Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a resident senior fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributing writer at The Next Move.

President Trump, his administration, and his Republican Party have not been blasting Russia and China. Those are monstrous, murderous dictatorships (and sworn enemies of the United States). No, they have been blasting Canada.

The United States has been fortunate in many ways. We have certainly been fortunate in having Canada as a neighbor. How many countries get so friendly, so like-minded, a neighbor, no matter our occasional disagreements?

Remember this extraordinary fact: the border between our countries is the longest undefended border in the world.

Nevertheless, Trump & Co. have cast Canada as a villain. They say that Canada has taken advantage of us, swindled us, done us dirty. In the minds of the new Republicans—the post-2016 Republicans—America is perpetually a victim, a “pitiful, helpless giant” (to borrow Nixon’s phrase).

What’s more, Trump & Co. have repeatedly threatened to annex Canada. “The 51st state,” they call it.

Are they just joking? “Trolling”? If so, is that the way the US government—any serious government—should conduct itself?

On Tuesday, the White House put out this charming meme:

Here we have an eagle, mauling a goose—a Canada goose. Get it? Pretty cool, huh?

Then there is this:

Our president is big in the renaming business. (Think “Gulf of America,” as opposed to the somehow intolerable “Gulf of Mexico.”) Trump doesn’t consult anyone—that would be prissy process stuff. He is the type who decrees.

Here is another example of the president’s handiwork:

If you regard this as childish, some will claim that you have “TDS,” i.e., “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In all likelihood, you simply have a mature idea of what a president of the United States, and his country, ought to be.

Turn, now, to the vice president, JD Vance, who earlier this week told an audience, “Canada is a state. Sorry. Freudian slip. That was actually an accident.” Was it?

The first month of 2025 seems a long time ago, but think back to it. On January 30, 10 days after the second Trump administration began, Kristi Noem, who was then our secretary of homeland security, traveled to the Northeast. She visited the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the US–Canadian border.

On one side is Derby Line, Vermont; on the other is Rock Island, Quebec. The Haskell family built the structure on the border because they wanted Americans and Canadians to have equal access.

Throughout the building, there is a black line, indicating the border. On her visit, Secretary Noem hopped from one side to the other. “USA No. 1,” she said on the American side. “The 51st state,” she said on the other. She did this over and over.

In a piece published a few months later, I asked, “Was this patriotism? If you’re really number one, do you have to thump your chest about it? Do you have to belittle someone else? How should a great and good country behave?”

Long ago, I learned a point from William F. Buckley Jr., the late and great writer. It went something like this: “There are Americans who fail to grasp that other people, too, have patriotism. That others, too, have a sense of national pride, of national dignity.”

You have heard about the “Ugly American”—the lout, ignoramus, and jingoist who crashes his way around the world. I have always kicked against this stereotype. Argued against it. Resented it. Have our president and vice president made it true? I’m afraid they have—that they, indeed, typify it.

Days after Donald Trump was sworn in for the first time, in January 2017, I had occasion to write a post titled “Mexico and Us.” “The United States is the top dog—the top dog in all the world,” I said. “Diminished, yes, but still top.”

And “in dealing with such countries as Mexico—very far from the top—we can afford to be large-minded, generous, considerate.”

In diplomacy, this costs you nothing, and gains you a lot.

“A nation, a people, must be allowed its self-respect,” I went on. “Its dignity. A nation, when it is little, must not be made to feel like a lackey or a wretch—or to be made to pay.”

You may remember that one of Donald Trump’s selling points in the 2016 presidential campaign was that he would build a wall along our southern border, and make Mexico pay for this wall.

Whatever became of that wall, by the way (never mind the funding for it)?

Bill Buckley had experience everywhere, but he had a great deal of experience in Latin America. He had lived there, and spoke Spanish. He knew the keen sensitivity in Latin America about the yanqui colossus. He had a sense of where and how the United States should tread, when it came to our southern neighbors.

Buckley was one of the relatively few conservatives who supported President Carter’s Panama Canal treaties. (George F. Will was another one.) In 1978, Buckley had a famous debate with his friend Ronald Reagan on the subject.

In that post of mine in January 2017, I wrote, “I think my 14-year-old self was on Reagan’s side. But you couldn’t deny that Buckley made some good points.”

Yes. See whether you agree:

“I hope that Governor Reagan will not tell us tonight that Panamanian pride is not involved in the matter of the treaties. He may tell us that Panamanian pride must, in this case, be subordinated to our national interest. And if he convinces me that the national interest requires the subordination of Panamanian pride, I shall side with him.”

There is, of course, a “but” coming.

“But he must not tell me that pride does not count.” And “he ought not to suggest that American pride is one thing and Panamanian pride quite something else.”

With apologies to Bill (Buckley), maybe I could leave the final words to Calvin Coolidge. That president was known as “Silent Cal,” but when he spoke, he truly had something to say.

On October 6, 1925, Coolidge delivered a speech in Omaha, Nebraska. Its title: “Toleration and Liberalism.” (This meant what sometimes goes by “classical liberalism,” of which Coolidge was a representative.)

“The generally expressed desire of ‘America first’ cannot be criticized,” said the president. “It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first.”

This “cannot be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness. Hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions will not be productive of any benefits in this direction.”

No, “we can make little contribution to the welfare of humanity on the theory that we are a superior people and all others are an inferior people. We do not need to be too loud in the assertion of our own righteousness.”

A final sentence from that president, 101 years ago:

“We can only make America first in the true sense which that means by cultivating a spirit of friendship and good will, by the exercise of the virtues of patience and forbearance, by being ‘plenteous in mercy,’ and through progress at home and helpfulness abroad standing as an example of real service to humanity.”

That was a different kind of Republicanism, a different kind of Americanism. We can have it again—if we want (and only if we want). “A nation is a daily plebiscite,” said Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French scholar. May we soon hear and heed the better angels of our nature.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

Never say never: I agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on something!

In an ABC interview from a couple of weeks ago, the New York congresswoman happily declared that “Woke 1 was crazy.”

“Woke 1,” as it’s become fashionable to call the start of the decade moral panic, was indeed crazy.

Land acknowledgements were crazy (try acknowledging everyone who’s ever lived on a piece of land in literally any other part of the world).

The firings. The social exile with no hope of recovery. The policing of speech. That was more than crazy: it was destructive on a societal level.

Many progressives made excuses for lawless behavior amid several high-profile police killings of Black Americans. They whetted Americans’ appetites for a different type of lawlessness: the crackdown we are seeing rogue federal agents conduct now. People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country. Yet when they see Democratic electeds treat riots with kid gloves, they’ll support an authoritarian right over the specter of anarchy and chaos.

Some may bristle at my reference to demonstrations in this period as riots, but AOC herself used the word in 2019 when she declared that groups that “are marginalized and marginalized and marginalized […] have no choice but to riot.”

What is missing from the conversation about 2020—Trumpism, Woke 1, the origins of coronavirus, and so on—is real accountability. Accountability was the missing ingredient in Woke 1, where the priority in approaching alleged wrongthinkers was always cancellation; punishment rather than rehabilitation—if, in fact, the accused had even done anything wrong.

So I am not out to cancel AOC, though I agree with her on vanishingly little. Her electoral career is for voters to decide. What I would like from the congresswoman is accountability; not for her to simply disown her bad ideas but to seriously interrogate what made those ideas bad.

The same can be said for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the target of a Republican-led witch hunt for the better part of a decade, but is also a deeply flawed leader.

Before I proceed, because I understand that criticism of Dr. Fauci is a tripwire in many conversations, let me be clear: I vociferously oppose RFK Jr.-style vaccine denial and the dollar-store pseudoscience the president himself advanced during the first administration. I vaccinated myself. My entire family was vaccinated. My only regret is that my mother—who was still in Moscow—was not able to take it; she died on Christmas Day 2020 before the jab was widely available. You can understand why this topic is personal for me.

Fauci was in an impossible position during the pandemic, but he was also arrogant. He confidently dismissed alternative theories about the origins of the pandemic while privately entertaining other possibilities. He spoke with absolute certainty in public when he was not so certain behind closed doors. He assumed that Americans wanted false reassurances when what they really wanted was honesty.

People who stepped out of line faced severe professional and social consequences. Prominent media outlets constructed a deeply uncharitable straw man of anyone who questioned the wet-market hypothesis, calling it “old-fashioned racism.”

Journalist Terry Moran claims ABC censored his story on the lab-leak theory after running it by Fauci. Moran, mind you, is no Trumper—he was fired from ABC for (correctly) calling Stephen Miller a bigot.

Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who received the Nobel Prize in medicine for his groundbreaking discoveries on HIV, was rendered an outcast for trying to prove a lab origin through scientific analysis. Of course, he also harbored anti-vaccine views (Newton had an interest in alchemy—nobody’s perfect). But viruses were Montagnier’s expertise, and on the coronavirus he was shut down for deviating from the party line. You can agree or disagree with him, but his summary dismissal is antithetical to the free exchange of ideas.

During the pandemic, many careers and reputations were upended. The room for serious intellectual investigation shrank rapidly in 2020.

It’s worthwhile to engage Fauci on all of these points in the context of a thoughtful, well-reasoned congressional hearing.

But today’s Republicans don’t do thoughtful and well reasoned, and because of that, people like Rand Paul have made it less likely that there will ever be an honest reckoning with Fauci over his missteps. Fauci is pleading the Fifth again and again because being forthright now will expose him to even more abuse. Republicans have set up accountability as an all-or-nothing game, a choice between a politicized arrest or acting as if nothing went wrong.

Given those options, most liberal-minded people would choose the latter, and we can’t blame them, because Fauci’s mistakes are not criminal and throwing him in jail would be a terrible miscarriage of justice. But that’s still a deeply suboptimal outcome from the perspective of truth and good governance.

Now, there are public figures whose actions should land them in front of a judge (I can think of a few in the current administration). AOC and Fauci are not such people. From the proponents of Woke 1 or those who stifled the conversation around the pandemic, what we need is accountability.

The problem is that accountability is a moderate solution. Americans, with your revolutionary spirit, struggle with that kind of moderation; it provides neither the relief of absolution nor the satisfaction of righteous punishment. But those sharpening their blades should remember that no democracy was ever rescued by the guillotine.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a senior fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributing writer at The Next Move.

For Alexander Malofeev, the Russian pianist, age 24, I have a possibly strange question: “Do you feel young?” We older people consider him young, of course, but I know this: when I was 24, I did not feel young.

So, does he? His answer is yes and no.

No, because he has been concertizing since he was about 11. You start to think in terms of music seasons, he says, not in terms of calendar years. He has been working for about 15 years now. You might even call him a veteran.

But at the end of 2022, he left Russia—which gave him a new lease on life, or a different kind of life. He now lives in Berlin. He feels a new freedom, a wider latitude. So, in a sense, he is just a few years old.

The question “Do you feel young?” is not a straightforward one for Sasha Malofeev. (“Sasha” is the common nickname for “Alexander,” and that is what Malofeev goes by.)

I have sat down with him at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria, where he is playing a recital and I am doing some journalistic work. To hear our interview—our podcast—go here.

Malofeev was born in Moscow on October 21, 2001. (For an American like me, that means about a month after 9/11.) There was a piano at home—an upright. A piano is standard equipment in Russian homes, certainly in Muscovite ones.

“My grandpa studied music,” says Malofeev. “My grandma studied music. My dad studied music. None of them can play. But we had this piece of furniture, and when I was five, we unwrapped it, so that I could try it out.”

He was good at it.

Sasha was educated at the leading musical institutions in Moscow: the Gnessin School, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. When he was 13, he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians. The age limit for that competition is 17.

