The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas | The Roundtable

This week, hosts Ryan and Spencer sit down as the year closes out to share their Christmas plans and recommendations: music, theater, food, drink, and more! Stay tuned in the new year!

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As we close out 2025, the Trump Administration has racked up many big wins. But none are as significant as what President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have done to repair the recruitment crisis that took place during President Biden’s watch.

When I served in the House of Representatives, I chaired the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, so I saw firsthand how bad things got under Biden, especially at the Pentagon and in our military.

When Biden was president, he presided over the worst recruitment crisis since our military became an all-volunteer force over 50 years ago.

In 2022, the Army set a goal to recruit 60,000 new soldiers, but it only managed to recruit 45,000. That’s 15,000 soldiers short. And the same thing happened again the following year, when the Army was again 15,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 recruitment goal. When you add up the recruitment losses under President Biden between 2021 and 2025, the Army shrank by 40,000 soldiers due to a lack of recruits. That’s as many as four divisions of troops.

The Navy fared no better. In 2023, it was 7,500 sailors short of its recruitment goal of 37,000. In 2024, it was nearly 5,000 short of its goal of over 40,000 new sailors. So between 2021 and 2025, the Navy shrank by 16,000 sailors, which is about three aircraft carriers’ worth of United States sailors.

That’s how bad the recruitment crisis got during Joe Biden’s watch.

But how did this happen? The Biden Administration treated the military as a political experiment. I don’t think we’ve seen the military politicized in that way ever before in American history.

The Biden Pentagon dropped physical fitness standards to support woke DEI initiatives throughout the armed services. As a side note, the Marines were the only good news during those four years, because the Marine Corps never dropped its standards.

Then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand down to combat extremism in the military immediately after Joe Biden was sworn into office. They spent nearly six million man-hours military-wide on that stand down. Those are hours that could have been spent on training our troops to combat our biggest enemy—and our biggest geopolitical threat—China. Or those millions of hours could have been spent on preparing to evacuate Afghanistan in a much more responsible way. Instead, the Biden Administration focused on partisan politics.

Then, General C.Q. Brown, who served as the General Chief of Staff of the Air Force, issued racial quotas for the United States Air Force.

Even worse, Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Army argued it was a bad thing that more than 80% of our recruits come from military families. She said there was “a risk of developing a warrior caste in America.” When the Secretary of the Army should have been trying to boost recruitment, she insulted patriotic Americans who are inspired by their parents to serve and suggested that the Army didn’t want them.

When you combine all these factors, it’s no wonder we had a recruitment crisis in the United States Armed Forces. Fewer young Americans wanted to serve, because they stopped believing in the mission.

I often think back to a 2023 article from the Wall Street Journal that featured a poll showing that patriotism among Americans, especially young Americans, had plummeted to a historic low. Only 38% of Americans in 2023 said that patriotism was very important to them. That was down from 70% in the 1990s. To this day, this story astonishes me. I’d love to see an updated poll showing what those numbers look like today.

You can’t build a military without patriots. You can’t ask young men and women to put their lives on the line when the culture tells them that the country isn’t worth fighting and dying for. You can’t expect the next generation of Americans to raise their right hand, as so many of my colleagues did in the Senate, and take an oath to protect this nation when so few believe America is the greatest country in the history of the world.

The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan played a huge part in the military recruitment shortage under Joe Biden. Americans saw 13 brave servicemembers killed at Abbey Gate, including a Hoosier. American guns and vehicles were abandoned to the Taliban on that embarrassing, disastrous, and deadly day. Young Americans asked themselves, “Who wants to be part of that type of military?” And they said, “Not me.”

The good news is that all of these issues have been fixed in a short period of time. President Trump changed everything. In fact, it changed immediately on election day, just a little over a year ago.

Military leaders testified that recruitment increased dramatically the day Donald Trump won the election. The Army met its 2025 recruitment numbers four months early. The Army reached its retention goals for the whole year in just six months. Navy recruitment hit a 20-year record.

And how did all of this happen? President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are inspiring young people to serve, because they are restoring our military’s strength and greatness. They stopped wokeness and DEI initiatives throughout the Department of War. And they are focused on what really matters to our military: patriotism, a sense of mission, and lethality.

