- Critics trade new labels for old ones as the administration shifts gears.
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Critics have used many phrases to describe Donald Trump’s presidency, some of them unprintable. Scholars and journalists have debated whether Trump’s approach is “authoritarian,” “white supremacist,” or “fascist.” More recently, however, a growing number of people have begun referring to the “Trump regime.”
“The Trump regime has proven over and over,” The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote, that its morality is “the advantage of the stronger.” A fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute complained that oversight tools “were effectively destroyed by the Trump regime last year.” And a writer for The Nation called for Democrats to “launch a ‘Nuremberg Caucus’ to investigate the crimes of the Trump regime.”
Google Trends shows that although the phrase was occasionally deployed during Trump’s first term, it has become far more common over the past year. These usages are meant to tell us something about the state of contemporary politics in the United States—although exactly what is not always clear.
Ambrose Bierce, the sardonic author of The Devil’s Dictionary, might have observed that a “regime” is any government that one doesn’t like. Those referring to the “Trump regime” this way seem to be implying that the administration is rapacious and authoritarian. But few of them are explicit about that, and their counterparts in the academy indulge in the same vagueness. “Very rarely do regime analysts stop to define what they mean by political regime,” the political scientist Gerardo L. Munck complained in 1996. The word was popularized in American politics as a sort of euphemism: During the George W. Bush presidency, regime change was a bloodless, technocratic term for the bloody, chaotic effort to topple Saddam Hussein and install a democratic system of government in Iraq.
A good working definition, Munck told me in an email, is “the set of rules that regulate how people come to occupy government offices and how government decisions are made.” But even scholars often employ the term as a pejorative, used to describe authoritarian government. These “regimes” tend to have two main characteristics, sometimes overlapping though also in tension: first, the personalization of government around a single individual, and second, a set of informal power structures, such as business oligarchs or a “deep state,” that operate outside of the formal system of government.
One could argue that the U.S. has had the same “regime” since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president. Alternatively, one could look to moments such as the post–Civil War amendments or the New Deal as shifts in the regime. Either way, to state that Trump oversees a regime is to suggest an epochal change.
That’s how Robert Reich sees it. Reich, a commentator and professor who served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, has been one of the most consistent and prominent users of the phrase. “I began referring to the Trump ‘regime’ rather than ‘administration’ because, especially in his second term, Trump has acted more like an authoritarian ruler than a president in a constitutional system of governance,” he wrote to me in an email. “This is no ‘administration’ that manages the executive branch by implementing the will of Congress, as expressed by the citizens of the United States.”
I thought that perhaps scholars of regime systems would push back on using the label for Trump’s government, but the ones I spoke with cautiously endorsed it. “In the past, it was common to refer to the Pinochet regime in Chile or the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq,” Munck said. He told me that the use of Trump regime “is a correct appreciation, that highlights a key weakness in the current state of democracy in the U.S.” And Licia Cianetti, a political scientist who recently co-authored a paper on defining the word, wrote to me that “the personalisation of Trump’s style of rule, and some features like its oligarchization, make the use of ‘regime’ in this pejorative sense expedient to express what seems to be happening to American democracy.”
Without downplaying the dangers that Trump poses to the American way of government (perils that The Atlantic has been aggressive in describing), I am not ready to join the “Trump regime” crew yet. One reason is that regimes can be resilient—a point that, ironically, Trump’s actions have demonstrated. “We have, really, regime change,” Trump said about Iran this week. “This is a change in the regime because the leaders are all very different.” That’s nonsense. Although American forces have arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and killed several Iranian leaders, removing the dictators has not dislodged the dictatorships in either Caracas or Tehran.
The 250-year-old democracy in Washington might also be stronger than those who wish to undermine it believe. Trump may hope to topple the laws and checks that constrain him, but he has not yet fully succeeded. Polls show widespread voter disapproval of Trump’s presidency and suggest trouble for the president’s allies in the midterm elections. Fair elections in 2026 and 2028 would not undo all of the damage Trump has done, but they would show that some observers have overstated his ability to demolish the constitutional system. Long live the regime!
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Today’s News
Iran allowed several Pakistan-flagged oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a move President Trump described as a “present” to the U.S. that signals Iran’s openness to negotiations.
Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, appeared in New York federal court for the first time since their seizure by U.S. authorities in January, as Maduro’s lawyer pushed to dismiss drug-trafficking charges, arguing that U.S. restrictions are preventing them from funding their defense. The couple—who have pleaded not guilty—remain in custody.
Several Senate Republicans are urging the White House to invoke the National Emergency Act and temporarily pay TSA officers if the Department of Homeland Security funding standoff over immigration enforcement continues, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: clavicular0 / Instagram
What Was Clavicular?
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Clav, as he’s known, has had a moment this year. Seemingly overnight, he became wildly popular among the lost boys of the internet—the kinds of people who spend their time watching Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, and Andrew Tate, the proudly misogynistic elder statesman of the manosphere, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking (he has denied the allegations). In January, Clavicular joined Tate, Fuentes, and the extremist podcaster Myron Gaines at a nightclub in Miami. Videos of the group listening to the Kanye West song “Heil Hitler” went viral; Clavicular was singing along.
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- Markets dip as Trump softens Strait of Hormuz ultimatum
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Early this morning, with Asian markets sharply down and oil tankers idling in the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump offered Iranian leaders a familiar mix of threats but also a reprieve. What had been, only days earlier, a 48-hour ultimatum—reopen the strait or face the destruction of energy infrastructure —softened into something more elastic: a five-day extension for what he described as “very good and productive” talks with Tehran.
