy asking to do an interview. “Those days are over.”

When I chatted with him on the phone, his disembodied voice sounded like clips from his father 40 years ago, and he relished going after Trump. “He makes the kind of promises like the cult leader from Heaven’s Gate made: like, ‘On December 18 this year we will all be teleported up to the mother ship,’” he said. “And it doesn’t happen. But the crazy part about it is in a cult, people just double down. They find a rationale for the reason it didn’t happen and reinvest themselves into the cause of that cult leader.”

Hunter also believes his father would have beaten Trump had he only been given the chance. But it’s just like him to double down as well. He is, after all, a Biden.

Some billionaires pay too little tax

But the case for levies on wealth is unconvincing

June 4th 2026

Suppose you are the billionaire founder of Veblen Luxe SA, a European company selling solid-gold luggage tags. How should you organise your financial affairs? One option would be to hold your Veblen shares directly. But then you must pay income tax immediately when the company pays you dividends.

Your accountant might tell you it is wiser to put the shares in your holding company, Hespérides S.à r.l. In a holding company, dividends can pile up without triggering much of an income-tax bill. True, you cannot spend the cash. But it can still be used for investments and some expenses. If you persuade a bank to lend you your spending money against your Hespérides shares, and dividends pile up faster than your debts, you may be able to keep borrowing and postpone income taxes indefinitely.

It is such arrangements that Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics takes aim at in his short new book, “We Need to Tax Billionaires”. Mr Zucman, whom your columnist interviewed for our “Inside Economics” show, has arguably surpassed Thomas Piketty, his compatriot and erstwhile co-author, to become the favourite economist of left-wingers everywhere. His latest thesis is that holding companies allow the ultra-rich to pay taxes at far lower rates than most of the public, and even those who support flat (rather than strongly progressive) taxation should support new levies on wealth to level the playing field.

For example, in Mr Zucman’s native France holding companies enable billionaires to pay about 25% of their income in taxes, including corporate levies paid globally, he calculates. The average Frenchman, by comparison, faces an all-in effective tax rate of 51%. Mr Zucman sees this as an injustice and proposes to top up the annual tax bill of the ultra-rich to a minimum of 2% of their net worth. Last year he campaigned for such a levy in France.

Holding companies are more of a problem for European taxmen than for America’s IRS. Uncle Sam has since 1934 imposed a 20% tax on the undistributed income of personal holding companies, after public fury when J.P. Morgan, a plutocrat banker, paid no income tax for two years running. Still, Mr Zucman says this Rooseveltian fix was incomplete. He notes that Warren Buffett’s listed holding vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, has not declared a cash dividend since 1967. Earnings pile up, free of income tax.

Wealthy Americans can also borrow against appreciating assets to fund their lifestyles. When they die, their heirs benefit from the “stepped-up basis”, which disregards all previous capital gains when shares are inherited. If assets appreciate fast enough, and profits are reinvested, in theory a dynasty can avoid income and capital-gains taxes for ever. Mr Zucman says the tax rate paid by the wealthiest 400 Americans—those appearing in the Forbes rich list—is 24%, compared with 30% for the average citizen.

Mr Zucman’s work often provokes controversy, because wealth taxes are unpopular among economists and because of regular disagreements about his data. His latest research, too, has brought about a data dispute. David Splinter of the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional body, says Mr Zucman and his co-authors have underestimated how much tax American billionaires pay. Mr Splinter makes different assumptions about capital gains, how Forbes fortunes are spread among family members, and state and local levies paid. He also includes transfers in income for all Americans and deducts tax credits from their tax bills. He finds billionaires’ tax rate to be 38%, and that of middle-income Americans just 18%. Mr Zucman says Mr Splinter has made mistakes.

Whatever you make of his data, Mr Zucman has identified laxity in Europe’s treatment of holding companies. He is also not the only person to note the injustice of the stepped-up basis and other loopholes like it elsewhere in the world. But is a minimum wealth tax the solution? It would be straightforward for Europe to copy America’s treatment of holding companies, and for America (and others) to fix their capital-gains taxes. Instead, Mr Zucman arrives at his 2% minimum by supposing that billionaires can expect to earn a 6% return on their fortune, so a 2% net-worth tax approximates to a 33% income tax. In reality, though, it is one thing to ask the owner of Veblen Luxe to pay 2% of his net worth. It is another to shake down startup founders, with no cash profits, based on valuations that could collapse if their business goes awry.