Under Joe Biden, young Americans saw the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Today, they see a military that puts America first, taking out narco-terrorists before they can bring deadly drugs into our country. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they support strikes on these drug boats.

When you ask young men and women if that’s the type of military they want to be part of—one that’s stopping drugs from flooding into America, killing our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our friends—you get an overwhelming yes.

When America is strong, when America is confident, when America wins, our young people want to serve. Patriotism isn’t dead; it was just dormant during Biden’s four years in office. Patriotic citizens were waiting for leadership that America could believe in again, like what we have in Donald Trump today. 

Secretary of War Hegseth is doing an extraordinary job. He’s the exact leader we need to restore the military’s focus on lethality after four disastrous years under Joe Biden, when the focus was on anything but. He has brought back the warrior ethos to our military. And he has worked hard to ensure that America’s Armed Forces can meet tomorrow’s challenges.

Our enemies have been put on notice under Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of War.

The path forward is clear: we must continue supporting this administration’s efforts to restore our military and make it as great as it can be. Our all-volunteer military depends on Americans who choose to serve. Americans will choose to serve when they believe in the mission, trust their leaders, and take pride in this great country. President Trump is giving them that, and America is stronger for it. That’s great news as we close out 2025.

The post America’s Military Is Back appeared first on The American Mind.

The assassins who conspired against Julius Caesar could have stabbed their victim in the street, but they chose to commit their crime in the Curia of Pompey while the Senate was in session. The location’s symbolism was part of the message they intended to send. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus with a microphone in his hand as he answered questions from the crowd. It was the style of debate that earned him the love of millions and the admiration of many powerful figures, including the president of the United States. It was also the activity that led his murderer to mark him as someone who “spreads too much hate” and therefore deserved to die.

Charlie Kirk was a once-in-a-century talent who will not be replaced. He had boundless energy, acute judgment, and a capacity to evolve that was unusual in a public figure. His organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and its political affiliate, Turning Point Action, managed a turnout operation for President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that helped achieve the biggest popular-vote victory in a generation. Kirk himself could have been on a presidential ticket someday, possibly even the first ticket for which he would have been eligible. Had he lived, he would have turned 35 a month before the 2028 election.

It was a shock, then, to see how Kirk was described in mainstream news outlets in the days following his assassination. The print edition of The New York Times in its obituary headline called him “Organizer of Young Voters Who Helped Shape the Rise of the Hard Right.” The Guardian called him a “divisive provocateur.” That was the respectable media. Down in the gutters of TikTok, X, and its liberal alternative, Bluesky, people were proclaiming their indifference to his death or saying he got what he deserved.

Two things were clear from this reaction. These people didn’t understand who Charlie Kirk was and what he meant to people, and they didn’t grasp how the response to his death would be taken by the Right. Conservatives observed with horror how many people were gloating over the death of a young father because they disagreed with his political opinions. They rightly took it as a portent of a dark period for American democracy.

Open to Questions

Charles James Kirk was born in 1993 and grew up in Prospect Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The high school he attended, Wheeling High School, tipped to being majority Hispanic during his time there and many of his classmates were illegal immigrants. His first effort at political organizing was a success: as a senior, he got his fellow students to protest the raising of the price of cookies in the cafeteria from 25 cents to 50 cents, and the old price was restored.

He chose not to go to college, which led many people in later years to write him off intellectually. This was a mistake. Everyone who thought he was too sophisticated for Charlie Kirk, but gave him a chance, came away impressed. He had an enormous appetite for self-education. One example was his participation in the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship in 2021. He had already founded an empire by then—Turning Point USA took in over $55 million in revenue that year—yet he wanted to learn what Claremont had to teach him. He was exceptionally humble for someone with his accomplishments.

Instead of enrolling at a university, at age 18 he founded Turning Point as a student group dedicated to standing up for small government on college campuses. By the time of his death, TPUSA had 900 college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters with hundreds of thousands of members. Like many Republicans, Kirk evolved from the small government emphasis of the Tea Party years to a more rounded conservatism that fit in well with the Trump agenda. On social media, where he had tens of millions of followers, his most popular video clips were taken from his campus appearances in which he would throw himself open to questions from anyone, on any topic, from the existence of God to the national debt.

Read the rest here.

The post The Murder of Charlie Kirk appeared first on The American Mind.

