◼ President Donald Trump dispatched Vice President JD Vance and Middle East envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Islamabad for peace talks with the Iranians. An agreement was not reached. But the party with leverage is free to walk away from the negotiating table, and that’s what Trump’s team did. Before the talks collapsed, Trump deployed warships to the Strait of Hormuz for threat-clearing operations while daring the Iranians to break the cease-fire. And when negotiations broke down, the president ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports. Far from abandoning the war, Trump appealed to one of warfare’s oldest tactics to break Iranian resistance—and Tehran is feeling the squeeze. Absent relief, Iran will have no money to pay its militias and paramilitary forces, and nowhere to store its crude oil and petroleum products. The United States can hold out longer than Iran, but the global economy is feeling the strain as well. The question now looms large: Will America relent before Iran gives in?

◼ Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, the front-runner in the California governor’s race, suddenly dropped out and vacated his House seat. The San Francisco Chronicle and CNN had just published articles alleging that Swalwell, a married father, had been preying serially on female staffers for over a decade; one of them accused him of sexual assault. Another woman subsequently accused him of assaulting her too. Swalwell has denied the allegations, but the behavior of his political allies—Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign had been endorsed by 21 members of Congress as well as most of the major unions in California politics, all of which instantly dropped him—suggests that few of them were surprised. And that is another scandal: After the allegations broke, one journalist and insider after another came forth to claim that he or she, along with “everyone else,” knew about Swalwell’s disgusting behavior. They chose to conceal this knowledge for years and would likely have done so for years more had it served their interests.

◼ Trump and members of his administration have picked a fight with the pope. This is unwise and unnecessary. The president was stung by the Holy Father’s criticisms of the war in Iran and is angry at his stance on immigration. There have been conflicting accounts of a testy meeting between Trump officials and the papal nuncio, which reportedly included menacing references to an Avignon-style schism. Whatever really happened has been overshadowed by Trump’s public rhetoric. In a post on Truth Social, he called Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and said that he doesn’t “want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela,” as if the pope were a candidate seeking Trump’s endorsement. Catholic voters, driven away from their onetime home in the Democratic Party by its militant cultural leftism, have been a key part of Trump’s coalition. The sensible approach would be to respond to those voters’ concerns rather than attack the leader of their church. But Trump can brook no rivals, so he responds to everything as a personal slight. Worse, he briefly posted an image depicting himself as the Lord. If he were more familiar with the Bible, he might have read about what can happen to leaders who do that sort of thing.

◼ Trump renewed his intimidation campaign against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, threatening to fire Powell if he does not resign from the central bank. Trump also pledged to continue a criminal probe into Powell over alleged financial mismanagement of the Fed’s office renovations. The president is furious with the Fed for not slashing interest rates to near zero, but his pretextual lawfare is counterproductive. Under current law, Trump cannot fire Powell. And he is sabotaging his own nominee to replace Powell, Kevin Warsh, because Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) has promised to block Warsh’s confirmation until the probe into Powell is retracted. Inflation, meanwhile, is still well above normal levels. If Trump gets his way on interest rates, it could surge again, wrecking whatever economic favor Trump has left. If the president had any impulse control, he would end this crusade.

◼ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was targeted in two violent attacks. First, an attacker tried to firebomb Altman’s home, but the Molotov cocktail he threw bounced harmlessly off the house. Two days later, a gunman sitting in a car outside Altman’s house opened fire on the residence. Thankfully, no one was harmed. These attacks reflect a disturbing new trend of violence against proponents of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire on the home of an Indianapolis city councilor who had recently voted to approve construction of a local data center. Progressivism’s leading lights—such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—are demanding a halt to the construction of facilities that provide streaming services, cloud computing, and AI. Aspiring radicals are told that data centers and AI will make their lives unaffordable, their social relationships unnavigable, and their world unlivable. They believe it, and they are lashing out violently at their surroundings. If there was a causal link between rhetoric and right-wing violence as circumstantially compelling as this, we’d hear a lot about how Republicans should lower the temperature. But the left gets a pass.

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◼ As the war in Iran continues, Trump has shifted his social media attacks away from the Iranians and toward other extremists with apocalyptic visions and incendiary rhetoric: podcasters Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones. Trump fumed, “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” If this is taken seriously, it raises the question of why Trump has appeared on their programs. The podcasters look silly for their sudden public doubts about a president they had previously praised in near-messianic terms and whose critics they previously lambasted. Apparently their disagreements with Trump are just a reflection of wise and discerning geopolitical prudence, while others’ disagreements with Trump betrayed their character flaws. If Trump is really that upset about this supposed betrayal, maybe he needs to be more selective in how he chooses allies and friends.

