Last week, the House of Representatives adopted 29 bipartisan recommendations from the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Among them are plans to improve the House's record of staff diversity and retention — including better ways to address the needs of entry-level staff, the annual legion of congressional interns included.
Our group caters to students who are passionate about public service and come from low-income backgrounds or are in the first generation of their family to attend college. We help them get placed in offices throughout the House and Senate, but now they are among the most vulnerable communities on Capitol Hill.
While Congress is facing an extended period with most staffers on telework, possible layoffs of contract employees, and potentially an extensive adjournment in the wake of the novel coronavirus, we implore lawmakers to think of how this can impact the thousands of interns now positioned on the Hill — as well as those planning to intern in Washington this summer.
The Trump administration is still determining how to bolster our nation's markets in the wake of this economic shock and further contain the spread of the virus. If one of the solutions is for Congress to do almost all of its work remotely, who will keep the Hill's lights on?
Historically, you can thank congressional interns for this. The people answering phones, fielding requests, and communicating with visiting constituents in most congressional offices are the college students, recent graduates, parents and veterans who are so passionate about public service that they are willing to work as interns just to be involved in running our nation's government.
Earlier this year, Congress appropriated an additional $17 million to support these internships, but it is at the discretion of each member's office whether to use the money to pay the interns for their time. In the wake of a possible government suspension, College to Congress urges members to keep their interns' livelihoods in mind when considering the wellbeing of their staff. We implore individual congressional offices to remember your interns when making telework arrangements.
Retaining current paid interns, hiring paid summer interns and keeping interns onboard during the coronavirus crisis would not only help ensure a smooth continuation of government, but it would also protects the financial wellbeing of these important workers in a time of high economic anxiety.
College to Congress is grateful for the abundance of caution that our government is taking, and we implore you to keep the most junior and most vulnerable members of your staff in mind as you move forward in your pandemic response planning.
And those congressional interns currently living in the D.C. area who are unable to telework, or who find themselves postponing or ending their internships prematurely? Please contact College to Congress for advice on returning to Washington after this crisis passes.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.