Latest news with #FranklinFoer
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Americans Don't Do This
Just when you think you'll never laugh again, Columbia University students pick up a new cause: free speech. Who among us wants to step on the punch line by asking questions? For example, do these newfound champions of the First Amendment really mean it, and will their next move be to champion a Zionist whose speech has been policed (probably by them) and demand that his right to free expression be upheld? Magic 8 Ball says: Don't count on it. Two kinds of speech are routinely censored on college campuses: anything that could come under the broad taxonomic category of 'hate,' and certain statements of fact that might cause pain to community members. The vague goal is a student life in which feelings of 'belonging' and 'inclusion' are extremely important, and actively fostered. Students have come to understand the college campus as a place where never is heard a discouraging word. Observers question whether these institutions are thereby inculcating fragility in their students instead of resilience. Yes and no. Protesters at Columbia certainly seem to be swayed by the notion that speech can be a form of violence. Yet they are anything but fragile. Casting an event which included the murder of children as an act of 'armed resistance' requires cool calculation. (What, exactly, was Hamas resisting in those children? ) [Franklin Foer: Columbia University's antisemitism problem] I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole 'belonging' and 'inclusion' system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year's encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.) And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed. Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don't do this. Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression. It's a sorrowful subject for me because I am an almost literal child of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which kicked off when I was 3 years old, a faculty kid among thousands of them. That movement followed an earlier struggle for free expression: the fight against an anti-Communist loyalty oath that faculty and staff were required to sign beginning in 1949. As a girl, I knew adults who had suffered the consequences of refusing to do so. One of them was the medievalist Charles Muscatine, my father's colleague in the English Department, whose previous crimes against the state included storming the beaches of Normandy. Years later, he explained why he didn't sign: 'It was a violation of academic freedom, which is the idea that in a free society, scholars and teachers are allowed to express and believe anything that they feel to be true,' he said. 'As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself, and I felt that I couldn't really justify teaching students if I weren't behaving the same way. So I simply couldn't sign the oath.' Muscatine knew he could lose his job because of it, but he was a principled man and willingly left the university after being fired. A dramatic legal battle took place, in which the cause of academic freedom was pitted against Red Scare thuggery, and in 1952, the First Amendment won big. Many fired faculty, including Muscatine, returned to the university. [Caitlin Flanagan: America's fire sale–get some free speech while you can] More than a decade later, however, a second battle at Berkeley—concerning not compelled speech but freedom of expression itself—would change the nature of campus life forever. In the fall of 1964, a group of students who had gone to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer returned to campus, eager to tell their California peers what was happening in the South. The students set up tables near Sproul Plaza—then, as now, a locus of student life. They were told to disband; political speech was not allowed. The university's intention was apparently to squash anything that might encourage racial tension, and obviously it was asserting a power it did not possess. As the students of the Free Speech Movement pointed out, the university was a public institution, and they did not forfeit their constitutional rights when they stepped onto campus. The university's administration had no honest way to resist this challenge, and the students won. I grew up the daughter of a man who, like Muscatine, had also seen combat in the Second World War, who stood firmly on the side of the Free Speech Movement, and whose belief in a university's commitment to academic freedom was absolute. I knew that the search for truth required that speech must always, always be protected, and I knew that tenure was not a sweet deal that promised a lifetime's employment, but a guarantee that no matter what political pressure was brought to bear on a scholar and his work, he would not lose his job because of it. If students and faculty cannot speak, write, and think freely, a university is an imitation of what it ought to be. One night last spring, dozens of protesters at Columbia participated in the time-honored tradition of occupying Hamilton Hall. (The question of how many of these people were actually students at Columbia and its affiliated institutions is a charged one.) Keen students of the ways of this particular form of 'resistance,' they took hostages of their own: three maintenance workers who were inside the building when the protesters entered. Two of the three men—Mario Torres and Lester Wilson—spoke on the record with The New York Times in a May 8, 2024, article. Torres was at work on the building's third floor when he heard a commotion below. He found five or six protesters blocking a staircase with chairs. Proving himself to be the single best employee of Columbia University since Lionel Trilling clapped his erasers a final time and went home for good, Torres said, 'What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?' Torres said he was told that he didn't make enough money to get involved and was offered 'a fistful of cash' to look the other way. To that Torres replied, 'I don't want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.' It was a face-off between the values of the Ivy League and those of the working class, and I know exactly where I stand on that particular matchup. In his interview with the Times, Torres, who says he was injured during the incident and bootlessly called public-safety officers for help, spoke for many of us when he said of Columbia, 'I cannot believe they let this happen.' Wilson, another maintenance worker, went down to the ground floor only to find that the main doors had been shut tight with zip ties. 