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Atlantic
4 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Mossad's Former Chief Calls the War in Gaza ‘Useless'
In John le Carré novels, the spies often lie and keep secrets even when they don't have to, because it's a 'mentality,' le Carré once explained, a way of living 'you never shed.' So it was notable when 250 veteran Israeli intelligence officers recently signed their names to an open letter demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throw away his plans to escalate the war on Gaza. The war, they wrote, 'doesn't contribute to any of the declared objectives, and will lead to the death of hostages, soldiers and innocents.' At least six other similar petitions have circulated, signed by reservists, retired officers, and veterans from various branches of the Israeli military. 'That's the first time that's happened in Israel,' says Tamir Pardo, our guest on Radio Atlantic this week and one of three former Mossad directors who signed the open letter. After my interview with Pardo, in Tel Aviv, he asked me to emphasize one thing: His position on the war does not make him a 'leftist,' he said. And I could see his point all around me in Tel Aviv, where opposition to the war has spread far beyond the Israeli left, and far beyond the families of the remaining Israeli hostages. In a recent poll, 70 percent of Israelis said they don't trust the government, and about the same portion said they want a deal with Hamas to return the hostages and end the war—something the government has resisted even in this latest round of cease-fire talks. The protests are not, for the most part, focused on the suffering of Gazans, as protests are in other parts of the world. They're primarily about returning the hostages. But Pardo and others made clear to me that they believe the war is not serving Israel in any way. They want it to end. The latest cease-fire proposal includes an exchange of hostages, living and dead, for Palestinian prisoners. Israel has promised a temporary cessation of fighting but, as of yet, no commitment to end the war. In this episode, Pardo, with his decades of experience fighting terrorism, explains his perspective on how the war unfolded, what went wrong, and what should happen now. [ Music ] News clip: It's been 100 days since the attack by Hamas in southern Israel. News clip: — 100 days of grief and protests— News clip: Israel and Hamas have been at war for six months. News clip: It's been exactly a year— News clip: One year after the horror— News clip: It's been nearly 600 days since Israel's war on Gaza began. News clip: — 600 days since Hamas militants staged their murderous attack on October 7. Six hundred days, and they are still holding 58 Israeli hostages. Hanna Rosin: The war continues day after day, month after month. Now over a year and half old, though, it feels like it's at a new breaking point. News clip: In Gaza, concerns of famine grow, which is why chaos broke out at the opening of an aid-distribution site in Gaza that's run by a U.S.-backed group. News clip: Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies to Gaza on March 2. Rosin: This week, there's a temporary cease-fire proposal on the table. The potential deal involves releasing 10 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of 18 dead. News clip: Hamas did not explicitly accept or reject the offer, but it said it was prepared to release 10 living Israeli hostages and 18 dead ones in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners. Rosin: Israel has already agreed to it, and Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Hamas that it must agree or, quote, 'be annihilated.' But Hamas leaders are so far hesitating. The main sticking point is the same sticking point as always: Hamas doesn't want a 30-day or 60-day or a 90-day cease-fire. They want a promise of an end to the war. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And that's a question a lot of people have. When will the war end? What will it take? And what happens to Gaza when it does? [ Music ] Rosin: I happened to be in Tel Aviv visiting a sick relative when news came out about this latest cease-fire proposal. I haven't been here since October 7, and when I arrived, I was struck by one obvious thing: In the U.S. papers, I read about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is or isn't doing, or what other officials in the Israeli government are saying about the war. In Tel Aviv, what the government wants or says seems irrelevant, or at least totally drowned out by what the people want. The gap between the government and the people seems enormous. The country feels like it's choking on despair and frustration with its own government and the lack of an end to this war. To be clear, what drives the protests here is different than in the U.S. Protesters only rarely hold up pictures of, say, children killed in Gaza. Mostly, they spotlight the hostages and the government's betrayal in leaving them there. And I didn't have to go far to see this discontent. My plane landed, and the flight attendant, in a smooth flight-attendant voice, said, ' Tachzir otom abayita achshav ' ('Bring them home now'). And then the plane burst into applause. I went to an ATM machine at the airport, and as my money shuffled out, an automated voice said: 'Bring them home safely.' I arrived at my aunt's apartment building, and a big sticker covered the entryway: netanyahu is dangerous. Her street has been renamed by another sticker: netanyahu traitor street. I happened to arrive at the end of May, on the 600th day of the war. I was taking a bus that day, and the driver stopped in the middle of the road and said, 'Sorry. Can't move. Everyone, get off,' because the streets were clogged with hundreds of protesters, most of them wearing shirts that, in large block letters in English, said N-O-W. 'Now,' as in: Bring back the hostages now. But also end this war. Now. Rosin: 'Six hundred days of darkness,' he says. 'Six hundred days, and there is no light at the end of this war.' Protester: (Shout in Hebrew.) Rosin: 'Enough of this war,' someone shouts in the background. Protester: (Speech in Hebrew.) Rosin: 'How long will we live in a country that's at war?' Protester: Bring all of them back now. Protesters: Now! Protesters: (Chanting.) Bring them home. Rosin: So those are the streets. And there's one more thing boiling over, something fairly new in Israeli society, which makes this anger at Netanyahu and the war seem wider than usual. It's coming from the military itself. Veterans of the Israeli Defense Force, pilots, medics, military leaders en masse from everywhere have been asking Netanyahu to stop the war. In April, more than 250 veterans of the Mossad, Israel's equivalent of the CIA, signed an open letter asking Netanyahu to bring the hostages home, even if that means ending the war. Spies don't usually sign open anything. This letter included three former Mossad chiefs. And while I was in Israel, I sat down with one of them. Tamir Pardo: We are already 600 days after October 7. And we have five divisions deployed in Gaza. And I don't see an end to that war. It is useless. It's accomplishing nothing. Nothing. I'm not talking about those people who are living or dying in Gaza. I'm talking about Israel. From Israel's point of view, it's a waste of time. What we're doing—waste of lives, waste of money, wasting the future. Rosin: This is Tamir Pardo. He's 72 and retired now, but he spent his life in the Mossad, which he ran between 2011 and 2016. He was running the agency when it began placing booby-trapped walkie-talkies into Lebanon, and reportedly planned a string of high-profile assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. In other words, he spent his life fighting against terrorism, exactly what Netanyahu's government claims to be doing in Gaza. In theory, he very much believes in the mission. Pardo: The responsibility of the Mossad is to avoid our enemies [obtaining] nuclear weapons, whoever they are, wherever they are. My responsibility was to stop any terrorist attempt against Israelis that are outside the state of Israel, or from terrorists that are trying to hit us from abroad. Rosin: That description, vague as it is, cements a certain image of deterring terrorism, but not endless fighting. One thing Pardo said to me over and over again is something he thinks Netanyahu has forgotten: War is not the endgame. Pardo: At the end of the day, when I'm thinking about my children, my grandchildren, I would like that they're going to live in a safe country, but in a peaceful country. And in order to achieve peace, from time to time, you have to use your sword. But I don't think that you can solve the problem with your sword. What's happening here now in Israel, it's insane. Rosin: The exact meaning of insanity changes depending on who you ask. For many in the international community, even longtime allies of Israel, it's the situation on the ground in Gaza: the killing of civilians, the failure to deliver aid, the widespread starvation of innocent people. For many in Israel, it's the hostages. A promise between Israeli citizens and their government has always been that they will keep them safe, and if one of them should end up in danger, the government would rescue them. Six hundred days has crushed that promise. For Pardo, it's practical: War requires a goal. And Pardo doesn't believe Netanyahu's stated goal of destroying Hamas is a realistic one, certainly not if you also want to bring the hostages home. Rosin: So today is the 600th day that the hostages are held. There's protests everywhere. I was surprised when I got here. In Tel Aviv, all the streets, they've been renamed Netanyahu Is a Traitor Street. You know, there are posters everywhere. It's a very common position here to criticize Netanyahu. Why aren't the hostages home, in your opinion? Whose fault is that? Pardo: Our fault, Israel's fault. On October 8, it was 24 hours after October 7, and I said to my friends within the old boys' club, 'Mossad: Bring the hostages home now. Don't start a war. Negotiate and bring the 251 hostages home now. Then solve the problem.' That was the biggest mistake of the state of Israel, because those hostages should have been released weeks after. You cannot defeat Hamas and bring the hostages back at the same—the same priority. You have to choose. And our government preferred to kill than to bring the hostages. Rosin: Now, as someone whose job it was to fight terrorists, why is it so clear to you that the first priority shouldn't have been to fight the terrorists? Pardo: Because those people—children, women, civilian, and soldiers as well—were kidnapped because of our fault as a state. The armed forces in every country [are] responsible for the safety of those civilians who are living in the country. And this war, the result of October 7 was because our armed forces, they failed to do it. Now bring them back, and then punish those who did it. And I'm saying punishing, not revenge—different. Rosin: What's the difference? Pardo: I don't believe in revenge. You have to punish, and you have to find out and kill all those who did what they did on October 7. Okay? Full stop. You don't have to destroy Gaza, because it's meaningless. I think that we are creating—in the last 20 months, we are creating more problems [than] we are solving, at the end of the day. Yes, okay, we killed 70 or 90 percent of those, let's say, terrorists that are living in Gaza, but we killed many more civilians. And the day after, when we'll see that day after starts, we are going to have a very big problem there in Gaza. Because I think that when you are gonna have 2.1 million people that don't have no housing, no job, no water, no electricity, no health-care system, we will have to solve the problem. No one else will have to solve it. We will. And then we are creating such a problem that I don't know how we will be able to solve it. I'm not expecting, let's say, Americans to solve the problem. I'm not expecting Egyptians to solve the problem. We are there, so we'll have to solve the problem. Rosin: And you created the problem. Pardo: And we created the problem. Rosin: So recently, you signed an open letter saying: 'End the war in Gaza,' as did hundreds of other Mossad, Shin Bet, generals. Have you seen that level of open protest before? I mean, does something feel different about that to you? Pardo: Yeah. That's the first time that it happened in Israel. Rosin: First time that what—what exactly? Pardo: That so many veterans, with their experience, are watching what's happening here in Israel, and there is an understanding that we are taking the wrong path. We are creating damage, a huge damage, to the state of Israel, okay? By what we're doing, we are accomplishing nothing. [ Music ] Rosin: After the break. Pardo explains what he thinks is the real reason Netanyahu is staying in this war. [ Break ] Rosin: In the street protests, there's one particular chant that comes up over and over: Protesters: (Chanting in Hebrew.) Rosin: Ad shechem hozrim kulanu chatufim. 'Until they're back, we're all hostages.' [ Music ] Rosin: It's easy to understand why the family and friends of any individual hostage are raging in the streets of their government for failing to rescue the person they love. But to understand why the average Israeli so deeply identifies with the hostages, why they are still out protesting 600 days later, you have to go back into Israeli history. In the first decades of its existence, Israel was regularly at war. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Suez War, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War. And then in 1976, a terrorist event happened that in many ways still defines the relationship between Israelis and their government. News clip: Palestinian hijackers are still holding more than 250 hostages and an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport, in Uganda. Rosin: A flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked. The plane and its hostages were taken to Idi Amin's Uganda. News clip: One hundred and one hostages released today were flown to Paris, but another 110 are still being held at the airport at Entebbe, Uganda. About 85 of them, Israeli nationals. The Palestinian hijackers with some non-Arab accomplices now say they will execute the hostages on Sunday unless their demands are met. Rosin: In what was a rare approach for the time but afterwards became a global counterterrorism model, IDF commandos raided the airport and rescued the hostages. News clip: The daring Israeli raid into Uganda still leaves unanswered many questions. News clip: Political leaders and editorialists over most of the Western world and some of Asia were delighted with Israel's bold and successful rescue of the civilian hostages in Uganda. Rosin: The details of the operation are extraordinary: Huge planes flying low over the Red Sea, two Land Rovers and a Mercedes painted black to pose as Idi Amin's presidential convoy, and Israeli soldiers operating thousands of miles from home with no hope of backup. The only member of the IDF team killed was Yonatan Netanyahu, leader of the raid and the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu. The story of his brother's death became a key point in Netanyahu's political rise. It was also a key moment in Tamir Pardo's life. When I was asking him how well he knew the prime minister, he said this: Pardo: I knew his oldest brother, Yoni Netanyahu. He was my commander in the unit that I served in 1976. Unfortunately, he was killed less than one foot from me at the Entebbe raid. Rosin: Inside Israel, the raid at Entebbe cemented a promise: Yes, Israeli citizens are always vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but the government will always— always —rescue them, no matter how hard they are to reach. For many Israelis, October 7 broke that promise. Pardo: What happened in 1976, people were kidnapped, not because we neglected something, we forgot something. October 7 is because we broke our obligation towards our people. The state of Israel betrayed the first thing that the IDF exists for: to defend our civil people. What happened there was a disaster. There were 2,000 people that managed to break into Israel because we neglected our duty. And that's the reason: When you did it, you have to pay the price. And the first price you had to pay is to bring them home, and then, find a way to solve the problem using the stick—but only after bringing them home. Rosin: Pardo has decades of calculating when and how to use lethal aggression and to what end. Here's how he does the math on this war. Pardo: I remember, before the war—and you can go and check the figures—IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) estimated that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 people that can use weapons in Gaza. Nine months ago, the military spokesman said that more than 17,000 Hamas terrorists were killed. So think about how many were wounded. Let's assume that another 6,000 were wounded, and we know that more than 3,000 were in prison in Israel, we captured. So actually, the job was finished. We killed all the generals, the leaders there, the commanders of brigades, platoons, whatever. Okay? So those who are still there, the vast, vast majority are those who were recruited after the war started. And they don't have any experience. Okay? But they can hold a Kalashnikov (an AK-47) and kill a soldier here and there. But the main power—90 percent of the power—was finished more than nine months ago. Rosin: So, enough? Pardo: Enough. At the end of the day, the Hamas is not only a military power, a terrorist power, okay? It's a political power as well. So thinking that you can erase political power by a military attack, that's wrong. That's wrong. And every civilian that is killed today, his brother, his son, his father will hold the gun tomorrow. Rosin: And so why didn't it unfold that way? Again, Pardo is blunt. Pardo: So I think that our prime minister today is trying to solve his personal problems—not our problems, his problems. And that was what he was doing from the first day that he was indicted, from the first day of his trial. He's not thinking about Israel as a state. Rosin: Netanyahu was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The prime minister has denied any wrongdoing, and says it's a witch hunt. The trial is still ongoing and has distorted Israeli politics in so many ways, one of them being the war in Gaza. There's criticism that Netanyahu has an incentive to keep the war going to distract from and delay his own problems, to keep lots of wars going. In fact, Pardo is not sure Netanyahu even has any postwar strategy anywhere. Pardo: What is your postwar strategy in Lebanon? What is your postwar strategy in Syria? What is your strategy versus Iran? Okay? Using the stick—thinking that by using the stick, you're gonna solve the problem, it's wrong. Rosin: You need to negotiate. Pardo: Exactly. In order to solve problems, you need to negotiate. Negotiate when you have a stick in your hand. Use the stick if it's needed, but understand, at the end of the day, you should negotiate for an agreement. The point is that our government believes in using the sticks. Not one stick—sticks. Rosin: It is unusual for a Mossad veteran to be so outspokenly critical against the government, but maybe not, in this case, surprising. Ehud Olmert, who's a former prime minister of Israel, last week accused his country of committing war crimes. Or as a hobby. Yair Golan, the main opposition leader, accused the government of killing babies for sport. That one got the most attention outside and inside Israel, even as Golan tried to walk the statement back. Rosin: Yair Golan famously said, 'killing babies for sport.' Pardo: That was awful to say. Rosin: That was awful? Pardo: And it was wrong. I, I— Rosin: That one went too far? Why? Pardo: It's not too far. It's wrong. Rosin: What do you mean? Pardo: No one, even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, are not killing babies for fun. Okay? I don't agree. They're fascists. They are the KKK in Israel. They're fascists, but they're not killing—even fascists in Israel are not killing babies for fun. Rosin: Let me give you some clarity about who he's talking about here. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, they are, as Atlantic contributor Gershom Gorenberg put it recently, the 'leading extremists' in Israel's most right-wing government in history. They are both West Bank settlers, and 'they both want Israel to reoccupy all of Gaza, to renew Israeli settlement there, and to'—quote—''encourage' Palestinians to emigrate.' Rosin: Do you believe these are war crimes? Pardo: Look—I hope not. I hope not. But fighting in a place like Gaza, 364 square kilometers—in this small place, there are squeezed more than 2 million people, fighting, using all warfare capabilities. Many civilians are getting killed, unfortunately. That there is a war in such a place, it should be very, very short war. Rosin: Short? Pardo: Short. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Pardo: Because as time is passing, many, many more civilians are getting killed. Many more civilians are losing part of their families, losing their homes, losing everything. And to conduct a war for 20 months in such a small place, bad things are happening. Rosin: It would be hard to avoid a war crime? Pardo: It's gonna be very hard. Okay? And that's what worries us, should worry every Israeli. Rosin: I asked Pardo to sum up what he thinks should happen next. [ Music ] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Atlantic
22-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
What RFK Jr. Doesn't Understand About Autism
Expressing concern can sometimes be a delicate endeavor. One can intend to be empathetic, but the target of concern hears only condescension and pity. So it is with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently talked about how much autistic children suffer. These poor kids, he said at a July 16 press conference, would never 'pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use the toilet unassisted.' Listening to Kennedy, some parents of autistic children felt seen. 'I found myself nodding along as Mr. Kennedy spoke about the grim realities of profound autism,' Emily May, whose daughter has limited verbal ability, wrote in The New York Times. But our guest this week, Eric Garcia, who attended the press conference, saw it differently. Such an intimate and detailed accounting of their failures, Garcia says, 'almost bordered on pornography to me.' Garcia, the author of We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation and a political reporter at the Independent, has watched as Kennedy's forceful entry into the autism debate has deepened confusion about the condition and opened up rifts in the autism community. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Garcia about myths spreading about autism under Kennedy. Yes, there's the one about how vaccines cause autism, which the scientific community has rejected. But there's also a more fundamental one that Kennedy references often: Is there, as he repeats, an 'autism epidemic'? And if not, what explains the dramatic rise in reported cases of autism over the past few decades? Garcia also recounts his own story growing up autistic in the age of exploding diagnoses, and landing now in a moment where, for his job, he covers a health secretary's particular brand of concern. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is very concerned about autism. He has been for a couple of decades, since he first became convinced that mercury in vaccines made children autistic, which by the way, there is no credible evidence supporting this theory. On April 16, now as head of Health and Human Services, RFK gave a press conference, and he described the tragedy of what he calls the autism 'epidemic.' For years, he has insisted there is an epidemic, even though there is a lot of debate among researchers about this—all of which he dismisses as 'epidemic denial,' a term he repeated several times in that press conference. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: There are many, many other studies that affirm this, and instead of listening to this canard of epidemic denial, all you have to do is start reading a little science, because the answer is very clear, and this is catastrophic for our country. Rosin: 'Catastrophic,' he says, because families continue to suffer, because their child will never, as he put it, do many of the things that make life worth living. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. There is a lot of confusion out there about autism—why it's increasing, if it's even increasing. And what even counts as autism? And I think it's fair to say that RFK's strong and public entry into this debate has not in any way helped to clear things up. So we're gonna talk to someone who writes about autism and also covers politics for the U.K. paper the Independent, and is himself autistic: Eric Garcia, author of We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. Eric, welcome to the show. Eric Garcia: Thank you. Rosin: Eric, you covered that April 16 press conference that RFK held about autism. Was there anything in his statement that stuck out to you? Garcia: Yeah, you know, there was obviously the whole thing, which is that 'autism destroys families.' RFK Jr.: This is an individual tragedy as well. Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. Garcia: Saying that autism destroys children or destroys families is so corrosive, and it goes into the larger stereotype that people with disabilities are a burden. RFK Jr.: These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. Garcia: I hear him taking some of the most intimate and graphic details of autistic people's lives and using it as a pawn for spreading disinformation. RFK Jr.: These are children who should not be—who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they're 2 years old. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children. Garcia: And I see him also taking the real challenges that high-support-needs people [have] and making their lives seem like a tragedy rather than lives that are whole and worthy on their own. This isn't to say that they don't face significant challenges. They absolutely do, but exploiting their experiences in such a public way, in some ways, almost bordered on pornography to me. Rosin: I want to get into RFK's actual ideas about autism. Let's start with the idea that there's an autism epidemic. This is something he's been saying for decades. It's a critical part of his argument. It's the assumption from which everything else flows: There is an epidemic, so we have to get to the root of it and do something about it. So I'm going to do something that's not that podcast friendly, which is look at what anybody listening to this podcast could do, which is Google the term increase in autism diagnoses, increase in autism, and you'll see—can you describe what you're looking at? Garcia: Yeah, it's known kind of, like, as the hockey stick. Rosin: Yeah. Garcia: What you see is that over time, there was an increase in diagnoses. So it says that something like one in 10,000 kids in the past had an autism diagnosis. And then over time, that number just increases and increases, and it makes it look like, on a very surface level with a very surface-level understanding, that this is an epidemic. Rosin: Right. And I want to pause here because I feel like this is very confusing to people. Anybody can Google these charts, and pretty much any year you start in—so there's a chart that shows California. You can start in the '40s and '50s. Basically, nobody has autism. Garcia: Correct. And then it's around the year 1990 when it starts to lift. And then you get to 2020, and it booms into the sky. Now, you can do this about Northern Ireland, California, Sweden— Garcia: Oman, China. Rosin: —Oman, China. I mean, basically everybody would look at these charts and hear RFK say there's an autism epidemic, and it makes some kind of sense. And I think it's really important to pause here because that's what a layperson who knows nothing would pick up. Garcia: It totally makes sense that on the surface it looks like there's this spike. But you have to remember, of course, autism didn't get a separate diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980. It didn't get one. Then you got what was then called Asperger's syndrome, thanks to the research of Lorna Wing in the United Kingdom. Then in 1994, which was the year that my parents started screening me for things, you got I believe it was PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. But, you know, it was this gradual improvement in and broadening of the spectrum. And then in 2013, what happened is the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM, puts all of these diagnoses under one umbrella as autism spectrum disorder, and there are levels. There's Level 1 autism, which is people who can speak in full sentences but might have difficulty with sensory processing or might have difficulty with social interaction. Then there's Level 2, where they might be able to speak in smaller sentences or smaller words. And then there's Level 3, which is where they need, you know, I think, the classic around-the-clock care that we typically associated with autism—and we still associate with autism. And we shouldn't erase those people. But I think that it's important to remember that the diagnostic criteria was changing at the time. Rosin: Right, so all this broadening of the diagnostic criteria, all the stuff you're describing, that explains a lot of the sudden rise, what RFK is calling 'the epidemic.' Garcia: Yes. This was around the time that people with disabilities received more rights. The [Americans with Disabilities Act] was passed in 1990. And it's important to remember that even though autism wasn't really mentioned in the ADA, it was mentioned specifically in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and that just meant that you saw an increase in the number of children being served who had what we now consider autism spectrum disorder. So it's kind of this strange marriage of the science improving and government policy causing a windfall. So it was easy, I think, for people to look at those numbers and say epidemic. Rosin: Right. And the obvious question is why? Now, RFK seems pretty certain about what the cause is. RFK Jr.: Within three weeks—and probably, we're hoping, in two weeks—we're going to announce a series of new studies to identify precisely what the environmental toxins are that are causing it. This has not been done before, and we're going to do it in a thorough and comprehensive way, and we're going to get back with an answer to the American people very, very quickly. Rosin: By the way, Eric, it's been, like, two or three weeks, and that report never came out, at least not yet. But the important phrase to me in that is 'precisely what environmental toxins are causing it,' not if environmental toxins are causing it but which ones. So what does he mean by that? He's basically concluded, despite this openness he has to doing research, that the cause of autism is environmental toxins. What is he referring to? Garcia: This is something that's been talked about for a long time, which is that environmental toxins have contributed, if not play a major role, in the increase in autism rates. And then the other major culprit is, of course, vaccinations, and particularly the MMR vaccination—the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. And that has been debunked multiple times. The guy who put out that study, Andrew Wakefield, had his medical license revoked in the United Kingdom, and the study that was put out in 1998 was retracted in 2010. Rosin: Right. So we have pinned down what RFK believes: This is an environmental toxin. Let's get to the root of it. Garcia: Correct. Rosin: That's his belief, and he happens to be the secretary of the HHS, so his belief holds some weight right now. Now let's shift from what he believes to what the scientific consensus and the world is saying, versus what RFK is saying. When were you born? Garcia: I was born in 1990. Rosin: 1990. Okay. That's a critical year because it's around the period that everyone pinpoints to when autism starts to explode. What is your experience as a child, growing child of how people are talking about autism? Garcia: This is really interesting. It's funny, the way that my mom says it is that—so we were living in Wisconsin at the time, and she read this ad on the paper for, like, free pre-K screenings. This is, like, in 1994 or '95. They couldn't pinpoint, but they said there was something 'wrong' with me or there was something—like I wasn't hitting the marks. But you have to remember, of course: There's always a lag in scientific understanding, like, when something is established, you know, officially versus when it enters our bloodstream, so to speak, or enters the zeitgeist. So they didn't know, but they were like, Well, he's verbal. He could speak, so we don't know if that's autism, and things like that. And then what happened was we moved to Sacramento, and what happened, according to my mom, is that she's trying to get services, things like that. They say, He's fine. There's nothing wrong with him. It's weird—like, in Wisconsin, they're like, Something's, quote, unquote, 'wrong.' And then in California it's, There's, quote, unquote, 'nothing wrong with him.' And then it just so happens that my dad's boss's wife happened to be the head of, like, special education for the entire region. So that got me, like, an in. And then what happened is afterward, we moved to San Antonio, Texas, and there was this one doctor who, I guess, had been researching autism for a while. And then they were like, Well, this is what it's called—this Asperger's syndrome. And then, like, I started—and it's funny because, you know, when you hear this term Asperger's syndrome, it's like you can imagine the kind of jokes that are made on the playground at the time. And, you know, it was funny because my diagnostic journey kind of matched the science and the public understanding as it was coming. [ Music ] Rosin: So the scientific consensus and Eric's life seem to show that a major reason autism is, quote, 'on the rise' is because of improved awareness and access to health care. But within the autism community, there is a lot less consensus about what RFK is saying and what should be done next. That's after the break. [ Break ] Rosin: RFK is not the only person, though, who believes that this isn't just about diagnoses. Garcia: Correct. Rosin: Right. So there are legitimate scientists who would say, Oh, it's not just a matter of: We're capturing more people. There is something going on. So I want to talk about that for a minute. Even RFK agrees that autism has a genetic component. Like, studies of identical twins have shown that they are more likely to both be autistic. What other factors have people found have contributed to autism since the 1990s? Garcia: Yeah. There have been talks about how, like, you know, parents having children older is— Rosin: Right, the age of fathers. Garcia: The age of fathers is one of the things. There's talk about mutated sperm. You know, so there definitely is some discussion. And, you know, and I should note that the United States spends so much money on researching autism, and a large chunk of the projects the United States government and nonprofits fund are about biology. Rosin: So what, in your mind, is the problem with RFK calling it an epidemic? Garcia: The problem with RFK calling it an epidemic, in my opinion, is that it treats it like it's a crisis. It treats it as if it's something to be fixed or it's something to be mitigated and something to be stopped. And when we already spend so much time researching the biology and researching—and I'm not necessarily even opposed to researching biology. I think it could be worthwhile. I think it could lead to scientific breakthroughs. It could help with finding ways to treat co-occurring conditions, like epilepsy. A lot of autistic people die from epileptic seizures. But, like, treating it as a crisis and treating it as something to be fixed or prevented is corrosive to a lot of families. It's corrosive to a lot of autistic people. It puts the blame back on parents, and it focuses more on fixing this issue rather than accommodating and giving services to autistic people when the pie is so scarce. You know, this is the same administration that is trying to cut Medicaid. Rosin: Right. So when you are standing and listening to RFK say things like this, to you, the message is, Something about me needs to be fixed. Garcia: Yes. And something about a large amount of people needs to be fixed, rather than, These are people who are human beings who need services and who need support and who need acceptance in the world. Rosin: I want to talk about how RFK's statements have opened up and exposed certain rifts inside the world of autism. Recently, a mother of an autistic child, Emily May, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, which was called ' Kennedy Described My Daughter's Reality.' She writes, 'When [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr. said in a recent press briefing,' the same one we've been talking about, 'that autistic children will 'never pay taxes,' 'never hold a job,' 'never play baseball,' many people in the autism community reacted angrily.' Probably you did, Eric. 'And yet I was transported back to the psychiatrist's office and her bleak prognosis that my child might never speak again. I found myself nodding along as Mr. Kennedy spoke about the grim realities of profound autism.' Can you explain what this divide is about between, say, a community that you represent and this parent's community of children who she describes as profoundly autistic? Garcia: Yeah. First off, I should say, and I want to be as careful as I can with this—I don't want to make too many people mad. It's important to remember that a lot of parents of high-support-needs autistic kids disagree with Emily, and a lot of people agree with her. In fact, Emily and I were DMing before that article came out. And, you know, the thing that I would say is that term, 'profound autism,' that is an ongoing debate that's going on right now because The Lancet in 2021, 2022 put out a commission arguing that there needed to be a separate label called 'profound autism' for those kind of, as I mentioned, Level 3 autistic people or what we would call high support needs. And their argument is that the diagnosis of the spectrum is too broad, and that creating the 2013 diagnosis of ASD erases the needs of some people, of those high-support-needs people, and folks like myself are occupying the conversation. Rosin: Is that because you can speak for yourself, whereas a nonspeaking child cannot necessarily speak for themselves? Garcia: Yeah, that's their argument. Rosin: And so they feel like they've been made invisible now? Garcia: They feel like they've been made invisible, and I think that they feel like, while we've been highlighting a lot of the accomplishments of people like myself, that we're ignoring their needs. And so there's this idea that there's a need to create a separate label, profound autism, and a lot of autistic self-advocates, including some nonspeaking autistic self-advocates, argue that this is that this would just add to stigma—and that by labeling someone as profoundly autistic, that would lower expectations and say that they would never be able to achieve all those things. And the thing that I would say is that a lot of times, my overture—I'm not an activist; I'm a journalist; I'm a writer; I write about autism, but I don't advocate for a policy thing, but my overture—and my olive branch and my fig leaf is the people who are on the front lines, advocating for your kids, are those same speaking autistic advocates and those same self-advocates. It's funny—when I was interviewing Julia Bascom, the former head of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, she has in her office one of the signs that they made for pushing back against the repeal of Obamacare, saying, 'Please don't cut Medicaid so autistic people have to stop making phone calls.' They are on the front lines this time to prevent the cuts to Medicaid that Republicans want to do, that RFK's administration—the Trump administration—wants to do, and House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to do, and Republicans in the House want to do. Rosin: I see. So you're saying you, as a speaking autistic advocate or writer, are not making a distinction between high needs and not-high needs. You're just out there raising awareness for autism more broadly, whether it's for her kid, for yourself, for society just to generally understand autism. Garcia: And I'll say this, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, and forgive me for being—I don't know how emotional I can