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As America approaches its semiquincentennial, a surprising trend offers profound hope for the nation’s renewal: young Americans are returning to church. If you are like me and have noticed week by week more younger attendees and far fewer gray heads in your house of worship, this is anecdotal confirmation that change is afoot.

Recent data from the Barna Group reveals that Millennials and Gen Z are leading a resurgence in church attendance, with younger generations attending nearly two weekends per month on average in 2025—up significantly from just over one in 2020. Young men in particular are driving this shift, with higher weekly attendance rates than women for the first time in decades. This marks a historic generational reversal, as younger adults outpace older cohorts in frequency of worship.

Though Presidents’ Day is here, the nation as a whole does not seem to take much notice. That’s too bad, because we can learn some valuable lessons—both for our country and for ourselves as individuals—by taking time to reflect seriously on the character and actions of America’s presidents.

At first sight, it may seem paradoxical for a democratic nation to celebrate Presidents’ Day. In a democracy, after all, the people call the shots, and their elected leaders, even those of the highest rank, are just servants of the public. What is there to celebrate if the president is no more than an instrument of the people’s will? Why honor him more than any other public official? Why not have a holiday in honor of the sovereign people instead?

If we turn to the constitutional thought of our nation’s Founders, however, we find that these initial impressions do not capture their views of the presidency—nor of America’s democratic republic. The Federalist teaches us that we have a unitary executive, which makes the presidency unique among the political offices created by the Constitution. In the other branches of the federal government, the houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, power and responsibility rest with a majority of the members.

The desire to bring new life into the world runs deep in human nature. We know instinctively that children are worthy of the greatest care, and that the mission of parents is among the noblest in life. If our natures did not tell us this so strongly, the pain of childbirth—with all the toil, trials, and heartbreak that follow—would never seem worth it.

The pain of unfulfilled desire for children runs equally and correspondingly deep. In Jewish and Christian Scripture, infertility is almost a byword for anguish, much as having children is a byword for joy, chief among the blessings of God (“Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine…” “The barren wife shall bear seven sons….”). From the beginning of our species to its present, the importance of raising and forming the next generation has been self-evident to all generations.

January 3, 2026. Caracas. 2:47 AM.

The helicopters had come in low over the Caribbean, running dark. The Delta Force operators on board were well-rehearsed. By 3:29 AM, it was over. Thirty-two Cuban bodyguards lay dead in the compound. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were in flex cuffs, hustled onto a transport aircraft bound for New York. At Mar-a-Lago, President Trump watched the operation unfold in real time with his national security team. It was January 3—exactly 36 years to the day since American forces had extracted military dictator Manuel Noriega from Panama City.

To the general public, the operation in Caracas may have seemed to come out of the blue. But in fact it was only the latest episode—the most dramatic one yet—in a 60-year war that most Americans have never known about. Our adversary in that war has been the Castro regime, which has been pursuing a project far more ambitious than the survival of Cuban socialism. Its goal has always been the revolutionary transformation of the entire Western Hemisphere—including the United States itself.

“We Shall Be Victorious”

Last month, Democrat Abigail Spanberger was sworn in as the 75th governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. With Democrats now in control of the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion, Virginia has become the parade ground for the Left’s most radical, destructive, and aggressive ambitions: constitutional amendments for abortion, landmark gun-grabbing legislation, and an outrageous gerrymandering scheme that would make Illinois blush.

Spanberger also wants to reshape Virginia’s institutions of higher education. Two more odious bills have slinked their way before the House and into committee: HB1374 and HB1377. The former dissolves the Virginia Military Institute’s Board of Visitors and transfers its governance to Virginia State University. The latter, and more pernicious, creates the VMI Advisory Task Force “to determine whether [VMI] should continue to be a state-sponsored institution of higher education.”

The Left’s assault on VMI is nothing new. Cries of racism, sexism, and Confederate sympathies brought reporters to the small campus in Lexington, Virginia, during the woke wave of 2020, where they conjured stories to fit the cultural narrative. The upheaval resulted in the renaming of VMI buildings and the removal of Stonewall Jackson’s statue that had dominated the campus for decades.

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.

Bad Bunny, Worse Politics | The Roundtable Ep. 304

When the history of the Christian Classical Education movement is written, the central figure will surely be Pastor Douglas Wilson. The Association of Classical Christian Schools, which he founded, includes even more member schools than Pastor Wilson has written books—and that is saying something. Over the past half-century, through the institutions and associations he has created, the essays, articles, and polemics he has written, and the sheer force of his personality, Pastor Wilson has helped guide the educations of tens of thousands of Americans.