D.C. wasn’t supposed to be like this. Hard as it is to believe today, the capital was set apart as its own district not to make it an untouchable bureaucratic citadel, but to make it work for all Americans. Unattached to any one state and free from the control of any one constituency, our government was supposed to serve the whole country. Decades of misunderstanding, however, have muddled this design. Federalization gives us a fighting chance of restoring it.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government resided in Philadelphia until a military mutiny prompted it to leave. With this in mind, the framers proposed an optional federal district. Under the proposal, Congress could create a capital and be vested with “exclusive” legislative authority over it. This would put the government in a position to contemplate and sympathize equally with all Americans. The states approved. And so the framers’ proposal was ratified under Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution. Congress then placed the capital along the Potomac River, and D.C. was organized in 1801.

Puzzlement quickly ensued. Congress tried many approaches to local governance and settled on a semi-independent model, enacted as the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973. This established a congressionally appointed judiciary and a popularly elected city council, mayor, and attorney general. Under home rule, D.C. could make its own law, albeit with congressional oversight.

The Founders warned us about this model, however. They anticipated that self-governance would embarrass, impede, and endanger the federal government.

Trump derangement syndrome has only vindicated this position. In 2017, D.C.’s attorney general joined litigation against Trump’s so-called Muslim ban. Then in 2020 D.C. painted a “Black Lives Matter” memorial along 16th Street Northwest, flipping an urban bird at the Trump White House. And in 2025, the District’s attorney general protested Trump’s public-safety initiative, contesting his right to seize the Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard across the city.

One might overlook these obstructions if the District’s fierce independence enabled it to ensure safe and efficient self-governance. But that doesn’t describe D.C. In 2023, a Senate staffer traversing the northeast part of the city was knocked to the ground and repeatedly stabbed in the head and chest. Then in May 2025 two embassy interns were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum. The following month, a congressional intern was fatally shot in the Mount Vernon Square neighborhood.

Nor is partisanship the only problem. D.C. behaves almost as poorly when Democrats wield federal power. In April 2024, pro-Palestinian protesters erected an encampment at George Washington University (a federally chartered school). City officials refused to remove the protesters for two weeks even though their disruptions interfered with students’ final-exam preparations.

Bringing the capital to heel will ultimately require legislation. There’s already a proposal to repeal home rule. It’s a great start, but the proposal doesn’t detail how D.C. would operate afterward—not a promising omission when Congress tends to be so ineffective. Perhaps the most prudent solution would be to subsume the District’s entities into the federal government. Then Congress need not work from a blank slate by creating new bodies for local governance. Instead, D.C.’s city council could become an advisory body to recommend local laws. This would meet the Constitution’s requirement that Congress make the laws without requiring it to fuss over the minutiae of local governance.

This idea won’t appease locals who want equal electoral representation to that enjoyed by other Americans, if not greater. We know that D.C. residents (or, more accurately, the Democrats in their ears) seek D.C. statehood. But if it’s a state they’re after, then they should entertain retrocession or repeal the District’s charter. Bastardizing the Constitution to preserve the mock state is not the way to go.

Knowing that Democrats in Congress will object on these grounds to any discussion of federalization, we should use litigation to force a solution on this matter. The difficulty with litigation is finding a plaintiff—a D.C. resident who believes in a federal capital and whose case wouldn’t be easily dismissed by local judges seeking to avoid the issue. But with so many conservatives currently serving in D.C. under the Trump Administration, now might be the time to bring a suit.

The right litigant has two ways to attack home rule—challenge D.C.’s lawmaking power or neuter its prosecutorial authority. The lawmaking approach likely faces two objections. First, judges might question how Congress’s ultimate legislative authority under home rule meaningfully differs from exclusive authority under the Constitution. Second, they might raise the constitutional-liquidation theory, which posits that the post-enactment tradition fleshes out constitutional indeterminacies.

Neither objection holds water. For one thing, exclusive legislative authority means what it says—one body enacts the law. Using D.C.’s city council as a think tank wouldn’t violate this principle, because only Congress would oversee legislation from introduction to enactment. But home rule fails because Congress shares its authority with another body. In fact, a law could exist under home rule without Congress touching it at all. The Constitution doesn’t envision such an anomaly.