be in this thing. Rosin: As much as you want. Garcia: Yeah. I think meeting other autistic people, including high-support-needs, nonspeaking autistic people, helped me learn about myself. You know, I think about how when nonspeaking autistic people for so long—they're diminished, and their voices are erased, and people write them off as not worthy or not valid. I'm reminded of when I was called a retard in elementary school. And so what I would say to them is that, like, I don't know what it's like to be nonspeaking autistic, but I do know what it's like to be overwhelmed and overstimulated in a world that doesn't—you know, I didn't drive a car to get here, because I can't drive. Some autistic people can drive, and God bless them. I just can't. It's overwhelming—sensory overload. And I guess what I just want to say is that I don't know exactly what it's like, but I've learned so much from your kids. I've learned so much, and I've learned how similar we are. And I've learned how, even though there are still very big differences, that they deserve to be treated [as] valid. And if I fought so hard to get my voice heard, my God, the reason why I try to interview nonspeaking—it is so important in all of my books and all of my writing to include nonspeaking voices, because, my God, I want their stories told and I want them to be heard. Rosin: Isn't that what RFK wants? Like, what's wrong with his approach to nonspeaking autistic kids? Like, his bringing this to light? What's the difference between what you want and what he wants? Garcia: I think what I want is, I think the difference—because, believe it or not, there is some overlap—is that he sees this as a tragedy to be fixed. I see these as people who deserve everything possible. We're probably always going to have autism, and we're always going to have autistic people with us. So what do we do about it? How do we serve these people? How do we see them as full human beings who have needs and wants and concerns, and how do we fix the gaps so that the actually impairing and disabling parts of autism are addressed and mitigated? And how do we help them to live good and happy lives? Rosin: Well, Eric, I feel like that is a beautiful place to end. I really appreciate you coming and talking to me about this. Garcia: Hanna, I really appreciate you having me here. Thank you. [ Music ] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak, fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin, and thank you for being a listener. Talk to you next week.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump and the Crown Prince
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Three years ago, Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia and was pointedly not greeted at the airport by any of the kingdom's major leaders (a mere governor of a province was the highest-ranking official who showed up). This week when President Trump landed in Riyadh, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met him at the end of the jetway, shook his hand warmly, and walked him down the purple carpet. In Qatar, his entourage was greeted by red Cybertrucks, camels, and dancers. The affection appears mutual and genuine. That is in part because Trump speaks the transactional language of the Gulf leaders he met with this week, and they appreciate him for it. As a gift, he gets a luxury jet from Qatar while U.S. citizens get … ? That remains to be seen. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, about this new era of chumminess among the American president and Gulf leaders. What does it mean that Trump has not brought up any of Saudi Arabia's human-rights violations? Is that luxury jet just norm breaking or illegal? And how might this friendship influence Trump in his dealings with Israel as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, threatens to escalate attacks on Gaza?Hanna Rosin: Have you been seeing the pictures of Trump on the tarmac being greeted by various royals? Hussein Ibish: Yeah. Rosin: I wonder if you read it this way: He seems very relaxed. Ibish: He is very relaxed. He's home. He's come home. This is, like—outside the U.S., this is his favorite place. [] Rosin: I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and that is Hussein Ibish. Ibish: I'm Hussein Ibish, and I'm a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, and I write for many publications, especially The Atlantic. Rosin: This week, we're watching the president's visit to the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The pictures we're referring to show Trump at the airport tarmac in Saudi Arabia being greeted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a royal welcome. Lavender carpets. Golden swords. Arabian horses. And Trump smiling through all of it. This is a stark contrast to a few years ago, when MBS, as bin Salman is known, was a pariah in the West for his human-rights violations. So what does Donald Trump's new approach to the Gulf states mean for our Middle East policy? And why is Trump so at home there? Ibish: He lives in a world of patrons and clients. He lives in a world where authority is not questionable. And that's very familiar. It's a very familiar space to—especially the Saudi royals, but—all of them. And he understands them, and they understand him. And he loves them, and they love him. He can be himself, the unedited version. He doesn't have to check his instincts. He just go[es] with it. And that's kind of unusual for Trump. Rosin: The word that seems to summarize Trump's approach is transactional. That's the word that a lot of people use. So what are Middle East leaders getting from America, and what is Trump getting from them? Ibish: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward, right? The Middle Eastern—not leaders, but—countries, what they're getting, ultimately, is protection. They're getting military protection, which is often unsatisfactory from their point of view. But they don't really have a good alternative to the United States, so they have to try to work to make it as good as possible. And that's what they're doing. They're buying goodwill from the U.S. They're also buying weapons, which they want and need. It's not, you know, purely just gifting. However, what Trump is getting in return is lots of money, and more for himself than for the country. There is money coming for the country. There are these large weapons sales of missiles and other things to Saudi Arabia, the biggest weapons sale in U.S. history. And the U.A.E. is looking at buying over a million semiconductor chips from Nvidia. And so on. All three countries are buying lots of American stuff, which is a big boon to Trump's bid to revitalize American manufacturing. But there's also a grifting angle here, right? Trump is getting a lot of money for his own company. We've never seen this before. We've never seen, even in the first Trump term: The level to which this state visit is also a private-business visit is amazing, because the projects include a Trump Tower in both Riyadh and Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia; another Trump Tower in Dubai, in the U.A.E.; and a Trump International Golf [Club] and resort in Qatar. There's also a cryptocurrency scheme connected to his sons, in which a U.A.E.-linked company has just agreed to invest $2 billion, with a B—$2 billion. The company is not going to look the same after this trip. It's going to go from being a very-successful-for-its-size mom-and-pop shop built on the vast inheritance that Trump's had from his father, Fred—but now he's taking it into the stratosphere. I mean, the amount of financial clout that's coming to his family-owned, privately held business is just amazing. And what the Arabs are doing here is buying goodwill. It's an investment. It's an investment in Trump as a friend and, you know, ultimately also with the U.S. But right now Trump has, you know, instituted l'état c'est moi: 'He is the country, and the country is him.' And until somebody stops him or until he leaves the White House, that's the way it's going to be. And this is very understandable to a group of people who deal in patron-client relations as a matter of course. Rosin: Okay, so just to summarize, the transaction is: They get protection, and what Trump gets is money for the country and money for himself. Ibish: Exactly. They get protection and he gets money. We get money. Rosin: Yeah, it's very clear when you describe it: The symbol, the concrete thing that is going to symbolize this trip for a long time, is this luxury jet from Qatar. How should we understand what this transaction is? Ibish: Well, it's the absolute—I was waiting for you to bring it up, because it is exactly the kind of icon, the avatar of this trip. It says it all. Qatar, which is an unbelievably rich country, has 300,000—maybe 400,000—citizens. Most of the country, between 2 and 3 million people, are ex-pat laborers, foreign workers, Arab and Western technocrats. But collectively, those 350,000 or so Qataris are the largest single exporter in the world of liquid natural gas. And obviously, all of the wealth goes to the citizens. I mean, it's just amazing. You've never seen a country with this level of per-capita wealth. And it uses that money for national interests. In this case, what they've done is: One of the former prime ministers who is a royal has a jet, a luxury Boeing 747 that's kitted out not for a president but for a wealthy man who enjoys luxury travel on his own private plane. So what the Qataris have done is they've said: You can have the plane for use as president while you're in office, and after that it will be transferred to your presidential library, meaning he could still use it after that. So it's sort of been—they've very cleverly muddied the waters or blurred the line between private and public here, in order to give this plane to Donald Trump as an individual. They can say that they haven't, that they've given it to his presidency, right? Rosin: This is so interesting. Basically, what you're saying is this is the president that the Gulf leaders have been waiting for. Trump is the man that they can finally deal with in the way that they want to. Ibish: Yeah. Well, in a lot of ways I think that's true. I remember a certain high-ranking—or formerly very high-ranking—Gulf individual who said just as much in 2016, after he was elected. They said, He does the same things—and he listed a bunch of verbs that were unlawful actions—and said, We do that. And he does that. It's not, obviously, unlawful in their countries. It's normative, but traditionally not allowed in the United States and in Western countries in general. And I think this man was absolutely correct when he said, We do this and he does that, and we do this and he does that, and that they would feel very comfortable with him. They certainly would disagree about how much pressure he should put on Israel regarding Gaza, things like that. But I was thinking yesterday that there's really no daylight between Trump's positions on all the really most-important issues and those of Saudi Arabia. You can't find a major irritant there, which is really amazing. Rosin: Such as what? What issues? Ibish: Well, I mean, anything you think of—the war in Ukraine, the nature of U.S.-Saudi relations, you know, how business should be conducted, the Yemen war, talks with Iran (they both want a deal). They convinced him that lifting the sanctions on Syria was a good idea. They just agree, more or less, on just about any issue. That can change overnight, because if there was a spike in oil prices, they would disagree right away. But I was contrasting that in my mind with the problems that the U.S. and Trump have with Israel right now, where there's disagreement about Gaza, about the cease-fire with the Houthis, about the talks with Iran, about the negotiations with Hamas. There are many irritants. Now, that's not to say the U.S. is closer to Saudi Arabia than it is Israel. I don't think that's true. The Israeli relationship with the U.S. is very deeply ingrained and protected by political influence in the U.S., especially from evangelical Christians on the right. But yeah, I think Trump is sort of ideal in many ways from, say, a Saudi point of view. [] Rosin: So now that we've established the nature of this relationship and where we are now, I want to understand what it means—to the rest of us, not to Trump and his family. So when you hear about U.S. relations with Gulf states in the past, especially Saudi Arabia, human rights enters as a factor. Not always forcefully, but it's always— Ibish: Well, it's definitely a rhetorical factor with most administrations. Whether they're Republican or Democrat, they do bring it up. Trump doesn't—ever, at all. Rosin: Right. So how important is that departure or shift? Ibish: Well, I mean, MBS has learned—and one of the big questions about him when he was a young, rash leader, you know, beginning in 2015, when he came in as defense minister, and a quick rise to where he is now, which is head of government. That is to say he is the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, so he runs the government. And human-rights issues became very serious in his early years with the arrest of the dissidents, the sort of adventure in Yemen that was ill-advised and badly done, to put it mildly, and also the jailing of important people who are not perhaps on board fully with the changes—the reforms, the social liberalization, or other concerns that MBS had about them—who were jailed at the Ritz Carlton. Rosin: Yeah, and of course, the 2018 murder of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA concluded MBS ordered, although he denied it. Ibish: I was coming to that. That's the big enchilada—right?