I grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist home that flavored savory foods with peanut butter, which others find gross, but I loved it. Tonight I added peanut butter to a bean and cheese burrito and it was delicious. I can’t think of any food that isn’t better with peanut butter.
Claude: Your family was ahead of the curve. Half the world cooks savory food with peanuts. West Africans build groundnut stew on them. Southeast Asians make satay sauce. Sichuan cooks toss them into kung pao and dan dan noodles. Mexico has salsa de cacahuate, a peanut and chile salsa, and many moles use peanuts to thicken and enrich the sauce. So a bean and cheese burrito with peanut butter sits closer to Puebla than to a church potluck.
The Adventist version grew out of need. A vegetarian kitchen has to find fat, protein, and depth somewhere, and nuts filled that role. Nut loaves, peanut butter gravies, and lentil roasts carry that logic. Outsiders flinch because Americans file peanut butter under sandwiches and cookies.
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On September 22, 2026, Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles record the 168th episode of Inside Trump’s Head, the podcast The Daily Beast launched in October 2025. Coles runs content at the Beast after editing Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan and running content for Hearst. Wolff has written four books on Trump, starting with Fire and Fury. The week hands them material. Four days earlier Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds, and ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox suspended pool coverage in solidarity. On Monday the White House launched Trump TV, a 24/7 YouTube stream of old speeches. Trump speaks at the United Nations while they record, and Xi Jinping arrives Thursday for a state visit.
Coles mentions Melania as “the subject of your lawsuit” and says they should catch up on it. They never do. On May 22, 2026, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil threw out Wolff’s preemptive suit against the first lady and faulted him for tactical gamesmanship, and Melania’s lawyers pressed for sanctions over the summer. The Beast has its own history in the matter. In July 2025 it pulled a story built on a Wolff interview about Melania and apologized for it. The host’s outlet apologized to the woman the host sued, and the show moves on to Melania’s hair.
The analysis fits Wolff’s career. Access through the front door buys nothing. The story lives in the conflict and in the back channel, and he has built his books on the second. He also names the incentive: “He needs them. They need him.” What he leaves out is the microphone in front of him. The episode carries the title “Why Floundering Trump Will Sell Out on World Stage,” and later Wolff announces that once the midterms pass, “we will begin the 2028 race, and we’ll be back four days a week.” The win-win he describes includes a podcast that grows with every Trump fight. Wolff sees the trade clearly and exempts his own stall.
The facts since recording cut against his forecast that the ban is a ten-minute news cycle. The outlets sued, and at a hearing Wednesday Judge Timothy Kelly voiced skepticism about the White House’s process. On Trump TV, Coles says nobody is watching, and Wolff predicts it will make billions the way Truth Social did. The comparison misfires. Axios describes Trump TV as a government stream on the White House’s YouTube channel, with no business behind it to sell.
Then the line that fills the comments. Wolff says he would not vote with enthusiasm for anyone. Coles asks who he will vote for. “No, I try not to vote.” Coles lets it pass. A seventh-grade teacher writes below the video that he teaches his students voting is a civic duty. Another viewer asks what the point of the blathering is, if Wolff will not cast a ballot. Some editors have abstained on principle. Leonard Downie Jr. stopped voting when he ran the Washington Post newsroom to guard his neutrality. Wolff gives no reason. The line fits his posture over fifty years. He watches the court and reports on the factions, and he joins none of them. It sits oddly beside the alarm he sounds ten minutes earlier about the First Amendment and a commander in chief who might start a world war.
On August 18, 2026, America the Possible posted an hour-long conversation between Michael Wolff and Martin Puris. Puris co-founded Ammirati & Puris, wrote “The Ultimate Driving Machine” for BMW, and served as media adviser to George H.W. Bush in both of his presidential campaigns. Businessweek profiled him in 1992 as an elegantly tailored copywriter taking heat from ad critics for his Bush spots. America the Possible is his campaign to rebrand democracy. He introduces Wolff as “my brilliant friend,” and he opens with the line Abba Eban used about the Palestinians, who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. He fears it fits the Democrats. Both men summer on the East End of Long Island, and at the close they plan lunch in Amagansett.
The room differs from the Daily Beast studio. Puris is an older man from Wolff’s world who lets him talk, and Wolff talks at length. A commenter thanks Puris for finally interviewing Wolff as a competent journalist and adds, “lessons to be learned here… listening Ms. Cole.” Another calls it the best interview with Wolff he has seen.
Puris says Trump loved Wolff despite the books. Wolff corrects the verb. Trump “would have preferred a complimentary book, but in the end he probably would have preferred a best-selling book.” On the 2024 trail, in a hotel lobby in Iowa, Trump walked past a pack of reporters, spotted Wolff, pointed, and said, “I made that guy rich.” Wolff’s gloss: Trump claims credit for books that say terrible things about him, “and to some extent he’s right.” Puris guesses Fire and Fury sold 12 or 15 million copies, and Wolff lets the number stand. On the Beast a month later Wolff described the war between Trump and the press as good for both sides. Here he concedes the same bargain for himself, in a hotel lobby.
Puris brings a poll showing young Americans losing faith in democracy. Wolff answers the way a magazine editor answers a press release: “These statistics are related to the question that’s asked. Who did the polling?” When Puris says millennials grew up with Vietnam, Wolff does the arithmetic on air. A 45-year-old was born in 1981, six years after Saigon fell. Puris calls AOC “kind of a blip” and Mamdani something more. A commenter calls the remark sexist.
He admits he can’t explain his access, and he grants Trump the credit for his fortune. He reads politics as aesthetics and says so to a governor at a billionaires’ dinner. He claims to know Trump believes he won in 2020. He places himself as a skeptic of change who votes for no one and doubts the polls. The midterm certainty is the part to watch, since he has already walked it back.
‘Why Melania’s New Grab Is Terrifying Trump: Wolff | Inside Trump’s Head’ (July 21, 2026)
On July 21, 2026, Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles record the 141st episode of Inside Trump’s Head. Coles sits in the Daily Beast studio in steaming Manhattan. Wolff calls in from somewhere cooler and explains that this is his summer vacation, one day of it, and “that’s the kind of vacation I take.” The episode is presented by PMI U.S., the American business of Philip Morris International. Its sponsor spot about America building its way forward through disruption airs in the middle of the segment on the first lady’s marriage. A viewer complains that the ad lands right in the middle of things.
The evidence cuts against the theory. Cheung did not need Trump’s memory. His post carried a screenshot of a 2020 magazine article that had written up the rumor’s long life in pop culture. The rumor lives online, where a 44-year-old aide can find it in a minute. Wolff reads a private obsession of an old man into an act a staffer could perform with a search bar. The reading may still be right about who wanted Gere hit. It cannot prove it, and the method shows: a confident account of what sits in Trump’s head, built from the timing of a post.
The segment sets a standard the show does not keep. The hosts will not repeat a rumor about a 76-year-old actor. They spend ten minutes on the sitting first lady’s marriage from unnamed White House sources, with a divorce-court punchline, while Melania’s lawyers press for sanctions against Wolff over his earlier claims about her. The Gere rumor was false on its face and decades old. The marriage reporting comes from sources Wolff will not name. The two differ in kind, and still the show draws its line where the subject has no lawyer on the case. Later in the hour Coles recalls Hugh Grant’s 1995 arrest with Divine Brown and catches herself: “Me and Stevie, we’ve got a lot in common.”
He theorizes what sits in Trump’s head from a single post, and the post’s own screenshot undercuts him. He retells the “except divorce court” scene while litigating with its subject. He describes the press’s duty to keep a war in view, then lets the war wait behind celebrity and marriage. And he dismisses a rival book whose thesis he shares. Coles makes the better call on the Senate, and she names the show’s habit when she jokes about Stevie.
The hour is valuable now for a reason Wolff could not plan. It records his predictions eighteen months before this review, and events have since graded most of them.
The debrief puts the access question to two men who managed access for a living. Stewart compares Wolff to Michael Lewis and his months with Sam Bankman-Fried, and asks why anyone agrees to it. The times he has been “royally screwed over” came when he let a journalist spend days with him, The New Yorker for nearly two weeks. Campbell lists his own exceptions: Peter Stothard of The Times, whose weeks inside Downing Street happened to fall during the buildup to Iraq; Robert Harris in the 1997 campaign; and Michael Cockerell’s documentary on the Number 10 press office, which drew more coverage than anything Cockerell had made. Campbell credits Wolff with “enough humility to admit he got a lot of the stuff wrong.” The tape shows less of that than Campbell remembers. Wolff parsed the episodes and called the result poetry.
Coles then retells an Atlantic City story that Wolff says Epstein told him. It reaches the audience at three removes, from Epstein to Wolff to Coles, and Wolff confirms it with a string of yeps. His summary: “They were predators and women were their prey.” Trump has long said he broke with Epstein years before his arrest and knew nothing of his crimes. On this stage the sole witness is a dead man with every motive to implicate a famous former friend, relayed by a reporter whose book depends on the story. Wolff may be right. The sourcing is the sourcing, and the room hears it as settled.
A litigant solicits witnesses against the first lady from a stage, before an audience that paid to hear him. She found the way out he could not see. On May 22 Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil dismissed the suit, faulting what she called an inappropriate level of tactical gamesmanship and declining to be conscripted into the spat. The deposition he promised the room never took place.
Coles closes with the show’s community. YouTube, she says, told them they had the most articulate comments of any podcast, highly literate and politically engaged. She reads viewer verse, a limerick and a haiku among them, and ends on a limerick that rhymes Trump with a bodily function. The crowd laughs. Under the video, a commenter writes that Wolff needs to be protected at all costs.
‘Michael Wolff | Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ (Jan. 16, 2018)
On January 16, 2018, eleven days after Fire and Fury came out early to beat a legal threat, Michael Wolff opened his book tour at the Free Library of Philadelphia. His interviewer was Dick Polman, national political columnist for WHYY and writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. The crowd filled the hall and two overflow rooms. The recording went up on YouTube on May 3, 2019, two weeks after the Mueller report was released, and it has about 30,000 views. It shows Wolff at the moment of his greatest fame, before he knew what the next eight years would do to his forecasts.
‘Michael Wolff: Why Rupert Murdoch ‘Is In Charge’ Of Fox News, And How He Really Feels About Trump’ (Sep. 26, 2023)
On September 26, 2023, the day The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty went on sale, Michael Wolff sat for a half hour with Diane Brady on Forbes Newsroom. The video captures his Murdoch forecasts on publication day, three years before the family settled the question, and his most candid statement of method, given in answer to a question about a dog.
The sentence leaves out Lachlan, who ran Fox and was that constituency. Two years later Rupert and Lachlan settled the trust fight. Lachlan took sole voting control through 2050, Prudence, Elisabeth and James were bought out for about $1.1 billion each, and the terms were built to keep Fox’s direction. Murdoch did not die first. He was 94 at the settlement and still chairman emeritus. The book is called The Fall. Fox is still standing, and the son Wolff left out of the answer holds the keys.
Brady brings a status moment at the close. Her boss, Steve Forbes, she says, doubts a rematch and thinks it could be Gavin Newsom. Wolff: “I think all you have to say is that Steve Forbes thinks that.” Then, “You can cut that.” Brady offers full transparency and moves on. The guest mocks the owner of the house on the owner’s show, and the host keeps it in.
The best passage comes when Brady raises the dog. The Fall describes a lunch at Tucker Carlson’s Florida home in which DeSantis spoke in an outdoor voice indoors, pushed one of the Carlsons’ spaniels under the table, and prompted the question, had he kicked the dog? Carlson called it “totally made up” and said DeSantis never touched the dog. The DeSantis campaign called it absurd and false. Why, Brady asks, is this not a book with footnotes?
A week later he named his source. He told Mediaite that the source was Carlson himself: I just reflect what he told me. Asked if Carlson was lying, Wolff said maybe he exaggerated, maybe he lied, maybe he regrets saying it. What he could vouch for with the greatest authority was that Carlson said it happened. A Carlson spokesman called that false too. The episode shows the negotiated-reality critique cutting both ways. Wolff escapes the curated account by publishing what a source said in private. He then cannot vouch for the event, only for the saying of it. When the source recants in public, the reader is left with two tellings by the same man and a reporter who stands behind the telling, not the dog. The claim is honest as far as it goes, and it goes only as far as the source.
‘Author Michael Wolff, “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” and “Fire and Fury”‘ (Apr. 25, 2024)
On April 25, 2024, Michael Wolff made his first visit to the New York State Writers Institute, at Page Hall on the University at Albany’s downtown campus. Times Union editor Casey Seiler moderated. That day Trump was in a Manhattan courtroom for his hush-money trial while the Supreme Court heard three hours of argument on his immunity claim. Wolff had sat in the trial every day but this one. Seiler notes that it was fifty years since Wolff’s first significant piece in The New York Times Magazine, and he reads the Washington Post review of The Fall: Wolff “harbors no qualms about consorting with some of America’s worst people, nor about burning them blithely in the service of his narrative.” Seiler compares him to a fellow New Jersey native, Philip Roth, a lively chronicler of the establishment eager to puncture its conceits.
Seiler, an Albany man, turns to his own subject, Andrew Cuomo. Wolff profiled him for New York and found him “fascinating,” a man who wore it on his sleeve. If Eric Adams is pushed out, “I think Andrew Cuomo will run to be the mayor of New York City, and I think he will win.” Seiler: “You heard it here first.” Cuomo ran. Zohran Mamdani beat him in the June 2025 primary and again in the November general, when Cuomo ran as an independent. The miss belongs with the Fox forecast. Wolff read the court he knew and missed the voters he did not.
‘DIGITAL AGE – The Net Made Dean, Did TV Do Him In? Michael Wolff’ (Feb 25, 2004)
On February 25, 2004, a week after Howard Dean quit the presidential race, Michael Wolff sat for a half hour on The Digital Age, a cable show hosted by James Goodale, the former vice chairman and general counsel of The New York Times who defended the paper in the Pentagon Papers case. Wolff had just moved from New York to Vanity Fair and had just published Autumn of the Moguls.
The list reads differently now. In 2004 it was a roster of New York money willing to back a columnist. Four years later Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to a sex offense involving a minor, and in 2020 a jury convicted Weinstein of rape. At the 92nd Street Y in January 2026, Wolff dated his Epstein relationship to 2014, when Epstein asked him to consider writing about him. This tape shows the two men were in business together a decade earlier, when Epstein was still the mysterious billionaire. Nothing here suggests Wolff knew of the crimes, and the public record of them came later. It does show that the source Wolff would later rank with Bannon as his most acute reader of Trump came from his own circle of backers. The joke about men with no friends lands on the man who became their friend.