Relatedly, liquidation presupposes that a constitutional provision is ambiguous. But here, the framers couldn’t have written a clearer provision. Congress’s authority over D.C. is exclusive; that means only Congress can exercise it. And so even though Congress has handed lawmaking power to D.C. on multiple occasions, viewing this abdication as indicative of the Constitution’s original meaning would only sanction congressional laziness and cowardice.

The prosecutorial approach would open a more straightforward path to a more limited victory. The pitch is simple: the D.C. attorney general is a federal creation. And yet, he’s elected and can sue the federal government at will. This flouts the appointment process, as well as the president’s power to remove officers and direct executive-branch entities. Now would be the perfect time to press this argument, as the Supreme Court aims to clarify the president’s removal power later this term, and the D.C. Circuit recently questioned whether “the District possesses an independent sovereignty that can give rise to an Article III injury from actions of the federal government.” The only issue is that D.C. could still make law. But some of that law will be unenforceable if the attorney general cannot prosecute. Hence, a small win—but a win, nonetheless.

Congress has subverted the Constitution by entertaining home rule. The results have been ugly, and will get uglier. District residents will grow increasingly radical in their demands for self-governance. The framers, in their wisdom, didn’t create a sovereign D.C.—they bequeathed us a federal city to preserve a neutral national government. We should restore that vision.

The post Reining in D.C. appeared first on The American Mind.

“Ana minkum wa ileikum,” shouted 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, newly elected mayor of New York, to the heaving crowd in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater just before midnight on Election Night. I’m one of you!

What did he mean by that? Mamdani, after all, can come off as almost comically foreign. Look at the way he waves as he walks to the podium. He doesn’t swing his arm like a regular American. He doesn’t even wiggle his hand, as the late queen did. He frantically flaps his fingertips against his thumbs, the way kindergarteners do when they are pretending to listen to an imaginary friend. There’s something a bit “off” about Mamdani, like those German spies in old movies who, despite their perfect English, give themselves away by not knowing who won the last World Series. Or like Barack Obama, who proclaimed his affection for the Chicago White Sox and then proved unable to name a single player who’d ever taken the field for them. (Mamdani fends off baseball questions, such as whether he’s a Yankees or a Mets fan, by professing himself a fan of English soccer.)

There is a difference between running for president and running for mayor. In a city that is 36% foreign-born, being foreign is a plus. And like Obama growing up in Hawaii, knowing no black people but struggling, as the age demanded, toward a black identity, Mamdani has actively crafted an outsider image. Born in Uganda, the son of the Columbia professor of postcolonial studies Mahmood Mamdani and the Indian film director Mira Nair (she directed the Disney film Queen of Katwe), Mamdani arrived in the United States at age seven from South Africa, where his father had been teaching for years. Before entering politics, he had a brief career as a rap artist under the name “Young Cardamom.”

But radical politics was always his overriding interest. Mamdani is the product of Bronx Science, an elite public high school where admission requires competitive exams, and Bowdoin, which was among the wokest handful of colleges in the country during his time there. He found his mentors in the street-savvy Democratic Socialists of America (where he was close to Bernie Sanders and New York State Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the city’s Muslim Democratic Club (which pursues its own kind of left-wing politics). He rallied a base of immigrants, Muslims, women, and gays. And armed with a gift for invective, he has ridden out against Donald Trump and his policy of tight borders and swift deportations. “Hear me, President Trump, when I say this,” Mamdani shouted toward the end of his victory speech. “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” President Trump, perhaps realizing such a confrontation could do him more harm than good, deferred the prospect for a bit by inviting Mamdani to the White House for an affable conversation on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

A Brand-New City

Thus far, Mamdani has had extraordinary good fortune. With the Democratic Party in disarray last winter, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo looked like he could easily take the party’s nomination away from the scandal-tarred incumbent, the black ex-cop and later Trump ally Eric Adams. Cuomo, it’s true, had resigned the governorship under a cloud of sexual-harassment allegations in 2021. But his followers figured such peccadillos would matter less in the big city. What they hadn’t reckoned with was the way the city’s electorate had changed.