'So, I begged them,' Wilson said. Eventually someone cut the ties and allowed him to leave (the other two men were allowed to leave soon after that). When a maintenance worker has to beg for his freedom, his fate in the hands of people whose messes he literally has to clean up, you have to wonder if these people are on the right side of anything at all. In their complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently opened an investigation into their claims, Torres and Wilson report something we have not heard before: that long before the spring of 2024, they had been repeatedly ordered to erase swastikas off Columbia University chalkboards. I am not inclined to disbelieve the testimony of these two hardworking men. To believe in free speech means that you support the cause even when the speech in question is repugnant to you. In a perverse way, you almost run to those cases; it's how you keep clean accounts with yourself. For this reason, I am on Mahmoud Khalil's side. [Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil's detention is a trial run] To the degree that any layperson can understand the range of legal issues undergirding his case—which include a law from the anti-Communist 1950s and the apparently undecided issue of the extent to which a noncitizen has First Amendment rights—what is clear is that the government's desire to deport Khalil is largely related to the nature of his political speech. A two-page memo about Khalil by Secretary of State Marco Rubio released earlier this month does not allege any criminal activity. Yet Khalil's position that a genocide is occurring in Gaza is exactly the kind of potentially offensive but protected speech America was designed to tolerate. Our country has had a legally enforceable right to free speech since the 18th century, and we did not become great in spite of it. We are the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky. If America is folding up its tent, as it perhaps seems to be doing, hold your head high. Once you were part of the greatest idea in the history of the world. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Americans Don't Do This
Just when you think you'll never laugh again, Columbia University students pick up a new cause: free speech. Who among us wants to step on the punch line by asking questions? For example, do these newfound champions of the First Amendment really mean it, and will their next move be to champion a Zionist whose speech has been policed (probably by them) and demand that his right to free expression be upheld? Magic 8 Ball says: Don't count on it. Two kinds of speech are routinely censored on college campuses: anything that could come under the broad taxonomic category of 'hate,' and certain statements of fact that might cause pain to community members. The vague goal is a student life in which feelings of 'belonging' and 'inclusion' are extremely important, and actively fostered. Students have come to understand the college campus as a place where never is heard a discouraging word. Observers question whether these institutions are thereby inculcating fragility in their students instead of resilience. Yes and no. Protesters at Columbia certainly seem to be swayed by the notion that speech can be a form of violence. Yet they are anything but fragile. Casting an event which included the murder of children as an act of 'armed resistance' requires cool calculation. (What, exactly, was Hamas resisting in those children? ) Franklin Foer: Columbia University's antisemitism problem I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole 'belonging' and 'inclusion' system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year's encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.) And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed. Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don't do this. Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression. It's a sorrowful subject for me because I am an almost literal child of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which kicked off when I was 3 years old, a faculty kid among thousands of them. That movement followed an earlier struggle for free expression: the fight against an anti-Communist loyalty oath that faculty and staff were required to sign beginning in 1949. As a girl, I knew adults who had suffered the consequences of refusing to do so. One of them was the medievalist Charles Muscatine, my father's colleague in the English Department, whose previous crimes against the state included storming the beaches of Normandy. Years later, he explained why he didn't sign: 'It was a violation of academic freedom, which is the idea that in a free society, scholars and teachers are allowed to express and believe anything that they feel to be true,' he said. 