And would the rate stay at 2%? Mr Zucman charges that opponents of wealth taxes resemble early opponents of income taxes. Yet critics of income taxes were, in hindsight, right to warn that the tax would grow significantly over time. And plenty on the left would not stop at 2%. Odds are that California’s proposed 5% “one-time” tax on wealth will not be a one-off. From June 4th Mr Piketty can be found at the World Inequality Conference in Paris advocating a progressive global wealth tax starting at 1% annually above €2.2m ($2.5m) and rising to 20% above €553m. He has previously backed wealth taxes with top rates as high as 90%.

Crossing the Piketty line

It is unclear to what extent Mr Zucman endorses such extreme ideas. He supports experimenting with different rates. His suspicion of wealth runs deep: he says he sees little difference between those who get rich by capturing governments, like Russian oligarchs, and entrepreneurs who create new products. Wealth, he thinks, always brings dangerous political influence.

Yet the possible costs of deterring innovation are vast. Past research by William Nordhaus of Yale University has found that innovators capture for themselves just 2% of the value they provide to society; more recent work by Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard finds that innovative effort is surprisingly responsive to tax rates. Closing tax loopholes is reasonable. Seizing the assets of society’s most productive people is a road to economic ruin. ■

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The best, and worst, TV series and films of 2026 (so far)

Our suggestions of what to watch, and what to avoid, on your summer holiday

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June 4th 2026

5 min read

The best

“Amandaland”

Amanda is back—as pretentious, dishonest and delusional as ever in the second season of this sitcom. Her pitiable attempts to make it as an influencer are extremely entertaining, thanks to the sharp script.

“Babies”

This show is heart-wrenching and beautifully acted. It explores how isolating infertility can be and reveals the cold and unsympathetic manner that couples encounter from doctors as they navigate the medical system.

“The Boroughs”

A widower discovers that otherworldly creatures are stealing precious years from the residents of a retirement community. The most unsettling thing about this series is not supernatural: it is the normal, natural process of ageing.

“The Christophers” 

The greedy children of Julian Sklar (Sir Ian McKellan), an artist, want to forge the last series of his renowned paintings and sell them for a fortune. For all its talk of fakes, this film—about ageing, inheritance and artistic taste—is a real masterpiece.

“Dreams”

A wealthy female philanthropist (Jessica Chastain) has a secret affair with a young ballet dancer from Mexico, who crosses the border illegally to be with her in San Francisco. This film is a taut, chilling morality tale about passion and power.

“Half Man”

Niall and Ruben grow up together and develop an intense and twisted sort of brotherhood. This series is a nerve-shredding exploration of obsession, masculinity and trauma from Richard Gadd, the creator of “Baby Reindeer”.

“Henry David Thoreau”

This three-part documentary from Ken Burns explores why the American naturalist is so alluring today. In an era when many are searching for meaning, Thoreau’s life and writing offer succour.

“I Swear”

A biopic that is funny and full of heart. Robert Aramayo deservedly won awards for his performance as John Davidson, a Scottish campaigner who was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome as a boy.

“Kokuho”

This historical drama about kabuki, traditional Japanese theatre, has the compressed intensity of a story told in verse. Lush and painstakingly shot, the film follows the orphaned son of a gangster in his effort to become an actor.

“Legends”

In the early 1990s Britain was losing its war on drugs, so the government turned to an unusual bunch of fighters: civil servants. This is a thrilling and pacy series about little-known British heroes.

“Love Story”

This controversial hit series imagines what happened beyond the public eye, as John F. Kennedy junior, America’s most eligible bachelor, wooed an elegant outsider before their deaths in a plane crash in 1999. A doomed fairy tale that is enthralling to watch.

“No Other Choice”

After a year of humiliating unemployment, a middle-aged man hits on a plan: he will murder everyone who is qualified for the job he is applying for. Ingenious, grisly fun, this film is the best South Korean satire since the Oscar-winning “Parasite”.

