Noel King | Vox

A cautionary tale about tax cuts

2026-04-14T18:05:48-04:00

A man in Van Nuys, California, holds a sign encouraging motorist to express their anger at IRS on their final day to file 2005 income taxes on April 17, 2006. | David McNew/Getty Images

Americans are getting crankier about paying taxes.

Most people don’t enjoy paying Uncle Sam, but for much of the 2000s and 2010s, a sizable percentage of Americans thought that the amount of federal taxes they paid was “about right,” according to Gallup. But recently, the share saying their taxes were “too high” has been climbing; last year, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they pay too much.

Call it the Great American Tax Revolt, or maybe the Third American Revolution. Whatever we label this anti-tax wave, its effects are already rippling out across the country. Republicans in red states are slashing property taxes, or threatening to eliminate them entirely. Even some Democratic lawmakers are proposing massive tax cuts to be paid for with tax increases on only the very richest.

All of this reminds Isaac Martin, a professor of urban studies at University of California San Diego, of the battle over Proposition 13: a 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes statewide, setting off a chain of fiscal and social consequences that the state is still grappling with.

“I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free,” Martin told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

King and Martin talked about the history of property tax in America, the story of Prop 13, and what California’s experience suggests about where the rest of the country may be headed.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What was going on with taxes in the 1970s?

There was what we call now the property tax revolt, a major grassroots movement of protest against local property taxes. It was a nationwide thing. It happened in communities all around the US, but people really remember the events in California because Californians at that time, in 1978, amended their constitution to limit the property tax. And that tax limitation, which they called Proposition 13, then became national news and had all kinds of impacts in and outside of California.

I lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and I remember Proposition 13 being a big topic of conversation, but not everyone will know of its history. Why does Prop 13 matter? Why is it such a big deal?

Proposition 13 is a big deal for a few reasons. The first is that it very dramatically changed the state’s tax structure. It said local governments cannot levy any property tax in excess of 1 percent, so it capped the property tax rate at 1 percent.

“It’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger.”

The second and more important thing it did is it put an annual cap on the amount that the assessed value of your property for tax purposes could increase from year to year. Even if your home was appreciating in value very rapidly, as far as the local tax assessor was concerned, it wasn’t actually going up more than 2 percent per year in value. And that, among other things, constrained the finances of local governments in California.

It also gave property owners a tax break that grew over time, the longer they stayed in their homes. It was the beginning of a real cascade of similar changes to California law, including later initiatives in the 1980s that said that the tax break you have on your home because you got in early, you can pass that down to your children. You can pass that down to your grandchildren. That’s one reason why Peter Schrag, who was the [opinion] editor of the Sacramento Bee for many years, said in the 1990s, Listen, we now have a hereditary aristocracy of property in California.

The story of Proposition 13 in California matters for at least a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that it’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger. As I understand it, it’s a story of the simplest, worst solution to a real crisis.

Where did [Prop 13] come from?

First off, property taxes have always been a mess in America. Property taxation is the oldest tax we have in the United States. It predates the republic. And until the middle decades of the 20th century, the property tax was still being administered as if we were in the horse-and-buggy era.

The people who were in charge of figuring out how much your house or your business was worth for the purpose of taxing it were political animals, and they didn’t tend to have much expertise in actually appraising property. Instead, what they would do is just kind of write down from year to year, Oh, we wrote down this number for your home last year. Let’s write it down again this year.

They were giving away these kinds of informal tax breaks to people in a way that was often also very political. They might trade a low assessment for bribes. They very commonly traded low assessments for votes. And in the 1960s, led by California, many states then began to reform how they administered the property tax. They brought in computers, they professionalized assessment, and suddenly for the first time, many, many property owners, especially homeowners in the United States, started to get taxed on the actual values of their homes for the first time. And it turned out they didn’t like that.

It was a cause of an incredible freak-out — people petitioning to abolish the property tax. One of the most colorful figures in the movement was a real crank named Howard Jarvis, who was a Los Angeles entrepreneur, a kind of serial entrepreneur, who first in the late 1960s campaigned to abolish the property tax and got nowhere with it, but did get enough traction that he decided it was worth continuing to try.

He teamed up with a used car salesman named Paul Gann, and took inspiration actually from the Los Angeles property assessor, who was also arguing for property tax reforms, a guy named Phil Watson, and wrote a limitation — a state constitutional amendment to limit taxes — that became Proposition 13. They collected more signatures than any ballot initiative in the history of California. And in June 1978, a majority of the voters went for it.

Why did a majority of voters go for it? Was it hard to convince people?

Jarvis wrote later in his memoir that the best argument was simply to go up to people and say, Sign this, it will lower your property taxes.

All right, so the upshot is what exactly? What happens after voters say, Yeah, this is what we want.

Quality of services in many cases declined. It’s clear, for example, that there was a shift in fire protection away from professional fire departments and toward volunteer fire departments in some parts of the state.

It hurt the schools. School finance has continued to, of course, increase in California as it has elsewhere in the US, but California used to be at the top in terms of quality of education in primary and secondary education and in terms of school spending. And now it’s definitely not.

“The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide.”

It has hurt the quality of infrastructure — potholes in the roads, response times of first responders. It has shifted the state tax structure onto income taxes, which means that the tax system in California is really swingy — in a boom, a lot of money might flow into the state’s coffers, and in a recession, the state budget really suffers. During the financial crisis, this meant that local governments that could no longer rely on a lot of property tax revenue were especially vulnerable to bankruptcy.

It has also created all kinds of unfairness — new unfairness, rather unlike the old system. Now you might actually pay a lot more tax than somebody else in your neighborhood who has an identical home worth the same amount of money, just because they bought their home earlier than you did. And they might agree that that’s unfair, but they might not vote to change it because it’s an unfairness that allows them to stay in their home.

You’re aware that Americans are growing irritable about paying taxes, and I wonder whether you think it’s fair to look at California and see a warning about where the rest of the country might be headed?

