The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

The US-Israel relationship is finally facing a reckoning. It doesn’t need to slide into antisemitism

Graham urges Israel to rein in attacks on Iran fuel infrastructure thehill

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) urged Israel to scale back attacks on Iranian fuel infrastructure as oil prices in the U.S. spike on supply concerns.

“Our allies in Israel have shown amazing capability when it comes to collapsing the murderous regime in Iran. America is most appreciative,” Graham said in a Sunday post on the social platform X.

“However, there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime,” he added.

“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select. Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”

Graham’s post featured a link to Axios, which reported the Trump administration was surprised by Israeli strikes targeting 30 Iranian fuel depots over the weekend.

anyone with any sense who was president would have attacked Iran. I would have. Anyone with a working brain would have.

The world's chief sponsor of terrorism, who chant "Death to America" every day, cannot be allowed to acquire atomic bombs.

... the fact remains that anyone with any sense who was president would have attacked Iran.

The civilian population of Tehran is currently being exposed to a toxic cloud of chemicals due to the oil refinery being set ablaze.

They can't rise up against the regime, they can't even go outside.

Is there a heart somewhere inside Kristi Noem, underneath all those costumes, behind all that lacquer? She makes no attempt to show it. Whether killing an inconvenient dog or slandering Minnesotans gunned down by federal agents, she picks cruelty over compassion — and, sadly, seems to equate that choice with strength.

Does she have a pinch, even a grain, of modesty? She spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on advertisements for, well, Kristi Noem. That seemed to peeve the president. From his underlings he expects compliments, not competition.

But another, less colorful trait of Noem’s should have disturbed him, and should unsettle us, even more, because it’s the root of so much of what’s wrong with Trump’s White House — an explanation of its dysfunctions, a key to its disgraces, a signal to the world of how fickle and foolish America has become: She’s unprofessional.

During her mercifully terminated stint as the homeland security secretary, she made extravagant claims without much, if any, attempt to ascertain their veracity. She used government resources in questionable ways. She treated public service as private amusement. That’s not how true professionals behave. But it’s how many senior officials in the Trump administration do.

And it’s a big part of my and many other observers’ profound apprehensions about the military strikes in Iran. We can’t trust that they got the degree of deliberation that war demands. We can’t assume temperance, reflection, rationality. Those hallmarks of professionalism aren’t values to which the Trump administration subscribes.

It’s a twisted culture, its warp and warts evident not only in the shenanigans at federal departments that routinely draw scrutiny but also in the melodrama at those that typically don’t. The inspector general for the Department of Labor, for example, is investigating allegations of professional misconduct by its leader, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and several of her top aides. Chavez-DeRemer has been accused of using department resources for personal trips (something Noem is said to have done, too), having an affair with a member of her security detail (hold on to that thought), taking department workers to strip clubs (is this the new morale building?) and drinking alcohol on the job.

Oh, and her husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, has been barred from the department’s offices because at least two women who work there have accused him of sexual assault (which he has denied).

Wild as all of that sounds, it’s actually a Trump administration leitmotif.

In The Wall Street Journal last month, Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey and Tarini Parti wrote that Trump frequently wondered what was going on between Noem and one of her senior aides, Corey Lewandowski, who have repeatedly confronted questions about their conspicuous closeness.

“Lewandowski and Noem, who are both married, have publicly denied the reports of an affair, but people said they do little to hide their relationship inside the department,” the Journal article explained. It added, “The pair have lately been using a luxury 737 Max jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Sounds comfy. And … familiar. Fancy trips, airborne love, unconventional doings with the security detail — it’s so very Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, who timed a recent, government-funded excursion to Italy to coincide with the Winter Olympics, where he guzzled beer and whooped it up with the American men’s hockey team after its victory over Canada. On many flights he’s accompanied by his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, “one of the best-protected country music singers in the United States,” as my Times colleague Elizabeth Williamson wrote recently in a triumph of understatement.

“F.B.I. tactical agents have ferried her to a resort in Britain before a dinner at Windsor Castle and to an appointment at a hair salon in Nashville,” Williamson continued. “Last April, agents in two S.U.V.s stood guard outside a senior center in Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home of Dixon, Ill., while she sang for a few dozen young conservatives.” I hope they enjoyed the concert.

