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From left to right: Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer and France's President Emmanuel Macron hold a meeting during a summit at Lancaster House on March 2, 2025, in London, England.
It is among the most familiar patterns of the Trump era. First, the president says or does something weird, rude or otherwise norm-defying. Some elected Republicans object, and the response from Trump and his minions is to shoot the messenger. The dynamic holds constant whether it’s big (January 6 pardons) or small (tweeting “covfefe” just after midnight).
The essence of this low-road-for-me-high-road-for-thee dynamic rests on the belief that Trumpism is a one-way road. Insulting Trump, deservedly or not, is forbidden, while Trump’s antics should be celebrated when possible, defended when necessary, or ignored when neither of those responses is possible. But he should never, ever face consequences for his own actions.
This was the week Trump’s routine went global.
A number of longtime defenders of the transatlantic alliance are very angry at our allies.
NATO members have refused to allow American jets to launch from, or even over, their territory. They won’t help secure the Strait of Hormuz. French President Emmanuel Macron has even called for a coalition to “stand up” against both the United States and China.
I think these are serious strategic mistakes, especially Macron’s posturing to go out like a modern-day de Gaulle instead of as a lame duck. But politically, they are hardly shocking.
Let’s review how we got here.
Trump has routinely mocked our allies. For efficiency’s sake, let’s forgive all of the petty jabs from the first term ostensibly intended to get them to spend more on defense. In Trump’s second term, he claimed our NATO allies would never fight on our behalf, despite the fact that the only time NATO invoked Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all — was in the wake of 9/11.
Back in January, in Davos, Switzerland, Trump revised this false claim, admitting that some did fight in Afghanistan, but that “they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” This infuriated not just allied leaders, but their voters. Indeed, Trump is even unpopular with the populist right across most of Europe.
On a per capita basis, Denmark, not America, had the most casualties in Afghanistan.
Speaking of Denmark, Trump threatened to go to war with the Danes to take possession of Greenland. The threats, public and private, were so relentless and serious that Denmark had to actually plan for a war against the U.S.
Trump didn’t go as far with Canada, but he poisoned that alliance with his repeated insistence that Canada should become America’s 51st state.
Trump also cut off most direct military aid to Ukraine, opting instead to strong-arm Europe into buying American weapons to boost our defense industry. And all while lending rhetorical aid and comfort to Russian President Vladimir Putin as Trump’s “peace envoy” talked up business deals with Russia.
Trump abrogated trade agreements with our allies to levy massive tariffs on nearly all of them, forcing many countries to pursue trade agreements with China. His erratic shifting of policies and rates sent allied economies scrambling. Trump’s American defenders may roll their eyes at his openness to emoluments — a plane from Qatar, a gold bar and Rolex from Swiss business leaders, a crown from South Korea — but just imagine how this stuff is viewed by the broader public in allied countries. Trump mocks notions of shared values, but if you bring him a trinket, he’ll talk.
Then Trump launched a surprise war on Iran without consulting our allies. When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested sending aircraft carriers to help, Trump mocked him.
“That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer,” Trump posted on Truth social. “But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Trump has since changed his tune. In his national address last week, Trump essentially called our allies cowards who needed to muster some “delayed courage.” On Monday, he explained he was done with NATO because they refused to give him Greenland.
Trump’s one-way-street antics work domestically because of his support within the GOP base. But he can’t incite a primary challenge to elected allied leaders, not when he’s loathed. In January his approval rating in the U.K. was 16 percent (and in Denmark just 4 percent). One in 5 Europeans see America as a greater threat than China or North Korea.
Again, I think it would be good for Europe—which has seen energy prices skyrocket because of the war and still needs the U.S. for its security—to swallow some of the humiliation and help. But the refusal of Trump and his defenders to acknowledge why it’s politically hard at this point is maddening.
Trump would never dream of taking a devastating political hit for an ally. But he and his defenders cannot fathom why allies feel the same way about him.
(Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.)
An urgent look at the risks of unregulated artificial intelligence—from job loss and environmental strain to national security threats—and the growing political battle to regulate AI in the United States.
AI may not be the only existential threat out there, but it is coming for us the fastest. When I started law school in 2022, AI could barely handle basic math, but by graduation, it could pass the bar exam. Instead of taking the bar myself, I rolled immediately into a Master of Laws in Global Business Law at Columbia, where I took classes like Regulation of the Digital Economy and Applied AI in Legal Practice. By the end of the program, managing partners were comparing using AI to working with a team of associates; the CEO of Anthropic is now warning that it will be more capable than everyone in less than two years.
AI is dangerous in ways we are just beginning to see. Data centers that power AI require vast amounts of water to keep the servers cool, but two-thirds are in places already facing high water stress, with researchers estimating that water needs could grow from 60 billion liters in 2022 to as high as 275 billion liters by 2028. By then, data centers’ share of U.S. electricity consumption could nearly triple.
