The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Columnist
For the past few weeks, I have been arguing that Israel has inflicted the equivalent of a Six Day War-level defeat on Iran and its resistance network, and this would have vast consequences. Well, irony of ironies, the Assad family in Syria took power in 1971, in part because of Syria’s devastating defeat in the 1967 war. What goes around comes around.
Hold on to your hats, though; you haven’t seen anything yet. Here are five quick observations.
Funniest statement by any world leader so far: That award goes to … President-elect Donald Trump for his social media post: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Attention Mr. Trump: Syria is the keystone of the entire Middle East. It just collapsed like a blown-up bridge, creating vast new dangers and opportunities that everyone in the region will seize upon and react to. Staying out of this is not on the menu, especially when we have several hundred U.S. troops stationed in Eastern Syria. We need to figure out our interests and use the events in Syria to drive them, because everyone else will be doing just that.
Biggest U.S. interest: This is also a no-brainer. It’s that this uprising in Syria in the long run triggers a pro-democracy uprising in Iran. In the short run, it is sure to trigger a power struggle between the moderates there — President Masoud Pezeshkian and his vice president, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — and the Revolutionary Guards hard-liners. We need to shape that struggle. The events in Syria, on top of Iran’s military defeat by Israel, have left Tehran naked. This means that Iran’s leaders will now have to choose — quickly — between rushing for a nuclear bomb to save their regime or getting rid of the bomb in a deal with Trump, if he takes regime change off the table. That is why, Mr. Trump, to put it in your typeface: WE CAN’T HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
Biggest known unknown: Who are the rebels who took over Syria and what do they really want? A pluralistic democracy, or an Islamic state? History tells us that in these movements the hard-line Islamists usually win out. But I am watching and hoping it will be otherwise.
My biggest worry expressed in a single headline: That goes to Haaretz in Israel: “Post-Assad Syria Is in Danger of Being Run by Out-of-control Militias.” We are at a moment in the history of the Middle East where there are many countries that I would describe as “too late for imperialism, but they failed at self-government.” I am talking about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. That is, no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize them, but they have failed at being able to manage their own pluralism and forge social contracts to create stability and growth. We have never been here before in the post-World War II era — a moment when so many countries have descended into this Hobbesian state of nature, but in a much more connected world.
This is why, having just spent the past week in Beijing and Shanghai, I repeatedly told my Chinese interlocutors: “You think we are enemies. You are wrong. We have a common enemy: Disorder. How we collaborate to shrink the World of Disorder and grow The World of Order is what history will judge us both for.” (Not sure they got it, but they will.)
Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria: “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, then to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
Opinion Columnist
The stunning collapse of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, a family business since the 1970s, is a geopolitical earthquake creating winners and losers around the world. First, the losers:
Iran is a big loser; Syria has been a close ally and a vital overland transport link to Lebanon and Hezbollah. Iran supported Syria as President Bashar al-Assad fought to remain in power during the country’s horrifying civil war, and it used Syria to project power around the region. Iran has already been badly weakened in recent months, and this adds to the sense that Iran’s regime is possibly vulnerable and certainly a lesser power.
One question is whether all this adds to the arguments within Iran’s leadership to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Russia likewise loses an important ally and it will presumably also lose its valuable military bases in Syria. In 2015, Moscow intervened militarily to back the Assad regime in the civil war, dropping bombs on civilian targets and adding to its unpopularity among citizens.
Russia particularly values its naval base at Tartus, which allows it to support warships in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah backed Assad in the Syrian civil war, and it depended on weapons shipped from Iran through Syria to Lebanon. The Assad regime for decades interfered violently in Lebanese politics. That said, Hezbollah remains a significant force in Lebanon, even if weakened.
The Alawite sect in Syria, an offshoot of Shiite Islam amounting to perhaps 10 percent or more of Syrians, will now be at risk. The Assads were Alawites, and Alawites were resented for the privileges they enjoyed. I would be terrified if I were an Alawite in Syria today.
I worry that Syrian Christians, who had to some degree been protected by the Assads, may also be targeted and harassed, and that women will lose rights. The triumphant forces aren’t the Taliban, but they are a step in that direction. That said, the civil war in Syria hurt everyone, including women and Christians.
So who are the winners as Syria changes hands?