There’s a tendency to talk of Noem, Patel and their perk-minded compatriots as grifters. The appellation certainly fits. It’s tempting to focus on the inadequate experience and kooky beliefs of flamboyant strivers — from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence — whom Trump has elevated to the top tiers of government.

But that obscures and gives short shrift to their fundamental sloppiness, selfishness, disregard for proper procedure, evasion of accountability. They simply don’t do their jobs — or at least don’t do them earnestly, maturely or competently.

That was clear early on, when the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, used the messaging app Signal for a group chat that discussed sensitive military information, then dismissed any complaints about that cavalierly — an adverb that, when coupled with spitefully, covers about 99 percent of his behavior.

It’s clear when lawyers for the Justice Department — Alina Habba, Lindsey Halligan, Jeanine Pirro — have their cases thrown out or their appointments voided. When their boss, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, shows up at a congressional hearing with a crude cheat sheet filled with puerile insults. When Patel takes to social media to crow about developments in prominent investigations that turn out to be dead ends. When a major report released by a commission under Kennedy cites an array of nonexistent studies. When he or other members of Trump’s cabinet capriciously fire or haphazardly hire people for important positions.

I’m sure these administration officials deem professionalism overrated, outdated, an enemy of necessary disruption, a brake on real genius. It’s for slowpokes and prudes. It’s fussiness for fussiness’s sake.

Wrong. Professionalism recognizes that your job is bigger than you are. It rightly regards teamwork and discipline as handmaidens of accomplishment. It understands that a sturdy institution requires a code of conduct. And it sweats details, because if you get enough of those wrong, you get nothing at all right.

Noem, to be fair, sweated details — about her itinerary, her apparel, her accessories. But about the violence against Americans in cities that her armed agents flooded? She couldn’t be bothered. She had a plane to catch.

It has become clear that Trump had no plan in Iran other than to strike it, knock out the leaders he didn’t like, and hope the Iranian people would rise up and put in place new leaders he could deal with. It was supposed to look like what happened in Venezuela in January, when U.S. forces launched a surprise military strike that enabled them to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, leaving in his place the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who promises to work with Trump and has given him access to the country’s oil resources.

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark explains that the Trump administration didn’t bother to have a theory for why the U.S. was going to war with Iran, or to explain to the American people why such a war would be a good thing, because they didn’t think there was going to be a war, just a fast, hard strike that would enable the U.S. to put a new Iranian leader in place.

But the initial Israeli strikes killed most of the people the administration hoped would replace 86-year-old hardline ayatollah Ali Khamenei as supreme leader, and yesterday Iran proclaimed as his successor Khamenei’s 56-year-old son Mojtaba Khamenei despite Trump’s statement that “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me.” Mojtaba Khamenei is thought to be even more extreme a hardliner than his father.

Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward reported today that according to current and former U.S. officials, “President Trump has told aides he would back the killing of new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei if he proves unwilling to cede to U.S. demands, such as ending Iran’s nuclear development.”

This morning, Joe Wallace, Summer Said, Rebecca Feng, and Georgi Kantchev of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article titled “The Long-Feared Persian Gulf Oil Squeeze Is Upon Us,” warning that the stoppage of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has set off “the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s and [is] threatening the global economy.” Ships move not only oil but also fertilizer used for crops around the globe through that strait.

On March 3, Trump offered government insurance for shipping and floated the possibility of Navy escorts for ships in the strait, but that has not been enough to restore voyages. So this morning, on the Fox News Channel, Brian Kilmeade, who cheered on Trump’s attack on Iran from the television studio, told the captains of oil tankers they must simply conquer their fear and start up. “If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, if you want to make sure this ends up with complete Iran capitulation,” he said, “show some guts and go through that Strait, and do it.”

The spreading war in the Middle East threatens the ties between the region and the U.S. that Trump has pushed since taking office. As Eliot Brown, Georgi Kantchev, and Lauren Thomas of the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the richest countries in the Persian Gulf last year tried to strengthen ties with Trump by pledging billions of dollars of investment into the U.S. Now they are having second thoughts. A prominent Dubai businessman posted at Trump on social media: “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war?” Trump had placed the Gulf states “at the heart of a danger they did not choose,” he wrote.

