Yesterday I had a conversation with my good friend, the Russian dissident Mikhail Zygar, and he said something that completely shocked me. It should shock you, too.

He told me his sources say that even liberals in Russia are now so tired of the war in Ukraine that a nuclear option is being discussed “daily” as a way to end it.

Yes, it’s speculation. But it’s speculation that was once confined to the fascist fringe and has now become widespread, because it’s seen as the only way out.

Putin, they believe, will never end the war in its current form. The argument goes that “a horrible end is better than endless horror.”

“Unlike Donald Trump,” he says, “no one is an optimist in Moscow.”

Let that sink in.

Zelensky May Be in Real Trouble This Time

I had reached out to Mikhail to discuss the warp-speed collapse of the US-Ukraine relationship over the past two weeks. To recap: Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky are now publicly insulting each other, and Trump is saying Russia has been “fine” on Ukraine. This comes after the US relaxed sanctions on Russia in a cynical bid to keep global gas and diesel prices down ahead of the midterm elections - and presumably to curry favor in order to secure the release of Stephen James Hubbard, which has just happened. It also comes after Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, which Ukraine’s military relies on to hit targets inside Russia, seemed to be switched off in places (and then back on), amid confusion over whether Musk or the US government was responsible.

Mikhail’s read of Zelensky’s tongue-lashing is that it may be the only way he can hold on to his presidency. The last time he stood up to Trump, in that disastrous February 2025 Oval Office meeting, his popularity surged at home and in Europe.

He must be hoping the same thing will happen this time. But the picture is less clear.

Zelensky is now openly criticized at home. Ukraine’s prosecutor general fled after being accused of corruption, and Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s right-hand man and chief negotiator, was arrested on corruption charges.

Mikhail was careful with his language on the topic. Criticizing Zelensky, he said, “is not always pro-Putin.” Many in Kyiv believe the country’s institutions are strong enough that a new, less tarnished leader would strengthen Ukraine, not weaken it. “He’s not a sacred cow.”

But there is a darker reading of Trump’s calls for Zelensky to leave office. Putin will never sign a peace deal with Zelensky in power. Trump wants a win before the midterms. Pushing Zelensky aside is the price of Putin’s cooperation, and Trump appears willing to pay it.

Why Has Europe Removed Alisher Usmanov From Its Sanctions List?

There’s another factor muddying things. Until now, Europe’s support for Ukraine and Zelensky has been unequivocal, and its position on Russia robust.

And yet on September 22nd, the EU removed two Russian oligarchs, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, from its sanctions list.

Mikhail is more understanding about Fridman, who, he says, was always the softer figure, someone “ready to denounce the war but never dared.”

But Usmanov is another matter. He is a member of Putin’s inner circle with deep Gazprom ties, someone Mikhail is prepared to call a war criminal. So why remove him from the sanctions list? It isn’t clear. There have been reports that the French government is trying to get two French citizens released from Azerbaijan, but nothing has been confirmed.

Put all this together, and the situation this winter in Ukraine looks bleak. Very bleak. As Mikhail puts it, it is “doomed to be a humanitarian catastrophe.”

I’m not sure I have ever conducted such a sobering live video chat on Substack.

When it comes to considering Trump’s role in all this, and his support for Putin, I highly recommend season four of The Diplomat on Netflix. I have now watched the final episode twice. I won’t spoil it, but it is a timely reminder of the necessity to resist autocrats.

Zelensky’s grip on power may be weaker than it was, and Ukrainians are entitled to debate that. But our government’s role in the latest events is despicable. I recommend Orlando’s latest substack on the sanctions waiver as a useful guide explaining why.

The full conversation with Mikhail is up on the channel. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Vicky

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To which I replied:

So, I kicked off this week’s live video chat with Rob Shuter, gossip king with a conscience, relieved that I don’t cover the British royal family full-time.

But I do want to know all the juice about them and other celebrities in the news. I had a list of people I wanted about whom Rob to provide the latest dish, and you can watch our delightful conversation above.

We covered, in order:

• Harry and Meghan: They’ve settled quietly, more or less, in the Cotswolds. Today they make their first joint outing, in Nottingham. Meanwhile, the Princess of Wales was spotted with Princess Charlotte on the Tube: a lovely mother-daughter moment… or was it to show that London is so safe the Sussexes don’t need security?

• Charles Spencer and Piers Morgan: Earl Spencer’s Diana memoir, Swan Song, hit number one, but there was a mistake in it and a legal kerfuffle in England that people here in the US may have missed. Spencer suggested Piers Morgan was behind tabloid gym photos of Diana in the Sunday Mirror, but Piers didn’t join the Mirror until years later. Spencer has apologized; Piers still vows to sue. The audiobook has already been amended.

• Kimberly Guilfoyle: Rob is friends with Kimberly, who is out as ambassador to Greece after reports that she asked a donor to cover a $100,000 credit card bill, which she denies. Rob texted her to commiserate and she told him to use only Signal, and now that’s been deleted too… Rob says she’s more upset that Trump brushed her off as someone who once dated his son, than losing her job. But Kimberly is like a cat with nine lives. She’s only had four… five to go.

• Kelly Clarkson: Rob swears she’s lovely! The real deal, no Ellen. His read on her row with Art of Play, a little Brooklyn store: a bit of hipster attitude reopened old wounds from her American Idol days, when red carpets snubbed her. His advice to her: apologize. Take the high road; even when you’re right, don’t punch down. Seems sensible to me.

• Selma Blair: Charged with assault after allegedly biting (yes, biting) a flight attendant on a Delta flight to JFK, then kicking an officer and a nurse; she pleaded not guilty. Rob says she has done it before, and she should do herself and us a favor, not blame it on meds or Multiple Sclerosis, and be held accountable.

• Diddy: Rushed from Fort Dix to hospital at 1 a.m. with a head injury and back before sunrise. Reports haven’t confirmed the cause; Rob’s sources say it was a scuffle with a more powerful inmate. Rob, who worked with him, thinks Diddy secretly loves the headlines.

• Presley Gerber: Cindy Crawford’s son died at 27 in a Santa Monica sober living home, the kind California doesn’t license like rehab. Rob, who worked for Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks, calls modeling the ugliest business he’s seen. His advice: If your kid wants to go into it, just say no….

And finally, Luigi

Rob turned the tables and asked about my book (with James Patterson) on Luigi Mangione, which I’m racing to finish ahead of publication in February next year.

December is the big news month ahead. Luigi is due to be sentenced in federal court, where Brian Thompson’s family may give victim impact statements and Luigi gets his chance to speak. And as we’ve learned, Luigi likes to speak. Remember his “one plus one equals two” outburst about double jeopardy as the state judge left the bench?