In brief, Malofeev has played everywhere, and with everyone, meaning the premier orchestras and conductors. He has a contract with Sony Classical. He’s on top of the musical, or at least the pianistic, heap.

A question for him: “Did you choose this?” He answers that no one chooses anything at five years old. He was given a regimen, and he accepted it. “You wake up. You go to the piano.” There was never any choice—until he moved out of Russia when he was 21. That was his choice.

I tell him, “I want to use the expression ‘declaration of independence.’” He laughs and says, “Yeah, maybe.”

Another question, offbeat: Does he feel that he can be goofy, serious artist though he is? The rest of us can be goofy, especially when we’re young. It’s normal and expected.

There is no goofing off in the Russian musical system, says Malofeev. It’s work and sacrifice. It’s well-nigh military. “I had very limited social experience and very few chances to be goofy, or to get to know what that is.” Now he is “trying to find more balance.”

I have skipped too far ahead in our story, or rather his story.

In February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the West, some presenting organizations canceled appearances by Russian musicians. These musicians included hard-core Putinists. They also included at least one innocent bystander: 20-year-old Sasha Malofeev.

On March 2, he made a statement, on Facebook: “The truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence or predict.”

Five days later, he made another statement: “Honestly, the only thing I can do now is pray and cry.” He was reluctant to say anything—anything further—that might affect his family in Russia. (That tells you something about the Russian government, doesn’t it?)

Winding up, he said, “I do understand that my problems are very insignificant compared to those of people in Ukraine, including my relatives who live there.”

I commented, “What a mensch, that young man.” I made that comment in an essay that says all I know to say on the question of cancellations, boycotts, and the like: “When Politics Invades Art.”

Malofeev may be out of Russia, but Russian he is. The Russian language is “the air I breathe,” he says. So is Russian music. And the two are related, he says: the language and the music.

If Malofeev has a hero, or model, it’s Rachmaninoff—who, I might add, left Russia in 1917, about a month after the revolution, and died in Beverly Hills in 1943.

Malofeev and I spend some time on Vladimir Horowitz, another pianist who idolized Rachmaninoff (as any sensible pianist, or person, would). Horowitz left Russia in 1925—a bit late—and died in New York in 1989.

Horowitz came from the “Russian school,” for sure—exemplified it—but he also absorbed influences from all over the world, in a high-flying international career.

Life experiences find their way into musicianship, says Malofeev. He notes that most of the people in his audiences are much older than he (obviously). They bring a wealth of experience to their listening to music. And what does he, the pianist, bring?

“I’ve spent my whole life practicing in a room and basically stewing in my own juice.”

To this, I have two reactions. (1) How in the world did this young Russian learn the expression “to stew in one’s own juice”? He grins. He likes English, and he’s adept in it. (2) He has experienced, emotionally, maybe more than he knows.

These days, he feels free to explore repertoire off the beaten path. He is playing Medtner (a composer whom Horowitz also prized). He is playing Mieczysław Weinberg, a Polish-born Jew who went to the Soviet Union in 1939 (five days after Germany invaded Poland). He is playing Arthur-Vincent Lourié, who has an amazing story.

This man, né Naum Izrailevich Lurya, was born in Russia in 1892, and he died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1966, having many adventures and misadventures in between. He worked for the Voice of America.

In his Salzburg recital, Malofeev plays some Lourié pieces. And some Sibelius pieces, essentially unknown. And, at the end, a very well-known piece: Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in B-flat minor.

My article today is not one for music criticism, but I can tell you that Malofeev’s playing of the sonata deserves the highest possible praise, namely the adjective “Rachmaninoff-like.”

Earlier this year, Sony Classical released an album by Malofeev called Forgotten Melodies. That is also the title of a set of piano pieces by Medtner. The composers represented on the album are, in chronological order: Glinka, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner. All four of them were born in Russia, and all four of them died in exile (in Berlin, Paris, Beverly Hills, and London, respectively).

Talking with Sasha, I tick off the Russian- or Soviet-born pianists I can think of who live in the West: Grigory Sokolov, Evgeny Kissin, Arcadi Volodos, Yefim Bronfman, Igor Levit, Daniil Trifonov—and now Malofeev. There are others.

Rachmaninoff was 69 when he died, and Malofeev will be that age in 2070. What will Russia be then? No one can know, but we can all hope for the best.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

Donald Trump is an unhappy man these days. Most recently, he’s taken that unhappiness out on a staunch American ally, South Korea. The proximate source of the president’s rage was a planned US-South Korea summer military exercise. According to a Truth Social post drafted in Trump’s typical rambling style, the war games are “totally inappropriate and hostile” to the North Korean regime, which “has been unthreatening and respectful,” at least “as long as Donald J. Trump has been President” (yes, he really wrote this in the third person).

Apprised that it would be too late to call off the exercises altogether, the president decided to have them “substantially” reduced. The basis for Trump’s turnaround is, unsurprisingly, his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” the hereditary dictator in Pyongyang.

It would be easy to write a column lashing out at Trump or poking fun at his affinity for autocrats like Kim. Naturally, I condemn Trump’s abandonment of South Korea, and I abhor the cowardly Republicans who know better but refuse to call out the president. However, simply saying this doesn’t help Seoul’s position.

Instead, we need to go back to basics. With Donald Trump as president, we can’t take anything for granted. The president exploits assumptions. For decades, Washington hummed along doing the same things—like supporting South Korea—“because that’s what America has always done.” Trump comes crashing in and asks “why?” and the professional policy class are frequently ill equipped to respond.

So we have to explain why South Korea matters—and why supporting America’s other frontline democratic allies matters too. The answer cannot be “just ‘cuz.”

First, there is the practical case. In his Truth Social post, Trump bemoaned the cost of the joint Korean-American exercises. But a strong deterrent is far less costly than open war. And if it should come to war on the Korean Peninsula, then a well-prepared South Korean military will shift much of the burden off of US forces.

Meanwhile, some Americans may want a foreign policy retreat, but dictators are not so circumspect. Kim’s government is already an active participant in Russia’s slaughter in Ukraine, contributing troops and hardware. Pyongyang would not pull back from Ukraine if America did the same in Korea; on the contrary, the Kim regime would have a freer hand abroad.

These arguments could be applied to any number of other frontline US allies: Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, and America’s European partners in NATO.

But why intervene at all? This cost-saving argument presumes that protecting South Korea from Kim-family domination (or Taiwan and Japan from China, or Ukraine from Russia, and so on) is a worthwhile enterprise. Not everyone shares this assumption. Trump only does what benefits number one, and he’s happy to play the non-interventionist card so long as the friendly attention of dictators enriches him personally. Meanwhile, JD Vance and others in his orbit are committed heirs to the Lindbergh tradition. There’s an isolationist bent on the ascendant far-left as well.

Here, then, we need to lay out how engagement with the world makes the average American better off.

Most of Washington’s security partnerships are economic as well. In the example of South Korea, Seoul’s relationship with Washington involves billions in investments into US companies, supports strategic American industries, and has created tens of thousands of new American jobs in just the last couple of years.

South Korea, like many other US allies, provides a friendly presence along strategic transit corridors. The American public’s sudden introduction to the Strait of Hormuz is a stark reminder that these are not just geographic trivia questions but strategic choke points that can make or break global trade—and deliver a real financial blow to ordinary people thousands of miles away.

Donald Trump likes to cast allies as freeloaders and ungrateful charity cases (he is vindictive that the South Koreans will not get involved in his poorly conceived war in Iran). This is an awfully flat, transactional view of the world, and in almost every instance it is also inaccurate. US prosperity would be directly impacted if South Korea were absorbed by the Stalinist north.

Underlying this practical argument is the moral one. South Korea fought hard for its freedom. Its people sacrificed much in order to avoid being overrun by the north and its Soviet and Chinese accomplices.

For decades, South Korea was also under a dictatorship—though not nearly as repressive and closed a system as the one that still exists above the DMZ. Democratization was a long and challenging process. The South Koreans have remained vigilant, as all good stewards of liberal democracy must—just two years ago, parties across the political spectrum united to halt an abortive autocoup, a sort of Korean January 6, and prevent their country from returning to strongman rule.

The United States is organized around ideas, not blood and soil, and one of the great principles that I admire about this republic is its solidarity with its sister democracies.

Americans consolidated liberty under relatively easy conditions, without any really threatening neighbors and with ample room to grow across a sparsely populated continent—a sort of blank slate. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the European NATO allies, Ukraine, and others built free societies under far more challenging circumstances, in complicated geopolitical environments, on top of centuries of fraught history. Ensuring their democratic experiments continue to succeed is something that Americans can and should take pride in.

None of this can be treated as obvious or guaranteed. Through two administrations, Donald Trump has shown that longstanding custom is easily flouted. The things you and I consider virtuous about America—like supporting other democracies—are things that we will need to proactively make a case for, every single day.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and managing editor of The Next Move.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump made some additions to the White House Palm Room: two photos of himself with autocratic leaders; one alongside Xi Jinping, the other with Vladimir Putin. The picture of the president with Putin, a memento from the Russian dictator’s 2025 Alaska visit, was placed above a photograph of Trump’s own granddaughter. Trump has since taken down the picture of his grandkid, but Putin is still there.

Trump’s admiration for foreign authoritarians is shared by Hasan Piker, the influential political streamer who’s staged frequent interventions in Democratic primaries. Piker has interviewed numerous successful primary candidates on his stream, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, Chris Rabb, and Abdul El-Sayed. He praises Mao Zedong as one of the greats and dresses like him too. Piker even has a Chinese flag positioned prominently in the background of many of his streams.

Trump and Piker aren’t the first American public figures to do a little pro-dictator interior decorating. In the early twentieth century, the writer H.L. Mencken hung an autographed portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II on the wall of his Baltimore bedroom. He fantasized about the German emperor conquering the United States, and thought the country would be better for it.

Mencken submitted his pro-Prussian fan fiction to the Atlantic, which turned him down. But Americans who daydreamed about dictators would find a wider platform just a few decades later amid the ideological competition of the Cold War.

In that era, there were conservatives who embraced right-wing authoritarians as more than just unsavory partners of geopolitical convenience. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote effusively about Francisco Franco, describing him as an inheritor of “the great Christian monarchical Spain of the period of the Conquests;” “an authentic national hero,” who “above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause to wrest Spain” from “Marxists and nihilists.”

Buckley’s National Review identified the generalissimo as “a part, an integral part, of Western civilization.”

On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Angela Davis, the left-wing black activist, was drawn to the Soviet Union over its nominal stand for racial equality. Davis criss-crossed the communist bloc, ostensibly championing America’s downtrodden. Standing beside despots like East Germany’s Erich Honecker and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, she ignored the downtrodden living under their one-party regimes.

Today, we have Trump and Piker, and not only them: Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens extol Russia’s supposedly traditional values before online audiences numbering in the millions. Legions of social media influencers jet off to the UAE and fawn over its opulence, making no mention of the human misery at the foundations of Dubai’s glamorous skyscrapers.

More often than not, these dictator defenders are projecting. They find (or claim to find) something in oppressive systems that is wanting in America—a strong leader, a path back to a glorious past, or perhaps a road toward the utopian horizon. As journalist Lincoln Steffer, fresh from a visit to Soviet Russia, wrote to a friend: “I have seen the future and it works.”

Dictatorship, of course, does not work—not for the countless people who are disenfranchised under non-democratic regimes.

The United States, for all of its many problems, has a remarkable capacity for self correction. I’m not much one for quoting Bill Clinton these days, but he had it right when he said that “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Every great advancement in US history has been a realization of a hitherto unfulfilled promise from our founding. We have never needed to emulate a Xi, a Putin, or a Franco, and we should have the confidence to reject those who say that we do.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump made an incredible claim—literally incredible, as in impossible to believe. He said he had won his 43rd golf championship. All of these “championships” have been “won” at clubs owned by the “victor,” Trump.