On Saturday, Vivienne Walt of the New York Times warned that such investments have gone both ways, with U.S. tech giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Oracle investing in large-scale facilities across the Middle East with an eye to making the region a global center for AI. Now they are questioning the security of such investments.

Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin of ABC News reported today that shortly after the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, the U.S. intercepted encrypted messages suggesting that Iran has activated covert operatives, or “sleeper assets,” in other countries. When Eric Cortellessa of Time magazine asked Trump if Americans should worry about attacks at home, Trump answered: “I guess. But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

Under increasing pressure over the Epstein files, the Department of Justice (DOJ) today released some of the missing documents concerning an allegation from an Epstein survivor that Trump raped her when she was thirteen or fourteen. The so-called 302 report released today concerns four separate FBI interviews with the woman. (FD-302 is the form used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to provide an official record of summarized interviews.) The DOJ’s initial document drop included only the interview in which she talked about her abuse at Epstein’s hands; the other interviews discuss Trump. Some of the files related to that accusation and those interviews are still missing.

The White House has responded to the pressure on Trump by posting an image of what appears to be a pilot in an aircraft under the caption “PATRIOTS ARE IN CONTROL.” The Steady State, a group made up of former national security officials, explains that in Q-Anon circles, that phrase “refers to the long-standing belief that Trump and a hidden network inside government were secretly running things the entire time.”

Trump has become so desperate to force Republicans in Congress to limit voting before the 2026 midterms that yesterday morning he took to social media to threaten them. He said that unless the Senate weakens the filibuster to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act over the objections of Democrats, “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION—GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY—ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL: NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILATION FOR CHILDREN! DO NOT FAIL!!!”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded: “The SAVE Act is Jim Crow 2.0. It would disenfranchise tens of millions of people. If Trump is saying he won’t sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: there will be total gridlock in the Senate. Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances.”

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) does not have the votes even to make up a majority in favor of the act, let alone the 60 he would need to overcome a filibuster, and has said he will not change the filibuster to try to pass the measure.

Brian Finucane noted today in Just Security that Congress, especially the Senate, could cause other problems for Trump. Although it has so far declined to reclaim its power to rein in his military adventures, it could still do so through the power of the purse. The administration appears to be planning to ask for more money to fund the war in Iran. Congress could refuse that money or could place restrictions on it by passing laws establishing such restrictions, although Trump could veto such measures and it would take a supermajority in each chamber of Congress to override his veto.

In the midst of Trump’s tanking numbers on all the issues that used to be Republicans’ strength—the economy, immigration, national security—Trump spoke today to Republican members of the House at their annual policy retreat at Trump’s property in Doral, Florida.

The Republican majority is now so thin that Johnson can afford to lose just a single vote on the House floor, and as of this morning, that seat seemed to be in jeopardy with Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) facing calls to resign after admitting to an affair with a former staffer who later died by suicide.

This afternoon, Representative Kevin Kiley of California announced he was leaving the Republican Party to become an Independent. When California redistricted the state to counter Texas’s redistricting, Kiley’s district became much more competitive. Kiley says that going forward, he will “have to consider” every bill “on its own merits.”

This afternoon, Weijia Jiang of CBS reported: “NEW—In a phone interview, President Trump told me the war could be over soon: ‘I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force.’ He added that the U.S. is ‘very far’ ahead of his initial 4–5 week estimated time frame. Asked about Iran’s new Supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who Trump has openly criticized, he said, ‘I have no message for him. None, whatsoever.’ Trump said he has someone in mind to replace Khamenei, but he did not elaborate. As for the Strait of Hormuz, Trump noted that ships are moving through now, but he is ‘thinking about taking it over.’ Trump warned Iran, ‘They’ve shot everything they have to shoot, and they better not try anything cute or it’s going to be the end of that country.’”

The price of oil had spiked overnight up to its highest level since global trade surged in 2022 after the Covid-19 lockdowns, peaking briefly at over $100 a barrel. News that the Group of Seven advanced economies (G7) is willing to consider releasing strategic oil reserves if necessary brought it down from its highs. A dropping stock market reflected the spike in oil prices. Those drops moderated after news about the possible release of strategic oil reserves, and the news that Trump considers the war ending meant the market ended up higher by the end of the day than it had begun.

But once the market had closed, Trump changed his tune, telling House Republicans, “We have won in many ways, but not enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.” When asked at a later news conference if the war would be over this week, Mr. Trump said, “No.”