The real swing factor is whether the state judge Gregory Carro lets a murder trial go ahead. Prosecutors just filed a blockbuster brief arguing that stalking and murder are different crimes, and the legal experts I’ve spoken to are divided.

Meanwhile, the book is available for pre-order now.

Until next week,

Vicky

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If you have five minutes of downtime this week, I urge you to buy a copy of Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City by my fellow Substack author Anand Giridharadas (who writes The Ink).

It’s about the sickening moment in May 2023 when Daniel Penny, a white 24-year-old former Marine, was riding the F train in New York and Jordan Neely, a black homeless, mentally ill, one-time Michael Jackson impersonator, entered his car, screaming that he was hungry, thirsty, and ready to die. Penny put Neely in a chokehold that lasted several minutes, and Neely died. A manslaughter charge against Penny was dismissed; a jury acquitted him of criminally negligent homicide.

But, as Anand says in our chat, what happened in the courtroom barely mattered in the court of public opinion. The entire country had already sorted itself into pre-assigned lanes (Penny was either a hero or a vigilante; Neely was either a victim or a criminal), “so there’s no need for thinking. Thinking need not apply.”

He wrote this book to make people think.

Much like American Rage, the book I am writing with James Patterson about Luigi Mangione, this was a case that hardened the divisions of our time. (In a twist of ironic timing, Anand tells me that he heard about Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson as he was covering Penny’s trial. Months later I’d be sitting in more or less the same place to cover Mangione’s pre-trial hearings).

In Man in the Mirror, Anand is at pains to humanize everyone involved. He finds the complexity in the story, and the gray shading most people don’t want to consider.

I haven’t finished it yet, but I have to tell you: seldom has a work of nonfiction grabbed me like this one. By the second page I felt I was reading a modern Bonfire of the Vanities. We are instantly inside characters who ring true; we understand and feel them, even when they are very different from us, even when their beliefs are not ours. We also understand the gritty New York they inhabit, a place where compassion chafes against conviction and ambition.

It turns out that Bonfire was Anand’s template, but he inverted it. “Bonfire is pulling everybody down,” he says. In Tom Wolfe’s book “everybody’s a poseur.” Man in the Mirror aims the opposite way: it pulls everybody up, forcing you to understand each person on their own terms instead of mocking them from a safe remove.

Watch our chat to hear the details of his reporting and writing process; the thought he put into its structure and style. And what it’s like to publish a book three weeks after your wife publishes hers!

I hope you enjoy the chat and find this book as gripping as I do.

— Vicky

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Hey Everyone,

I know, I know…I’ve been talking about it for months.

Coming to you in February 2027 is American Rage: The Making of Luigi Mangione, my new book with James Patterson, published by Little,Brown.

You can preorder it now.

This is a BIG book in terms of scope. The biggest I’ve ever written. It’s about Luigi, yes. But also about US healthcare; and about Gen Z and AI and America on the brink of a crisis.

One fun thing about working with Jim is that he knows a thing or two about advertising. (It was what he did before he became a full-time writer).

So this video arrived in my inbox last night. Enjoy!

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He never took a salary. But did this make him conflict free, as White House lawyers claimed?

As Dexter Filkins shows in his blockbuster New Yorker piece, “Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy,” absolutely not. In almost every region he’s supposed to be representing the United States, he has interests of his own.

Yet, until now most journalists have not bothered to probe Kushner’s conflicts in Trump’s second term. In our conversation, Filkins wonders aloud if it’s because Kushner gives journalists plenty of off-record access. If true, that is very troubling.

Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

“A force field around these guys”

In the first Trump Administration, Filkins says reporting on Jared and Ivanka was, frankly, easy. The White House leaked constantly. He remembers that they “all but left the back door open.”

This time it is different. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything so hard,” he told me. “I felt like there was a force field around these guys.”

Ignorance In The Iran Negotiations

His New Yorker piece opens with a scene on the eve of the war with Iran. Kushner and Witkoff are in Geneva with Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. According to someone in the room, the Iranians put real concessions on the table, including suspending uranium enrichment, which was unprecedented.

But according to someone briefed on the talks neither Kushner nor Witkoff understood what the Iranians were offering. There was no technical adviser in the room, according to Filkins’ source. (The White House denied this). Talks collapsed, and within hours we were at war.

Ironically the war with Iran and the chaos it has caused in the Middle East is exactly the opposite of what the Saudis, Emiratis and Qataris - the three larges investors in Kushner’s fund, Affinity - wanted.

Filkins: Somebody pointed out to me, somebody who’s very plugged in in the Middle East, an American, but he pointed out to me that, and I think this has been reported in other places, but that when Jared was negotiating in Geneva the deal with Iran, at the very same time, he was trying to raise money in the Middle East from the Gulf countries for his private equity fund. And so what this person said to me was, I think he was there to get paid. He was basically running around saying, not physically in the Middle East, but he was going around saying, like, I saved you from Iran. I took care of the Iranian problem. How about another billion?”

And no way to prove that. But of course, then you stand back and look at it and you’re like, well, that might have been true back in March, but it’s not true now. The war is a disaster by any measure. And the Iran problem hasn’t been taken care of at all.

And so it’s a really interesting question. How do those investors, the people that invested in Jared, You know, the Saudis are giving $3 billion. I think they’re up to now. The Emiratis, the Kuwaitis, how, sorry, the Qataris. How do they feel about that investment now?

Potential business interests with Russia

Filkins has a scoop to do with the negotiations around Russia’s war with Ukraine. He got hold of a raw European intelligence document that listed ten potential business deals in Russia for Americans, conditional on Moscow getting the Ukraine peace deal it wants. The names include Rick Grenell, Gentry Beach, Witkoff, the Trumps, and Jared Kushner. The White House said that the deals are “for the American people.”

Filkins says the document suggests something more personal.

However, he also says that there were people who told him that Kushner’s involvement in the Ukraine talks had been a positive.

Well, you know, when you do a story like this, you have to be willing to kind of, you know, you have to be willing to accept that not everything will add up perfectly. And so, and this is a great example. Ukraine’s a perfect example. So you have, on one hand, you have this intelligence document, which I reported, that basically said all the Trump guys are like trying to make deals with Putin on the side, business deals. And on the other hand, there were people who spoke to me about Jared and Ukraine and negotiations who said it’s just been a real positive that he’s involved.