What happened next grades both halves of his pitch. Wasserstein hired Adam Moss from the Times. Goodale asks if Wolff would have gotten along with Moss. “No.”“One of my rules is, one step ahead of the sheriff.” Under Moss, New York became the most decorated magazine of its era, and the website Wolff called the gold became the business, spinning off Vulture, The Cut and Grub Street until Vox Media bought the company in 2019. Wolff read the asset correctly and lost it to a man he dismissed. The magazine thrived without his column, the one thing he was buying it to save.
He undercut that answer half a minute earlier. The scream, he conceded, “was picked up and passed… everybody had this, everyone was sending it to each other. It became a novelty item.” That was the shared experience arriving, and he described it as a novelty. Four years later Barack Obama took the Dean model, small donors and online organizing, and used it to expand a base and win. Twelve years later Trump turned a narrow, intense following and his own feed into the presidency, with television chasing the posts. The targeting argument about McGovern and Dean was sound for its cases. The claim that the net could not become the arena was wrong, and Wolff spent the next two decades chronicling the man who proved it.
Goodale closes: old media lives, yes or no? Wolff: “No.” Goodale: “We just went through a whole program and came up with a different conclusion.” It is the funniest exchange in this series, and the most exact. Wolff had spent half an hour arguing that old media made and unmade Dean, and then, asked for a verdict, chose the more interesting answer.
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I asked ChatGPT: “Is there anything I might not know about my father?” It replied:
Possibly, Luke. The most personal thing I found is your mother’s own account of him during her final illness.
In “Testament of Faith,” published shortly after her death, Gwen credited his encouragement with helping her “keep a song in my heart the whole way through.” She described a friendship stretching back more than twenty years, including nearly seventeen years of marriage. That gives you her own assessment of him as a husband during an exceptionally difficult period. Australasian Record, May 25, 1970, pp. 12, 14
Two details in those contemporary records may be less familiar:
Your father encouraged her to write that testimony. The editor explicitly says he suggested she put her thoughts on paper to help others facing similar suffering. He therefore helped bring this surviving account of your mother’s experience into existence. Same issue, p. 12
After her death, he published a personal acknowledgment describing her as someone who “loved her family and Lord beyond human telling.” He also thanked friends for years of practical help during her illness. It is a small surviving piece of his voice immediately after losing her.
One earlier detail also stands out: before becoming a minister, he had already begun a newspaper career. His biography reports that he progressed from copyboy to editorial work at Associated Newspapers while still a teenager, having left school amid financial hardship. Writing was already part of his life before theological scholarship.
Your father’s first doctorate was in speech, not theology. His 1960 Michigan State dissertation, A Rhetorical Study of Certain Pauline Addresses, was submitted through the Department of Speech. He treated seven Pauline letters as speeches intended to be read aloud. His central conclusion was that Paul’s authority came from character and self-disclosure: “He ever conveyed himself, not ideas merely.” This helps explain your father’s unusual combination of theologian, preacher, debater, and public performer. Read the dissertation.
The dissertation contains a short autobiography written when he was about thirty-one. He says he finished his secondary-school requirements in 1943 and then spent three years working in both the composing and editorial departments of Associated Newspapers in Sydney. This is more substantial than the usual story that he was merely a teenage copyboy. Typesetting, editing, journalism, argument, and public speech all preceded his theological career.
His theological break with Adventism developed over decades. In his 1959 master’s thesis, Daniel 8:14 and the Latter Days, he wrote that the church’s response to criticism had been “rather stereotyped” and had added little to its defense of Daniel 8:14 for more than a century. He called for the church to examine every doctrine closely. Yet he still concluded that the 2,300 days extended into the end times. Read the 1959 thesis
That establishes a more complicated trajectory:
By his own later account, doubts or concerns began around 1945.
In 1959 he recognized serious interpretive problems but still defended the traditional prophetic framework.
During the 1960s and 1970s, study gradually moved him away from that position.
By 1979 and 1980, he believed the doctrine threatened Christian assurance.
Glacier View therefore represented the public arrival of a question he had lived with for most of his adult life. His intellectual movement was gradual and documented.
The institutional conflict followed him even after death. According to theologian Norman Young, Avondale College’s council initially approved holding your father’s memorial in the college church. The South Pacific Division later withdrew permission. The memorial was moved to the University of Newcastle, where more than 500 people attended. Young says the organizers deliberately kept the dispute out of the service. Norman Young’s account in Spectrum
That memorial preserved two intimate details. His favorite hymn was Charles Wesley’s “Depth of Mercy, Can There Be?” His favorite biblical passage was Romans 8:28–39, ending with the assurance that nothing can separate believers from the love of God. Gillian spoke about his emphasis on forgiveness. Elènne described him as her mentor, pastor, confidant, and “go to person.”
The emerging picture is of a man whose driving concern was assurance. He encountered religious anxiety as a teenager, spent decades examining the doctrine that intensified it, and ultimately accepted serious professional consequences because he believed people should not live in fear about whether God had accepted them. That concern appears much earlier in his life than the public controversy suggests.
Benny Hill was born Alfred Hawthorne Hill in Southampton on January 21, 1924, the middle child of Alfred Hill and Helen Cave. His father managed a surgical-appliance business. Before settling into respectability he had run away to join a circus, and Benny’s grandfather Henry Hill had also been involved in circus entertainment. Hill grew up close to the remnants of Victorian and Edwardian popular entertainment: circus, music hall, comic songs, physical comedy, sexual innuendo, and the broad comic character types that would eventually populate his television programs.
The family was lower-middle-class. Alfred senior’s shop dealt in the sort of medical and sexual merchandise that respectable Britain preferred not to discuss openly, including contraceptives. That detail has attracted biographers because Benny’s eventual comic universe was also built around the collision between public respectability and private sexual curiosity. In his childhood, jokes about sex existed in the same semi-forbidden territory as seaside postcards and music-hall double entendres. Hill inherited a comic tradition that was already generations old.
He attended Taunton’s School in Southampton. Hill later recalled that observation and mimicry came early. His father’s shop provided material. He watched customers, remembered faces and voices, and after closing time stood behind the counter imitating them. A remarkably early profile of Hill quotes him describing exactly this childhood routine. The habit remained with him. His mature comedy depended less upon invention from nothing than upon noticing some cadence, gesture, vanity, pretension, costume, or social type that could be exaggerated.
After school he worked at Woolworths in Eastleigh, then at various times as a milkman, driver, bridge operator, and drummer. The milk round became part of his personal mythology and eventually supplied the setting for his biggest record, “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West).” His early working life mattered because Hill’s comedy remained fascinated by clerks, shopkeepers, policemen, doctors, television announcers, waiters, salesmen, old men, and petty officials.
Hill belonged to the generation whose early adulthood was interrupted by the Second World War. Called up in 1942, he trained as a mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He worked as a mechanic, truck driver, and searchlight operator, reaching Normandy in September 1944 after the main D-Day landings. His service subsequently took him through northwestern Europe. Before demobilization he moved into service entertainment, an environment in which men who had spent years driving trucks or maintaining equipment could suddenly find themselves writing sketches and appearing before audiences.
The Army did not magically transform Hill into a polished comedian. Stage performance remained difficult for him. What military entertainment did provide was proximity to professionals who recognized his ability and encouraged him. This was a recurring pattern in Hill’s career. He possessed considerable comic instinct but was poorly suited to the conventional means by which a British comic was expected to establish himself. Television eventually solved that problem.
After the war he entered a British entertainment industry still organized around variety bills, summer seasons, touring revues, radio, and the surviving institutions of music hall. He adopted “Benny” partly in homage to Jack Benny, one of his favorite American comedians. He studied other performers constantly, absorbed techniques, and reworked them into his own increasingly visual style.
One of his early professional jobs was working as straight man to Reg Varney. Hill struggled much more onstage than his later television assurance would suggest. He suffered from stage fright, lacked the commanding projection of a traditional music-hall comic, and had some bruising experiences in variety. His gifts were mimicry, characterization, observation, editing, and visual juxtaposition. Television would allow him to substitute those talents for the naked encounter between a solitary comedian and a live audience.
He was working in radio by the late 1940s, appearing on programs including Variety Bandbox. His first television appearances came around the turn of the 1950s. By 1954 he had attracted attention through Showcase, where he appeared in multiple disguises and parodied television programs and personalities. He was named television personality of the year while still a young performer learning what the new medium could do.
The Benny Hill Show began on the BBC in January 1955. The timing could scarcely have been better. Britain was becoming a television society. Television ownership was expanding rapidly, and ITV began broadcasting later that year, ending the BBC’s television monopoly. Much early television entertainment had been borrowed from radio, theatre, and music hall. Hill belonged to the first generation of performers who began discovering what television comedy could do that none of those older forms could.
An early Hill routine captures the idea. Through filming and editing, he could appear as several participants in the same television discussion. The underlying multiple-exposure trick was hardly unprecedented, but its use as part of a fast television parody showed Hill thinking in terms of the screen. A character could look at another character who was also Benny Hill. A joke could exist in the cut between two shots. Speed could be manipulated. A close-up could supply the punch line. Television could manufacture comic events that had never existed continuously before a live audience.
That early Benny Hill is easy to lose because the later program became such a powerful stereotype. He was an impressionist, writer, singer, and parodist. He spoofed television personalities, advertisements, documentaries, news programs, popular songs, crime dramas, chat shows, and whatever else happened to be moving through British broadcasting. He could play several characters in a sketch. He liked accents and linguistic jokes. He had a fine memory for voices. He understood the comic possibilities of close-ups, cuts, speeded film, visual incongruity, and reaction shots.
The other half of his inheritance came from music hall. Hill loved the comic world in which pompous men are humiliated, authority figures are idiots, old men are unexpectedly lustful, husbands are cuckolded, skirts blow upward, and an innocent sentence acquires an obscene second meaning. He added techniques borrowed from silent film. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the visual comedians of the silent era belonged to his ancestry alongside British music hall. His best work often needs little dialogue. That later became one reason it travelled so successfully abroad.
He also developed recurring personalities. Fred Scuttle, with his cap, salute, crooked glasses, and spectacular inability to understand whatever job he had been assigned, became one of the most durable. Hill impersonated contemporary broadcasters under altered names. Television personalities, cooking programs, police dramas, political broadcasts, game shows, and commercials were endlessly cannibalized. Some characters and ethnic impersonations that television accepted at the time are jarring now. Hill’s archive contains both sophisticated television parody and material that has aged badly.
His BBC career was considerably broader than the later Thames show. He tried a situation-comedy anthology, Benny Hill, in 1962 and 1963, playing a different central character in different stories. In 1964 he played Bottom in a large-scale television production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The casting sounds like stunt casting, yet contemporary reaction was favorable and the production was a considerable popular success. From 1964 to 1966 he also had Benny Hill Time on the BBC Light Programme.
Films never suited him as well as television. He starred in the Ealing comedy Who Done It? in 1956 and appeared in Light Up the Sky!. His supporting film roles included Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Italian Job. His filmography is respectable, but no director found a cinematic Benny Hill equivalent to the television form Hill devised for himself. His special talent lay in controlling the duration, editing, characterization, and rhythm of a comic television sketch.
The decisive second phase began in 1969 when Hill moved from the BBC to Thames Television. Thames had recently become London’s weekday ITV company and was building one of the great light-entertainment operations in British television. The new version of The Benny Hill Show ran from 1969 until 1989. This is the Benny Hill most of the world remembers.
The supporting company became part of the effect. Henry McGee was the smooth announcer and straight man. Jackie Wright was the diminutive bald comedian whose head Hill repeatedly slapped. Bob Todd supplied an enormous range of eccentrics, grotesques, and authority figures. Nicholas Parsons appeared frequently during an earlier phase. Sue Upton, Louise English, Jenny Lee-Wright, and many others became familiar performers. Hill may have been the name above the title, but the rhythm depended increasingly upon a repertory company whose faces viewers immediately recognized.
The famous chase sequence eventually became a kind of compressed silent movie. Film was accelerated. Someone was caught in a sexual or social transgression. Police, old ladies, beautiful women, husbands, nurses, monks, burglars, or assorted eccentrics joined the pursuit. Doors opened and closed. Clothes vanished. Everyone changed direction. The action was usually accompanied by “Yakety Sax,” the instrumental associated with saxophonist Boots Randolph. The association became so complete that millions of people who did not know its title understood it simply as the Benny Hill music.
At his peak, Hill occupied a place in British culture that is difficult to reconstruct in an era of fragmented audiences. Some broadcasts drew audiences above twenty million. Thames ultimately sold the program to more than a hundred countries. The features that increasingly irritated sophisticated British critics helped make Hill exceptionally exportable. A viewer did not have to understand Westminster politics, British class codes, or regional accents to understand a pompous official falling into a pond or a guilty man fleeing an enraged husband with his trousers around his ankles.
America was the great late-career surprise. Edited half-hour versions entered American syndication in the late 1970s, and Hill became a substantial television presence there. The American audience discovered him when he was already in his fifties. His international celebrity consequently peaked at almost the same moment that his cultural standing within Britain began to deteriorate.
His foreign success says something about the unusual nature of his comedy. Monty Python was intensely verbal and culturally specific even when it was visually surreal. Hill could reduce comedy to appetite, embarrassment, pursuit, collision, concealment, and revelation. Those jokes crossed linguistic boundaries with little assistance. In this respect there is a line between Hill and the later international success of Mr. Bean. Rowan Atkinson’s character was very different from Hill, but the export mechanism was similar. Physical comedy travels.
Hill could also write comic songs. “Gather in the Mushrooms” reached the British charts in 1961. His triumph was “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West),” a mock-Western about a fatal rivalry between a milkman and a baker. Released in 1971, it spent four weeks at number one, became Britain’s Christmas number one, and earned Hill an Ivor Novello Award. Strip away the television girls and “Ernie” reveals something older in Hill. It belongs to a British tradition of comic narrative songs in which ordinary tradesmen are elevated into heroes of ridiculous epics.
Hill’s private personality was almost the reverse of the voracious extrovert he played. He never married and had no children. Biographical accounts describe crushes, failed romances, awkward courtships, and rejected proposals. Actress Annette Andre later said that she had rejected a proposal from him. His inability to establish a conventional intimate life became one of the central themes of later biographies.