Sunni Muslim Islamists have been savagely suppressed in Syria for decades, and they are finally in charge. The new leadership includes forces that had been involved in Islamic State and Al Qaeda, although they have disavowed that extremism. We’ll see. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m wary.
Israel gains, at least for a time, by the weakening of enemies like Iran and Hezbollah, not to mention the Assad regime itself. But having a hard-line Islamist regime next door, if that’s the direction Syria goes, may not be great for the long term.
Turkey wins influence next door. It may use that influence to try to rein in Kurds around the region.
The United States may also gain in the sense that Russia and Iran are clear losers, but much depends on what comes next. I’m hopeful that Austin Tice, an American journalist believed imprisoned in Syria since 2012, may be freed and allowed home. Releasing him would be a way for Syria’s new leadership to show its bona fides.
Anyone who values human rights has to feel relief at the departure of the Assad regime. But we’ve also seen how hard-line Islamists can rule in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I fear revenge attacks in Syria. So two cheers for the overthrow of Assad, but be vigilant about what comes next. One hard lesson I’ve learned from covering the world: Sometimes what follows a terrible regime is just as bad, or even worse.
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Opinion Columnist
Things could still go badly for Syria following the abrupt downfall of Bashar al-Assad on Saturday and the end of 54 years of ruinous Assad family rule.
The Islamist militia that led the revolt, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant), has old ties to Al Qaeda and remains on the U.S. list of designated terrorist organizations, though its leader now disavows terrorism. The experience of post-revolutionary Arab states — whether in Yemen, Libya, Tunisia or Egypt — has not been a happy one.
Foreign powers, particularly Turkey, may seek to replace Iran’s former dominance in the country with their own. And Syria’s ethnic and sectarian divisions among Alawites, Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs could still prove explosive, with spillover effects in Jordan, Lebanon and other neighbors.
Yet this is also a moment of opportunity for a country that has mainly known dictatorship since it became independent in the 1940s. Political prisoners — including one former pilot who spent 43 years in prison for refusing to bomb the regime’s domestic opponents — are being freed. Millions of Syrians driven from their homes by 13 years of civil war and repression have a chance to return.
The country can also put an end to the quasi-occupation by the foreign military powers that propped up Assad’s rule: Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Russian military. The sight of Syrians ransacking Iran’s embassy in Damascus — with portraits of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and the I.R.G.C.’s Qassim Suleimani torn to shreds — is evidence of just what Syrians think of the “Axis of Resistance” led by Tehran.
It’s a good thing that Syrians are the principal agents of their own liberation. But it’s no secret that Assad’s downfall was largely brought about because his allies no longer had the will or wherewithal to defend him. The Russian air force, whose planes smashed Aleppo in 2016, was too enfeebled by losses in Ukraine to do much in Syria. Hezbollah, decimated by Israel’s exploding pagers, airstrikes and ground incursions, could no longer provide Assad with the foot soldiers he once used to starve his people into submission.
As for Iran, Israel’s retaliatory strike in late October on key military facilities left it too weakened and exposed to save Assad. Tehran is now rapidly withdrawing its once-considerable military presence in Syria. Cut off from this military supply chain, Hezbollah has never been in a more precarious position, giving the Lebanese people their own rare opportunity to bring this terrorist militia to heel and restore their sovereignty after decades of de facto Syrian and Iranian occupation.
Victory, as the saying goes, has a thousand fathers. But credit for Syria’s liberation from Assad must also be given for Israel’s courageous decisions to ignore calls for cease-fire and pursue its enemies — whether in Gaza, Beirut, Hodeidah, Damascus, or Tehran. Each of these actions was denounced at the time for risking “escalation.” But victory over terrorists and tyrants has a way of paying dividends for the victorious and defeated alike.
Let’s hope the next leaders in Syria recognize the debt and finally seek peace, after 76 years of fruitless rejection, with their Jewish neighbor.
Opinion Writer
A five-seat advantage in the House. This is what Speaker Mike Johnson has to look forward to in the 119th Congress. There will be 220 Republicans to 215 Democrats. One of the chamber’s skinniest majorities ever.
