Food FOAR thought (and The JVL welcomes cutting and pasting to share the Good Word beyond the paywall):

We Are in the Worst-Case Scenario

The November 2024 version of you would be shocked at what the September 2025 version accepts as reality.
Jonathan V. Last
Sep 29, 2025
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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

1. Plans

After Trump’s re-election I did my best to imagine how things might go better than we feared.
Then I laid out my worst-case scenario. You can revisit it here, if you like to wallow. I’ll give you the short version:

• Robert Kennedy Jr. attacks public health institutions in meaningful ways.
• “Mass deportations” are mostly for show.
• Trump spends his energies waging war against the federal government itself, taking control of the institutional levers of power in an attempt to fundamentally change the system.
• We’d see wholesale corruption of the FBI and Justice Department, turning the rule of law into nothing more than a political cudgel to punish the president’s enemies.
• And finally, a purge of military leadership in an attempt to make the armed forces personally loyal to Trump.

We are only nine months in and these mile markers are all far in the rearview mirror. I want to talk about this today for a few reasons:

1. To understand where my imagination failed.
2. To see how far we’ve already traveled.
3. To re-anchor our understanding and expectations of what comes next.

This will not be a fun exercise. We should do it anyway.

2. JVL Is Sometimes Wrong

Let’s start with my failures of imagination. In trying to forecast the worst-case scenario I did not foresee that Trump would:

• Use third countries as destinations for deportations.
• Turn ICE into the largest American law enforcement organization.
• Make masked and unbadged ICE agents into an unaccountable secret police snatching people off the streets.
• Deploy the military in American cities.
• Have his head of the FCC openly threaten TV networks that displease Trump.
• Unleash a rogue team of outsiders led by Elon Musk to thoughtlessly (and often illegally) slash programs and personnel across the federal bureaucracy.
• Kill USAID.
• Remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board without cause.
• Fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs without cause.
• Summon every flag officer in the U.S. armed forces to a mass, in-person meeting with him.

I’m sure you can think of other things that have happened since January 20 that weren’t on my radar last November, even when I was in four-alarm-fire mode.

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The most alarming developments have been the crossing of what I viewed as worst-case red lines: the politicization of the law and the military.
It started with the blanket pardon of January 6th convicts. Then there was the Justice Department firing a parade of attorneys until they found someone willing to dismiss the government’s case against Eric Adams. Then the FBI raid on John Bolton’s house. Then the firing of federal attorneys until Trump found someone who would indict James Comey.
And obviously: the government’s total indifference to any legally questionable conduct from Trump allies.
As for the military, Trump has made it clear that his secretary of defense’s remit is making the officer class more pliant. Hegseth has removed high-ranking officers and purged the JAG corps. The illegal strikes on civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela seem designed to test the limits of order-following: When asked to cite which legal authority sanctioned the attacks, no individual within the administration has been able to provide one. Trump is already using the military in open defiance of the law because he understands that once you get one soldier to break the law for you, the next soldier will be easier to convince.
Finally, there’s tomorrow’s meeting at Quantico.
Remember when Trump threw a military parade to celebrate his birthday? Now he’s convening an in-person meeting of every senior military officer in which he plans to address them. Maybe it’ll all be very innocent and proper.
But I would not bet on it.

So that’s how far we’ve traveled in nine months.
It is useful to imagine what your reaction would have been, on November 5, 2024, if I described our current reality to you. Would you have thought that this was about what you expected? Or would you have thought that we had already shot past your worst-case scenario? I’d like you to pause for a moment and think about that. Then discuss it in the comments.

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The second thing I’d like you to discuss is this: Understanding the curve we’re on now, where do you see us in thirteen months?
In the next year we will start to get a sense of whether or not Trump is willing to part with power. If the midterm elections proceed in a regular and orderly way, and Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress, and the new Congress is seated properly, then I will feel more confident about liberalism’s resilience.
My worst-case scenario for this period is that Trump attempts to tamper with the elections in some way. He has already done this by pushing Texas and Missouri to redistrict ahead of schedule. Perhaps he will interfere in other “legal” but irregular ways. Perhaps he will interfere in extralegal ways.
And perhaps he will use the power of the state against elections in the way he has used the power of the law against justice.

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3. Smooth Criminals

On the Secret pod Sarah and I talked about a bunch of stuff, but what got people animated was my contention that Henry Kissinger probably isn’t a war criminal. There was a good conversation about this view in the pod comments. I want to make two clarifications that I think will add some value.
First, some people took my defense of Kissinger as “not a war criminal” to be an endorsement of the man and all his works. That is absolutely not what I intended. Classifying someone as “not a war criminal” is the most limited line-drawing imaginable and is a million miles away from approval.
Analogy: If I said that Elon Musk was not a serial killer, this would not be an endorsement or a way of excusing, say, his part in the destruction of USAID and the resultant death and misery caused by that act. It’s just me observing that whatever else Musk may be, he is not a person who engages in a string of ritualized murders.
Kissinger: not a war criminal ≠ Kissinger: great statesman.

Second, I think the disconnect here is related to the term “war criminal” itself and whether we believe there are a great many war criminals in the world or we reserve the term for a relatively small number of exceptionally bad actors.
I understand people who want to use the term expansively. Their argument is that anyone who takes or authorizes actions that violate the codified laws of war is a war criminal.
This definition makes some sense, but is too expansive to be of much use. Can you list the American presidents who would not be war criminals under such a broad categorization? And not just American leaders: Just about every leader of a country that engaged in modern warfare would be considered a war criminal. Is Harry Truman a war criminal? Winston Churchill? And not just the leaders, but their ministers of defense and flag officers and on and on.
Like I said: If you want to draw the line in that way, I get it. I just don’t think it’s a useful way to describe reality. To my mind, “war criminal” should be reserved for extraordinary situations. When we refer to someone as a war criminal, it should be closer to what we mean when we talk about crimes against humanity.
The reason we should have a more restrictive standard is because if everyone is considered to be a “war criminal,” then the term loses its deterrence value.
If everyone’s a war criminal, then no one is.

One last thing: A number of people suggested that I consult Christopher Hitchens’s book on Kissinger. I’ve added it to my reading list. But I would say—with respect—that Hitch was an entertaining writer and a gifted polemicist. Many people I am close to were friends with him and attest to his good nature.
But . . . his judgment was not always top-notch? Early in life he was a Trotskyite; later he was two-fists in on the wisdom of the Iraq war.1 He thought Mother Teresa was, if not a literal war criminal, then something close to it.
None of this invalidates his arguments on Kissinger. I mention it only by way of illustrating that Hitch was not an infallible guide.

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1
It was—is—possible to make a case for the war in Iraq. And I’ve argued many times that Iraqis are better off today than they would have been with Saddam’s regime left in place. But it was a close call; a judgment call. And reasonable people can disagree.
What was remarkable about Hitchens’ support for the war was how unreserved and militant it was. He did not seem capable of recognizing potential tail risks. That sort of thinking always made me nervous.