—for many people, including me, because he was a friend of mine for 15 years. And I, you know, I was just—I'm still scarred by it, and I think I always will be. [] Ibish: MBS, what we've learned about him is that, you know, he's not a sociopath, in the sense that he's educable. The question about him was always, Is he young and, you know, rash and doing these things because he doesn't know better, or is he kind of nuts? And the answer is, No, he's educable. He's evolving. He's maturing. Saudi Arabia remains a real human-rights violator from the point of view of human-rights norms. It executes a lot of people. Rule of law does not apply in the way we would expect. Dissidents—when they're found, when they exist—suffer, you know, arrest and imprisonment and long sentences. And even if they go as far as saying, Parts of the country should secede or leave Saudi Arabia, they can be executed. And they are sometimes. So it's not, you know, a happy story on human rights at all. But it's just way better than it was. And, you know, there are certainly more-alarming cases around the world. Rosin: Okay, so we need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about what this trip means for the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and U.S.'s role in them. That's when we're back. [] Rosin: Okay, we're back. So I want to put this Gulf visit in the broader Middle East context. As Trump was heading to this trip, he made a number of deals that seemed like they were trying to clear away American entanglements in the region—so the U.S. cease-fire agreement with the Houthis and Yemen, the agreement with Hamas to release the last living U.S. citizen held hostage in Gaza, and then the announcement that the U.S. was going to lift sanctions on Syria. Do you see a pattern in this series of deals? Do you see a common goal? What is it? Ibish: Yes. I think he's trying to reduce American exposure and involvement in conflict in the region—not only in the region, but in regional conflicts. So for example, the lifting of sanctions on Syria is a response to Gulf countries saying to him, in effect, You say you want us to handle our problems. Fine. We want to, you know, invest in Syria and build. We can't have any influence in Syria if we don't spend money there, because we don't have a militia or an army in Syria. The only way to get their attention is by investing in reconstruction and in other services where we can build constituencies of friends who will represent our interests and, by extension, yours. And we can't do that if every time we write a check, we have to worry about the Treasury Department slamming us. So if you want us to handle our business, you gotta take these sanctions off. The deal with the Houthis in Yemen is undoubtedly directly connected to another conflict-ending or conflict-containing policy of Trump, which is the negotiations with Iran. Trump definitely wants a deal with the Iranians, another version of the Obama peace deal—which he railed against but is trying to resurrect—but he wants it to be longer and stronger and tougher on Iran. And he can get all of that because of what happened to the Iranians under Biden. I mean, he'll never give Biden the credit for having put Iran in this situation, but it was under his presidency that Iran was crippled in its regional status, and the biggest blow by miles was the Turkish-engineered downfall of Assad in Syria. You know, that's why the—letting the Saudis and the Emiratis and others, you know, do what they can in Syria without sanctions is part of that. You know, he needs to take advantage of this moment of Iranian weakness and the fact that they need 20, 25 years to rebuild their power and to rethink their national-security strategy, because it was all based on the idea that Arab militia groups led by Hezbollah in Lebanon would provide a powerful forward defense against Israel and, ultimately, the United States. And that was tested and proved untrue. Hezbollah was decimated by Israel. So Iran is in very bad shape. It needs to rethink everything, and it needs time. And Trump understands this, and Trump wants a deal because he doesn't want to be put in a situation of having to confront the Iranians militarily. And Iran wants a deal, and the only country left that doesn't want such a deal is Israel. With Obama, the Arabs were totally against it, but now they're all for it because they want calm and regional stability. Rosin: So that is the one big, obvious point of disagreement, which you mentioned, is Israel. Ibish: Yeah. Rosin: This is coming at a moment when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning that he's going to escalate in Gaza. As you've been seeing this Gulf trip unfold, what do you think it means for Israel, Gaza, and America's role in all of that? Ibish: I mean, it certainly incentivizes Trump to think very carefully about doing what he can to restrain Israel's worst impulses in Gaza. The situation in Gaza is so dire after more than 70 days of complete blockade—no food, no medicine, no water, no electricity, no shelter, nothing, no supplies into Gaza. People have been reduced to the point of starvation. That's where we're headed here. And it's a crime—it's certainly a war crime, and it's probably a crime against humanity. What the Israelis are proposing to do is to go back into Gaza with full force, force all the population—2.2 million who are not Hamas fighters and cadres and officials—into a tiny enclave in the south, where they will be kept supposedly protected but actually kind of herded, where they'll be kept with what the UN says is very, totally inadequate plans for their food and water and medicine and shelter. Meanwhile, Israel proclaims it will scour the entire rest of the country for anything and everything connected with Hamas and destroy it. Gaza delenda est. You know, the bottom line is: This is kind of the war that the most-extreme factions in Hamas have been waiting for. It provides them with an open-ended, long-term insurgency. Now, obviously, the Israelis can rely on brute force to crush Hamas. But I think they've started to get the hint that as long as there are Palestinians in Gaza, there will be some form of Hamas, because Hamas is not a list of people and equipment. It's a name. And if you take a bunch of Palestinians and some of them say they're Hamas, then there will be Hamas, and that's likely to persist no matter what Israel does. And we're getting closer and closer to the end goal of where I think the logic of this for Israel goes, which is depopulation. Gaza has to be, you know, depopulated of Palestinians in order to be free of Hamas. And because the two go together in Gaza, under the circumstances. Rosin: So given that that's the current situation, and given that Trump is now engaging in the Middle East, how does this change the calculus for how he and the U.S. engage? Ibish: Everything that has happened in the region incentivizes him to stop the Israelis from going ahead with this plan, at least as it has been structured now. It's too extreme. It's too brutal. It's too genocidal. It's too over the top. And I really think the fact that he made such close friends again and reinforced his relationship with these countries that don't want that, both at the emotional and the strategic registers, that need it not to happen in every possible way, is really important. It gives him every reason to hold the Israelis back and say, Guys, come on. Don't do this. Don't do this this way. Don't do it. And he's the only person in the world at the moment who has real leverage over Netanyahu, because of the nature of the Israeli-U.S. relationship. Rosin: Yeah. Well, Hussein, this has been so clarifying. I really appreciate you helping us navigate and understand what this trip to the Gulf states might mean. Ibish: Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak, fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin, and thank you for being a listener. Talk to you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Three years ago, Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia and was pointedly not greeted at the airport by any of the kingdom's major leaders (a mere governor of a province was the highest-ranking official who showed up). This week when President Trump landed in Riyadh, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met him at the end of the jetway, shook his hand warmly, and walked him down the purple carpet. In Qatar, his entourage was greeted by red Cybertrucks, camels, and dancers. The affection appears mutual and genuine. That is in part because Trump speaks the transactional language of the Gulf leaders he met with this week, and they appreciate him for it. As a gift, he gets a luxury jet from Qatar while U.S. citizens get … ? That remains to be seen. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, about this new era of chumminess among the American president and Gulf leaders. What does it mean that Trump has not brought up any of Saudi Arabia's human-rights violations? Is that luxury jet just norm breaking or illegal? And how might this friendship influence Trump in his dealings with Israel as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, threatens to escalate attacks on Gaza? The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: Have you been seeing the pictures of Trump on the tarmac being greeted by various royals? Hussein Ibish: Yeah. Rosin: I wonder if you read it this way: He seems very relaxed. Ibish: He is very relaxed. He's home. He's come home. This is, like—outside the U.S., this is his favorite place. [ Music ] Rosin: I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and that is Hussein Ibish. Ibish: I'm Hussein Ibish, and I'm a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, and I write for many publications, especially The Atlantic. Rosin: This week, we're watching the president's visit to the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The pictures we're referring to show Trump at the airport tarmac in Saudi Arabia being greeted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a royal welcome. Lavender carpets. Golden swords. Arabian horses. And Trump smiling through all of it. This is a stark contrast to a few years ago, when MBS, as bin Salman is known, was a pariah in the West for his human-rights violations. So what does Donald Trump's new approach to the Gulf states mean for our Middle East policy? And why is Trump so at home there? Ibish: He lives in a world of patrons and clients. He lives in a world where authority is not questionable. And that's very familiar. It's a very familiar space to—especially the Saudi royals, but—all of them. And he understands them, and they understand him. And he loves them, and they love him. He can be himself, the unedited version. He doesn't have to check his instincts. He just go[es] with it. And that's kind of unusual for Trump. Rosin: The word that seems to summarize Trump's approach is transactional. That's the word that a lot of people use. So what are Middle East leaders getting from America, and what is Trump getting from them? Ibish: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward, right? The Middle Eastern—not leaders, but—countries, what they're getting, ultimately, is protection. They're getting military protection, which is often unsatisfactory from their point of view. But they don't really have a good alternative to the United States, so they have to try to work to make it as good as possible. And that's what they're doing. They're buying goodwill from the U.S. They're also buying weapons, which they want and need. It's not, you know, purely just gifting. However, what Trump is getting in return is lots of money, and more for himself than for the country. There is money coming for the country. There are these large weapons sales of missiles and other things to Saudi Arabia, the biggest weapons sale in U.S. history. And the U.A.E. is looking at buying over a million semiconductor chips from Nvidia. And so on. All three countries are buying lots of American stuff, which is a big boon to Trump's bid to revitalize American manufacturing. But there's also a grifting angle here, right? Trump is getting a lot of money for his own company. We've never seen this before. We've never seen, even in the first Trump term: The level to which this state visit is also a private-business visit is amazing, because the projects include a Trump Tower in both Riyadh and Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia; another Trump Tower in Dubai, in the U.A.E.; and a Trump International Golf [Club] and resort in Qatar. There's also a cryptocurrency scheme connected to his sons, in which a U.A.E.