In February of this year, Kristina Becvar and I published a column in The Fulcrum reaffirming our mission amid a barrage of executive orders from the Trump Administration. We sought to clarify our role—not as partisan commentators, but as stewards of fact-based reporting and healthy self-governance.
We wrote then:
“Our challenge as a publication, dedicated to keeping our readers informed so we can repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives, is not to be overly reactive or partisan. At the same time, we must not ignore the dangers of the administration's degrading, hostile, and accusatory language and dangerous actions when they occur, while also acknowledging inappropriate responses when they occur.”
We continued:
“The Fulcrum must be mindful of the fact that Trump won a plurality of the vote and currently has a majority approval rating. If we are to serve our mission of engaging a broad spectrum of citizens from the left, right, and center in the political process, all working together to face tough challenges facing our nation, we must be mindful of this fact.
We believe it is our obligation to acknowledge that a varying percentage of the administration's statements and actions have merit and are based on truth while, at the same time, not normalizing the language Trump uses or understating the devastating impact many of his executive orders or other actions are having on millions of people in the United States and around the world.”
Since that column, The Fulcrum has published numerous pieces that have criticized President Trump for inflammatory rhetoric and for actions perceived as threats to constitutional norms, the rule of law, and the integrity of our elections. We will continue to do so—without hesitation and without apology.
But we must also resist the gravitational pull of binary thinking.
Too often, citizens, media outlets, and political leaders treat politics as a zero-sum game—where acknowledging an opponent’s success is seen as a personal or ideological loss. The Fulcrum rejects this premise. We will not be party to a worldview that sees governance as warfare and truth as tribal.
With that in mind, we recognize a significant development in the Middle East: an agreement that has led to the release of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and that may lay the groundwork for a broader cease-fire in Gaza. President Donald Trump played a meaningful role in facilitating this outcome. While it is premature to declare this a historic peace accord, the hostage release marks the first step in a complex 20-point peace plan.
This is a powerful beginning. President Trump deserves credit for being fully engaged and for offering unconventional solutions that led to the release of hostages. His involvement, while not without rhetorical overreach—declaring peace achieved and forecasting a bright future for Gaza—nonetheless represents a commendable contribution to a fragile moment of progress.
As a nation, we must learn to hold praise and concern in the same breath. Truth is rarely binary. Americans are often seduced by partisan reflexes—embracing information that confirms their beliefs and dismissing evidence that challenges them. This tendency, while human, can blind us to the good deeds of those we dislike and the harmful actions of those we admire.
A healthy democracy demands more than loyalty; it requires discernment.
We must commit to a new politics of problem-solving—one grounded in reason, logic, and inquiry, where conclusions follow from evidence, not ideology. This new politics must create space for people of differing views to sit together, grapple with hard truths, and make the decisions that everyone knows must be made.
To do this, we must move beyond the blame game.
The challenges we face—climate instability, economic inequality, and democratic fragility are too complex for a simple “for or against” mindset. Meeting them requires rising above reflexive partisanship and embracing a more thoughtful, principled engagement.
At The Fulcrum, we remain committed to that path. Not because it is easy, but because it is necessary.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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.