“The Pitt”

This popular medical drama about an overworked, underfunded emergency room in Pittsburgh celebrates not brilliance or glory, but the simple act of being dedicated to your job. The show may remind older viewers of “ER”, but it is grittier and more addictive than its long-running predecessor.

“Ponies”

The KGB surveils any Americans of any influence in Moscow. But Bea and Twila, as women, are classified as “persons of no interest”. Thanks to a cold-war setting and ample skulduggery, this satirical comedy series is a lot of fun.

“Project Hail Mary”

This film is both a science-fiction caper and a buddy comedy about an astronaut and an alien. Though the film is too long, it stands out for its cinematography and droll script; Ryan Gosling is brilliant in the lead role.

“The Sheep Detectives”

This charming family-friendly film is a love letter to farm animals and golden-age murder mysteries. The script delivers both big laughs and unexpectedly moving moments, as it explores loss and memory.

“The Stranger”

A sumptuous and rich adaptation of Albert Camus’s classic existential novel. This black-and-white film boasts beautiful cinematography, but also captures the ennui and despair of the book.

And the worst

To save you time, we wasted ours

“The Bride!”

In this frightfully bad film, a dead woman is reanimated to marry a lonely monster. The movie mixes too many genres, from sci-fi and Gothic noir to “Bonnie and Clyde”-style capers. This remake of a film from 1935 never fully comes to life.

“Imperfect Women”

This show is like buttered popcorn: bingeable but unsatisfying. Its big ideas—of how well you know your partner and what women hide from their closest friends—are handled simplistically.

“Ladies First”

A man whacks his head and wakes up in a world where gender roles are flipped. This over-the-top film offers endless scenes of men being sexually harassed and getting cosmetic surgery, while women eat burgers and pass wind.

“Michael”

This nauseating biopic is a sanitised and sanctified version of Michael Jackson’s life story. For a movie about an oddball megastar who befriended a chimpanzee, much of it is also surprisingly dull.

“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie”

This video-game-inspired film is already the year’s highest-grossing movie worldwide. It is also a gross misuse of your time. The plotless film carries you on a hallucinogenic and frenetic journey that only nostalgic gamers will enjoy.

“Wuthering Heights”

Emerald Fennell turns a haunting tale of class, obsession and revenge into a bodice-ripper. She rounds off the sharpest edges of the story and focuses on the erotic awakening of Cathy and Heathcliff.

“Your Friends & Neighbours”

Coop (Jon Hamm), a financier-turned-thief, does not know when to quit stealing from his neighbours. The writers of this show also don’t know when to quit. The new season has all the flaws of the first, plus another: redundancy.■

All shows and films were released in America or Britain in 2026 and are available to watch in cinemas or on streaming platforms.

How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism

 

The me-first doctrine is a threat to prosperity

June 4th 2026

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5 min read

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AI Narrated

Something new is stirring on the left. A fresh crop of socialists want to remake the economy with price controls, hefty wealth taxes and a spree of nationalisations. Supercharged by fury over Gaza, they are winning voters at a formidable pace. Many rose to prominence only recently, like Zack Polanski, who leads the Green Party in Britain, or Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. Others are long-standing political fixtures: the septuagenarian Jean-Luc Mélenchon is on his fourth swing at the French presidency, but thumping support from the 20-somethings of “Generation Z” has put the Elysée back in his sights again.

Call it Gen-Z socialism. Not because all its adherents are young—or because it is new for young people to lean leftward—but because it is the brand of leftism, made for the TikTok era, that today’s young revolutionaries support.

Forget weighty collectivist ideals or seizing the means of production. Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine. Climate change and race, preoccupations of the 2010s and early 2020s, are now much more peripheral concerns. So are social issues, barring Gaza. Angst about inflation, housing and artificial intelligence have replaced all that with something cruder. “This country is awash in wealth,” says Avi Lewis, freshly elected leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, a country where productivity has been all but flat for a decade. “We can have nice things.” Saying that prices should be capped to keep your bills down while someone else pays for your public services is a seductive, shareable message.

Plenty of the grievances that animate Gen-Z socialists do stem from real issues. Inflation has been too high, rent in big cities is now often unaffordable and AI could upend the labour market. Dismissing these worries would be foolish. Yet Gen-Z socialism is wrong about how to fix the problems of capitalism. It must be resisted, because it is a profound threat to prosperity.

