Dear President Ozymandias

 

Bret Stephens

Dear President Ozymandias

June 2, 2026

Credit...Eli Hiller/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

To: Our greatest president

From: Your greatest fans

We are writing to let you know, sir, that we are as outraged as you are that some liberal judge has ordered that your name be stripped from the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Not only is the decision wrong, it’s also backward. You’ve survived three assassination attempts and yet the building will keep his name?

On a related subject, sir, we hope those knuckleheads in Congress won’t let some old law stand in the way of putting your face on a $250 bill. After all, nothing advertises the strength of a country’s economy like high-denomination bank notes. And since restaurant meals now often run to about $250 (minus drinks and dessert) for a party of four, making a bank note with your mug shot on it will be triply convenient: faster payment; a reminder of how affordable things have become under your presidency; and proof that, in the land of the free, you can get away with just about anything.

We’re also big supporters of your plan for your triumphal arch for Washington soaring a proud 250 feet, nearly as tall as the Capitol itself. Hopefully it will include large gold-plated statues of the greatest American leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln and yourself. People are calling it the “Arc de Trump,” like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. That one was commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, just before such strokes of military genius as the Peninsular War, the invasion of Russia and the Hundred Days campaign of 1815.

Do you know they named a bridge and a train station in London in honor of the battle that ended that last excursion?

At any rate, leaders who build gargantuan triumphal arches always go on to greater military glory. Maybe yours will be for the liberation of Hormuz, though that may have to await the deployment of the new “Trump class” battleships after the first one commissions sometime around 2036.

We fear, however, that you may be missing significant opportunities to enhance your and your family’s visibility.

We were tempted to suggest, for example, that you consider renaming the Statue of Liberty the “Melania Knauss Trump Statue of Liberty,” in honor of the first immigrant — a legal immigrant, of course — to become first lady. But Lady Liberty isn’t exactly a “10,” except maybe in her dress size, and the poem about “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” is not on-brand when it comes to the Trump name.

For now, we have shelved the idea. But have you considered building a svelter “Statue of Melania,” 250 feet tall (not including the base), on nearby Governors Island? The inscription could read: “Give me your Central European catalog models and anyone willing to write a $25 million check.”

Future generations will find it inspirational.

We also believe you were too modest when you chose to rename the Gulf of Mexico after America rather than after yourself, as you had thought to do at first. But why settle for a mere gulf? The Atlantic Ocean is named for Atlas, a figure from Greek mythology, which makes little sense since Greece is nowhere near the Atlantic. And the Pacific Ocean, which is much larger than the Atlantic, was named after a brand of Mexican beer, Pacifico, which makes no sense at all.

You know what does make sense? Trump Oceans. Plural. It simplifies geography while amplifying your name.

And we cannot stop there.

You mustn’t be shy about putting your name to the new White House ballroom. And though we understand that adding your face to Mount Rushmore (for which there’s already a bill in Congress) may, alas, be a geological impossibility, why not, while it’s being repaired and redone, add the name TRUMP in huge gold-tiled letters to the floor of the Reflecting Pool in the National Mall? Ideally, these should be lit up at night in a way that can be visible from 30,000 feet, if not from space.

Speaking of space, aren’t we going back to the moon under your presidency? That’s got to mean naming rights in addition to bragging rights. At a minimum, our first lunar base must be named for you. (The second one can be named for Elon, or maybe Jeff, whoever is first, provided you’re still on good terms with either of them.) But why do we even call our planet’s moon “the Moon,” as if a generic noun should be a proper noun, too? That needs to change.

Get ready for it: Trump Moon.

Mr. President, there are so many ways to honor your priceless achievements and legacy, but we’ve already taken too much of your time. And time being the most valuable thing of all, it reminds us, finally, of a poem:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Yours sincerely,

Percy, Bysshe and Shelley

 

Trump Has Failed as Commander in Chief

 

Thomas L. Friedman

Trump Has Failed as Commander in Chief

June 2, 2026

Credit...Photo Illustration by Naila Ruechel for The New York Times. Source

 

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

With each passing month of his presidency, Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief.