In 1991, Pastor Wilson published Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. This book remains the blueprint for Christian Classical Education across America. Its title was inspired by “The Lost Tools of Learning,” a 1947 lecture by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). Outside Pastor Wilson’s movement, Sayers is mostly known, if at all, as the author of some moderately entertaining detective stories. Her translations of Dante for Penguin Classics are still in print, but so dated as to seem older than the medieval original.

Taylor Swift’s recent hit album The Life of a Showgirl was characteristically catchy yet ideologically confusing. It’s a picture of a woman being torn between the life of a girlboss and the life of a wife—and possibly mother.

Deeply in love with her fiancé, Travis Kelce, Swift’s album unsurprisingly features her most sexual song to date, while other tracks reflect on her time in show business, with a mix of triumph and tragedy. Recorded during the European leg of her wildly successful Eras Tour, the album is in many ways an ode to the career she loves. But it is also a love letter filled with lyrics that are equal parts profound and a little corny, pointing toward a life in which Swift could leave the showgirl era behind altogether.

Take this set of stanzas from Wi$h Li$t, a song that mocks the soulless hustle of Hollywood and the music industry, contrasting it with the quiet happiness of family life in the suburbs.

They want that yacht life, under chopper blades

They want those bright lights and Balenci’ shades

And a fat a*s with a baby face

They want it all

They want that complex female character

They want that critical smash Palme d’Or

And an Oscar on their bathroom floor

One year ago, President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to develop policy recommendations to protect access to in vitro fertilization (IVF), expand its availability, and lower its cost to patients. Then in October, the administration announced additional measures to lower costs for IVF and common fertility drugs and explore pathways like expanded employer benefits or excepted benefit categories for assisted reproductive technologies. While this included joint efforts across federal agencies to make this costly intervention more affordable, the administration stopped short of imposing broad new federal mandates for insurance coverage or direct government funding of IVF.

Shortly before Christmas, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers made a dramatic announcement: the U.S. was placing five individuals described as “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex” on a visa sanctions list in an effort to curb foreign suppression of Americans. The undoubted headliner of the group is Thierry Breton, the former E.U. Internal Market Commissioner who spearheaded efforts to enforce the E.U.’s Digital Services Act (DSA) during the last years of his tenure in the European Commission. The list also includes the two managing directors of the hitherto relatively obscure German organization HateAid, which serves as a so-called “trusted flagger” under the DSA.

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.

The Mini-Bus, the Short Bus, and the Clown Car | The Roundtable Ep. 303

If Hayek taught us to inquire about who ought to decide and Lincoln taught us to ask to what end, then the question of immigration compels us toward a third and inescapable question: Where is the line drawn?

The principles of subsidiarity and federalism demand that matters should be resolved at the lowest level of authority competent to manage them. Much of what the national government has usurped would be more wisely and justly managed by the states, local communities, families, and institutions of civil society. The Constitution itself was framed to embody this division of powers, preserving the vitality of local self-government against the dangers of centralized tyranny.

Reading Hillary Clinton’s most recent article, “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” it’s hard not to have at least some sympathy, and perhaps even empathy, for her.

Yes, Clinton was one of the most ruthless political operators of the last century, a woman who would seemingly do almost anything in pursuit of power. She was extremely close to becoming president, the prize she had always wanted, before being thwarted by Donald Trump of all people, a figure she treated as little more than an absurdity during much of her 2015-16 campaign.

It would be easy to dismiss anything Clinton writes as simple, cynical political posturing. And to be sure, there is plenty of politicized misrepresentation of facts in her latest article. And yet her recent piece attacking the Trump GOP for its supposed lack of empathy, using Minneapolis as a backdrop, is revealing, for it lays bare the moral core of today’s Democratic Party.

If her piece were just political and not reflective to some degree of her sincere belief, she could have done it as an X post or a short op-ed—she certainly didn’t need 6,000 words in The Atlantic to make her case. In this respect I differ somewhat from Pastor Joe Rigney, one of the targets of Clinton’s ire, who wrote his own excellent response. Clinton wrote this essay because, to a certain extent, she means it.

Many in Washington have begun to speak the language of war. Republicans tell us we are fighting for the Constitution, for the culture, and for the future of the country. That rhetoric alone marks a welcome change. For decades, American politics has been treated as a technocratic dispute among credentialed elites, where process matters more than outcomes and elections merely decide if the managerial state has to occasionally mount some resistance against GOP political appointees.