This evening, Trump’s account posted: “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far. Additionally, we will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again—Death, Fire, and Fury will reign [sic] upon them—But I hope, and pray, that it does not happen! This is a gift from the United States of America to China, and all of those Nations that heavily use the Hormuz Strait. Hopefully, it is a gesture that will be greatly appreciated.”

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice commented: “Trump is completely flailing. He didn’t anticipate the economic blowback and now he’s trying to undo the past 10 days and contain the damage.”

As part of its apparent war on what the administration calls “narco-terrorists” in Latin America, U.S. Southern Command announced yesterday that it has struck another small vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing another six men.

When I was in business school at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 2010s, I played in my one and only fantasy football league. I was in an “executive” MBA program, a variation on the traditional MBA degree that caters to mid-career and occasionally senior managers and executives, which is exactly what we were: a bunch of mostly middle-management guys (and a very few women), all of us looking for a résumé-burnishing credential that would bump us up a couple of pay bands and win us access to better boardrooms. We worked all over the place: in health care, the rail industry, steel, IT, law, nonprofit, oil and gas.

One of the fellas worked in marketing for Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino. (Slots were legalized in Pennsylvania at select locations in 2004, and, believe it or not, Pennsylvania lags behind only Nevada in total legal casino revenues.) He told some hilarious and hair-raising stories about the tricks of the trade for keeping the most compulsive customers, in this case largely fixed-income retirees or un- and underemployed adults, locked into the games, the never-ending sounds and lights of obsessive, repetitive, bets. You had to understand, he explained, that it wasn’t only or even mostly about winning. It was about the flow, the disappearance of anything other than the machine and the game. It was about action. Not the outcome so much as the anticipation, the suspended time between the bet and the result. They bring the drinks to you for a reason. Losing was a reason to keep playing, and the rare win was, well, reason to keep playing, too.

As for the fantasy league, I’d always been a sports fan, but I was never a stats guy. I just let the computer draft for me, allowing some algorithm to assemble the rough equivalent of an index fund, something like a representative, weighted average of the NFL as a whole, and I let it ride. I am a zealously passive investor, and I became a passive fantasy sportsman.

My league partners—not coincidentally, many of them were also intensely fond of day-trading stocks—took a different tack: tracking statistical minutiae, daily injury reports, message-board rumors, and making constant trades and roster changes. I spent the first half of the season winning and then, beset by injuries to my relatively static team, spent the second half losing. In neither half did I get much pleasure out of it. But my fellows, even (perhaps especially) when they were making manic trades to try to reverse a losing streak, seemed to be having a lot more fun. It was all about the flow.

Betting and investing have much in common, and they increasingly overlap, as young men who bet on sports are also likely to dabble in crypto, stocks, and more exotic vehicles. Both are predominantly men’s games, with yawning gender divides in participation. Recent data from Morning Consult shows that sports betting is 70 percent male. Most men place their first bet on a sporting event in high school or college—their first foray into financial speculation, and their first taste of the adrenaline rush of action. According to a Siena survey, 48 percent of men aged 18 to 49 have a betting account.

All this activity has become remarkably visible in the culture over just a few years. On TV, ads for betting apps have now achieved a ubiquity that puts gimmicky insurance companies to shame. NFL broadcasts partner with FanDuel and DraftKings, integrating highlights from games directly into the apps. And enticements to gamble reach beyond sports: CNN has announced it will partner with Kalshi, a “prediction market,” displaying a live ticker of odds on-screen during its news broadcasts. Bet if you dare, on the next market crash or atrocity. Pundits, posters, and commentators cite Polymarket along with poll numbers to predict future world events. Polymarket was also an “exclusive partner” of the Golden Globes, a desperate stunt for a moribund awards show. “Never tell me the odds,” barked Han Solo to C-3PO, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We have no such option, and our garish Death Stars are all sponsored by BetMGM.





For a long time in America, sports betting was mostly illicit. You had an uncle or a friend or a frat brother who took a little action under the table. Or you pooled some money with friends and did a March Madness bracket. Then, with the rise and popularization of the internet, it became easy to bet online. A thriving gray market of offshore betting parlors like BetOnline or Bovada eventually emerged, often starting with online poker as early as the 1990s and expanding into sports betting in the early 2000s, allowing U.S. customers to circumvent anti-gambling statutes in the United States. (Offshore bookmakers also became early adopters of cryptocurrency, unsurprisingly, as it allowed easier movement of money out of the United States without banks or credit card companies subject to U.S. regulations having to take note.) Even before betting apps on smartphones, the relative lack of friction of online betting paved the way for a new, faster, higher-frequency form of wagering.