-linked company has just agreed to invest $2 billion, with a B— $2 billion. The company is not going to look the same after this trip. It's going to go from being a very-successful-for-its-size mom-and-pop shop built on the vast inheritance that Trump's had from his father, Fred—but now he's taking it into the stratosphere. I mean, the amount of financial clout that's coming to his family-owned, privately held business is just amazing. And what the Arabs are doing here is buying goodwill. It's an investment. It's an investment in Trump as a friend and, you know, ultimately also with the U.S. But right now Trump has, you know, instituted l'état c'est moi: 'He is the country, and the country is him.' And until somebody stops him or until he leaves the White House, that's the way it's going to be. And this is very understandable to a group of people who deal in patron-client relations as a matter of course. Rosin: Okay, so just to summarize, the transaction is: They get protection, and what Trump gets is money for the country and money for himself. Ibish: Exactly. They get protection and he gets money. We get money. Rosin: Yeah, it's very clear when you describe it: The symbol, the concrete thing that is going to symbolize this trip for a long time, is this luxury jet from Qatar. How should we understand what this transaction is? Ibish: Well, it's the absolute—I was waiting for you to bring it up, because it is exactly the kind of icon, the avatar of this trip. It says it all. Qatar, which is an unbelievably rich country, has 300,000—maybe 400,000—citizens. Most of the country, between 2 and 3 million people, are ex-pat laborers, foreign workers, Arab and Western technocrats. But collectively, those 350,000 or so Qataris are the largest single exporter in the world of liquid natural gas. And obviously, all of the wealth goes to the citizens. I mean, it's just amazing. You've never seen a country with this level of per-capita wealth. And it uses that money for national interests. In this case, what they've done is: One of the former prime ministers who is a royal has a jet, a luxury Boeing 747 that's kitted out not for a president but for a wealthy man who enjoys luxury travel on his own private plane. So what the Qataris have done is they've said: You can have the plane for use as president while you're in office, and after that it will be transferred to your presidential library, meaning he could still use it after that. So it's sort of been—they've very cleverly muddied the waters or blurred the line between private and public here, in order to give this plane to Donald Trump as an individual. They can say that they haven't, that they've given it to his presidency, right? Rosin: This is so interesting. Basically, what you're saying is this is the president that the Gulf leaders have been waiting for. Trump is the man that they can finally deal with in the way that they want to. Ibish: Yeah. Well, in a lot of ways I think that's true. I remember a certain high-ranking—or formerly very high-ranking—Gulf individual who said just as much in 2016, after he was elected. They said, He does the same things —and he listed a bunch of verbs that were unlawful actions—and said, We do that. And he does that. It's not, obviously, unlawful in their countries. It's normative, but traditionally not allowed in the United States and in Western countries in general. And I think this man was absolutely correct when he said, We do this and he does that, and we do this and he does that, and that they would feel very comfortable with him. They certainly would disagree about how much pressure he should put on Israel regarding Gaza, things like that. But I was thinking yesterday that there's really no daylight between Trump's positions on all the really most-important issues and those of Saudi Arabia. You can't find a major irritant there, which is really amazing. Rosin: Such as what? What issues? Ibish: Well, I mean, anything you think of—the war in Ukraine, the nature of U.S.-Saudi relations, you know, how business should be conducted, the Yemen war, talks with Iran (they both want a deal). They convinced him that lifting the sanctions on Syria was a good idea. They just agree, more or less, on just about any issue. That can change overnight, because if there was a spike in oil prices, they would disagree right away. But I was contrasting that in my mind with the problems that the U.S. and Trump have with Israel right now, where there's disagreement about Gaza, about the cease-fire with the Houthis, about the talks with Iran, about the negotiations with Hamas. There are many irritants. Now, that's not to say the U.S. is closer to Saudi Arabia than it is Israel. I don't think that's true. The Israeli relationship with the U.S. is very deeply ingrained and protected by political influence in the U.S., especially from evangelical Christians on the right. But yeah, I think Trump is sort of ideal in many ways from, say, a Saudi point of view. [ Music ] Rosin: So now that we've established the nature of this relationship and where we are now, I want to understand what it means—to the rest of us, not to Trump and his family. So when you hear about U.S. relations with Gulf states in the past, especially Saudi Arabia, human rights enters as a factor. Not always forcefully, but it's always— Ibish: Well, it's definitely a rhetorical factor with most administrations. Whether they're Republican or Democrat, they do bring it up. Trump doesn't—ever, at all. Rosin: Right. So how important is that departure or shift? Ibish: Well, I mean, MBS has learned—and one of the big questions about him when he was a young, rash leader, you know, beginning in 2015, when he came in as defense minister, and a quick rise to where he is now, which is head of government. That is to say he is the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, so he runs the government. And human-rights issues became very serious in his early years with the arrest of the dissidents, the sort of adventure in Yemen that was ill-advised and badly done, to put it mildly, and also the jailing of important people who are not perhaps on board fully with the changes—the reforms, the social liberalization, or other concerns that MBS had about them—who were jailed at the Ritz Carlton. Rosin: Yeah, and of course, the 2018 murder of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA concluded MBS ordered, although he denied it. Ibish: I was coming to that. That's the big enchilada—right?—for many people, including me, because he was a friend of mine for 15 years. And I, you know, I was just—I'm still scarred by it, and I think I always will be. [ Music ] Ibish: MBS, what we've learned about him is that, you know, he's not a sociopath, in the sense that he's educable. The question about him was always, Is he young and, you know, rash and doing these things because he doesn't know better, or is he kind of nuts? And the answer is, No, he's educable. He's evolving. He's maturing. Saudi Arabia remains a real human-rights violator from the point of view of human-rights norms. It executes a lot of people. Rule of law does not apply in the way we would expect. Dissidents—when they're found, when they exist—suffer, you know, arrest and imprisonment and long sentences. And even if they go as far as saying, Parts of the country should secede or leave Saudi Arabia, they can be executed. And they are sometimes. So it's not, you know, a happy story on human rights at all. But it's just way better than it was. And, you know, there are certainly more-alarming cases around the world. You couldn't really say that around the time of the murder of Jamal, because Saudi Arabia was really one of the worst violators at that time. And now I think it's almost back to normative Saudi behavior, hardly a good standard—it's a very low bar—but it's very different than he was years ago. Rosin: Okay, so we need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about what this trip means for the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and U.S.'s role in them. That's when we're back. Rosin: Okay, we're back. So I want to put this Gulf visit in the broader Middle East context. As Trump was heading to this trip, he made a number of deals that seemed like they were trying to clear away American entanglements in the region—so the U.S. cease-fire agreement with the Houthis and Yemen, the agreement with Hamas to release the last living U.S. citizen held hostage in Gaza, and then the announcement that the U.S. was going to lift sanctions on Syria. Do you see a pattern in this series of deals? Do you see a common goal? What is it? Ibish: Yes. I think he's trying to reduce American exposure and involvement in conflict in the region—not only in the region, but in regional conflicts. So for example, the lifting of sanctions on Syria is a response to Gulf countries saying to him, in effect, You say you want us to handle our problems. Fine. We want to, you know, invest in Syria and build. We can't have any influence in Syria if we don't spend money there, because we don't have a militia or an army in Syria. The only way to get their attention is by investing in reconstruction and in other services where we can build constituencies of friends who will represent our interests and, by extension, yours. And we can't do that if every time we write a check, we have to worry about the Treasury Department slamming us. So if you want us to handle our business, you gotta take these sanctions off. The deal with the Houthis in Yemen is undoubtedly directly connected to another conflict-ending or conflict-containing policy of Trump, which is the negotiations with Iran. Trump definitely wants a deal with the Iranians, another version of the Obama peace deal—which he railed against but is trying to resurrect—but he wants it to be longer and stronger and tougher on Iran. And he can get all of that because of what happened to the Iranians under Biden. I mean, he'll never give Biden the credit for having put Iran in this situation, but it was under his presidency that Iran was crippled in its regional status, and the biggest blow by miles was the Turkish-engineered downfall of Assad in Syria. You know, that's why the—letting the Saudis and the Emiratis and others, you know, do what they can in Syria without sanctions is part of that. You know, he needs to take advantage of this moment of Iranian weakness and the fact that they need 20, 25 years to rebuild their power and to rethink their national-security strategy, because it was all based on the idea that Arab militia groups led by Hezbollah in Lebanon would provide a powerful forward defense against Israel and, ultimately, the United States. And that was tested and proved untrue. Hezbollah was decimated by Israel. So Iran is in very bad shape. It needs to rethink everything, and it needs time. And Trump understands this, and Trump wants a deal because he doesn't want to be put in a situation of having to confront the Iranians militarily. And Iran wants a deal, and the only country left that doesn't want such a deal is Israel. With Obama, the Arabs were totally against it, but now they're all for it because they want calm and regional stability. Rosin: So that is the one big, obvious point of disagreement, which you mentioned, is Israel. Ibish: Yeah. Rosin: This is coming at a moment when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning that he's going to escalate in Gaza. As you've been seeing this Gulf trip unfold, what do you think it means for Israel, Gaza, and America's role in all of that? Ibish: I mean, it certainly incentivizes Trump to think very carefully about doing what he can to restrain Israel's worst impulses in Gaza. The situation in Gaza is so dire after more than 70 days of complete blockade—no food, no medicine, no water, no electricity, no shelter, nothing, no supplies into Gaza. People have been reduced to the point of starvation. That's where we're headed here. And it's a crime—it's certainly a war crime, and it's probably a crime against humanity. What the Israelis are proposing to do is to go back into Gaza with full force, force all the population—2.2 million who are not Hamas fighters and cadres and officials—into a tiny enclave in the south, where they will be kept supposedly protected but actually kind of herded, where they'll be kept with what the UN says is very, totally inadequate plans for their food and water and medicine and shelter. Meanwhile, Israel proclaims it will scour the entire rest of the country for anything and everything connected with Hamas and destroy it. Gaza delenda est. You know, the bottom line is: This is kind of the war that the most-extreme factions in Hamas have been waiting for. It provides them with an open-ended, long-term insurgency. Now, obviously, the Israelis can rely on brute force to crush Hamas. But I think they've started to get the hint that as long as there are Palestinians in Gaza, there will be some form of Hamas, because Hamas is not a list of people and equipment. It's a name. And if you take a bunch of Palestinians and some of them say they're Hamas, then there will be Hamas, and that's likely to persist no matter what Israel does. And we're getting closer and closer to the end goal of where I think the logic of this for Israel goes, which is depopulation. Gaza has to be, you know, depopulated of Palestinians in order to be free of Hamas. And because the two go together in Gaza, under the circumstances. Rosin: So given that that's the current situation, and given that Trump is now engaging in the Middle East, how does this change the calculus for how he and the U.S. engage? Ibish: Everything that has happened in the region incentivizes him to stop the Israelis from going ahead with this plan, at least as it has been structured now. It's too extreme. It's too brutal. It's too genocidal. It's too over the top. And I really think the fact that he made such close friends again and reinforced his relationship with these countries that don't want that, both at the emotional and the strategic registers, that need it not to happen in every possible way, is really important. It gives him every reason to hold the Israelis back and say, Guys, come on. Don't do this. Don't do this this way. Don't do it. And he's the only person in the world at the moment who has real leverage over Netanyahu, because of the nature of the Israeli-U.S. relationship. Rosin: Yeah. Well, Hussein, this has been so clarifying. I really appreciate you helping us navigate and understand what this trip to the Gulf states might mean. [ Music ] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak, fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin, and thank you for being a listener. Talk to you next week.
