A Year of Magical Thinking

This essay appears in our Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy.

On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of condemnations of political violence by U.S. public officials, from federal legislators to state officials. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, “Political violence has no place in America.” But there seems to be plenty of room for violence of the apparently nonpolitical sort: federal immigration agencies have used the recent push for mass deportations to accelerate their long and violent history with high-profile murders on the street and in their detention centers; as of April 23, the U.S. military has killed at least 186 people in a consistent campaign of bombings in Latin American waters; and there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondent’s Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.

The presumed exemption from violence of the elite rests on a broader bedrock of delusion that exists in its most virulent form on the ascendant American right. Last summer, U.S. Representative Madeleine Dean wielded the most unlikely of rhetorical weapons in a debate on the congressional floor: a banana. Across her sat Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, attempting to defend the Trump administration’s tariff policy. After confirming with Lutnick that the president’s baseline 10 percent tariff applied to banana imports, Dean explained that the price of bananas at Walmart had risen 8 percent. To which Lutnick replied: “If you build in America, there is no tariff.” This exchange did not exactly soar to the heights of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it was no less illuminating of the basic political conundrum of our era: that a critical mass of the political leadership of the United States appears to sincerely believe in magic.

What few banana plantations operate in the United States produce some 3,600 tons of bananas—a rounding error by comparison to the production from Guatemala, which produces 2.8 million tons a year. Plus, the fact that one cannot effectively “build” this tropical fruit at scale in the United States is intimately related to some fairly important facts about twentieth-century U.S. politics, including a four-decade stretch of wars and military interventions and a CIA-backed coup that inaugurated four decades of genocide in the very country that now provides us with the lion’s share of our bananas.

This administration has, up until now, been extraordinarily successful in making other people pay the price for its mistakes and crimes.

It would be easy to hand-wave this away as a one-off slip-up or lapse in message discipline. But the blasé attitude of the ruling class toward the Banana Question fits squarely into a pattern being set across an ever-expanding list of topics. The present administration has scaled back environmental protections against toxic chemicals and dismantled climate rules and subsidies, eliminated vaccine recommendations for children while cutting funding for food safety inspections, and slashed the budget of the office that collects tax revenue while claiming its other layoffs were motivated by a concern over government debt. And it has done all of this while initiating a war in the most politically volatile region of the world on the flimsiest of pretexts, causing disastrous knock-on effects that are already sending energy markets into tumult and threatening to spur a global crisis in food production.

No doubt, Lutnick was bullshitting, and he was bullshitting because he understands himself to live in a world constrained only by the whims and attention span of his boss, rather than the basic contours of reality that the rest of us navigate by way of quaint norms around truth and honesty. The Trump administration sustains this carelessness by holding onto a raft of genuine insight amid the sea of delusion: it has, up until now, been extraordinarily successful in making other people pay the price for its mistakes and crimes. But that raft is thin. The structure whose supports our elites are steadily kicking down is also the one that props up their own personal safety from disaster and political invulnerability to accountability. And all of this can go away.

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It is easiest to make the case that all of this can go away by reflecting on the fact that it has. The COVID-19 pandemic remains with us in 2026, suppressed only by historic and ongoing efforts from researchers and medical professionals. Some people took health precautions less seriously in response to information that poor people of color were more severely affected by the virus than other groups. But “safer” does not mean safe: by one statistical analysis, the poorest and richest counties in the United States contracted COVID-19 at similar rates, though residents of richer counties were likelier to survive the ordeal. Past epidemics and public health crises from polio to the Spanish flu follow this same broad pattern: while unsurprisingly, the poor and socially marginalized are hit first and worst, any delusions of invulnerability harbored by the rich are soon punished. As public health researcher Svenn-Erik Mamelund puts it, “The first wave hits the poor, the second wave hits the rich.” The recent historic rise in measles infection levels, closely following the Trump administration’s stoking of anti-vax sentiment, suggest that the relevance of these little history lessons is already more than academic.