In the most recent case, Trump said he had won the senior championship at Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, New Jersey. He announced his achievement in his trademark fashion:

“I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things. It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t!”

A score of 70 would be two under par. That is, again, incredible. As Rick Reilly commented, “No 80-year-old on earth with a pancake swing and the chip yips has ever shot TEN SHOTS under his age.”

Reilly is a veteran golf writer who in 2019 published a book about Trump and golf: Commander in Cheat.

You thought a 70 was good, how about a 67? That’s what Trump claimed to have shot in 2023, to win that same championship. He wrote, “Now, some people will think that sounds low, but there is no hanky/lanky [sic].”

Trump is a specialist in hanky/lanky. Reilly, in his book, reports that caddies nicknamed him “Pelé”—for his habit of kicking his ball out of the rough and into the fairway.

Bill Clinton was no stranger to hanky/lanky, on and off the golf course. In 1996, Byron York published a long, detailed piece on that president and his golf in The American Spectator: “Clinton’s Bad Lie.”

Falstaff says, “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” Trump has an amazing ability to co-opt others in his grievances, boasts, and fabrications. Last week, I wrote about the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and his embrace of Trump after the 2016 election. In 2017, Graham claimed that Trump had shot a round of 73 with him.

That told me more about Graham than about Trump’s golf.

In 1994, Kim Jong-il, the late North Korean dictator, played his first round of golf. He had a score of 34—over 18 holes. His round included 11 holes-in-one. If you don’t believe that, you can take it up with North Korean state media.

Fidel Castro was not one for golf—although there are some famous, goofy photos of him as a young dictator with his comrade Che Guevara, on the golf course. They are wearing military fatigues and combat boots. Castro effectively banned golf in Cuba, condemning it as a “bourgeois” pursuit.

But his son Antonio managed to play. He was sometimes depicted as a golf champion, as well as a fishing champion. Also, he was an official in national and international baseball federations.

Dictators’ sons like to involve themselves in sports. (I have a number of stories about this in a book, Children of Monsters.) Vassily Stalin was the boss of several Soviet teams. He punished them ruthlessly when they did not succeed. In Iraq, Uday Hussein did the same thing. He was the head of the national soccer federation and the Olympic committee.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser podcast

Muhammad Qaddafi headed Libya’s Olympic committee. His brother Saadi headed the soccer federation. He was also a player—the captain of the national team, in fact. Referees never crossed him, and broadcasters were not allowed to mention any other player’s name. They referred to Saadi by name. All the other players, they referred to by their numbers.

Saadi bought his way onto the European circuit for a while. He signed with teams in Italy. The joke in Libya went, “Other players are paid to play, but Saadi pays to play.”

At the end of 2021, an interesting hockey match took place in St. Petersburg, Russia. On one team were Vladimir Putin and the dictator from Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. Also present on the ice were retired Russian hockey stars. The dictators’ team won 18 to 7.

Putin scored seven goals—as many as the other team altogether. Lukashenko scored a measly two goals. But his 17-year-old son redeemed the family honor, scoring four.

It’s easy to laugh at dictators and their pretensions. But shouldn’t Americans be embarrassed when their president claims to have won his 43rd golf championship? By shooting two under par? Maybe that is not as outlandish and outrageous as Kim Jong-il’s 34, but—come on.

In 2016, a colleague of mine, on his way to being a full-time Trump booster, said, “Trump isn’t a liar, he’s a bullshitter.” In the years since, I have not really detected the difference.

Golf is a game of honor. It is a revealer of character. The subtitle of Byron York’s 1996 piece about Clinton was, “The way he plays golf tells you more about his character than any special prosecutor ever will.” The subtitle of Rick Reilly’s 2019 book is “How Golf Explains Trump.”

When I spoke of these issues on social media, a tweeter named Jas Easterly responded with a quote: “If you aren’t playing by the rules, it’s not golf.” He then said that his grandfather Harry had despised cheats. Harry Easterly was the president of the United States Golf Association and a steward and champion of the rules.

A couple of weeks ago, I podcasted with Gabriel Sterling, an elections official in Georgia. He was one of the Republicans who refused to falsify the 2020 presidential election, despite great pressure from Trump & Co. I told a favorite story about Bobby Jones.

In the 1925 US Open, he called a penalty on himself—two strokes—and wound up losing the Open by a stroke. When people praised him for his sportsmanship and honesty, he would have none of it. “Sooner praise a man for not robbing a bank,” said Jones.

Yes. But when bank robbery is in vogue and encouraged—not participating in it is commendable.

Gabe Sterling made an interesting point. The rules of golf are written down, but you have to carry them out. You have to abide by them. Otherwise, they are irrelevant words on paper. And our government functions in much the same manner.

We have “parchment barriers” aplenty, but there’s no substitute for honorable men and women in public life, and in life at large.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

Before you continue reading today’s column, have a listen through David Remnick’s New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Megan Romer. Remnick’s interviewee is the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. The conversation is just 29 minutes long, but it is extremely illuminating.

Three weeks ago I published an article in these pages under the headline, “Democratic Socialists vs. Social Democrats.” In that piece, I argued that America’s ascendant democratic socialists are not like their pro-democracy, pro-welfare-state foils in Northern Europe.

In their interview, Remnick asked the DSA’s Romer: “Is there a model for a politics or a society that is real and existing in this world that you would like to see the United States copy?”

Here was an opportunity to prove me wrong. Romer could have named Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, and I’d be forced to reconsider my original thesis.

“I think there are lessons we can take from different socialist projects,” the DSA co-chair answered, before naming one such project: Cuba, citing lessons Americans can learn from the Caribbean island nation’s “participatory democracy.”

Cuba, of course, has no “participatory democracy;” it’s a “people’s democracy” of the kind that once ruled in the [East] German Democratic Republic and still reigns in the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea. Cuba is a communist dictatorship in its seventh decade. The Communist Party’s dominant role is enshrined in the Cuban Constitution (a document Romer lauds for its “queer friendliness”).

This was just one of many instances during the sub-half-hour conversation in which Romer beclowned herself. We could point to the way Romer champions a zero-sum call for the dissolution of the State of Israel while conceding that she has no knowledge of the most consequential negotiations in recent Israeli-Palestinian history.

Or we might consider her total opposition to US military aid to Ukraine, a position that surely makes her popular with the likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Tucker Carlson. It is clear that she is out of her depth.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

Indeed, the takeaway in many quarters is that Romer is a buffoon unworthy of our attention. As one reader insisted to me earlier this week, “100% of Americans don’t know who Romer is.”

Megan Romer is a buffoon. Still, anyone who knows who the current president of the United States is surely recognizes that buffoonery is no obstacle to great power and influence. Idiots can inflict a lot of damage when their views go unchallenged.

Romer, according to her own retelling in the New Yorker interview, was a Hillary Clinton Democrat before 2016. A decade later, she is confidently quoting Marx as if she just walked out of a compulsory course on Scientific Communism in mid-century Moscow.

A YouGov/Cato Institute poll recently found that 34% of Americans aged 18-29 hold a “favorable view” of communism. Perhaps Romer, who’s now in her early 40s, was among that cohort of younger American adults who were communist-curious. She is profoundly ignorant, but ignorance is powerful.

As to the reader’s point that the DSA leader is an unknown for 100% of Americans, this is very much untrue (be careful with absolutes!). Before the New Yorker Radio Hour, Romer made a stop through Fox News, which is watched by millions of Americans. Romer’s Fox interlocutor ran through a host of extreme positions, from fully open borders to complete abolition of prisons. Romer cheerfully confirmed that each of these out-there viewpoints is, in fact, the platform of DSA.

As the DSA’s influence grows, exchanges like these will shape how huge swaths of the voting public understand the Democratic Party. One need only look at Michigan. Democrats’ chances of holding onto the state’s second US Senate seat tanked after democratic-socialist-adjacent Abdul El-Sayed won last week’s primary. And, as bad options go, El-Sayed is not even the worst. He embraced and campaigned with Maoist cosplayer Hasan Piker and blithely dismissed an attack on a Jewish preschool as a case of “hurt people hurting people.” But he’s not formally a member of the DSA and rejects the socialist label. Even still, El-Sayed’s primary victory may prove a pyrrhic one for Democrats.

The Democratic Party has been largely feckless in the face of this self-destructive radicalizing force gaining traction inside of its house. The establishment coalesced around weak and uninspiring candidates like Congresswoman Haley Stevens in Michigan, or got behind people who were literally compromised—in the case of Andrew Cuomo in New York City.

I have made clear my deep issues with politicians like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, but I also understand why people were not particularly moved to vote for their opponents. Extremism looks attractive when the establishment does not deliver.

Meanwhile, traditional Democrats too often fall right in line when a DSA-style candidate wins. Stevens immediately reconciled with El-Sayed. Chuck Schumer even endorsed Graham Platner. Far-left insurgents are able to take the Democratic Party’s institutional support for granted.

Now, I don’t expect Democrats to turn around and stump for authoritarian-right MAGA Republicans (nor would I recommend that they do). But the party should play hardball with upstart candidates. If a person wants access to the party’s resources and high-profile endorsements, they should be required to disavow toxic positions and associations. Democrats must internalize what it means for people like Megan Romer to claim its ballot line. The Democrats should take seriously their base’s burgeoning tolerance for illiberal ideologies, no doubt energized by the influx of funding for US universities from foreign authoritarian regimes (Qatar is the top foreign government donor to American campuses, followed by China; Saudi Arabia is fifth).

For Democrats, facing these challenges is a moral imperative and a strategic one. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement captured the Republican Party because the old guard rolled over as proto-fascists crashed through the doors. The answer to fascism cannot be Marxism, and voters in the middle must see that the Democratic Party understands this.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Refer a friend

Nathan Law became Hong Kong’s youngest-ever elected lawmaker at 23—then watched his city’s promised freedoms rapidly collapse as China tightened its grip. Jailed, disqualified from office, and forced to flee before the 2020 National Security Law took effect, Law now lives in exile in the UK while Beijing harasses his family back home. In this episode of Older/Wiser, Linda and Nathan discuss Hong Kong’s broken “one country, two systems” promise, the human cost of standing up to an authoritarian regime, transnational repression on foreign soil, and why Nathan still continues his advocacy even from thousands of miles away.

If you’re a premium subscriber to The Next Move, you are among the first to hear this episode of the Older/Wiser podcast—24 hours before the rest of the world gets to tune in. Early access to this podcast is just one of the ways we’re saying “thank you” for your support. Premium subscribers also receive automatic entry into exciting raffles and contests and invitations to Zoom calls with Garry Kasparov and other pro-democracy leaders.

If you’re not yet a premium subscriber and you’d like to get access to these perks and support our work, there’s never been a better time to join our community. Your support drives the work of the Renew Democracy Initiative, including bringing political dissidents to meet students, business leaders, and elected officials, as well as providing humanitarian assistance to frontline communities in Ukraine. Click here for an update on our on-the-ground work in Ukraine.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

ICYMI: Tune in to last week’s episode of Older/Wiser:

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

There’s an old expression: “If you have something to say, say it to my face.” As a rule, I criticize public figures when they’re alive and kicking. When they die, I favor praise or silence.

My friend William F. Buckley Jr. would occasionally write a biting obit—as he did when Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist, died in 1995. The writer Florence King said that WFB had authored an “attack obituary” or a “hit obit.”

He arguably had. But Rothbard, an old Buckley antagonist, deserved it.