America’s gambling landscape had long been a patchwork, but sports betting was tightly regulated throughout most of the twentieth century, and the major sports leagues were scrupulously united in opposition to gambling, which they rightly viewed as a major threat to the integrity of their games. But the public was more ambivalent, and as states sought new sources of revenue, Congress decided to act.

The most significant anti-sports gambling law was the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, abbreviated as PASPA (and sometimes called the Bradley Act for one of its sponsors, Bill Bradley, a U.S. senator and former professional basketball player). The law—which garnered 62 co-sponsors in the Senate and passed both houses overwhelmingly—was in fact a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. It did not technically outlaw sports gambling nationally, although that was broadly its purpose, but rather prevented state, local, and tribal governments from legalizing it. It contained robust carve-outs for Nevada (of course) and also for existing sports lotteries in Delaware, Montana, and Oregon. It exempted pari-mutuel horse and dog race betting and, for some reason, jai alai. It gave New Jersey—in a gift to Atlantic City—a year to come up with its own legalized sports betting regime. But, as writer and researcher Jonathan D. Cohen observes dryly in Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, “New Jersey, being New Jersey, failed to do so.”

This failure was in some sense the great precipitating event of the broad legalization of sports gambling in the United States. After two failed attempts to overturn PASPA, Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, in 2014 signed a state law legalizing sports gambling in New Jersey in contravention of PASPA. The four major professional sports leagues and the NCAA brought suit; that suit eventually became Christie v. NCAA; by the time it was decided by the Supreme Court in 2018, Christie had been term-limited out of office, and it was renamed Murphy v. NCAA, after the state’s new Democratic governor, Phil Murphy. The Supreme Court overturned PASPA in May of that year, with Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion, concluding that PASPA illegally “commandeered” the authority of state legislatures and violated the states’ rights that we always hear about when some part of America wants to do something terrible. The floodgates opened. As of December 1, 2025, with the legalization of sports gambling in Missouri, a total of 39 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico had legalized some form of betting on sports.

Losing Big and Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by sports journalist Danny Funt, each trace this story. Losing Big is perhaps a bit more cerebral and reads at times (particularly in its concluding chapter) as a policy white paper; Everybody Loses is occasionally scattered, its chapters jumping from topic to topic, but it is deepened and enlivened by the many extraordinary and candid contacts and conversations that Funt makes with industry insiders, from lobbyists to “VIP hosts” to corporate and league executives. Both cover in depressing detail the swift collapse of guardrails; the rush of revenue-hungry state governments to get in on the action; the swift acquiescence of professional and college sports, whose concerns about cheating and integrity were overwhelmed by the smell of money; and the ubiquity of Kevin Hart on your television and mind, selling vice.

Both books focus on the two dominant players in the U.S. market—DraftKings and FanDuel. FanDuel started in Scotland, a pivot from an early “prediction market” company called Hubdub that allowed people to bet on the outcomes of the 2008 U.S. elections and found that, when the elections ended, the market evaporated. It turned to daily fantasy sports, or DFS, a rapidly expanding market in the United States, if a questionably legal one. As with BetOnline and other already existing internet-based sports betting sites (many of these based in the Caribbean), it was trivially easy for players to move real dollars into virtual, offshore online accounts for the purpose of placing bets.

DraftKings was founded in Boston in 2012. The two companies were intensely competitive with each other, and their competition drove them to market dominance. They spent millions on lobbyists. (Kamala Harris emerges from Funt’s book as an accidental villain. He reports that when she was California attorney general, lobbyists heard a rumor that she was about to send DraftKings and FanDuel a cease-and-desist letter. At that time, her chief of staff was married to a partner in the law firm that represented the apps, who turned out to be a key figure in shaping efforts to get Harris to back off, according to one lobbyist who spoke to Funt.) FanDuel and DraftKings attracted millions of customers, and they learned a great deal about them, including personal financial information and their favorite sports and players. When PASPA fell and states began to legalize sports betting, they had an enormous first-mover advantage and a ready-made customer base to transform into dedicated, legal gamblers.