No country’s Gen-Z socialists are quite alike. The realities of power have forced some, like Mr Mamdani, to become more moderate. But they broadly agree on three core principles. First, that growth does little to help ordinary people. Theirs is a zero-sum mindset, where a better outcome comes not from creating but from taking—as they fear ai barons will soon do on a vast scale. Second, that spending can be paid for by the richest. Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires. The third tenet is a remarkable hostility to private enterprise. Gen-Z socialists are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds. They would have chunks of everyday life, from housing to groceries, governed by state diktat.

Politics has always had zany fringes. The far right is no less barmy—and more dangerous. But what is so worrying about the Gen-Z socialists is how deeply their ideas are bleeding into the centre-left. Desperate to compete, even mainstream Democrats in America now propose mad schemes like exempting over half of tax filers from federal income tax. In Britain the Labour Party, having won power on a centrist platform, has been spooked by the Greens and is rekindling its zeal for higher taxes and state control. Increasingly, the ideas of the Gen-Z socialists can win even when their candidates lose.

That is bad news. Rent controls would worsen housing shortages by crushing the incentive to build. The profit margins of big supermarket chains, demonised by Gen-Z socialists, are already wafer-thin after years of ruthless competition—a miracle of modern capitalism. Wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation. Do not assume that the failure of these policies, if implemented, would bring about an automatic course correction. Europe has struggled for decades to escape the low-growth funk left by its own over-regulation; the rise of statist “Peronists” in Argentina helps explain its century of relative decline.

Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task. The first step is for free-market liberals to stop apologising. A series of popular criticisms of capitalism, each containing a grain of truth, has in aggregate obscured the fundamental wisdom that private enterprise is at the root of human prosperity. Yes, people aren’t always rational, as behavioural economics shows. True, inequality matters and growth is better when broad-based. Free trade and globalisation create losers as well as winners. But this is the best time in human history to be born, given record real incomes, high life expectancy and low rates of extreme poverty. A punchier defence of capitalism would work better in the social-media age than hand-wringing by uncharismatic centrists like Sir Keir Starmer.

Centrist governments must also solve the problems driving popular discontent. “Abundance” liberals are right to want to build cheap and plentiful housing and infrastructure. Politicians must stop saddling the young with the burden of funding excessive pensions. The tax system must ensure that meritocracy prevails over inheritocracy: broader-based inheritance taxes and levies on property would help. The hardest challenge will be the disruption caused by advances in AI. The Gen-Z leftists have set out their stall with calls for a moratorium on data centres and a government jobs guarantee. Liberals must be more positive and imaginative in their own prescriptions, using a mixture of taxes, distributed capital ownership and support for workers to make sure that the upsides of labour-market disruption are widely shared.

The world is ruled by little else

Populists have the wind in their sails; it can sometimes seem as though market liberalism is doomed to political failure. The Economist disagrees. A robust defence of the ideas that have brought unprecedented riches has barely been tried. Many of the problems that animate Gen-Z socialists, like high rents, are the result of markets that are insufficiently free, not excessively so. There is time yet for liberalism to once again produce results—and to win the argument. 

Donald Trump says Pete Hegseth loves war. That should disqualify him

 

How did standards for military leaders fall so low?

Jun 4th 2026

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5 min read

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Of all the jokes President Donald Trump has told at his aides’ expense, none has been more demeaning than his remark in late May about his civilian leader of the armed forces, Pete Hegseth. “He loves war,” Mr Trump said during a cabinet meeting, grinning as he patted Mr Hegseth on the arm. Mr Hegseth, fawning, chortled along. If Mr Hegseth meant what he has often said about America’s need to restore its warrior ethos, he should have winced instead. In the code of America’s greatest generals, hatred of war has been as foundational as grim awareness of the necessity to prepare for it.

“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly,” General Dwight Eisenhower told the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1947. Fifteen years later, General Douglas MacArthur, no one’s idea of a pacifist, cautioned the cadets against becoming warmongers. “On the contrary,” he said, “the soldier above all other people prays for peace.”