How so? Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed near Iran. Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united. Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home. And there is nothing that encourages an enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing America at war with itself.

And how has Trump risen to that commander-in-chief unifying duty? He has not lifted a finger to bring Democrats behind the war. Instead, he’s prioritized acting like a commander in thief. At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies, which could include those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was so outrageous that even some of his most reliable Republican Party sycophants couldn’t accept it.

Trump conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those Trump supporters who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor. In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”

Fortunately, a federal judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing this terrible plan.

If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters.

Alas, though, Trump apparently wants money only for people who tried to overthrow our Constitution at home, not for those who want to emulate our constitutional democracy abroad.

In addition, the Trump-directed Justice Department quietly inserted, as a supplement to that slush fund deal, a one-page document signed by Blanche stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members or his businesses. That measure remains in force, Blanche said on Tuesday.

President Trump has another moniker suggesting his ethical challenges: “trader in chief,” as The Associated Press recently proposed. Why? Because “recent presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and sell orders,” The A.P. wrote, “many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”

That was an average of 50 trades a day in stocks that included U.S. military suppliers affected by the Iran war. “If he were defense secretary, he would be committing a crime,” Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics adviser in the George W. Bush administration, told The A.P. “Technically he can do this, but it is a fundamental breach of trust.”

Not only has Trump choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine, but he is also reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them.

Just as Americans are starting to realize that Trump is becoming a predator on our system — trying to manipulate the justice system to generate cash available to his Jan. 6 pirates and immunity from ongoing inquiries into taxes for himself and his family — our allies are concluding that Trump’s America is becoming a dangerous predator on them.

Indeed, something is happening with America’s traditional allies that I never thought I would see in this lifetime or the next. In the post-World War II era, we and our allies together embraced the doctrine of “deterrence” against the Soviet Union, and later Russia, to prevent any attempt by the Kremlin to forcibly expand its influence into the free world or put neighbors under its thumb.

Not any longer.

Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.

As a result of all that, something unprecedented is happening: “Deterring Trump’s America is now becoming a strategic priority of our allies as much as deterring Russia was,” Nader Mousavizadeh, the chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm, and a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, told me.

And how could it not? When you look at how Trump has hammered Canada with tariffs, it is hard not to conclude that the worst position for a country to be in during the second Trump administration “is to be America’s closest ally and have integrated your economy, energy systems and military with that of the United States,” Mousavizadeh said. Everyone can now see, he added, that Trump will “weaponize any country’s dependence on America and use it to extract whatever he can in the narrowest and most tactical and transactional definition of American power.”

No wonder that after Trump stepped up his rhetoric about taking over Greenland, European NATO members — Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland and the United Kingdom — all announced plans to send small military contingents to Greenland to bolster the Danes.

Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, noted in an essay for the Atlantic Council that though these NATO allies tried to frame their move as necessary to bolster Arctic security, they also “have used the word ‘deterrence.’ For Europeans to speak in such terms about the United States, even implicitly, is a low point, but it is needed.”

Let’s not forget that early on Trump forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real “Trump Doctrine”: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.

The only rational response for our allies is to try to “deter and diversify,” Mousavizadeh concluded. And if Trump keeps this up for his full four years, he added, “no NATO leader can ever again responsibly agree to the degree of dependence on U.S. technology, U.S. defense systems or financial systems” that NATO countries long took for granted.

I have been in Portugal this week and I have been shocked by the degree to which European business executives speak of having lost faith in American institutions and in America as the guarantor of global legal norms — something they have always taken for granted. It is literally disorienting for them, like hikers who have lost their compass.

In short, having a president who behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad. This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.

 

 

Bill Pulte Is Not Being Sent to Lead the Intelligence Community

Trump’s acting DNI pick suggests the office may be used less to assess threats than to serve power.

Brian O’Neill

Jun 03, 2026

On Monday, President Donald Trump named Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director of national intelligence. The selection is less a personnel oddity than a signal about what Trump now appears to want from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: not an independent intelligence integrator, but another instrument of political power.