I do. I mean, I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free. The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t operate efficiently, but it does mean that when you think about how much you’re willing to pay for them, you also have to pay attention to what you’re willing to give up.

Obama’s top Iran negotiator on Trump’s screwups

2026-04-14T15:54:49-04:00

“It’s hard to believe that someone”s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations,“ former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said on Vox’s Today, Explained. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump, in between blockading the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Strait, and curtail the country’s nuclear program.

So far, he’s been unsuccessful — and during his first term in office, he tore up the US’s previous nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015.

To find out how the US and Iran got to yes last time — and why they haven’t under Trump — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama administration team that got a nuclear deal with Iran.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do you think it would take for the US to get a new deal with Iran right now?

It depends on what the objectives are for the president and for Iran. Right now, President Trump wants to make sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they create a risk for Israel, who is our ally and all of the countries in the Gulf region.

Iran, on the other hand, has control of the Strait of Hormuz, so they’re looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment and they want to be able to continue to have relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis.

There’s a big gap and it’s curious, because the negotiation team on our side is quite small. The negotiation team on their side includes people like Abbas Araghchi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations. He’s now the foreign minister and he knows every single detail of that deal.

Back when you were negotiating with Iran, were there moments looking back when you thought, This is just not going to happen?

Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I said to my counterparts, “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters and the supreme leader at the time gave a speech and set out a whole new set of parameters that I think surprised even his foreign minister.

We had to figure out how we could get from where we were, which we thought was on our way to a deal, to now consider what the supreme leader had publicly said.

We know, in part because President Trump articulated this early and often, that there were some Americans who thought we could have gotten a better deal with Iran. What do you hear as the main complaint and what do you say to those critics?

“All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks.”

The critics say that the strongest part of the deal only lasted for 15 years. They wanted it to last forever. We argued that it gave us what is called a one-year breakout timeline so that we would have a year — if somehow we discovered Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely — to do something about it.

I think some critics wanted to go to war. They thought they could create a regime change. We constantly said to the United States Congress, if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz, it could increase the gas prices, it could take down the international economy, it could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.

Are the right people at the negotiation table?

I find it difficult to believe that Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner can be successful in two weeks. I fully suspect that the negotiations will continue beyond two weeks if they get any traction at all.

I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who has no formal role in the government, don’t have credibility with Iran because twice before when they were negotiating with Iran, we attacked.

It’s hard to believe that someone’s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations.

Is there a risk this time around that the US comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?

I think it’s very hard to be that reductive. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. They don’t have the navy they once had. They don’t have the missile programs they once had. They don’t have the nuclear programs they once had.

They can rebuild all of that and if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions relief from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But at the moment they have been set back.

The United States, in my view, has been set back. We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances. We have put Russia and China in stronger positions. We have removed oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran, already putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can prosecute their horrible and illegal war against Ukraine.

All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks. The regime in place in Iran now is more hard line than the one before, if you can believe it, and may decide it must have a nuclear weapon in order to deter future attacks.

If Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon, I can assure you many other countries, even some of our closest friends around the world, will think they need a nuclear weapon as well.

How fan fiction went mainstream

2026-04-10T17:36:07-04:00

Copies of the book Heated Rivalry on February 25, 2026. | Michael Reichel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 10 million registered users. Its users spend their time both reading and writing many, many words about their favorite fictional characters. It’s a place that allows normie readers to try out their characters in different scenarios and with different outcomes. In the last couple of years, sites like AO3 became fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who might provide them with their next big hit.

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius wrote about how fan fiction is going mainstream for the Washington Post. “Fanfic,” as it’s known to its friends, is the underpinning of smash hits from Heated Rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fanfic adherents grow up and get jobs in various roles in the mainstream, we’ll see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream.

Kurzius spoke Today, Explained host Noel King about why fan fiction is everywhere. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. For the whole interview, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is fan fiction?

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the big tent philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by preexisting works. But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics are fan fiction, right? We could think recently about Percival Everett’s James, that’s Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count?

In speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me she used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are winning awards. And so fanfic is that too. But she came around to the idea that if you define everything that way, then that’s such a broad category that it kind of loses meaning and so a more narrow version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on preexisting property that exist in the gift economy. And this is key. The idea that this is something that people are doing not to make money and in fact ought not make money doing this, that it’s just they’re doing it because it is fun or exciting or community building to do.

Where did this start?

Last century, there were people who were writing zines, for example, very popularly, Star Trek among them. But those were very specific as to one fandom. People were writing fan fiction about particular characters in one world, and that tradition passed forward to various websites and online newsletters that again, were balkanized into a particular fandom.

It was only later when we saw broader websites like, for example, fanfiction.net, that were bringing all of these different fandoms together and saying, if you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you might like Supernatural. Let’s see what these characters could do, or what happens if we put these beloved characters from different worlds together and have them meet with one another.

That brings us to the modern day with Archive of Our Own, which I would say is kind of the big powerhouse archival player these days. And certainly where I look for fanfic when I read it.

Explain what Archive of Our Own is.

Archive of Our Own is a website where people can post and read fan-created transformative works, and it is organized in such a way that it’s clear it was created by librarians, right? You can certainly search by fandom, by character. You could also search by the kind of story you want to hear, or a trope that you’re interested in. You would be amazed at just how extensive the archives are on Archive of Our Own.

You would say, even if you don’t know what any of this is, it is being mainstreamed. It has been mainstreamed into culture, now. You are actually consuming things that started out as fan fiction. What are they?

The big one, the Kahuna that became the juggernaut, would be 50 Shades of Grey, which was actually Twilight fan fiction. 50 Shades of Grey completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series. And it got publishers thinking. I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren [the pen name for co-author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings], who actually met writing Twilight fanfic, and they said that when they first spoke to people about going into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, “Don’t say a thing about fan fiction. That’s a scarlet letter.” Well, that is not true anymore.

