This is one piece of gold that President Trump is never going to get his short, stubby fingers on: an 18-karat gold medal with three naked men embracing, awarded to those who promote peace, democracy and human rights. The Nobel Peace Prize has been given to some beauts — like Henry Kissinger, for helping end the Vietnam War he perpetuated to aid Richard Nixon’s re-election. But the prize was not designed for someone like Trump. The Norwegian Nobel Committee would no doubt discontinue the award before it would give it to him. His longing is partly inspired by his jealousy of Barack Obama, who absurdly got a Nobel Peace Prize after only eight months in office for just being a cool dude. Our 79-year-old president admitted recently that he also envies Obama for the way he airily bopped down the stairs of Air Force One, while he himself has to slowly creep down, grasping the railing, worried that he’ll fall and look as unsteady as Joe Biden. I’ve always thought we were lucky that Trump was not more prone to invasions, à la his fellow draft dodger Dick Cheney, given his belligerent persona, vengeful nature, fascination with military trappings and U.F.C. macho bluster. He insisted on having a military parade here in June and he’s planning a U.F.C. fight next June on the White House South Lawn for the country’s 250th birthday. Even though most liberals have tried to paint Trump as a deranged hawk at heart, the former real estate developer always seemed, blessedly, more drawn to the art of the deal than shock and awe. While he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, threatens Venezuela and strikes alleged drug boats off its coast, he more often seems to consider war a waste of time and money that could be better spent building a beachfront property in North Korea or Gaza. “Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” he said in his first foreign policy speech in Washington during the 2016 race. He added, “A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength.”Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Even though he tepidly supported the invasion of Iraq, amid the rah-rah patriotic push to punish somebody, anybody, for 9/11, he would later call it “the single worst decision ever made.” In May, he denounced the debacles of “neocons” and “interventionists,” vowing a future “where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.” If Trump can untie the Gordian knot of the Middle East, it will be a spectacular feat — although it will have been accomplished by accommodating Bibi’s brutal annihilation and starvation of Gaza. And, of course, there’s probably some money in it for him and his family somewhere. But the region is a graveyard of peace deals. As David Sanger wrote in The Times: “Much could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The ‘peace’ deal Mr. Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started long before Israel’s founding in 1948, and has never ended.” As Tom Friedman pointed out, it is Trump’s moral indifference to the human rights transgressions of his partners in the peace plan that allows him to break through old paradigms. That is the same moral indifference that will prevent him from ever getting a Nobel. You can’t get a medal for promoting democracy when you tried to overthrow the democracy you were running. Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column. Link Copied He has shown utter disdain for our Constitution and the laws that have made us the greatest democracy in the world. Once in 2016, I asked him about the violence that was breaking out at his rallies. He said he thought it added some excitement to the proceedings. Trump is constantly posting cruel, nasty images on Truth Social. He loves gladiatorial combat, the scenes of masked ICE officers roughing up people, even if they have their American passports in their pockets. What sort of person — much less a president — does not object to headlines like this in The Hill: “Top DHS Official Defends ICE Officer Who Shot Pastor With Pepper Ball”? The Rev. David Black was protesting peacefully at an ICE facility in a Chicago suburb, hands out, offering to pray with officers, when an ICE officer on a roof shot him in the head with a pepper ball. While Trump may have sparked dancing in the streets in the Middle East, he’s sparked danger in the streets in America. He is siccing American troops on blue cities, distorting the National Guard’s largely humanitarian mission and turning it into, as The Times’s John Ismay put it, “a partisan strike force at the whim of the president.” Trump expressed another chilling whim to the generals recently when he said he had told Pete Hegseth: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Even as he says he should have won the Nobel five times over for his work solving foreign conflicts, he is creating conflicts in America, concocting perilous crises in American cities. Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the National Governors Association, told The Times that the president was violating states’ rights: “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.” While he’s freeing hostages in Gaza, Trump is seizing some here. He’s forcing Pam Bondi to play the tortured servant Renfield to his dark, narcissistic Dracula. She is scurrying around eating insects, doing the president’s dirty work of indicting his foes and purging anyone who worked with them. The Department of Vengeance, nee Department of Justice, has indicted James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and more Trumped-up vindictive indictments are surely coming. Richard Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn’t do much with it. He could only dream of doing the kind of stuff Trump has gotten away with. Trump seems oblivious to the paradox of enforcing peace abroad and disrupting it badly at home, of soothing violence overseas and inflaming it here. While he’s rechristened the Pentagon the chesty “Department of War,” he’s bragging about forming a Board of Peace — with himself, of course, the chief peacenik — to oversee Gaza’s new governing body. The contradiction is hard to square. It’s not going to win our president a peace prize.

