- Trump's Iran Take: Two Regime Changes, Zero Evidence
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According to President Trump, Iran has undergone not one, but two regime changes already this year—and the new government is far more “reasonable” than its predecessors. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead,” he told reporters on Air Force One this weekend. “And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.”
Trump and his Cabinet have been warming to the phrase regime change since the start of his second term. It’s a marked shift from what he campaigned on. As far back as his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, he was calling for the country to “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change,” and he reiterated those views in his most recent bid for reelection. Last year, around the time Trump decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, he called those two words “not politically correct,” seeming to understand their rhetorical link to America’s failed “forever wars” during the 2000s and 2010s. Yet in the same Truth Social post, he started coming around to the phrase: “But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” In the weeks leading up to last month’s attack on Iran, Trump said that regime change would be “the best thing that could happen” to the country.
With his comments this weekend, Trump is casting regime change as a mark of progress in the war. He is signaling—perhaps in the hope of calming down oil markets—that the United States has already achieved an important victory. At the same time, he’s dramatically escalating the conflict in other ways, threatening the complete destruction of some of Iran’s most crucial energy infrastructure as the Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations. But regime change hasn’t actually happened. Although American and Israeli attacks have taken out key Iranian leaders, their replacements are still very much part of the existing system.
Iran’s supreme leader is now the cleric Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated late last month. Other officials who have been killed, such as the heads of the Supreme National Security Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been replaced via the typical governmental channels—that is, by the Iranian president and his associates. (Trump has claimed that Mojtaba is seriously wounded, but on Sunday, the Iranian government transmitted a defiant message, purportedly written by him, through state media.) Iran’s government is the same theocracy it has been since the revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the shah. That any of these new appointees have meaningfully different attitudes toward the U.S. than past leaders did is, despite Trump’s assurances, far from certain.
People often use regime to refer to the government of a single political leader—particularly one they dislike, or who was not elected democratically—but as my colleague David Graham helpfully explained last week, regime actually refers to a system of governance that doesn’t always change when the head of state does. “One could argue,” he wrote, “that the U.S. has had the same ‘regime’ since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president.” Arash Azizi, a scholar of Iranian history and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, told me that “the war and decapitations have affected the internal factional balance, but they haven’t changed the regime. There is arguably even more regime cohesion now than there was before the war.”
As for what an actual regime change in Iran might look like, Azizi said that it “would include either an unraveling of the Islamic Republic’s core structures or, at the very least, abandonment of its key policies. I think this is likely in the medium term (and it would have been even without the war)”—the regime’s signature policies are both unpopular in Iran and strategically untenable, Azizi explained—“but nothing of the sort has happened yet.” In other words, Trump is misusing the phrase to project an image of success in this historically unpopular war.
The Trump administration has offered an abundance of conflicting explanations for its goals in Iran—10 rationales in the first six days of the war alone, my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl have noted. But the president’s recent actions have underscored his rejection of the anti-interventionist values he campaigned on. In addition to escalating the conflict in Iran, he has sought to destabilize other foreign governments over the past few months: After the January capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (and the subsequent installation of a Trump-approved interim leader), the White House established its first effective oil blockade against Cuba since the Cuban missile crisis. Despite slightly softening the blockade in recent days, there’s no indication that Trump has backed down from his stated goal of ousting Cuban leadership and ushering in a more pro-American government.
Perhaps Trump really will carry out regime change in Iran. As my colleague Nancy Youssef wrote earlier today, there are still many paths this war could take—and no military strategist would ever advise determining the outcome of a war just a few weeks in. But in the meantime, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about Trump’s assessment of how things are going.
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Today’s News
The Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors violates free-speech rights, a decision that could affect similar laws in more than 20 states.
The U.S. military has begun flying B-52 bombers over Iran for the first time in the war. The move signals that Iranian air defenses may be weakened after weeks of strikes, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran can still retaliate with missiles.
Israel’s defense minister said that its military plans to occupy much of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River after its ground invasion ends, and that displaced residents will be barred from returning for the time being.
Evening Read
Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
What Maxxing Reveals About Life Online
By Ian Bogost
Perhaps you’ve heard of looksmaxxing, the online trend in which young men strive to become supposedly attractive, often through self-harm. Thanks to Clavicular, a young, fringe manosphere influencer, this term—and others modeled after it—has proliferated. You can be a looksmaxxer by soft maxxing (skin care or exercise) or by hard maxxing (plastic surgery or self-mutilation). Looksmaxxers often find themselves jester-maxxing, that is, using humor to gain the attention of women.
Maxxing can be specialized, too, and even modest, maximally speaking. A dude might be personality-maxxing instead of jester-maxxing. Less incel-maxxing versions might entail health-maxxing—what people called wellness approximately 10 minutes ago. Want your gut to be more regular? That’s fiber-maxxing. Want to build bulk? You’re protein-maxxing. Some so-called tradfem women want to bear more children through fertility-maxxing—a process our culture once understood as getting pregnant again. Maxxing goes the other way too, maximizing harm instead of benefit: Maybe you’ve got a drug habit, in which case you might be pill-maxxing. Anorexia, for some, is now starve-maxxing.