Mr Trump may just have been teasing Mr Hegseth, as he had before, for his early advocacy of a war with Iran that is stuck in a costly stalemate. Yet with his knack for naming discomfiting truths, the president put his finger on an unsettling quality in his “secretary of war”, the title that he and Mr Hegseth prefer. Where past military leaders treated violence as a tragic necessity, Mr Hegseth celebrates it as righteous and even thrilling. His favourite word—it does sound pretty cool—is “lethality”. When he got his own chance to address West Point cadets, at their commencement on May 23rd, he deployed the word five times, not counting two mobilisations of “lethal”. By contrast, “peace” clouded his vision of ferocity only once, thus: “You feel comfortable inside the violence,” he instructed the cadets, “so that our fellow citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is your calling card.”

The essence of Mr Hegseth’s message would strike past leaders of the military as conventional: troops must be ready to fight and win. From his years in the National Guard, Mr Hegseth has a horror of being exposed as under-equipped. In his book “The War on Warriors”, published in 2024, he twice refers to a recurring “standing-naked-in-front-of-the-class nightmare” about being on a mission. “I’m racked with anxiety,” he writes. “Where is my weapon? I can’t find my rifle. I’m hoping nobody will notice.” (Well, Freud might have observed, sometimes a rifle is just a rifle.)

But, like hanging on to one’s rifle, the readiness to kill when called upon has traditionally been only a baseline requirement in the eyes of America’s greatest warriors. They have usually asked more of rising military leaders. When, as president, Eisenhower again addressed a West Point commencement, in 1955, he reflected on his own complacency upon graduating there 40 years earlier. The pace of change, the arrival of catastrophically powerful new weaponry, had since sharpened a “need for wisdom, and the caution that wisdom enforces”. Cadets had to prepare not just to command but to understand the economic, political and spiritual aspirations of other peoples: “Your entire lives may and should be as seriously devoted to leading toward peace as in preparing yourselves for the tasks of war.” For his part, MacArthur urged “the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength”. Since the cadets must have known that President Harry Truman fired MacArthur in 1951 over resisting a ceasefire in Korea, his exhortation to leave politics to the civilians must have landed with particular force. “Great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution,” MacArthur said.

In his own speech, Mr Hegseth namechecked Eisenhower and MacArthur. But if technology is transforming the battlefield, if new threats darken the horizon, if the question of the military’s role in politics is again being asked, the cadets got no guidance from the secretary of war. “The world today is at a crossroads,” Mr Hegseth intoned, then swerved into a cul-de-sac, “just as it has been for the past 250 years.” Iran merited a bare passing mention. He dwelled instead upon the menace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). “Woke and weak leaders” had tried to undermine West Point, but “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” It would not be surprising if DEI programmes committed some excesses for a time in the armed forces, as elsewhere in American life. But Mr Hegseth’s hysteria is hard to square with his rapture for the proficiency of the fighting forces. If DEI de-lethalised the troops, where is the evidence? If the battle against DEI is won, as he says, why is he still fighting the last war?

The old-boys preference

When Mr Hegseth told the cadets, “You’ve seen an obsession with race and gender,” he might have been speaking of his own pattern of stunting the careers of black or female officers. His boast that merit alone now determines promotion seemed a smokescreen for his efforts to promote loyalists, or possibly for himself.

Even before becoming chief of America’s biggest employer and the world’s mightiest military based on his performance as a Fox News commentator (“Central casting” was Mr Trump’s high praise for him at that cabinet meeting), Mr Hegseth was not averse to seeking preferential treatment in hiring. When he rejoined the National Guard in 2019, there were scant openings in infantry battalions for majors like him. “Thankfully,” he writes in “The War on Warriors”, “my good friend” had just become the commander in New York. When Mr Hegseth telephoned, this “great dude” promised to hire him “even if they had to create an additional slot”. But the perpetually aggrieved Mr Hegseth again winds up a victim because, he claims, the appointment was blocked for political reasons. One does not need DEI training to marvel at his sense of entitlement, or much common sense to long for a return to high standards for America’s most important jobs. 

How Trump hacked the presidency

By Jason Willick. 

Like Anthropic's Mythos AI model, the president has a supercharged ability to find a system’s weaknesses.