Like traditional casinos, online sportsbooks use a variety of mechanisms to entice gamblers in and then to keep them betting. They use deceptive advertising, claiming generous “average” payouts when in reality “just 1.3 percent of [daily fantasy sports] players were collecting 91% of prize money,” according to a McKinsey report cited by Funt. Like traditional casinos, they employ “VIP hosts” to cosset heavy hitters, and they lure big bettors with comped Super Bowl trips and other complimentary goodies. For more ordinary suckers, their strategies have become more refined. For example, they track your betting frequency, and when it declines, they bombard you with special offers and incentives to get you going again. They are becoming shockingly sophisticated users of mined personal data. Because sportsbook apps require that users activate geolocation on their devices (ostensibly to be sure that gambling is legal where players are), they can pinpoint exactly where a gambler is sitting in a ballpark and use seat prices to infer income and wealth information. An exec at a geodata firm speculates to Funt that they could soon pinpoint the type, and price, of the residences in which bettors live. And of course the pure seamlessness of the apps, the incredible ease of moving money from a bank account into the app, is an enormous incentive to compulsive behavior: the drugs, the dealer, and the ATM all in a single, handheld device. Americans placed $150 billion in bets in 2024, a number that has continued to rise. DraftKings alone has nearly four million monthly users.

Even as they strive to lure players in, sportsbooks are also perfectly willing to kick people out, to limit bets and arbitrarily reduce payouts. Sports betting is not pure chance, and while amateur gamblers are prone to making ill-informed bets for bad reasons (betting on personal favorite teams is a big one), smart gamblers and close followers of statistics and betting lines are quite capable of making money. “Increasingly,” Funt writes, “sportsbooks are seeking to boost profits by weeding out winning customers.... Sometimes customers don’t even get a chance to make money: They’re limited simply for demonstrating glimmers of competence.” A “Chicago-area attorney” and regular DraftKings customer named Beau Wagner, for instance, makes a sharp, $1,000 bet on a long-odds NBA scoring outcome and wins 50 grand. The next day, he finds himself limited to $100 bets on whole game outcomes and less than $4 a bet on single-game, single-player scoring. Funt goes on to quote DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players that we want,” and then an unnamed former DraftKings employee: “At the end of the day, these companies are built on losers.”

Many losers appear in both Funt and Cohen’s narratives, such as Kyle, a pseudonymous young man who opens Losing Big on a losing streak that costs him his job and financial independence, and who closes it by relapsing into gambling after a failed recovery. Several of the features of online gambling make it easier than ever to lose large amounts. Bettors are able to instantly re-up their accounts with more and more money. This enables them to “chase their losses,” to imagine that the next winning bet will cover all the preceding losses. And if that doesn’t work? Bet again. Unlike traditional casinos, to which access is at least somewhat limited by physical location and hours of business, mobile betting platforms afford opportunities to gamble constantly. Bets can be placed continually throughout games and events. And bettors have access to any sport in any time zone. Too early or late for American football? There is a soccer match in England, boxing in Thailand, snooker in Australia. In this way, online sports gambling mimics social media’s endless, addictive scroll.

The industry claims to support “responsible gaming,” and it allows “self-exclusion,” a porous and ineffective mechanism for voluntarily banning oneself from gaming, but these are a tissue. Since 2017, and especially since the pandemic, whose limits on social activity unsurprisingly turbocharged online gaming, calls to gambling addiction hotlines have exploded: From 2022 to 2025, calls to 1-800-GAMBLER quadrupled to 19,000 a month. There are now recovery centers for gambling addicts such as one run by Right Choice Recovery in Dayton, New Jersey. Athletes, including college athletes, routinely face abuse, harassment, and even death threats over their performance and appear resigned to it as background noise to their vocation. And everyone now openly speculates that someone—the players, the coaches, the refs—is on the take.





Both books concede that sports gambling is here to stay, and they offer a variety of regulatory and technological fixes. They propose creating what Cohen calls more “friction”: imposing waiting periods between adding funds to an account and laying bets; limiting the number and frequency of bets; conducting finance checks on players, especially those who lay high-dollar wagers. Both call on the federal government to do more to create guardrails and enforce standards.