Compare it to the situation in 1993, when Republican Rudy Giuliani swept into the mayor’s office. His win was a harbinger of the Republicans’ conquest of Congress the following year. Giuliani was aided by a conservative Catholic (and heavily Italian) bloc of about a fifth of the electorate that today has mostly, in one way or another, departed. More broadly, Giuliani got three-quarters of the white vote in a city that was 43%—and is now just 31%—non-Hispanic white. And that ethnic category now contains different people. The voters that political scientists describe as “progressive new class”—gays, workers in the non-profit sector, people in high tech—have risen from not much more than a tenth of the city to about a quarter. It may now be unwinnable for a Republican.

And in fact, when the dust cleared on the Democratic Party primary on June 24, the city had proved unwinnable even for an old-fashioned Democrat. Under a newly rolled-out “ranked choice” voting system, Mamdani won the nomination outright, with no need for a runoff. He and his advisors were as shocked as anybody: they had not even written a victory speech.

The race was not over, though. Cuomo re-entered as an independent and sought (in vain) to push marginal Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa out of the race. Cuomo had hoped to win with the strategy that the independent billionaire Michael Bloomberg pioneered when he became mayor in the aftermath of September 11, 2001—collaborating with the city’s business elites to finance a mammoth, if mercenary, ground operation. Cuomo had done something similar in his 2018 governor’s race and got all he could out of the strategy this time. In fact, he made an impressive showing: he got 100,000 more votes than Adams had in his winning bid four years ago.

A brand-new electorate was revealed in November. The 350,000 Muslims eligible to vote, whose turnout percentages had barely scraped into the double digits in the past, were galvanized by Mamdani’s frequent attacks on Israel, and went to the polls in droves. The city’s Jews, still a mighty force in Democratic Party politics but no longer a hegemonic vote bank, gave Mamdani only a third of their votes, with Cuomo picking up the other two-thirds. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, whose Brooklyn congressional district is a Nantucket-shaped patchwork of historically black and historically Jewish districts, pointed out that Mamdani’s support was weakest among older blacks and Latinos living in ungentrified areas. Perhaps Jeffries was seeking a non-Israel-related pretext for withholding his endorsement from a fellow Democrat more in tune with his party’s waxing hostility to the Jewish state. Other top Democrats, including senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, withheld their endorsements, but Jeffries will likely face a primary next year from a Mamdani-aligned candidate, and in October, he belatedly jumped on the bandwagon. Anyway, Jeffries had a point: it was the transmogrified young population of New York that put Mamdani over the top. Mamdani won 82% of women under 30.

Read the rest here.

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As part of its celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life has published my Provocation, “Government by the Unelected: How it Happened, and How it Might be Tamed.” This full-length essay seeks to assess how the Founders’ principles have fared after 250 years. I argue that government by the consent of the governed has gradually diminished—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—and has been substantially replaced by the government of a permanent, unelected, and allegedly expert class.

The fuller work traces the history of this development, pointing both to the rise of the Progressives in the latter part of the 19th century and to the role of the federal courts in enabling the Progressive remaking of American government during the 20th century. These phenomena will not be unfamiliar to readers of my scholarly work or that of others in the Claremont Institute’s orbit.

My opening piece in this symposium focuses on the final part of “Government by the Unelected,” which covers the remarkable effort President Trump and his administration are undertaking to restore some semblance of government by consent. While the Left and its acolytes in the media decry this approach as an assault on “democracy,” the administration has, in truth, embarked on the most extensive project since at least the 1930s to reclaim executive power from unelected bureaucrats and judges.

It would be far preferable if we did not have to rely exclusively on the president in the current effort to restore government by consent. In addition to their elected president, the sovereign people are supposed to rule through their elected Congress—and Congress could certainly do much to stick up for its constituents and rein in the bureaucrats and judges. But it is because of Congress that we are in this position in the first place, and no fair-minded observer can plausibly believe that today’s congressmen are likely to take back the vast authority they have given away to agencies and courts. For better or worse, it has been left to the people’s other representative—the elected president—to regain for them the means to choose how they are governed.

Let’s set the scene for the situation coming into President Trump’s second term. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, rule by bureaucratic decree was standard practice. Unelected bureaucrats pushed through major policies that weren’t popular enough to be approved by voters, including immigration amnesty, climate change and vaccine mandates, student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoria, and biological males in schoolgirls’ bathrooms.