When Lindsey Graham, the veteran South Carolina senator, died last month, there were many appreciations and many—well, non-appreciations. Today, I propose to write neither type of piece. I will offer some observations, providing angles on a politician of our times.

I first encountered Graham at Davos in the mid-2000s. He was in the company of Senator John McCain, as he often was. Graham clearly relished being in Davos. He relished being “in the arena” wherever that arena was.

In those days, Graham was a bête noire of the Right. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him “Senator Grahamnesty,” for his work on immigration reform. (“Amnesty,” “Grahamnesty,” get it?) Graham was also tagged as a “neocon,” in a pejorative way.

So was John McCain, of course.

“He’s like a son to me,” McCain often said of Graham. In a jocular mood, he’d say, “Lindsey is my illegitimate son.”

I talked with McCain about this in 2015. It was the second-ever episode of my podcast, Q&A, the first having been with Garry Kasparov, the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move.

McCain said that he and Graham had many interests in common—chiefly concerning foreign policy and national security. They were big promoters of freedom, democracy, and human rights. They thought that both America and the world were better off with America engaged in the world.

McCain also noted that Graham was just plain fun. “Entertaining.” “Not boring.”

So true. Graham once told me that when he showed up at some campaign event or civic gathering, “my first ten minutes is standup.”

In 2016, he ran for president—the Republican nomination. He and Donald Trump brawled. Graham said, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.”

He also said—tweeted—“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

The GOP did not get destroyed. Trump, in fact, won. And that changed everything. Many Republicans had objected to Trump, not on grounds that he would be bad for the country, but on grounds that he couldn’t win.

No one got with the program with more alacrity, or brazenness, than Lindsey Graham. In November 2017, he told CNN, “What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy some kind of kook not fit to be president.”

Had Graham forgotten that he had called Trump a “kook” “unfit for office” the year before?

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

In the past decade, I have heard the expression “to navigate the Trump era.” How have Republican politicians and journalists “navigated the Trump era”?

It is only human to do some navigation. And it is natural for politicians to be political. (The journalists have less excuse. Truth-telling should be more their bag.)

“You want Graham to have a seat at the table,” I often heard. “You want Graham to play golf with Trump. Better that Graham be in his ear than the isolationists, right?”

Maybe. But Trump has always changed people more than they have changed him.

We must also consider the simple matter of partisanship—“the call of the tribe.” (Mario Vargas Llosa used this phrase in the title of a book.) Graham was a Republican, and where his tribe went, there went he.

But he was probably more aware of this than most. He would comment on his own hypocrisy.

When Trump and his team covered for the Saudi dictatorship after that dictatorship murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Graham said, “If they were in a Democratic administration, I would be all over them for being in the pocket of Saudi Arabia.”

When Trump announced a pullout from Syria later in 2018, Graham said, “If Obama had done this, we’d be going nuts right now: how weak, how dangerous.”

Graham stayed close to Trump right through the afternoon of January 6, 2021, when the mob assaulted the Congress. That night, Graham said, “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough.”

Enough was enough for about three weeks. Graham was then back at Trump’s side, along with pretty much every other Republican in the country.

In this, Graham was a man of our times, an emblem of our times—though more colorful and flagrant than most.

When the United States and Israel launched what would be called the “Iran war” last February, Graham appeared on Fox News and said, “To Donald J. Trump: You just surpassed Ronald Reagan as the most consequential Republican president since Lincoln.” He went on to say, “You’re Reagan plus, plus, plus.”

Was the senator pumping Trump’s ego? Or did he mean it?

“To live is to maneuver,” said Whittaker Chambers (in a line quoted by Bill Buckley). Yes. It is hard, and unwise, to live without maneuvering or navigating. But to a point. You have to stand for something, right? You have to draw some line, right?

Herbert Hoover gibed that FDR was “a chameleon on plaid.” Lindsey Graham once said to a friend of mine, “If you’re lookin’ for consistency, I’m not your guy.”

Congressman Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who served in the House from 1975 to 2007, had the job of speaking to new members at their freshman orientation. He stressed one thing: Figure out what you’re willing to lose your seat over. What principle or policy. If there is no such thing, “then you’re going to do damage here.”

Lindsey Graham would have been reelected unto forever. His predecessor, Strom Thurmond, was in the Senate for almost 50 years.

One evening, Graham and I were speaking at the same conference (with the senator having a bigger role, obviously). We were sitting at the same table when our host was introducing him. Graham was looking at his phone.

Our host noted that Graham had now received more votes than anyone else in South Carolina history. I leaned over and whispered to Graham, “More than Strom?” He nodded yes. Still looking at his phone, he said, “Don’t tell him. He’ll come back.””

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

Last week, I was in Poland on a personal diplomatic mission. I met the president, the foreign minister, a former prime minister, and the mayor of Warsaw. My goal was simple: strengthen a coalition for Ukrainian victory and against Russian imperialism.

On its face, that task might appear straightforward, especially in a place like Poland. As I’ll explain, things are never so simple.

Like the Ukrainians, Poles have also experienced the bitter taste of Russian imperialism for generations. Tragedies like the Katyn massacre—the murder of nearly 22,000 Polish officers by the Red Army—are seared into the Polish national consciousness. The Soviets invaded Poland along with the Nazis in 1939, and Poles lived under a Soviet-backed communist dictatorship for nearly half a century after the war.

All of that means a basic understanding of the Russian threat is baked into Poles’ DNA. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland stepped up to provide critical aid. The Polish government has provided the Ukrainian military with more tanks than any other country. Meanwhile, Poland hosts nearly a million Ukrainian refugees, making it the number two destination for people fleeing the Russian invasion.

The sudden arrival of such a large foreign population naturally puts a strain on even the most harmonious relationships. Polish law enforcement have reported an uptick in xenophobic attacks on Ukrainians, occurring everywhere from a construction site where refugees work to the schoolyard where their children play.

Add to this the fact that Poland and Ukraine have their own complicated backstory. Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently designated a Ukrainian military unit as “Heroes of the UPA”—the World War II-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army. To Ukrainians, the UPA are freedom fighters who resisted Soviet-Russian colonization. Poles remember the UPA as the villains behind the murder of their countrymen in the borderlands between Poland and the USSR. Americans may be accustomed to viewing World War II as a binary conflict, but many Central and Eastern European nations were caught between the twin evils of communism and fascism.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

In July, videos of Polish men beating a young Ukrainian couple went viral. There have been calls for an end to military aid to Ukraine until Zelenskyy withdraws the UPA honor. Lech Walesa, the heroic dissident and Poland’s first post-communist president, removed a Ukrainian flag pin from his chest. Walesa had worn the pin from the beginning of Russia’s invasion, and had previously lobbied the US government to provide more support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, the current president, Karol Nawrocki, rescinded Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle, the highest award conferred by the Polish government.

Tensions about refugees and history are now feeding off of each other. Anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland is at its highest point since the full-scale invasion began.

This is the complex situation into which I stepped. I met with President Nawrocki, who’s affiliated with the right-wing Law and Justice party, and I met with Warsaw Mayor Trzaskowski from the liberal Civic Coalition (Trzakowski ran against Nawrocki in the last presidential election). I saw my friend, Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski of the Civic Coalition, and I shared a long conversation with former Prime Minister Mateusz Moriawecki, who led a Law and Justice government for six years. Now he’s launching a new political party that he describes as “the most lefty of the righties.” Anyway, I was not in Poland to pick sides; I was there to repair a coalition that spans the political spectrum.

My message was clear: Whatever Poland’s historical differences with Ukraine, they share a common enemy in Russia now, and the alliance between Warsaw and Kyiv is essential for both. A Russian missile landed on Polish territory during my stay, putting a very fine point on that argument. Vladimir Putin is actively probing NATO’s defenses, and I believe an open attack on an alliance member— probably one of the Baltics—is coming soon.

Of course, many friends of Ukraine would also humbly advise that Kyiv practice a bit of pragmatism in its dealings with Poland. Nevertheless, the priority should remain the same. Poles and Ukrainians might look to fellow democracies Japan and South Korea for inspiration. Tokyo and Seoul are finally rekindling their relationship despite a painful history because the threat from North Korea and China is too immediate to suffer decades-old distractions.

Americans, too, should consider what it means to prioritize and build a broad coalition for Ukraine. Zelenskyy recently caught flack from left-wing pundits like Mehdi Hasan for taking an interview with MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who previously parroted the pro-Russian line. It’s certainly fair to question the motivations behind Loomer’s about face—grifters tend to follow the money. But people in the Ukrainians’ position can’t afford to pick and choose. The truth is that I don’t even agree with my Polish hosts on every single issue, but those private disagreements are unimportant. If Loomer’s conversion in turn converts her followers on the American right, then it will have been worth it. New recruits in the global fight for freedom over tyranny are always welcome.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Sabina Cherner is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. She is a student at Tufts University, where she is studying international relations and economics.

Max Mottola is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. He is a student at the University of Chicago, where he is studying political science and economics.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture,” President Donald Trump told Fox News on Friday. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in.”

He was talking about Ceuta. Photographs and videos of tens of thousands of migrants swimming toward the Spanish city from Morocco have been circulating on social media for nearly a week. Those images will have real political impact—on both sides of the Atlantic.

What happened in Ceuta?

Ceuta is in Spain, but not in Europe: it’s an exclave located on the North African coast next to Morocco. The city has been under Spanish control since the sixteenth century.

For two days last week, the world watched a genuine humanitarian crisis unfold in real time, as somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people, most of them young Moroccan men, surged across the border into Ceuta, nearly doubling the city’s population. Dozens died in the attempt, most by drowning: Spanish authorities placed the death toll at 72 as of Sunday.

The Spanish government responded by swiftly deploying armed troops to join local police in deporting those who crossed illegally, and installed an inflatable barrier restricting access to the peninsula on which Ceuta sits. By Saturday, 48,300 had been sent back.

The spark for this exodus is disputed. There was a rumor—amplified across WhatsApp and social media—that Spain’s border was effectively open. This was based on a recent Spanish Supreme Court ruling that hopeful migrants interpreted as preventing their forced return if they crossed the border by sea. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez laid the blame on traffickers who deliberately spread misleading information about that ruling.

Yet the scale of the crisis has led many observers to suspect orchestration rather than spontaneity. Some migrants reported being waved forward by Moroccan border guards, fueling speculation that the episode echoes a 2021 incident, when Morocco loosened its border controls to pressure Spain over aid money and the disputed Western Sahara territory. (Some expanded this theory to include—without evidence—Israel: Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth, for example, suggested a conspiracy between Rabat and Jerusalem to stop Israel-critical Spain from closing the Atlantic to Israeli shipping.)

Nevertheless, other governments have weaponized their borders before. Belarus shepherded Afghan and Middle Eastern migrants into the European Union via Poland in 2021. In the United States, Republican governors Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Doug Ducey sent thousands of migrants in planes and buses to Martha’s Vineyard and northern sanctuary cities, a calculated gesture of contempt for the Biden administration’s border policy.

What the right is saying

Despite Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s relatively lenient border policy, illegal immigration has stayed low throughout his tenure. The prevailing online response, both domestic and global, however, had very little to do with the facts.

Still, the images from Spain were real and visceral, and they will carry serious political currency in Europe and America. The scenes of a human cascade into Ceuta might have been lifted from a piece of nativist propaganda bearing the caption: “This is what happens when the left takes over.”

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

Within hours, Spain’s far-right Vox leader Santiago Abascal was in Ceuta calling the crossing an “invasion” and an “act of war” by Morocco, while simultaneously blaming Sánchez’s immigration policy for enabling it. Leaders of far-right movements across Europe insisted that the “invasion” could not be reversed, and that it would eventually reach their countries with destructive consequences.

Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD posted, “Sánchez will try to distribute them across the EU with the majority ending up in our country. This must not be allowed to happen. Germany must insist on deportation and advocate for the suspension of the Schengen Area!” Jordan Bardella of France’s National Rally accused Spain’s prime minister of “opening the doors of all of Europe,” vowing to “hold Pedro Sánchez and all the ideologues of population replacement accountable.”

For much of the far-right, the Ceuta incident provided the perfect pretext to declare that the “great replacement theory” they had long warned of was finally underway. Mainstream politicians, eager to avoid a repeat of the 2015 European migrant crisis which helped catapult the far-right to mainstream success, chimed in too. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a social democrat, appealed for other EU states to consider suspending Spain’s access to the Schengen free-movement zone. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni heeded the call, reimposing border checks with Spain for a month.

The American response arrived with none of the pretense of sincere concern for European border security.

Other members of the Trump administration quickly echoed the president’s admonition that Ceuta would be a precursor to a supposed future Democratic immigration meltdown.

Stephen Miller, the White House’s chief immigration strategist, added his own apocalyptic warning: “Democrats will see your home trampled and stolen by invaders and they will rejoice.”

The US State Department’s official X account went further, explicitly blaming Spain’s “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe,” and concluding with an assurance that Washington is “considering actions to defend Americans at home and abroad from this threat.”

Elon Musk joined the chorus, reposting a flurry of warnings from affiliated far-right accounts.

A strategic blind spot

Against the barely concealed enthusiasm with which the far-right covered Ceuta, much of the prominent anti-Trump media has remained conspicuously silent. While legacy media outlets covered the story, platforms in the anti-Trump “resistance” media ecosystem like The Contrarian, The Bulwark and Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From an American have not as of this writing. Major elected Democrats have been quiet too.

That’s a strategic blindspot: Ceuta was undoubtedly the biggest story on the American right last week. The images from Ceuta may not have registered in social media feeds strewn with stories of ICE abuse and daily corruption from the Oval Office. But they are being seen by millions of Americans susceptible to the far-right’s influence. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that footage from Ceuta will feature in campaign ads this fall or in 2028. We can dispute manipulated narratives, but in order to push back against authoritarian populism, we need to be aware of what the narrative is to begin with.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Refer a friend

Is liberalism dead? Linda’s latest guest doesn’t think so. Shikha Dalmia is the president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and founder of The UnPopulist. She and Linda discuss Shikha’s political trajectory as an Indian-American immigrant and her organization’s recent event, LibCon—the Liberalism in the 21st Century Conference. Linda and Shikha unpack the trend of executive overreach, and discuss how to safeguard liberal values by reinforcing our institutions against authoritarian overreach.

If you’re a premium subscriber to The Next Move, you are among the first to hear this episode of the Older/Wiser podcast—24 hours before the rest of the world gets to tune in. Early access to this podcast is just one of the ways we’re saying “thank you” for your support. Premium subscribers also receive automatic entry into exciting raffles and contests and invitations to Zoom calls with Garry Kasparov and other pro-democracy leaders.

If you’re not yet a premium subscriber and you’d like to get access to these perks and support our work, there’s never been a better time to join our community. Your support drives the work of the Renew Democracy Initiative, including bringing political dissidents to meet students, business leaders, and elected officials, as well as providing humanitarian assistance to frontline communities in Ukraine. Click here for an update on our on-the-ground work in Ukraine.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

ICYMI: Tune in to last week’s episode of Older/Wiser:

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Max Mottola is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. He is a student at the University of Chicago, where he is studying political science and economics.

Last Monday, Andy Burnham became the seventh prime minister of the United Kingdom in the decade following Brexit. If ever there were a data point that illustrated leaders failing to meet the moment, this is it.

Burnham’s immediate predecessor, Keir Starmer, announced his resignation last month. Starmer squandered a landslide Labour Party victory to become one of the most unpopular prime ministers on record.

That’s no small feat considering who came before Starmer: Liz Truss’s 45-day tenure was outlived by a head of lettuce, while Boris Johnson partied at 10 Downing Street while his poor handling of Covid yielded needless deaths.

Ultimately, Starmer’s historically bad numbers stemmed from his inability to deal with the economic grievances that plagued prior governments while the Iran War made things even worse. Impatience was mounting before Starmer even took office. The frustrations that drove Brexit—from immigration to the economy—have only intensified in the decade since the referendum.

Voters took a chance on Starmer’s Labour Party for the first time since the referendum to leave the European Union (Starmer is also the first Labour premier since 2010). Ten years on, most Brits want to rejoin the EU, yet institutional hurdles stand in the way. Accession requires the Council of the EU’s unanimous approval and a years-long negotiation process. The EU has changed in the absence of its noncontiguous free-thinking former member, and the UK’s unceremonious departure complicates a smooth homecoming. Neverending debate without a clear path to accession may simply antagonize voters seeking immediate economic relief.

Meanwhile, discontent over the Labour/Conservative duopoly ultimately empowered fringe excesses. The same appetite for change that saw the Tories lose control in 2024 energized radical ideologies, expanding the two party system into a five (perhaps now even six) party contest.

Nigel Farage drove Brexit and benefited from it. His far-right Reform UK is surging in British election polls.

Reform supporters have conveniently forgotten that Farage was the original face of the Brexit movement and thus the person most responsible for the current predicament. Populist parties like Reform thrive on voters’ short memories and appetite for distraction. In this case, Reform found an easy diversion in the tried-and-true practice of scapegoating immigrants. Farage profits from sensationalist claims intended to spark outcry, like false accusations of government housing programs prioritizing immigrants. Nativist rhetoric will only get louder with images flashing across phone screens of thousands of Moroccans pouring over the Spanish border in Ceuta.

“Before long many will be crossing the English Channel,” Farage wrote on X of the people streaming into Spain’s North African exclave.

Brexit lowered immigration from EU countries, but post-Brexit immigration reforms, including relaxed restrictions on work visas, increased non-EU immigrants. The far right responded by fearmongering around assimilation concerns and the demographic “risk” to white Christians.

Starmer tried to counter Reform’s growing influence with a rightward pivot, doubling the wait for permanent settlement status, ending recruitment of overseas care workers, and declaring in a controversial speech that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers.” It’s unclear how Burnham will tackle immigration, but he has kept on Starmer’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who limited pathways to citizenship for migrants and refugees alike.

American readers might find this pattern familiar. Donald Trump was first elected president in the same year that the Brexit referendum passed, tapping into many of the same grievances as Farage: immigration, race, and economic anxiety among them. Like Britain’s hapless post-Brexit prime ministers, many of Trump’s opponents have tried to imitate the monster they’re fighting rather than offer an alternative.

With immigration a top voter concern in 2024, Kamala Harris mirrored her British counterparts by adopting a more hardline stance on the border to try to match Trump. She compromised on her previously held positions. For example, Harris was among Democrats in 2020 to advocate for decriminalizing border crossings, rendering illegal entry into the country a civil rather than criminal offense and freeing up resources while ensuring more humane treatment of migrants. Yet the vice president retreated from that opinion four years later.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

In the sole Trump-Harris debate, Harris failed to fact check her opponent when he falsely claimed that there were “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” She could’ve also pointed out that the first Trump administration deliberately separated thousands of children from their families, an inhumane policy rejected by 69% of Americans. Instead, Harris cited voting for a bipartisan border bill that Senator James Lankford called “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” The bill, if passed, would’ve restricted asylum access and staffed the southern border with 1,500 additional agents.

Trying to outflank a Trump or Farage on immigration by turning right is morally questionable and strategically unsound. When the immigration issue devolves into a competition over who is “tougher” on border security, right-wing populists, who aren’t constrained by moral or factual guardrails, tend to win out.

Instead, mainstream leaders from center-left to center-right should offer an alternative that provides for a secure border while offering humane outcomes for immigrants. If these leaders want to actually lead, they must not be afraid to set the terms of the discourse and confidently frame their arguments in an effort to sway public opinion. It takes time, discipline, and skilled messengers to alter the views of a critical mass, but difficult work must be undertaken when it comes to combating far-right demagogues. Pivoting back across the pond, we should remember that David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on Brexit was ultimately the consequence of playing on his populist opponents’ turf.

Lawmakers should start with a change in messaging that centers immigrant contributions, making it clear that immigration provides a great benefit to our society. They should confidently dispel widely circulated falsehoods that immigrants disproportionately commit crimes, drain public resources, and are a drag on the economy. James Talarico, the Democratic US Senate nominee in Texas—an R+6 state on the southern border—is leading the charge, posting on his campaign website that “our border should be like a front porch—it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door.”

On the legislative front, Congress should push to undo draconian border deterrence policies that cause needless deaths, and instead invest in hiring more immigration judges and humanitarian aid workers to expedite the asylum application process and protect human lives. Legislators should expand skills-based legal immigration and pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, starting with those who qualify under DACA, those who’ve lived in the US for 10 years or more, parents of service members, and business owners. They should resume targeted humanitarian parole programs that have historically lowered border crossings. Lastly, they should go for the root of the issue by resuming the Biden administration’s effort to provide humanitarian aid to Central American countries, disincentivizing southern border crossings through peaceful means.

The Democratic and Labour approach to dealing with the far right has been rooted in a backwards-looking politics of defense. Before Trump and Farage, perhaps it would’ve been prudent to take a page out of the opposition’s playbook if voters seem more receptive to it. That strategy isn’t viable when the opposition is unrestrained by norms and ethics. Populist, nativist rhetoric demands a confident, head-on approach.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

In June, at the G7 summit in France, President Trump said, “Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections.” America’s enemies have always said that our democracy is a sham. Now we have a president who says it, and on foreign soil.

Who needs Kremlin propaganda? And who undermines trust in American democracy more than the president himself?

Traditionally, the rigging of elections is a job for dictators and their cadres. Last week, Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile, ran an article under the following headline: “As support for Putin slips, the Kremlin lowers the ruling party’s election target amid fears a landslide victory would look suspicious.”

That headline says a lot about the nature of dictatorships.

Russia will “hold” “legislative” “elections” in September. (There will be an unusual number of quotation marks in this piece of mine.) “President” Putin does not have to “run again” until 2030. But he has done pretty well in “elections” past.

In 2000, he squeaked by with 53 percent of the “vote.” (His closest competitor got 29 percent.) Since then, his total has ranged from 64 percent to 87 percent.

Of course, it helps if your main opponents are dead. Boris Nemtsov, the valiant opposition leader, was murdered in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, another valiant one, was murdered in 2024 while in prison.

In a 1987 column, Charles Krauthammer came up with the “Tirana Index.” Named for Albania’s capital, the index holds that, in Krauthammer’s words, “repressiveness correlates with electoral success.” In 1982, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha had won by 1,627,959 votes to 1.

Why was there a need for any opposing vote at all? One vote does not make a fig leaf. Maybe a thousand votes would have been more imaginative?

François Duvalier was not a man for fig leaves. In 1957, he was elected president of Haiti. This election was less corrupt than subsequent elections would be.

In 1961, Duvalier decided to stage a referendum, asking the people whether they would like six more years of him as “president.” They answered in the affirmative—by a vote of 1,320,748 to zero.

Duvalier, humble, said, “I accept the people’s will. As a revolutionary, I have no right to disregard the will of the people.”

Not waiting for the expiration of his “term,” Duvalier staged another referendum in 1964. This time, he asked the people whether they wanted to make him “president” for life. They did—by a vote of 2.8 million to 3,234.

That’s a lot of no votes—almost amounting to a fig leaf.

In 1971, the dictator was ailing and in need of a successor. That would be Jean-Claude, his only son. But according to the Haitian constitution, you had to be 40 to be president. And Jean-Claude was 19.