These are the weakest sections of two otherwise excellent books and analyses. Like so much else about our present social, political, and economic discourse, such narrow recommendations feel like admissions of defeat. Sports gambling and all the abuses and problems it entails are part of a larger predicament, one that seems to be engulfing our entire society—a jackpot culture that prizes the lottery above work, wages, steady returns on investment. Equity markets are frothier than ever, with enormous AI companies puffing more and more into a self-inflating, self-dealing bubble. “Meme stocks” appear and disappear. Strange things are happening in commodities markets, with silver prices in particular rising even faster than gold over recent months. The entire extended Trump clan hawks various coins and crypto products.

And now, nearly two decades after FanDuel’s election-prediction forerunner, so-called prediction markets are back with a vengeance. These are another form of casino, where players—often the same young men who play sportsbooks—can bet on the outcome or likelihood of, quite literally, anything. These casinos style themselves as “markets,” seeking the respectable patina of stocks, bonds, and commodities, but they are a form of wagering little different from sports betting. There is of course an element of chance in traditional capital market investments; stock prices can go down, companies do go out of business, creditors can go unpaid. But these things are not supposed to be a pure wager: There is supposed to be some asset at the other end, an ownership stake, a future cash flow, a barge full of soybeans. The invested or lent capital is, theoretically, being allocated into some productive enterprise: a business, a factory. How antique!

“The long-term vision,” said Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of the prediction market company Kalshi, with the remarkable candor that now dominates a society that has abandoned niceties, decency, and restraint, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” To financialize everything. To do for the society and economy of the entire world what DFS and parlays and prop bets did for sports: crack them up into microscopic, constitutive parts and induce the population to wager on lines going up and lines going down, to take the greater whole and make it even less than the sum of its billions of parts.

When in January the United States armed forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, Cilia Flores, one particular story, a minor subplot to the invasion, immediately caught my eye. A newly created account on the prediction market site Polymarket appeared on the Friday just before the invasion and bet $30,000 on what was at that time the extremely low probability that Maduro would be ousted. Like a long-shot racehorse winning the Derby, a low-probability event promises enormous rewards on these markets, many multiples of the original wager. Several other accounts then bet even more specifically on Maduro’s capture. That $30,000 bet turned into over $400,000 when the United States launched its weird, swift assault. These bets, a report from Axios observed with considerable understatement, “will renew longstanding questions about inside information and access to prediction markets.”

“War,” wrote Smedley Butler, “is a racket.” And it is the “only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” That was in 1935. We’ve advanced since then. We’ve collapsed the distance between profit and loss, between winning and losing, and we’re well on our way to eliminating the distinction between dollars and lives. How long will it be until we can bet on the single soldier, the success of a single bullet?

There is something fundamentally anti-human about the transformation of every victory and every misfortune, every event, incident, outcome, opinion, intention, or accident into an occasion for a wager. How can we govern ourselves—and I mean this in both the political and the old-fashioned, personal sense—if we replace conscience and consciousness with nothing more than a guess? Whether a person or a society, those that take as a guiding attitude that they have nothing to lose will soon discover that it’s become literally true.

Even if you could prove that Trump invaded Iran because Satan told him to, the fact remains that anyone with any sense who was president would have attacked Iran. I would have. Anyone with a working brain would have.

The world's chief sponsor of terrorism, who chant "Death to America" every day, cannot be allowed to acquire atomic bombs.

Today, administration officials gave a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the war in Iran. Democrats who spoke to the press afterward appeared to be furious.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told reporters he was coming out of the briefing “as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate. I am left with more questions than answers, especially about the cost of the war. My questions have been unanswered. And I will demand answers because the American people deserve to know.”

“I am most concerned about the threat to American lives, of potentially deploying our sons and daughters on the ground in Iran. We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran…and there is also, as disturbingly as anything else, the specter of active Russian aid to Iran, putting in danger American lives. Literally, Russia seems to be aiding our enemy, actively and intensively, with intelligence and perhaps with other means, and China, also, may be assisting Iran.”