After decades of enabling bureaucratic rule, however, the Supreme Court has started to pare back the authority of the administrative state in important ways, and officials in the incoming Trump Administration have been clearly paying attention. Much of what is now being attempted by entities in Trump’s Executive Office, like the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has been inspired by the recent signals from the high court.

Within the last year or two, we have seen the demise of Chevron deference—a 40-year-old doctrine that permitted agencies to judge the extent of their own powers. In another major decision, the Supreme Court stopped agencies from imposing civil penalties without first going to an independent Article III court. (For years, they had been allowed to issue and enforce penalties simply by using their own in-house enforcement mechanisms.) And, finally, we have also seen the rise of the so-called “major questions” doctrine, where the courts have started to require what they should have been requiring all along: that agencies exercising power on a major question of public policy must first be able to point to a law where Congress has specifically granted them the power to do that.

Add to these important legal wins the fact that we again have a president who is focused on reining in the bureaucracy by making it accountable to voters. There are two important parts of this effort, the first of which has gone almost unnoticed.

Who Rules?

The president issued an executive order in February that massively reduced the independence of so-called independent regulatory commissions. These are very powerful agencies (for example, the FTC, FCC, NLRB, etc.) that have been free to regulate independently of presidential oversight ever since they were established. The Trump EO overturned an earlier Clinton EO, requiring all regulations from the agencies to go through the OIRA review process—basically to get the approval of the elected president. Most consequentially, it forbids these agencies from interpreting federal law in any way that contradicts the views of the presidential administration.

More well-known have been the president’s efforts to make top agency officials accountable to him as the elected president. Without bureaucrats being accountable to elected officials, we don’t really have a republic. Nowadays, we are effectively governed by these agencies—they make vaccine mandates, forgive student debt, tell you what kind of car to buy, and so on. The people vote for the president, but if the agencies in his executive branch don’t have to follow him, then the votes of Americans don’t affect how they are governed. The only way agencies can be made to follow the policies of the elected president is if he has the ability to hire and fire top agency officials. The same principle applies to any company or organization—boards hire a chief executive to carry out their policies, but they can’t really govern their organizations if employees are beyond the control of their chosen executive.

Yet we know that over the decades since the Progressives gave us the administrative state, Congress has created numerous agencies that defy this very principle of democratic accountability. Congress has walled off large parts of the bureaucracy from presidential control. This is typically done by writing in the law that its top officials cannot be removed by the president, or can only be removed “for cause” and not “at will.” How can this be if, per the Constitution, the elected president is the only one who is supposed to be able to exercise the executive power?

The Trump Administration has clearly decided to force the courts to answer that very question. Since the 1930s, they have botched the answer. But within recent years, the Supreme Court has given signs that it wants another shot at taking the test, and that it might get that answer right this time around. This is what helps explain the president’s firing of top officials from the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Reserve, among others, even though the law and existing court precedent suggest he cannot do that.

It should be no surprise that the president is mostly losing on this issue in the lower courts. Even if district judges were more sympathetic to the president’s aims, the lower courts are not in a position to overturn existing Supreme Court precedent. Instead, these questions have to filter their way up the appellate ladder, where they can be reconsidered and where new, more constitutionally sound precedents can be handed down.

Ending the New Deal Nightmare

The worst precedent on this front is the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court turned its back on the constitutional understanding that had prevailed since the Founding, deciding that it was permissible for Congress to remove parts of the executive branch from the control of the people’s elected chief executive. Without this decision, the administrative state as we know it would not exist. But the Supreme Court has, in recent years, been signaling a potential reconsideration of Humphrey’s, and the president’s high-profile firings of top agency officials indicate he is looking to seize on that opportunity.

Early indications are good that the Supreme Court will eventually overturn the Humphrey’s case. In May, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Wilcox supported the president in his removal of a commissioner of the National Labor Relations Board. Although the justices did not consider the full merits of the question, they did indicate that the president was likely to succeed if such a case came before them. In July, the Court—with identical reasoning—allowed the president to remove members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Overturning precedents like Humphrey’s Executor is necessary to begin getting the administrative state under control.