Yet the cliché of the miserable, friendless clown also goes too far. Hill maintained long friendships. Performers returned to work with him repeatedly. Several colleagues remained protective of him after his death. What seems unusual is the degree to which a man whose public character radiated sexual appetite appears to have remained emotionally adolescent in parts of his private life. Sexual confidence was much easier to perform than intimacy.
Fame barely altered his material habits. Hill rented modest accommodation. He travelled by public transport, walked considerable distances, and never learned to organize his life around the fact that he had become wealthy. Despite accumulating millions, he was famous among acquaintances for economy that could shade into miserliness.
Travel was one of his indulgences. He loved France, particularly Marseille, spoke French, and acquired varying amounts of several other European languages. His linguistic curiosity fed his comedy. Foreign accents could become caricatures, but Hill also possessed considerably more interest in languages and foreign cultures than his Little England stage persona might suggest.
There was something close to monastic about his dedication to comedy. He watched television compulsively for people and formats to parody. He remembered voices, faces, phrases, and mannerisms. Colleagues recalled a continual accumulation of jokes and scraps of ideas. His television world was constructed partly from other television. A presenter only had to develop a sufficiently recognizable vocal tic, hairstyle, posture, or catchphrase before Hill had raw material.
There was a limiting side to this method. Hill became extraordinarily good at being Benny Hill. Eventually he became too good at being the Benny Hill that viewers already knew. The recurring characters, sight gags, sexual pursuits, and editing tricks that had once represented experimentation hardened into formula.
During the 1970s the program moved further toward sexual display. By the early 1980s it included the dancers known as Hill’s Angels. Attractive young women had always been present in his work, but they now became one of the show’s central visual trademarks. This development coincided with Hill’s greatest international marketability and with the beginning of his critical disaster at home.
British comedy was changing around him. The Comic Strip, The Young Ones, and the broader alternative-comedy movement challenged much of the club and television comedy that had dominated the previous generation. The new comedians were more overtly political, more suspicious of racial and sexual stereotypes, and eager to distance themselves from forms of entertainment they associated with an older Britain.
Hill became a conspicuous target. Ben Elton emerged as perhaps the name most closely associated in popular memory with criticism of Hill’s sexual politics, although the later legend sometimes gives him more responsibility for Hill’s cancellation than he possessed. Feminist criticism of Hill was broader than Elton, and there was plenty in the programs to criticize. Women were frequently presented for male visual consumption. Voyeurism and lechery supplied endless plots. Some ethnic, gay, and gender stereotypes common in mid-century comedy became increasingly difficult to defend.
Yet the popular memory that Benny Hill was simply driven from television by “political correctness” compresses a more complicated history. John Howard Davies, who became Thames’s controller of light entertainment in 1988, made the decision to end the program the following year. Davies later emphasized economics and demographics. The series was expensive. Its domestic audience had declined. Women were less enthusiastic viewers than men. Hill was aging. The format looked exhausted to the executives responsible for deciding whether to commission another expensive series.
Cultural attitudes had moved against him at the same time. Both explanations matter. The show was an aging and costly television format whose sexual comedy had become a symbol of what a rising comic generation disliked about the old order. Its continued profitability overseas made the cancellation feel particularly savage from Hill’s perspective. He had spent decades being told that audience popularity validated his instincts. Suddenly executives were telling him that the world around those instincts had changed.
The loss mattered because television was more than his occupation. It organized his life. Hill had never built the conventional substitutes available to a retired celebrity. He had no wife, children, grand country house, political vocation, or second career. He wrote comedy. He watched television. He accumulated ideas for shows. The cancellation removed the structure around which the rest of his existence had been arranged.
Yet his career was not quite finished. International affection remained enormous. In 1991 he received an award associated with Charlie Chaplin at the comedy festival in Vevey, Switzerland. There were discussions about returning him to British television. A revival might well have occurred had his health held.
His physical condition had deteriorated. Hill had become considerably overweight and developed serious heart trouble. In early 1992 he was hospitalized following a heart attack. Doctors recommended cardiac surgery, which he declined. Kidney problems added to his difficulties.
Over Easter weekend in April 1992, Hill died alone in his flat in Teddington. The commonly accepted date is April 18. His body was discovered on April 20 after friends and neighbors became concerned. A postmortem found coronary thrombosis. He was sixty-eight. The circumstances were sufficiently bleak to cement the image of Hill as the lonely clown abandoned by the country that had once adored him.
That interpretation contains truth but also retrospective melodrama. Hill had friends. He remained internationally famous. Television companies were interested in working with him. His death followed serious medical problems and his refusal of recommended treatment. The fact that he happened to die alone should not be turned into proof that he had lived without human connections.
He was buried in Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton near his parents. His estate was worth several million pounds. His will had become badly outdated because its principal beneficiaries, his parents, had died years before him. The resulting disposition of the fortune became another peculiar postscript to the life of a man who had earned enormous sums without developing much interest in the conventional performance of wealth.
Hill’s historical reputation is more interesting than either “comic genius” or “sexist relic.” Both descriptions capture something and conceal something.
His late-period sexual comedy aged badly. Some ethnic caricatures aged worse. A modern viewer moving indiscriminately through the archive will encounter jokes that depended upon assumptions about women, foreigners, gay people, and racial groups that mainstream British television subsequently abandoned. The lecherous middle-aged man chasing young women was the brand.
Reducing forty years of work to Hill’s Angels produces a different distortion. The early Hill was one of the people figuring out the grammar of television comedy while British television was still figuring out what it was. He understood recorded television, editing, parody, character multiplication, visual juxtaposition, filmed inserts, and the power of recurring screen personalities. What became formula in the 1970s and 1980s had often been experiment in the 1950s.
The most important modern biography is Mark Lewisohn’s Funny, Peculiar: The True Story of Benny Hill, published in 2002. Lewisohn, later celebrated for the depth of his Beatles scholarship, approached Hill with a similar appetite for chronology, documentation, interviews, and myth correction. The resulting portrait is much richer than the lonely-dirty-old-man story. Hill emerges as an observant, emotionally peculiar, intensely hardworking entertainer who understood television early, achieved almost unimaginable international success, and then lived long enough to watch the culture alter its judgment of the comic language he had helped popularize.
His life almost perfectly spans a transformation in British entertainment. He was born into a world still connected to circuses and music halls. He learned his profession through variety, service entertainment, touring shows, and radio. He became famous as television entered the British home. He developed his own program during the BBC monopoly, survived the arrival of ITV, moved successfully into commercial television, adapted to color, became one of the first British television comedians to achieve enormous international syndication, and finally collided with the revolution in British comedy during the 1980s.
That chronology helps explain why arguments over Hill sometimes become arguments over Britain. His childhood belonged to the England of Woolworths, dairies, surgical-appliance shops, seaside postcards, variety theatres, and neighborhood tradesmen. His prime belonged to the Britain of mass television, commercial advertising, package holidays, suburban aspiration, and increasingly relaxed sexual codes. His decline coincided with the emergence of a more self-conscious culture in which television institutions became much warier of the assumptions about race, sex, gender, and authority embedded in older popular entertainment.
He was simultaneously old-fashioned and technologically adventurous. That is one of the central paradoxes of Benny Hill. The moral universe of many of his jokes came from the music hall, but the means by which he delivered them could be strikingly modern. The dirty joke might have been ancient. The cut that completed it belonged to television.
The strangest part of the legacy may be that one fragment of his technique survived more completely than the programs themselves. “Yakety Sax” escaped The Benny Hill Show and became an international musical synonym for incompetence, frantic pursuit, and events descending into farce. People who have never watched a complete Benny Hill program understand what happens when footage is accelerated and that saxophone begins. The joke became detached from the comedian who established its modern grammar.
Benny Hill spent much of his career impersonating and cannibalizing the mass culture around him. Eventually mass culture cannibalized Benny Hill. The chase, the speeded film, the saxophone, the naughty old man, the slap on Jackie Wright’s bald head, and the image of beautiful women running in formation broke free from their original programs and became reusable signs. Hill became a meme decades before the word acquired its modern meaning.
The result is that his reputation remains divided between people who remember the enormous pleasure his programs gave them and people who know him chiefly as an example of what television once permitted. Both groups are remembering a portion of the man. Benny Hill was a product of the old British comic tradition, an early innovator in the new medium of television, a British cultural export, a compulsive mimic, a skilled comic songwriter, an awkward bachelor, an international celebrity who lived with surprisingly little grandeur, and finally a performer overtaken by changes in the culture he had spent his life observing.
Seen across the full span from Southampton in 1924 to Teddington in 1992, the story is larger than the familiar image of the grinning man being chased across a park. Hill began near the end of music hall and died at the beginning of the modern multi-channel television age. Between those worlds he discovered that a camera, an editing machine, a funny face, and a few seconds of film could turn an awkward former milkman into a famous comedian.
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Reggie White, the star defensive lineman of the Green Bay Packers, drew sharp criticism from some state legislators today after his remarks concerning a range of racial and ethnic groups in an off-the-cuff talk before the State Assembly.
White, a minister at a Knoxville, Tenn., church that was burned down by arsonists in 1996, was invited by Republican leaders to talk about his New Hope project. The project, which operates in Wisconsin and Tennessee, encourages urban redevelopment and promotes minority ownership of small businesses.
But his comments ranged from remarks on race relations to his interpretations of Scripture.
White said that homosexuality is ”one of the biggest sins” in the Bible and said that he was ”offended” by gay and lesbian groups that compare their struggle for civil rights to the struggles of African-Americans.
”In the process of history, homosexuals have never been castrated,” as enslaved blacks were, he said. ”Millions of them never died. Homosexuality is a decision. It’s not a race.”
In his effort to promote racial harmony, the Packer player, who is black, said that each racial and ethnic group has its own ”gifts,” that, when taken together, form ”a complete image of God.”
But in describing those gifts, White said that blacks ”like to sing and dance,” while whites ”know how to tap into money.” He said that Hispanic people ”are gifted at family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and he can put 20 or 30 people in one home.”
Asians, he said, know how to ”turn a television into a watch.” American Indians, he said, ”have been very gifted” in ”spirituality.”
He also said that early Americans chose to enslave blacks, rather than Indians, ”because Indians knew the territory, and knew how to sneak up on people.”
Reggie White’s notorious March 1998 appearance before the Wisconsin State Assembly makes considerably more sense when placed inside the religious and racial journey that preceded it. The remarks were improvised and some of the racial examples were crude enough that White later expressed regret. Yet the underlying argument did not appear from nowhere. By 1998 White had spent almost two decades moving through Black evangelical churches, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, inner-city ministries, interracial churches, the racial-reconciliation movement, charismatic Christianity, prophetic ministries and experiments in Black economic development. He had come to believe two things simultaneously: American racism was historical, institutional and spiritually destructive, and racial and ethnic differences had been deliberately created by God and carried distinctive gifts. The first conviction pushed him beyond the usual evangelical language of individual prejudice. The second supplied the framework that produced the stereotypes for which the speech became famous.
White’s religious formation began with his grandmother, Mildred Dodds, in Chattanooga. When White’s mother temporarily moved away after remarrying, Reggie and his older brother Julius stayed with their grandmother. White later remembered her religious commitment as the beginning of his own “spiritual awareness.” She walked several miles to church and brought the boys with her. According to White’s later account, she did not force religion on him. Her example attracted him to it.
The central religious mentor of White’s childhood was the Rev. Bernard Ferguson of Alton Park Bible Church. Ferguson was white and served a congregation that was overwhelmingly Black. White later called him “the greatest man of God I ever saw” and remembered that Ferguson had a gift for teaching children. “I always wanted to be a Christian, but I never knew how,” White recalled. Ferguson taught him that understanding came first. White described accepting Christ around thirteen and told his family while still a boy that he intended to become both a professional football player and a minister. White’s recollections of Ferguson suggest that his first important model of Christian leadership was already interracial: a white minister who made himself responsible for Black children in a Black neighborhood.
Alton Park was an independent evangelical Bible church. That distinction helps explain White’s later religious mobility. His deepest early identity was biblical and evangelical before it was strongly denominational. At seventeen he received a Baptist ministerial license through St. John’s Baptist Church after preaching a sermon on forgiveness before ministers. Later accounts often say that he was “ordained” at seventeen, though White himself generally said that he received his minister’s license. Either way, he entered adulthood carrying a recognized Baptist preaching identity while retaining the looser Bible-church formation of his childhood.
At the University of Tennessee, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes gave White a ready-made model for combining religion and sports. By his sophomore year in 1981 he was talking about becoming an evangelist. By his senior season the nickname “Minister of Defense” had attached itself to him. The FCA model was simple and powerful: athletic ability produced an audience, and the Christian athlete had an obligation to use that audience for evangelism. White would embrace that premise more completely than almost any American athlete of his generation.
During his twenties White preached wherever football took him. He treated his celebrity as a pulpit. Yet he later distinguished these years from a deeper religious change around 1987. In a 1989 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said that although he had been licensed at seventeen, “the Lord changed my life” only two years earlier. He had previously imagined that he could enter “the world of sin,” return to God, ask forgiveness and repeat the cycle. He now believed Christianity required complete surrender.
The Philadelphia White consequently became pastoral inside professional football. By 1989 he had preached in more than one hundred churches. He conducted a weekly Bible study in his home and had baptized several teammates in his bathtub. He refused alcohol and tobacco advertising. He told the Times that the principal reason he played football was that football gave him a platform to preach the Gospel. This was the mature form of the FCA ideal: God had given White extraordinary athletic ability so that football could become an instrument of evangelism.
Philadelphia also broadened his understanding of ministry. One important figure was the former Eagles running back Herb Lusk, pastor of Greater Exodus Baptist Church in North Philadelphia. White, Randall Cunningham, Seth Joyner, Herschel Walker and other Eagles attended. Lusk built a church that combined evangelism with food distribution, employment assistance and neighborhood programs. White admired what he called Lusk’s “vision of life.” Lusk explained his approach simply: it was difficult to talk to people about Jesus when they were hungry, unemployed or desperate.
That premise became central to White’s racial thinking. Saving a young drug dealer’s soul accomplished little if the young man returned to a neighborhood in which legitimate employment remained unavailable. White became increasingly interested in credit, employment, business ownership and neighborhood institutions. Race was becoming an economic and institutional question as well as a question of prejudice and personal reconciliation.
The person who did the most to give this concern an elaborate theological framework appears to have been Rick Joyner. Joyner founded MorningStar Ministries, a charismatic and prophetic Christian organization that emphasized supernatural healing, prophecy, spiritual warfare, hearing God’s voice and interpreting contemporary events through biblical prophecy. White encountered Joyner around 1992 after players from the Washington Redskins gave him recordings of Joyner teaching about racism. White invited Joyner to speak at his church. Joyner stayed with Reggie and Sara White, and the two men began talking frequently by telephone.