Except that, for the first few months, Johnson won’t even have that much of a cushion, thanks to Donald Trump raiding the conference for his cabinet. Starting out, there will be only 217 Republicans, meaning that even one defection could torpedo a bill being pushed through along party lines. In the House, a tie vote means a bill fails. Think about it: All it would take to tank a Republican measure would be for, say, Nancy Mace to miss the vote because she was out gender-policing the Capitol’s restrooms.
To contend with this extremely ugly math, Johnson will need to trot out some next-level leadership, transforming himself into a combination cat herder, couple’s therapist and hostage negotiator. Even in this MAGA-fied Republican Party, there are diverging needs and visions.
The conference’s smattering of suburban moderates cannot afford to look extreme, even as the Trumpian die-hards are feeling empowered to let their freak flags fly. With zero room for error, every single Republican member is a do-or-die vote able to make ulcer-inducing demands, from Lauren Boebert to Brian Fitzpatrick. And when it comes to advancing Trump’s Big Plans, Johnson probably shouldn’t count on his previous go-to move of having the Democrats bail him out.
Daddy Trump can certainly help with the heavy bullying, but there appear to be some heated, heartfelt disputes on the not-so-distant horizon over taxes, spending cuts, immigration, you name it. I’m sure we’re all looking forward to another debt-ceiling throwdown.
How’s this for an extra wrinkle: Republicans lawmakers are already jockeying to win over Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the leaders of Trump’s hyped-up, non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, to their budgetary visions. Some members want DOGE to drum up support for slashing discretionary spending. Others note that mandatory entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid are the real debt drivers — another tough math problem that some House conservatives can’t seem to get “through their rock head,” grumped Representative David Joyce, a Republican on the appropriations committee, to Politico.
And did I mention that Marjorie Taylor Greene managed to get herself put in charge of House panel tasked with working closely with DOGE? I don’t know about you, but when I think efficiency, I definitely think MTG.
I am more than a little fascinated to see how Musk and this whole DOGE business complicate an already complicated congressional landscape — and how Johnson manages to deal with the compounded craziness. The unfolding drama promises to add some sizzle to the new year.
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Opinion Columnist
Peter Westbrook, a six-time Olympic fencer, was a force of nature.
So when my daughter called me this week to say he had died after years of treatment for liver cancer, it landed heavily on me, as it did for her.
Westbrook, 72, was the founder of the Peter Westbrook Foundation, which introduced young people — many of them Black and underprivileged — to the world of fencing.
That foundation is where my daughter took up the sport. Westbrook had identified her talent and offered her weekday lessons. And once you were in his “family,” he was nurturer, soother and patriarch from that point forward.
Westbrook was a second father — or maybe even a primary one — to many of the children in his program, including my daughter.
It was impossible to be dreary in his presence.
His face had molded itself to allow his toothy smile to perpetually sit in it. Cheer was his default setting. He was a ball of energy and light.
Until the end, he held on to a boyishness, an endearing lightheartedness — goofiness, the children might say — that was precious and priceless.
He not only taught his students how to be amazing athletes and scholars, but he also showed them what it was to live and be alive, how to build community, how a relentless pursuit of passion was a manifestation of its own kind of love.
The way he would counsel crestfallen athletes after a tough loss, making sure that they understood that their confidence was not crushed, making them understand that in many cases just making it to the match at all — a step into this traditionally white and wealthy world — was itself a victory.
And it was in that environment of deep caring and devotion that he built an Olympic dynasty of Black fencers. Since 2000, most of the Black fencers the United States sent to the Olympics were part of Westbrook’s foundation.
It isn’t often in life that you meet truly transformative figures, people whose vision of their purpose and mission in life is so clear that it forces you to question yours, whose commitment to a single, benevolent good is so unwavering that you are left in awe of it.
Peter Westbrook was one of those people.
I will miss the days when he found me on the border of my daughter’s strip, a knot of anxieties. “Hi, dad. How’s she doing?” His smile wide and spirit easy, he calmed me. And more important, he calmed her. In his presence, the world shifted, and it settled.
Editorial Board Member
For 20 years, New York City has done very little to build new housing, a grave mistake that drove rents out of control, making it increasingly difficult for many people to live in the nation’s largest city.
Finally, though, the city may be on the verge of changing course.
The City Council is expected to vote Thursday on a plan that would make it significantly easier to build housing throughout the five boroughs. It would slash archaic and onerous zoning rules that limit even the most modest attempts to build housing at every turn.