'As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself, and I felt that I couldn't really justify teaching students if I weren't behaving the same way. So I simply couldn't sign the oath.' Muscatine knew he could lose his job because of it, but he was a principled man and willingly left the university after being fired. A dramatic legal battle took place, in which the cause of academic freedom was pitted against Red Scare thuggery, and in 1952, the First Amendment won big. Many fired faculty, including Muscatine, returned to the university. Caitlin Flanagan: America's fire sale–get some free speech while you can More than a decade later, however, a second battle at Berkeley—concerning not compelled speech but freedom of expression itself—would change the nature of campus life forever. In the fall of 1964, a group of students who had gone to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer returned to campus, eager to tell their California peers what was happening in the South. The students set up tables near Sproul Plaza—then, as now, a locus of student life. They were told to disband; political speech was not allowed. The university's intention was apparently to squash anything that might encourage racial tension, and obviously it was asserting a power it did not possess. As the students of the Free Speech Movement pointed out, the university was a public institution, and they did not forfeit their constitutional rights when they stepped onto campus. The university's administration had no honest way to resist this challenge, and the students won. I grew up the daughter of a man who, like Muscatine, had also seen combat in the Second World War, who stood firmly on the side of the Free Speech Movement, and whose belief in a university's commitment to academic freedom was absolute. I knew that the search for truth required that speech must always, always be protected, and I knew that tenure was not a sweet deal that promised a lifetime's employment, but a guarantee that no matter what political pressure was brought to bear on a scholar and his work, he would not lose his job because of it. If students and faculty cannot speak, write, and think freely, a university is an imitation of what it ought to be. One night last spring, dozens of protesters at Columbia participated in the time-honored tradition of occupying Hamilton Hall. (The question of how many of these people were actually students at Columbia and its affiliated institutions is a charged one.) Keen students of the ways of this particular form of 'resistance,' they took hostages of their own: three maintenance workers who were inside the building when the protesters entered. Two of the three men—Mario Torres and Lester Wilson—spoke on the record with The New York Times in a May 8, 2024, article. Torres was at work on the building's third floor when he heard a commotion below. He found five or six protesters blocking a staircase with chairs. Proving himself to be the single best employee of Columbia University since Lionel Trilling clapped his erasers a final time and went home for good, Torres said, 'What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?' Torres said he was told that he didn't make enough money to get involved and was offered 'a fistful of cash' to look the other way. To that Torres replied, 'I don't want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.' It was a face-off between the values of the Ivy League and those of the working class, and I know exactly where I stand on that particular matchup. In his interview with the Times, Torres, who says he was injured during the incident and bootlessly called public-safety officers for help, spoke for many of us when he said of Columbia, 'I cannot believe they let this happen.' Wilson, another maintenance worker, went down to the ground floor only to find that the main doors had been shut tight with zip ties. 'So, I begged them,' Wilson said. Eventually someone cut the ties and allowed him to leave (the other two men were allowed to leave soon after that). When a maintenance worker has to beg for his freedom, his fate in the hands of people whose messes he literally has to clean up, you have to wonder if these people are on the right side of anything at all. In their complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently opened an investigation into their claims, Torres and Wilson report something we have not heard before: that long before the spring of 2024, they had been repeatedly ordered to erase swastikas off Columbia University chalkboards. I am not inclined to disbelieve the testimony of these two hardworking men. To believe in free speech means that you support the cause even when the speech in question is repugnant to you. In a perverse way, you almost run to those cases; it's how you keep clean accounts with yourself. For this reason, I am on Mahmoud Khalil's side. Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil's detention is a trial run To the degree that any layperson can understand the range of legal issues undergirding his case—which include a law from the anti-Communist 1950s and the apparently undecided issue of the extent to which a noncitizen has First Amendment rights—what is clear is that the government's desire to deport Khalil is largely related to the nature of his political speech. A two-page memo about Khalil by Secretary of State Marco Rubio released earlier this month does not allege any criminal activity. Yet Khalil's position that a genocide is occurring in Gaza is exactly the kind of potentially offensive but protected speech America was designed to tolerate. Our country has had a legally enforceable right to free speech since the 18th century, and we did not become great in spite of it. We are the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky. If America is folding up its tent, as it perhaps seems to be doing, hold your head high. Once you were part of the greatest idea in the history of the world.