A recorded phone call with MBS

Filkins unearthed another scoop here. While it was known that one of the big reasons the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman - who invested $2 billion in Kushner’s fund affinity, against the advice of his own advisors - felt he owed Kushner partly for effectively giving him a green light to exercise a palace coup and imprison his cousin Mohammed Bin Nayef and take his place as Crown Prince, it was not known that the phone call in which this happened was recorded.

I mean, for your listeners, I thought it’s a pretty amazing moment because you’ve got, you know, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is this incredibly important place sitting on this, you know, oceans of oil. It’s an authoritarian country. It’s very unstable. And the king, you know, the king is elderly and kind of faded out.

So the top job is really who’s going to be crown prince. And that’s basically, you just laid it out. Mohammed bin Nayef, who had been the crown prince, you know, MBS had his eyes on his job and was maneuvering and trying to stack it all up. But he checked in with Jared first.

I mean, that’s what he did. And the phone call was secretly recorded. And basically, Jared said, you know, you got the green light here. We don’t oppose this in the White House if you were to go for it. And he did. I mean, he went for it. He deposed his cousin.

Albania, barefoot

We get into Kushner’s controversial $4 billion real estate project in Albania: the one where Ivanka claimed they’d discovered it after swimming ashore off a yacht and climbing barefoot up an undeveloped Albanian hillside…

The project has stalled due to protests and obstacles on multiple fronts.

Filkins was lucky enough to go to Albania and meet with the colorful Prime Minister Edi Rama.

For all this and more, read the New Yorker article and watch or take a listen.

And see you next week!

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Hey Everyone,

Tomorrow (Wednesday October 30th) at 4pm ET I will be joined for my weekly live video chat by the New Yorker writer, Dexter Filkins, to discuss his latest blockbuster piece on Jared Kushner’s conflict of interests as he tries to resolve conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine.

Click here to read the article.

And here’s Dexter’s impressive bio.

As you know, this is in my wheelhouse because in 2019 I published Kushner, Inc.

Look forward to seeing you all Wednesday at 4pm ET!

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Delighted to chat this week with my friend Jacob Weisberg, whose new book, Profiles in Cowardice (a riff on JFK’s Profiles in Courage) asks: why did so many powerful Americans fold under pressure during Trump’s second administration?

In his book, Jacob profiles eight institutional leaders who, he argues, failed to stand up to Trump’s unconstitutional power-grabs. They are:

• Brad Karp, former chair of Paul, Weiss (the law)

• Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone (Wall Street)

• Jeff Bezos, Amazon (Big Tech)

• Sian Beilock, Dartmouth (universities)

• Mitch McConnell (the Senate)

• John Roberts (the Supreme Court)

• Megyn Kelly (the media)

• George W. Bush (the Republican establishment)

In our thirty-minute conversation, we honed in on three: Karp (the only one who spoke to Jacob for the book); Schwarzman and Bezos.

What was it about each of these three men’s characters that led them to bend the knee to Trump in a way that may have been self-serving in the short term, but Jacob believes damaged the democratic principles that guides each of the bodies they lead in the long term? For Karp, Jacob argues, it’s people-pleasing. For Schwarzman, ego. And for Bezos, his space ambitions.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Buy Profiles in Cowardice here, or from an independent bookstore via Bookshop.org.

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If you want to know why Don Jr. was forced to pay back Umar Kremlev, the Russian “friend of Putin” who paid for two afterparties for Don Jrs’ wedding to Bettina Anderson, you need to watch my live interview with Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author with the inside track.

Here is a link to Mikhail’s fabulous post on Kremlev, which is what spurred me to invite him to do an interview on Thursday. (It was after this, apparently, that Don Jr paid the money back to Kremlev).

Quick recap for anyone just catching up.

ProPublica reported on September 14 that Kremlev — head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports body financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom — footed hundreds of thousands of dollars in wedding expenses at the couple’s May wedding in the Bahamas.

Apparently Kremlev rented one of the private islands where the reception was held and where guests slept, covered the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event, paid through an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai. Kremlev himself was on the roughly 50-person guest list, as part of a group of Russian speakers whose presence puzzled other attendees. (Don Jr had said afterwards that the wedding had been very intimate. Just family and close friends.)

Last week Mikhail revealed biographical details about Kremlev that are frankly, stunning. The U.S. coverage has mostly referred to him a “Russian oligarch.” But, according to Mikhail, that’s only the half of it.

Kremlev is the “wallet” for Alexei Rubezhnoy, the current head of Putin’s Presidential Security Service — the man Mikhail describes as probably the first person to see Putin each morning and the last to say goodnight, “the most important person in the Kremlin.” Russian security officials aren’t supposed to own businesses. So, Mikhail says, they hold them through proxies. And guess who is Rubezhnoy’s “proxy”? Yes: Kremlev.

Kremlev’s empire — a monopoly on Russia’s legal sports-betting market (handed to his company after Putin signed a decree restricting licenses to a single operator), and Rolf, Russia’s largest auto dealership chain, seized from a dissident businessman who’d fled to Vienna after opposing the Crimea annexation — sits, in Mikhail’s telling, in Kremlev’s name but not in his control. “Kremlev is the front,” he said. “Rubezhnoy owns nothing. He cannot do it.”

Kremlev was not christened Kremlev. Born Umar Lutfuloev in Serpukhov, outside Moscow, he did two stretches in prison in his early twenties, worked as a boxing promoter, and at 28 changed his surname to Kremlev — a name that, as Mikhail pointed out, conveniently echoes “Kremlin.”

He was installed as head of the Russian Boxing Federation by its supervisory board — previously chaired by a past head of Putin’s security service, now chaired by Rubezhnoy — and rose from there.

It isn’t known how Kremlev and Don Jr met, but as IBA president, it was Kremlev who first raised questions about boxer Imane Khelif’s sex eligibility at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a controversy later amplified by Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, and Trump himself.

The Trumps’ well-documented boxing and UFC ties may be exactly how a man Mikhail flatly calls “mafia” ended up close enough to Don Jr. to bankroll his wedding weekend.

What I still cannot fathom is why Bettina Anderson would post on Instagram “NO CONSPIRACY, NO MYSTERY” and that “friendship doesn’t require a political motive” and that the couple would “never be embarrassed or apologetic” about being grateful for friends from all over the world.

With friends like this, as the saying goes, who needs enemies?

If Anderson didn’t get the problem of the optics of having this guy pay for her wedding festivities, it seems her father-in-law may have.

On Friday, President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that “as I understand it, he paid him back” — and a person close to Don Jr. confirmed the repayment to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Congress has not sat on its laurels. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on House Oversight, opened an investigation this week seeking records on Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev and the payments, and Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on House Intelligence, asked FBI Director Kash Patel to examine the matter. Garcia’s framing was blunt: Kremlev, who has been sanctioned by the Ukrainian government, “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the President’s son. What did he get in return? We need answers.”