The plan, known as City of Yes, is expected to yield 80,000 units of new housing over the next 15 years. That’s just a tiny fraction of what the city needs, but the plan is still a win because it signals that the Democrats who run New York are at last willing to override longstanding opposition — often from their own constituents — to build the housing the city needs to grow.
The plan works by changing the citywide zoning law to allow for the building of three-, four- and five-story apartment buildings along pre-existing retail corridors and near transit centers. It would make it easier to convert offices and other spaces, such as church parking lots, into housing. And it’s particularly promising that the plan is designed to incentivize modest development throughout the city, rather than in a few discrete locations.
If the plan is enacted into law as expected, it would be a significant achievement for Mayor Eric Adams and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.
In many places in the United States, encouraging this kind of development and slashing regulations to do it is seen as good business. In New York, it has been nearly impossible. One reason is that Democratic officials have until very recently faced little political competition, so building new housing in established neighborhoods — wealthy and not — wasn’t considered worth the electoral risk of angering the small but vocal group of residents who don’t want more development of any kind.
As mayors tinkered rather than built, middle-income New Yorkers began to leave the city. Over half of all city residents spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent, while one-third of residents spend half of their income on rent. The homeless shelter population has exploded, a tragedy only compounded by the arrival of more than 220,000 migrants. One in eight schoolchildren in the city is living in a homeless shelter.
Donald Trump’s increasing support in New York City appears finally to have shaken Democrats awake to the realization that inaction on housing is politically untenable, and the City of Yes plan looks to be headed for approval.
The leading Democrats running for mayor against Adams next year are also signaling serious support for more development. The housing plan unveiled by State Senator Zellnor Myrie this week is ambitious as well as creative, and would build housing wherever possible, including on city-owned land and in sites alongside industrial areas. Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is also running for mayor, told me he too is a strong proponent of more housing production. He has already championed the Gowanus neighborhood rezoning in Brooklyn.
For too many years, no statistic, not even homeless children, has been sufficient to move the Democrats who run the state and city to risk real political capital to start building housing. It turns out that may require political competition.
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Opinion Columnist
The nominee for defense secretary was in trouble for carousing, transgressing with women and liquor.
President George H.W. Bush was trying to save his choice, so he assigned a top White House official to have a private chat with two New York Times White House reporters.
Gerald Boyd and I went over to the White House one cold day in February 1989 to hear what the official had to say about John Tower, a Texas senator and a former chair of the Armed Services Committee, so diminutive that he could barely peek over the top of some lecterns. Could the president justify putting a man in charge of the Pentagon who was prone to drunkenness and chasing secretaries around desks?
What if, the official asked us in a wheedling tone, Tower gave up hard liquor and drank only white wine?
Gerald and I just stared at the official. This guy was going to start bargaining with us over the type of alcohol that Tower could drink?
What if, the official pressed on, Tower had only two glasses of wine a night?
Gerald and I were nonplused to find ourselves the arbiters of louche behavior, pulled into a negotiating session over inebriants. What next? Tower would promise to chase only one secretary a week?
What if, the official said, in a last desperate bid, Tower had only one glass of wine a night?
White House officials kept trying to make a deal. They told Gerald that Tower had told the president and two key senators that he was sticking to two glasses of wine a day on the advice of doctors who had treated him for a malignant polyp in his colon. But doctors interviewed by Gerald said that this sort of advice for that sort of health problem was puzzling. The White House also volunteered that Tower’s medical reports showed no evidence of liver damage. What if, Bush officials asked, senators were allowed to choose a physician who would be permitted to interview Tower’s physicians?
In the end, the Senate rejected Tower’s nomination, the first time since 1959 that the chamber had refused to consent to a president’s cabinet nominee. It was shocking, given how clubby the Senate was in those days and how freewheeling many senators were. Some of the senators who went up to vote against Tower had alcohol on their breath.
Bush learned the hard way what Donald Trump will learn with Pete Hegseth: Sometimes you have to cut your losses. As William Gladstone said, the first requisite of a good prime minister is to be a good butcher.