These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco/Hermione fan fiction, or at least a prominent Draco/Hermione writer wrote a series that wasn’t exactly the fanfic, but certainly the fanfic roots were actually being advertised by the publisher as a selling point. One very famous one is The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which was originally a Rey/Kylo Ren fan fiction from Star Wars. And what is so kind of funny and meta about that is that that is now being adapted into a movie. And the male lead is actually married to the actress who played Rey in Star Wars.

If you look at genre fiction these days, publishing houses, when advertising those works, are using very similar tags to the ones that you would see on Archive of Our Own. So they are broadcasting those same tropes as saying, if you like that, you’ll find that in this book. Because they’ve realized, thanks to fan fiction, that’s how a lot of readers like to find what they’re going to read next.

Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is a decade, a decade and a half ago, fan fiction writers were writing in the first-person present tense, and it created this kind of urgency and immediate connection, but you weren’t seeing that a lot in traditional publishing. Now that has been subsumed by traditional publishing. So a lot of really popular trends, even in terms of writing, began in fan fiction. You might also see joyous queer romance was a huge part of fan fiction before traditional publishing got on board.

So it seems clear to me, based on what you’re saying, that writers of fan fiction and the work itself are being taken more seriously than they were, I don’t know, 20 years ago. Why do you think that is? Is it just because, hey, some of this writing is pretty darn good, let’s take it seriously?

I think part of it is just a broader mainstreaming of fanfic, and that people are kind of waving that fanfic flag proudly in a way that they hadn’t a decade or so ago. And if we’re understanding the structures of traditional publishing, whether it is the editors who are acquiring works or literary agents, a lot of these people are people who grew up on fan fiction, right? So they might not have the same hangups or ideas about fan fiction that previous generations had. They’re interested in it, and they see it as a legitimate form of writing.

Part of it, I think, is because traditional publishing is in, some may say, dire straits, and there’s a broader hunger for IP, intellectual property, things that have already been proven successes. And if you look at some of these fanfics on Archive of Our Own, they have millions of views. I think traditional publishing looks at this and says, “This is basically as safe a deal as we are going to get in terms of thinking that that might be able to translate into book sales.”

What I find really interesting about it is, if one of our elemental definitions of fanfic is that it exists in the gift economy, what happens when fanfic becomes a legitimate path to traditional publishing? What does that mean for fanfic as an art or as a community? And I think that that’s something that a lot of fanfic writers and readers are wrestling with right now.

Is the Iran war turning into Trump’s Iraq?

2026-04-07T14:14:40-04:00

Iranian flags are seen amongst debris at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, which was hit by US-Israeli strikes on April 7, 2026. | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

How closely does President Donald Trump’s war in Iran compare with America’s last conflict in the Middle East?

Both the Iran war and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have paired conventional American military dominance with shifting, ambiguous objectives. And both feature an American president desperate to declare the mission accomplished.

“I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu,” Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at the New Yorker who was the former Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Filkins talked to King about America’s quick conquest of Iraq in 2003, the chaos that followed, what the Iraq War did to the American psyche, and where the similarities between that war and Trump’s war in Iran end.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

President Bush claimed to have won the conflict [in Iraq]; about six weeks in, he gets on an aircraft carrier, he’s got this banner behind him that says “mission accomplished.” What was the moment for you that it became clear that the mission had not been accomplished?

It was clear the moment that the US military entered Baghdad, and it’s April 9, 2003. The chaos and the looting and the bloodshed began immediately. By the end of the day, after the US military marches triumphantly into the capital; by nighttime, the capital is on fire. And there’s total anarchy.

When President Bush flew on the aircraft carrier and said, “mission accomplished,” it was absurd then. But then of course it became a cruel joke because the anarchy that we witnessed in the capital that day just spread far and wide across the country and engulfed the country and stayed that way for a very long time.

What allowed it to keep going? The anarchy starts in Baghdad and then it spreads. And there’s a world in which the US is there. We’ve got good troops, we’ve got good weapons, and so we just win. But that’s not what happened.

The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.

The US military is really good at what they do, and what they do is destroy their enemies. But that is not enough necessarily to make a just and lasting peace that will endure and that will, say, allow the United States to leave.

“The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.”

The United States had plenty of firepower, but it wasn’t enough to hold the country together. This was a very traumatized country that had been torn apart in many different ways, including by its own government, for many, many years. And so all these things kind of spilled out in front of us.

The overwhelming fact was that the United States military, after it destroyed the government, was unable to keep order. And until you can have order, you can’t build anything that will last. And it took many, many years for the United States to figure out a way to make that happen.

By the time we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, how had the region changed? What did that war do to the Middle East?

The Iraq War was like a magnet for every lunatic — and I mean it, every lunatic — not just in the Middle East, but across the world. It was drawing people, particularly from across the Islamic world, into the country to fight the Americans. And so it became this kind of self-sustaining firestorm.

You could hear, you could see the propaganda, you could hear it on loudspeakers: Come to the fight, come and fight the Americans. And so we got ourselves into this kind of terrible situation where we saw ourselves as the saviors. But many people across the region saw us as invaders and as occupiers.

I wonder if you can reflect on what you think the Iraq War did to Americans. Because I remember the torture memos, I remember Abu Ghraib…I just remember — and again, I was young, but I remember these things where it was like, Oh shit, this is who we are now.

I would say it’s a bit of a sad ledger because I think when the Americans went in and couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, didn’t find any nuclear weapons, people felt like they’d been lied to, that the government wanted this war, that they wanted to go to war no matter what and they made up this intelligence to go in.

Whether that’s true or not, I think there was a huge sense that people felt betrayed. We kind of lost our bearings, lost our way. I think, correctly, there was a feeling like, Oh my God, we embarked on this gigantic ambitious, bloody, expensive venture, and what did we get out of this? And I think the first and foremost, for a lot of people, it was a lot of pain that we got out of it.