Atlantic
08-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
How Much Would You Pay for That Doll?
When President Donald Trump mused that 'maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?' it wasn't a deeply developed critique of late capitalism, or a sly nod to Weberian asceticism. Still, for those of us who'd been hoarding items in a Temu shopping cart, it did raise some important philosophical questions: Is a car vacuum necessary? How many baseball hats can you stack? How many dolls is too many? Once again, Trump reached into our guilty, greedy, modern hearts and dug out the nostalgia for a simpler time when we were content with less. But also, once again, he skipped over the dirty details. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with a doll manufacturer and a policy analyst about tariffs and Americans' relationship with choice. Elenor Mak, the founder of Jilly Bing, talks about her dream of giving Asian American kids the choice of having a doll that looks like them, and how the new tariffs might kill it. Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab at Yale discusses who would actually be hurt by the tariffs, and the choices they take away—and what you could actually do if you wanted to shift American consumer behavior. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: Last week, at a Cabinet meeting, while answering a question about tariffs, President Donald Trump mentioned dolls. President Donald Trump: Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. [ Music ] Rosin: Now, this wasn't any deep social commentary, just an offhand statement. But it did get me thinking about how kids today—including my own— do have a million dolls versus, say, when I was a kid. Rosin: Do you remember your first doll? Elenor Mak: Oh, of course. My first doll was Ada. I took Ada with me everywhere: to the park, to dim sum. I tried to bring her to school. But I also remember she was beautiful in a way that I felt I never could be. Rosin: This is Elenor Mak. Mak: She had these beautiful blond curls. She had big blue eyes. She had that porcelain skin. And even then—I think I was somewhere [around] 5 or 6 years old—I remember thinking, I wish I looked like Ada. Rosin: When Elenor was a kid, like when I was a kid, what she didn't have was that much choice. But even after Elenor grew up and had her own kids, the options were still pretty meh. There were basically blond dolls, some brunettes, and some that Elenor describes as 'vaguely Asian.' Mak: You're not really sure what they're supposed to be. And the only reason I knew some of these dolls were intended to be Asian was because they had a name like Ling, or they were holding panda bears or had a really bad haircut and— Rosin: (Laughs.) Mak: —you know, like that bowl cut my mom did give me. But as an Asian American mother, I don't relate to any of that. Rosin: So when Elenor had her daughter, she did not want her to have the bowl-cut model. She wanted a doll that her child could actually relate to. So Elenor did the thing that most people do not do— Mak: Oh, of course. Rosin: She started a company to make her own dolls. It's called Jilly Bing, partly named after her daughter, Jillian. Mak: Jillian is now 5, Jilly Jillian. Rosin: She wanted to create them in the U.S., but she couldn't find a doll manufacturer here who could do it. Mak: Every lead led to the same thing, which is: They've closed. They no longer create dolls. Rosin: So Elenor looked outside the U.S. and found a factory in China that she developed a close relationship with. Mak: Doll manufacturing is a heavily manual process. The rooting of every doll's hair is done manually. Rosin: Wow. Mak: They would weigh the hair to make sure there's consistency. And someone would free-form, like, sew it, putting it through the sewing machine until the doll's head was fully rooted. There is tremendous precision required. Someone is manually placing these tiny little dolls' head[s], right? So my doll is 14 inches. So the head, I'm guessing it's two to three inches. So someone is manually putting this onto the assembly line, which then they stamp the eyes and the blush. And even if it's just, like, one-one-hundredth off, that doll suddenly, like—I have some Jilly dolls that look like Party Jilly because her eyeliner is like— Rosin: (Laughs.) Mak: I saved those. I saved those—a special edition. But the eyeliner's just a little bit off, and suddenly it's like, Okay. This is not the adorable, you know, wholesome — Rosin: Jilly was out late last night. Mak: I call her the Party Jilly. [ Music ] Rosin: Things were going okay for Elenor. She got some good press in places like CBS— Anchor: Elenor Mak, good morning. Rosin: —and the Today show. Rosin: But then came the tariffs. Anchor: Just in the last few moments, the BBC has confirmed that U.S. tariffs against China add up to 145 percent— Mak: My husband texted me. I remember him saying, Have you seen the tariffs? And I was like, What are you talking about? My head spun. Anchor: —that is including the existing 20 percent tariffs that were already imposed on the country at the beginning of the year. Mak: Our doll retails for $68, so that is considered a premium doll already. To think that I would charge $150-plus for this doll—it was like putting a nail to the coffin of our business. [ Music ] Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. Tariffs are no longer an abstraction. They are showing up in shopping carts—supermarket and virtual. And they are forcing a lot of Americans to reckon with a way of living we've taken for granted—products get made cheaply somewhere else, giving us an abundance of choice over here. We'll talk more later about how tariffs have the potential to change American culture, but first: the Jilly Bing emergency—what tariffs look like from the side of the American producer who is determined to give us more choice. Before the most restrictive tariffs on China went into place last month, Elenor Mak was already in emergency mode. A factory she'd developed a good relationship with announced they had plans to close—totally unrelated to the impending trade war. So like every good entrepreneur, Elenor hustled. Mak: And that whole process nearly broke us—just really kind of rushing inventory in and starting work with a new factory—and I thought that was gonna be the worst of it. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: So when the tariff announcement came, it was almost like, Wow. It just felt debilitating. Rosin: And when you heard about the tariffs, did you immediately go into action? Like, call the staff, sit back of the envelope, figure it all out? Did you call people? How did you move through that process? Mak: Yeah. I think there was a part of—you know, speaking to a lot of founders who are also in consumer-products sourcing from China, Vietnam—I think a lot of us just said, This can't be. This won't pass. This is a political move. This won't actually go through. So I think it was disbelief. But there was also a need to start actioning, right? Calling our factory, calling the freight forwarders, trying to understand what the impact was. And I would say it was just chaos. No one really knew, right? There was speculation: This is what it could look like, or, If you get it in by this date. But [at] the end of the day, there was this risk that by the time our imports came in, we would be hit with this 145 percent price increase. Rosin: So the decision—I understand. So the decision is even about putting in orders because you don't know what's going to happen at the back end. It's about the uncertainty because you just can't predict the entire process. You can't predict it from beginning to end, so you could be stuck with this inventory that you then have to pay so much more for. Mak: Absolutely. So for me, you know, now that you're—I'm walking down memory lane: We were about to sign a purchase order, right? So April—and then that way we would get the goods in by sort of August, September, right before the holidays, to have it arrive into our warehouse. But once we sign that purchase order, that becomes binding. And then, you know, once it arrives in the port, whatever the prices are, I am responsible for that. So for me, the decision was to not issue that purchase order. Rosin: I see. Okay. So it's April; you've got a decision to make. So I see why you had to do this really quickly. Numbers are going through your head, like, How much more is this gonna cost? Everything that you mentioned. But on the other side of it is your company, this thing that you've built that's very personal. So how did you weigh all that? Mak: I think it was pure exhaustion. It was a feeling of, Oh my gosh, how many more of these boulders coming downhill can this small business [take]? Right? It's largely me who was full-time on the business, and I think just from a mental capacity, I was burned-out. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: And to think about, you know, signing that PO, waiting for my shipment to come in, and holding my breath until it arrived at the port to figure out what the price could look like, it was just, I think, more than I could bear. And I was devastated, right? Because I think for us, you know, it was always about giving more families choices. I think one thing I wanted to share is: This doll is meant to be Asian American. And our doll has brought joy to a lot of kids and adults, and it was devastating to think this could end if I'm forced out of business. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: But for me, in the short term, we have inventory, we have the silver lining, and I can ride this out for some time. But that inventory also will not last forever. Rosin: You know what? I don't know that I have a good sense of—maybe this is just how entrepreneurs are. I don't know that I have a good sense of whether you—do you think you'll weather this? I can't tell. Like, how realistic a hope is that? Mak: I can only weather this if the policies change in the next year. And so as an entrepreneur, I think, I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic. But I'm also practical when I look at my numbers, when I see my inventory, you know, the trends. So yeah, maybe that's why you're not—it's like a part of me is optimistic things will sort itself out before my sort of self-imposed deadline of when we would need to place a PO comes out. Rosin: So before the last doll is out of your house or wherever you keep the dolls, things have to shift politically. Mak: Yes, because with the current tariffs, there's just—I cannot survive. [ Music ] Rosin: That was Elenor Mak, founder of the doll company Jilly Bing. After the break, the other side of the equation: Us, the consumers—our coffee, our toasters, our cars, our assumption that all things are available to us instantly. That's in a moment. [ Break ] Gimbel: My name is Martha Gimbel. I'm the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale, which is a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the impacts of federal economic policies. Rosin: So Martha, I know the Budget Lab has been busy tallying up how Trump's tariffs are going to change the prices of all kinds of goods for Americans. I myself am thinking about the long term, like how our consumer culture around cheap products might change. But first I want to talk about some specifics. We just talked to an independent doll manufacturer, so want to use that industry as an example. Say it's my kid's birthday coming up, and I want to buy them a doll. What is the landscape I'm looking at? Gimbel: It's not ideal, I think is the technical term, you know? We just don't produce that many toys in the United States anymore. And, you know, I think people sometimes get a little bit itchy about that, and they think, Oh, we should be making things in the good old USA. But that makes things much more expensive, and it also means that if you're making toys, you can't do other types of jobs, which may be more highly compensated. Rosin: Right. And just to dig in, let's say you have to buy a toy in three months— like, are we talking twice as much? Like, do you have any projections? Since I know this is what you guys do. Like, how much more expensive would I expect it to be? Gimbel: So it depends a little bit on where specifically the toy is made, how much the producer of the toy was able to get inventory into the country ahead of time, how much they feel they can try to pass the price onto their consumers, etcetera. Just as an example, we think that in the short run, rubber and plastic products overall—so obviously, a lot of dolls are made out of plastic—will increase their prices by about 22 percent. But obviously, given the tariffs on China, if something's entirely made in China, it will likely increase by much, much more. Rosin: Yeah, so for weeks now, we've been warned that we should expect prices of certain goods mostly made in other countries to go up, like rice, toasters, coffee, I mean, plastic goods, like you just said. Can you project overall how much a household budget of an average American family is likely to go up? Gimbel: Yeah, so we find that we think that, you know, on average, households will pay about $5,000 more a year. Rosin: Wait—$5,000? That's actually a lot. Gimbel: It's a lot of money. You know, most people can't easily absorb that in their household budgets, right? If you say to people, all of a sudden, To consume what you consumed last year, that's gonna cost you $5,000 more, that makes people a little bit itchy, understandably. One thing I should say is that