Lindsey Halligan, at the White House in March when she was one of President Trump’s personal lawyers. Lindsey Halligan/Zuma Press WASHINGTON—Lindsey Halligan, President Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney in Virginia, faced intense criticism for charging former FBI Director James Comey last month in a case other prosecutors in her office thought was unjustified. If anything, the experience has emboldened her. Halligan’s indictment Thursday of New York Attorney General Letitia James on allegations of mortgage fraud came faster than even some of her allies were expecting. She presented the case without informing Attorney General Pam Bondi or Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, people familiar with the matter said. Halligan “wanted to just get it done,” one of the people said. She is also likely to bring additional charges against James, the person said. James, a Democrat who previously brought a civil fraud suit against Trump and his business, called the allegations baseless and said the prosecution was an obvious case of political retribution. Her lawyer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday. Halligan had been planning to present the allegations against James in Norfolk, Va., where the New York official’s property is located and where some thought the Justice Department would face a more favorable grand jury that would vote in support of an indictment. But logistically that wasn’t possible until next week, and Halligan didn’t want to wait. Instead, she moved forward in Alexandria, near where her office is located, unconcerned that a potentially less conservative pool of jurors might reject her, people familiar with her thinking said. New York Attorney General Letitia James, in 2024. Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin declined to comment on grand jury matters but said the agency is “united as one team in our mission to make America safe again.” Bondi and Blanche knew generally that Halligan intended to seek an indictment of James at some point but were caught off guard by the timing, people familiar with those discussions said. Halligan, 36, is at the forefront of the administration’s push to bring prosecutions that Trump has encouraged against his perceived foes. She has been leading the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia since Sept. 22, after Trump pushed out her predecessor, Erik Siebert, who also was a Trump administration appointee. Siebert and others in the office raised doubts that the evidence was strong enough to bring charges against either James or Comey. Halligan charged Comey a few days after she arrived, on allegations that he lied to Congress in testimony five years ago. Comey pleaded not guilty this week. Halligan, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers who had never been a prosecutor, presented both cases by herself, with limited help from her Justice Department superiors and virtually none from other lawyers in her office wary of their new boss, people familiar with the matter said. “Obtaining indictments by herself on short notice in two incredibly high-profile cases is impressive,” said John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia. More surprising still, he said, was that she was able to obtain them in a highly politicized environment, in which grand juries in Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere have recently rejected indictments related to Trump-imposed crackdowns on crime and protests. Securing a conviction, though, will be harder because it requires a much higher standard of proof—and because the Justice Department will face questions about its motives. Halligan’s go-it-alone approach may prove challenging as the cases proceed, experts said, as she will have to counter a flurry of defense motions while juggling her work leading the office. Few prosecutors within her Virginia outpost have met her or seen her outside of court, as she goes straight up to her office most mornings accompanied by her protective detail, people close to the office said. In the Comey case, she has brought on out-of-district prosecutors from North Carolina. Increasing the urgency, Halligan faces a ticking clock on her tenure—and arguments that she isn’t legally allowed to serve in the role at all. U.S. attorney positions are subject to Senate confirmation. Interim officials typically can serve in the role for 120 days, and then can remain if the judges of the district vote to allow it. Judges did vote to accept Siebert, and legal observers say it is questionable that Trump was entitled to install Halligan as a new interim appointment after forcing Siebert aside. Comey’s legal team has already signaled that it will argue Halligan’s appointment is invalid, and that the prosecution was based on impermissible political motives. James is expected to do the same. Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected] and Meridith McGraw at [email protected]

Alan Macleod exposes how the CIA operated 885 covert websites disguised as blogs and fan pages, spying globally—including on allies—leading to devastating intelligence failures in Iran and China.