We do indeed.

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The book is a sprawling business bio, but the main topic of our conversation was Black’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which he gets to in the last third. Had Bill got close to understanding exactly why Black paid Epstein $170 million?

It’s a question that the House Oversight Committee wants to ask Black - but, as of now, he’s refusing to return to Congress after a previous voluntary hearing was stopped short when the committee asked Black about various NDA’s he has signed with women. He argues that these NDAs - apart from one which he has turned over - had nothing to do with Epstein and are confidential. Right now he’s suing Congress for embarking on a “fishing expedition” and has refused its subpoena to return to sit for more questions.

So…

What did Bill find out?

The bad new is he’s stuck taking Black’s word for what happened, given that Epstein is dead. And two key people - Black’s former tax lawyer Carlyn McCaffrey, and, Andy Levander, the author of an independent investigation into Black, did not talk to Bill, presumably because they’d be disbarred if they did.

Further, Bill did not wind up seeing the actual tax documents that Black talks about. Black balked at this, apparently, and cited privacy. Bill says he thinks this is understandable.

I don’t.

My own view of this is that if Black really wants to clear up this controversy, he needs to go the extra mile and reveal everything, “privacy” be damned. The reason we care about the specific “tax advice” for which he paid Epstein an astronomical amount, is not because we are prurient. It’s because Epstein could not have pulled off his ghastly criminal enterprise without the hundreds of millions of dollars he had behind him and Black is one of the two known chief sources of this money; Leslie Wexner is the other. (Bill mentions in our interview that the financier Glenn Dubin also contributed to Epstein’s piggy bank. True. But not at the same scale as Black and Wexner.) Black and Wexner trusted Epstein sufficiently that they each handed him well north of $100 million for whatever it is he was doing for them. Black admits to Bill he wasn’t even paying attention to exactly how much he was paying Epstein for his services and was shocked to discover the full amount.

I mean, wow.

So, here’s what’s in the book about the improbably gargantuan fee for “tax advice”: According to Black, his original high-priced trust-and-estate attorney at the blue-chip law firm of Weil Gotshal - a woman named “Carlyn McCaffrey” - who now works at another reputable law firm, McDermott, Will and Schulte LLP, - allegedly botched something in documents, exposing Black to a potential $2 billion tax liability.

Bill writes: When he [Black] confronted McCaffrey, he said, at first she denied that there was a potential problem and then conceded there was “a terrible mistake” made that could only be rectified by taking an action explicitly prevented by the documents that McCaffrey had drafted.

Right there, I have a major problem with this version of events. How many top lawyers say to their clients that, yes, they have made a “terrible mistake” and its going to cost the client $2 billion? In many years of reporting about finance, I have never heard of a conversation like this. It doesn’t just sound unlikely. It sounds preposterous. It’s a lawsuit to end all lawsuits the moment the words are uttered.

Because, if a law firm - especially one as well-known as Weil Gotshal - botches something and makes a $2 billion mistake for a client, they are, of course, on the hook to pay that money! That’s why they have insurance! (I phoned around my lawyer friends at top firms to get their take on this..and their off-the-cuff reaction is, yes, of course, they are on the hook, and, of course, that’s why law firms have insurance. And, yes, this story sounds like a fairytale. But without looking at the documents or speaking to McCaffrey, it’s impossible to give a definitive verdict.)

Next, according to Black (and Bill), not only could Weil Gotshal not fix the “terrible mistake,” nor could lawyers at Paul, Weiss and Sullivan and Cromwell.

Hmm. Again, my lawyer friends just do not buy this. One of my sources says “almost everything in tax law is reversible”. But, since Bill did not see the actual documents, he and we are left depending on Black’s word.

So — as the story goes — Black turned to Epstein, who wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant, and had not even graduated college - but who had nonetheless positioned himself to Black as an expert on family offices and tax structuring and was so trusted by Back that he’d even put him on the board of his family foundation. (This, despite the fact that, per Bill, Elliot “Skip” Stein - Black’s friend who had first introduced Epstein to Black suspected that Epstein’s personal wealth in the early 1990s was mostly stolen from European families who had illegally laundered their money into the US.)

Anyhoo…Epstein, according to Black, found a workaround - and Black then had Epstein’s ideas vetted by major law firms, which claimed they worked. Bill says he spoke with lawyers at these law firms - and Black’s story as far as he can tell checks out.

According to Bill, once Epstein had proved himself with the tax issue, he wheedled his way into giving tax advice on Black’s purchase of jets, art, yachts, etcetera. It was money Black says he didn’t even realize he’d spent, until investigators dug it out for an independent report after Epstein’s death. Until he read it in the report, he thought he’d paid Epstein a mere $75 million or so.

Bill says he pushed Black on this:

And I said, oh, come on, Leon. That’s crazy.

Yes, I know you think that’s crazy, Bill, but I own 93 million Apollo shares.

If the stock goes up $1, that’s $93 million. If it goes up $1.50, that’s $150 million.

So that’s, you know, I didn’t think about it.

When you think about this exchange, it’s no wonder that many people believe the pitchforks are coming.

It also partly explains why Leon Black garners zero sympathy for his protestations that he knew nothing of Epstein’s sex crimes and is therefore being unfairly hounded over this. The guy clearly neither knows nor cares how a statement like this comes across in the midst of an affordability crisis.

Bill Cohan is a former investment banker and one of the very best financial journalists operating today. He’s also a friend. Which is why I wanted to talk to him about his book, which is fabulously reported and engagingly written.

But I was struck reading it, at how the culture has changed dramatically. Twenty years ago there was a mass appetite for biographies like this one. In 2010 my first book, The Devil’s Casino, was about Lehman Brothers and the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, we all wanted to know what drove the Kings and Queens of Wall street, what were the characteristics behind their material success - and what caused their failures - and that of the financial system.

Today, I think readers’ appetites have altered. Mine certainly has. Other than trying to understand the Epstein piece of it, I don’t care about Leon Black or how he made his money. I think that in the main we are no longer intrigued by self-made billionaires unless their wealth is created at the cutting edge of AI or industries that directly impact or alter the world we live in; in fact I’d go so far as to say we now abhor the billionaire class unless we see them using their vast wealth to improve other people’s lives in the vein of Mike Bloomberg - or even Black’s one time boss, the rehabilitated Mike Milken.