As you’ve told the story of the war in Iraq, I am definitely hearing parallels to the war in Iran. What do you make of the comparisons? What is appropriate and what is going too far at this moment?

I’d say any war is horrible and terrible things inevitably happen. For instance, in the Iran war, it’s pretty clear that the United States bombed a school for children and killed 150 kids or so. That kind of thing happens, and it’s not to excuse it in any way — those things are kind of terrible across the board.

But I would say there’s a sense that I have, having lived through, and seen up close, the Iraq War — that the government once again is having a hard time speaking clearly about its goals and its justifications for being there.

That’s disturbing because we live in a democracy and the government should only be able to do what it is sanctioned to do by its people. President Trump has given out so many different justifications as to why we’re there. And so in that sense, I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu.

One of the takeaways we hear is that America never learns its lesson. America is going back into the Middle East. America’s going to fight another stupid, forever war.

You clearly have a more nuanced perspective on this, and you were in the region, and that counts for a lot. What is the big lesson here for you after the last 25 years of US interference in the Middle East?

I think maybe that there isn’t a big lesson, but in the case of Iran, in the Iran war, I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I don’t like the way the war started. I’m very disturbed by it, but we’re in it and it’s too late to turn back now.

I think the best that we can hope for and that we should hope for is that we can get to a satisfactory resolution. At a minimum, I think that means for the Strait to be open so that the world economy doesn’t tumble into recession. My main hope is that we can somehow extricate ourselves from this war in a way that doesn’t leave the region in even greater chaos than what we have now.

Why Trump betrayed MAGA, according to Tucker Carlson

2026-04-02T14:52:09-04:00

Tucker Carlson attends a meeting in the East Room of the White House on January 9, 2026. | Al Drago/Getty Images

After five weeks of muddled messaging, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation on Wednesday night to make the case for his war on Iran. That message was…still muddled. He did not articulate a clear exit plan from the conflict, fobbed the Strait of Hormuz problem off on other countries, and denied that regime change was the point.

Among those making a clear case against the war is longtime Trump ally and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now hosts a mega-popular podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show.

In an interview with Today, Explained, Carlson told Vox’s Noel King that the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way. And let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I’d love to hear it.”

Carlson told Noel that he brought his argument directly to Trump, to no avail. “I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person, and made the case,” he said. “And in the end it had no effect. So I tried. But I haven’t been in touch with the president since then.”

In addition to the war, Carlson and Noel discussed the conservative moment’s Nazi problem — and how much blame he bears for it. Plus, whether he’s considering a presidential run, and why MAGA voters support the war.

You don’t think that the US should be at war with Iran. Why not?

I haven’t heard a consistent case from anyone, and I would say it’s not just the Trump administration. My strong sense, having watched it closely, is that there was not a groundswell of support for this war from within the Trump administration. The president made the decision to do it, but he wasn’t surrounded by advisers who were urging him to do it. Just the opposite. I don’t think there was any enthusiasm for it.

So why are we in this war?

He did it, as the secretary of state explained, because we were pushed into it by the Netanyahu government, by Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, to be totally clear, that’s not a way of exculpating the president. He’s the commander in chief of the US military. Trump made the decision; it was the wrong decision.

But if you’re asking why did he make that decision, it’s because he was pushed into it by Benjamin Netanyahu, which raises the second obvious question: Where did Netanyahu get the power as the prime minister of a country of 9 million to force the president of a country of 350 million to do his bidding?

I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what happened because the secretary of state said it and the speaker of the House said it, and I watched it. And what happened was the Israelis went to the White House and said, We are going to do this. We’re going to move against Iran.

At that point, the US had really only two choices. One is to follow and the other is to tell Israel no and force them not to do it, because as Marco Rubio explained on camera, if you allowed Israel to go alone, you were certain that American forces and citizens and interests in the Gulf would be destroyed.

But either way, Benjamin Netanyahu made the decision on the timing of this. That’s another way of saying he was in charge. And I’m just here to say I think it’s wrong, and I think the majority of Americans think it’s wrong.

President Trump has been talking about Iran since the late 1980s. A Guardian interview recently resurfaced from 1988, and he’s asked, “If you were a politician, what would your platform be?” He says, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.”

This sounds a lot like the way he’s talking [now] about doing a number on Kharg Island. You’re aware of that. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Can’t this war just be what he wants?

I’m not denying him agency. I stated his agency, which is a matter of fact, not opinion. He’s the commander in chief. He gives the orders. Donald Trump made the decision.

It is also true that Israel forced that decision. That’s what happened. It’s not a question of did Donald Trump hate Iran or love Iran and now hates Iran? He’s been consistent on that.

The question is whether a regime change war against a country of almost 100 million people on the Persian Gulf was a) achievable, h) a good idea for the United States, and c) a good idea for the world. And Trump has said consistently, No, it’s a terrible idea. He’s been really specific about it: Regime change war in Iran is a bad idea. So this is the change. It’s not that he woke up one morning and was mad at Iran. What do you do about it is the question.

Not long after the US took Nicolás Maduro into custody in Venezuela, you did a monologue and you said that the US, an empire, needs serious men to run it, people who are wise and understand stakes, not flighty, silly, emotionally incontinent people.

In light of the way that this war was launched, given the lack of coherent messaging as you’ve described it, the apparent lack of a plan to get out of Iran, do you think we have serious men making wise decisions in the White House?

We’re not seeing wise decisions, obviously.

I think Venezuela, I think the war in Ukraine, I think all of these build on each other, but I think that the Venezuela operation set us up for what happened in Iran. It sent the message that you can achieve regime change at almost no cost. And as we’re learning five weeks in, that’s not possible in Iran, and the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

I don’t think anyone who’s paying close attention has slept well for the last month. I would love to be able to say, Okay, we made our point and we killed their religious leader. And somehow that’s virtuous, I guess. And this is victory and we’re leaving.