◼ The Justice Department is having a rough go in its legal battle with AI giant Anthropic. In contracting with the government in 2024, the company required that its AI tool, Claude, not be used to control weapons systems autonomously or for mass domestic surveillance. Angry that Anthropic would not relent on these restrictions, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth not only exercised the government’s right to replace the company with another provider (OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool) but punitively designated Anthropic a supply chain risk (SCR). Two lawsuits have resulted. A federal judge in California found that the SCR label was applied as a pretext to punish the company for its public opposition to the Trump administration’s pressure. Now the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has also signaled that Hegseth may have violated the SCR statute. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche boasted on X that the court had endorsed Hegseth’s designation, which was not true. Indeed, the court granted Anthropic expedited review, noting that it may recover damages. Blanche should not be commenting on pending cases, especially if he’s going to distort court rulings.

◼ While the world’s eyes are trained on the Persian Gulf, Ukraine’s soldiers have been engineering a series of small victories in their war against Russian invaders. In February and March, Ukrainian forces made modest but cumulatively meaningful gains on the battlefield. The Russian onslaught continues, but the Kremlin’s spring offensive has been frustrated by Ukraine’s dogged defenders. “The last time we had seen Ukrainian forces make more ground than the Russian forces seized was in 2023,” George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, observed. “This is new.” Indeed, but it’s not the only thing that’s new about this conflict. The war in the Persian Gulf demonstrated that the world would benefit from Ukraine’s homegrown anti-drone capabilities, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has since embarked on a diplomatic offensive throughout the Middle East. He’s not only exporting his country’s expertise and technical capabilities to U.S. allies in the Gulf but also securing agreements that further isolate Moscow. Apparently, Ukraine has some cards to play after all.

◼ Reports of the death of Hungarian democracy were—what a surprise—an exaggeration. Viktor Orbán’s gerrymandering of the electoral system for his Fidesz party backfired, and Péter Magyar’s Tisza party will have a supermajority in the new Hungarian parliament. Magyar should use it wisely for necessary housecleaning rather than the pursuit of vendettas. We also hope that he will, as he seems to want to, return Hungary to the free-market approach that Orbán once endorsed but then rejected. That switch benefited the leader of Fidesz and his circle for a while, but ultimately it undermined his country’s economic performance so badly that the electorate, restless after 16 years of the same man in charge, revolted. Brussels will complicate Magyar’s task. The EU will welcome, as we do, Magyar’s intention to abandon Hungary’s pro-Putin orientation. But it will be dismayed, as we will not be, if Magyar sticks with Orbán’s tough immigration policy. And this is not the only area where Brussels and Magyar may clash. Meanwhile, some €33 billion in badly needed EU funds destined for Hungary are currently either frozen or “pending.” The EU’s self-proclaimed defenders of democracy will be tempted to use that money to bludgeon Magyar into accepting policies that his supporters dislike.

◼ Good news: The U.K.’s handover of the Chagos Archipelago (more formally the British Indian Ocean Territory) to faraway Mauritius has, for now, been shelved. It had been agreed that Britain be granted a 99-year leaseback of the largest island, Diego Garcia, which hosts an important joint U.S.-U.K. military facility. Handing over a property for free and then paying to use a portion of it hardly seems an example of the art of the deal. Especially because the legal consequences of such an arrangement would have had troubling implications for the operation of the military base. The reason for London’s proposing the handover was supposedly an advisory ruling from the International Court of Justice, but it likely owed more to Labour’s postcolonial cringe. After initially (and surprisingly) supporting the idea, the Trump administration turned against it. As American consent for a transfer is legally required, that is that. For now.

◼ Europe’s war against free speech continues. Reversing the verdicts of the country’s lower courts, Finland’s Supreme Court has found Päivi Räsänen, a member of parliament from the center-right, socially conservative Christian Democratic party, guilty of “inciting hatred.” In 2004, Räsänen, a doctor by training, published a pamphlet in which she argued that homosexuality was a “developmental disorder,” which she later republished online. Even though the court conceded that Räsänen’s commentary did not contain anything like an incitement to violence, three of its five judges still found her guilty of “making available to the public a text that insults a group,” or “hate speech.” She was fined, and the court ordered that the offending passages be destroyed and removed from the internet. Be thankful that the U.S. has a First Amendment, and that it has no “hate speech” exception.

◼ The Artemis II completed its mission and returned to earth. Its crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, having ventured further into space than any astronauts before them. Despite the popularity of declinist rhetoric, this achievement is proof that America’s unique culture of creativity and grand ambition still produces extraordinary results. Our future is bright—and greater adventures still lie ahead.