Contributing Opinion Writer
Robert Byrd, the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, was steeped in the classics and in the history of the Senate. “Julius Caesar did not seize power in Rome,” Byrd declaimed on the Senate floor in 1993. “The Roman Senate thrust power on Caesar deliberately, with forethought, with surrender, with intent to escape from responsibility.”
In January, when the next Senate begins holding confirmation hearings, we’ll learn how many Senate Republicans will cede power to Donald Trump. With a 53-to-47 Republican majority, it will take only four Republicans to reject Trump’s assault on their constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on nominations to his cabinet.
The contours of this constitutional struggle aren’t clear yet, but I see two battles brewing. The first — a kind of test vote — could revolve around the nomination of Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Now that the Trump team has agreed to allow the F.B.I. to conduct background checks on nominees (though it’s not clear whether every nominee will be scrutinized), what will the Senate do if those checks turn up negative information? A damaging F.B.I. report on allegations that Hegseth sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 — combined with his poor record as a manager of two veterans organizations and his alcoholism — might threaten his nomination.
The second battle would occur if Trump then tries to push Hegseth or other rejected nominees into office by appointing them after forcing Congress to recess (perhaps aided by a House-sanctioned adjournment), circumventing the Senate confirmation process. Then we would have a full-on constitutional crisis.
Just as two former Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, became household names when they challenged President Biden on some issues, might a handful of “constitutional Republicans” emerge early next year to stand up to Trump on the separation of powers?
It’s not naïve to think that many senators will want to hang on to their power. World-weary Democrats outside the Senate think Susan Collins’s assurances will melt like early December snow on first contact with Trump. But Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn and Mike Rounds have all been quoted in recent days referring to their solemn obligations under the advice and consent provisions of the Constitution and they just may mean it.
Mitch McConnell is stepping down as party leader but will assume the chairmanship of the Senate Rules Committee in order to protect Senate traditions and prerogatives. A few other Senate Republicans show no signs of being afraid of Trump. Bill Cassidy voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial and Todd Young, like Collins, Murkowski and Cassidy, refused to endorse him this year.
That’s seven possible constitutional Republicans and there could be more. The MAGA world’s choice for Senate majority leader, Rick Scott, won only 13 out of 48 Republican votes last month. The vote was by secret ballot but still significant. The winner, John Thune, said recess appointments were on the table, but that was meaningless; everyone acknowledges their utility in limited circumstances and Thune, too, made a point of standing up for the Senate’s independence.
Words only? We’ll see. In a 1998 lecture in the Old Senate Chamber, Byrd told his colleagues that they must be “eternally vigilant” in protecting their constitutional powers from the encroachments of a “despotic” executive.
The choice for the Senate in 2025 is clear: Hail the founders — or Caesar.
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Opinion Columnist
The Federal Trade Commission just took much-needed action against a company and its subsidiaries. You’ve probably never heard of those companies, but they’ve probably heard of you. More accurately, they know where you’ve been. Exactly where you’ve been.
A clinic providing reproductive services? A protest? The new place you just moved, while trying to hide the address from an abusive ex or a stalker? They know.
Earlier investigations revealed that the companies, Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel, got that data through innocuous-looking apps, including weather and navigation apps. They sold that location data to third parties, including but not just law enforcement agencies. One minute you’re checking whether it’s raining, the next thing you know, immigration police are at the door, asking why you were visiting a migrant shelter. No need for a warrant, just a payment to a corporation will do.
These companies also sold, the F.T.C. says, “health or medical decisions, political activities and religious viewpoints” that they derived from the location data.
The new F.T.C. proposed order would ban these companies from selling “sensitive location data except in limited circumstances involving national security and law enforcement.” This would include places such as medical facilities, religious organizations, correctional facilities, labor unions, schools, shelters and military installations.
Also this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published new rules that would limit how credit data can be distributed — especially addresses, which are currently part of many people’s regular credit files. (If you receive a credit card or statements at home, your address is on there.) At the moment, marketers can easily purchase that data, and those purchases can result in more than just annoying ads.
Investigators from the publication 404 Media found that criminals can then purchase sensitive personal data for about $15 per person in Telegram groups where “members offer services for a price, such as shooting up a house, armed robberies, stabbings, and assault.”
The C.F.P.B. aims to limit distribution of such data to what’s defined as “legitimate purposes” under current financial laws, such as issuing credit or insurance or employer background checks.