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- Cuba's blackouts are a policy choice, and the cost is real for everyday people.
Updated at 5:34 p.m. ET on April 3, 2026
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Since January, the Trump administration has effectively blockaded nearly all oil shipments to Cuba, causing conditions on the island to deteriorate dramatically. Electricity is becoming more unreliable, food is spoiling, and a collapsing medical system now risks creating a major health crisis. Some hospitalized Cubans have reportedly already died as a result of the blockade. According to my colleague Vivian Salama, a staff writer who has been reporting on Cuba, it’s all part of the White House’s plan to choke the island, destabilizing Cuba’s top leadership and forcing its government into diplomatic talks with the United States. In today’s Daily, she and I discuss the Trump administration’s possible intentions for the country, and consider who stands to gain from such a sharp escalation.
Will Gottsegen: What is the White House’s plan for Cuba right now?
Vivian Salama: Late last year, the administration started clamping down on Venezuela economically and militarily with the forward-looking objective of doing the same thing to Cuba. For decades, Cuba has been highly dependent on Venezuela for economic purposes, primarily oil. By cutting off Venezuela’s ability to export oil, the administration was also hoping that it would inflict intense pain on and ultimately spur dramatic change in the Cuban government.
What the White House wants to happen remains sort of opaque. It says that Venezuela’s leaders need to go, but it doesn’t explicitly talk about regime change. It’s important to put Venezuela into that context, because even though the administration forcefully removed Nicolás Maduro in January, it did so while still maintaining, for now at least, his regime. Trump is working with Maduro’s vice president in Venezuela, and would potentially do something similar in Cuba. Will we see ground incursions, or a dramatic raid like we saw in Venezuela? That is a big question mark.
Will: The Trump administration has indicated that it’s more interested in changing Cuba’s leadership than it is in toppling the current regime. Why might that be the administration’s goal, as opposed to ending communism on the island?
Vivian: The goal is to pursue commercial and economic interests for the United States. That is really what President Trump is all about. The ideological element is not a primary factor for him, as it is for many Cuban Americans. Trump will have achieved something historic and significant if he is able to put in place a Cuban government, or a Cuban leader, at least, who is more compliant with the U.S. so that the U.S. can go and invest in Cuba. Anything beyond that is sort of in the weeds for him.
Will: Why is Trump choosing this moment to act?
Vivian: Every president, Democrat and Republican, has mused over the idea of regime change in Cuba. It has just been a matter of how they would achieve that.
This has been one of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s primary objectives since he took public office. He has long called for regime change in Cuba. He has long called for a democratic transition in Venezuela, and he was able to convince Trump that this is tied to two things: his immigration and anti-narcotics crackdown and his broader ambitions for the U.S. to reassert its dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Trump is also very much focused on his legacy. He’s a second-term president, and, barring a dramatic change to the Constitution, he will leave office. He wants to do things that other presidents talked about and didn’t do. The Iran war is among those. And so is a dramatic realignment of the Cuban government.
Will: What has the current oil blockade done to Cuba?
Vivian: Garbage is accumulating in the streets because there’s no gas for the trucks to go around and pick it up. People are reportedly dying or in very, very bad conditions because hospital generators are now failing. The city of Havana—and the country in general—has plunged into darkness multiple times because its power grid has completely failed. This is exactly the impact that the Trump administration was looking to achieve in order to bring the Cuban regime to its knees.
Cubans have gone through periods similar to this in the past. They are used to sort of hunkering down and relying on the bare minimum to function. But in this case, it’s been so bad that it seems the government has at least been forced to start negotiating with Washington.
Will: What has Russia’s role been here, as Cuba’s longtime ally? I know the Kremlin has said it’s going to continue sending aid to the island.
Vivian: After the blockade started, a Russian oil tanker set sail for Cuba. That was before the United States eased sanctions on Russian oil last month to help mitigate the Iran war’s effects on the global economy. And the tanker didn’t turn around, even when Trump later amended those sanctions to bar Russia from supplying oil to Cuba specifically. Russia’s move was seen as a sign that its relationship with Cuba remains pretty tight, but this wasn’t a purely humanitarian gesture. It was also an attempt to poke at the United States, and there were questions about whether or not there would be a confrontation.
Then Trump said on Sunday that he would allow the tanker to reach Cuba, effectively breaking his own blockade. The sense among administration officials that I talked with was that they have inflicted enough pain for the Cuban government to want to talk—they do not want the situation to reach a point where it spurs an exodus of Cubans, or leads to a pandemic of some kind on the island. There are worries that there could be an outbreak of cholera because of conditions there.
Russia always looks to benefit when there is geopolitical disarray. With the U.S. so focused on the war in Iran, Russia has stood to benefit both with regard to its own conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world. Cuba is a very small example of that. The fear is that if the U.S. continues to grant permissions to Russia, or turn a blind eye to Russia, the country could rebuild, once again, to be the kind of global menace that we saw in the years leading up to its invasion of Ukraine.