Duvalier père, ever thoughtful, asked the people whether they wanted the age minimum lowered to 18. In tandem with that, he asked them whether they wanted Jean-Claude to be his successor.

Amazingly, they did, and without a fig leaf: the result was 2,391,916 to zero.

“Papa Doc” died in April 1971, and the 19-year-old “Baby Doc” took over, becoming the youngest national leader in the world. (Those interested in more on this subject may consult my book Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.)

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq in 1979. In 1995, it occurred to him to hold a referendum, ratifying his rule. Why do they do it? Why do dictators go through the charade? Their ego may demand it. Also, these charades might be the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

In 1995, 8.4 million “votes” were “cast,” and Saddam Hussein got 99.96 percent of them. Some 3,000 “votes” went the other way—same as in Haiti in 1964.

By 2002, Saddam Hussein was even more popular. He staged another referendum, this time winning 100 percent, in a 100 percent turnout—11,445,638 “votes.”

Putin is more canny than that, you see. He assigns himself more plausible, though equally fraudulent, percentages.

In Egypt, “President” Sisi had an “opponent” in the 2018 “election.” It was an interesting kind of opponent to have: the man, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, endorsed Sisi. Moussa got almost 3 percent of the vote anyway.

Back in 1996, Yasser Arafat allowed an opponent in the Palestinian Authority. She was a grandmother, Samiha Khalil, who got 11.5 percent against Arafat—which was pretty respectable, under the circumstances.

I have written in a jocular or sardonic manner about a grave and maddening subject: the faking of elections by dictators and the denial of rights to citizens.

For many years, I heard people say, “Castro is popular with his people, you know!” One answer was this: “If that’s true, why doesn’t he prove it? If he is so popular, why doesn’t he allow opposition parties? Why doesn’t he allow independent media? Why doesn’t he allow free and fair elections?”

Also: “Why does he exile, jail, maim, or murder his critics?”

In recent years, I have heard people say, “Putin is popular with his people, you know!” The same answer applies.

Let me end where I began, with the United States. On January 2, 2021, President Trump got on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia. Trump had lost the election in November 2020, and he was trying to overturn it. One state he was trying to reverse was Georgia.

Trump said to Raffensperger, “What I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes.” That is a specific, not a ballpark, number. Biden had won Georgia by 11,779. Trump was not even allowing himself a cushion.

On Thanksgiving Day, at the White House, Trump had said of Raffensperger, “He’s an enemy of the people.”

Dictators, rather than democrats, talk that way. So far, our constitutional “guardrails” have held, more or less. But whack on them long enough, and who knows?

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

Whenever I write about the far left, the comments pile on quickly. There’s always a vocal contingent of readers who seem to prefer that The Next Move shut up altogether if we’re not going to just talk about Donald Trump and how bad he is. So it was with my most recent piece on the difference between European social democrats and the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America.

And, look, we mostly talk about Donald Trump and how bad he is, because the president is the most powerful and potent threat to American democracy. Unlike the DSA, which regarded Kamala Harris and Trump as two sides of the same evil coin, I don’t play the false equivalence game. I do, however, care about strategy, and as Americans approach the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, it will exert a growing influence on the Democratic Party and reshape the electoral playing field.

Before we continue the conversation, it’s important to establish some basic facts about the DSA and the American far left generally. You can agree or disagree with my conclusions, but we need to be operating off of the same set of facts.

Here are five things you should know about the DSA:

1. We can’t ignore the DSA and its influential boosters. Comments on my last article tried to deflect from the socialist problem. One reader argued that this is all a sideshow, pointing out that the DSA has only 100,000 members.
   
   I get it. With ICE agents continuing on their unrestrained rampage and a new Watergate practically every day, self-reflection feels difficult for many in the anti-Trump camp. But blindness is a recipe for disaster.
   
   Simple statistics like the number of card-carrying members belie the DSA’s growing sway in the Democratic Party. Who is involved matters much more than how many formally pay dues to the organization.
   
   That “who” includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is likely to be a viable candidate in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of America’s largest city. This is no fringe leftist book club.
   
   Hasan Piker, the man who addressed a College Democrats National Convention (not some classroom meeting for a no-name campus chapter) dressed up as murderous dictator Mao Zedong, is also a real problem. Closing your eyes, clamping your hands over your ears, and repeating “he’s not real, he’s not real” won’t make him go away. Piker boasts millions of followers, has hosted interviews with multiple current and aspiring members of Congress, intervened in Democratic primaries for DSA candidates, and now, addressed a national gathering of young Democratic Party leaders.
   

2. The DSA’s founder, Michael Harrington, was a relative moderate compared with today’s American socialists. Harrington started DSA after breaking with other socialists who withheld support for Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Harrington favored backing a major party nominee to challenge the incumbent Republican president, Richard Nixon. In other words: a pragmatic approach to participating in American democracy.
   

3. The modern DSA refused to support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. It’s a morbid historical irony that during the 2024 presidential election, the DSA, the organization Harrington founded in the spirit of political pragmatism, refused to support Kamala Harris. On the eve of the most consequential presidential election since the Civil War, the DSA released a shameful statement casting a false equivalence between Harris and Donald Trump. As the specter of a second Trump term loomed, Zohran Mamdani, one of the most prominent DSA officeholders, encouraged voters to reject Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
   
   Despite a long list of disagreements with Harris and the Biden administration, I endorsed the vice president in my personal capacity because I recognized the threat posed by a vengeful Trump. The events of the past year and a half leave me feeling sadly vindicated in my decision. As someone who comes from a country lacking free and fair elections, I’m also angry with self-indulgent factions like the DSA that fell back on the luxury of being uncommitted.
   

4. The DSA has moved from a principled pro-democracy stand on world affairs to tankie turpitude. Today’s DSA includes explicitly communist factions. Yet Harrington rejected the brutality of Soviet and Chinese communism and his icons were real social democrats. In 1980, the DSA founder organized a conference attended by West Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and future French President Francoise Mitterand.
   
   In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins (New York’s first DSA-member to serve as mayor—not Zohran Mamdani) hosted Brandt, who was by then president of the Socialist International (an alliance of mainstream social democratic parties), at City Hall.
   
   Today’s DSA would regard those men as insufficiently socialist; in 2017 the group derided European social democrats who “sound the retreat and accommodate capitalist forces.” Instead, the group’s sympathies lie with regimes like China that Harrington rejected. The DSA rejects aid to democracies like Taiwan and Japan in the face of aggression from Beijing, while engaging in shameless victim blaming on Ukraine.
   
   As the DSA shifted, its international allegiances changed too. Most major social democratic parties—think of the factions that have governed countries like Germany, France, Sweden, the UK, and Israel—were once members of the Socialist International. In the past decade, the organization has split, with the German Social Democratic Party leading an exodus of other social democratic parties to a new Progressive Alliance to stave off the ascent of the far left.
   
   The DSA went in the other direction. DSA was a member of the Socialist International until 2017. In 2023, it joined up with another new coalition—the Progressive International, launched by Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis. It’s an explicitly anti-Western organization whose answer to the war in Ukraine was a call to dismantle NATO. As they say, tell me who your friends are.
   
   

5. I’m not the only one raising the alarm. Ten Democratic members of Congress and a number of candidates have signed a pledge, the Promise to America, declaring “we are capitalist, not socialist.”
   
   Meanwhile, prominent former members of the DSA have deserted the organization over its extremism. Several founding members quit in an open letter published in The New Republic after the DSA issued a mealy-mouthed defense of the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel.
   
   Maurice Isserman, biographer of DSA founder Michael Harrington, also left the organization after October 7. “An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians,” he wrote, “has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist.”

In his resignation from the DSA, Maurice Isserman warned of “tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members.”

Isserman was speaking about the internal politics of the DSA, but he could just as well have been speaking about what the DSA is doing to the Democratic Party. What we are witnessing is an aggressive attempt at a hostile takeover of an American institution. There is still time to stop it.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Issac Luna (Olvera) is a former US Marine Corps officer who fought for the Ukrainian military after the full-scale Russian invasion. He is the author of the book Reckoning Dreams and Fire, a memoir about his experience in Ukraine and other battles. Mr. Luna remains based in Ukraine. Follow him on X.

In March of this year, a few dozen people gathered in Moscow to protest. They weren’t speaking out against Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine; they were demonstrating against Internet restrictions in their own country. This act of self-expression was short-lived: 13 people were taken into custody

Meanwhile, for the last two weeks, in Kyiv and in every other major Ukrainian city, thousands have been protesting. Police stand nearby, calmly keeping watch. No one is arrested. In fact, many off-duty police officers are among the protesters.

Ukrainians are showing up to demonstrate against the removal of Mykhailo Fedorov, a young, reform-minded politician, from the post of minister of defense.

All of this is taking place under martial law, which grants governments expanded emergency powers needed to confront a declared threat. In Ukraine this means men aged 23 to 60 are barred from leaving the country, mass conscription, and curfews in most cities, including Kyiv. Ukrainians have endured these extraordinary restrictions for a reason: to protect their democracy. That’s why a US Marine veteran like me volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian military in the very first days of the full-scale invasion. Now Ukrainians are hitting the streets en masse for the same reason—to safeguard their freedom—and I had the privilege of joining them.

The ousted defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, is 35. A former tech entrepreneur, he’s spent nearly a decade in government, charismatic and untainted by the oligarch politics or scandals that have dogged Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration. Some protest signs even depict Fedorov as a saint, Byzantine-style.

Fedorov rose to prominence leading Ukraine’s digital transformation, moving services like passport applications, birth registrations, and marriage licenses online, providing a lifeline for millions displaced by war, and a system that cuts down on bribery by removing face-to-face contact and leaving an auditable digital trail.

Fedorov then got an unlikely promotion: minister of defense. With no military experience, and just old enough to be battalion commander, many were skeptical, myself included.

In Ukraine, many top commanders came from civilian careers, bringing ideas that often challenge the military orthodoxy. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi is one such individual: a man with a distinctively unkempt beard. He was a grain trader until 2022, but joined the military when Russia invaded. He pioneered Ukraine’s drone program and leads the equivalent of a brigade as a major. The deputy commander of Ukraine’s Air Force is a colonel with only five years of military experience. He was a TV producer before that. So the decision to put Fedorov in the top military job was less radical than in countries where business-as-usual rules apply.

Still, Fedorov’s appointment unsettled some in the traditional military establishment. He reportedly clashed with the commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, a general associated with the Soviet old guard that often favors costly conventional ground assaults.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

On paper, the Soviet-style doctrine disadvantages a smaller, less-well-equipped country like Ukraine. On the other hand—to be fair to Syrskyi—I am a NATO-trained former infantry officer, and I recognize that an old-school ground assault is often the only option.

Syrskyi pulled off incredible feats: the defense of Kyiv, the Kharkiv counteroffensive, and even an incursion into Russia. The front has been mostly stable. His imperfect approach deserves credit, but he does not enjoy the popularity and sterling reputation of Fedorov (a high bar).

During my service with the US Marine Corps, my instructors often said, “Don’t send a Marine where you can send a bullet first.”

Fedorov embraced a similar philosophy: don’t send a soldier where you can send a robot first.

With that mentality, he moved quickly, which is what the situation demanded. He coordinated with Elon Musk to block Russia’s access to Starlink. He also accelerated the deployment of cheap drones and ground robots, an asymmetric strategy that spared Ukrainian lives while killing Russians faster than Moscow could replace them. After uncovering overspending, he introduced polygraph testing for employees and implemented a more competitive and transparent procurement process.

Many credit Fedorov for turning the tide in the war. During his tenure, Ukraine recovered more land than it lost, disrupted Russian logistics in Crimea, intensified strikes against Russia’s energy infrastructure, triggering a fuel crisis, and decimated Russia’s shadow fleet in the Sea of Azov.