In its Wilcox decision, the Court seemed to say that agencies cannot be shielded from the president’s removal power—except maybe the Federal Reserve. But its reasons for this exception were vague, which is unsurprising, because it’s not clear why, as a matter of constitutional principle, the Fed gets special status. Even if as a matter of policy one might support the Fed being independent from politicians, that doesn’t answer the constitutional question. For any governing authority to be exercised in our country, it ultimately has to be ordained by the people. In the system of government outlined in the Constitution, the people do that ordaining by establishing three branches of government—and only three branches.

Is the Fed in either the legislative branch or the judicial branch? It is in neither, so it must be in the executive branch. But if that’s the case, how can the Fed be outside the control of the elected president? He’s the only one to whom the people grant executive power in the Constitution. It will be difficult for the Supreme Court to dance its way around this little conundrum, much as it may try to claim that the Fed is some kind of private institution that nonetheless exercises a huge amount of public authority.

Nor is President Trump inclined to help the Court dodge the question. Just a few months after the Court signaled that it might stop short of embracing presidential removal for the Fed, the president fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook. To no one’s surprise, including the administration’s, the removal was enjoined by a strategically chosen district judge. But the president is looking to the higher levels of the judicial ladder, and the Supreme Court will now ultimately have to explain why the Fed gets to make hugely consequential national policy decisions while retaining its independence from the only officials whom the voters have constitutionally empowered to make such decisions—an independence the Court no longer seems inclined to extend to any other federal entity.

And the Trump Administration has thrown one additional curveball in this case.

The law governing the removal of officials at the Fed is like many of the laws pertaining to independent agencies, mandating that officials may only be removed by the president “for cause.” Similar to ordinary employment or contract law, this is typically taken to mean that one cannot be fired “at will.” Or, in this case, one cannot be removed simply because a president may prefer an official more sympathetic to his own policy views. Instead, at least as these laws have generally been interpreted, as long as an official does not commit a serious wrong—theft, bribery, or other obvious forms of malfeasance—he is presumed to be safe from presidential removal, even if he is executing policy in a manner entirely at odds with the wishes of the elected chief executive.

The curveball with the firing of Fed Governor Cook is that President Trump maintains this was not an “at will” firing, but that he removed Cook “for cause.” She is the subject of a criminal referral for mortgage fraud from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. At the time of this writing, Cook is also the subject of a federal grand jury investigation. So even if one were to say that it is constitutionally permissible for Congress to restrict the president to “for cause” removals, he is saying in this case that there is cause, and is thus arguably following the letter of the law. As with the question of “at will” presidential removals, whatever the Supreme Court ultimately decides on “for cause” removals will also have deep significance for the power of the administrative state, and for the president’s ability to make the bureaucracy more politically accountable.

Hysteria on the Left about the “death of democracy” notwithstanding, this brief snapshot of what the Trump Administration is up to suggests that a serious effort is underway to re-establish democratic and constitutional government. Much rides on what the Supreme Court will decide in the several pertinent cases it has on its docket this term. Even more rides on whether voters, in the 2026 and 2028 elections, wish to take advantage of this opportunity to regain their status as republican citizens, or will instead choose to remain subject to bureaucratic despotism.

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Foreign policy and international relations are not disconnected from domestic politics—they are intimately intertwined. As I previously argued at The American Mind, the downsides of imperial foreign policy involve not only the possibility of being routed abroad, but also corroding social relations between citizens and their representatives at home. Perhaps the clearest recent example of this is the tragic shootings of two National Guardsmen in our nation’s capital by an Afghan national who was resettled in the U.S. after the war in Afghanistan.

Jeremy Carl is surely right that many of our Afghan allies are far from benevolent allies like the British or Canadians, as evidenced by reports from our own soldiers of serial pederasty amongst the Afghan National Police. But we should also analyze the extent to which the shootings can be described as “blowback.” It is reasonable to ask to what extent U.S. policymakers laid the groundwork for these sorts of attacks by our intimate involvement in nation-building in Afghanistan.

“Blowback” is not a term created by your favorite Ron Paul libertarian or Pat Buchanan-thumping conservative neighbor. The Central Intelligence Agency coined the term in the early 1950s to describe unintended consequences arising from its actions abroad. One may also use the term more broadly to highlight results that are the opposite of the original intentions of policymakers, even if mission creep does not occur.

The most obvious example of blowback is the creation of both the Taliban and the training of Osama bin Laden in the late 1970s as a part of Operation Cyclone. Beginning in 1979, the CIA began funding local Afghan and Arab fighters, including bin Laden, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Soviets. Bin Laden would later use both the weapons and the training he received against the United States. The Taliban ended up capturing much of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s using weapons from the operation.