May 31, 2026 

 Think of Donald Trump as the Mythos president. Anthropic’s Mythos artificial intelligence model created a media sensation for its purported ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities in thousands of computer systems. It didn’t create vulnerabilities — they were there all along and occasionally caused problems. But Mythos apparently has a special knack for smoking them out.

Trump has a similar ability for the presidency. He has cleverly found and exploited ambiguities in the office to circumvent traditional limits. His lawsuit against his own government, and the resulting “settlement” involving an extrajudicial payout fund for allies, is a prime example.

That lawsuit took advantage of the fact that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” as the Supreme Court put it in 2020. There are more than 300 million American citizens who can sue the federal government to right a perceived wrong. The president is the only one among them who, if he does so, is actually suing himself.

Trump was wronged by the leak of his tax returns in 2019 and 2020. It wasn’t out of bounds for him to sue the IRS over the breach. But for Trump’s “public” self to settle a suit with his “private” self? That doesn’t compute.

The administration didn’t hesitate to exploit the vulnerability. The Justice Department announced its intent to “settle” Trump’s suit with the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” The idea is to pay people the administration thinks have been mistreated by the government, most likely the president’s political allies such as participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

It bears repeating that Trump is pressing on a vulnerability that already existed, not blowing up the system outright. As the University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq writes, past administrations have used federal settlements to generate payouts “to politically preferred groups even when there was no real prospect of a legal challenge against the government prevailing in court.”

Huq cites as one example the Clinton administration’s monetary settlement with Japanese people from Latin America whom the United States interned during World War II, even though the law only provided for payments to Japanese who were U.S. citizens or residents. “There is, to be sure, no moral equivalence between the interned Japanese and the Jan. 6 rioters,” Huq writes.

That statement is so obviously true it’s jarring. But it’s essential to understanding Trump’s Mythos quality. He can look at a system coldly, without regard for moral judgments. If a vulnerability exists, then it can be exploited to benefit morally deserving and undeserving groups alike. A Democratic-appointed federal judge on Friday launched an inquiry into the settlement, but that seems to reflect a moral objection rather than a strictly legal one.

Another part of the settlement claims to shield Trump from certain future legal actions by the U.S. government, including IRS audits based on his already-filed tax returns. Scholars debate whether a president can pardon himself, but in some ways this deal is broader, because a pardon applies only to criminal charges. The agreement, signed by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, covers civil fines as well.

Once again, the president is exploiting a bug in the law that was not entirely unknown. When the Biden Justice Department was prosecuting Trump in 2024, it tried to persuade the Supreme Court that former presidents didn’t need broad immunity from prosecution. After all, a lawyer for the Biden administration told the justices, a president is already shielded from prosecution for doing things his attorney general tells him are legal.

The idea is that the attorney general represents the U.S. government, and the U.S. government can’t go back on its word to anyone — even the president. Now the U.S. government has formally agreed to limit future Trump investigations. But when the president is the government, the whole theory short-circuits, and Trump is happy to benefit from the ensuing confusion.

Another “hack” the administration may be perfecting is the use of indictments of foreign leaders to justify military interventions. The indictment, unsealed last week, of Cuban strongman Raúl Castro over the 1996 shoot-down of two planes wasn’t really a law enforcement action; it was a military threat. After all, the administration took care to describe its January military incursion into Venezuela to arrest dictator Nicolás Maduro and take greater control of the country’s politics as a “law enforcement” operation pursuant to a criminal indictment for drug and gun trafficking. Now it’s signaling Castro could be next.

The Constitution intended for Congress to play a key role in decisions to award government payouts and launch wars. That role has been eroding for some time, but Trump has been particularly cunning about finding vulnerabilities. Want a taxpayer fund for allies? Just sue the government in your private capacity and order your Justice Department to settle. Want to send U.S. forces to a foreign capital to kill its security forces and seize its ruler? Just get a grand jury in New York to rubber-stamp an indictment of the tyrant.

Mythos’s hyper-competence at finding software weaknesses has prompted a frenzy of bug-patching in the software that makes the world run. The executive branch needs some bug-patching, too.

By Jason Willick

Jason Willick is a Washington Post columnist focusing on law, politics and foreign policy.follow on X@jawillick

Harvard vs. Trump is the result of a massive error

The university argues its scientists are a public good. It needs politics to make that case.

The Washington Post. 

May 27, 2026.