Joyner later recalled that White seldom wanted to talk about football. He wanted to talk about Philadelphia, drugs, unemployment and Black young men whom White had helped convert but who could not find legitimate work. White became closely associated with MorningStar and eventually served on its board. Joyner also joined the board of White’s National Society of Nehemiah.
The National Society of Nehemiah, launched in the early 1990s, shows how far White had moved beyond conventional athlete evangelism. Named after the biblical leader who rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls, the organization was explicitly interdenominational and aimed to confront violence, drugs, racial conflict, economic deprivation and educational deprivation. It proposed local credit institutions, vocational education, alliances between churches and businesses, investment in local leaders and a system in which people who advanced economically would help someone behind them advance as well.
White’s analysis mixed religious conservatism, Black economic development and an increasingly structural account of racial inequality. He had little faith that government alone could repair urban communities, but he did not imagine that racism had disappeared. In In the Trenches, published in the 1990s, White argued that American law and institutions had historically been constructed against Black people. Historian Paul Emory Putz has drawn attention to passages in which White discussed the Constitution’s treatment of enslaved people, disproportionate imprisonment, police treatment of Black men, the suppression of Black history and the complicity of Christian churches in slavery. White wanted Christians to recognize both the church’s failures and its role in abolition.
His political categories consequently fit badly into a conventional left-right division. He advocated entrepreneurship, church responsibility and personal transformation. He also believed that past racial inequality continued to operate through present institutions. He could criticize government dependence in one paragraph and discriminatory policing in the next.
White’s association with Knoxville’s Inner City Church pushed these concerns further. The congregation was founded by brothers David and Jerry Upton and deliberately brought Black and white Christians together in a city where church life remained heavily segregated. Jerry Upton later remembered meeting White when White was still playing at Tennessee and drawing him into a Bible study. White became an associate pastor and major financial supporter of the church. According to the later ESPN and Andscape investigation “Through the Flames: Reggie’s Church,” Inner City also operated programs intended to help lower-income families purchase homes and start businesses.
On January 8, 1996, Inner City Church was destroyed by arson. Investigators found accelerants and incendiary devices. Racial slurs including “White Is Right” had been painted on the building. White immediately interpreted the attack as racist violence and used his enormous public platform to demand attention to the wave of church burnings occurring across the South. Contemporary reporting described the church as multiracial and recorded White’s anger that authorities appeared to be investigating church members and pastors while he believed white-supremacist organizations deserved greater scrutiny. “It’s time to stop sweeping this stuff under the rug,” he said.
There is an important qualification to the church-fire story. The arson was real and the racist graffiti was real, but the perpetrators and motive were never conclusively established. The later ESPN investigation reconstructed the federal inquiry and showed that investigators also considered people associated with the church. Nobody was charged with setting the fire. White died without learning who did it.
What matters for understanding White’s racial development is what the event meant to him. An intentionally interracial church to which he had attached his ministry had been destroyed amid racial threats. He connected the fire to the longer American history of violence against Black churches. During the following year he invoked the Birmingham church bombing, the treatment of Black Americans by law enforcement and the country’s recurrent failure, as he saw it, to remember racial violence. His religious language of reconciliation acquired a harder historical edge.
At the same time, White remained committed to interracial Christianity. When Wisconsin residents contributed heavily to rebuilding the church, White emphasized that most of the assistance had come from white donors and described it as “a step forward in defeating racism.” His racial worldview was never separatist. He wanted distinct groups to remain conscious of their histories while becoming parts of a functioning Christian community.
This brings us to the idea that made his 1998 Wisconsin speech so strange: different races possessed different gifts.
Here Rick Joyner and MorningStar matter enormously. In a MorningStar teaching issued before White’s Wisconsin speech, Joyner described racism as a spiritual battle and argued that America had an opportunity to demonstrate that different peoples could live together with dignity while “esteeming one another for the great gifts that every race brings to the whole of society.” The same document identified Reggie White as a MorningStar board member and predicted that he would become a major Christian voice against racism.
The resemblance to White’s later language is difficult to miss. There is no documentary evidence that White simply borrowed the Wisconsin passage from Joyner. There is strong evidence of transmission: White had sought out Joyner specifically because of his teachings about race, the two became close friends, White joined MorningStar’s board, Joyner participated in White’s social ministry, and MorningStar publicly taught that races contributed distinctive God-given gifts.
The underlying theology resembled a racialized version of the Pauline image of the church as one body with many members. Different individuals possess different spiritual gifts. No member is sufficient alone. White appears to have extended that logic to peoples and cultures. Human diversity had divine purpose. Each racial or ethnic group contributed capacities that others lacked. When combined, they displayed something closer to the fullness of God’s creation.
This theory was intended to attack racial hierarchy. No race could claim completeness or superiority. Everyone needed everyone else.
Meanwhile his social ministry had expanded into Wisconsin. In February 1997 Reggie and Sara White publicly announced an Urban Hope Project with Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson. White’s programs focused heavily on minority entrepreneurship, business plans, access to capital and economic development. This background helps explain why, when White later described white people as gifted at organization, business and “tapping into money,” he reached instinctively for that example. He had spent years confronting the difficulty of directing capital into poor Black communities. A real institutional disparity became, in White’s theological vocabulary, evidence of a characteristic racial “gift.”
By March 25, 1998, all these strands had converged. White arrived at the Wisconsin State Assembly expecting to speak about community development and a recent visit to Israel. Instead he delivered an almost hour-long religious meditation on race, slavery, homosexuality and American society. Contemporary accounts record his argument that God had created racial difference intentionally and endowed different peoples with different abilities.
Blacks, he said, were gifted in worship and celebration. Whites excelled at organization, business and access to money. Hispanics possessed unusual strength in family structure. Asians were inventive. Native Americans possessed particular spirituality. Put the gifts together, he said, and they formed “a complete image of God.”
White thought he was making an anti-racist argument. The examples produced the opposite reaction in many listeners. Legislators heard familiar stereotypes presented as facts about racial groups. The objection went beyond etiquette. White had moved from the defensible proposition that cultures develop different traditions and institutional strengths to the much stronger claim that racial groups had been divinely “gifted” in characteristic ways.
White initially defended the theory. The next day he explained that he had generalized because Americans were unwilling to acknowledge that different cultures really were different. The purpose, he insisted, was cooperation: “If we came together it could benefit all our communities.”
Several days later he softened the defense. In a statement reported by CBS News, White acknowledged that his examples had been “clumsy and inappropriate” and asked forgiveness from anyone he had demeaned. He nevertheless retained the underlying theology. His conclusion remained that the combined characteristics of different peoples reflected “the full image of God.”
The racial remarks were one application of White’s worldview.
His comments about homosexuality came from another part of the same worldview. White understood Black racial identity as involuntary and attached to a distinctive history of enslavement, violence and legal discrimination. He understood homosexual conduct through his reading of Scripture as morally prohibited behavior. From those premises he rejected comparisons between the gay-rights movement and the Black civil-rights struggle. He regarded one as a struggle surrounding inherited racial status and the other as a dispute over conduct governed by biblical morality. His claim that homosexuality was simply a “decision” reflected his religious belief.
White’s MorningStar involvement immediately after the controversy demonstrates how embedded he was in charismatic Christianity at the time. He continued speaking at MorningStar conferences on prophecy, hearing God and spiritual warfare. Joyner’s theology interpreted racism as part of a larger supernatural struggle. White believed God communicated concrete instructions to people. He famously said that God had told him to sign with Green Bay. He attributed several recoveries from injury to divine healing. Even after the Wisconsin controversy, he spoke of his public ministry as something God had called him to continue.
The 1998 speech therefore came near the point of maximum certainty in White’s religious life. He believed Scripture gave definite moral answers. He believed God spoke into contemporary circumstances. He believed racism had spiritual causes. He believed racial differences served a providential purpose. He believed Christian churches should rebuild poor communities. And he believed an athlete whom God had given a public platform had a responsibility to proclaim these things without excessive concern for social approval.
Yet even then White was growing dissatisfied with the evangelical institutions around him.
One expression of that dissatisfaction was CAUSE, Christian Athletes United for Spiritual Empowerment. White helped establish the organization with players including Cris Carter and Hardy Nickerson, with Minnesota Vikings chaplain Keith Johnson playing an important role. White complained that Christian athletes could be exploited by ministries interested in their celebrity. CAUSE proposed athlete-to-athlete mentorship and greater accountability.
Race was part of the story. Historian Paul Emory Putz identifies Johnson as an important mentor to White and places CAUSE within dissatisfaction among Black athletes who believed Black leadership and contemporary racial problems received inadequate attention in established evangelical sports ministries. White described CAUSE in 1999 as consisting mainly of Black professional football players and said its goal included bringing spiritual renewal to Black Christians.
Johnson was a United Methodist pastor who had served as a Minnesota Vikings chaplain. After becoming increasingly interested in the Hebrew foundations of Christianity, he developed a relationship with [Nehemia Gordon](https://www.nehemiaswall.com/proclaiming-gods-name-on-nashville-radio), a Karaite Jewish scholar and teacher of Biblical Hebrew. Gordon says explicitly that Johnson introduced him to Reggie White.
By then White’s confidence in his old religious world was collapsing.
After retiring from football in 2000, White began questioning the basic assumptions that had governed his public ministry. The change went much deeper than switching denominations. He began doubting his own method for deciding what God had said.
The clearest evidence comes from an extraordinary 2004 interview recorded shortly before his death. As Tom Krattenmaker reported in Salon, White looked back on twenty-one years of preaching and admitted that he had often preached what someone else had written or what he had heard another preacher say. He concluded that he had been more of a motivational speaker than a serious teacher of Scripture. He also felt that churches had used him because he was a famous football player. He described himself as having been “prostituted” by a religious culture that valued his celebrity.
More radically, White reconsidered claims of personal revelation. The younger White had confidently said that God told him to do particular things. The older White said that when he looked back, some things he had attributed to God had really been what Reggie White wanted. He became unwilling to say that God had spoken unless he could ground the conclusion in Scripture.
This amounted to a crisis of religious epistemology. White had relied on pastors, evangelical institutions, charismatic teachers, religious experience and his own sense of divine guidance. He increasingly distrusted all of them.
His answer was to go behind the interpreters to the text.
White began studying the Hebrew Bible and concluded that translations sometimes obscured or altered meaning. He traveled to Israel. Nehemia Gordon became his Hebrew teacher and showed White important Hebrew manuscripts, including the Aleppo Codex. Gordon recalls teaching him Biblical Hebrew regularly by telephone during the last part of White’s life. White explained his motivation in characteristically absolute terms: if he was going to find God, he had better find God for himself and investigate Scripture in its original language.
White also entered the broader Hebrew Roots and Torah-observant Christian world. His son Jeremy later told Sports Illustrated that the family increasingly called themselves “believers” rather than Christians. White stopped eating pork and stopped celebrating Christmas and Easter because he had concluded that these practices could not be justified from Scripture in the ways he had been taught. He withdrew from conventional church life and hosted a small Bible study at home.
This phase is sometimes described as Hebrew Israelism, but Jeremy White rejected that characterization. His father did explore whether biblical Israelite history might bear on Black ancestry, yet Jeremy said this was secondary to the larger religious inquiry. White did not teach that Black people alone were the chosen people and did not formally identify with a Hebrew Israelite organization. “Hebrew Roots Christian” or “Torah-observant Christian seeker” is closer, with the qualification that White died before his theology reached a settled form.
His relationship with MorningStar deteriorated over these new teachings. Rick Joyner later said that he believed White had become open to doctrines Joyner considered erroneous and eventually refused to let White teach some of them in MorningStar churches. The two men remained personally attached and reconciled before White’s death, but the disagreement marks the scale of White’s theological migration. The prophetic charismatic mentor who had helped shape White’s religious thinking in the 1990s could no longer accept portions of White’s theology a decade later.
White died on December 26, 2004, at forty-three, while this reconstruction was still underway. ESPN’s later documentary The Minister of Defense uses extensive footage from the 2004 interview filmed two months before his death. It captures a very different religious personality from the man who had spoken to the Wisconsin legislature six years earlier.
The continuity between those two Reggie Whites is as interesting as the change. White remained intensely serious about the proposition that religion had consequences. As a child, that seriousness meant following his grandmother to church and listening to Bernard Ferguson. As a teenager it meant preaching. At Tennessee and in professional football it meant turning athletic celebrity into evangelism. Under Herb Lusk and the Uptons it meant feeding people, financing businesses and rebuilding neighborhoods. Under Rick Joyner’s influence it meant interpreting racism as a spiritual conflict and racial diversity as part of God’s providential design. In CAUSE it meant creating institutions in which Black Christian athletes could exercise leadership. At the end of his life it meant doubting his own preaching, learning Hebrew and testing inherited teachings against the biblical text.
The principal figures in that journey consequently played different roles. Mildred Dodds supplied the example of lived religious devotion. Bernard Ferguson taught the boy White how Christianity could be understood and modeled interracial ministry. St. John’s Baptist Church gave the teenage preacher a Baptist ministerial identity. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes taught him to convert athletic celebrity into evangelism. Herb Lusk connected evangelism with economic and social ministry in Black neighborhoods. David and Jerry Upton and Inner City Church gave White an interracial congregation and a practical program of community lending and development. Rick Joyner and MorningStar supplied a charismatic theology of prophecy, spiritual warfare, race and distinctive group “gifts.” The National Society of Nehemiah and Urban Hope turned those ideas toward entrepreneurship, credit and neighborhood reconstruction. Keith Johnson and CAUSE pushed White toward Black-controlled Christian institutions and then toward the Hebrew foundations of Scripture. Nehemia Gordon finally became his Hebrew teacher and helped convince him that religious truth had to be tested against texts he could increasingly read for himself.
Seen in that sequence, the Wisconsin speech becomes more comprehensible. White was trying to reconcile several truths as he understood them: America contained a real history of racial oppression, cultures differed, every people possessed dignity, Christianity demanded racial reconciliation, economic inequality could not be solved by preaching alone, and God had intentionally created human diversity. His theory of complementary racial gifts supplied a way to hold these propositions together.
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Kyle Sandilands is going through an extraordinary combination of career upheaval, legal warfare and a health problem.
The biggest immediate news is his brain aneurysm. Sandilands disclosed in 2025 that doctors had found an aneurysm. In an episode of his new documentary series released last week, he showed himself returning for follow-up imaging after putting off the appointment. He says the aneurysm has grown from 4 mm to 5 mm. His doctors have apparently decided that operating now carries greater risk than continuing to monitor it, although Sandilands says surgery may eventually be necessary. He sounded unusually frightened about it and said he does not want to die.
At the same time, his radio career has undergone a remarkable rupture. On February 20, he had the now-famous on-air confrontation with Jackie “O” Henderson. He attacked her interest in astrology and called her “almost unworkable.” Henderson did not return to the show. Court documents say she had already complained to ARN about Sandilands’s conduct in August and September 2025. Her lawyers later alleged that repeated bullying had left her psychologically unwell. ARN treated Sandilands’s February conduct as serious misconduct, gave him 14 days to remedy the breach, and terminated him in March.
Both Sandilands and Henderson then sued ARN over the destruction of contracts reportedly worth $100 million each. Sandilands originally sought about $85 million. In June he settled for $12.09 million. The deal is more interesting than the headline figure. ARN also agreed to provide $1.5 million in advertising for his next venture. In return ARN gets 19.9 percent of revenue from that venture for three years, and Sandilands agreed temporarily to stay away from ARN’s direct competitors.
He then built his own subscription service, Kyle Sandilands Live, which launched August 10. It is basically an attempt to take breakfast radio off terrestrial radio and turn it into a paid audio-video membership product. The launch was technically awful. Audio disappeared, phones failed and one show had to be abandoned. But the business numbers appear much better than the technology. By mid-August reports put it at roughly 55,000 paying subscribers at $99 a year, implying about $5.4 million in annual subscription revenue before costs and revenue sharing.
That makes the story more interesting than “Kyle got cancelled.” He may accidentally have become an experiment in whether an enormous radio personality can take his audience with him and bypass a conventional network. The early evidence suggests that a substantial fraction of his audience will pay for him. He has begun talking about expanding the operation into a larger network and says he has offered Karl Stefanovic $2 million to do an afternoon show.
Jackie O’s side of the story is still live. She is pursuing at least $82 million from ARN, with a trial expected in October. Sandilands was subpoenaed earlier this month and ordered to produce material connected with that litigation. That puts him in the peculiar position of having settled with ARN while potentially becoming evidence in the lawsuit brought by the woman with whom he spent twenty-five years broadcasting.
And Sandilands has already recreated part of the old problem on his new show. Last week he became furious during an interview and verbally abused co-host Brooklyn Ross and contributor Mary Madigan. That matters because the independent platform removes much of the corporate supervision that restrained him at KIIS, while leaving the same workplace dynamics that helped destroy the Sandilands-Henderson partnership.
So as of September 14, the trajectory is weirdly double-sided. His conventional radio career blew up spectacularly and his relationship with Jackie O appears badly damaged. Yet he walked away with cash, launched a potentially viable direct-to-consumer business and retained a remarkably loyal audience. Meanwhile the aneurysm introduces a much more serious uncertainty than any of the media drama. It is probably the most consequential thing happening to him right now.
Henderson’s amended statement of claim says that on August 20, 2025, Sandilands attacked her dating life and psychological language on air. She told him he was pushing her too far and briefly left the studio. On September 10 they fought again, including an off-air confrontation. The following morning Henderson messaged KIIS boss Derek Bargwanna saying women listeners were describing their relationship as abusive and that senior management needed to address it. Bargwanna replied that he had already discussed the problem with senior executives. These remain allegations in Henderson’s case, although ARN admits much of the chronology.
There is an important piece of counterevidence for ARN. Its latest defence says that in December 2025 Henderson told Bargwanna that no further action was required concerning her September complaint. That could become significant at trial. ARN can argue that it believed the earlier problem had been resolved. Henderson can argue that management already knew there was a recurring Sandilands problem and failed to prevent another eruption.
Then came February 20. The pleadings give much more detail than most news stories. Sandilands told Henderson her astrology fixation made her “almost unworkable,” accused her of being unfocused and told her she was not doing her job properly. Henderson became visibly upset. ARN’s own defence says several employees immediately checked on her, senior executives told the show’s staff that Sandilands’s conduct was unacceptable workplace behaviour, and the chief content officer told Sandilands to contact Henderson about her wellbeing. According to ARN’s pleading, Sandilands said he would not call her but might text her.
That detail makes the subsequent legal problem easier to understand. Henderson’s lawyers told ARN she had suffered persistent bullying and “cannot continue to work with Mr Sandilands.” But they also said she was willing to continue performing her contract if ARN devised an alternative to the breakfast show. Henderson’s present case essentially says she exercised a workplace right by making a safety complaint and ARN unlawfully terminated her because of it. ARN’s position is that her letter amounted to a refusal to perform the job it had actually contracted her to perform. That distinction is likely to be central to the October trial.
There is another potentially explosive layer. Henderson alleges ARN’s public explanation to the ASX omitted material context about the bullying dispute. The current interlocutory fight has already reached internal corporate documents. Henderson sought board papers and communications concerning herself, Sandilands and the show from meetings in October and December 2025 and February and March 2026. Some categories have been agreed for discovery. That means the October case could expose what ARN’s board and senior management knew about the deteriorating partnership before the February explosion. The Federal Court has now created a public-interest online file for the cases and says hearings will be livestreamed.
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What follows is imagined. Maggie Haberman has written none of these sentences. The episodes, publication dates, interviews and reporting practices underneath them are real. This is the accounting she might write if she treated access as an economic relationship and asked what each side received from it.
I told myself that access was how I extracted truth from Donald Trump.
I rarely asked how much Donald Trump extracted from my need for access.
Start with the defense, because it is strong. I was good at this. In 2016 my name appeared on 599 New York Times stories. By 2019 stories carrying my byline generated 2.2 percent of all article views on the Times website. Jonathan Swan later said that I was the best reporter on the Trump beat and that the distance between me and the competition was substantial. He described thinking he had found something new, then discovering I had already deposited the fact somewhere in paragraph twenty-four. That happened because I knew Trump before Washington learned how to pronounce Mar-a-Lago. I had covered New York politics and tabloids. I understood what he read, which names counted with him, and the peculiar places the New York Post and the New York Times occupied in his imagination. I could usually tell when a provocation was theater, when somebody was manipulating him and when a grievance that sounded ridiculous was about to become policy. Most important, people answered my calls. Trump did too.
He insulted me in public and kept talking to me in private. I once said the reason was obvious: “He wouldn’t talk to me as much as he does if I wasn’t at the Times.” He craved the paper’s approval. That sentence contains the transaction. The Times had something Trump wanted. Trump had something I wanted. During an interview at Mar-a-Lago for my book, he turned to two aides and said, “I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.” He meant it as flattery. Enter it instead as a line item. It records what he received.
Journalism scholars have described this relationship for decades. Herbert Gans called it a dance in Deciding What’s News: the source gets amplification and some influence over the public agenda, the reporter gets information unavailable to outsiders. Oscar Gandy went further in Beyond Agenda Setting and called what sources provide an information subsidy. The subsidy lowers the reporter’s cost of production. Nothing subsidized is free.
The mistake would be imagining that a transaction requires a deal. Trump never had to say, “Write this nicely and I will call you tomorrow.” I never had to think, “I will soften this because I need him.” Economists call this a repeated game. Cooperation emerges without any agreement, sustained by the value of future rounds. Nobody shakes hands. The equilibrium does the work. A fact that produces one excellent story today can reduce the probability of receiving the next ten, and publication can frighten other sources watching how the first one gets treated. The reporter is maximizing accuracy, speed, importance, source protection, future information, competitive position and the public interest at once, and those variables do not always point in the same direction. I understood this by instinct because I had grown up in tabloid journalism, where sources called at midnight, lied about rivals, complained about headlines, rewarded reliability and punished betrayal. The sophistication of my source work became part of my reputation. It should also have become an object of my reporting.
Take July 2017. Trump invited Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt and me into the Oval Office, kept talking past his aides, and attacked his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. That was news. Access produced it. Nobody needed to leak the president’s thinking.
The president leaked himself.
Six months later, Michael Schmidt and I reported something more consequential: Trump had ordered the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller and backed down after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign. The public learned something important about presidential behavior while the presidency was still underway. That belongs in the credit column, permanently. So the easy criticism fails. “Access makes reporters stenographers” is no more serious than saying confidential sources make journalism unreliable. Sometimes the reporter with the strongest relationships publishes the most damaging story. The harder question begins after conceding all of that: what else does the relationship produce?
Trump understood journalism too. He understood that the New York Times could confer something Fox News could not.
Legitimacy.
He could speak to his own supporters without me. Twitter existed. Fox existed. His rallies existed. The Times reached the people whose recognition he had wanted since his Manhattan real-estate years. I was at once an investigator and a distribution channel. That does not mean I transmitted what he wanted. It means he had reasons to keep using the channel even when he hated the output. So did I. He called me a terrible reporter and returned my calls. He attacked the Times as fake and read it. He complained that stories were fabricated and supplied material for the next story. I called it “chain-reactive Trump.” He would make an outrageous statement. We would cover it because a presidential candidate had said it. He would respond to the coverage with another statement that became another story. I understood the chain. I rarely had the option of stepping outside it.
This is where my critics make a category error. They imagine the solution was to stop covering him. He was a major-party nominee and then president. Ignoring him would also have been an editorial decision with consequences. The problem was allocation: is the outrageous sentence the story, or is the policy occurring underneath it the story? I now think the first Trump presidency taught the press to answer that badly. By his second presidency, I said journalists had become better at separating signal from noise, and I cited immigration as an area where early coverage of style had obscured what the administration was doing. That is an institutional confession hidden inside a media interview. Personality coverage had value, and my knowledge of his personality generated hundreds of scoops. The marginal Trump mood story could still have less public value than an immigration regulation. Access creates its own salience. The thing your best source tells you feels important because you possess it. The thing occurring inside an agency may count for more because nobody is calling you about it.
Then came the book. The criticism of Confidence Man was predictable: I had saved the good stuff. People pointed to my report that Trump told aides after losing the 2020 election, “I’m just not going to leave.” Those remarks became public in September 2022 as the book approached publication, and critics asked the obvious question: why were Americans learning this twenty-two months after the election? My answer was factual. I had not known it in November 2020. I learned it after Trump had left office, and it took time to confirm. You cannot publish a story before a source tells it to you.
And retrospective reporting changes what sources will say. Before my book leave, I saw a revelation in another Trump book that I wished the source had given us for a newspaper story, and I asked why the source told a book author and skipped a daily reporter. The answer was immediacy. People around Trump believed a Times article would be weaponized against them within hours, while a book revelation landing months later carried less danger. That observation deserves an economics paper. Books create a different market for disclosure. The reporter does not merely choose when to publish. The source chooses when to become willing to talk. Lower the immediacy of publication and the supply of candor increases. Some of the strongest retrospective revelations exist only because they are retrospective, so “Why didn’t you publish this at the time?” can contain an impossible counterfactual. At the time, the source might not have told me.
The book created the information it later appeared to withhold.
That is the defense. Now follow the implication. The source’s preference for delay means information often becomes cheapest after the democratic decision for which it would have been most valuable. An aide tells the truth after the election. A cabinet secretary becomes candid after resigning. An adviser describes the attempted abuse after the presidency. The reporter can behave impeccably and the public can still receive the fullest account too late. This is a structural failure rather than a personal scandal. The book economy rewards historical truth. Democratic accountability needs contemporaneous truth. Those markets clear at different times, and the gap between their clearing dates is where self-government pays the bill. There is a second way to say this. The newsroom’s disclosure norms govern the newspaper. The book contract governs the book. Moving material from one to the other is regulatory arbitrage, even when nobody intends arbitrage.
My own reporting gives us a natural experiment. Take the toilets. While reporting Confidence Man, I learned that White House residence staff had found wads of printed paper clogging toilets and believed Trump had flushed documents. I did not save it for publication day. I reported it in February 2022, roughly eight months before the book appeared, and when I obtained photographs, they were published in August, still before the book. That case weakens the claim that I stockpiled news to sell books. The accusation survived because people preferred the theory. The White House refusal is a different category: source latency. And some stories did remain in the book until publication, such as Trump telling John Kelly he wanted Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner removed from the White House, almost by tweet. That anecdote had limited breaking-news value once everyone had left office and enormous biographical value. Books have architecture. Newspapers have urgency. The newspaper asks: what happened today? The biographer asks: what does this episode mean? A revelation that belongs inside a larger explanatory pattern can become more valuable when saved until the pattern exists. Again, nobody needs to behave corruptly. The institutional product changes the optimal publication date.
That is why the slogan “saving scoops for books” is analytically weak. The better question is whether the journalist has a disclosure rule: if information is verified, materially important to current public affairs and publishable without violating a source commitment, does it go into the newspaper? My conduct on the toilet story suggests my answer was yes. The audit should continue case by case. Do not infer motive from publication date. Reconstruct acquisition date, confirmation date, source restrictions and public relevance, then calculate delay. Do enough entries and we could replace an accusation with a dataset, and media criticism runs short of datasets.
Now return to access. The economist would call my source network an asset, and the asset appreciated as Trump rose. In 2015, covering him looked like the assignment nobody wanted. Then he won, and my accumulated knowledge acquired extraordinary market value. I did not want him to win. Specialization has returns anyway. A war correspondent becomes more valuable when war begins. No psychological corruption is required. The career incentive appears afterward. Once my comparative advantage became Trump, every continuation of the Trump story increased the value of the capital I had accumulated. That is true of many people who opposed him: journalists, strategists, pollsters, historians, lawyers, publishers. Trump became an industry, and I was among the people with the greatest Trump-specific human capital in the country. Does specialization affect perception? Of course it does. The person who knows a subject best sees details other people miss. She may also see the subject everywhere, and that risk runs highest when the subject manufactures attention. Trump knew conflict generates stories, a leak could punish an aide, a call could redirect a news cycle, a complaint could extend a story. I knew he knew these things.
Then I answered the phone.
Sometimes I extracted information. Sometimes he inserted information into the bloodstream through me. The same call can produce both. During his second presidency, asked whether my relationship with Trump had changed, I objected to the word “relationship.” I understand why. It implies friendship, loyalty or intimacy, and those implications are misleading. But a source-reporter relationship is an iterated exchange in which cooperation and conflict coexist. The source can attack the reporter Monday and call her Tuesday. The question is whether each party changes behavior because the other exists. Trump did. So did I.
That is a relationship.
The strongest evidence for my independence is also relational. Trump never froze me out for long, because he needed the channel. That gave me leverage. I could publish stories he hated because the expected future value of reaching the Times exceeded the immediate value of punishing me. That is the paradox. Access can compromise independence. Access can also finance independence. If the source needs you enough, you can afford to anger him. A reporter with weak bargaining power may soften coverage to preserve contact. A reporter with extraordinary bargaining power can publish aggressively because the source will return. Trump’s craving for Times attention increased my independence from Trump.
Then anonymity complicates the bargain. The Trump White House leaked all day. Officials leaked against rivals, to protect themselves, to steer him, to get colleagues fired. An anonymous source does not become pure because the resulting fact is true. Every leak has two informational components: the information, and that this particular person wanted me to know it. I was good at the first. The second belonged in the analysis more often. Suppose three aides tell me another aide has lost influence. Maybe he has. Maybe three rivals are trying to make it happen by getting it into the Times. Publication changes the underlying reality: Trump reads the story and begins wondering, other officials stop returning the aide’s calls, and the reporter has accurately described a factional perception and helped convert it into fact. Trump read stories about his own government as intelligence about his own government, so an aide who could not get through to him could sometimes get a message into the paper he would read. The journalist becomes part of the information system being reported.
The observer enters the experiment.
The solution cannot be abstinence. If I refuse the leak, somebody else may publish it. The better discipline is to ask what function the disclosure performs for the source. Why me? Why now? Who benefits if Trump reads this tomorrow morning?
Readers sometimes accused me of normalizing Trump because I described his behavior without adopting the moral tone they wanted. I rejected the underlying theory. After Confidence Man, I said some readers concluded that if the reporting was not defeating him politically, journalists must be doing something wrong. The expectation was unrealistic. A newspaper is not a political action committee. The Mueller firing story does not fail because Trump remained president. A fact is worth publishing because citizens should know it. That principle protects journalism from becoming propaganda. It also gives reporters a comforting definition of responsibility: I publish, and what happens next belongs to somebody else. The access economy complicates that innocence. My story can affect the subject. The subject can affect my next story. Sources can use my publication to fight each other. Readers can reward the paper for more Trump coverage, editors can observe the demand, and the next allocation decision arrives. No single person controls the system. Everyone participates in it. Trump wanted attention. Readers wanted Trump information. The Times wanted reporting readers considered valuable. I possessed the source network capable of producing it. This was an efficient market. Efficiency does not answer whether the equilibrium was socially optimal. We covered what millions wanted to know. Their wanting to know it increased the amount we covered. The amount we covered increased the amount there was to know. The chain reacted.
This is why Confidence Man was a better form for some of my reporting. The book escaped the hourly chain. I could begin in New York decades earlier and show that behavior Washington regarded as unprecedented had precedents in Trump’s business career, Roy Cohn, the tabloids, his family. One outrageous episode explains little. A forty-year pattern explains more. The book let me stop chasing Trump long enough to see Trump. Immediacy produces facts. Distance produces structure. We need both. The problem occurs when the structural account contains facts that would have altered public understanding while action was still possible.
There is another piece of evidence my critics should receive: the Mueller story. I had sources inside a presidency, and I used them to report, during that presidency, that the president had attempted to remove the official investigating him. If my operating rule had been “protect access above damaging disclosure,” that story should not exist. Neither should dozens of others. So the indictment has to shrink. Access did not make me Trump’s stenographer.
The harder criticism survives. Access made Donald Trump legible to me, and legibility can become centrality. The better I became at explaining him, the more valuable another Trump story became relative to a story outside my comparative advantage. The more people relied on me to interpret him, the more reason I had to remain inside his informational world. The system compounded. By 2022 CBS could call me his chronicler-in-chief. That title sounds like journalistic triumph.
It also describes dependency.
A chronicler needs the subject to continue supplying history. The subject benefits from having a chronicler. Everybody got something. Then Trump left office, and I kept reporting on him because he remained politically active, dominated his party and sought the presidency again. Defensible. It also meant the asset never matured into history. The source relationship remained live. In his second presidency the economics became harsher. Sources are more fearful, the administration more tightly controlled, fewer people willing to talk. Scarcity raises the value of access, so the discipline counts for more. The reporter who can still get the call possesses a rarer asset. She also has more to lose.
I know what my answer would be.
Publish.
The next call is never worth suppressing the current fact. I believe I lived by that rule. The rule needs a second line: do not allow the expected value of the next call to influence the threshold of the current story in ways you cannot see. That is harder. It asks for introspection about an incentive operating below the level of choice. Trump could attack me without ending the relationship, flatter me without making me trust him, offer access without obtaining favorable coverage. The leverage worked around the edges. His moods determined which sources called. His calls interrupted dinner. His presidency reorganized the newspaper. I did not need to like him. He occupied enormous space anyway.
The final accounting leaves most of my defense standing. Access journalism discovered real information. Repeated relationships let me report things casual visitors could not. I published damaging information while preserving access, and a major book discovery went into the newspaper eight months before publication. The criticism that survives is structural. Access is an exchange relationship. The source receives prestige, attention, a channel, the opportunity to frame, the ability to place an idea inside an institution he wants to influence. Sometimes the story destroys him. Sometimes he calls again anyway. The deeper question is what repeated access does to the reporter’s map of reality. The people who answer become visible. The people who do not answer become background. The person you understand best becomes the person you explain most. Then explanation becomes expertise, expertise becomes career capital, and career capital makes continued access more valuable.
Nothing corrupt has happened. The incentive has arrived.
This is why I would stop defending access journalism with the sentence “It’s how reporting works.” Of course it is. That is why it deserves examination. Markets work too. Then economists study their failures. The source-reporter relationship is one of journalism’s oldest markets: information exchanged for attention under unequal power, incomplete information, repeated interaction and strategic behavior. The journalist’s professional ethic operates as the regulatory regime. Sometimes regulation works. Sometimes the market produces too much of what everybody in it wants.
I told myself that access was how I extracted truth from Donald Trump. That was true. Donald Trump extracted attention, legitimacy, information and sometimes leverage from his access to me. That was true too. The relationship worked because neither truth cancelled the other.
I would still answer the phone.
I would just put the call on both sides of the ledger.
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Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.
Top executives of other major A.I. companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on A.I.; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace.
On the face of it, I find this inexplicable. I do not buy the anti-AI hype. If the US does not lead in AI, China will. This sounds like unilateral surrender. I think it is a terrible idea. At the same time, the leaders of American AI are smart people. What would be self-interested reasons for them to do this?
The strongest self-interested case is regulatory capture. A company that leads the field wants rules written around its own practices. If it calls for a licensing regime, compute thresholds, or mandatory safety evaluations, the rules that result will look like what it already does, and every smaller rival or open-source project will have to buy its way in. The cost of compliance falls hardest on those without a hundred lawyers and a government affairs office. Leaders who ask to be regulated ask to have the ladder pulled up behind them.
A second reason is time. If you have the best model and the most compute, a pause freezes the standings while you keep training in private, keep hiring, and keep raising money. The letter that asks everyone to stop for six months costs the leader nothing and costs the chaser six months.
A third is liability. Saying in public that the technology might be dangerous creates a record. When something goes wrong, the executive can point to the warnings and say he told everyone. This works as insurance against lawsuits, congressional hearings, and the retrospective judgment that he was reckless.
A fourth is valuation. Danger implies power. A product that might end the world is a product worth trillions. Warnings about superintelligence do the marketing that a press release could never do, and they do it in the voice of the sober scientist rather than the salesman. Investors, recruits, and reporters hear “this could be catastrophic” and understand “this is the most important thing on earth.”
A fifth is control of the story. The man who defines the risk defines the solution. If the danger is rogue superintelligence, the answer is a few careful labs with government backing. If the danger were concentration of power, surveillance, labor displacement, or copyright theft, the answer would be antitrust and litigation, which the labs do not want. Calling for a slowdown on existential grounds moves the conversation to the one frame where the incumbent is the hero.
A sixth is talent and morale. Many of the best researchers believe the risks are real. A leader who speaks their language keeps them from leaving for a rival or a nonprofit. A founder who says “we are the responsible ones” can pay in mission instead of cash.
A seventh is the government relationship. Nations now treat frontier AI as strategic. A company that presents itself as the safe steward gets defense contracts, export-control carve-outs, and a seat at the table when the state decides who may build what. The slowdown rhetoric and the national-security rhetoric come from the same mouths for the same reason.
None of this shows the warnings are insincere. A man can believe the risk and profit from saying so. The test is behavior. Watch whether a leader who calls for a pause pauses, whether he supports rules that would bind him at his own size, and whether he defines the danger in ways that would cost him if taken seriously. Most do none of the three.
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What follows is imagined. Every quotation, link, and number in it is real, drawn from his record and the public literature, but the essay is a counterfactual: the accounting he would publish if no masthead, owner, or source were reading, written in his voice as this series has mapped it. He has written none of these sentences. That is the point.
I was wrong about Iraq. That sentence costs nothing now, and I have paid it several times. The sentence that costs something is this one: I was wrong in a way my profession rewarded, and the reward is the thing I have never accounted for.
Start with what was true, because it is why anyone believed the rest. In March 2002 I published “The Great Terror” in The New Yorker. Halabja happened. Anfal happened. Saddam gassed Kurds by the thousands and I stood in the places where he did it and talked to the people who lived. Nothing found after the invasion made him less of a murderer. Then I went farther. Kurdish intelligence brought me prisoners. One said he had run weapons for al Qaeda from Iraq toward Afghanistan. Another described an Iraqi intelligence officer with a hand in Ansar al-Islam, the jihadist group in the northern hills. I wrote that the Kurds had every reason to want Washington to see Saddam and bin Laden in one frame. I said I was wary. Then I built the story anyway, because a caveat in paragraph forty does not undo a headline, and I knew that when I wrote the caveat. Six days later Dick Cheney called the piece devastating on Meet the Press. A magazine story had become an exhibit. In the Slate debate that fall I wrote that Saddam was the first ruler since Hitler to commit chemical genocide and that this was reason enough to remove him if never again was to mean never again. I was not dragged into the war by politicians. I supplied them a moral argument they could not have written.
Then the scoreboard came in. The Iraq Survey Group found no stockpiles. The 9/11 Commission found contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda and no collaborative operational relationship. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s postwar review found that Saddam distrusted al Qaeda, refused its requests for help, and regarded Ansar al-Islam as a threat to his regime. Read that last clause against my story. A substantial part of what I published rested on allegations that Saddam had a hand in Ansar. The captured documents showed he was trying to kill it. A British reporter later went back to the prison and found my weapons smuggler’s account coming apart under ordinary questions. The Kurds had handed me a man who told me what my sources wanted me to hear, and I had reported his answers as the interior of the regime.
I did publish an accounting. In 2008, for the fifth anniversary, Slate asked the liberal hawks how they got it wrong, and I wrote that I trusted the Germans, one German in particular, the chief of the BND, who had told me Saddam’s nuclear program was an immediate threat. I wrote that I did not realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be, and that the mess was almost entirely preventable. Every word of that is true, and read together it is an escape hatch. Blame a foreign intelligence chief, blame Rumsfeld, blame the occupation, and the idea underneath, that a frightening enough threat justifies preventive war, walks out intact for the next frightening threat. I did not write about the prisoner. I did not write about what it means to take a source from an interested intelligence service and print him. I wrote about execution because execution is a criticism that leaves the reporter’s method standing.
The method is access. The word is used as an accusation and it is also a technology. Access is how a reader learns what a president fears rather than what his press secretary says he fears. I built a career on becoming someone powerful people would talk to for a long time, and the trade was never crude. I take people seriously. I learn their vocabulary and their constraints. I give the argument room to make sense before I judge it. Powerful people like being understood, and being understood feels to them like fairness, and fairness produces the next interview. That is the machine. It produced the best work of my life and it produced Iraq, and I have never run the two through the same audit.
Run it on Iran. In 2010 I interviewed more than forty Israeli, American, and Arab officials for “The Point of No Return” and concluded there was a better than fifty percent chance Israel would strike Iran’s nuclear sites by the following July. It did not. Forty sources sounds like a sample. It was forty observations drawn from one strategic ecosystem in which every official talking to me was also an actor: warning Tehran, pressuring Washington, strengthening his faction at home, and believing every word while he did it. I thought I was measuring the probability of war. I was measuring the intensity with which Israeli officials wanted two governments to believe war was possible. Israel struck in June 2025 and the United States hit Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan a week later, and a Washington habit says that vindicates the 2010 piece. It does not. “Israel may one day strike Iran” was prescient. “Better than even by next July” was wrong, and the calendar is the only thing that keeps a threat forecast falsifiable. Iraq should have taught me to publish the scoreboard beside the story: the prediction, the date, the outcome, and next to each quote the interest of the man who gave it.
The Obama piece was the one where I came closest. He talked to me for “The Obama Doctrine” because he knew I understood the foreign-policy establishment he was resisting, and I let him make the strongest case for restraint anyone had let him make: the Middle East consumed attention out of proportion to its value, American fixes made things worse, the Washington playbook equated force with seriousness. I understood him. Then listen to my questions. Weren’t you too cautious. What about credibility. What about the red line. What about the allies who think we withdrew. Action needed an argument; inaction needed a defense. I had revised my conclusions since 2002. I had not revised the prior.
Here is the prior, in the terms a social scientist would use. In 2002 there were two possible errors. Say Saddam probably has no usable stockpiles and probably will not hand them to terrorists, and be wrong, and people die. Say he may have terrible weapons and may give them away, and be wrong, and a threat was overstated. Inside the moral economy of national security those two errors are not weighed equally. The hawkish error presents as prudence. The dovish error presents as negligence. Serious people know there are monsters; serious people listen to generals; serious people understand that presidents know things citizens do not. None of those propositions is false. The trouble is that they form a status system, and in the status system some errors make you look naive and others make you look responsible, and I chose the responsible errors every time. My career is the evidence. Iraq did not disqualify me from interpreting the next threat. It qualified me. I became the man who had seen American power go wrong, which gave me more standing to judge when it should be used again. Failure became expertise, and I moved from The New Yorker to The Atlantic and then to its editor’s chair and then to the moderator’s chair on Washington Week, and no one in that sequence ever asked me to show my ledger.
Trump is the evidence for the defense, and it should be entered. In September 2020 I reported, on anonymous sources, that he had called dead Americans suckers and losers. He denied it and his people disputed it, and in October 2023 John Kelly went on the record with CNN and confirmed the substance. Access produced truth. Anonymous officials produced truth. The machine works. The mistake is inheriting that vindication across stories. Sources can be right about Trump’s contempt and wrong about Saddam’s reactor. Generals can have honorable motives and institutional interests in the same sentence. “Jeffrey Goldberg has four sources” carries two pieces of information, the number four and the name, and I spent thirty years building the second so readers would stop checking the first.
Then, in March 2025, the strangest story of my life removed me from the equation. Michael Waltz added me to a Signal group where the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence discussed imminent strikes on the Houthis. I thought it was a hoax until the strikes happened on schedule. No one had cultivated me. No one was selling me anything. No senior official familiar with the matter characterized a meeting; the meeting was on my phone. It was access purified of relationship, and it was the best-sourced story I have ever published, and it needed none of the qualities that made me Jeffrey Goldberg. Any competent reporter added to that chat could have established what I established. The authority came from the document. I should have wanted more of that all along: documents, recorded statements, named sources, predictions with dates, people who pay for policy instead of people who design it. Iraq had the opposite structure. The confident interpretation came from sources with stakes, the uncertainty came from me, and the headline made the uncertainty disappear.
Israel is the hardest case because I cannot stand outside it. I moved there as a young man, served in the army, guarded Palestinian prisoners at Ketziot during the first intifada, became friends with one of them, and wrote Prisoners about it. Israel entered my identity before it entered my journalism. That gave me something real: I understand Israeli fear from inside, I know why Iranian threats do not sound theoretical in Jerusalem, I knew what October 7 meant before the American press had the vocabulary. Biography also fixes the prior. My work asks how Israel can stay secure, Jewish, democratic, and defensible. A reporter starting elsewhere asks who holds coercive power over whom, and what permanent military rule does to the ruled, and which arrangements became unthinkable because the state named them existential. Starting points determine which facts look like emergencies. I became one of Netanyahu’s harshest critics in American print, and the journalist’s favorite proof of independence is the list of people on his own side he has criticized. The harder test is whether he can ask the question his side calls illegitimate. I have not. Someone who rejects my premise will read my fiercest Netanyahu piece as an argument conducted inside the walls, and he will have identified the walls.
What survives, because a correction that burns everything is just the 2002 reflex pointed the other way. Going to Kurdistan survives; the massacres were real and needed a witness. Access survives as a way to learn what power believes; it fails as a way to learn what is true. The Obama interviews survive. The Kelly confirmation survives. The Signal judgment survives; I left the chat when I understood what it was and published only what the administration’s denials made necessary, and most press critics thought that sound. What does not survive is the inference I kept making from 2002 to 2010: that forty frightened officials constitute evidence about the world rather than evidence about forty officials. And a later scoop does not pay off an earlier factual debt. That is another Washington habit. The debt stands on its own line.
I know what publishing this costs. I edit a magazine whose owner bought it on the strength of the reputation this essay audits, and I moderate a program whose premise is that the people who have been in the room can tell you what happened there. The friends I made in those rooms will read this as ingratitude. They learned over twenty years what kind of argument I find morally serious: genocide, terrorism, a nuclear program, an ally abandoned. They learned that I know the analogies, Munich and Rwanda and Bosnia and September 11. Every national-security reporter carries an archive of catastrophes caused by acting too late. We keep a thinner one of catastrophes caused by acting too early, and Iraq is in it now, and mine is still thinner than it should be.
I did not stop being the journalist who was wrong about Iraq. I stopped believing several things he believed. I did not stop believing that the most revealing place to stand is beside the people making the decision, and I did not build the ledger that would have told me how often standing there made me wrong. Get close enough to power to learn what it knows. Stay far enough away to remember it may be wrong. And when the man in the room tells you the world is about to end, write down the date.
What follows is imagined. Robert Kagan has written none of these sentences. Every quotation, link, and number underneath them is real, drawn from his record and the public literature. This is the accounting he might publish if he subjected the American foreign-policy community to the same anthropology he has spent his career applying to nationalism, authoritarianism, and the enemies of liberal order.
I spent my career warning that tribal nationalism threatens universal liberal order. I never subjected my own foreign-policy community to the same anthropology. That sentence sounds like John Mearsheimer, so begin with him.
Mearsheimer’s argument against people like me is deeper than “Iraq was a mistake” or “NATO expansion provoked Russia.” In The Great Delusion, he argues that liberal hegemony contains a category error. Liberal states take principles developed inside their own societies, universal individual rights, democracy, open markets, international institutions, and conclude that other nations naturally want to organize themselves around the same principles. Then nationalism and balance-of-power politics return and remind the liberal hegemon that other societies possess histories, identities and security interests of their own. I have spent much of my career arguing that this realism is too cramped. Maybe the first question should have been whether it was also anthropology.
Mearsheimer writes that reason is the least important of the ways we form our preferences, weaker than socialization, because a man passes a long childhood under the value infusion of his family and society before his critical faculties mature, and by the time he can think for himself the work is done. I am good evidence for that claim. My father was Donald Kagan. He taught the Peloponnesian War at Yale for forty years, and he taught it at our table first. From him I absorbed the tragic view of politics before I could test it: power recurs, democracies tire, peace is an interval, the strong do what they can. I did not reason my way to those conclusions. I inherited them, and then I spent four decades supplying the reasons. By Mearsheimer’s account, that is the normal human sequence. The commitments arrive first, by blood and upbringing. The arguments come after, as defense rather than discovery.
I grew up inside an American national-security world. I entered government at twenty-five. I wrote about strategy, worked at think tanks, edited and wrote for magazines whose readers included the people making policy, and advised presidential candidates. My intellectual community moved among administrations, foundations, universities, journals and conferences. We argued ferociously with one another while sharing a remarkable number of premises about what America was, what history had taught and what responsible people were supposed to worry about. We did not experience those premises as tribal. We experienced them as reality.
That is how tribes work.
Start with the cases that went well, because otherwise this exercise is rigged. Bosnia belongs in my credit column. By the mid-1990s European diplomacy and United Nations peacekeeping had failed to end a war marked by ethnic cleansing and mass killing, and Srebrenica happened under the eyes of peacekeepers. NATO air operations against Bosnian Serb positions in 1995 helped alter the military balance and were an important factor leading to the Dayton settlement. NATO then enforced the agreement and maintained a secure environment for reconstruction. American power mattered, and there is no elegant realist sentence that makes that fact disappear. People were being killed. The balance of forces had produced slaughter. American and NATO coercion helped end the war.
Between Bosnia and the next war, Bill Kristol and I named the doctrine. In 1996 we published “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in Foreign Affairs and called for “benevolent global hegemony.” Read that phrase the way an anthropologist reads a tribe’s name for itself. We named our own dominance and chose the adjective. No hegemon in history has chosen a different one.
Kosovo gave me another reason to believe the lesson generalized. In 1999 Bill and I demanded that NATO defeat Slobodan Milosevic rather than accept ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. We wanted ground troops if necessary, and we wrote that ground forces would “eventually” be necessary because the air war could not accomplish NATO’s objectives. They were not. After seventy-eight days of bombing, Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo and NATO suspended the campaign, and refugees returned under international protection. Score the principle separately from the operational forecast. Intervention helped achieve the political objective. My certainty about how it would have to be achieved was misplaced. That distinction will become familiar.
Bosnia and Kosovo taught my generation something real and something dangerous. The real lesson was that American power could sometimes stop horrors that diplomacy alone had failed to stop. The dangerous lesson was that people who warned against intervention had just been demonstrated to possess a general theory of cowardice. Once you have watched “restraint” coexist with Srebrenica, restraint becomes morally stained. Once American force helps produce Dayton, American force becomes associated with moral seriousness.
Then Iraq appears.
In January 2002 Bill and I wrote that for the war on terrorism to succeed Saddam Hussein had to be removed. Not contained. Removed. Our argument had several layers. Saddam had invaded his neighbors, used chemical weapons, pursued weapons of mass destruction, defied international obligations, and ruled through terror. September 11 had changed the tolerance Americans could rationally have for threats that might mature before we acted.
Honesty requires an earlier date. In January 1998 I signed a letter to President Clinton from the Project for the New American Century, alongside Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle and a dozen others, urging a strategy that would “aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” Three years before the towers fell, my conclusion was complete. September 11 did not produce my argument. It produced my audience. That sequence deserves a name: when the recommendation stays fixed while the justifications rotate, the recommendation is coming from somewhere other than the justifications.
Then the central empirical premise failed. The stockpiles were not there. What did I do? I defended the model. In October 2003 Bill and I wrote that the case for war would have been “rock solid” even if there had never been a CIA, relying on Saddam’s history, the unresolved weapons questions and the larger strategic argument. In February 2004, after David Kay said the expected stockpiles had not been found, we again argued that the war remained right because the case had always been broader than WMD.
That sentence should bother me more than it has. “The case was always broader.” Every grand theory’s survival kit contains that phrase. One premise fails and the theory widens. Saddam’s tyranny remains. His past aggression remains. The possibility of future weapons remains. The democratic transformation of the Middle East becomes more important, and the failure of one rationale proves only that we should look at the others. This is how an argument becomes difficult to falsify.
We were not merely defending the original decision. We were still forecasting success. In September 2003 I wrote that success in Iraq remained within reach if the United States committed sufficient money, civilians, troops and political attention. In March 2004 Bill and I wrote that Iraqis had made “enormous strides” toward liberal democracy. In late 2005 we celebrated the high-turnout Iraqi election against critics we thought were determined to minimize good news.
Some of those observations were true. Iraq did hold competitive elections. Saddam was gone. Millions of Iraqis did risk their lives to vote, and the country did develop political institutions more pluralistic than Saddam’s dictatorship. We sold a different outcome. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died through war and subsequent violence. Sectarian conflict exploded. Millions were displaced. Iran gained enormous influence. Al Qaeda in Iraq emerged from the conflict and became an ancestor of ISIS, and the United States spent years and immense resources attempting to stabilize a country whose political order it had destroyed.
My theory had expected the removal of tyranny to create an opening for liberal politics. It underestimated what Mearsheimer would have told me to put nearer the center of the model: nationalism, sect, state collapse, foreign occupation, local legitimacy, and the inability of outsiders to manufacture political order merely by removing the regime obstructing it.
I did eventually become furious at the Bush administration’s execution of the war. Too few troops, too few civilians, too little planning, too little commitment. Those criticisms were justified, and in April 2004 I argued that the administration had failed to produce a military and political strategy adequate to the mission. But execution became my escape hatch. If only we had committed enough. If only the occupation had been competent. If only Washington had understood the size of the task. Those counterfactuals may be true. They also preserve the theory by locating the failure one level below it. Perhaps liberal democracy could have been implanted; we simply implanted it badly.
I should have entertained the harsher possibility. Maybe the difficulty was the information. Maybe Americans did not know enough to reorder Iraq. Maybe no plausible occupation could confidently predict the political consequences of smashing an existing state, and maybe a project requiring extraordinary foresight, competence, legitimacy, patience and domestic support should be judged partly by the probability that those conditions will exist. “It could have worked under better management” is not necessarily a defense of a policy. Sometimes it is evidence against choosing policies that require better management than governments usually possess.
Then came the Arab Spring, and again I saw universal aspirations. In 2011 Michele Dunne and I urged the United States to support a genuine democratic transition in Egypt rather than preserve the old regime under another name. We regarded the uprising as an opportunity for Egyptians to claim political rights Americans said they believed were universal. I said something more expansive that year. I believed the region’s old dictatorships were ultimately going to fall, that Islamists would win elections, and that Islam could make its peace with democracy.
There was something admirable in that argument. Washington had spent decades claiming to support democracy while cooperating with Arab autocrats, and we were finally being forced to decide whether universal rights meant anything when voters might elect people we disliked. I chose the universal principle. Then Egypt supplied the local history. Mohamed Morsi won the presidency. His government alienated large parts of Egyptian society. Mass protests returned, and in 2013 the military removed him. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi eventually consolidated a more authoritarian system than the transition had been intended to replace.
Again the aspiration was real, and again the institutional pathway was weaker than I assumed. My liberal universalism knew that Egyptians wanted dignity, participation and accountable government. It knew less about the Egyptian military, the Muslim Brotherhood, institutional distrust, constitutional bargaining, state capacity and the distribution of organized force. Those were not footnotes. They decided the outcome.
Libya belongs in the same ledger, and it is the entry that hurts, because by then the experiment had already run once. In March 2011 I signed a letter urging President Obama to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, recognize the rebel council, and explore targeted strikes against Qaddafi’s assets. Obama acted, NATO flew, and Qaddafi fell in October and died in a drainage pipe. Then the state dissolved. Militias partitioned the country. A second civil war followed, and by 2017 reporters were filming open-air slave auctions outside Tripoli. Iraq had taught the lesson eight years earlier: removing the regime removes the state, and what fills the space answers to local force. I signed anyway. Do it once and the failure can be execution. Do it twice and the failure is the model.
Now Russia. Here my record improves. Long before the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I argued that the optimistic post-Cold War theory was failing. In 2007 I wrote about the return of authoritarian great powers. Russia and China showed that capitalism did not inevitably produce Western-style liberal democracy, and that powerful authoritarian states could remain integrated into the global economy while resisting the liberal political model and supporting alternatives to it.
That argument aged better than the end-of-history optimism I was attacking. Russia did become more authoritarian. It did use military force in Georgia, seize Crimea, intervene in Ukraine’s east, and launch a full-scale invasion in 2022. China did not democratize as it grew wealthier, and the geopolitical competition between major authoritarian powers and liberal democracies became harder to dismiss. When I titled a book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, I was identifying something real. Power politics had not disappeared. Ideology had not disappeared. National rivalry had not disappeared. The apparent universal convergence of the 1990s was an interval.
Give me that one. Then ask the Mearsheimer question. What caused what?
I supported NATO enlargement. In 1997 I argued that the United States should maintain enough military strength to honor the security guarantees it was about to extend to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Those states joined, and others followed. There is a powerful case that enlargement worked. Poland, Czechia and Hungary became members in 1999, and the Baltic states later joined. These countries were incorporated into an alliance whose central promise is collective defense. Russia invaded non-NATO Georgia in 2008 and non-NATO Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. It has not launched the same kind of conventional invasion against Poland, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, and NATO has since reinforced precisely those eastern members.
If you are Polish, that comparison is not theoretical. The people living between Germany and Russia possess their own historical memory. Realists sometimes discuss NATO enlargement as though Eastern Europeans were pieces moved by Washington across a chessboard. They wanted in. They had reasons. Poland’s leaders regarded membership as a way to escape centuries of strategic vulnerability, and universalism did not invent their fear of Russia.
