A monitor displays President Donald Trump as he delivers a message on the war in Iran in Washington, April 1, 2026. (Jason Hendardy/The New York Times) By JAMELLE BOUIE To have spent any amount of time observing President Donald Trump over the last month is to conclude that he is in far over his head. The president is struggling with the consequences of his actions, raging in protest of the fact that for all its firepower, the United States cannot bomb Iran into submission. W

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday night, April 12, 2026. Trump on Sunday lashed out at Pope Leo XIV and took credit for his ascension to the papacy. Leo had issued a rare direct criticism of a threat by Trump last week. (Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times) By ROSS DOUTHAT Let’s analyze the world’s latest church-and-empire fracas, the open conflict between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV, in terms o

A crowd during an anti-government concert on Heroes’ Square in Budapest, Hungary, April 10, 2026. (András Zoltai/The New York Times) By MICHELLE GOLDBERG On Saturday, the day before the election in Hungary, I went to Puspokladany, a run-down town of about 16,000 in the northeastern part of the country, for the penultimate rally of the opposition leader, Peter Magyar. Though the region has traditionally been a stronghold of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, the squar

Members of the Basij paramilitary volunteer militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps march past a ballistic missile on display during a military “force parade” in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 10, 2025. The Trump administration is facing several unpalatable options: A lengthy negotiation with Tehran over the future of its nuclear program, or a resumption of a war that has already created the largest energy disruption in modern times, and the prospect of a long struggle over who

Donald Trump should at long last recognize the ineptitude of his impulsive, go-it-alone approach. (Jason Hendardy/The New York Times) By THE EDITORIAL BOARD When President Donald Trump attacked Iran on Feb. 28, we called his decision reckless. He went to war without seeking congressional approval or the support of most allies. He offered thin and contradictory justifications to the American people. He failed to explain why this naive attempt at regime change would end better

An employee enters the Anthropic office in San Francisco, June 7, 2023. A panel of federal judges on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, denied a motion from Anthropic to stop the Department of Defense from labeling it a security risk, a setback for the artificial intelligence company in its battle with the Trump administration over how AI should be used in warfare. (Marissa Leshnov/The New York Times) By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Normally right now I would be writing about the geopolitical i

The SLS rocket takes off to begin the Artemis II mission at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., April 1, 2026. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times) By ROSS DOUTHAT I am a firm nonbeliever when it comes to the cult of John F. Kennedy, but like an atheist admiring the King James Bible, even I can appreciate some of the Kennedy scriptures. So as our latest lunar mission circles back to Earth, I found myself revisiting the speech at Rice University that launched us

Republican lawmakers, Cabinet members and senior advisers to President Donald Trump applaud during hiss State of the Union address, in the House of Representatives Chamber at the Capitol building in Washington, Feb. 24, 2026. (Damon Winter/The New York Times) By ROSS DOUTHAT Kristi Noem is gone. Pam Bondi is out. If there’s going to be a fall guy for our ill-starred regime-change operation in Iran, it’s likely to be Pete Hegseth, whose prewar overconfidence is being highlight

christianity.com By DAVID FRENCH I grew up in a strict, fundamentalist Christian tradition. Most churches in my denomination didn’t celebrate Christmas and Easter (though that is now changing) because they were deemed pagan vestiges that had been arbitrarily Christianized by the apostate Catholic Church. My family embraced those holidays, but my church did not — so much so that at church we’d sometimes defiantly sing Christmas carols out of season, just to demonstrate our t

A monitor displays President Donald Trump as he delivers a message on the war in Iran in Washington, April 1, 2026. In a functioning American democracy, the president would deliver an Oval Office address at the start of a new military conflict. Donald Trump, however, decided to wait until a month into his war with Iran to give a speech about it to a skeptical public. (Jason Hendardy/The New York Times) By MICHELLE GOLDBERG In a functioning American democracy, the president wo