Bin Laden used his fame and rhetoric to attract the early members of al Qaeda and carry out bombings on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center, and the U.S. embassy in 1998. Eventually, he and his minions carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Another example of blowback is the creation of ISIS. The child of U.S. support for the Free Syrian Army, fighters under Operation Timber Sycamore would funnel weapons and training to their most extreme elements. Amongst those was Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamic organization allied with al Qaeda. Members would split off from this group, U.S. weapons in hand, to help form ISIS. Hardly the intended goal, U.S. intervention in Syria indirectly helped to create further Islamic terrorism in the Middle East—which would soon reach home.

Analysis of blowback requires journalists and political scientists to look beyond mere assertion of motives and draw a causal line from intervention abroad to the consequences that followed from said intervention. If we see the tragedy that occurred over Thanksgiving as an example of blowback, we must understand what was intended with U.S.-Afghan policy as it related to the perpetrator.

The New York Times reports that the perpetrator, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was a former member of a CIA-backed paramilitary group called “Zero Units.” Reports indicate that the CIA used them to help kill high-level Taliban and ISIS fighters, as well as civilians, in night raids.

These units would often do the dirty work of U.S. forces, being described as “death squads.” They appear to have been the worst of the worst in terms of tactics and behavior, and in exchange were given extensive covert support. It should be no surprise that radicalized youth and brutal killers would occupy such positions.

Over 10,000 Zero Units fighters were brought to the United States after the fall of Afghanistan.

Though the American people rightfully do not want to feel that they have abandoned allies to be killed, Zero Units members very likely do not have the cultural background conducive to living in America. But if we cannot bring them here, they become part of the mass of refugees moving toward Europe, which helps instill a mistrust of the United States among potential future allies.

Why aid the United States in fighting terrorists if the perception is that the government will abandon you? This drives potential allies into the arms of insurgents and terrorist groups. The CIA has equipped and trained these fighters—now they may turn those weapons against the American people, who will certainly bear the costs of terrorism, unlike the policymakers who armed these groups.

Clearly, providing permanent refugee status to Zero Units members is not the answer, as many come away as disturbed as Lakanwal did. Those not already “head choppers and door kickers” when they entered the units either became one or they left scarred. Reports indicate that Lakanwal became increasingly isolated and erratic during his time in the U.S.

An unknown number of asylum seekers from Afghanistan are either dangerous already or a ticking bomb. This is why we should not create the conditions where we are stuck with two unfavorable options. A lack of potential allies or dangerous former allies within our borders puts the U.S. at risk.

This is not to suggest that we should never work alongside potential allies in other countries, because they may potentially use the resources we equip them with against us. We should enter these potentialities into the calculus of our decision-making. And neither is this some kind of moral equivalency, wherein the United States occupies the same moral plane as individuals who commit terrible acts of violence.

But it does raise this question: Should we allow policymakers to engage in covert support of dangerous groups to thwart another foe?

The answer in Afghanistan was an obvious no. Our mission went from capturing Osama bin Laden to overthrowing the Taliban to installing a democracy in Kabul to eventually protecting women’s rights. It was obvious by 2002 that bin Laden had escaped into the mountains of Pakistan, and U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan were not serving the original purposes of U.S. action. Why was it the United States’s mission to overthrow the Taliban, which posed no broader geopolitical or security threat to our interests?

Afghanistan had proved before that supporting insurgents could lead to terrorism. The CIA should not have been surprised that their squads would attract those naïve enough to believe they could handle the work or potential terrorists. Seen in this light, Lakanwal’s horrific actions before Thanksgiving are a predictable outcome of endless wars and shifting goalposts.

When U.S. officials are deciding whether to engage in military action, they must consider the possibility that those they ally with may lash out in the only means available to them as they face a superior military: insurgency and terrorism. They shouldn’t equip those whom they have reason to believe will attack the U.S. later. And they also shouldn’t put the country in a situation where we may have to care for potentially dangerous former allies.

Blowback is a real cost of foreign policy, and one that policymakers must account for. If they do not, their failures will ultimately be borne by the average American and our men and women in uniform.

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