My suggestion to Black (not that he’s likely to take it): If it’s as easy for him to make money as he tells Bill Cohan, why doesn’t he stop whining about being treated unfairly and repeating that he is shocked and horrified by Epstein’s crimes - and instead set up a charity to protect women and girls against sex trafficking? Not as part of an NDA settlement, or to get himself out of a congressional hearing - but just because he can afford to, and it’s the right thing to do?

That, at least, would be a story I’d be interested to read.

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The conundrum that is America’s Second Lady Usha Vance keeps cropping up at dinner parties? Who is she really? Is she in heaven or is she in hell? Is she complicit in her situation or appalled by it? First Lady chronicler, Kate Brower just published an excellent Vanity Fair profile on the Second Lady and agreed to go live with me.

A Yale liberal in a MAGA world

We started with the basic contradictions: Usha Vance voted for Hillary Clinton and was a registered Democrat until 2022. Yet she is now the second most high-profile woman in MAGA land; She’s Hindu, yet she’s married to a man who wrote a bestselling memoir about his conversion to Catholicism and has said, publicly, that he’d like her to convert too.

She’s whip-smart and accomplished; she graduated summa-cum-laude from Yale Law School, clerking for Justice John Roberts and worked in corporate law - and yet now she’s given birth to a fourth baby, plays a public supporting role, and talks about children’s books on a podcast.

Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, a microbiologist, isn’t just liberal-adjacent — she’s a DEI trailblazer. Dr. Chilukuri created a course at UC San Diego, officially titled “Exploring Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Relation to Human Biology”. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Chilukuri has not been photographed anywhere near the Trump White House.

So….is Usha Vance a long-suffering victim who has been forced into a trad-wife mold thanks to her ambitious husband? Or is it more complicated?

According to Kate’s reporting, yes, it’s a lot more complicated. Usha’s Yale Law school friends emphatically say she is not a victim. She’s a detail-oriented meticulous thinker who is as interested in power as her husband and is content, for now at least, with the role she is playing.

And yet there are quiet signs of rebellion, indications that she isn’t fully immersed in every aspect of Trump World.

Kate dropped one detail in our conversation that didn’t make it into the Vanity Fair piece: Usha’s hairdresser has been urging her for a while to dye the grey streaks in her hair.

She won’t.

Apparently she’s comfortable in her own skin in a world that rewards exactly the opposite.

Speaking of:….

We pivoted to the First Lady, who is facing a different problem — Invisibility. Where is she these days? She can’t hide behind the excuse of looking after Barron any more.

And why has Melania’s foster care program working to return Ukrainian children taken by Russia raised only $2 million?

And, conversely just how many millions is she raking in from licensing agreements? A LOT…. It’s unprecedented.

Enjoy our conversation!

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What would they suggest we do to course correct? AJ throws out some thoughts.

Enjoy our conversation (as well as AJ’s hat!)

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Hey Everyone,

A few weeks ago at Substack’s summer cocktail party in Manhattan, I ran into a friend, fellow substacker, AJ Jacobs who most recently spent a year dressing and attempting to live like a Founding father for his book: The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning.

Among the list of things he did in order to “live constitutionally”:

I carried a musket on the streets of NYC and shot muskets at a rifle range

I gave up social media in favor of writing pamphlets with a quill pen

I quartered a soldier in my apartment, as is my Third Amendment right

I applied to Congress for a letter of marque, which is my constitutional right to be a pirate.

I started a petition on a scroll of paper and got hundreds of signatures and brought it in person to Congress.

I fined my sons thirty-seven and a half cents for every time they cursed, as was the constitutionally-approved law in New York State in 1789.

I tried unsuccessfully to follow coverture, the 18th century system that says married women can’t sign contracts.

The point of this exercise was to remind his readers of what our Founding fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution, and to explore the idea of “originalism,” the guiding principle by which our Supreme Court issues rulings on guns, religion, women’s rights and more. Supposedly the idea of originalism is to follow the original intentions of the framers.

As many of you know I tackled the thorny topic of originalism in my podcast series: Pipeline to Power, which you can order here.

What did AJ find? And what does it signify for us and this court?

Well, tune in tomorrow at 5pm ET for what promises to be a serious conversation dressed up in AJ’s light, humorous and engaging tone.

You can find his substack at Experimental Living with AJ Jacobs.

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As promised, my son Orlando Doull and I got together to see if we could conquer the generation gap and listen to each other’s points of view in a non-judgmental way.

We discussed my latest reporting on Bryan Kohberger - which you can download here and also read in the paperback version of The Idaho Four.

Idaho Four Part 7[93]

412KB ∙ PDF file

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As Orlando says in our chat, this new section in the book is a painful reminder that our justice system does not serve victims of crimes in all the ways that it should. In fact it can rob them of agency, even as it delivers “justice”. The Goncalves family predicted that Kohberger would try to wriggle out of his sentence a year ago when they pushed in vain to have the case go to trial and not let Kohberger cop a guilty plea. I spoke to Steve Goncalves yesterday. It gives him no comfort to have been proven right. Some of the other victims’ parents are devastated.

I hope that a judge moves fast to quash Kohberger’s petition. As you will see in the excerpt, he had plenty of opportunity to express reservations about his defense counsel in court - and he did not do so.

We moved on to talk about incel culture (in which Kohberger was embedded) and the latest reports around Gen Z refraining from having sex.

From there we get into Gen Z’s love affair with Zohran Momdani and the DSA and what he sees coming politically.

We also discuss the importance of American soft power abroad - the subject of Orlando’s latest newsletter.

I was particularly struck by Orlando’s comments about the schism dividing the Democrats and how his peers in Gen Z did not turn out to vote for candidates they viewed as “imperfect” in 2020 and 2024.

Give us your feedback and let us know if you found this interesting - and what you’d like us to tackle next time.

Orlando’s substack is Orlando Doull’s Lunch Break. Feel free to reach out to him with comments and suggestions.

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Hey Everyone,

In a piece of serendipitous timing, just as Bryan Kohberger has announced that he is filing to reverse his guilty plea, telling the New York Times “My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,’ the paperback version of The Idaho Four has dropped!

You can buy it here.

In the new edition of our book there is a whole new section at the end with brand new reporting in which we tell the story of exactly what went down when Kohberger copped to a guilty plea all of a sudden in June of last year, saying, yes, he had murdered Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, thereby avoiding a trial which had already been delayed three years. We take a look at what went down through the eyes of Alivea Goncalves Stevenson, Kaylee’s elder sister, whose stunning speech directed at Kohberger in the courtroom was a tour de force.