The pace of reforms was not fast enough for Fedorov, but it was too jarring for the establishment. Fedorov accused Syrskyi of slow rolling key reforms and urged Zelenskyy to replace him. Instead, six months into the job, President Zelenskyy fired the tech visionary and kept the military traditionalist.

The decision caused an immediate public uproar. Thousands of Ukrainians, carrying cardboard signs, marched toward the presidential complex along the well-worn path Ukrainians have used to express mass anger: in the revolutions of 2004 and 2014, and most recently in 2025, when crowds demanded the independence of anti–corruption institutions.

Many rank-and-file soldiers opposed Fedorov’s dismissal. In most countries soldiers can’t publicly protest against their chain of command. Ukraine is different because the situation here is unlike any in the world.

Many of Ukraine’s nearly one million soldiers were civilians not too long ago, and they remain engaged in issues that affect their very survival. They often show up to protests in civilian clothing. The military doesn’t try too hard to prevent it.

This was different. A Ukrainian friend, Alex, was an IT manager, until he was drafted over a year ago. He had planned to attend the protest but he heard soldiers who joined might face punishment, so he stayed home

Nevertheless, his interests were well represented. My fiancé’s sign featured a popular slogan: “I am here for those who are there [on the front].”

It is more than a slogan. I asked a young woman behind me why she had come. She opposed the president’s decision, and she was particularly motivated because her own father is fighting. It’s a strangely beautiful symbiotic relationship. The protesters were fighting for those who fight for them.

The crowds gathered daily and haven’t stopped. Their signs captured the mood: “You finally have such good cards, and you decided to play the fool.”

Another said “Help the president understand what is more effective: drones or shovels?” with a photo of Syrskyi next to a shovel.

The consensus was unambiguous: yes to Fedorov, no to Syrskyi.

I’m not Ukrainian so I’m not entitled to make demands, but I’m not indifferent to the events or its outcome.

In 2022, I left my life in the United States to fight in the Ukrainian army because I believed Ukraine deserved support as it defended its democracy against an autocratic invasion. And I’ve been inspired by their resolve since then.

Democracy is an active verb, so I came to the square to see if the country is moving in the right direction. And I am inspired once again. No one is being shot by the Ukrainian security service. No one is being arrested. In the middle of a war, under martial law, between air raid alarms, brigades of mostly young Ukrainians marched toward the president’s compound to make demands. That would not happen in Russia.

And it is working. Ukraine is no dictatorship. Its president is responsive to public demands under the most trying circumstances. After six days of the protests, Zelenskyy dismissed the unpopular general, Syrskyi. Stepping into the role of commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is Mykhailo Drapatyi, a respected 45-year-old who started this war as a battalion commander. Unlike Syrskyi, with no connection to the Soviet legacy and the old guard.

It was another massive victory for the Ukrainian people, just as they won when they protested last year to restore the independence of a government anti-corruption watchdog.

The story isn’t fully resolved, though. Fedorov hasn’t been reinstated. Zelenskyy offered him other roles, including something akin to a national security adviser post, which he reportedly declined (along with offers from Palantir and the Italian government). Negotiations continue, but Ukrainians themselves are the catalysts and the brokers of this process.

More photos from the protests:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

A small incident on July 15 relates to something bigger about where we stand—“we” meaning the United States.

The Navy’s Blue Angels conducted a flyover in Pensacola, Florida, where they are based. One pilot flew dangerously close to the beach, sending umbrellas and chairs flying.

Fox News, on its website, played the story this way: “Blue Angels thrill beachgoers with wild low flyover.” Yes, some were thrilled. Other people were maybe a little less so.

One of these was Captain Adam Bryan, the Blue Angels’ commanding officer. In an interview the day after, he said, “One of our pilots found himself over the beach, over a crowd, in an unsafe situation.”

Bryan went on to say, “We’ll have a heavy review of what happened yesterday to ensure that, one, we don’t put ourselves in unsafe situations again and, two, we learn from it.”

Captain Bryan graduated from the Naval Academy in 2005 and has been honored many times. He is clearly a professional.

The Trump administration did not sound like Bryan, at all. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, posted a picture of a flyover—if not the specific flyover in question—and said, “Carry on Patriots.”

Parnell’s boss, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, tweeted, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.” (This was a play on an old satirical line: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”)

The White House posted a Blue Angels picture and said, “It’s okay to love America.” Had anyone suggested otherwise?

Then chiming in was the acting secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao. He posted a video of the flyover and said, “That’s the sound of Freedom!” He also said, “No reprimands. No firings. No problem.”

One of the president’s sons, Eric Trump, got into the act, tweeting, “Can’t stand the manufactured outrage by the low-T mainstream media.” “Low-T” stands for “low-testosterone,” and it’s a new putdown in the MAGA vocabulary.

Outstanding in this whole affair was the pilot himself, Lieutenant Chris Houben, of Geneva, Illinois. He talked with the Florida House representative for Pensacola, Michelle Salzman, who wrote the following about him:

“He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t try to shift blame. He simply talked about the miscalculated turn, something no pilot ever wants to experience … More than anything, he talked about the weight he’s been carrying since that moment.”

Salzman continued:

“He shared that he was shaken by what happened and needed time to process it. You could see the disappointment on his face. This wasn’t someone brushing off a mistake, it was someone who holds himself to an incredibly high standard and was deeply affected by falling short of it.”

That is the kind of man we ought to want in our military.

For many years, I have had two prayers (among others) for Americans on the right: that they recover a proper sense of patriotism and that they recover a proper sense of manliness. Patriotism is not chest-thumping jingoism, and manliness is not grunting, preening machismo.

On the Fourth of July, eight Army pilots, in Apache helicopters, did a flyover of their own. This was on the South Carolina coast. Apparently, the flyover was problematic, and the Army immediately suspended the pilots, with an investigation pending.

But Hegseth tweeted, “We’ll fix this. Carry on, Patriots.” Not long after, his spokesman, Parnell, tweeted, “Effective immediately, the suspension of all involved South Carolina pilots has been lifted. Carry on Patriots.”

Parnell, unlike his boss, has no time for commas.

Still another incident had occurred in March. Apache pilots paid a visit to the home of Kid Rock, outside Nashville. He calls his home the “Southern White House.” Kid Rock is sort of an official artist of the MAGA GOP. For example, he performed at the 2024 Republican convention.

On that day in March, Kid Rock and the pilots exchanged salutes, as the helicopters hovered. On social media, the rocker posted a video of the moment, along with a statement that began, “This is a level of respect that [the] shit for brains Governor of California will never know.” (In this period, Governor Gavin Newsom and President Trump were feuding.)

The Army immediately suspended the pilots with an investigation pending. Hegseth put a quick stop to that, saying—what else?—“Carry on, patriots.”

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

A month later, Hegseth and Kid Rock took joyrides together in Apaches.

More than a few people wondered, “What if Apache pilots had hovered over the home of Bruce Springsteen, an anti-Trump rocker? Would that have been cool? Would the pilots have been ‘patriots’ then?”

Of all the institutions in America, it would be nice if our military were free of partisan and tribal politics.

I think of Ron Silver, the movie actor, who died in 2009. He was an ardent Democrat and liberal activist. At Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, in 1993, Silver saw a military flyover at the National Mall. At first, he bristled. Why should the military be involved? But then he thought, “They’re our planes now.”

He got over this. In fact, Silver became a “9/11 Democrat,” meaning a Democrat who supported President George W. Bush after the War on Terror began. Silver spoke at the Republican convention in 2004, the one that renominated Bush.

Back to this business of testosterone (I’m afraid). Last week, Secretary Hegseth posted a video of himself, which he headed “The High-T Department of War.” (The Trump administration has been styling the Department of Defense the “Department of War.”)

In the video, Hegseth said that the Pentagon would be screening servicemen for their testosterone levels.

“What is a man?” is an ancient question, and so is “What makes a soldier?” We might explore these questions at length another time. For now, I would like to recall another Trump secretary of defense, very different from Hegseth.

He was Jim Mattis, who served from 2017 to 2019. Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general. He commanded our forces in three wars. Trump was attracted to Mattis’s nickname: “Mad Dog.” But the general had another nickname: the “Warrior Monk.” Mattis is a very thoughtful, sober type.

Hopelessly at odds with Trump, Mattis resigned. Trump then pronounced him “the world’s most overrated general.”

For a time, Trump had another former Marine Corps general at his side: John F. Kelly. Kelly was first the secretary of homeland security and then the president’s chief of staff. At almost the same time as Mattis, Kelly resigned, dismayed at what he had seen.

Kelly is at the center of one of my favorite stories about patriotism. Before the confirmation hearing on Kelly’s nomination to the DHS post, a young White House aide suggested to him that he wear an American-flag lapel pin.

Bear in mind, Kelly had commanded troops in one war, Iraq, and lost a son, Robert, in another, Afghanistan.

Kelly said to the young aide, “I am the American flag.” What need had he of a pin?

Over and over, Pete Hegseth has ousted senior and experienced officers from the military—men and women who know our traditions and ethos. The most recent to go was General Chris Donahue. There must be civilian control over the military—but let it be as wise and apolitical as possible.

A politically charged military is a threat to democratic health.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Evan Gottesman is the managing editor of The Next Move and director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative.

For all of the pomp around America’s 250th birthday, the Revolution has been conspicuously absent at the movies of late. It was the Minions who dominated the box office over the Fourth of July weekend. The only film tangentially related to the founding, Angel Studios’ Young Washington (directed by Jon Erwin), finished behind both the umpteenth Despicable Me spinoff and Toy Story 5.

(You know what they say about Washington: First in war, first in peace, third on opening weekend.)

After seeing Young Washington earlier this week, I can say that I understand those numbers. It’s not that American moviegoers think that the semi-verbal jaundiced Tic Tacs Bob and Kevin are more compelling figures than the father of our nation. It’s that the only recent movie about George Washington has nothing compelling to offer.

Which is odd, because Angel is an explicitly ideological operation. Not a traditional studio, Angel is mission-driven, and its mission—in the company’s own words—is “to amplify light.” What this actually means is that its theatrical releases often carry Christian and right-wing themes.

A movie about George Washington would be the perfect vehicle for Angel to seed these ideas, putting a religious conservative message at the heart of America’s independence. But Young Washington ditches 1776 for a more obscure episode in the future first president’s life, his service in the French and Indian War some two decades earlier.

This choice of setting is Young Washington’s first problem. The French and Indian War just isn’t the kind of conflict that will have you on the edge of your seat.

Most viewers will probably have last heard about this war in middle school, if they know about it at all, so Angel offers a refresher in a series of title cards. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain and France are butting up against one another as their respective colonies encroach deeper into the New World.

Unlike the Revolution or the Civil War, this isn’t a fight over competing visions of what America should be. About a half hour into the movie, it occurred to me that I really didn’t give a shit about which of these two creaking empires got to raise a flag over some outpost in the Ohio Country. The pointlessness of the war is reinforced by the heavy use of generative AI to illustrate many of the battle scenes and establishing shots (an AI producer, AI utility, and five AI artists are named in end credits).

I believe that the last major motion picture to feature the French and Indian War was 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, with Daniel Day Lewis starring in an adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel. In that movie, the war is only a backdrop for characters who are far more engaging than the cliches and stereotypes that populate Young Washington.

In Angel’s Washington biopic, the colonists are predictably plucky. The British are out of touch and snobby. The French are even snobbier. There might be some truth to each of these characterizations, but Young Washington doesn’t go deeper than cardboard cutouts, to the point that different characters repeat the same lines of dialogue (take a shot every time someone declares that “even a pawn can defeat a king”). It gives the impression that it’s all one writer speaking through different masks rather than distinct characters to get invested in.