Yet, there exists a harmful disconnect between rhetoric and behavior. While Republican leaders increasingly talk like participants in an existential struggle, they continue to govern like caretakers of the status quo. They campaign like insurgents, but legislate like custodians.

This contradiction is heightened with talk of a “Golden Age,” a phrase often invoked as a form of reassurance or a fulfilled prophecy. Republicans, though, are mistaken: we are not in a Golden Age. Augustus did not declare the Pax Romana in the middle of a civil war, let alone a cold one like ours. It was named after power had been consolidated and institutions reshaped. Golden ages follow conquest; they don’t precede it.

The Pax Americana will come after victory is achieved, not before it.

Fake constitutionalism is increasingly becoming a problem in America. There is a marked tendency for public officials, political commentators, and those in the media to invoke bogus constitutional principles or bogus interpretations of genuine constitutional principles. They do this mainly to cast blame on their political opponents or to shelter the otherwise unacceptable behavior of their political allies. Fake constitutionalism undermines constitutional government by spreading misconceptions about what our Constitution means.

Regrettably, the First Amendment has become one of the most fruitful areas in which fake constitutionalism thrives. It is now commonplace for Americans—even constitutional lawyers—to make inflated claims about the protections afforded by the First Amendment, extending its scope far beyond the safeguards the American Founders had in mind when they debated and wrote this essential provision of our Constitution. The most recent case in point is the misplaced outrage over the supposed violations of the First Amendment involved in the arrest of Don Lemon.

R.J. Pestritto is right that the removal fight matters. If the president cannot fire executive subordinates, it becomes difficult to see how he can “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But Pestritto also says near the end of his essay that removal is only a first step, and he cautions against merely substituting judicial power for administrative power. That’s the point I want to pull forward here: restoring presidential control over the executive branch alone does not cure an unconstitutional delegation and a fusion of powers. We need to address the fact that most of the administrative state has no constitutional warrant—and also that restoring such awesome power to the president absent greater reforms might in fact do more harm than good.

The Trump Administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn its decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which held that Congress could limit the president’s power to remove members of “independent regulatory commissions.” In that case it was the Federal Trade Commission, but the principle has been applied to others like the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and, biggest of all, the Federal Reserve.

Approximately 10-15% of U.S. couples of reproductive age experience infertility. One response is to pursue in vitro fertilization (IVF), which is fraught with many negative ethical and practical implications. Another way is to get to the root cause of infertility. Shouldn’t that be the MAHA way?

President Trump expanded access to IVF with his February 2025 executive order. In October, he lowered costs for IVF and other fertility treatments.

When Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum last week, he was draped in the tricolor semiotics of American mythology: a bright red tie blazing against a navy suit and a brilliant white shirt, the azure backdrop proclaiming “World Economic Forum” in relentless repetition.

“We are the hottest country in the world,” he declared, as actual temperatures prepared to plummet toward record lows. Yet this apparent contradiction reveals not cynicism but rather a profound understanding of politics and human nature. Trump operates in the order of symbolic truth, where the sign serves not to deceive but to reveal deeper patterns of meaning.

His appearance in Switzerland, swimming in the red, white, and blue of the American flag while surrounded by the gray neutrality of European technocracy, was no accident. It was rather a deliberate act of semiotic resistance, a refusal to surrender national identity to the homogenizing forces of globalist abstraction. Trump understands intuitively what others labor to learn: that in an age of mass communication, the skillful deployment of signs can restore meaning to a world threatened by semantic collapse. His color palette functioned as a vital reminder that symbols still possess power, that representation can serve truth rather than obscure it.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America was a vigorous, growing nation, coming of age in a new era of technological and industrial progress, with all the strains and stressors that develop under periods of mass movements and economic growth. Thousands of people flocked to the United States in search of opportunities. Despite domestic challenges and opposition from the wealthiest, Americans were able to rally in favor of reforms including antitrust legislation and increased food and workplace safety standards.

The Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts, two landmark laws from the era, form the cornerstone of the federal government’s enforcement of antitrust policy. Rapid industrialization after the Civil War allowed corporations in sectors such as railroads, oil, steel, and finance to consolidate market control, suppress competition, fix prices, and wield outsized influence over workers and politics. Farmers, small businesses, and labor organizations argued that these practices distorted markets and undermined democratic governance.

But since then, the usage of antitrust law has varied over the last century. In recent decades, federal regulators have gravitated more toward a “laissez-faire” view of antitrust enforcement. This hands-off approach puts the amorphous concept of the “market” at the core of the government’s concerns instead of taking more proactive measures to prevent unfair monopolies.

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.