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Twilight of the ‘Cougar’
By Anna Holmes
No label really existed to describe my mother when in 1965, at the age of 27, she met the man who would become my father, a baby-faced guy who had just turned 18. But there were plenty of stereotypes. In The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had written of the older woman who pursues “fresh flesh” because young men are the “only ones” she can hope will feel desire for a “maternal mistress.” The woman does so, too, to combat the anxiety of aging, de Beauvoir wrote, felt by “the one whose life is already finished, even though death is not imminent.” Ouch.
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- The Real Cost of Flying Starts Before You Board
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Walk into any American airport today, and you might end up in a security line that extends past the baggage claim. You might hear a muffled voice announcing over the intercom that your flight has—once again—been delayed. And you might have to pay even more for this experience.
Airfare has spiked since the start of the war in Iran, as airlines cope with rising jet-fuel prices and the new risks of flying in and around the Middle East. Business Insider found that the average price of a flight from one end of the United States to the other rose from $167 in February to $414 in mid-March. Outside the country, ticket prices for major routes connecting Europe and Asia have surged, per data from Alton Aviation Consultancy: The Hong Kong–London route is 560 percent more expensive than it was last month, and the Bangkok-Frankfurt route is up 505 percent. (Flights between the two continents would ordinarily pass through the Middle East.) And tickets are likely to stay expensive for some time.
Americans are already seeing prices rise at airports and at the pump—the average cost of gas in the U.S. has gone from $2.98 a gallon to $3.98 a gallon over the past month—but the breadth of the war’s economic consequences is just starting to become clear. The energy shock could have broad implications for the prices of all kinds of consumer goods, including clothing, food, and computers (also: party balloons). What’s happening to plane tickets is a preview of what might come next for other industries.
“Airfares are certainly the canary in the coal mine,” my colleague Annie Lowrey, who writes about economic policy, told me. “No other major consumer good or service I can think of is as sensitive to energy costs.” Jet fuel makes up roughly 30 percent of the cost of an airline ticket, and much of that increase is getting passed on to customers. When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz earlier this month, it pinched off the world’s oil supply, and prices shot up. The average price of jet fuel spiked more than 58 percent during the first week of the war and has increased more than 10 percent each week since. Airlines began feeling that strain right away, which soon started to bear on tickets—dynamic-pricing systems allowed companies to change what they charge for each seat in real time.
Airlines have always had razor-thin margins. Fuel is the industry’s largest operating cost and can represent about 25 percent of a company’s total yearly spending. American Airlines recently said that it will be forced to spend an additional $400 million this quarter. “If oil prices stay where they are today, that’s 11 billion [dollars] of expense for us,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said this week. He also suggested that, for the company to break even, it would need to raise ticket prices another 20 percent. That direct correlation—as fuel prices go up, so does airfare—helps explain why the Iran war’s effects on plane tickets have been so immediate. A similar dynamic is at play in the trucking industry: When the cost of diesel goes up, so do the rates for ground-shipping contracts.
The other big-picture issue affecting airfare has to do with flight capacity. More than 52,000 flights to and from the Middle East have been canceled since the start of the war. Flights that haven’t been canceled might have to take longer paths around the Middle East, using up more fuel and putting more pressure on airlines to compensate elsewhere, Martin Dresner, a supply-chain professor at the University of Maryland, told me.
The Iran war could also raise the prices of semiconductors (reliant on helium, much of which comes from the Middle East), clothing (many synthetic fibers, including polyester, are made from oil), and aluminum-based products, as well as any consumer goods that travel via air freight. Fuel surcharges account for roughly 19 percent of the cost of a package delivery in the United States, and as shipping and transport costs go up, so could the price of groceries, Annie said. Businesses that sell nonperishable goods such as computers and clothing would likely react by selling off inventory and then, eventually, increasing sticker prices.
Many of those effects won’t be felt immediately. Take urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer that’s integral to modern farming. Much of its global supply comes from the Middle East, and urea prices have increased by 50 percent since the war began. Although farmers may take a direct hit on those prices, consumers may not actually experience a price shift for a while, thanks to the nature of the agricultural supply chain. Reduced urea leads to reduced crop yields, which leads to fewer and more expensive food products—a far more indirect relationship than that of jet fuel and airfare.
Were the strait to fully open right now, some of those potential issues would never materialize, and the global oil supply would start to recover. But even if the war were to end today, “we’re looking at months ’til production is fully restored, at least,” Jason Miller, a supply-chain professor at Michigan State University, told me. Airlines will see elevated costs until the oil supply stabilizes—which is likely why United Airlines’ CEO has been telling people to book their tickets for summer travel as soon as possible, before prices go even higher. Ultimately, this economic squeeze could last longer than the war that created it.
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The Very Powerful Men Who Think Introspection Is Dumb
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective. From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power.
That thesis received further confirmation earlier this month when the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that he engages in “zero” introspection—or at least “as little as possible.” Andreessen, a billionaire AI evangelist, was speaking to the podcaster David Senra, who enthusiastically approved. Senra explained that he had learned introspection was useless by reading 410 biographies of entrepreneurs. “Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self,” Senra said, referring to the Walmart magnate. “He just woke up like, I like building Walmart; I’m gonna keep building more Walmarts, and just kept doing it over and over again.”
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