Pulte has no known background in intelligence, counterterrorism, diplomacy, military affairs, or national security policy. His professional experience is rooted in real estate, private equity, philanthropy, and, most recently, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). In a conventional administration, that résumé would raise immediate questions as to his ability to oversee the nation’s intelligence enterprise.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (left) meets with Bill Pulte before his confirmation to be director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2025. (U.S. Senate photo by Renee Bouchard)

But in this administration, Pulte’s lack of intelligence experience may not be the most important fact about him. His relevance lies in how he has already used government authority.

At FHFA, he did not merely administer housing finance policy. He used his position to push allegations of mortgage fraud against Trump’s perceived political opponents, including Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff. None of those allegations has resulted in a conviction, but the apparent purpose was less courtroom success than public embarrassment and official suspicion.

Pulte’s missing credentials as an intelligence adviser may not matter to Trump. The DNI was created after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to integrate the intelligence community, set priorities, manage budgets, improve coordination, and “to act as the principal adviser to the President . . . for intelligence matters related to the national security.” But the formal hierarchy is not the visible hierarchy in this administration. Since last year’s Iran crisis, CIA Director John Ratcliffe appears to have become the president’s principal intelligence adviser.

That leaves ODNI available for another purpose. At FHFA, Pulte could apply regulatory pressure in service of political grievance. At ODNI, he would have access to the machinery that can recast political opponents, protest movements, and election disputes as intelligence concerns.

Pulte’s selection does not break from the trajectory of outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s tenure. It suggests that trajectory is moving into more dangerous territory. As I noted last week in The Contrarian (A Farewell Letter to Tulsi Gabbard), Gabbard surrendered the DNI’s core function, repeatedly blurring the line between intelligence leadership and political messaging.

Trump’s New Intel Head Is Worse than Unqualified

Norman Eisen

·

Jun 3

Read full story

She showed how ODNI could be politically useful even when its director was sidelined from major intelligence decisions. Pulte’s selection portends the next stage: converting Trump’s grievances into national security priorities.

Counterterrorism is where that danger becomes most immediate. As DNI, Pulte would have oversight of the National Counterterrorism Center, the institution built to coordinate how terrorism concerns are identified, analyzed, and elevated across the government. That matters because the administration’s new strategy, released on May 6, names familiar threats — al-Qa’ida, Iran, jihadist networks, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations — while moving toward treating political and cultural identity as a warning sign.

That framework creates the opening. Protest movements can be described as foreign-influenced networks. Political opponents can be framed as counterintelligence concerns. Domestic dissent can be treated as national security-adjacent. Election disputes can be kept alive not through evidence but through the suggestion that intelligence agencies are still “looking into” them.

If Trump wanted a serious long-term intelligence leader, he could nominate someone with national security credentials and ask the Senate to confirm that person. Instead, Pulte enters through a side door, without immediate confirmation, while reportedly keeping his FHFA responsibilities. That arrangement looks less like sustained intelligence leadership than access, control, and political utility before the 2026 midterms.

Congress should not wait to see whether Trump submits Pulte for permanent confirmation. The House and Senate intelligence committees should demand answers now. Questions such as “What authorities will Pulte exercise as acting DNI?” are not procedural niceties. They go to the heart of whether the intelligence community remains an instrument for informing policy or becomes an instrument for protecting power.

Presidents are entitled to loyal officials, but the DNI’s job is not to make intelligence conform to presidential instinct. It is to ensure the intelligence community bounds uncertainty, frames risk, and delivers warning — especially when the warning is unwelcome.

That credibility is difficult to build and easy to spend. Once intelligence language is used to launder political grievance, the damage spreads. Analysts learn what conclusions are welcome. Agencies learn which issues carry risk. Allies begin to wonder whether intelligence sharing will be handled professionally or filtered through domestic vendettas. Citizens begin to doubt whether threat warnings are real or merely convenient.

Pulte’s appointment should be treated as a warning about intent. Trump has assigned to the post a loyal executor with no attachment to the intelligence community’s professional culture.

ODNI was created to integrate the intelligence community and improve coordination across agencies. Under a second Trump administration, that mission has been narrowed and distorted. Pulte’s appointment suggests the next step: an office that gives political suspicion the color of intelligence authority.