Meanwhile, there was a 26,362% increase in videos of child sex abuse last year, thanks to AI, and in only nine days, Grok shared 4.4 million images, at least 41 percent of which were sexualized images of women. Conversations with AI chatbots alone have already led two US teenagers to kill themselves and a 56-year old American to kill his mother and then himself, while Anthropic admitted that their AI model suggested it could blackmail and even “kill someone” to avoid being shut down.
Perhaps even more ominously, the Department of War wanted to use Anthropic to make fully autonomous weapons and conduct mass surveillance on Americans, threatening that the company better abandon their ethics rules or else. The Pentagon admitted they used Anthropic’s Claude in the kidnapping of President Maduro; now it may have been involved in the tragic bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, leading to the deaths of 168 children. As a former Lieutenant Commander, helicopter pilot, and mission commander, I’m horrified.
When unregulated AI has proven its potential to be a job-killing, resource-sucking, murderous machine, the fact that national AI regulations aren’t in place already is a failure of our federal government. Congress Republicans have tried to preempt states from regulating, arguing it will disrupt innovation in the industry, but they have no national alternative. The White House only just released a policy framework on March 20, suggesting a “light touch” at best in terms of regulation, but even if Congress did write this toothless and symbolic “regulation” (endorsed by Big Tech), Trump has already vowed he won’t sign anything until the SAVE Act–a thinly veiled voter suppression bill–passes.
Of course, Trump is dragging his feet. When the AI industry stands to rake in trillions of dollars per year, and Trump and tech billionaires have established such a clear symbiotic relationship of self-enrichment, it’s no surprise that the greediest among us are also the most likely to resist restraints. Establishing standards to promote child safety, support workers, stop deepfakes, and give you control of your data are all common sense, necessary, and popular positions, but threatening to Trump megadonors with a trillion-dollar bottom line. Protecting Americans against the dangers of AI will just have to wait.
Indeed, the battle over AI is being waged in the midterms. These tech oligarchs and their super PACs aim to defeat and intimidate lawmakers, signaling: “Try to regulate us, and we’ll ruin you.” Industry leaders have spent more than $11.18 million on the 2026 elections already, mostly in New York, but also Texas, Illinois, and North Carolina; now, a new “dark money” political group with close ties to Trump just pledged to spend at least another $100 million to push his AI agenda. Don’t let their dark money influence you. While there are cogent arguments for the value of AI (it improves personal efficiency, can increase accessibility for people with disabilities, and may have infinite potential in the field of medicine, etc.), unregulated AI is simply not worth defending.
We cannot afford to miss the boat like we did with social media. For now, we must personally regulate our relationship with this technology. If your field requires AI, then master it, but ensure you use it to optimize your personal impact and not as a crutch. Fortunately, this election cycle, we have a unique opportunity to beat the oligarchs and prove that Big Tech does not control our future. We the People can do it. So, please: talk to your friends, knock on doors, and vote. And in the meantime, cultivate your compassion, curiosity, creativity, and ethical judgement. The AI age may be upon us, but large language models cannot come to your improv show or introduce you to a new cuisine. Embrace what it means to be human.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
Across the nonprofit sector, signs of strain are becoming more visible. Staff turnover is rising, compliance demands are increasing, and community needs are growing more complex. Yet the funding structures that support this work remain largely unchanged. What appears today as instability is not a sudden disruption. It is the predictable outcome of a model that has relied on endurance rather than investment.
For decades, nonprofit organizations have been tasked with addressing society’s most persistent challenges. Domestic violence, homelessness, behavioral health, and poverty depend heavily on nonprofit infrastructure to deliver services and stabilize communities. The sector has sustained this responsibility not because it was designed to be durable, but because the people working within it continued to adapt under pressure. Commitment filled the gaps where investment was limited. That approach is now reaching its limits.
In his widely viewed TED Talk, The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong, social entrepreneur Dan Pallotta challenged a long-standing assumption about nonprofit work. He argued that nonprofits are expected to solve complex social problems while being restricted from investing in growth, talent, and infrastructure. Organizations are often judged by how little they spend rather than by the outcomes they produce. That expectation continues to shape funding practices today.
The demands placed on nonprofit organizations have expanded significantly. Programs must deliver measurable outcomes, maintain compliance with regulations, manage financial risk, protect confidentiality, and respond quickly to crises. These responsibilities require trained staff, reliable systems, and consistent leadership. They require capacity. Yet funding structures frequently prioritize short-term services over the infrastructure needed to sustain them.
Capacity building remains one of the most underfunded components of nonprofit operations. Investments in workforce development, supervision, data systems, and leadership are often labeled as overhead rather than recognized as essential infrastructure. When these functions are under-resourced, organizations operate reactively, addressing immediate needs while postponing long-term improvements. Over time, this pattern weakens stability and limits the ability to scale effective solutions.