ICE Storm | The Roundtable Ep. 302

Close on the heels of Renée Good’s death, Minneapolis protestor Alex Pretti was killed in another altercation with ICE agents. Investigation into both incidents will hopefully make judgment easier in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion the situation looks grim. Losing ground on the media battlefield and in polls ahead of the midterms, Trump must consider the extent and nature of his mandate on immigration. This week, the guys take a hard look at the electoral reality and discuss what it means for the Right’s policy agenda. Plus: regulatory bloat (aka Hegel’s revenge) makes it hard to translate political will into meaningful action in the UK, while inclement weather and exploding trees (!) make for an eventful week in the U.S.

Donald Trump says many things, some of which should be taken literally and some of which should not. When Trump first mentioned the idea of America acquiring Greenland in 2019, many European leaders assumed, or at least hoped, that this plan fell into the latter category. However, as the last few weeks have demonstrated, Trump is quite serious about America obtaining the largest non-continental island in the world. If accomplished, getting Greenland will likely be remembered as the beginning of Europe’s own century of humiliation, as the reality of its status as essentially a vassal of the U.S. becomes undeniable.

Trump’s Greenland plan has garnered opposition domestically as well. While no small part of this disagreement stems from people who would refuse to brush their teeth if Trump told them it was healthy, there are sincere policy disagreements over the issue, notably within the “realist and restraint” coalition that has opposed the failed foreign policy status quo. Sensible realists have put forward proposals that seek to avoid annexation or invasion while still securing American interests via “dollar diplomacy,” as Justin Logan and Sumantra Maitra recently argued in The National Interest.

What is unfolding in Minnesota cannot be understood without first confronting a difficult truth: some cultures arrive intact. They do not dissolve on contact with modern society, nor do they gently adapt—they replicate.

Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.

This structure is pre-modern, but it is also anti-modern. It resists the very conditions that make liberal societies function: individual accountability, transparency, impersonal law, and trust beyond kin. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligation. Where it persists, institutions decay.

Industrial societies require a high culture that is transmitted through mass, state-run education, because only such a culture can sustain economic mobility, the bonds of social trust, and full political citizenship within a highly differentiated division of labor. Nationalism in this sense is not an irrational passion but the adjustment mechanism by which politics and culture come into alignment.

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.

Halfway to the Midterms | The Roundtable Ep. 301

As anti-ICE protests escalate in Minneapolis, agitators storm a church mid-service. But Trump’s deportation efforts are combining with economic pain to drive his poll numbers down. Uncertainty about Greenland doesn’t seem to be helping matters, though the breakdown of NATO may be unavoidable or already happening in all but name. With midterms looming, how should the administration approach this delicate moment? Plus: the discipline of classics, and with it the prestige institutions of the American academy, seem determined to self-destruct. Ryan, Mike, and Spencer survey the landscape and offer up a few cultural recommendations.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 301 appeared first on The American Mind.

President Trump began the first full week of 2026 with several announcements, one of which was likely to get missed in everything that’s been taking place: he committed his administration to “ban[ing] large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” because “[p]eople live in homes, not corporations.” A fair enough observation.

However, according to the Brookings Institution, large institutional owners account for less than 3% of home ownership nationally. Yet home prices are still absurdly high.

Affordability is a key topic for young people who lived through the post-CARES Act inflation and resent many of their elders for owning homes they don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford. Zohran Mamdani soared into the New York City mayor’s office in part because he repeatedly spoke on this issue. While it is a positive sign that the Trump Administration is looking to tackle exorbitant home prices for young Americans, its ban on institutional investing may miss the forest for the trees, that great expanding forest being the Federal Reserve.

The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who was shot after hitting an ICE officer with her car according to video footage, have many asking the question, “What exactly do these anti-ICE activists think they are doing?”

The seemingly incomprehensible decision by Good, a mother with stuffed animals in the glove box of the vehicle she used to obstruct the enforcement of federal law, is leaving people scratching their heads. Reporting that Good became an activist through a peer group at her child’s progressive, social justice-focused charter school has not provided many answers. Media outlets like CNN have sought to demonstrate that the work Good was involved in was more like a side project of the local Parent Teacher Association than domestic terrorism.

But reality was something else.

In mid-December, the White House released an executive order establishing the second Trump Administration’s space policy. In the order, the president outlines a policy to “secure the Nation’s vital economic and security interests” and “unleash commercial development” in the stars.