Angel’s politics do sneak through occasionally. There are some allusions to the almighty and faith as motivators for the characters, especially George and his widowed mother, Mary Ball Washington. In fairness, these didn’t feel terribly out of place given the period.

A few points that did feel more jarring. In one sequence, Washington proclaims a “miracle” as he and a colleague literally walk on water, striding across an icy river. Later, in a post-battle conversation, an Indian chief heavily implies that Washington enjoys divine protection. Now, there is some real history behind each of these scenes: Washington actually did walk over the frozen Allegheny in 1753. Two years later, after several very-close calls in battle with the French, Washington credited his survival to “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence.”

Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that these interactions were meant to cast the founding father-to-be as almost Christlike. I’m a liberal, atheist Jew—not exactly Angel’s target audience. It’s not for me to say that deifying an American president is un-Christian, but it certainly feels un-republican in the classical sense. Then again, our current president believes that God rescued him “for a purpose,” or at least he says so.

This isn’t to say that Young Washington is all bad. William Franklyn-Miller, who fills the title role in his debut as a lead, feels well cast to represent Washington’s famously understated presence. Andy Serkis, who portrays the overconfident British General Edward Braddock, is a lot of fun for the couple of minutes that he’s on screen. There’s the whiff of an interesting story arc here and there: Washington’s struggle to rebuild his life after his father’s death or the way that he grapples with failure on the battlefield, for example. But these threads are left underexplored in favor of more soulless, AI-infused battles.

The most interesting thing about Young Washington is Angel’s business model. In the middle of the credits, Kelsey Grammer (of Cheers fame) asks viewers to “pay it forward,” presenting a QR code inviting you to cover someone else’s ticket to Young Washington. I was shocked that the movie was still in theaters three weeks after release. Aside from myself and a friend who accompanied me, there were maybe seven or eight others in our small Manhattan theater. I say this with no cynicism at all: that’s a lot more than I expected for a weeknight showing of this kind of movie in New York City. I wondered if any of them were beneficiaries of Angel’s “pay it forward” appeal. Is there a left-of-center equivalent to this kind of brute-force messaging campaign, or have we ceded that territory too?

According to Grammer—who portrays Virginia aristocrat Lord Fairfax—the audience’s contributions will make Young Washington the number one movie in America and advance Angel’s message.

Well, young George Washington already lost the battle for number one to Buzz, Woody, and the Minions, and I’m still not sure what the message of this movie was. It’s curious that even conservative Angel Studios chose to sidestep the Revolution and the founding, the things that Washington is best known for. After 2020, there’s certainly a reluctance to glorify the Founding Fathers, especially those, like Washington, who held human beings in bondage. Yet just a decade ago, those early American leaders enjoyed a renaissance among liberals with the release of the musical Hamilton—once performed before the Obamas at the White House.

A good retelling of Washington’s life would account for the harm he inflicted on enslaved people. But Americans would also benefit from seeing Washington as the general who resigned his commission at the end of the Revolutionary War rather than reign as a military dictator. We are due for a reminder of the Washington who stepped down after two terms as president.

Rather than tell stories like these, stories that have something to say about our country—however messy and sometimes contradictory—Angel gives us a film about George Washington that somehow says nothing at all.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

A couple of years ago, the image of a speaker addressing a national Democratic Party gathering in a Zhongshan, the famous “Chairman Mao suit,” would have been the stuff of Republican fever dreams. Yet there leftist streamer Hasan Piker was, delivering a speech from the stage of the College Democrats Summer Convention while decked out like a Chinese communist functionary.

Piker regularly endorses primary candidates representing the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. He considers Mao, a dictator responsible for tens of millions of deaths, to be “one of the great leaders.”

Piker’s decidedly illiberal heroes and fashion choices clash with what many on the left desperately want to believe about the DSA. Whenever I raise concerns about the DSA, the refrain is always that these socialists simply want the generous welfare state that exists in Scandinavian social democracies like Sweden and Denmark.

At the College Democrats convention, Piker devoted far more energy to supposed internal enemies than to the existential threat of MAGA authoritarianism. “No more to the Democrats who will collaborate with the fascists,” he thundered.

Listening to Piker’s speech, I heard echoes of the interwar years, when Joseph Stalin raged that “Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” At the critical moment in the early 1930s, Moscow directed the German Communist Party to treat the Social Democrats as their primary enemies—effectively holding the door open for Adolf Hitler.

How does all of that square with the rationalizations that American socialists are just like Nordic social democrats? Tellingly, these excuses more frequently come from people who are outside of the DSA. For example, one Guardian article quotes European observers sanewashing Zohran Mamdani as “normal” by Nordic standards.

Instead of relying upon charitable third-party interpretations of what the Democratic Socialists of America is, we should again listen to the DSA themselves. The organization explicitly rejects the association with Scandinavian social democracy. A 2017 entry in the official party publication accuses social democrats of “retreat” and “eroding the very reforms they hope to preserve.”

“We need a mass socialist presence,” the text goes on to proclaim, “looking to not merely tame but overcome capitalism.”

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser podcast

The key to understanding the difference is the noun. In social democracy, the priority is democracy. Under democratic socialism, the emphasis is on socialism, with democracy reduced to a mere modifier.

Social democrats want to remediate some of the injustice and unfairness that comes with unfettered capitalism. I get it: After all, I lived through the Russia of the 1990s. Ultimately, whatever disagreements I have with social democrats, we share common ground as democrats.

The same cannot be said for many socialists.

On Monday, Nicaragua’s socialist dictator Daniel Ortega declared that his country was done with holding elections. Forever.

Unsurprisingly, the DSA’s International Committee opposes US sanctions on the Nicaraguan regime. Bernie Sanders, America’s senior DSA representative, visited Nicaragua during Ortega’s first stint as president in the 1980s. When a constituent pressed Bernie over the Sandinista leader’s piss-poor human rights record, the then-Burlington mayor had only gaslighting to offer.

A “temporary suspension of certain civil liberties” was the Vermont politician’s spin on the situation in Nicaragua circa 1985. After being ousted in 1990, Daniel Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007 and never left. How’s that for “temporary”?

There’s a reason for this dictator apologia, and it’s the same reason that Piker’s icon is Mao and not, say, Olof Palme, Sweden’s Cold War Social Democratic prime minister. Palme introduced left-wing policies at home and was one of the harshest opponents of US foreign policy of his era—but he was also a sharp critic of the Soviet Union and its communist puppets in Eastern Europe. More than that, Palme was an elected head of government, not a revolutionary militant.

Many in the Democratic Party are still pretending that the DSA is something moderate, normal—something it does not claim to be. It’s time for those Democrats to wake up and recognize that the war they’re fighting now has two fronts.

What’s happening inside the Democratic Party now will lay the groundwork for the midterms and beyond. Stay tuned: I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks and months ahead.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Sabina Cherner is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. She is a student at Tufts University, where she is studying international relations and economics.

Ariane de Gennaro is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative and an incoming JD candidate at Harvard Law School. She previously wrote for the Yale Daily News and worked in the office of Senator Mazie Hirono.

A few weeks ago, we were grabbing a burger at a popular joint when a pack of German soccer—sorry, football!—fans stumbled in. They had clearly just returned from Germany’s group-stage match against Ecuador at MetLife Stadium, still decked out in jerseys and bucket hats. After briefly conversing amongst themselves they asked what we’d recommend (the obvious answer: a double burger and the loaded, animal-style with the signature house sauce). A few bites in, one of the fans turned to his friends, still chewing, and in that thick, Central European accent declared that they simply don’t make hamburgers like this back home (which left us wondering if this German had been to Hamburg).

That’s the World Cup in miniature, and now that the tournament has closed, with Spain beating Argentina 1-0 in an exhausting extra-time final, it’s worth examining what the United States showcased to the world in the last five weeks hosting it alongside Canada and Mexico. For one summer, the US reintroduced itself to millions of people, not through fraught geopolitics, but through the spontaneous and entirely sincere America that exists between the highways and stadiums; the America of the burger spot where we encountered those curious German fans.

Videos of foreign fans marveling at free soda refills, discovering Buc-ee’s with religious awe, touring suburban Walmart’s as if they were at the Met, and road-tripping between host cities to see national parks they never knew existed. Football tourists were falling for a country that, by many surveys, they’d soured on in recent years.

In many host cities, Americans also rediscovered the wider world. In Lawrence, Kansas, the University of Kansas’ marching band rehearsed and performed Algeria’s national anthem to show their support for their temporary guests. Boston pubs experienced unprecedented beer shortages and introduced an extended “last call” curfew during the eventful, yet brief, week during which they hosted the Scottish Tartan Army. Strangers offered rides, meals, and hospitality to fans they are unlikely to cross paths with ever again.

None of these efforts were choreographed by a tourism board or a State Department strategy memo, and that’s precisely why it landed.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

It’s worth sitting with how strange this timing is: America’s reputation seemingly improving as its government tightens visa restrictions, empowers ICE agents to knock on the doors of citizens who post the “wrong” opinion online, and threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of networks who won’t air the president’s speeches. The better side of America that ultimately showed up for visiting fans from abroad persists in spite of the Trump administration’s hostile posture toward the world.

Nonetheless, the positive feedback comes as a welcome reprieve after years of the world dunking on American tourists, American politics, and American culture (or lack thereof). The World Cup, then, has been positive for international impressions of the United States—right?

Of course, it would have been impossible to avoid the uglier politics altogether. Fresh from a disruptive appearance at the NBA Finals, President Trump made a more direct intervention at the World Cup. In a knockout match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the US’s star players, striker Folarin Balogun, received a red card, resulting in his suspension from the upcoming match in the Round of 16.

The United States would have to play without one of its strongest assets—that is, until President Trump gave FIFA a call. It was unfair, he said, to suspend a player for what shouldn’t have even been a red card. Trump normally doesn’t watch much soccer, but he knows these things.

FIFA—an organization known for its corruption—lifted the suspension in response to the intervention of its powerful host.

In the end, the United States was knocked out in a humiliating 4-1 loss against Belgium. The defeat was made all the more embarrassing by the unprecedented interference in favor of the American team. The situation seemed to offset the authentic joy that fans from around the world were experiencing on the ground. Up top, America was still consumed by political overstep and dysfunction.

Ordinary Americans spent a summer proving that our country still has real, exportable decency to offer the world. They did so unscripted and mostly unaware of the public diplomacy role they were carrying out.

Our president spent the summer undercutting that positive impression. Whatever goodwill the US earned from the World Cup was earned over countless small unremarkable interactions. Whatever stains on our reputation we suffered can be attributed to a man who cannot even watch a soccer match without trying to rig it in his favor.

Fittingly, the closing image of the whole affair was Trump himself, standing on the MetLife Stadium pitch on Sunday night, handing Spain’s captain the trophy. Spanish Captain Rodri raised it, La Roja celebrated a second title, and the American president got to be the man at the front of the photo anyway. A photo that was soon posted on the FIFA official social media with Trump conveniently cropped out, and then shortly posted by the White House with the president front and center. There is a strange, almost accidental honesty to the whole scene— the country did the work, and the man at the podium still found a way to make it all about him.

Hosting a global spectacle such as the World Cup has never been proof of a healthy democracy. Strongmen have used sporting events to launder their regimes’ legitimacy for decades—Russia providing a recent example with the 2018 World Cup, held after Moscow had already annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. America showcased its more human side over the past five weeks, recouping some much-needed goodwill. Now, it’s our turn to show up as good citizens, hold our leaders accountable, and demonstrate that the best of our nation won’t be outweighed by the worst of our government.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move: