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Updated at 2:13 p.m. ET on February 5, 2025
It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs. Nevertheless, soup kitchens stopped handing out food, clinics suspended care, and truckers paid through aid programs stopped delivering medicine.
Then came the purge. Early yesterday morning, the Department of Government Efficiency, a Musk-led group that has been announcing what stays and goes in Washington, told employees not to come to work. Musk posted on X an hour later, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” More than 1,000 employees—including some in war zones—were locked out of their work accounts. Earlier today, Politico reported that nearly all of USAID’s Washington-based staff will soon be placed on leave, and ABC News reported that staff on foreign assignments are being evacuated.
USAID, which has distributed aid to hundreds of millions of people around the world for 60 years, estimates that it has extended children’s life expectancies by six years in many of the countries it works in. But its $40 billion in annual spending—about 0.7 percent of the U.S. budget—has been criticized for inefficiencies, and many Americans accuse the government of spending irresponsibly on foreign aid. In a statement this week, the Trump administration accused USAID of wasting more than $100,000 on theatrical productions in Ireland and Colombia. In fact, these projects were funded by the State Department. Still, some critiques of USAID spending are arguably fair: During George W. Bush’s presidency, for example, USAID contracted companies that had been major Bush-campaign donors for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. USAID was established by Congress as an independent agency, and by law, only Congress can dissolve it. The White House, though, seems determined to do away with it as an independent agency; yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he is now the acting head of USAID. If the agency is successfully subsumed by the State Department, it could, in theory, continue in a slightly diminished form—or be totally gutted. When reached for comment, a State Department spokesperson referred me to Rubio’s recent statements to the media. One of them read: “USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”
So far, the administration has framed the foreign-aid pause as temporary. But even if much of USAID’s work is allowed to resume in a few months, the intricate global-health ecosystem being torn apart will not be easily repaired. Famine and disease—two of the issues against which USAID has made the most progress—don’t stop when funding does, and can spread disastrously in even a short window. Prior to the stop-work order, at least 220,000 people worldwide got their HIV medication every day at clinics supported by the U.S. government. Juli Duvall-Jones, who oversees an HIV clinic in eastern Ivory Coast, told me that the pregnant women her clinic serves are no longer receiving their daily treatment, meaning that some children will almost certainly contract HIV during birth or through breastfeeding. People who are exposed to HIV have only 72 hours—less than the amount of time many clinics have now been closed—to begin a medication regimen called post-exposure prophylaxis that can help prevent infection. A pause of any length in USAID-funded anti-HIV efforts will cause more people to contract the disease. Missing doses of treatment can make it less effective. Without treatment, the disease kills young people in about 12 years, and older adults even faster.
The head of one aid group, who, like several aid workers I spoke with, asked that neither she nor the group be named for fear of permanently losing their USAID funding, told me that her organization—which, among other projects, treats severely malnourished children and babies in Sudan—is now scraping by on money diverted from other projects. Most aid efforts operate on extremely thin margins, so any pause in funding is felt almost immediately. “We can sort of keep it going for a few days,” she said. But once the money runs out, these children will lose the supplemental oxygen, fortified foods, and 24/7 medical supervision they need. Many, she said, will die in two to six hours.
As the 90-day pause drags on, longer-term consequences will start to become clear. In Uganda, the national government has stopped spraying insecticide and distributing bed nets to pregnant women and young kids; during the country’s next rainy season, which spans from March to May, malaria cases and deaths may spike. The Center for Victims of Torture, a global nonprofit, has furloughed most of its staff and stopped rehabilitation programs in Jordan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, including one for women among the estimated 100,000 raped in a recent war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Scott Roehm, CVT’s director of global policy and advocacy, told me that many of the center’s clients attempted suicide prior to getting help. He fears what will happen to people who have to stop their treatment—and those who never get help at all.
Right now, it seems unlikely that all or even most of USAID’s programs will resume at the end of April. Yesterday, Donald Trump said Ukraine should give America its lithium in exchange for aid, suggesting that programs that don’t give the U.S. an immediate win may be cut for good. The longer the pause lasts, the more devastating the effects will be, not just for aid recipients but also for Americans. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a monitoring tool funded by USAID, has been offline since Friday. Without it, aid workers may struggle to intervene early enough to prevent mass starvation, and farmers have lost a major tool for anticipating agricultural shocks. Michael VanRooyen, an emergency physician who has led humanitarian work in Darfur, Rwanda, and Ukraine, estimates that an extended pause in food aid could kill hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children. USAID workers leading the agency’s response to an active Ebola outbreak in Uganda were among those locked out of work systems. Without their involvement, the U.S. could miss signs that the outbreak is growing or changing—or even that a new pandemic is brewing.
Democratic lawmakers have started pushing back on the demolition of USAID. Yesterday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, said in a statement that “dismantling USAID is illegal and makes us less safe,” and placed a blanket hold on nominees for State Department positions until USAID is back up and running.
But if the agency is restored—next week, next month, or years from now—restarting its work won’t be as simple as turning the flow of cash back on. After the week USAID has had, staff might be hard to come by. According to one group of development workers tracking the fallout, the aid freeze has caused nearly 9,000 Americans and far more people around the world to lose their jobs. Many may decide to pursue work outside the humanitarian sector, which typically offers low pay and benefits. Even if the pause ends quickly, the federal government has given workers little incentive to return. Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization,” “a ball of worms,” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
Whoever does come back to work will need to get back in touch with the people who lead local organizations (many of which have or will have gone defunct), the world leaders with whom they once partnered, and the people who shuttle supplies around the world. Susan Reichle, a foreign-assistance expert who served in every presidential administration from George H. W. Bush’s to Trump’s first term, told me that the pause has already broken trust that could take years to repair. “USAID staff are having to meet with ministers of health, ministers of power, ministers of education” to tell them that work has stopped, Reichle said. “And they can’t tell them if or when those partnerships will ever continue.”
Having a measured, humane debate about the way the U.S. distributes humanitarian aid is possible. It is in the country’s interest to spend aid money effectively. And the way the United States distributes global aid could certainly be improved. But the instant retraction of much of the world’s food and health-care infrastructure will create damage that cannot be undone. After three months, “many of those people will be dead, or so severely harmed and malnourished that it causes them irreversible and deep suffering,” Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. A pause on saving lives means exactly that.
This article originally misstated that theater productions in Colombia and Ireland were funded by USAID. In fact, they were funded by the State Department.
In the isolation of a Washington, D.C., office building, with a small team of acolytes, Elon Musk is dismantling the civil service and fulfilling an old dream. Deep within the folds of the Western brain resides a yearning for a savior: a master engineer who imposes reason and efficiency on the messiness of modern life, who can deploy his acumen to usher in a golden age of abundance and harmony. This is a fantasy of submission, where the genius takes charge.
Given American conservatives’ recent rhetoric, their surrender to Musk’s vision of utopia is discordant, to say the least. Ever since the pandemic, the MAGA movement has decried the tyranny of a cabal of self-certain experts, who wield their technical knowledge unaccountably. But even as the right purports to loathe technocracy, it has empowered an engineer to radically remake the American state in the name of efficiency.
Trumpists might be surprised to know that they are fulfilling a dream first conceived by a 19th-century French crank, Henri de Saint-Simon. A utopian polymath who fought in the American Revolution and claimed to be a descendant of Charlemagne, he imagined a society in which engineers and industrial managers usurped the aristocracy at the top of the pecking order. The ruling cadre of engineers, he theorized, wouldn’t just solve social and economic problems, but serve as high priests, guiding society to efficiency, progress, and harmony. Technocracy and spirituality were intertwined in his doctrine, which he called the “New Christianity.”
In the last years of his life, Saint-Simon struggled to find a publisher for his books. His despair led him to shoot himself seven times in the head, a failed suicide attempt. Only after his death, in 1825, did he win cultlike devotion; his wider influence became unmistakable. Scholars dubbed him the “father of socialism,” and his veneration of the engineer ricocheted through the history of the left, especially in its faith in centralized planning. “Master technology,” Stalin famously implored his followers. “It is time that the Bolsheviks become experts.” (Eventually, Stalin murdered and imprisoned those who followed this command.)
The worship of the engineer is not confined to any single strain of ideology. It’s a modern impulse, and even ardent critics of the state have fallen victim to it. In Atlas Shrugged, every high-school libertarian’s favorite novel, Ayn Rand’s heroic protagonist, John Galt, is an engineer whose solitary capacity for invention and heterodox thinking make him a sort of über-mensch. And there are hints of this same heroic self-conception in the right-wing swatches of present-day Silicon Valley. Engineers are prophets of a new order because they promise inventions that will usher in the purest expressions of freedom: realms (cryptocurrency, space colonies) that are beyond the reach of the state.
One pivotal figure in American political history briefly embodied the noblest aspirations for technocracy—President Herbert Hoover, nicknamed the Great Engineer. After training at Stanford, he made a fortune in the mining business. Hoover believed ardently in scientific management: Any procedure could be simplified through studying the data. By monitoring workers, the engineer could cull waste from the productive process. Born a Quaker, Hoover delivered lyrical descriptions of his life’s work, which aren’t so far from Saint-Simon’s faith. Where other occupations were “parasitic,” in Hoover’s view, the engineer was the handmaiden of a humane social order because he “elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life.”
At his best, Hoover’s technocratic skills were something to behold. He was a genius at orchestrating responses to catastrophes; his coordination of food and supply shipments in Europe during World War I became the basis for his political mystique. Progressives were so enamored of his work that they desperately hoped he would run for president as a Democrat, so that they could preside over a new era of rational, well-organized government. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a fan before he became a foe, tried and failed to draft Hoover to run as his party’s standard-bearer in 1920.
Elected as a Republican in 1928, Hoover was in the White House when the nation’s economy collapsed. History regards him with disdain, less for his policies than for his distinct lack of warmth and his disregard for human suffering. He treated food distribution as an engineering problem, yet he never managed to describe victims with compassion. According to his biographer Joan Hoff Wilson, “They all became statistics—by the same impersonal scientific engineering approach and temperament that was to shock and dismay his fellow Americans during the Great Depression and erode his political credibility with them.”
The problem with applying scientific management to the government is its hollow heart, as the former auto executive Robert McNamara later showed to horrifying effect. As the secretary of defense, he presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, deploying a data-driven approach that rendered casualties in the vernacular of statistics. (McNamara didn’t train as an engineer, but he self-consciously employed the mindset.) In his enthusiasm for optimization and efficiency, he paid no heed to the terrible human toll of his immaculate systems.
In a far more benign way, Jimmy Carter, the only other engineer to become president, struggled to form human connections with the public. As the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker put it, he used an “engineer’s approach of devising ‘comprehensive’ programs on this subject or that, but repeatedly failed to mobilize public opinion in their support.” Carter’s brain was ill-equipped to process the irrationality of politics.
Despite this history of failure, Americans haven’t shaken the hope that some benevolent, hyperrational leader, immune to the temptations of political power, will step in to redesign the nation, to solve the problems that politicians can’t. That hope is unbreakable, because American culture invests engineers with the aura of wizardry. This is true for Elon Musk. For years, the media glorified him as a magician who harnessed the power of the sun, who revived the American space program, who rescued the electric car. Given that hagiographic press, some of it deserved, he could easily believe in his own ability to fix the American government—and think that a large chunk of the nation would believe that, too.
But in his short stay in Washington, Musk has already evinced the same moral shortcoming that afflicted Hoover and McNamara, the same inability to calculate the costs of cruelty. He has casually paused global aid programs that alleviate suffering; he has moved to destroy bureaucrats’ careers without concern for the rippling personal consequences. He has done this with an arrogance suffused with the spiritual self-certainity of Saint-Simon’s priestly caste of engineers. To a brain as rational as Musk’s, democracy is waste and inefficiency. The best system is the one bursting forth from his mind.
When I was in my early 20s, commuting to work over the freeways of Los Angeles, I listened to Brian Wilson’s 2004 album, Smile, several hundred times. I like the Beach Boys just fine, but I’m not a superfan, and the decades-long backstory of Smile never really hooked me. But the album itself was sonic mesmerism: each hyper-produced number slicking into the next, with Wilson’s baroque, sometimes cartoonish tinkering laid over a thousand stars of sunshine. If I tried to listen again and my weathered Mazda mutely regurgitated the disc, as it often did, I could still hear the whole thing in my head.
Around this time, a friend invited me to see Wilson perform at the Hollywood Bowl, which is a 17,000-seat outdoor amphitheater tucked into the hills between L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. Elsewhere, this could only be a scene of sensory overload, but its eye-of-the-storm geography made the Bowl a kind of redoubt, cool and dark and almost hushed under the purple sky. My friend and I opened our wine bottle, and Wilson and his band took the stage.
From the first note of the a capella opening, they … well, they wobbled. The instruments, Wilson’s voice, all of it stretched and wavered through each beat of the album (which constituted their set list) as if they were playing not in a bandshell but far down a desert highway on a hot day, right against the horizon. Wilson’s voice, in particular, verged on frail—so far from the immaculate silk of the recording as to seem like a reinvention. Polished and rhythmic, the album had been all machine. But the performance was human—humans, by the thousand, making and hearing the music—and for me it was like watching consciousness flicker on for the first time in the head of a beloved robot.
Music is different now. Finicky CD players are a rarity, for one thing. We hold the divine power instead to summon any song we can think of almost anywhere. In some respects, our investment in how we listen has kept pace: People wear $500 headphones on the subway; they fork out the GDP of East Timor to see Taylor Swift across an arena. But the engine of this musical era is access. Forever, music was tethered to the human scale, performers and audience in a space small enough to carry an organic or mechanical sound. People alive today knew people who might have heard the first transmitted concert, a fragile experiment over telephone lines at the Paris Opera in 1881. Now a library of music too big for a person to hear in seven lifetimes has surfed the smartphone to most corners of the Earth.
In another important way, though, how we listen has shrunk. Not in every instance, but often enough to be worthy of attention. The culprit is the single speaker—as opposed to a pair of them, like your ears—and once you start looking for it, you might see it everywhere, an invasive species of flower fringing the highway. Every recorded sound we encounter is made up of layers of artifice, of distance from the originating disturbance of air. So this isn’t an argument about some standard of acoustic integrity; rather, it’s about the space we make with music, and what (and who) will fit inside.
From the early years of recorded music, the people selling it have relied on a dubious language of fidelity—challenging the listener to tell a recording apart from the so-called real thing. This is silly, even before you hear some of those tinny old records. We do listen to sound waves, of course, but we also absorb them with the rest of our body, and beyond the sound of the concert are all the physical details of its production—staging, lighting, amplification, decor. We hear some of that happening, too, and we see it, just as we see and sense the rising and falling of the people in the seats around us, as we feel the air whipping off their applauding hands or settling into the subtly different stillnesses of enrapturement or boredom. People will keep trying to reproduce all of that artificially, no doubt, because the asymptote of fidelity is a moneymaker. But each time you get one new piece of the experience right, you’ve climbed just high enough to crave the next rung on the ladder. Go back down, instead, to the floor of the most mundane auditorium, and you’ll feel before you can name all the varieties of sensation that make it real.
For a long time, the fidelity sell was a success. When American men got home from World War II, as the cultural historian Tony Grajeda has noted, they presented a new consumer class. Marketing phrases such as “concert-hall realism” got them buying audio equipment. And the advent of stereo sound, with separated left and right channels—which became practical for home use in the late ’50s—was an economic engine for makers of both recordings and equipment. All of that needed to be replaced in order to enjoy the new technology. The New York Times dedicated whole sections to the stereo transition: “Record dealers, including a considerable number who do not think that stereo is as yet an improvement over monophonic disks, are hopeful that, with sufficient advertising and other forms of publicity, the consumer will be converted,” a 1958 article observed.
Acoustic musicians were integral to the development of recorded sound, and these pioneers understood that the mixing panel was now as important as any instrument. When Bell Laboratories demonstrated its new stereophonic technology in a spectacle at Carnegie Hall, in 1940, the conductor Leopold Stokowski ran the audio levels himself, essentially remixing live the sounds he’d recorded with his Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski had worked, for years, with his pal Walt Disney to create a prototype of surround sound for Fantasia. The result was a system too elaborate to replicate widely, which had to be abandoned (and its parts donated to the war effort) before the movie went to national distribution.
Innovators like Stokowski recognized a different emerging power in multichannel sound, more persuasive and maybe more self-justifying than the mere simulation of a live experience: to make, and then remake in living rooms and dens across the country, an aural stage without a physical correlate—an acoustic space custom-built in the recording studio, with a soundtrack pieced together from each isolated instrument and voice. The musical space had always been monolithic, with players and listeners sharing it for the fleeting moment of performance. The recording process divided that space into three: one for recording the original sound, one for listening, and an abstract, theoretical “sound stage” created by the mixing process in between. That notional space could have a size and shape of its own, its own warmth and coolness and reverberance, and it could reposition each element of the performance in three dimensions, at the inclination of the engineer—who might also be the performer.
Glenn Gould won permanent fame with his recordings of Bach’s keyboard works in the 1950s. Although he was as formidable and flawless a live performer as you’ll get, his first recording innovation—and that it was, at the time—was to splice together many different takes of his performances to yield an exaggerated, daring perfection in each phrase of every piece, as if LeBron James only ever showed up on TV in highlight reels. (“Listen, we’ve got lots of endings,” Gould tells his producer in one recording session, a scene recalled in Paul Elie’s terrific Reinventing Bach.) By the ’70s, the editors of the anthology Living Stereo note, Gould had hacked the conventional use of multi-mic recording, “but instead of using it to render the conventional image of the concert hall ‘stage,’ he used the various microphone positions to create the effect of a highly mobile acoustic space—what he sometimes referred to as an ‘acoustic orchestration’ or ‘choreography.’” It was akin to shooting a studio film with a handheld camera, reworking the whole relationship of perceiver to perceived.
Pop music was surprisingly slow to match the classicalists’ creativity; many of the commercial successes of the ’60s were mastered in mono, which became an object of nostalgic fascination after the record companies later reengineered them—in “simulated stereo”—to goose sales. (Had it been released by the Beach Boys back then, Smile would have been a single-channel record, and, in fact, Brian Wilson himself is deaf in one ear.) It wasn’t really until the late ’60s, when Pink Floyd championed experiments in quadraphonic sound—four speakers—that pop music became a more reliable scene of fresh approaches in both recording and production.
Nowadays, even the most rudimentary pop song is a product of engineering you couldn’t begin to grasp without a few master’s degrees. But the technologization of music producing, distribution, and consumption is full of paradoxes. For the first 100 years, from that Paris Opera telephone experiment to the release of the compact disc in the early 1980s, recording was an uneven but inexorable march toward higher quality—as both a selling point and an artistic aim. Then came file sharing, in the late ’90s, and the iPod and its descendant, the iPhone, all of which compromised the quality of the music in favor of smaller files that could flourish on a low-bandwidth internet—convenience and scale at the expense of quality. Bluetooth, another powerful warrior in the forces of convenience, made similar trade-offs in order to spare us a cord. Alexa and Siri gave us new reasons to put a multifunctional speaker in our kitchens and bathrooms and garages. And the ubiquity of streaming services brought the whole chain together, one suboptimal link after another, landing us in a pre-Stokowski era of audio quality grafted onto a barely fathomable utopia of access: all music, everywhere, in mediocre form.
People still listen to music in their car or on headphones, of course, and many others have multichannel audio setups of one kind or another. Solitary speakers tend to be additive, showing up in places you wouldn’t think to rig for the best sound: in the dining room, on the deck, at the beach. They’re digital successors to the boombox and the radio, more about the presence of sound than its shape.
Yet what many of these places have in common is that they’re where people actually congregate. The landmark concerts and the music we listen to by ourselves keep getting richer, their real and figurative stages more complex. (I don’t think I’ve ever felt a greater sense of space than at Beyoncé’s show in the Superdome two Septembers ago.) But our everyday communal experience of music has suffered. A speaker designed to get you to order more toilet paper, piping out its lonely strain from the corner of your kitchen—it’s the first time since the arrival of hi-fi almost a century ago that we’ve so widely acceded to making the music in our lives smaller.
For Christmas, I ordered a pair of $60 Bluetooth speakers. (This kind of thing has been a running joke with my boyfriend since a more ambitious Sonos setup showed up in his empty new house a few days after closing, the only thing I needed to make the place livable. “I got you some more speakers, babe!”) We followed the instructions to pair them in stereo, then took them out to the fire pit where we’d been scraping by with a single unit. I hung them from opposite trees, opened up Spotify, and let the algorithmic playlist roll. In the flickering darkness, you could hear the silence of the stage open up, like the moments when the conductor mounts the podium in Fantasia. As the music began, it seemed to come not from a single point on the ground, like we were used to, but from somewhere out in the woods or up in the sky—or maybe from a time before all this, when the musician would have been one of us, seated in the glow and wrapping us in another layer of warmth. This wasn’t high-fidelity sound. There wasn’t a stereo “sweet spot,” and the bass left something to be desired. But the sound made a space, and we were in it together.
Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:
American tariffs hurt Americans.
President Donald Trump has always insisted that tariffs are paid by foreigners, that they put free money into the U.S. Treasury. Trump’s week-long tariff war confirmed that nobody else in the U.S. government or in American business believes him. The National Association of Home Builders published a letter to the president predicting that his tariffs would raise the cost of housing construction. Automobile stocks slumped because investors expected Trump’s tariffs to add thousands of dollars to the cost of each new vehicle. The senior Republican in the Senate publicly pleaded for potash to be exempted from tariffs so as not to increase fertilizer prices for his farm constituents, belying Trump’s claim that the higher prices would be paid by the exporters.
Tariffs beget retaliatory tariffs.
When Trump paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those countries halted their retaliatory actions. But China is proceeding with a range of tariffs against U.S. exports, reserving more retaliation for later. Americans are already paying for previous rounds of Trump trade actions against China. In the first Trump presidency, China cut its purchases of U.S. soybeans by 75 percent over a single year in 2018. Brazil in 2018 overtook the United States as the world’s largest soybean producer. During the campaign of 2024, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lamented that the United States had become a net importer of food. He omitted to mention that a reason for this status was precisely the harm done to U.S. farm exports by Trump’s first-term tariffs.
There’s not much point in negotiating trade treaties with the United States.
Trump renegotiated NAFTA during his first term, replacing it with his USMCA deal. Now, in his second term, he has reneged on that. Trump’s version of NAFTA offered a range of legal ways to terminate the agreement; he did not use any of them. He did not even pretend that Canada or Mexico had somehow defaulted on their end of the bargain. He simply ignored the deal and proceeded with his tariffs under a series of contradictory excuses.
Days earlier, Trump had issued a flurry of threats against Colombia, which also has a trade agreement with the United States. Again, Trump ignored all the legalities of the treaty; again, he used trade as a weapon to resolve nontrade disagreements.
Mexico and Canada have oriented their economies to the U.S. under first NAFTA and then USMCA. That probably will not alter even after Trump’s episode of blackmail. But other countries, farther away, may wonder whether there’s any point in signing deals with such a bad-faith partner as the United States has become.
“Friend-shoring” is a fiction.
As relations have worsened between the United States and China, many in the U.S. government have looked to friend-shoring as a way to keep most of the benefits of free trade. The idea is to redirect U.S. purchasing power away from hostile China and toward more trustworthy partners. The assumption behind the term is that those partners will gladly trust the United States.
Trump, Vice President Vance, and their allies in Congress havethreatened unilateral military action against Mexico; Trump himself indulges in speculation about the forced annexation of Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and about absorbing Canada as a 51st state.
Maybe that’s all just a lot of ugly talk. But the president has made clear that so-called friendship with the United States does not ensure anything for America’s partners: not trade access, not the security of treaties, not even their territorial integrity and national independence.
Friend-shoring imagined extending trade with American allies. Trump-shoring means that today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy, without cause or even warning.
Instability is the future.
Trump has now allowed North American trade a 30-day reprieve. His supporters want to claim that he won big concessions worth all the tumult he caused. Such claims are transparently untrue. Canada had made its big proposals for more cooperation on border issues back in December. In any case, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has observed, illegal drugs are much more likely to flow north into Canada than south from Canada. Mexico’s offer to (once again) shift National Guard units to the border from other duties inside the country is generally recognized as symbolic. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page correctly identified the embarrassing truth in a headline on Monday: “Trump Blinks on North American Tariffs.”
Trump is a uniquely emotionally needy president, prone to impulsive vindictiveness.
In 2019, Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney forbade Homeland Secretary Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to discuss threats to the integrity of the 2020 election. Such discussions upset Trump, The New York Times reported, by reminding him of questions about Russian interference in the 2016 election. In mid-November 2020, Trump refused to hear or think more about the coronavirus pandemic even as fatalities spiked to their peak. An aide explained to The Washington Post that Trump was “just done with COVID … It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.” For two weeks after the election of 2020, he forbade his administration to cooperate with the transition process and denied Joe Biden’s team access to information and the funds required by law.
As Trump confronts derision about his splendid little trade war of February 2025, will he lash out again? And how is any business of any size supposed to plan for the future when the president creates economic crises to act out his ravenous ego needs?
“America First” makes it safer not to be America’s ally.
In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of about $55 billion. That same year, it ran a deficit with Vietnam of about $123 billion, more than twice as much, and with Thailand of about $46 billion, only slightly less. Yet it was Canada, not Vietnam or Thailand, that Trump threatened with tariffs.
One difference: Canada is as a rule closely aligned with the United States. By geography, by history, by ideology, Canada has few geopolitical options. Vietnam and Thailand, however, have worked hard to balance their relationships with the two greatest powers, and hostile U.S. action against either could swing that country toward China, away from the United States.
A lesson of Trump’s trade war that all the world will hear: Countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump. Countries such as Vietnam and Thailand that carefully navigate between the two great economic powers without making undue commitments maximize their security and their dignity.
To reward non-aligned countries and punish U.S.-aligned ones might seem a reckless, even a perverse, choice by a U.S. president. But that’s the president Americans have, and the choice he has made for them.
Several stories below the British Library’s Magna Carta room, alongside a rumbling line of the London Underground, is a brightly lit labyrinth of rare and historic items. Past a series of antique rifles chained to a wall, past an intricate system of conveyor belts whisking books to the surface, the library stores an enormous collection of plays, manuscripts, and letters. Last spring, I checked my belongings at security and descended to sift through this archive—a record of correspondence between the producers and directors of British theater and a small team of censors who once worked for the Crown.
For centuries, these strict, dyspeptic, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious bureaucrats read and passed judgment on every public theatrical production in Britain, striking out references to sex, God, and politics, and forcing playwrights to, as one put it, cook their “conceptions to the taste of authority.” They reported to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in 1737 became responsible for granting licenses to theaters and approving the texts of plays. “Examiners” made sure that no productions would offend the sovereign, blaspheme the Church, or stir audiences to political radicalism. An 1843 act expanded the department’s powers, calling upon it to block any play that threatened not just the “Public Peace” but “Decorum” and “good Manners.”
Hardly chosen for their artistic sensibilities or knowledge of theatrical history, the men hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office were mostly retired military officers from the upper-middle class. From the Victorian era on, they scrutinized plays for references to racial equality and sexuality—particularly homosexuality—vulgar language, and “offensive personalities,” as one guideline put it.
Twentieth-century English theater was, as a result of all this vigilance, “subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,” wrote the playwright and former theater critic Nicholas de Jongh in his 2000 survey of censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions. The censors suppressed or bowdlerized countless works of genius. As I thumbed through every play I could think of from the 1820s to the 1960s (earlier manuscripts, sold as part of an examiner’s private archive, can be seen in the Huntington Library in California), it became clear that the censors only got stricter—and more prudish—over time.
“Do not come to me with Ibsen,” warned the examiner E. F. Smyth Pigott, nicely demonstrating the censors’ habitual tone. He had “studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully,” and determined that the characters were, to a man, “morally deranged.”
In cardboard boxes stacked on endless rows of metal shelving, string-tie binders hold the original versions of thousands of plays. The text of each is accompanied by a typewritten “Readers’ Report,” most of them several pages long, summarizing the plot and cataloging the work’s flaws as well as any redeeming qualities. That is followed, when available, by typed and handwritten correspondence between the censors and the applicants (usually the play’s hopeful and ingratiating producers).
These reports can at times be as entertaining as the plays themselves. On Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one examiner wrote: “Omit the business and speeches about flybuttons”; on Sartre’s Huis Clos: “The play illustrates very well the difference between the French and English tastes. I don’t suppose that anyone would bat an eyelid over in Paris, but here we bar Lesbians on the stage”; on Camus’ Caligula: “This is the sort of play for which I have no liking at all”; on Tennessee Williams: “Neuroses grin through everything he writes”; and on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: “A good play about negroes in a Chicago slum, written with dignity, power and complete freedom from whimsy. The title is taken from a worthless piece of occasional verse about dreams deferred drying up like a raisin in the sun—or festering and exploding.”
These bureaucrats were eager, as one of them wrote, to “lop off a few excrescent boughs” to save the tree. They were anti-Semitic (one successful compromise involved replacing a script’s use of “Fuck the Pope” with “The Pope’s a Jew”) and virulently homophobic. In response to Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, in 1958, one Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Troubridge noted: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism at the end of this play, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indications that the dead man was a homosexual.”
But the censors could also, occasionally, aspire to the level of pointed and biting literary criticism. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” the report for a 1960 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker begins, “though it has not that author’s vein of nihilistic pessimism, and each individual sentence is comprehensible if irrelevant.” One gets the impression that, like the characters from a Bolaño novel, at least some of these men were themselves failed artists and intellectuals, drawn to such authoritarian work from a place of bruised and envious ego.
Indeed, one examiner, Geoffrey Dearmer, considered among the more flexible, had written poetry during the Great War. He reported to the Lord Chamberlain alongside the tyrannical Charles Heriot, who had studied theater at university and worked on a production of Macbeth before moving, still as a young man, into advertising, journalism, and book publishing. He was known, de Jongh wrote, for being “gratuitously abusive.” (Heriot on Edward Bond’s 1965 Saved: “A revolting amateur play … about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs,” including a “brainless slut of twenty-three living with her sluttish parents.”) Another examiner, George Alexander Redford, was a bank manager chosen primarily because he was friends with the man he succeeded. When asked about the criteria he used in his decision making, Redford answered, “I have no critical view on plays.” He was “simply bringing to bear an official point of view and keeping up a standard. … There are no principles that can be defined. I follow precedent.”
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An examiner’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The director Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2002 about his experiences with the censors, said that the office “was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended.” Once, he called to ask why some lines had been cut from a play he was directing:
“We all know what’s going on here, Hall, don’t we?” said the retired naval officer angrily. “It’s up periscopes.” “Up periscopes?” I queried. “Buggery, Hall, buggery!” Actually, it wasn’t.
As comic as these men seem now, they wielded enormous, unexamined power. The correspondence filed alongside the manuscripts reveals the extent to which the pressures of censorship warped manuscripts long before they even arrived on the censors’ desks. Managers and production companies checked scripts and suggested changes in anticipation of scrutiny. In a 1967 letter, a representative of a dramatic society eager to stage Waiting for Godot writes, “On page 81 Estragon says ‘Who farted?’ The director and myself are concerned as to whether, during a public presentation, this might offend the laws of censorship. Awaiting your advice.” Presumably, the answer was affirmative.
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An examiner’s report on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
Playwrights also performed their own “pre-pre-censorship”—limiting the scope of their subject matter before and during the writing process. According to the 2004 book The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, as far back as 1866, the comptroller of the LCO, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, “explicitly commended examiners for operating this ‘indirect system of censorship’ because it enabled the Office to keep the number of prohibited plays to a minimum and forestall concerns about repression.”
Some plays made it past the censors only as a result of human error. When I met Kate Dossett, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in Black-theater history, she told me that the case of the playwright Una Marson is an example of what “gets hidden in this collection.” Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price, depicts a young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside who moves to Kingston and takes a job as a stenographer. Her white employer seduces—or, in today’s understanding, sexually harasses—and impregnates her. The drama is a subtle exploration of miscegenation, one of the core taboos that the LCO often clamped down on. But the play was approved because the examiner—confused by the protagonist’s class markers and education—didn’t realize that she was Black.
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The script of Una Marson’s At What a Price
“This play is to be produced by the League of Coloured Peoples but it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are coloured and speak a more or less diverting dialect,” the report states. “The main story is presumably about English people and is an old-fashioned artless affair.”