Gov. Kevin Stitt condemned President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops across state lines, the first Republican governor to speak out against the practice. Over the last two weeks, Trump has attempted to dispatch National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities, including Chicago and Portland, Oregon. When those dispatches were temporarily paused by federal judges, the administration tried to send federalized troops from Texas and California across state lines. “We believe in the federalist system; that’s states’ rights,” Stitt, who chairs the National Governors Association, told The New York Times on Thursday. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.” “As a federalist believer, one governor against another governor, I don’t think that’s the right way to approach this,” Stitt said. Stitt’s comments come just days after Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker threatened to withdraw from the National Governors Association if it failed to speak out against Trump’s federalization of National Guard troops against the wishes of state officials. Stitt told the Times his comments represented his personal opinion, not an official statement from the organization, because its nonprofit status exempts it from being required to weigh in on political matters. National Guard troops were deployed to Chicago and Portland last week by the Trump administration in response to urban crime and protests against immigration enforcement. Despite the ongoing legal challenges against the use of troops in Chicago, members of the Texas National Guard arrived in the city this week after Gov. Greg Abbott offered to turn over control of them to the administration. On Thursday, however, an Illinois federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the state for 14 days. “I find that allowing the National Guard to deploy will only add fuel to the fire that the defendants have started,” U.S. District Judge April Perry said. “I was surprised that Governor Abbott sent troops from Texas to Illinois,” Stitt told the Times. “Abbott and I sued the Biden administration when the shoe was on the other foot, and the Biden administration was trying to force us to vaccinate all of our soldiers and force masks across the country.” Stitt said he believes more Republican governors share his views. “Maybe you just haven’t asked the right ones,” he said. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch. Every day we strive to produce journalism that matters — stories that strengthen accountability and transparency, provide value and resonate with readers like you. This work is essential to a better-informed community and a healthy democracy. But it isn’t possible without your support. Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

For years, San Franciscans considered him their benevolent, big-hearted billionaire. While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them. But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0. The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale. Mr. Benioff’s shift serves as another example of a prominent Bay Area tech executive acceding to the Republican president’s view of the world. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, gave Mr. Trump a 24-karat gold gift and heaped praise upon the president in an August visit to the Oval Office. Last month, at a White House dinner for tech barons, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Mr. Trump he was “a very refreshing change.” To many Silicon Valley observers, such attempts to accommodate Mr. Trump are simply a matter of protecting tech businesses, especially after watching Mr. Trump threaten companies, individuals and institutions that have run afoul of him. And Salesforce has hundreds of software contracts with the federal government. Nearly nine months into Mr. Trump’s second term, San Francisco has avoided the heavy federal incursions seen in Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago. The most palpable action in the city has involved agents arresting immigrants at the federal courthouse, sometimes in aggressive ways. But the president, in an Oval Office gathering in August, mentioned that he was considering sending federal troops into San Francisco as he ticked off a list of other Democratic-led cities. He said that Democrats had “destroyed” San Francisco and that he would “clean that one up, too.” Mr. Benioff said he liked that idea and thought that Guard soldiers could help reduce crime in the city. “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said.ImageRecruits at the San Francisco Police Academy in 2018. Mr. Benioff said the city needed to hire another 1,000 officers.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Mr. Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of “agentic enterprise,” a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together. Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police. The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities. But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it needs another thousand. “You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.” Mr. Benioff’s team wanted him to highlight his latest round of philanthropy, which includes another personal donation of $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco children’s hospitals named after him, as well as a $39 million company gift to schools and children’s causes. His family and company have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes over the past 26 years. “I don’t think anyone has hired more people or given more money or supported San Francisco more than I have,” Mr. Benioff said. Since the pandemic, he has mostly lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, where he has bought up numerous parcels of land. He said that he wasn’t sure how many days he spends each year in San Francisco, but that he is never in one place for more than a day or two. Mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat who avoids discussing national politics or even saying the president’s name, did not address Mr. Benioff’s view that Mr. Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco. In a statement, his spokesman highlighted the city’s falling crime rates and increased hiring of law enforcement officers. Other San Francisco politicians rebuked Mr. Benioff. “You can’t support San Francisco and want to see us invaded,” said Assemblyman Matt Haney, a Democrat. “It’s one thing to wrongly support Trump’s misguided economic policies. It’s quite another to support a direct assault and occupation of our city.” Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, was livid that Mr. Benioff wanted the National Guard in the city. She would seek to prosecute anyone, including federal agents, who becomes violent or harasses residents, she said. “San Franciscans right now sit scared that we are next in line for what Trump is delivering to other cities across this nation,” Ms. Jenkins said. “I’m disappointed that anyone would want to invite that chaos into our city.” Rafael Mandelman, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said he agreed that the city needs more police officers, but said there was no need to send federal troops. He said he understood why so many tech leaders were turned off by the swing further left in the city five years ago, but said that they were moving too far to the right. “I really don’t think Trump is the answer,” he said. Though San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have elected more moderate leaders in recent years, they remain staunchly Democratic and oppose Mr. Trump. A Public Policy Institute of California poll in June found that 77 percent of likely voters in the Bay Area disapproved of Mr. Trump, the highest share for any region in the state. But over the course of a 50-minute conversation, Mr. Benioff did not have a negative word to say about Mr. Trump or his policies. “I fully support the president,” he said. “I think he’s doing a great job.” During the interview, Mr. Trump’s voice could be heard in the background. Mr. Benioff was watching a YouTube video about the Israeli hostage release deal, for which he praised the president. Mr. Benioff is close enough to Mr. Trump to have been invited last month to a state dinner that was hosted by King Charles for the president at Windsor Castle in England. Mr. Benioff said that he was incredibly honored to be seated directly across the table from Mr. Trump and spent the dinner telling him “how grateful I am for everything he’s doing,” he recounted. Mr. Benioff, who also owns Time magazine, said he had not closely followed the news about the immigration raids, Mr. Trump’s call to gerrymander congressional districts before the midterm elections, the government shutdown or the Trump administration’s attacks on the media. He said Time, which named Mr. Trump its “Person of the Year” last year, had faced no pressure from the White House. “We haven’t been under attack,” he said. “We provide accurate, balanced journalism.” He praised Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to slash federal spending, texting a recent photo of himself hanging out with Mr. Musk and a Tesla robot. He likewise praised David Sacks, another San Francisco tech billionaire and the chairman of Mr. Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It all seemed to be a major political shift for Mr. Benioff. In 2016, he hosted a large fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Mr. Trump, at his $31 million mansion on the edge of the Presidio in San Francisco. In 2018, Mr. Benioff personally funded a city ballot measure campaign to tax businesses, including his own, for services for those who are homeless. ImageWhen Mr. Benioff cut the ribbon in 2018 to open Salesforce Tower, he asked the head of a local meditation center to lead the crowd in chanting a Sanskrit call for peace.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times When he cut the ribbon that same year to open Salesforce Tower, a rocket-shaped building that consumed the city skyline, he asked the head of a local meditation center to lead the crowd in chanting “Om, shanti,” a Sanskrit call for peace, and called on his fellow tech leaders do more to combat poverty. Myrna Melgar, a San Francisco supervisor, said that Mr. Benioff’s comments about the National Guard and Mr. Trump “threw me for a loop.” She speculated that his political shift might be for self-serving business reasons. “From the railroad barons until now, that’s nothing new,” she said. “But with Marc Benioff, it’s particularly disappointing. It’s definitely out of step and out of touch with what most San Franciscans would want.” On Thursday, Mr. Benioff said he had never been progressive even if many San Franciscans thought he was. He said he was a longtime Republican before switching to become an independent voter. At the end of the interview, he turned to a public relations executive. He could be heard asking why her mouth was wide open and if he had said anything he shouldn’t have. “What about the political questions?” he asked. “Too spicy?” Then he hung up.

Trump’s chaos reigns: Greene backs Obamacare, UPS destroys packages, judges block Guard troops, the Senate funds the war machine, and Nobel defies Trump's tyranny.

Trump’s chaos reigns: Greene backs Obamacare, UPS destroys packages, judges block Guard troops, Senate funds war, and Nobel defies tyranny.