The consequences are visible across service systems. Organizations struggle to retain experienced staff when compensation cannot keep pace with the demands of the workload. Training becomes inconsistent when resources are limited. Technology systems fall behind reporting requirements. Leaders spend more time responding to crises than strengthening operations. These challenges are not the result of poor management or lack of dedication. They reflect structural constraints embedded in the funding model itself.
In fields such as domestic violence and homelessness, the impact is particularly significant. Programs are responsible for safety, housing stability, and recovery from trauma. Survivors depend on coordinated, reliable, and responsive systems. When organizations lack the capacity to maintain staffing or implement consistent practices, the risk extends beyond operational inefficiency. It affects safety and accountability.
The nonprofit funding model has historically prioritized short-term outputs over long-term stability. Grants are often limited to short cycles, requiring organizations to repeatedly secure funding for ongoing services. Restrictions on spending may prevent investment in technology, workforce development, or leadership training, even when those investments would improve performance. Instead of building durable systems, organizations are expected to sustain services in the face of continuous uncertainty.
Other countries have shown that stability is possible. In New Zealand, multi-year funding agreements help reduce uncertainty and enable organizations to plan for the future. Stability is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.
Programs addressing domestic violence, homelessness, and behavioral health operate on timelines measured in years, not months. Workforce development, housing stability, and system coordination cannot be built within annual funding cycles. When funding remains uncertain, organizations shift their focus from long-term planning to short-term survival. This cycle reduces efficiency, increases turnover, and limits innovation.
Annual funding renewals also carry an administrative cost that is rarely acknowledged. Leaders and program staff spend significant time preparing applications, negotiating renewals, and advocating for continued support. That time is diverted from improving services and strengthening partnerships. The expectation that organizations must repeatedly justify essential services is not an efficient use of public resources.
One practical reform is the establishment of long-term, earmarked funding for core social services. Agencies responsible for safety, housing, and crisis response should have predictable funding streams dedicated to essential operations and capacity building. Earmarked dollars create stability, allowing organizations to hire staff with confidence, invest in training and technology, and plan strategically for the future.
Stable funding is not about increasing spending without oversight. It is about aligning funding timelines with the realities of the work. Social problems such as homelessness and domestic violence develop over years and require sustained intervention to resolve. Funding structures should reflect that reality.
The strain visible across the nonprofit sector is not temporary. It is a signal that the current model has reached its limits. Long-term solutions require long-term investment, sustained capacity building, and funding structures designed to support stability rather than survival.
The future of nonprofit work depends not only on compassion or dedication, but also on the willingness to build systems designed to last.
Stephanie Whack is a survivor of domestic violence, an advocate at the intersection of victimization and homelessness, and a member of The OpEd Project Public Voices Fellowship on Domestic Violence and Economic Security. In 2024, she was awarded the LA City Dr. Marjorie Braude Award for innovative collaboration in serving victims of domestic violence.
WASHINGTON — Cris Gulacy-Worrell used to call herself a “public school purist,” openly advocating against school voucher programs in the early 2010s. Then she founded Oakmont Education, a network of charter schools in Ohio, Iowa and Michigan, designed to help students who have dropped out of high school earn their diplomas and secure jobs.
Now she describes herself as “pro-school choice” and wants to see change in the K-12 education system.
“I think, for far too long, we've treated students and families like they are not in the driver's seat and we've told them to wait,” Gulacy-Worrell said. “A lot of our students have been given the ugly side of what education's supposed to be about, the intolerance side, the side that was designed to fail them. The system is really broken, and we can’t band-aid it.”
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration made sweeping changes to K-12 education, which is now playing out across the nation as governors in 27 states have opted into the first national school voucher policy, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).
Beginning in 2027, the policy, structured as a federal tax-credit program, will allow private donors to write off up to $1,700 in donations to scholarship-granting organizations per year, funding private school tuition for qualifying families.
The scholarships will be available to families earning up to 300% of their area’s gross median income, a threshold that can reach $300,000 in higher income regions. Families who already send their children to private schools are also eligible for the voucher.
Sasha Pudelski, the director of advocacy for AASA, the school superintendents association, which represents public school district leaders, said the school voucher program would have a tremendous impact on public schools across the nation, leaving them underfunded and with the most disadvantaged students.
“We’re funding two different systems,” Pudelski said. “We’re simply subsidizing the kids that are already, for the most part, attending private school, and now just paying a tuition discount essentially for them.”
Of the states that have opted into the ECCA program thus far, they are primarily run by Republican governors, Pudelski said. She said that AASA is fighting to defend public schools from the effects of routing public dollars to private schools, which causes public schools to lose funding and students.