From the beginning, some prominent figures fought against the system of censorship. Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa bears the distinction of having been the first British play banned under the Licensing Act of 1737. The work, ostensibly about the Swedish liberator Gustav I, was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Responding to the ban in a satirical defense of the censors, Samuel Johnson wrote that the government should go further, and make it a “felony to teach to read without a license from the lord chamberlain.” Only then would citizens be able to rest, in “ignorance and peace,” and the government be safe from “the insults of the poets.”
Universal History Archive / Getty
A cartoon from 1874 satirized the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to clean up the stage.
Henry James, in his day, spoke out in defense of the English playwright, who “has less dignity—thanks to the censor’s arbitrary rights upon his work—than that of any other man of letters in Europe.” So, too, did George Bernard Shaw. “It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets and authors of modern Europe, men like Ibsen,” Shaw wrote, “delivered helplessly into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this despised and incapable old official.”
By the time the Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the censorship of plays, social attitudes were changing. The influx of workers from Jamaica and other countries in the Commonwealth in the 1950s challenged the stability of racial dynamics; sex between men was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967; divorce became more common; and the rock-and-roll era destigmatized drugs. For years, theaters had been taking advantage of a loophole: Because the LCO’s jurisdiction applied only to public performances, theaters could charge patrons a nominal membership fee, thereby transforming themselves into private subscription clubs out of the censors’ reach.
It must have gotten lonely, trying to stand so long against the changing times. “I don’t understand this,” Heriot wrote, plaintively, about Hair. The American musical was banned three times for extolling “dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality and free love,” but in the end, one gets the impression that the censors just gave up. Alexander Lock, a curator at the library, pointed me to Heriot’s report on the final version of the musical. The pain of defeat in his voice is almost palpable: “A curiously half-hearted attempt to vet the script” had been made, he wrote, but many offenses were left intact.
Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968. That month, by royal assent, no new plays required approval from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which was left to devote its attention to the planning of royal weddings, funerals, and garden parties.
Some may be tempted to dismiss the censors’ legacy as limited to, as a 1967 article in The Times of London had it, “the trivia of indecency.” But the damage was far deeper. The censors, de Jongh wrote, stunted English theater, kept it frivolous and parochial, and prevented it from dealing with “the greatest issues and anguishes of this violent century.” No playwrights addressed “the fascist regimes of the 1930s, the process that led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghastliness perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, or the tyrannies experienced in China and under other totalitarian leaderships. No wonder. Their plays would have been disallowed. In the 1930s you could not win licences for plays that might offend Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.” Shakespeare never “had to put up with” censorship so “rigorous and narrow-minded,” Peter Hall wrote. His “richest plays and his finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs.”
These practices may strike us today as outlandish and anachronistic. Many of us take for granted creative license and the freedom of expression that undergirds it. But the foundation upon which these rights—as we think of them—are situated is far less immutable than we would like to imagine. As recent trends in the United States and elsewhere have shown, advances toward greater tolerance are reversible.
Indeed, many Americans on both the right and the left correctly sense this, even if they do not always understand what genuine censorship looks like. Activists on college campuses have confused the ability to occupy and disrupt physical space for the right to dissent verbally. Meanwhile, Elon Musk warns that “wokeness” will stifle free speech even as he uses the social-media site he owns to manipulate public debate.
Perusing the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is, among other things, a reminder of what censorship really is: government power applied to speech to either limit or compel it. And it is also a reminder that in the long term, many such attempts backfire. They reveal, as Sir Roly Keating, who was chief executive of the library from 2012 until the beginning of this year, told me, more about the censors’ own “fears, paranoias, obsessions” than they ever succeed in concealing.
Chris Hoare for The Atlantic
Inside the archive
There is also the sheer fact of what Keating called “this extraordinary imposition of bureaucracy.” Just as the Stasi archive provides unparalleled insight into the interplay of art and politics in postwar East German society, and the Hoover-era FBI’s copious files on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and other Black American luminaries amount to a valuable cultural repository, the Lord Chamberlain’s archive can now be seen as one of the preeminent collections of Black and queer theater in the English-speaking world. It includes not just the plays that were staged, but also those that were rejected, and in some cases multiple drafts of them. These are precisely the kinds of works that, without the backing of institutions that have the resources to protect their own archive, might have been lost to history.
“Theater’s an ephemeral medium,” Keating told me. “Early drafts of plays change all the time; many don’t get published at all.” Among the many ramifications of censorship, I had not adequately considered this one: the degree to which methodical suppression can create the most meticulous collection. It is a deeply satisfying justice—even a form of revenge—that the hapless bureaucrats who endeavored so relentlessly to squelch and block independent thought have instead so painstakingly preserved it for future generations.
Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “All the King’s Censors.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