As an American, I would like to see that because I want to get out of this with as little damage as possible, but I don’t see how you can do that without leaving Iran stronger than it was in real terms. They have no navy, they have no air force — okay, but they control 20 percent of the world’s energy. How does that not make them stronger than they were in February?

Who are the serious men?

You find out in moments like this. Who can think clearly, who can accept unhappy truths, digest them and make wise decisions on the basis of them or who retreats into fantasy?

Who are you seeing do that? The former. In the White House. In the administration.

I don’t know. I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person and made the case — not too different from the case I’ve just made to you. And in the end it had no effect.

I haven’t been in touch with the president since then, and so I don’t know. But I do think that there are people, I know that there are people in the White House who may disagree with me on all kinds of issues, but they want to do the best for the country. They’re not crazy. And I’m sure that they’re giving, I hope they’re giving good advice. But the question at this point is how do you get out of this?

It’s not easy. This just happened in 2003. I was there, both in Washington and in Iraq in the aftermath. And it shocks me that we are doing this thing again, particularly under a president who understood exactly what happened in 2003, campaigned all three elections against doing an Iraq War again, because it was stupid. He was the only Republican to campaign against the Iraq War. It’s why he won the nomination, in my opinion, in 2016.

It’s amazing to me that the president who knew, and said he knew again and again and again that this was wrong, that he just did the same thing.

Why people are having such strong reactions to Lindy West’s new memoir

2026-03-27T18:14:16-04:00

West performs onstage at the Larkin Comedy Club on June 4, 2017, in San Francisco, California. | FilmMagic/FilmMagic

You might remember feminist writer Lindy West from her days on X (né Twitter) yelling at sexist, anti-fat trolls. Or from her book Shrill. Now, West is back with Adult Braces, a memoir detailing her journey, a literal road trip, to accepting her husband’s request to open up their marriage. Except it wasn’t really a request, as West tells it. And this time, people across social media had very strong opinions about it.

Slate senior writer Scaachi Koul joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to talk through the internet’s reaction to West’s new book, and all that came after.

Below is an excerpt of Koul’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about Adult Braces.

It’s a very digestible book. Adult Braces is Lindy’s memoir. This is her fourth book. She’s written a lot of political polemics, social polemics, a lot of personal writing, but this is some of her most personal. It’s a memoir about her taking a cross-country road trip, but also about her reformatting her marriage and turning towards polyamory with her husband.

Why do you think [the polyamory] has got people so upset here?

I think there’s a few trains of controversy here, and some is legitimate and some is really not. So the illegitimate complaints are kind of about this narrative having to do often with Lindy’s weight. She’s fat. She writes a lot about being fat. Or some people are saying that it has a lot to do with gender. Her partner, Aham, who is her husband — Aham goes by he/him and they/them — is nonbinary. So there’s been a lot of needless jabs at this particular facet of the story.

The other side of it is that the story that Lindy tells in this memoir — and all we really have to go on is what she tells us — is pretty brutal to her. Their entry into polyamory is not necessarily honest. A lot of people have been using the word “coercive polyamory.” It’s not a term I’ve ever heard before, but the idea that you kind of tell your partner, “it’s this or nothing.”

She’s clearly a reluctant participant for the first spell of their jaunt into polyamory. They meet someone, he falls in love with her first, and then she also falls in love with this person, Roya. And now the three of them are together.

When we frame this as it was coercive, as she was talked into it. There’s an opposite side of this that says: No, Aham, her husband, was honest with her right from the beginning, and she sort of hoped that it would never come to pass.

It’s clear that he told her, A condition of our marriage will be polyamory.

I think she understood some of the risks. She’s an adult. Lindy does not want to be infantilized. She said that several times — that she had and has autonomy, and these are her decisions. I believe that they are her decisions.

I want to bring the third into this, as the marriage did: Roya. Tell me about where Lindy starts with Roya, where Lindy ends with Roya, and why you think the ending has also made people uncomfortable.

When Roya is brought into the picture, it is true that Aham had more than one other girlfriend in addition to his wife. And so Lindy is a little…I would say she was reticent to kind of learn anything about this person and was sort of like, go do what you must. Aham starts to travel to Portland once a month to spend a weekend with Roya.

He has a big medical issue come up while she’s touring, and Roya is there to help. That starts to change the nature of their dynamic. Lindy talks a lot about — Wow, is this what it’s like to get a wife? Somebody who’s so organized, who takes care of the medical details and listens to me?

Over time, they start to develop a friendship, and then their relationship turns, and it becomes romantic. It fundamentally reshapes the entire nature of their polyamory and of their marriage and of their family. And then after that, Roya, she moves into the woods with them, and that’s where she is now.

You went out to the place where the family lives now. You wrote a profile of Lindy West. When you were there, did you push her at all on the question of coercion?

She preempts that question. I think it’s something that people have already said to her. She says that that’s just not true, and I kind of understand what she’s saying, which is, How can I prove it to you other than living in this life?

But if you try to write anything to convince other people, especially when it comes to memoir, it will feel dissatisfying. And I know that intimately. There’s only so much I can do. What I can offer is a perspective and a version of events. But as soon as I cross a threshold into feeling like I’m evangelizing for something, if you don’t believe me about my own experience, then it doesn’t mean anything.

I think people look at Lindy as a one-way mirror in a lot of ways. They see themselves in her. And when she makes decisions — when anybody in that position, [whether] a celebrity, influencer, writer, [or] creative, makes decisions that their audience doesn’t like, [that audience] takes it really personally.

Lindy is someone who I think a lot of people, especially her fan base, have viewed as bombastic and confident and bawdy and fun. And [then] compare that with the version that we read in Adult Braces — who is anxious and insecure, and being harmed by this person in her life.

As the audience, your proxy is her. You feel defensive of her.

What do you think about this argument that Lindy West’s memoir about coming to polyamory is like the death of millennial feminism?