Then comes the part my own framework handles badly. Russian leaders also had perceptions. They repeatedly described NATO’s eastward movement as threatening. The 2008 Bucharest declaration said Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” even though neither received a formal membership plan. Putin publicly treated possible membership for both as a red line, and months later Russia fought Georgia.
I usually processed that sequence in one direction. Russia opposed NATO enlargement because Russia wanted a sphere of influence over its neighbors, and the aggression therefore vindicated enlargement. That may be substantially right. It is incomplete causal reasoning. An alliance can be defensive in the intentions of its members and threatening in the perception of a state outside it. The outside state can be aggressive and still react to the alliance. Its reaction can then convince the alliance that expansion was necessary, the alliance expands again, the outside state sees confirmation of encirclement, and both sides obtain evidence for their prior. International relations scholars have a name for this problem. The security dilemma. I knew the term. I rarely let it do much work in my story.
Mearsheimer’s version can become monocausal too. Explaining Russian conduct through NATO expansion can underweight Putin’s authoritarian politics, Russian imperial history, Ukraine’s independent agency and Moscow’s resistance to neighboring democracies escaping its control. My version had the opposite bias. I treated Russian reaction as evidence about Russia. I was less willing to treat it as evidence about us.
That asymmetry becomes clearer in my description of the liberal order. For years critics accused people like me of disguising American empire in universal language. Eventually I stopped disguising much of it. In 2018 I defended the postwar liberal order by saying explicitly that it rested on American hegemony. I acknowledged that the United States sometimes violated the rules it claimed to uphold, intervened without United Nations authorization, and maintained a double standard. I even wrote that while the liberal order rejected spheres of influence, there was one exception: the United States, which effectively treated the world as its own sphere of interest.
Read anthropologically, that is an extraordinary paragraph. Russia thinks Ukraine belongs inside a privileged security sphere, and I call that imperialism. The United States treats Europe, East Asia, the Persian Gulf and the global trading system as matters of legitimate American strategic concern, and I call that world order.
There are powerful reasons to distinguish the two. American hegemony after 1945 helped produce stable alliances among countries that voluntarily remained inside them. Germany and Japan became prosperous democracies rather than revanchist military powers. Western Europe experienced an unprecedented period of peace among its great powers. NATO expanded partly because states asked to join it. The Soviet bloc had to use force to prevent defections; the American-led bloc generally did not. Those differences matter.
The anthropological correction is that every hegemon has a vocabulary in which its preferences become order. Russia has one. China has one. We have one. Ours includes rules, openness, democratic choice and universal rights. Those principles may be better. Their moral quality does not make them culturally unlocated. They came through a history. They have institutions, a capital city, a professional class, budgets, and aircraft carriers. I spent decades attacking nationalists for mistaking the preferences of their tribe for universal necessity. Washington was the tribe whose universal necessity I wrote.
In 2014 I made the whole case one more time, at length, in an essay called “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.” I argued that the breakdown of order was a failure of American will, a problem of identity and purpose rather than capability. President Obama, whose caution that essay criticized, invited me to the White House to “compare world views.” Sit with that fact. The administration I was attacking read my attack and set a place for me. That is what dissent looks like inside my community. It is a seating arrangement. The argument between engagement and more engagement runs across the president’s table, while the argument for less waits outside the building.
This brings me to Trump.
In May 2016 I wrote “This Is How Fascism Comes to America.” I argued that fascism would arrive “not with jackboots and salutes” but with a television huckster tapping popular resentments while an entire political party fell into line behind him. I warned that the Republican Party believed it could domesticate him and that the movement’s allegiance increasingly ran to the leader rather than the party.
Some of that diagnosis deserves to remain. Trump did become president. After losing the 2020 election, he attempted to overturn the result. Republican elites who had once opposed him largely accommodated themselves to his leadership, and he returned to office in 2025. The personalist element I identified was not invented.
Then I repeated my characteristic mistake. I moved from structural warning to maximal prediction. In November 2023 I wrote that a Trump dictatorship was becoming “increasingly inevitable.” I described federal bureaucracy, law enforcement, political retaliation, congressional weakness and personal loyalty as the machinery through which a second Trump administration could erode liberal constraints.
By September 2026 parts of that machinery have recognizable empirical counterparts. The Justice Department has pursued investigations and cases involving prominent Trump critics, some of which have been dismissed or have failed in court. Internal Justice Department watchdog capacity has diminished. The administration introduced a civil-service application question asking applicants how they would advance presidential policies, which a federal judge blocked in September 2026 as improperly politicizing merit hiring.
Other parts of my prediction require more humility. Federal courts are still blocking executive actions. Grand juries have declined indictments sought by prosecutors. Judges have dismissed cases, and the November 2026 congressional elections are proceeding. Those facts do not refute warnings about erosion of institutional restraints. They do refute any temptation to describe the institutional outcome as predetermined. I inserted that caveat into my 2023 essay. I said nothing in history is inevitable. Then I put “increasingly inevitable” in the headline. That is my recurring rhetorical pattern. The qualification is in the model. The certainty is in the prose.
In October 2024 the pattern acquired a coda. Within minutes of learning that the owner of The Washington Post had blocked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, I resigned as editor at large, calling the decision a premature capitulation to Trump. A week later I joined The Atlantic. I do not retract the word capitulation. I note the sociology. My protest and my landing happened inside the same small set of rooms, and the passage from resignation to new masthead took seven days. Exits from my world are lateral.
Trump raises another anthropological problem. My theory of American history increasingly treats liberal universalism as the authentic American tradition and anti-liberal movements as recurring rebellions against it. In Rebellion, I trace Trump’s movement through earlier challenges to the American liberal project: slavery, Jim Crow, the Klan, the John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan and other forms of hierarchy or reaction. There is real continuity there. American history contains a genuine struggle over universal rights.
Yet notice what I am doing as a historian. I decide which American inheritance is America. One strand becomes the constitutional order and the competing strand becomes rebellion. Every nation tells history that way. The French republican tells France through the Revolution and treats Vichy as betrayal. The Russian nationalist tells Russia through imperial continuity and treats liberal interludes as foreign contamination. The Chinese Communist Party tells China through national rejuvenation and treats dissent as disruption. My story is morally different. It is structurally familiar. I construct a national self whose preferred principles are universal, then describe opponents as deviations from the authentic tradition. That may be the right interpretation. It is still an interpretation produced inside a tribe.
Now democracy versus autocracy. Here again I saw something early. The 1990s produced a powerful belief that economic modernization, globalization and rising prosperity would gradually dissolve authoritarian government. China would liberalize, Russia would converge, and international institutions would socialize states into common rules. I said no. Authoritarian regimes could modernize, cooperate with each other, and acquire wealth without acquiring liberal politics, and their success could make authoritarian political forms more attractive. Russia and China gave that argument considerable support.
My error came when I converted regime type into too much explanatory work. Democracies have interests. Autocracies have interests. Democracies sometimes cooperate with autocracies, autocracies sometimes fight one another, and states can clash over territory, status, resources and security even when they share domestic political systems. “Democracy versus autocracy” describes one axis of contemporary conflict. It does not replace geopolitics. If I let it replace geopolitics, I make the same mistake Fukuyama made from the other direction. He thought ideology was ending. I make ideology explain too much of what returned.
The better synthesis is less satisfying. Mearsheimer is right that nationalism and power politics survive liberalism. I am right that domestic regime type and ideology can affect foreign policy. Eastern Europeans were right that Russia presented a danger. Russians could perceive NATO enlargement as threatening without obtaining a veto over their neighbors. NATO could be both a voluntary defensive alliance and a strategic expansion from Moscow’s perspective. American power could both sustain a relatively open order and violate the rules of that order. The Iraq War could be sincerely intended to improve security and human freedom and still be a catastrophic exercise in overconfidence. Bosnia could justify one intervention without justifying the next one. History refuses to become doctrine. That is the sentence I have resisted for thirty years.
I write grand strategy because grand strategy makes history legible. America created an order. Autocracy challenges it. The jungle grows back. History returns. Anti-liberal rebellion threatens the republic. These metaphors do valuable work. They place events inside patterns. They also create protagonists: the liberal order, American power, democratic nations, authoritarian challengers. Once the cast is assigned, causation begins to follow morality. The liberal order acts to preserve stability while the autocrat seeks a sphere. The United States expands institutions while Russia expands power. We reassure, they threaten. We defend principles, they defend interests. The verbs carry the theory.
Anthropology would make me change the verbs. Washington has a culture. It has initiation rituals: graduate schools, think tanks, security clearances, council memberships, conferences, editorial pages, administrations in which yesterday’s think-tank fellow becomes tomorrow’s official and next year’s analyst explaining the policy he helped design.
I can make this concrete without leaving my house. My wife, Victoria Nuland, served as ambassador to NATO, as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney, as assistant secretary of state for Europe under Obama, and as under secretary of state for political affairs under Biden. I wrote the arguments. She carried out the policy. My brother Frederick and his wife Kimberly run the Institute for the Study of War, which supplies the daily battlefield assessments that newspapers cite each morning of the Ukraine war. When critics describe the foreign-policy community as an interlocking elite reproduced through schools, appointments and marriage, they are describing my dinner table. For years I heard that observation as an insult. It is a census.
The community has status hierarchies too. Some fears confer seriousness and some fears mark you as naive. Munich is serious. Iraq made intervention less serious for a while. Ukraine made deterrence serious again.
And the community keeps no scoreboard. I forecast for thirty years: ground troops in Kosovo, success within reach in Iraq, enormous strides toward liberal democracy, a democratic transition in Egypt, an increasingly inevitable dictatorship. No institution ever tallied the record, and no editor asked to see it before publishing my next certainty. In my profession, a man who is wrong in good company outranks a man who is right from outside it. I benefited from that accounting rule my entire career.
The community remembers failures selectively because professional identity requires a usable past. I spent my career explaining how Russian nationalism reconstructs history to justify its present. I should have spent more time watching Washington do the ordinary human version of the same thing. Bosnia becomes the memory proving intervention works. Munich proves appeasement fails. World War II proves American withdrawal is dangerous. The Cold War proves containment backed by military power works. Iraq becomes an execution error, Libya an aberration, Vietnam an analogy people misuse. Every historical episode arrives pre-indexed for policy. That is a culture. It does not make the lessons false. It makes them selected.
The American foreign-policy establishment’s deepest belief is that American withdrawal is an action while American presence is a condition. If the United States reduces troops, we have “done” something. If we maintain bases on another continent for seventy years, that is the baseline. If NATO expands, the international order expands. If Russia responds, Russia changes the status quo. Sometimes that description is correct. Sometimes the baseline contains decades of previous choices. The hegemon’s greatest conceptual privilege is control of the zero point. I defended that privilege because I thought the world it produced was better. I still do.
This confession would be cheap if I concluded that American leadership was merely imperialism with nicer stationery. It was more than that. Postwar American power created public goods. It deterred aggression against allies, helped keep Western Europe at peace, and allowed Germany and Japan to remain powerful without becoming military threats to their neighbors. It protected small states that could not have balanced the Soviet Union or later Russia alone. It maintained an economic system from which countries far beyond America benefited, and it gave liberal dissidents in authoritarian societies an external source of support. The Baltic states are freer and more secure inside NATO than they would likely be in a Russian sphere. Bosnians did not imagine the shelling. Kosovar Albanians did not imagine the ethnic cleansing. Ukrainians did not imagine the tanks crossing their border. Power matters. The realist told me that. So did my father. So did history.
The correction is not restraint as a universal doctrine. Universal doctrines caused the problem. The correction is to put my own community back inside history. American liberal internationalism is a tradition. It emerged from particular experiences: world wars, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, the Marshall Plan, Germany, Japan, Bosnia, September 11. Each event altered what a particular American elite feared and what it believed power could accomplish. That tradition contains moral insights. It also contains professional interests, institutional habits, status systems, trauma, analogy and myth. Like every other political tradition I have studied.
Once I admit that, Iraq looks different. We did not simply miscalculate. Our culture supplied the miscalculation. We had recently watched American power apparently succeed in the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo. We had watched the Soviet Union collapse, democracies spread across Eastern Europe, and dictatorships disappear in Latin America and Asia. We had come to believe that history had demonstrated both the universality of liberal aspiration and the unusual competence of American power at creating the conditions in which it could flourish. I criticized Francis Fukuyama for thinking history had ended. I carried more of the 1990s into Iraq than I understood.
Russia revealed the opposite failure. Because Iraq made American power look dangerous, many people became slow to recognize another kind of danger. Putin was not an American invention. Russia was not merely reacting. Authoritarian nationalism had agency. Great powers really do exploit weakness, small nations really can need protection, and sometimes the jungle grows back.
That is why the final accounting refuses to vindicate either tribe. The restraint camp has Iraq; I have Bosnia. The restraint camp has Libya; I have Poland. The restraint camp has the security dilemma; I have Ukraine. The restraint camp has nationalism; I have authoritarian power. The argument becomes useful only after both sides lose the right to turn their best case into a general law.
So what survives my career? The postwar order was unusually valuable, and American power contributed substantially to it. Authoritarian great powers did return. Russia was more revisionist and more dangerous than many Western policymakers wanted to believe. Eastern European countries had legitimate reasons to seek NATO membership. Bosnia demonstrated that military intervention can sometimes end horrors. Kosovo demonstrated something similar while also demonstrating that I could be wrong about the military means required. Trump demonstrated that liberal democracy possesses domestic vulnerabilities that complacent elites underestimated.
What fails? Iraq as a model of democratic transformation by force, and Libya as its confirmation. The assumption that aspirations for liberty tell us enough about the institutions that will follow dictatorship. The tendency to classify American coercion as order-maintenance and rival coercion as power politics without first examining whether the distinction is earned in the particular case. The habit of treating another country’s security fears as evidence of its pathology while treating ours as the structure of the international system. The belief that American leadership occupies a position outside ordinary nationalism.
And above all, the exemption. I granted my own political community an exemption from anthropology. Russian elites had historical trauma. Arab societies had tribal and religious attachments. European nations had nationalism. Trump voters had resentment and identity. The American national-security establishment had principles. That was too flattering. We had principles. We also had identity. We had a table where the tragic view of history was served with dinner, schools that stamped the type, letters we signed together, a scoreboard no one kept, and a capital that mistook its own tradition for the human condition.
I spent thirty years saying that a world without American power would revert to history. The deeper truth is that America never left history. Neither did the Kagans. Neither did I.
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