CBC
07-03-2025
- Politics
- CBC
What happened to 'The Resistance'?
Donald Trump's first four years in office were met with protest and obstruction — a popular movement which came to be known as 'The Resistance.' It featured a coalition that included members of the media, establishment Republicans, figures on the left, celebrities and business leaders. Forty days into his second term, many are wondering: what happened to 'The Resistance.' Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and joins us to discuss 'Resistance Fatigue,' the Trump administration's plan to overwhelm the attention of the public, and whether people are, today, too overburdened to care. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: Subscribe to Front Burner on your favourite podcast app. Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on YouTube
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump: A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When the Panama Canal was unveiled by the United States in 1914, the roughly 50-mile-long waterway symbolized American power and technological advancement. But the glow of progress soon faded. Building the canal killed roughly 5,600 workers over a decade, and many historians think that the death toll was higher. 'Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back,' my colleague Franklin Foer wrote last week. The 1964 anti-American riots in Panama revealed that 'the anger over America's presence would never subside.' The 1977 U.S.-Panama treaties signed by President Jimmy Carter relinquished control of the canal to Panama and established the passageway's neutrality. This move sowed discord in the Republican Party, the rumblings of which are most clearly felt in President Donald Trump's recent pledge to retake the canal. I spoke with Franklin about why Trump is fixated on this waterway, and what his preoccupation reveals about his vision for American expansionism. Stephanie Bai: In Donald Trump's inauguration speech, and even before he assumed office, he promised to retake the Panama Canal. Is this an issue that Americans care about? Franklin Foer: Until Trump started talking about it, the Panama Canal hardly ranked on the list of the top 500 strategic threats to America. Best I can tell, there were some toll increases, and the Chinese have started to pay greater interest to the canal over time. But there's zero national-security reason for the United States to deploy its prestige and military might to take back the canal. When it comes to his domestic audience, I think what Trump is betting on is a rising sense of nationalism that he can tap into. And I think by framing the canal as a lost fragment of the American empire and implying that it's rightfully ours, he's betting that it will be a piece of the broader 'Make America great again' sentiment that he coasts on. Stephanie: You wrote in your recent story that 'reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.' Why is it important to that faction of the country? Franklin: Many countries failed to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so America's success was seen as a feat of engineering—at least, Americans viewed it that way for much of the 20th century. But its construction exacted an enormous human toll; thousands of workers died. And by the 1960s, most American presidents pretty clearly realized that the canal generated so much resentment toward the United States that keeping it didn't make sense. But you also had a large sector of the American right that felt like we were abandoning our empire. And so Ronald Reagan, when he ran for president in 1976, made reclaiming the Panama Canal one of his central slogans. The issue was something that the insurgent New Right movement, a rising force in American politics, exploited mercilessly in order to raise money and garner enthusiasm. Stephanie: Trump's grievances include his claim that the canal's neutrality has been violated because it's under the control of China. Franklin: China likes to involve itself in the operation of infrastructure, and it has lots of global trading routes that it aims to control and exert influence over. There is a new Chinese presence in the canal, but that doesn't mean that they're about to take it over. One of the things that's ludicrously self-defeating about Trump's strategy within the hemisphere is that he's deliberately aggravating countries that could conceivably be thrown into the arms of China. So Panama may not want to enter into any sort of alliance with the Chinese, but because Trump is threatening military action against it, the country may decide that aligning more closely with China is in its interest. Stephanie: In response to Trump's inauguration speech, Panama President José Raúl Mulino said that 'the canal is and will remain Panama's.' As you noted, Trump has already floated the idea of using military force to retake the canal. Do you think this could actually come to pass? Franklin: I think Trump is testing limits to see what he can get. I would be surprised if he was asking the