To this, I’d say: Don’t get your hopes up. The proposed F.T.C. rule and C.F.P.B. guidance could easily be reversed under a new administration, and it’s not even certain if those agencies will survive the government dismantling Donald Trump has promised.
It’s a pity that Congress never passed proper privacy laws, so whatever the agencies can do will be limited and easily reversible.
Checking whether it will rain or playing a mobile game (another common source for such sensitive data) shouldn’t come at such a high cost, but when lawmakers don’t do what they should, that’s exactly what happens.
Editorial Board Member
At first glance, the imposition of martial law in South Korea on Tuesday appeared to be yet another ominous sign for democracies around the world. President Yoon Suk Yeol suspended “all political activities” for the first time since the country was a dictatorship in the 1980s. He claimed that it was the only way to save it from “the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people.”
It didn’t pass the smell test. Sure, North Korea is a threat, but it has always been a threat. Yoon, who is deeply unpopular, has been locked in an intractable political dispute with the opposition, which has blocked his budget, investigated his wife for corruption and attempted a flurry of impeachments. It may be hard to imagine a country more polarized than the United States, but South Korea fits the bill.
But Yoon’s effort turned into a victory for the South Korean people. Protesters pushed back. Lawmakers voted unanimously to lift martial law, with some of them reportedly climbing fences to get back into the National Assembly building to vote. Even Han Dong-hoon, the leader of Yoon’s conservative People Power Party, said it was “wrong” to impose martial law and vowed to help stop it.
It worked. By early Wednesday in Seoul, Yoon was forced to back down and announced that he would rescind the order.
It was inspiring, and crucial, because in the absence of international pressure, domestic opposition will become all that stands in the way of the dismantling of democratic norms. In the past, a U.S. ally might have feared attracting harsh words or consequences from Washington for taking such an undemocratic action. This episode suggests that that’s not the case anymore. The State Department had a tepid response, saying only that the decision to impose martial law was “concerning” and that disputes should be resolved peacefully and according to the rule of law.
Yoon was already looking ahead to the Trump administration, which is far more likely to turn a blind eye to strongmen who use undemocratic means to quash the opposition. The South Korean Embassy in Washington has already hired Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying firm associated with the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to The Korea Herald.
People who are trying to preserve their own democracies can’t count on the U.S. government to come to their rescue anymore, if they ever could. But the protesters in Seoul have just shown that if enough ordinary people fight for democratic values, those values will endure.
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Opinion Culture editor
Reports of the demise of moviegoing may be greatly exaggerated: In the last week, theaters drew the biggest five-day Thanksgiving box-office return ever, driven by “Moana 2,” which set a Thanksgiving record, along with “Wicked” and “Gladiator 2,” which both continued to draw massive crowds in their second week.
The nature of these films tempered some observers’ enthusiasm, prompting the reliable complaint that Hollywood is addicted to fattening up on sequels, prequels, franchises and familiar fare. But maybe this boffo Thanksgiving will put that objection to rest and allow us to express some overdue gratitude for the sequel — a oft-maligned industry staple that has long proved its commercial and artistic worth.
The case against sequels has always been that they’re nothing but lazy retreads that crowds out more interesting and original work. While you could justify, say, “The Godfather 2” as part of an epic ongoing saga, every “Jaws 2,” “Speed 2” or “Staying Alive” seemed like a cynical, dispiriting cash grab.
Yet surveying the 50 years since that second Godfather film, you could fill a festival with gold standard follow-ups. “Aliens,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Creed” are just a few sequels that equaled or surpassed the originals. Sequels have also become an intriguing tool for expanding, interrogating or complicating a story. Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy — ”Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight” — is as ambitious an examination of the arc of a relationship as Hollywood has ever attempted, and it could only have been attempted in the form of three films, spanning decades.
In addition to their artistic merits, sequels can provide commercial ballast exactly when Hollywood needs it. The reliable success of sequels can symbiotically support the production of riskier original blockbusters — films like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — in the way that, for publishing houses, best-selling cookbooks help finance literary hits.
It’s no secret that Hollywood is hurting — so if it takes a reconfigured TV series or a Denzel Washington-centric legacy sequel to revive the patient, we should be grateful for any signs of recovering health. As for “Wicked,” it’s not a sequel but its success is no less welcome — not least because its sequel is already set to be released, no doubt to great success, this time next year.