The EO follows on the Department of Energy’s “first-ever government purchase of a natural resource from space” last May. If successful, the procurement of lunar helium-3 by 2029 promises to be the first nugget in a 21st-century gold rush. With the value of the isotope reaching $20 million per kilogram by some estimates, prospecting and settlement of the final frontier—a goal of President Trump’s order—might soon follow.

Withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty (OST) might help secure that frontier for Americans. Ratified by the Senate in 1967, the treaty was born of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the global community focused on how to prevent preexisting terrestrial tensions from spilling over into space.

We are accustomed to thinking of political power as a binary: you either have it or you don’t. But in his 1945 masterpiece On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenel imagined it as an organism. Power is like a creature in a nature documentary, adapting, sensing opportunity, and slipping into the cracks. And it grows not because tyrants seize it but because people invite it. “Power is continually being summoned by the weak to save them from the strong who are close at hand,” de Jouvenel wrote. It expands not through violence but through promises. If one has heard the phrase “high-low vs. the middle,” this is how power operates. A higher power uses the low, whether for bodies, justifications, or clients, to attack the middle.

Here is where de Jouvenel’s argument becomes truly interesting. Power does not grow randomly: it grows toward legitimacy, toward righteousness, toward whatever moral vocabulary the age supplies. In medieval France, that vocabulary was justice. In the 20th century, it was security. But in the 21st century, the moral vocabulary of legitimacy is something different. Today’s most potent political ideal is anti-majoritarianism.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has attempted to hold Pax Americana together with a simple, deeply flawed strategy: pay everyone off and hope they behave. Allies, adversaries, neutrals—it didn’t matter. Subsidies, aid, trade asymmetries, security guarantees, sanctions waivers, and diplomatic indulgences were handed out on the assumption that gratitude would follow. It didn’t—entitlement did.

Bribery diplomacy rests on a childlike premise: if you keep paying, people will stay in line. In reality, when money flows freely and consequences never arrive, it stops being leverage and becomes reverse tribute. Nations don’t become loyal. They become resentful, arrogant, and defiant. And the moment you threaten to turn off the spigot, the outrage begins. “How dare you?” “You’re betraying us.” “You’re imperialist.” “You’re fascist.” The language is predictable because the psychology is.

Europe is the archetype. After World War II, the United States rebuilt the continent and underwrote its security. That made sense at the time. What didn’t make sense was continuing to subsidize Europe indefinitely while tolerating trade imbalances, defense freeloading, and open hostility toward American interests. When Trump demanded NATO countries pay their share, it was treated as the end of the “world order.” When he demanded reciprocal trade instead of one-way free trade, elites panicked. The system wasn’t collapsing; the subsidy was.

The debate over IVF has revealed a deep fissure inside the pro-life movement—not over whether life is sacred, but over whether we trust human beings to act in accord with that truth.

When President Trump announced a suite of policies to subsidize and support some forms of IVF, the fiercest criticism didn’t come from the Left. It came from those who consider themselves the most devout defenders of life. They denounced IVF as inherently immoral, condemned those who use it as selfish, and warned that creating embryos outside the womb violates the natural order.

This reaction was characterized more by moral discomfort than by moral clarity. Though the modern pro-life movement has done inestimable good, there are some among its number who conflate the misuse of fertility technology with the immorality of all fertility technology per se. It’s a reactionary posture that treats human innovation as a threat rather than a tool—one that, if guided rightly, can aid nature in its sacred purpose of bringing new life into the world.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

In the town of Howell, Michigan, Andrea Lee has been trying to secure special education resources for her children through lawsuits. According to local reporting, she’s filed “more than two dozen complaints and four legal grievances over the Howell Public Schools’ treatment of her three children with disabilities.” Special education policy in North Carolina’s Cumberland County is also being determined by way of lawsuit: A new lawsuit claims that the county’s school district “systematically violated federal disability law by delaying special education evaluations for children who showed clear signs of needing help.”

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), after all, makes it so that special education policy is essentially created lawsuit by lawsuit. It puts mandates in place and then, according to Miriam Kurtzig Freedman in the University of Chicago Law Review, sets up “an adversarial private-enforcement system for the rights it created.”

MAGA world seems to be down at the mouth lately. Though still months away, the latest polling seems to portend defeat in the upcoming midterms. And yet, looking back over the past year since January 20, 2025, I see not gloomy defeat but an America that has—for the first time in decades—a fighting chance.

The first year of President Trump’s second administration gives me hope that America will not continue on the path that seemed inevitable just over a year ago: tyrannical censorship, weaponized government agencies, and a Rubicon as heavily trafficked as the Rio Grande. Instead, the Trump Administration has racked up a series of clear victories in several major areas of policy that they can build on in the years ahead to inaugurate a new American golden age.

Monumental Immigration Enforcement

No issue was more central to Trump’s ascent than finally getting immigration under control, a demand from American voters that both parties had previously ignored for decades. In his first administration, Trump controlled the border. But in his second term, he’s done far more than that (crossings these days are virtually nil, something the political class said just a couple of years ago required an act of Congress). He’s taken massive steps toward removing the many millions who reside in the United States illegally.

In his escalating attempts to cut ties with China, President Trump has aggressively employed tariffs, threats, and embargoes. But there’s one potentially powerful tool the Trump Administration has yet to leverage fully: trash.

Hidden among America’s trash heaps and mining waste are potentially rich accumulations of critical materials that China currently monopolizes—and that the United States desperately needs. Capitalizing on those materials will remove one of China’s greatest sources of leverage over American national and economic security.

After decades of allowing domestic production of critical minerals to flatline, policymakers and industrial partners have finally woken up to the dangers of the Chinese critical mineral monopoly. The country controls 60% of critical mineral production and 85% of the world’s processing capacity. Yet these often-cited numbers can obscure even more frightening vulnerabilities.

In 1983, under the guidance of Ronald Reagan, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to “foster the infrastructure of democracy.” Reagan had used the phrase a year before in an address to Parliament to describe the building blocks of liberty: a free press, unions, political parties, and universities. The president’s stated aim was noble, even high-minded—to advance democratic norms without the blunt instruments that had characterized earlier Cold War interventions.

The institutional form chosen to achieve this aim, however, was peculiar from the start. The NED was conceived as a government-organized non-government organization—a GONGO—deliberately positioned at arm’s length from formal diplomacy while remaining entirely dependent on congressional appropriations. This structure allowed U.S. officials to exert political influence abroad while maintaining a veneer of non-intervention and plausible deniability. The result was not independence, but ambiguity: foreign policy without clear accountability to either Congress or the president.

Almost immediately after he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Donald Trump was being compared to Andrew Jackson. From his anti-establishment tenor to his breaking of norms to his raucous times in office, media observers and even the president himself have highlighted their similarities. “It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar to you?” Trump asked in 2017 during a speech marking Jackson’s 250th birthday.

But less discussed is the comparison between Jackson’s own revolution and Trump’s, particularly the endings. While this is understandable—Trump has in many respects served as America’s past, present, and political future for the last decade, and an ending to his time at the center of American life is difficult to fathom—as 2028 draws near, those who wish for Trump’s revolution to extend past his presidencies should look to how Jackson handled his own movement after he exited the White House.

Though Jackson left office in 1837, he did not leave the political scene. In fact, his political revolution was only half over. In managing the second half, Jackson would go on to become the most powerful former president in American history—and would see his revolution through to its conclusion.

In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision on in vitro fertilization (IVF) reshaped the national debate around fertility and pushed both Democrats and Republicans to present themselves as champions of reproductive health. As President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris fought for the White House, IVF shifted from a niche medical issue to a test of how each side understood family, women’s health, and how far the “right” to have a child goes.

What began as a legal question—whether embryos created through IVF are considered human persons—quickly widened into a debate about rising infertility rates and whether the country should move beyond IVF to treat the root causes of infertility itself. During President Trump’s second term, he has unexpectedly found himself at the center of these debates.

The Ruling Heard Around the World

In many ways, the United States had been building toward this moment for decades. President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics (2001–2009) was one of the first political efforts to think seriously about the rights of and responsibilities owed to human embryos.

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.

Minnesota ICE (ft. Kyle Schideler) | The Roundtable Ep. 300

One of the core executive powers is that of prosecuting criminals. Article II of the Constitution assigns “the executive power”—all of it—to the president of the United States. In practice, the power to execute the laws against those who have violated them is delegated from the president to the attorney general, the Department of Justice which she heads, and the 93 U.S. attorneys spread across the country.

Yet since he took office for the second time last January, President Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have had a heck of a time getting their people in place. Of the roughly 50 U.S. attorney nominations the president has sent to the Senate, fewer than half—just 19—had been confirmed by December 15, and all of those but three were confirmed en masse in October, some 10 months after Trump took office. Although another 13 were confirmed en masse on December 18, 14 are still awaiting confirmation as we approach the one-year mark of Trump’s second term.

It has been a healthy development that parts of the conservative movement over the last decade or so have become increasingly skeptical of the Republican establishment’s slavish devotion to excessive individualism, indiscriminate immigration, and globalism.