The new section will remind you that Kohberger’s plea was not something that all four of the victims’ families wanted to accept at the time. The Goncalves family wanted a trial precisely because they had reservations that Kohberger would pull a stunt like the one he is pulling now. Yesterday, I spoke to James Fry, the former Moscow police chief at the time of the murder investigation (now the police chief in West Richland, WA) and he told me he “was not surprised,” to see that Kohberger had filed to a appeal. “Kohberger has decided he doesn’t like being in prison - perhaps he should have thought of it before he went out and killed four innocent people - and before he said in court that he was pleading guilty because yes, he committed the crimes,” said Fry. “Unless the justice system is totally screwed, a judge will take two seconds to reject this plea.”

If you want to read our new pages, you can download them here:

Idaho Four Part 7

412KB ∙ PDF file

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Later this afternoon at 5pm ET, my son Orlando Doull of Orlando Doull’s Lunch Break and I will chat about the latest developments in the Kohberger story as well as other topics in the new around which Gen Z and Gen X may or may not see eye to eye. Orlando’s latest substack post on US soft power stems from a thought-provoking book launch event with Joel Rubin that I moderated in Washington, DC last week.

Here’s the photo and link to the write-up of our talk!

See you at 5pm ET!

And Here’s the cover of the new Idaho Four paperback!

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So yesterday, while Argentina were scoring two goals in the final minutes of the World Cup semi-final against my native country — ugh! — fortunately I was distracted by a great conversation with Adam Klasfeld.

We discussed the three Congressional hearings happening (strangely) simultaneously: confirmation hearings for both Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton, and testimony to the House Oversight Committee by Kathryn Ruemmler, the former Goldman Sachs General Counsel who stepped down after her flirtatious “joking” emails with Jeffrey Epstein were published in the Epstein Files.

We started with Blanche.

Adam broke down what the senators should have asked him but did not. (He also asked: why didn’t they get more coordinated and organized for this? Blanche is an easy target in that you don’t need to take his word for what he’ll do in the future — there’s plenty to see in his recent past.)

Adam gave props to Sen. John Cornyn, the lame-duck senator whose swing vote is likely pivotal for Blanche’s confirmation, and who cornered Blanche on the thorny legal details suggesting that the $1.8 billion slush fund related to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS (in which he demanded $10 billion after his tax records were published) is not truly dead in the water. He also focused on Blanche’s role in approving the unprecedented settlement that now gives the Trump family immunity from prosecution for tax crimes.

So that was good. But both of us felt Blanche was not properly pressed on the delayed botched roll-out of the Epstein Files or that infamous sit-down with Ghislaine Maxwell — after which she suddenly moved to a far nicer, more relaxed prison.

For my part, I felt that at least Blanche acknowledged the Epstein survivors’ presence in the room (unlike his predecessor Pam Bondi). And at least he gave an explanation for why he can’t commit to meeting them personally — by law, he isn’t allowed to if they have legal representation. He can, however, meet with their attorneys. So my question is: where are those attorneys? They have been strangely silent, in my view, when it comes to giving up the names of Epstein’s male co-conspirators.

We moved on to Jay Clayton’s ties to the Epstein story, which, as you may recall, Nina Burleigh and I discussed last week — and to Ruemmler’s testimony.

We closed on Regime Change, the new epic Trump tale from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. According to their reporting, all the topics that Adam and I typically talk about — lawfare, the weaponization of the Justice Department, the attempted rewriting of the Constitution — generate from the brain of Stephen Miller.

Enjoy!

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As promised, I went back to Nina Burleigh  (like me currently deep in book reporting and writing) to talk about three fabulous pieces of reporting on the Epstein Files she and Katie Chenoweth have done for their Substack American Freakshow.

The topics include:

1. Leon Black. (After storming out of his last session, Leon Black is expected back before the House Oversight Committee, supposedly on July 16.

2. Steve Bannon, somehow, has managed to stay almost entirely out of the conversation despite showing up in the Epstein files roughly two thousand times.

3. A small club of white-shoe lawyers — not the marquee names from Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, but a second tier of possibly far more important fixers, who have spent two decades quietly managing the money, NDAs, and much else that has contributed to keeping this story from fully surfacing.

The Bannon Mystery

We started with Bannon because Nina and Katie’s piece about him dropped yesterday afternoon and arguably should be getting attention on Capitol Hill.

Bannon and Epstein got to know each other well in Epstein’s last years.

The relationship timeline Nina and Katie have pieced together from the files is as follows: in the summer of 2017, Bannon was pushed out of the Trump White House. He and Trump were feuding, but Bannon was still the outside figurehead of the MAGA movement. Then, in January 2018, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was published, in which Bannon is quoted describing Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with the Russians as treasonous. Bannon became radioactive. His patron, Rebekah Mercer, was furious and stopped funding Bannon. He was, in Nina’s words, bottoming out.

And that is precisely the moment Jeffrey Epstein appeared

Wolff connected the two men. What followed was a few months of what Nina calls “footsie playing,” before an invitation to one of Epstein’s birthday parties, before an actual friendship. Within a short window, the man who built his political brand on smashing the administrative state and warning about a shadowy global elite was on Epstein’s plane, in Epstein’s orbit, cozying up to exactly the network he’d spent years telling his audience to fear.

The emails Nina and Katie highlight in the files show the two men engaged in a lot of shit-talk. They are proverbial “boys with toys”, full of empty braggadocio. My personal favorite is when Epstein offers his house to Bannon to make confidential calls because it’s like a “SKIF”. Right. They are discussing turning Mongolia into a crypto capital. They trash Trump, who Bannon says is “like an instrument”. In December 2018—roughly six months before Epstein’s arrest - their exchanges included mocking the #MeToo movement, with Epstein writing, “so many guys caught in the me too . reaching out to me [sic],” and the pair joking about staging a “million man march” on Washington in which participants would wear “pink dick hats.” In August 2018, Epstein and Bannon went back and forth, teasing each other about how Bannon looked on TV. Epstein wrote that he’d changed his plans just to watch Bannon on TV and told him he “looked so clean cut” that Epstein thought he’d “turned on the figure skating channel by accident.”

I told Nina that in the summer of 2017, not long after Bannon left the White House, I’d heard through people close to Michael Wolff that Epstein had reportedly offered to fly Bannon to the Middle East to meet Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. I raised it directly with Bannon at the time and told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from Epstein. He didn’t confirm or deny anything. He just smiled and said nothing — a moment I’ve thought about often since.