We can have feelings about anybody’s relationship as it is displayed to us. We are entitled to that, especially when we’re being offered a commodity like a book which you purchase. But one person’s personal story, discomfort, misery, contentment, fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment does not speak to the end of a social movement that was knit together over several decades, and has more to do with Lindy West’s corner of the internet.

Social movements flex. They change. I don’t think it’s the death of anything. It is just where that version of it maybe ended up.

When war becomes a meme

2026-03-25T16:18:11-04:00

A screenshot from a White House X post about the Iran war titled “Operation Epic Fury.” | White House via X/Twitter

Since the war with Iran began, the White House has been posting videos featuring the US military bombing targets in Iran, interspersed with clips from video games, sports highlights, and Hollywood movies. The White House says the videos are meant to highlight the success of the US military.

Some of the captions read like this: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” Others list goals for “Operation Epic Fury,” including: “Destroy Iran’s missile arsenal,” “Destroy their navy,” and “Ensure they NEVER get a nuclear weapon.” And ending with the words, “Locked in.”

Propaganda has always been a part of war. But it hasn’t always been this unserious.

To better understand how propaganda has been used in the past — and how the White House is using it now — we spoke with Nick Cull, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who specializes in the history of propaganda.

Below is an excerpt from Cull’s conversation with Today, Explained co-host Noel King, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full episode wherever you get podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In a time of war, what’s the objective of propaganda?

The first is to rally your own population. The second is to persuade allies that you’re doing the right thing: to make friends friendlier, to make allies more supportive, and maybe even create a few new allies. And the third is to demoralize your enemy.

Some people would call that psychological warfare: to break your enemy’s will to resist, to protect images of your strength that are so overwhelming that the enemy hastens to surrender or to compromise. And that’s also a very old element in communication in wartime.

What are some past examples of wartime propaganda in the United States?

President Wilson in the First World War spoke about a war to end all wars, a war to make the world safe for democracy. He had his 14 points for how the diplomatic scene was going to be reformed. On the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt spoke about the four freedoms and set out a whole vision for a new international order. President H.W. Bush talked about a war to protect a new order on the eve of the war with Iraq.

There’s always been a chaotic, violent kind of message around American war, and sometimes this occurs in popular culture. One example would be the song “Barbara Ann,” which was made famous by the Beach Boys. It was recorded in a parody version by a group called Vince Vance & the Valiants in 1980 and they did a version called Bomb Iran. It had lines like…

“Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, Tell the Ayatollah, “Gonna put you in a box.”

President Trump brought the song back last year and used it as the soundtrack in a White House video celebrating the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites.

Is the propaganda different this time?

What we’re seeing from the Trump White House are videos that integrate footage from video games with clips from Hollywood movies and with great declarations of kaboom. There’s even one with SpongeBob.

And all of this plays into an idea that war can be communicated through memes and clips from games. It’s a meme-ification of war, a gamification of war, an appeal to war-like images that are bizarrely taken out of context.

Who are these videos for and why would the White House not aim at the broadest part of the population?

I see these videos as having been created by young men, for young men. They’re full of references to the culture of young men, including game culture, including war-oriented video games and references that other people just wouldn’t get.

They’re articulating a visual and cultural language specific to a generation. It has a propaganda purpose, but it’s not a purpose that is focused on a wider section of the American public. And I think that the president has no interest in people who weren’t planning to vote for him.

Who benefits the most from these videos?

China, because it makes the Chinese look like the adults in the diplomatic room just by doing nothing. China will have tremendous appeal to the countries of the Global South, even to former partners of the United States in Europe who are appalled by this kind of unpredictable messaging and unpredictable behavior that goes along with it.

How Iran’s cheap drones are changing warfare

2026-03-25T13:52:27-04:00

An Iranian Shahed-136 drone is displayed at a rally in western Tehran, Iran, on February 11, 2026. | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

After more than three weeks of war in Iran, the US has destroyed major components of Iran’s military, including ballistic missile sites and much of the country’s navy.

One advantage Iran retains, though, is the Shahed-136. The Shahed, a one-way, single-use attack drone, is small, inexpensive, and highly accurate. Iranian drone attacks have led to the death of six US service members, damaged oil and natural gas facilities in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and are quickly depleting America’s interceptor stockpiles.

Michael C. Horowitz is a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He says these drones have ushered in a new era of warfare: “The way that I would think about this is just like the introduction of the machine gun at scale in World War I,” he told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Noel talks with Horowitz about what the drones can do, how the US can counter them, and what they mean for the future of warfare.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The US has done damage to Iran’s missile sites and military bases. But Iran still has cheap, easy-to-assemble drones that pose a real threat on the battlefield. Michael Horowitz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tell us about them drones!

These one-way attack drones, like the Shahed-136, are used essentially as a substitute for a cruise missile. Iran is using them to do things like target American air defense radars, which are necessary to find other drones and shoot them down. Iran is using them to target government buildings like embassies. Iran is using them to target critical infrastructure that countries in the Middle East use for oil and gas.

The thing that somebody like me worries about is that American aircraft carriers in general are extremely well protected. A drone in and of itself would never take out an American aircraft carrier. They’re just too small. But a lot of them could. And the real risk here is that suppose you fired not one, not a hundred, but 500 at an American aircraft carrier at once. Even if the US could shoot down 450 of them, that’s still a lot that are getting through it.

The scale of these one-way attack drones that you can launch generates the potential ability to not just target the kinds of infrastructure and things that we’re seeing Iran doing, but really important military targets as well, including our ships.

Iran presumably does not have an infinite number of these drones. How many do they actually have on hand?

We don’t actually know exactly how many Iran has on hand, but we know that they have thousands. We also know, for example, that Russia has the ability to produce a thousand or more every couple of weeks of their knockoff of the Shahed-136.

Iran likely has the ability to do something in that range as well. The US and Israel are obviously targeting their manufacturing capabilities, but Iran has a lot of manufacturing that’s more underground, and because you can use commercial manufacturing to build these systems, you can do that almost anywhere.