Opinion Columnist
OK, I’m pretty sure when you began your week, you weren’t thinking, “Gee, I hope Joe Biden follows up Thanksgiving with a pardon for his delinquent son.”
I can’t really argue that this was a good move, particularly considering how many times Biden promised it would never happen. There are, however, a couple of lines of defense.
One is the whole Biden story. He’s been with us so long — so veeerrry long — that we’ve sort of forgotten how he lost his wife and daughter in a car crash back in 1972 and how Beau, the star son of that first marriage, died of brain cancer, leaving Hunter as the only surviving child.
While there apparently hasn’t ever been a presidential pardon for a son before now, we have had some other incidents that make the Hunter story look sort of second-rate.
Remember, for instance, Donald Trump’s pardon of Charles Kushner, father-in-law of Ivanka, after he pleaded guilty to a deeply, deeply disgusting crime involving the hiring of a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law into a motel so …
OK, not going into detail. You can read about it in the stories covering Trump’s announcement that he’s going to make Kushner the ambassador to France in his next administration.
Truly, compared with that, Biden’s decision to let his son off the hook for tax offenses and having lied about his drug use when buying a gun seems less shocking. At least he didn’t make Hunter ambassador to a major international ally.
The big problem with Biden’s badness is that he’d specifically promised never to pardon Hunter and that he blamed the about-face on “raw politics” that “led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Nobody believes that, Joe. If only you’d said: “Look, I know this is wrong, but I can’t stand the idea of my troubled son being shipped off to prison. Other parents will understand. I’d rather risk the stain on my reputation than let anything else happen to my boy.”
We’d have known it was wrong, but we’d at least have appreciated that it was true.
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Last week I argued that the blows Israel inflicted on Iran and its most important proxy, Hezbollah, would have vast consequences for the military balance in the region. It has only taken a few days for those consequences to start showing up. Donald Trump reportedly wants the region’s conflicts quieted down by the time he comes to office. Hey — good luck with that.
For starters, with Iran and Hezbollah weakened by Israel, the leader they were protecting most, the beleaguered Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, took a body blow in the last few days when anti-government rebels in Syria swept in from their countryside redoubts and swept out Assad’s army from virtually all of Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria. Alas, though, many of these Syrian rebels are not boy scouts — the group leading the charge, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a former Al Qaeda affiliate — and if Assad were toppled from power in Damascus, Syria, it could draw Israel in and destabilize the whole Levant.
Interestingly, Turkey, which backs some of these rebel groups and had been restraining them, may have given the green light for the attack. Turkey has long been Iran’s archrival for regional domination.
At the same time, a Western intelligence source tells me, a rancorous debate is afoot within Iran’s leadership over who is responsible for letting Hezbollah drag both Iran and Hezbollah into a devastating war with Israel — on behalf of Hamas — when Israel had not even attacked Hezbollah. As a result, Hezbollah’s rocket forces, meant to deter Israel from ever bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, have now been shattered.
Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah, which had become the army of the Shiites of Lebanon and imposed itself as the sacred third part of the country’s trinity — “the army, the people and the resistance” — to which every Lebanese leader had to pay homage, has dramatically lost support.
Israel was so surgical in its bombing inside Lebanon, trying to hit only Hezbollah targets and pro-Hezbollah neighborhoods, that it sent the message: “If you live in places that are loyal to the Lebanese state, you are safe, but if you stay in places Hezbollah controls, you are not safe,” explained Hanin Ghaddar, an expert on Hezbollah at The Washington Institute.
The message to Lebanese Shiites: Move away from Hezbollah and sign up for the new trinity: the people, the army and the state.
I would not count Hezbollah out, but it is going to be hard-pressed to come up with the money from Iran to pay for the reconstruction of all the neighborhoods and villages it controlled that have been devastated. And without that money and a resupply of arms from Iran, the other Lebanese political parties will surely try to remove Hezbollah’s veto power in the cabinet over who can be Lebanon’s next president and prime minister.
A senior U.S. official remarked to me, though, that precisely because Iran is so wounded now, it may feel that the only way to protect itself is by making a mad dash for a nuclear bomb. The Middle East will be anything but “over” when Trump arrives.