Pentagon to draw up plans right now to retake the Panama Canal. But the problem is: Once he goes down this road of threatening to use military force to take something back, what happens when Panama doesn't give it back? I don't think there's an extremely high chance that we will go to war to take back the canal. But I think there's at least some possibility that we're going down that road. Stephanie: American expansionism seems to be top of mind for Trump. He talked about his 'manifest destiny' vision in his inauguration speech, and he has repeatedly spoken about annexing Greenland and Canada in addition to taking back the Panama Canal. Franklin: The fact that he's using the term manifest destiny, which is a callback to American expansion in the West in the 1840s and 1850s, shows that this is not a departure from American history but a return to the American history of imperialism. This is a big shift in the way that America now thinks of its role in the world. I think for Trump, who is a real-estate guy, acquiring real estate is a token of his greatness. He looks at Vladimir Putin and sees the way in which Putin has projected his power to expand his territory with Ukraine and thinks, Well, that's what powerful leaders and powerful nations do. And here he is starting to explore that possibility himself. Related: Emperor Trump's new map The political logic of Trump's international threats Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Europe's Elon Musk problem Trump can't escape the laws of political gravity. Greenland's prime minister wants the nightmare to end. Beware the weepy influencers. Today's News Trump is expected to sign executive orders that would ban transgender people from the military, reinstate troops who were discharged for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and remove the military's DEI programs. Colombia reached an agreement to accept the flights of deported migrants from the U.S. after Trump made threats that included steep tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian citizens. U.S. markets fell today after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek's latest cutting-edge chatbot app shot up in popularity over the weekend. Dispatches The Wonder Reader: Dinner is whatever you want it to be, and that fact can be overwhelming or freeing, Isabel Fattal writes. Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read The Worst Page on the Internet By Yair Rosenberg The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to 'Click me.' When they do, the game commences. The player's score, or 'stimulation,' appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines ('Child Star Steals Hearts, Faces Prison'), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic RFK Jr. is an excellent conspiracy theorist, Benjamin Mazer writes. The border got quieter, so Trump had to act. Tom Nichols: 'America is now counting on you, Pete Hegseth.' The chaos in higher ed is only getting started. Culture Break Examine. Starbucks' most beloved offering—free bathrooms—is disappearing, Ellen Cushing writes. And it reflects a tragedy of American life. Watch. Presence (out now in theaters) is a horror movie that locks its monster—and the viewer—behind the camera, David Sims writes. Play our daily crossword. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-01-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump: A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When the Panama Canal was unveiled by the United States in 1914, the roughly 50-mile-long waterway symbolized American power and technological advancement. But the glow of progress soon faded. Building the canal killed roughly 5,600 workers over a decade, and many historians think that the death toll was higher. 'Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back,' my colleague Franklin Foer wrote last week. The 1964 anti-American riots in Panama revealed that 'the anger over America's presence would never subside.' The 1977 U.S.-Panama treaties signed by President Jimmy Carter relinquished control of the canal to Panama and established the passageway's neutrality. This move sowed discord in the Republican Party, the rumblings of which are most clearly felt in President Donald Trump's recent pledge to retake the canal. I spoke with Franklin about why Trump is fixated on this waterway, and what his preoccupation reveals about his vision for American expansionism. Stephanie Bai: In Donald Trump's inauguration speech, and even before he assumed office, he promised to retake the Panama Canal. Is this an issue that Americans care about? Franklin Foer: Until Trump started talking about it, the Panama Canal hardly ranked on the list of the top 500 strategic threats to America. Best I can tell, there were some toll increases, and the Chinese have started to pay greater interest to the canal over time. But there's zero national-security reason for the United States to deploy its prestige and military might to take back the canal. When it comes to his domestic audience, I think what