as a share of income, it is a higher percent increase for households at the bottom. And that is because poor households tend to spend more of their income on goods, right? If you are a lower-income household, you are spending much more as a share of your income on shoes for your kids, food, things like that. Whereas higher-income households may be buying vacations, which are not tariffed. Rosin: Right. Are there some surprises that Americans might have in store? Like, things that you found are likely to go up way more than we expect? Things that I maybe don't even associate with China or know are made in China? Gimbel: To some extent, a lot of this is quote-unquote 'obvious,' right? We are expecting the big hit to be on clothing, for example. I think a lot of people realize that their clothes are not made in the United States. I think the thing that is going to be harder for people is: Even things that are made in the United States may buy inputs from abroad, right? So just because you've made the effort to find something that is produced in the United States doesn't mean that they're not getting cotton, silk, wood—whatever it is—from outside the United States. Rosin: So when you look at the landscape, are you thinking very few things are exempt from this? Like, most things are gonna be more expensive? Gimbel: I mean, services, technically— Rosin: Yes? Gimbel: —should be exempt from tariffs. Although, we did just see the president announce that they're going to be tariffing movies. I'm not entirely sure how that would work. But, you know, in general, I think there are very few parts of the goods-producing economy that we are expecting not to be hit. And I think one thing that's important to keep in mind, right, is: Say that you are, by some miracle, a domestic producer who is totally insulated from this, right? You buy your fabric from a nice fabric producer down the road who gets everything in the United States, etcetera. Why would you not raise your prices, right? So all of your competitors have to raise their prices by, let's say, 10 percent in the face of tariffs. You can raise your prices by 8 percent, still get a lot of market share, and get the benefit of those higher prices. And so we do also expect even domestic producers to raise the prices. Rosin: Oh, okay. That I hadn't thought of. So everything—all prices get raised. I mean, that just makes economic sense. Like, you're just increasing your profits. Gimbel: Yeah, why not? I mean, in the face of tariffs, it really is one of those no-place-to-run, no-place-to-hide kind of thing[s] for the consumer. Rosin: I want to talk about the problems President Trump says he's trying to solve with tariffs, because he talks about how short-term pain is worth it for the long-term gain, and that we'll see factories reopening in America. What do you make of this conversation we've been having for decades now about manufacturing shifting overseas? Gimbel: You know, I think that there is a lot of nostalgia for manufacturing. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Gimbel: I think one of the things that I find really bizarre about this entire conversation is that the United States is this incredibly rich country. And yes, to be clear: There were, you know, jobs lost in response to the 'China Shock,' in response to automation. But even so, if you can think about which country in the world has one of the strongest economies, most vibrant economies, where you can succeed, it's the United States. Other countries want to be us. They are trying to make their economies more like our economy. Why are we trying to be like other countries? Rosin: I see. So you are seeing it as a positive evolution away from manufacturing, so it's hard to understand what the nostalgia for manufacturing is. Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, in 1902, we all used to work in farms, right? And you know, yes, there are people still in the United States who work in farms today. A lot of their work looks very different than it did in 1902. And those jobs were really, really hard, and we've evolved to a version of the United States where we get to buy goods produced cheaply by other people who do really, you know, physically painful work, and we get to provide services and be paid—in the realm of the world—a pretty high wage for that. That seems like a really good deal to me. Rosin: Interesting. Do you think that that's a perspective from an expert looking on high and doesn't take into account people's feelings about service work or people's connection to factories or, you know, all these kinds of things that Trump talks about? The things that people are missing? Because it sounds so easy when you say it. Gimbel: I mean, I want to be very clear: Economists are not always great about people's emotions. And so I do not want to deny that. It is also the case, right, that there are people who used to work in manufacturing who have lost those jobs [and] have found it relatively hard to adjust to the new economy. And I do not want to dismiss the pain that those people have experienced, and it's been very acute pain for those specific people. For our overall economy, though, the shift to services has been really, really positive. And so I think there's a couple of things that kind of all get jumbled together here. Some is the specific, acute pain that the people who were not winners from the shift to a services economy have felt. And the other is a desire for what is seen as, like, a more old-fashioned version of America, and people are using manufacturing as some kind of proxy for that. I don't want to come across as if I'm like, There are no problems here. You know, the hollowing out of the middle class has been a real issue. But I think it's really important not to accept the premise that the problem is that manufacturing moved to China. Rosin: Right. I see. The problem is way more complicated than that. And from someone like you who looks at the big picture of the economy, it feels like an evolution, and it's a little confusing why we would want to undo it. Gimbel: Yeah, I mean, there are things that you can do to fix the economy, make it more equal, make people feel like they have more opportunities, etcetera. Putting giant tariffs on China in an attempt to bring back jobs that are legitimately hard and relatively low-paid jobs to the United States is not going to end the way I think a lot of people want it to. Rosin: Okay. Here's another big question: Americans are, in fact, used to cheap prices and infinite options. Is that fair to say? Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, we love cheap prices, and we love being able to just pop over to the store and pick whatever doll out we want for our kids. Rosin: Oh, it's funny you should mention dolls. So Trump did make the statement about dolls: Kids could have two instead of 30. And I am not pretending that Trump was making some kind of well-developed policy statement, but it is a diagnosis that people on all sides of the political spectrum have also made over the years. So what do you think about that sentiment in the context of this tariff-heavy moment? Gimbel: I mean, look—we can have a cultural conversation about: Do we have too much stuff? That is different than the economic conversation of, like, Should the government be putting strictures in place such that it makes it hard for people to buy the stuff that they want? I think one of the things that's been sort of confusing to people is that the Trump administration has started to say some of these things that sound a little bit, you know, for lack of better phrasing, central plannery, which is not something people have traditionally associated with government in the United States, much less the Republican Party. And so it'll be interesting to see how the American public responds to that. You know, I think on the 'Do we all have too much stuff?' thing, I think, again, it is easy to be nostalgic for, you know, quote-unquote 'a simpler time.' And my version of the story is that, you know, I had an Easter-egg hunt for my daughter and, you know, other small children a few weeks ago, and my mother and I were out there in the morning scattering plastic eggs. If any small children are listening to this, the Easter Egg Bunny was scattering the eggs. Rosin: (Laughs.) Gimbel: And my mother said, you know, When I was a child, we didn't have this. My mother dyed literal eggs and hid them in the backyard, and then we hunted for eggs, and we hoped we found all of them, because otherwise it smelled terrible. Rosin: Yeah. Gimbel: And, you know, I think there's just a lot of things like that that we just don't think about, like: Do the children need plastic eggs? No, they'll be fine. They'll survive. Is it kind of nice? Yeah, it is. Rosin: That's an excellent example. I totally see what you're saying by 'central plannery.' I got that concept immediately. It's, like, shifting culture from the pulpit, as it were. But why not go back to dyeing eggs? Like, don't you need to be forced into artificial scarcity? Like, is there a universe in which higher tariffs do have a potential to shift consumer habits and maybe help out this addiction to cheap? Because we all know that the addiction to cheap encourages bad labor practices and pollution all over the world. So it is a big problem that's hard to shift. Gimbel: You know, if there's something that you think is bad, you can tax it, right? So, you know, this is one thing that economists are in favor of but almost no one else likes, is a carbon tax where you put taxes on the amount of carbon that it takes to produce something, because there are externalities to that. The thing about tariffs, right, is they're just, like, a blunt, inefficient tool. So maybe there are things that are—just to stick with the carbon example—you know, very high-carbon intensive that are being produced that we're happening to hit with tariffs. But we're also hitting bananas. Why are we tariffing bananas? We can't grow bananas in the United States, certainly not at scale. Why are we tariffing coffee? None of this makes any sense. Rosin: I see. So it's just too crude an instrument. Gimbel: Yeah, we're just—we're hitting everything, rather than trying to think about: What is the behavior that we are actually trying to do here? Are there things we are trying to disincentivize? Is there revenue we're trying to raise? Is this the most efficient way to raise revenue? And we're just saying: Everybody's tariffed. We don't like it when we buy things from other people. And that's where we are. Rosin: Right. Right. So there isn't any intentionality. If you wanted to shift consumer culture, improve the environment, you would be doing it in an entirely different and more targeted way. Gimbel: Yes. I mean, I will say: I'm a little itchy on, you know, using taxes or, you know, economic incentives to shift culture. I think that's a broader conversation. But there are places where, you know, there is behavior that has spillover effects—like carbon—to society and the economy. And we do think about taxing those kinds of things, but we are taxing that specifically, rather than just a broad, everything's-gonna-hurt-now approach. Rosin: Right. Like, the very obvious example is: higher gas prices, less driving, like what they do in Europe. Can you see any scenario where this all unfolds in the way Trump imagines, which is short-term pain for long-term gain? Gimbel: No. Rosin: No scenario in which, like, the American manufacturing—more things are manufactured in the U.S.? You know, people figure out where the—how to make an American doll factory? Like, none of that seems realistic to you? Gimbel: No, it doesn't. And you know, first of all, you have to think about trade-offs here. So sure, if you do the tariffs, it is likely that some manufacturing jobs come back to the United States. That is absolutely the case. You are almost certainly going to lose a ton of construction jobs—just as an example, just in that one sector—because construction relies on a lot of inputs from abroad, and if those become much, much more expensive, they're not gonna build as much, and people are going to lose jobs. And so you have this focus on this one specific, relatively small part of the economy, and you're gonna ding the rest of the economy for that one small sector. And even within that sector, right, there are gonna be some manufacturers—as we were discussing before—who are going to suffer because they rely on inputs from abroad. And so what you're going to do is have a very, very expensive way of creating relatively few jobs in small industries, but everyone else loses. Rosin: Who do you think is gonna be hurt the most in the next year or two? Gimbel: You know, as we were discussing earlier, you know, as a share of income, this is gonna hit lower-income people harder. But the real answer is: everyone. This is going to hurt everyone. Everyone's going to be paying more money at the grocery store. They're going to be paying more money for children's clothes. Jobs are going to be lost. There will be impacts for the stock market. There are no wins here. This is not good. And I think because it seems so insane, people want to say or find some something that will be better because of this. And that's just very, very, very unlikely. Rosin: Well, Martha, I really don't relish ending an interview on no silver lining and no wins for anyone, but I think that's just the reality. So thank you for delivering us this medicine. I appreciate it. Gimbel: Anytime. Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's