In a recent First Things article, R.R. Reno pointed to America’s original Progressives—and to Woodrow Wilson in particular—as sources of inspiration for today’s conservative reassessment, because they too yearned for greater solidarity as they contended against the excesses of individualism. While I sympathize with Reno’s aims, Wilson and his fellow Progressive fathers of our modern state should not serve as guides to escaping our present mess—after all, they were the figures most responsible for bringing it upon us.  

Conservatism is a divided movement today. But if we’re honest, it almost always has been, coming as it did out of the shotgun marriage of traditionalists and individualists. What united the diverse elements of the conservative movement, however, was their opposition to the collectivism and statism foisted on us by the likes of Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. It is a sign of just how precarious our times have become—and of just how badly establishment conservatism has fallen short—that sensible conservatives should now turn for inspiration to those whose principal mission was to overturn the American political tradition and replace it with the modern state.

For years, AI has been surrounded by extreme predictions of ushering in either catastrophe or paradise, with breakthroughs in machine intelligence repeatedly promised as imminent for well over a decade. Elon Musk has recently stated that artificial general intelligence, where AI matches or exceeds human-level capabilities across tasks, could arrive as early as later this year. A reasonable person might assume that’s optimistic, but it nevertheless merits a serious look at what that means for Americans and our politics.

Many on the Right are correctly concerned about what this transition could look like for our nation. As government spending at all levels exceeds 40% of GDP, the reality is that it will be a political issue with implications for both this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Figures like Steve Bannon and Ron DeSantis are staking out pro-regulatory positions on AI, emphasizing risk mitigation and regulations that could alter the development of this technology. The regulatory appetite will likely only increase as we see the impact on the economy grow—a fact that must be reckoned with.  

We share a positive vision for the future AI may bring, where it dismantles bloated bureaucracies, unleashes economic growth, and rewards high-agency individuals to build the future we want to live in.

The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the following when asked to comment on an ICE agent’s shooting of a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over him with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal murder [of] a woman [who was shot] in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”

She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lenses.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Mamdani in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”

It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical Left regarding political conflict in our country.

At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.

At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”

Perhaps no group of scholars has investigated the principles of the American Founding more seriously than the students of Leo Strauss. The bicentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution produced notable Straussian commentaries, including the still-influential essay by Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics: The American Way.” Although those who studied directly under Strauss have, for the most part, retired or passed, we can expect the students of those students to take the lead as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and, in a few years, of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Yet Straussians, famously, disagree about the meaning of America. Following Diamond, so-called “East Coast” Straussians contend the founding was “low but solid,” grounded primarily and essentially in preserving life, liberty, and property and nothing more, thus eschewing or at best downplaying the cultivation of virtue and morality. So-called “West Coast” Straussians interpret America more favorably, even claiming that it is the “best regime” of Western civilization, as Harry V. Jaffa argued in these pages. West Coasters maintain that America, properly understood, aims at goodness and nobility. Why so much disagreement? More importantly, who gets America right?

“I think, in many ways, the uniformed military may help save us from this president.” – Senator Mark Warner on MS NOW

One of the reasons why civilians living in the Western world have comparatively high levels of public trust in their militaries is that their service members are taught to obey only lawful orders, the kind that satisfy basic moral and constitutional demands. That’s an important principle for most Americans, whose peace of mind relies on our military being under civilian control.

But what happens if a revolutionary movement works to divide the chain of command from elected lawmakers? Congressional Democrats, in partnership with mainstream media figures and establishment actors, have been running just such a play.

Judging by the War Department’s actions to capture cosplay Venezuelan “President” Nicolás Maduro and his wife, it seems that the latest attempts to cast Donald Trump as a dictator in the minds of America’s men and women in uniform have failed. Yet it would be a catastrophic mistake to dismiss the highly organized effort to turn the U.S. military against President Trump as more of the same partisan rhetorical games of the past. Had the Left succeeded, helicopters could have been hovering over the White House instead of a compound in Caracas. In their minds, that remains the desired outcome.

The American Founders freely acknowledged that natural rights were granted by God—“endowed by their Creator,” to use their language. They and their early republic successors saw the United States as an example to the rest of the world in practicing the art of self-government. But what bears remembering in our own day is that they did not believe the United States was a home for all the world’s freedom-loving people. Instead, constitutional nationalists like Daniel Webster understood the U.S. as a teacher of mankind, a republican people seeking to pass along the blessings of liberty they cultivated to their posterity.