So what did Bannon actually need from Epstein? Bannon already had a lot of contacts in the global populist movement. He didn’t need Epstein to meet MBZ - he already knew him. BUT what he didn’t have, after burning his bridge with Mercer, was financial backing — and leading the MAGA army from the outside requires funding. I have never understood why on earth Bannon, of all people, came up with the completely cockamamie scheme to “coach” Epstein for a supposed 60 Minutes sit-down that never had a chance of happening - except, of course, if he was being paid.

And apparently, he was supposed to be paid. According to Nina’s reporting, in the final month of Epstein’s life, the files show that Bannon was pressing Epstein for payment on a contract. That alone, Nina argues, is reason enough for Bannon to be called before the Oversight Committee.

What makes Bannon’s situation fascinating in my view is how successfully he has distanced himself from a scandal he is drowning in on paper. Unlike Trump. One doesn’t hear the base baying for Bannon to divulge what he knows.

Now, that, I’d argue, is a sign of power.

Leon Black, The Recruiters, And The NDAs

The Bannon story bleeds directly into the Leon Black story, which is where the Oversight Committee’s attention is now turning.

Black stormed out of his own committee hearing once already after he refused to discuss NDAs he may have with women in Epstein’s orbit.

Nina and Katie’s reporting focuses on two young Russian and Central Asian women who, according to the files, were actively recruiting for Epstein — steering women from their countries into his network. One of those women, according to Nina, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars directly by Black. Both women appear in email exchanges asking Epstein when Black is going to pay them, discussing what they call, without apparent irony, a “business.” One is looking for a “goodbye” gift - that she later references and says it enabled her to be a stay-at-home mom for a few years.

Whether these women were exploiters or exploited by Epstein is unresolved. It’s the uncomfortable gray zone this entire case keeps landing in: who is a survivor, who is a recruiter, and how often those categories collapse into the same person.

The paper trail alone does not prove that Black had any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking (and he has said he did not know about it). But it raises exactly the question the Oversight Committee should be putting to him: what did Leon Black understand about the operation that supplied him with women; why did he pay them - and why was Epstein apparently in the middle of some of these financial discussions?

Which gets us to the real bottleneck in this entire story: the NDAs.

Nina and I both keep landing on the same frustration. Survivors’ lawyers routinely stand in front of cameras demanding “justice for victims” while declining to name the men who paid for their clients’ silence. Why? Because, as Nina says bluntly, these were largely unsophisticated young women being guided by plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiate settlements, take a substantial cut, and then present signed NDAs as the price of the payout. The lawyers get rich. The names stay sealed. And the NDA machine — which Epstein himself pioneered, using it even to try to silence the original Palm Beach victims before his 2008 non-prosecution deal — becomes the single biggest reason the FBI and DOJ went nowhere on this case for two decades. Without a named victim willing to testify, prosecutors don’t have a case. Without broken NDAs, there is no named victim.

The Other Epstein Lawyers

Nina and Katie’s other recent piece looks at a different kind of lawyer entirely — not the Epstein defense “dream team” from the 2008 plea deal, but four men Nina and Katie call the Epstein Lawyers Association: Reid Weingarten, Jay Clayton, Andrew Levander, and Brad Karp.

Karp is the most well-known and publicly damaged of the four. He had to step down as chairman of Paul Weiss, after the files showed personal emails between him and Epstein, discussing not only Black’s business and private life, but a woman Epstein wanted deported.

Weingarten, whom I know, was Epstein’s personal lawyer going back to the Palm Beach era. He is a Washington fixture who once served on the Senate committee that investigated the “October Surprise” allegations in the 1990s.

Levander is arguably the most unusual of the four: a white-shoe lawyer with a decades-old Epstein connection dating back to the 1980s, when — according to reporting by James Patterson — he hired Epstein to help recover money lost in the Drysdale Securities collapse, one of Wall Street’s forgotten mid-80s crises. That chapter includes an almost cinematic detail: Epstein allegedly taking a private plane out of the Cayman Islands with a briefcase of bearer bonds belonging to a wealthy Spanish family, which he then deposited into a Swiss account the family could never access — while Epstein himself apparently could. Decades later, after Black was forced out of Apollo, it was Levander who produced the internal “independent report” — interviewing twenty people, including Black himself — that concluded Black paid Epstein $170 million for tax advice and would never have paid it had he known about Epstein’s sex crimes. Black was not, in that report, held responsible for anything worse than poor judgment.

And then there’s Clayton — the Trump-appointed former SEC chairman who became Apollo’s “non-executive chairman” after Black’s ouster, sat out the Biden years drawing an Apollo paycheck, and was installed by Trump in 2025 as the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York — the very office that held the Epstein case files before they were moved to Washington. The man who knows, as Nina puts it, “where the bodies are buried at Apollo” is now the man in charge of the prosecutor’s office that would decide whether to dig them up.

All of these stories highlight the network and machinery that enabled Epstein to thrive and avoid justice. All of these men know pieces of the Epstein story - pieces that still need to be put together.

It would be helpful for us to know what they know.

We’re watching Leon Black’s return to Congress closely. We’ll be back on Bannon the moment there’s more.

Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth’s Bannon and Epstein-lawyers reporting is available now on their Substack, The American Freak Show.

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Hey Everyone,

This week I am doing something different.

My son, Orlando, has started writing a substack called Orlando Doull’s Lunch Break. Orlando is 23. He works in corporate communications in Washington, DC. He’s a politics junkie.

His latest substack about Zohran Mamdani and the wave of Democratic Socialism sweeping New York, where he grew up, is thought-provoking. I know many people (my age and older) who are panicked in the way he describes, but I love how thoughtfully he argues they should not be. There is a precedent for the current moment that I think he lays out beautifully. (I think he’s omitted some important things from his argument but he tells me he has his reasons. He wanted to keep it tightly focused).

I may be his proud mom - and as you can see from the photo collage, we enjoy goofing around together - but I don’t think everything that comes out of his mouth or proverbial pen (or social media feed) is worth pondering or repeating. And he’s not shy from telling me whenever he thinks I have generated crud! But even when we disagree, we are usually able to have a constructive dialogue. Usually. There are also times where we feel frustrated with each other, like any parent and child.

As you know I am writing a book about Luigi Mangione and am therefore focused on trying to understand Gen Z, a generation that feels misunderstood and unfairly pigeon-holed by their elders.

So, when I phoned Orlando to talk about his piece on Zohran, we decided we’d try doing some mom/son live video chats around controversial topics to see if we can find a way to better understand each other’s points of view and, perhaps, bridge the generation gap between Gen X (me) and Gen Z (his).

We are noodling a title for our series, so feel free to write in with suggestions as well as ideas for subjects we should talk about

Meanwhile, his substack is below. Do subscribe to it, if you like his writing!