“Our advocacy has to be focused particularly for states that have never had any kind of funding going towards private schools before, keeping the funding out of those places because opening the door can lead to a lot of serious financial impacts for public education,” she said.
Several of the states that have accepted ECCA already have school voucher programs in place. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) operate in over 15 states, giving state education dollars directly to families to pay tuition to a school of their choice.
Pudelski said that the two states with the largest ESA programs, Arizona and Florida, have shown that voucher programs divert funding from public schools. She said that roughly 80% of the students receiving ESA vouchers were already paying for private school tuition.
Geneva Fuentes, of the Arizona Education Association, the state's largest public school educators' union, said the ESA program has caused Arizona to sink to 48th in the nation in per-pupil spending on public schools. She said the program has led to schools across the state closing and students going without the resources they need.
“We've seen that outreach from the proponents of the ESA program has been primarily targeted at wealthier and whiter families, and that's primarily because you have schools here in the Phoenix area that cost $20,000 a year, and the average voucher is a little bit more than $7,000 and so they're targeting families that have enough wealth to fill that $13,000 gap,” Fuentes said.
Bill Mattox, senior director for the Marshall Center for Education Freedom at The James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Fla., is a proponent of ESA and said the program’s success inspired the creation of ECCA.
“Our experiment in this, along with that of a number of other states, has caught the attention of national leaders, and they're saying, ‘Hey, we really ought to try to do something like this nationwide,” said Mattox. “With ESA, families can take the pot of money that would have otherwise been spent on their student in the public schools and break it up and use it however they see fit for educational purposes. That gives them a lot more flexibility.”
Mattox said that for states with existing ESA programs, the ECCA would “stack on top of them.”
Both advocates for and against voucher programs tout representing voters' interests. Approximately 65% of voters repealed Arizona’s legislature’s first attempt to enact a universal voucher in 2018.
“Four years later, Arizona lawmakers then went ahead and overrode the will of the voters and established a universal voucher program, which is now costing the state more than a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funds,” Fuentes said.
Gulacy-Worrell said polls show that 84% of parents are “pro-school choice.”
Educators and school administrators not only disagree on whether American families support school vouchers, but also clash over competition in the education sector and whether public tax dollars should be used to fund private and parochial schools that are not subject to the same federal regulations as public schools.
Kyle Smitley is the founder and executive director of the Detroit Achievement Academy and Detroit Prep, both small non-profit public charter schools. She said that, generally speaking, public charters oppose the ECCA because they fear their students would receive scholarship dollars to attend a private school and leave their public charter model.
Smitley said she hasn’t seen the quality of K-12 education improve with increased competition.
“I'm not sure that I've seen that, a random third-grade teacher at DPSCD (Detroit Public Schools Community District) teaching harder because she heard that there was a good school opening up a couple of blocks away. Like, that teacher was still teaching hard. And there are other systemic things, maybe in that teacher's way and in the family's way of the people who go there,” Smitley said. “Getting it right for kids is definitely deeper than the concept of a McDonald's versus Burger King competition economic study.”
Pudelski said that she didn’t think the goal of ECCA was to create competition.
“I think it's coming from billionaires who want to fund primarily religious education,” she said.
The only way to stop “publicly funding discrimination in private schools,” she said, would be to prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, disability, sexual orientation, and more, in all schools receiving taxpayers' money.
Gulacy-Worrell said concerns with voucher programs allowing discrimination are distractions from the real issue of students not receiving an adequate education to begin with.
“These districts that are failing kids were drawn to fail them,” she said. “We know it, we admit it, and school choice, particularly public charter schools, is the antidote to those red lines.”
She said that the new school voucher programs get “something moving for outcomes” for students and families, particularly those who’ve been historically excluded or marginalized.
However, Pudelski said that ECCA could be particularly harmful for rural students who rely on their area’s public school.
“It would lead to rural school closures in some cases, if suddenly they went from a school with 200 kids in it, K through 8, to 170,” she said. “That could be enough to make it financially nonviable for them to keep their school open.”
An alternative to school voucher programs is allocating more money to publicly accountable public schools, Pudelski said. She emphasized the need to fund public schools' special education programs, especially because private schools can turn away students with disabilities.
The effects of the ECCA on K-12 education in America, including academic outcomes, admission discrimination, public school closures and more, remain to be seen. Both Republican and Democratic governors will continue to announce their states' decisions to adopt or reject the program until it begins to take effect on Jan. 1, 2027.
“There has been a nationwide school choice movement that has a lot of money behind it, that has pressured lawmakers to override the will of voters, not just in Arizona, but in other states,” Fuentes said. ”We should have concerns anytime money that could go to support the majority of children who attend public schools is instead diverted to private hands.”
Cate Bouvet covers education for Medill on the Hill.