That’s one of the reasons why I have been very vocal that the United States needs to invest more in these capabilities. And why I was thrilled, frankly, in the context of this conflict, regardless of what one thinks of the conflict itself, to see the US use its first precise mass system, the LUCAS drone, against Iran.

The American military arsenal is based on quality over quantity. It’s based on having small numbers of exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce systems that are the best in the world, but they were designed to be essentially bespoke products. They were not designed for mass production. The issue is that that’s not enough anymore.

In a world that required having those expensive, exquisite systems to do things like accurately fire weapons at your adversaries, then that was a unique advantage for the United States military. But because everybody — both smaller states and militant groups — can launch more accurate precision strikes at lots of different targets, it means that just having those kinds of systems is not enough for the United States.

If Iran is firing a $35,000 Shahed-136 at the United States, and the United States is shooting it down with a weapon that costs anywhere between $1 million per shot and $4 million per shot, you do not need to be a defense planner to understand that that cost curve is in the wrong direction.

How did Iran get so well-armed?

Necessity is the mother of invention. A country like Iran has felt intense security threats in the region. In part that’s because of Iran’s own ideology: If you’re going to roll around chanting “death to America,” then you need to be prepared for the United States and the region to have some questions.

Iran fought a war against Iraq in the 1980s. Iran has been in continual tussles with various neighbors over the years. And so Iran built up a pretty extensive military arsenal. Not anywhere near as good as the United States or Israel, but Iran, in some ways because they had to, was a pioneer in developing these low-cost, long-range precise mass weapons that they then shared with Russia. And Russia’s used hundreds of thousands against the Ukrainians.

Is there a way for the US to defend against these Iranian drones without spending so much money?

The US has options. It’s just going to take some time to get there.

Another country where necessity has been the mother of invention has been Ukraine, facing down the Russian invaders now for four years. And because Ukraine is the victim of dozens to hundreds of launches of these Shaheds almost every day, Ukraine has pioneered lower-cost air defense systems using even less expensive drones, for example, to take out those $35,000 drones, or even in some cases using old World War II-style anti-aircraft guns.

If a fairly cheap unmanned drone can overwhelm a billion-dollar aircraft carrier, does the US need to start rethinking the way it fights wars?

One hundred percent. The plan to rely only on these exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce weapons is no longer going to be enough for the United States. That would especially be true in a war against the most sophisticated potential adversaries the United States could face like China or Russia.

What the United States needs to pursue is what’s called a high/low mix of forces. Some of those high-end systems like Tomahawk missiles and F-35s, things that the United States has worked on for a generation, but then also a new wave of these lower-cost systems that need to be treated not as the kind of thing you might hold onto for 50 years, but as cheaper, more disposable, and upgraded on a regular basis.

What do you think war looks like a generation from now?

The character of warfare is always in flux. The way that I would think about this is just like the introduction of the machine gun at scale in World War I. It fundamentally changed the character of warfare.

The machine gun then just became a ubiquitous weapon. Everybody had machine guns. And then in World War II it was the tank. And everywhere since then, there have been tanks.

What we are now seeing between the Russia-Ukraine war and this war with Iran is these one-way attack drones. It’s not that they’re the only things that militaries need, but these are now going to be part of the arsenal moving forward. And if you don’t have them, and if you can’t defend against them, you’re going to be in trouble.

You’re already paying for Trump’s Iran war

2026-03-10T15:17:15-04:00

The price per gallon of gas is shown on a sign at a station on March 9, 2026, in Miami. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

President Donald Trump continues to give mixed messages about the war in Iran. But what is clear is the impact that the conflict is already having on the US and global economies.

Oil prices, which briefly crested $100 a barrel on Monday, are higher than we’ve seen in years. People are already seeing the impact at the pump, with average gas prices above $3.50 per gallon. But the impact doesn’t stop there: It also means that the price of, well, everything, can go up.

Mike Bird, Wall Street editor for The Economist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that higher prices, if they endure, are likely to cause a problem for Trump and the GOP in the approaching midterm elections.

Below is an excerpt of Bird’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is the war in Iran already affecting the US economy?

Yes, is the short answer. Oil prices move very quickly to account for future conditions and current conditions, and that is fed almost immediately into gas prices. If you own a car, if you’ve been to fill it up recently, you will have noticed it was more expensive than the last time.

People who spend money on gas have less money to spend on other things. That also feeds into all manner of other things but the most visible immediate term impact is on gas prices.

Why don’t we go into all manner of other things while we’re here?

Energy’s an input good. The amount of energy you consume is mostly not in the form of gasoline. It’s embodied in products in all sorts of things that you purchase, even things that you wouldn’t consider as being energy intensive.

Agricultural goods require fertilizer, they require tractors. Everything that’s manufactured, it’s made somewhere and uses some amount of energy. So the feed-through from energy prices really hits every consumer item. Almost everything is affected by energy.

How long does it take? If I were to go to the grocery store today, am I going to find that eggs and vegetables are more expensive?

You probably wouldn’t find that immediately, if only because a lot of the supply chain activity around what you see in the store today will have begun before the attacks on Iran began.

These things feed through with a long and variable lag time. Some things will be appreciating relatively soon in the store and some things it might take months, maybe even more than a year.

“From an affordability perspective, this is now the second major supply shock caused directly by actions that the administration’s taken.”

If you imagine something like fertilizer costs, which are very closely pegged to the price of oil, [they] affect the amount of food produced in various parts of the world. You won’t start to see those lower amounts of food produced for quite a long time and the price effects won’t be seen for quite a long time.

What about the markets? The markets, fair to say, are kind of always whipsawing, but [they] always go back up, right?

Markets tend to, in the long term, go back up. It’s just whether you can see it through to the long term. There are not many extended periods — say, 10 years — in American equity market history where you weren’t looking at positive returns afterwards. There are a couple, most of them quite a long time ago.