The contours of the talks were not immediately clear, though Trump suggested while leaving Palm Beach this morning that both he and “the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is” should control the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. He boasted of “major points of agreement” and assured reporters that Iran, like the United States, wants “very much to make a deal.” Otherwise, he added, “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”
It was, by his telling, progress. By Tehran’s account, it was fiction.
The gap between Trump’s claims and Iran’s categorical denials underscores how little control either side has over the conflict—or its narrative. The White House is attempting to manage a large-scale military confrontation with an undefined exit strategy—a confrontation that is unnerving markets. As military strikes fail to reopen the waterway and allies worry about the expanding conflict, the administration is facing the limits of unilateral action.
Three foreign officials with knowledge of the U.S. efforts told us that Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has communicated with the Iranian government through Pakistan and other regional intermediaries in an effort to get the embattled regime to agree to demands regarding its nuclear program and uranium-enrichment efforts. They said that the U.S. presented a 15-point plan—based on the 15-point proposal presented to the Iranian government last year—to give the weakened regime a chance to concede and spare itself further bombardment. These officials, like others we spoke with, did so on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.
Vice President Vance spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today about efforts to restart talks with Iran, a person with knowledge of the discussions told us. Vance, whose long-held isolationist views have put him at odds with some in the administration—including the president—may also take part in talks in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, in the coming days, this person said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in a statement that the situation is fluid and that any “speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.” She added that the administration would not negotiate the conflict “through the press.” Iranian officials insist that there are no negotiations. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the Parliament speaker, dismissed Trump’s claims as market manipulation—they are an attempt, he said, to “escape the quagmire” and to reassure oil traders rattled by the strait’s closure.
The result is a war suspended between escalation and exit, its terms of victory as undefined now as they were at its outset.
Trump’s aides had previously urged him, advisers have told us, not to issue any ultimatums or deadlines that the U.S. would have difficulty enforcing—guidance that he followed for a time, even as his threats toward Tehran grew more belligerent. But the president grew frustrated late last week when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and refused to reopen it, even under heavy American and Israeli bombardment.
The strait’s closure sent oil prices soaring and stock markets tumbling, and it unnerved Republicans facing close elections this fall. (Trump has often taken the stock-market indexes to be the most important metric of presidential success.) By Saturday, Trump was seething that NATO allies had refused to help secure the strait—and that he had received criticism and negative news coverage for announcing that he was glad that Robert Mueller had died, two advisers who were aware of the president’s mindset over the weekend told us. That night, Trump issued his 48-hour ultimatum to Iran.
[Read: How much pain is Trump really willing to endure?]
But Iran showed no signs of budging, and some of Trump’s advisers and U.S. allies in the region warned that destroying Iran’s power infrastructure would be a mistake, one of those advisers and two other people familiar with the conversations told us. U.S. allies and experts warned that a strike of that nature might prompt Iran to attack its neighbors with much of its remaining arsenal.
And still, there would be no guarantees that the strait could be swiftly reopened. Allies also cautioned that extensive damage to Iran’s infrastructure might produce a failed state at the war’s end, which could create a refugee crisis and a dangerous breeding ground for terrorism and violence.
Since late last month, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed much of Iran’s senior leadership, the military campaign has moved quickly (but not smoothly) toward some of the administration’s discernible objectives. American forces have hit missile sites, naval assets, and fortified positions along Iran’s southern coast near the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has said that the bombing of Kharg Island, a centerpiece of Iran’s energy infrastructure, completely destroyed the island’s military sites, though oil facilities were conspicuously untouched.
The strait, effectively closed by threats of Iranian mines, drones, and attacks on ships, has proved more difficult to reopen than to threaten. Shipping traffic has dwindled. Insurance costs have spiked.
Trump is known to pay close attention to financial markets, and he announced the five-day extension just as Wall Street opened this morning. The markets immediately rebounded, and the price of oil fell. The president acknowledged the link to reporters soon after. “The price of oil will drop like a rock as soon as a deal is done,” he said. “I guess it already is today.”
One former administration official told us that even the prospect of resuming talks is enough to give Trump cover to extend his self-imposed deadline. It has also bought the president more time to consider whether he wants to deploy ground troops to the region, perhaps a strike force to seize Kharg Island. Such an operation—pushed vigorously in public and private by allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham—could force Iran to give up control of the strait but would also come at a cost: The fighting would likely be fierce, and Trump has expressed reluctance to risk numerous American casualties.
[Read: The Iran war’s next threat is to food and water ]
Allies, too, have hesitated to turn to force to reopen the strait. European and Indo-Pacific partners—Japan, Australia, and several NATO states—have resisted direct military involvement, instead urging diplomacy or limited escort missions through the strait. The coalition Trump once envisioned has not materialized.
Against this backdrop, the president’s messaging has grown more improvisational. On Truth Social, Trump has alternated between declaring overwhelming victory and calling for other nations to assume responsibility for the strait’s security. His suggestion today that the passage could soon reopen under U.S.–Iranian management lacks confirmation from Tehran. The strikes threatened on Iran’s power grid—once imminent—have been paused, not canceled, and made contingent on diplomatic momentum that one side insists exists and the other denies outright. Meanwhile, the fighting continues, with no clear end in sight.
- 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
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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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One U.S. crew member has been rescued after a fighter jet was shot down over Iran this morning; the status of the second crew member remains unclear as search efforts continue. A second U.S. warplane was hit by Iranian fire earlier today; the pilot is safe, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Netflix.
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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