6 min

By Harvey Mansfield

Harvey Mansfield is a retired professor of government at Harvard University and the author of “Where Harvard Went Wrong,” from which this op-ed, published originally in the Harvard Crimson, is adapted.

Lack of viewpoint diversity is the main field of the battle still raging between Harvard and the Trump administration, which in March sued the university for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination and sought to halt its federal grant payments. Until recently, “diversity” referred to race and sex, but opponents of this sort of diversity argued that the term should include opinion as well. “Viewpoint diversity” is their term. Clearly diversity is the darling of the left, and viewpoint diversity the counter from the right.

Harvard’s one-sided fondness for the left, comprehensive and prolonged, provoked its clash with the Trump administration. It also revealed a deeper division between science and the humanities — quiet now, but with a Harvard history.

Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives, not a further sprinkling of garish extremes. To lack a proper mix of left and right is not legally a crime — a reasonable point for Harvard — but it is a massive error, one that has forced Harvard into the courts. To depend on the courts to defend the university’s independence from federal oversight is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege. One can see the risk in depending on courts within the very policy of diversity, when that word was suggested to universities in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court’s 1978 case on affirmative action in student admissions. Yet in 2023, the court reversed itself, stymieing the universities by declaring race-based affirmative action in admissions illegal and unconstitutional. At this point, “viewpoint diversity” redeems diversity only by calling for the inclusion of diversity’s opponents.

If Harvard wants to prevent further trouble with Republicans, it needs to change its attitude. As the Harvard administration has begun to see, it needs to drop its gratuitous partisan posture. There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to the university.

Who risks the most in Harvard’s battle? The scientists, who need the government’s money to carry on their work of usually expensive experimentation in laboratories. This opens up a second problem of viewpoint diversity within universities that is not so easy to fix: the divide between the scientists and the humanists.

When I arrived as a freshman at Harvard, I took a course, Natural Sciences 4, taught by the university’s then-president James B. Conant. He was a scientist who took a leading part in the direction of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. Absorbed in the question of whether this was a good thing for humanity, he inspired a new program at Harvard called “General Education,” to which this course belonged. To make education “general,” including both science and humanities, seemed to be the goal.

After this course, the differences between these fields became clearer to me. Science deals with numbers, the humanities with persons — the particular human beings from which science abstracts. If a course takes up proper nouns like Shakespeare and Goethe, it belongs to the humanities; if it concerns impersonal objects as common nouns, it is science.

Our names are essential to us. Every human being has a proper name, each different, to respect the human desire for self-importance. Yet a doctor using medical science does not need to know your name to treat your human body. Science is a nameless, collective enterprise of what “we know.” Humanities professors write their own books and make “contributions” to Shakespearean literature.

Science progresses by discarding old hypotheses and finding new ones. The humanities do not progress — who now equals Homer and Shakespeare? — but offer insights into permanent human truths of honor and beauty that the scientific method cannot discern or recognize.

Humanities pore over dusty books and archives. Science, with its “pioneering research,” can, by contrast, deliver manifest benefits, above all in modern medicine. But science or its technology also delivers risks to humanity from possible atomic warfare and climate change. Perhaps science has remedies for the dangers it brings, but perhaps not.

Moreover, science needs to address and convince the nonscientific public that its research is worth funding. This is difficult, because the exactness of modern science arises from its use of mathematics, which keeps it remote from the great majority of human beings who are not adept with numbers. The public has to be addressed with rhetoric — which is inexact and often promises too much. Experience shows that science itself is both hypothetical and open-minded, while the task of conveying science is often partisan and closed-minded.

Science dominates the university, but it cannot defend or explain itself without departing from scientific rigor. There is no scientific proof that science is good.

Yet turning from science to the humanities for assistance, one encounters postmodern arguments that flounder in helpless relativism. Far from giving reasons science might be good, the humanities fail to justify even themselves.

Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society, the university’s advocates say; it’s worth the money! But doesn’t the university need some standard from outside society to justify itself as independent? Something like Veritas (Harvard’s motto) that combines science and the humanities — a Harvard that looks for the wisdom that makes science valuable to human beings.

A political scientist myself, I like to think that this wisdom centers on politics. A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have protected the scientists and corrected the humanists.