Due to an explosion in unrestrained Enlightenment universalism, Democrats of Webster’s day wanted to obliterate national borders and all non-democratic governments. Webster affirmed those same universal natural rights, but believed they could only be truly expressed through the particular history of the people of the American republic. It was not America’s job to tear down borders or obliterate national distinctions. It was America’s duty to teach all nations the value of natural rights by their example so that every nation might embrace natural rights in its own particular way, through its own institutions.

America was a nation founded upon universal principles, but those principles could only be truly expressed through the historical development and experience of the particular people who called themselves Americans.

Ronald J. Pestritto has done a splendid job in supplying us with a succinct account of the ideological origins of the administrative state, its evolution, and the attempts by Donald Trump and some of his predecessors to rein it in. Essentially a fourth branch of government, the administrative state has taken over most of the functions of government, yet is not directly responsible to any elected official.

Its establishment and expansion presuppose the existence of what Hegel called “the universal class”—an impartial, benevolent, all-wise cohort of Platonic Guardians apt to take better care of us than we would be capable of doing ourselves, even if we were blessed with ample resources. Such an arrangement makes a mockery of our pretension that, as human beings, we have the capacity to govern ourselves, and that it is incumbent on us to do so. How can there be liberty and personal responsibility when our conduct is governed in nearly every particular by individuals over whom we exercise no leverage? And how can there be a redress of grievances when our true rulers are largely beyond our reach?

Ronald Pestritto’s article on the Trump Administration’s efforts to tame the administrative state helpfully offers what he calls a “brief snapshot,” focusing primarily on the administration’s project to reshape administrative law to buttress presidential control over the bureaucracy through regulatory review and firing authority. His longer Provocation offers an exceptional and more thorough introduction to these and other issues, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand why the administrative state presents such a fundamental challenge to American constitutionalism.

The core principle that animates Pestritto’s article and Provocation is the consent of the governed—a principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a prerequisite of any just government. According to the Founders, our natural equality means that we cannot be governed by another without our consent. To accept government without consent would be tantamount to admitting that there are rulers who are so naturally superior that they may rule us against our will. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote just before the celebration of the Declaration’s 50th anniversary that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

The social media hashtag #NeverTrump first appeared in June 2015, days after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. For the balance of that year, social media derision attracted less attention than Trump himself, mostly due to the widespread belief that Trump’s campaign was self-extinguishing, which argued against pointless efforts to bring about an already inevitable defeat. In election cycles since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory, unlikely protest candidates for the GOP presidential nomination—Pat Robertson, Ron Paul, Herman Cain—had briefly surged in the polls, only to give way to a conventional politician who ended up as the party’s nominee. Bill Clinton observed that, when selecting a presidential nominee, there is an almost anthropological difference between Democrats, who fall in love with a previously obscure politician (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama), and Republicans, who fall in line behind an established one (Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney).

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.

Maduro No Más: Venezuela’s Future After His Capture ft. Josh Treviño & R.J. Pestritto | The Roundtable Ep. 299

Nicolás Maduro is in U.S. custody, pleading not guilty to federal drug and weapons charges. What does his capture mean for Venezuela, American foreign policy, and the global order? And how does this moment connect to the domestic fight over America’s administrative state? Josh Treviño of AFPI unpacks the geopolitical aftermath of Maduro’s arrest, and R.J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College discusses his latest publication about the rise of America’s unelected bureaucracy: Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed.

R.J. Pestritto’s “How the Trump Administration Is Taming the Administrative State” argues that President Donald Trump’s attacks on independent agencies seek to restore democratic accountability to the administrative state. For once, I find that Professor Pestritto has not gone as far as he could have. The fight over the removal of federal commissioners is only part of a larger campaign to free the executive from the misguided “reforms” of the Watergate era. The goal is not just to render the independent agencies democratically accountable, but more broadly to restore the “energy in the executive” that is the “definition of good government,” as Alexander Hamilton declared in Federalist 70.

Everyone remembers the famous warning Benjamin Franklin reportedly gave Elizabeth Willing Powel as he and his fellow framers left the Constitutional Convention’s final session: they’d created “a republic, if you can keep it.” What’s less understood is that we didn’t.

Ronald J. Pestritto’s new Provocation from the Center for the American Way of Life brings the welcome news that valiant efforts have begun to restore the lost republican framework that those great men designed. But since most Americans believe we still live under the regime forged in Philadelphia, what’s equally valuable in Pestritto’s essay is his lucid reminder of just how we squandered the brilliant contrivance that James Madison shepherded through the Convention: the self-governing republic formed, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, by “reflection and choice” rather than by “accident and force,” arguably the finest achievement of the Western Enlightenment.