Opinion Columnist
If Democrats want to understand one of the reasons the Republican Party is ascendant, they can look to President Biden’s pardon on Sunday for his son Hunter. In its rank mendacity, political hypocrisy, naked self-dealing and wretched example, it typifies so much of what so many Americans have come to detest about what the MAGA world calls “the swamp.”
Start with the mendacity. Last December, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, insisted, “I’ve been very clear: The president is not going to pardon his son.” The president reiterated the point in early June, when he told ABC’s David Muir that he would not pardon Hunter if his son was convicted, as he later was, of three felony charges related to his purchase of a gun while he was addicted to drugs. The younger Biden also faced separate criminal tax charges.
It was always a good bet that the president would break his word as soon as it was politically safe to do so. But he doubled down on dishonesty in his statement about the pardon, claiming Hunter’s prosecution was a result of “political pressure” on the judicial process. Nonsense. The charges stem from Hunter’s reckless lifestyle, abetted and financed by his willingness to trade shamelessly on the family name. A previous plea agreement between Hunter and federal prosecutors fell apart last year under scrutiny from a federal judge.
More obnoxious is the hypocrisy. Every year, federal prosecutors file hundreds of cases against persons charged with lying on the Firearms Transaction Record, or Form 4473, which is required from anyone buying a firearm from a licensed gun dealer. In 1993, then-Senator Biden made that form a key part of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. How is it that the same president who made both gun control and stricter tax enforcement key parts of his political message suddenly sees his own son’s transgressions as nuisance offenses?
As for the self-dealing, it’s touching that the president invoked his feelings as “a father” in letting his son off the legal hook. Too bad that luxury isn’t available to so many other parents who watch helplessly as their children run afoul of the law — and pay the legal consequence.
After the news of the pardon broke, a liberal friend wrote to say that perhaps it wasn’t such a big deal, at least when considering Donald Trump’s choices for attorney general and F.B.I. director. OK. But when a Democratic president behaves as Biden just did, it fuels the corrosive public cynicism that helped elect Trump yet again while licensing and excusing whatever plans the president-elect may have for politicizing justice and using it for the benefit of friends, family and self.
What a degrading finale for Biden’s feeble, forgettable, frequently foolish presidency.
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Opinion Columnist
The perfect expression of the authoritarian approach to the rule of law comes from a former Peruvian president, Óscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” The truly corrupted legal system combines impunity for the ruling class with punitive repression of political dissent.
When Jack Smith moved to dismiss his federal cases against Donald Trump, that clearly signaled Trump’s impunity. It was a representation of the adage that might makes right. He won, so he now enjoys a privilege from prosecution.
The selection of Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I. — a move that would require firing or forcing the resignation of Christopher Wray, the current F.B.I. director, well before the end of his 10-year term — demonstrates Trump’s commitment to repression and revenge.
Patel is the ultimate Trump loyalist. I strongly recommend reading Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Patel in The Atlantic. Much of her reporting was based on interviews with Patel’s former colleagues in the first Trump administration.
“Patel was dangerous,” Calabro wrote, summarizing their thoughts, “not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the C.I.A. or F.B.I., but because he appeared to have no plan at all — his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow.”
Patel is so absurdly devoted to Trump that he wrote a children’s book about Trump, called “The Plot Against the King,” in which he describes the Russia investigation as a plot by “Hillary Queenton” against “King Donald.”
In December 2023, he told Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
“We’re going to come after you,” he continued, “whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out.”
To be clear, this isn’t conventional tough-on-crime language. He’s not telling criminals that he’s coming after them. Instead, he’s clearly targeting people who blocked Trump’s illegal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Biden did not rig a presidential election. Trump lost.
The danger to the rule of law is magnified by the circumstances. Wray is a Trump appointee, and his term doesn’t end until 2027. The only reason to replace him is to find someone who is more responsive to Trump.
Trump has clearly learned the lessons of his first term. When he nominates establishment Republicans, they’ll often (but not always) resist his worst and most unconstitutional impulses. Even Bill Barr, his second hand-picked attorney general, drew the line when Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.
But now he’s nominating people who possess few, if any, moral lines at all. The danger of Patel isn’t primarily his ideology; it’s his loyalty. He is, as Calabro wrote, “the man who will do anything for Donald Trump.”
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