But communicable diseases are only one way to pierce the delusions of the rich that the ills of the social order are someone else’s problem. Historian Rachel G. Hoffman described the political culture that evolved at the end of the nineteenth century as an “age of assassination” in which political protesters “tried to kill nearly every major European ruler and head of state.” The closure of that age was not inevitable. It came about due to specific political interventions and historical developments—including the collapse of the French monarchy and the development of comprehensive labor law in the United States—that undermined the perceived legitimacy of politics done by these particular means. In other words, the resulting order has been less the outcome of an irreversible law of human progress than a détente produced by steel and blood.

Today, political violence looks to be on the rise again, from the most recent attempt on Trump’s life to the murders of state legislators in Minnesota, the broad-daylight assassination of a health care executive, and the firebombing of the home of tech mogul Sam Altman. Commentators horrified by the popularity of Luigi Mangione would be wise to reflect on the fact that, in the years Hoffman studied, the utility of assassinations and terrorism was openly advocated for by political groups, whether by the French Jacobins, the Russian narodniks, or the U.S. anarchists avowing the “propaganda of the deed,” all of which enjoyed a level of political support and sympathy above that of fringe outsiders. The current trend, which includes the outpouring of open sympathy for Mangione as well as a follow-up attack on Altman’s house, suggests that the norm against open advocacy for political violence is not only reversible but has perhaps already been reversed—the logical consequence of undermined trust across all social institutions, among them the “legitimate” formal systems one might hope would displace violence as an outlet for expressing and resolving political disagreements.On some level, they know. How else can we interpret U.S. corporate and political elites’ chatter about “colonizing Mars” except as an admission that the present course of politics doomed the planet? But the raft of insight is thin indeed, and the seas of delusion stormy. Rather than bringing their considerable economic control and political influence to bear on addressing the ecological collapse of the planet, scores of the hyperrich are instead adding another layer of delusion: the apocalypse bunker. Meanwhile, the President immediately pivoted from the third public attempt on his life to shilling for his “Militarily Secure Top Secret Ballroom,” which, as he assured the press, would have bulletproof glass and a drone-proof structure. Those in power may pretend not to know where the present political trajectories are taking us, but they seem to sense that they’ll have to hide. In short, we are ruled by a class of people who seem either to believe or presume that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction are things that will only ever happen to poorer and browner people. There’s essentially no other way to explain why the Trump administration is so eagerly destroying so much that does, in fact, protect wealthier and whiter Americans.Of course, the presumption is simply not true—and we are clearly in an era where this needs to be said outright—that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction can be contained to only affect poorer and browner people. Neither wealth nor social privilege can fully eliminate the risk of infectious disease, reverse the direction of a hurricane approaching landfall, or hold back the waters from entering the floodplain, whatever relative advantage it may confer in getting the nice spots of the rubble, or the finest bunker to live out one’s days in hiding. Of course, debunking the delusion won’t solve our political problems: we should not expect enough of these people to ever appreciate reality—at least, not via mere fact-checking. But we cannot afford to continue feeding the delusions. Before the Epstein files were slow-walked in the media, the architects of the 2008 financial crisis were almost exclusively bailed out rather than jailed, while those who orchestrated the invasion of Iraq have faced no legal or criminal repercussions at all, like those complicit, more recently, in the genocidal campaign in Gaza. It is this—the load-bearing, incontrovertible reality of elite impunity—that serves as their flimsy tether to the real world underneath the bluster and fantasy.

If we wait for the hyperrich to finally realize that their fates are tied to ours—for their children to contract measles, or for them to get cabin fever in their apocalypse bunkers—it will be too late for many of the rest of us. A better, quicker path out of this situation? Proving to the plutocrats that they actually are in the same game and bound by the same rules as common people by enacting harsh civil, criminal, and social penalties on those who have orchestrated our present political moment. This can be done within the confines of the rule of law—but only if legal consequences are swift, painful, and delivered on a timescale they cannot ignore. Minnesota prosecutors’ recent charging of ICE officials for crimes is one step forward in the process of presenting the administration with consequences it cannot fantasize away. But it will take scores more of these thrusts, aimed at officials far higher up the political food chain, to pierce the veil of invulnerability currently launching warships toward the Strait of Hormuz. We are going to have to make war their problem.

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