Trump is betting on is a rising sense of nationalism that he can tap into. And I think by framing the canal as a lost fragment of the American empire and implying that it's rightfully ours, he's betting that it will be a piece of the broader 'Make America great again' sentiment that he coasts on. Stephanie: You wrote in your recent story that 'reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.' Why is it important to that faction of the country? Franklin: Many countries failed to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, so America's success was seen as a feat of engineering—at least, Americans viewed it that way for much of the 20th century. But its construction exacted an enormous human toll; thousands of workers died. And by the 1960s, most American presidents pretty clearly realized that the canal generated so much resentment toward the United States that keeping it didn't make sense. But you also had a large sector of the American right that felt like we were abandoning our empire. And so Ronald Reagan, when he ran for president in 1976, made reclaiming the Panama Canal one of his central slogans. The issue was something that the insurgent New Right movement, a rising force in American politics, exploited mercilessly in order to raise money and garner enthusiasm. Stephanie: Trump's grievances include his claim that the canal's neutrality has been violated because it's under the control of China. Franklin: China likes to involve itself in the operation of infrastructure, and it has lots of global trading routes that it aims to control and exert influence over. There is a new Chinese presence in the canal, but that doesn't mean that they're about to take it over. One of the things that's ludicrously self-defeating about Trump's strategy within the hemisphere is that he's deliberately aggravating countries that could conceivably be thrown into the arms of China. So Panama may not want to enter into any sort of alliance with the Chinese, but because Trump is threatening military action against it, the country may decide that aligning more closely with China is in its interest. Stephanie: In response to Trump's inauguration speech, Panama President José Raúl Mulino said that ' the canal is and will remain Panama's.' As you noted, Trump has already floated the idea of using military force to retake the canal. Do you think this could actually come to pass? Franklin: I think Trump is testing limits to see what he can get. I would be surprised if he was asking the Pentagon to draw up plans right now to retake the Panama Canal. But the problem is: Once he goes down this road of threatening to use military force to take something back, what happens when Panama doesn't give it back? I don't think there's an extremely high chance that we will go to war to take back the canal. But I think there's at least some possibility that we're going down that road. Stephanie: American expansionism seems to be top of mind for Trump. He talked about his 'manifest destiny' vision in his inauguration speech, and he has repeatedly spoken about annexing Greenland and Canada in addition to taking back the Panama Canal. Franklin: The fact that he's using the term manifest destiny, which is a callback to American expansion in the West in the 1840s and 1850s, shows that this is not a departure from American history but a return to the American history of imperialism. This is a big shift in the way that America now thinks of its role in the world. I think for Trump, who is a real-estate guy, acquiring real estate is a token of his greatness. He looks at Vladimir Putin and sees the way in which Putin has projected his power to expand his territory with Ukraine and thinks, Well, that's what powerful leaders and powerful nations do. And here he is starting to explore that possibility himself. Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News Trump is expected to sign executive orders that would ban transgender people from the military, reinstate troops who were discharged for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and remove the military's DEI programs. Colombia reached an agreement to accept the flights of deported migrants from the U.S. after Trump made threats that included steep tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian citizens. U.S. markets fell today after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek's latest cutting-edge chatbot app shot up in popularity over the weekend. Dispatches Evening Read The Worst Page on the Internet By Yair Rosenberg The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to 'Click me.' When they do, the game commences. The player's score, or 'stimulation,' appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines ('Child Star Steals Hearts, Faces Prison'), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features. Culture Break Examine. Starbucks' most beloved offering— free bathrooms —is disappearing, Ellen Cushing writes. And it reflects a tragedy of American life. Watch. Presence behind the camera, David Sims writes.