And, Happy July Fourth!

Democratic Socialism: The Boogeyman?

The instinct to check concentrated wealth is older than the panic about it — and it has always had a New York address.

On a Tuesday night last November, my city elected a democratic socialist mayor, and a good part of the country reacted as though we’d run a red flag up over City Hall.

Zohran Mamdani took the oath on January 1st after pulling more votes than any mayoral candidate since 1969, in the highest-turnout city election since 1993. He ran on a platform that didn’t bother to be coy: freeze the rent on stabilized units, make the buses free, fund universal childcare, open city-run grocery stores, tax the top to pay for it. His opponent’s concession warned darkly about “socialism.” The President, watching from Washington, floated arresting him and choking off the city’s money. Listening to all of it, you’d be forgiven for thinking something genuinely alien had just landed in America.

It hadn’t. And the reason why has everything to do with the city that just voted.

Last week, New York held its primaries, and the message only got louder. A slate of candidates endorsed by Mamdani didn’t just win — they came for the establishment and got it. Brad Lander beat two-term Rep. Dan Goldman by nearly thirty points; Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; and Claire Valdez took an open Brooklyn-Queens seat over the retiring incumbent’s handpicked successor. Two of the three are card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America. In districts this blue, the primary is the election. Come January, Mamdani will have three new allies in Congress.

This alarmed a lot of people, plenty of them Democrats. Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey went on Fox News the next morning, called himself a “Democratic capitalist,” and announced that the socialists who’d just won were, in his telling, not Democrats at all.

I take serious issue with that, because it openly ignores history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt — arguably the architect of the modern Democratic Party, Governor of New York, four-term President — expanded the role of government in the economy about as far as it has ever gone: he created Social Security, raised taxes on the wealthy, and funded public works on a scale the country had never seen.

Gottheimer says these people aren’t Democrats. But FDR didn’t merely happen to be a Democrat who did these things. He was the modern Democratic Party — the man who built the coalition Gottheimer now claims to speak for. To call the heirs of that tradition fake Democrats is to read the party’s own founder out of it. And it was never only the Democrats. Teddy Roosevelt (FDR’s cousin) — Republican, trustbuster, face on the mountain — went after the “malefactors of great wealth” a generation earlier and used the Sherman Act to break Standard Oil apart. The instinct to put a check on concentrated money has never belonged to one party. It’s belonged to whichever one was paying attention.

And here’s what Gottheimer, of all people, should know, sitting in a seat just across the river: this instinct has a New York address. The New Deal he’s living off of was, in no small part, a New York export. Frances Perkins watched workers leap from the windows of the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 and later called that day the beginning of the New Deal; she went on to become FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the architect of Social Security. Roosevelt governed here. Robert Wagner, who wrote the law that gave American workers the right to organize, was our senator. So when New York sends a slate of democratic socialists to Washington, it isn’t smuggling in something foreign. It’s doing what it has always done — exporting the argument that capitalism works best when somebody is watching it.

Notice, too, when these moments arrive. They show up when the gap between the top and everyone else has stretched near the breaking point. When the Depression hit, Herbert Hoover’s instinct was to stand back and let the market right itself. That instinct didn’t save him, and it didn’t save the country. What came after wasn’t the end of American capitalism. It was its renovation — and the renovation kept the house standing for the better part of a century.

Which brings me back to my city, and to why these candidates keep winning. This is not a fever that happened to New Yorkers. Look at what they actually said on their way out of the polls: cost of living was the top issue, ahead of crime, and three in four called the cost of housing a major problem. These are not people who read too much theory. They do the rent math every month and keep coming up short. When that’s the reality, “freeze my rent and tax the billionaires” isn’t a radical incantation. It’s an answer to a question the people in charge kept declining to answer.

Somewhere along the way we started treating “free market, hands off” as the one authentic American creed, and everything to its left as a betrayal of the founding. That’s just bad history. The tradition was never pure laissez-faire; it was a running argument over where to draw the line between a market that rewards effort and one that simply entrenches whoever already won. My own line sits about here: I am in favor of a market economy, but only when the proper restrictions on monopoly, malpractice, and misuse are in place. That is not a socialist position. Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized it. So would the New Dealers.

You could watch the modern version of that argument in Lina Khan, who ran the Federal Trade Commission until 2025 and spent her tenure dusting off the trustbusters’ tools for the age of Big Tech. The wealth gap she was reacting to isn’t subtle: the top one percent now holds about as much wealth as the entire bottom ninety percent combined — a concentration the country hadn’t seen since the Gilded Age that turned the first Roosevelt into a trustbuster. And the ground is shifting under the people who say “socialist” like it’s a spell: support for capitalism has slid to 54 percent, the lowest in Gallup’s tracking, while support for socialism has climbed to 39. A whole generation is doing the math and landing somewhere their parents didn’t, partly because the America where you could “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Which raises the question the boogeyman talk is built to avoid: what would a fair market actually take? Not its abolition. A fair market doesn’t build itself — somebody has to set the table and then keep an eye on it, and that’s the part we’ve let slide. It means breaking up the monopolies that quietly set prices for the rest of us. It means building enough housing that rent stops swallowing half a paycheck, and funding the childcare and the buses that let people show up to the economy in the first place. It means writing rules that punish malpractice instead of subsidizing it. Call that socialism if it makes you feel better. I’d call it upkeep — the maintenance a market needs to keep the one promise it is supposed to make, that effort gets you somewhere. Do that work well and you don’t bury capitalism. You give people a reason to defend it again.

None of which makes the worries imaginary. The objections have teeth: rent freezes can choke off the new housing a city desperately needs, city-run groceries can curdle into city-run boondoggles, and capital and people can leave a place that overplays its hand. Mamdani and his new allies have mandates and to-do lists, not records, and those are very different things. Skepticism is fair. Panic is not. Taking a set of fairly ordinary demands about affordability and laundering them into a red scare isn’t an argument — it’s a way of dodging one. The American economy, right now, does not work for most Americans. Plain and simple. That’s the engine under economic populism, and the lawmakers who can’t say it out loud are the ones it’ll keep running over.

So, the boogeyman. Turn the lights on in the closet and the thing standing there looks an awful lot like our own history: a country that has repeatedly decided unchecked economic power is the government’s business, and a city that has done more than its share of the deciding. New York didn’t invent that last week. It just remembered it, loudly, and in an accent Josh Gottheimer should recognize from his own side of the Hudson. The real question was never whether democratic socialism is un-American. It’s whether the people shouting the word have read past the first chapter of the story — because the rest of the book is full of exactly this fight.

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