There’s been a lot going on in markets already this year. It’s been generally down the past few days because of all of this volatility.

The bigger question is, is this something that’s going to be over by the end of the week and there’s going to be an embarrassing withdrawal and a walkback? Or is it something we’re going to be talking about in six months time?

Now we should talk about President Trump. What do we hear him saying about his war with Iran and his affordability agenda?

There’s been a lot of muddled communication from the White House over the past few days when it comes to oil prices. The president has asked investors and the American public to look through what he calls short-term effects.

One thing we did see with the tariffs last year is there is this idea that the market is a disciplining factor on the president — that basically, he doesn’t like seeing the red line go down, that there is only so much of the sort of negative press that he’s willing to put up with.

Last year, it allowed for the reduction of tariffs. The tariffs didn’t go away. Obviously the tariffs [are] still really largely in place by various means. So what that means for something as complicated as this, because it’s a military endeavor, is very unclear.

Let’s say we want to envision a world where we can get oil prices back down to where they were three weeks ago. What has to happen?

The main question in terms of how quickly things go back to normal is how long this goes on in the first place. The longer it goes on, the more difficult it becomes to get this production all going again.

You can’t just switch it on and off overnight. You don’t have all the workers required ready to go. If it does drag into weeks and months, I think it’s not a linear process. It can get worse and worse depending on how long it lasts.

How do we see the president’s critics seizing on his refusal to acknowledge that he has not provided an end in sight at this point?

From an affordability perspective, this is now the second major supply shock caused directly by actions that the administration’s taken.

In terms of the president’s opponents and critics, the most important thing to start thinking about is how much this affects the midterm elections. If you see people paying significantly more for gas, seeing prices rise across the economy as they have for the past few years, that is going to be pretty bad for the Republicans electorally.

Is Trump coming for Cuba?

2026-03-09T14:50:54-04:00

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak during a roundtable to "save college sports" in the East Room of the White House on March 6, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

We’re not even three months into 2026, and already it’s shaping up to be President Donald Trump’s year of regime change. He successfully removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, he took the US to war with Iran late last month, and now he may be eying a new target: Cuba, which he told a reporter last week is “going to fall pretty soon.”

To learn more about what could happen — and why Trump is eyeing Cuba in the first place — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with The Atlantic’s Vivian Salama, who wrote recently about the administration’s Cuba ambitions.

Do we know what the Trump administration plans to do in Cuba?

We don’t know. I don’t know if they know, to be honest with you. I think the endgame is very apparent to them, which is that they want the post-Castro regime that’s now running Cuba to go away.

This is part of the president’s grander scheme to lock down American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. He’s talked about this at great length in the last year, as have many within his administration.

It was in his national security strategy. It is at the root of so many of the policies that we’ve heard him talk about since he took office for a second time: annexing Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal, even making Canada the 51st state.

Does the president really believe that the post-Castro regime in Cuba poses a threat to American supremacy?

I think the president does believe that. I do think he has Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his shoulder, who has made that a lifelong mission of his, to see an end to [Cuba’s regime].

Obviously, Secretary Rubio is the grandson of Cuban exiles, and this is something that is deeply rooted not only in his heart, but in the hearts of so many folks from South Florida, where he comes from.

Remember, Cuba is located just 90 miles from Key West. That has been a thorn in the side, not just of this president, but of seven generations of presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike. In fact, when we talk about whether or not this is a partisan issue, it probably haunted no one more than [Democratic] President John F. Kennedy; the Bay of Pigs was a huge debacle for his administration.

So many presidents over the past 70 years have tried one way or another to bring about an end to the communist regime in Cuba, and President Trump is now on a high from his successful ousting of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and this ongoing effort to bring about an end to the Iranian regime.

Advisers are telling me that he feels like he’s on a roll. It’s working. And so Cuba is next on the list.

We are seeing in Iran the risks of destabilizing a country. Bombs are flying all over the region. Iran is a regional player, and that’s worth noting. But what are the risks that the US runs in destabilizing Cuba?

One of the primary risks of destabilizing Cuba is, of course, a refugee crisis. People could flee the country by boat, by any other kind of mode of transportation. They could try to flood the US or they could try to go elsewhere.

And the migrant crisis, as we know — as the president has reminded us over and over again — is already in a dire state. And so to add to that could really exacerbate law enforcement efforts that are taking place in Central America and in the United States. Certainly, [it could] exacerbate the strain on the southern border. And so that is something to be considered.

President Trump is talking like this is inevitable. He said, without being asked, “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon.” So the president seems like he’s saying, this is inevitable. What do you think?

It certainly feels like this could be inevitable. Advisers of his that I’ve spoken to tell me that the president feels like things are going well in terms of the US operations, but also in terms of their efforts to cut off all the lifelines to Cuba, beginning with Venezuela.

He believes that that is suffocating this regime to the point that either they will surrender, they will leave willingly because they have no other option, or the US could go in there and [take] them out and it would be a very easy, low-risk operation.

To one of your first questions: Why now? Because they believe the circumstances are ripe for regime change in Cuba. They see — between Venezuela, between the momentum that the US has had — that the time to strike is now.

Vivian, it seems like President Trump is playing a long-ish game here. What is the long-ish game he’s playing?

Ultimately, folks I speak to in the White House say that yes, they are concerned that the president’s focus on some of these overseas operations could ultimately come back to haunt Republicans who are on the ticket this November.

But at the end of the day, I think there is a sense, especially among those who are advocating for these military operations, that it’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. You get them done quickly as a one-two-three punch, and that way come summertime, the president can go out there when he’s on the trail, on the stump campaigning for some of these people on the ballot, to say, look at what Republicans have given you.

We’ve given you victory overseas. America’s safer now because we did this, and the memory of those military operations, the strain that they brought, will be behind them at that point, and they can focus on domestic issues. Whether or not that works out remains to be seen, but that is definitely the objective that they’re looking to achieve.