“So, the American people deserve to know much more than this administration has told them about the cost of the war, the danger to our sons and daughters in uniform, and the potential for further escalation and widening of this war, a war of choice made by this president, not chosen by the American people, with potentially huge consequences to American lives.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted on social media that the administration appears to have no goals for the war except continued bombing, and no plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) was obviously frustrated that the administration is giving out information only under the cloak of classified briefings, making it hard for elected officials to communicate with their constituents about the war. “[W]e’ve been calling over and over again for them to come out of the classified briefings, to allow us to have these conversations, as much as we can, in an open setting, not just with the press, but with the American people, and with our constituents. With our men and women who serve in the military with their families, who are waiting home for them.”

While it is “solely the responsibility of the United States Congress to declare war,” she said, she called attention to Trump’s frequent use of the word “war” to suggest Republicans are hiding his seizing of that power by claiming Trump’s attacks on Iran do not fall under that constitutional provision. “Make no mistake,” she said, “this is Trump’s war. He says it every day…. And he wants to go any further, he needs to come out and have this discussion with Congress and the American people.

“[W]hat I heard is not just concerning,” Rosen said, “it is disturbing, and I’m not sure what the endgame is or what their plans are.” She said Trump “has not shown, to this Congress, to me, or, I believe, to us in our classified briefing…any plans for what he wants to do for the day after.” She warned that Trump could not simply stop the war and have everything go back to the way it was on February 27. The Middle East has sustained too much damage. “You see the bombs, you see the destruction. It’s not going to stop just because he wishes it to be so.”

A key reason the Framers of the Constitution put the power to declare war in the hands of Congress, rather than the executive, was that they were all too familiar with the history of European kings who had launched wars of choice that had reduced their subjects to poverty under crushing war taxes. They feared that the same thing could happen in their new country: that supporting an army would cost tax dollars, impoverishing the citizens of the new nation.

If the debate over war went to Congress, voters could hear the reasoning for the war hashed out and decide for themselves if the cost in lives and treasure was worth it to them. And, after they voted for a war, members of Congress would have to answer to their constituents for the money they spent and the lives lost.

That argument is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending $1 billion a day in his attacks on Iran but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country’s ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.

To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits.

Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) reposted Houghtaling’s article and commented: “You better believe we’ll be investigating.”

Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate, expressed his concerns about the Iran war on CBS Mornings yesterday. “As a millennial, I saw how military disasters like the Iraq War robbed this nation of young lives, of billions of dollars of our moral standing in the world, and I worry that our current leaders are repeating those same mistakes,” he said.

“I was in Sand Branch, Texas, which is a community south of Dallas that doesn’t have running water. It doesn’t have basic sewer infrastructure,” he continued. “So every dollar we spend bombing people in the Middle East is a dollar we’re not spending in Sand Branch, Texas, or in our communities here at home.”

“We’re always told that we don’t have enough money for schools, or for health care, or for our veterans. But there’s always enough money to bomb people on the other side of the world. And so we can support the democracy movement in Iran. We can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, all without bombing innocent schoolchildren, or sending our American troops off to die on the other side of the world.”

Talarico was channeling a Texas-born Republican from the post–World War II years: President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In early March 1953, soon after he took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, and Eisenhower jumped at the chance to reset the militarization of the Cold War.

All people hunger for “peace and fellowship and justice,” he said in a speech to newspaper editors, and he deplored the growing arms race with the USSR. Even if the two superpowers managed to avoid an atomic war, pouring wealth and energy into armaments would limit their ability to raise up the rest of the world.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” The sweat of workers, the genius of scientists, and the hopes of children would be better spent on schools, hospitals, roads, and homes than on armaments. World peace could be achieved, Eisenhower said, “not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber and by rice.”

Extremist Republicans sneered at what they called Eisenhower’s “stomach theory” of diplomacy, but Eisenhower’s approach to the world was forged by his horror at what he saw at Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, when he commanded the Allies in World War II. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote. He was determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again.

Eisenhower recognized that economically dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated by a strong leader to back a cause—any cause—that promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance.

Such extremism had been dangerous enough in the hands of the Nazis, but 1945 gave quite specific shape to Eisenhower’s fears. The atomic bomb, unleashed by the United States over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in summer 1945, changed the meaning of human conflict. If a charismatic political or religious extremist roused a dispossessed population behind another war, and if that leader got his hands on a nuclear weapon, he could destroy the world.

Promoting economic prosperity and better standards of living at home and around the world was not just about peace or justice, Eisenhower thought; it was about saving humankind.