The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office with all of us—Azar, Giroir, the advocates, and me. I never expected to be there so long. Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges.
Donald was still Donald, of course. He bounced from subject to subject—disability to the stock market and back to disability. But promisingly, Donald seemed genuinely curious regarding the depth of medical needs across the U.S. and the individual challenges these families faced. He told the secretary and the assistant secretary to stay in touch with our group and to be supportive.
After I left the office, I was standing with the others near the side entrance to the West Wing when Donald’s assistant caught up with me. “Your uncle would like to see you,” she said.
Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going?”
“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”
“Sure, happy to do it.”
He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.
“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives. For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.
I turned and walked away.
If you think it can’t get worse than that you would be wrong:
Eric said he’d been getting some resistance from Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Ann Marie, Robert’s widow. I really didn’t look forward to these calls.
“Why don’t you call Donald?” Eric said. “Talk to him about it.”
I thanked Eric for the heads-up and promised I would.
Soon thereafter, I was up at Briarcliff Manor, home of the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, N.Y. Donald happened to be there.
He was talking with a group of people. I didn’t want to interrupt. I just said hi on my way through the clubhouse. I called him later that afternoon, and he answered.
I got him up to speed on what Eric had told me. I said I’d heard the fund for William was running low, and unfortunately, the expenses certainly were not easing up as our son got older. In fact, with inflation and other pressures, the needs were greater than they’d been. “We’re getting some blowback from Maryanne and Elizabeth and Ann Marie. We may need your help with this. Eric wanted me to give you a call.”
Donald took a second as if he was thinking about the whole situation.
“I don’t know,” he finally said, letting out a sigh. “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Wait! What did he just say? That my son doesn’t recognize me? That I should just let him die?
Did he really just say that? That I should let my son die . . . so I could move down to Florida?
Really?
I’m usually pretty good at getting my head around things that other people say, even when I don’t agree with them. But this was a tough one. This was my son.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that. It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son.
45% (at least) of the American voting public is going to cast its ballots for this psychopath.
The first Deadpool film, released in 2016, broke lots of rules. It was R-rated and hyper-violent, but it was also self-aware in the Family Guy way, frequently puncturing the fourth wall and mocking the seriousness of the superhero genre. Deadpool, played by Ryan Reynolds, knew he was in a movie—and a dumb one, at that. This intentionally juvenile humor bred massive success, and by 2018’s Deadpool 2, our quippy antihero knew he was in a cinematic universe—albeit the junky one run by 20th Century Studios that quivered alongside the ruthless success of Disney’s Marvel enterprise. (For those of you who haven’t relentlessly kept up: The film rights to the different Marvel superheroes are owned by different studios, and it’s generally accepted that Marvel Studios—which is owned by Disney—has made the better movies.)
Times change, corporate acquisitions happen, and now we have Deadpool & Wolverine, in which Deadpool not only knows he’s in a cinematic universe but also wants to go to a better one. It’s an almost entirely metatextual movie—a series of Variety articles given life, crammed in a Lycra suit and encouraged to curse with impunity. Shawn Levy’s film exists to properly usher Deadpool into Disney’s squeaky-clean Marvel Cinematic Universe, helped along by the wearily professional Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), dragged out of retirement (and death) for one last rodeo. But Deadpool & Wolverine is also a gleeful funeral for all the stunted series and cinematic universes the MCU has squashed over the years, even referencing long-rumored projects that never came to fruition.
Yes, the film is razzing the corporate frameworks around these beloved (or sometimes despised) enterprises. But it also assumes that audiences know as much as Deadpool does inside his own movie. Deadpool is very aware that the MCU mastermind Kevin Feige is his new producer, that his jokes about cocaine won’t fly under Disney’s radar, and that Hugh Jackman is both too old for this nonsense and very good at singing Broadway numbers. At times, the movie more resembles a jokey sizzle reel at CinemaCon than it does actual cinema. For viewers who spend a lot of their time online, soaking up the discourse generated by insider-fan accounts and message boards, all of this will seem warmly familiar. But good luck if you’re coming in with no prior knowledge.
Nevertheless. Feige’s mainstream instincts are easy to detect here. The prior Deadpool films were scuzzy and cobbled together, even as the budget grew; the cameos from other Marvel characters felt half-hearted and perfunctory, inclusions for Deadpool to roll his eyes at, not for fans to cheer over. Deadpool & Wolverine, on the other hand, has that bland MCU sheen that makes all of its movies look expensive but nonthreatening, happily accepting of mediocrity rather than attempting something artsy or daring. Similarly, what passes for the narrative stakes have been honed to fan-service perfection, with characters spouting sci-fi gibberish about how characters such as Wolverine are “anchor entities” that keep universes going, essentially proclaiming that superheroes are the most important things imaginable.
The MCU has undoubtedly lost some commercial and critical momentum, but because Deadpool & Wolverine is so firmly focused on satisfying the nerds, I predict it’ll crush at the box office. The familiar presences of Reynolds and Jackman will definitely help; I’ve certainly grown tired of the former’s motor-mouthed wisecracking in every single movie, but he’s very comfortable with Deadpool’s profane monologues. Jackman, meanwhile, can deliver gravitas in his sleep, even as his role here diminishes the glorious swan song he received in 2017’s Logan, in which he sort of went out like Clint Eastwood. (Deadpool & Wolverine is aware of this too, and makes several jokes about it.)
Shall I attempt to describe the plot of this jokey mash of cutaway gags and PowerPoints? Very well. Deadpool, a scarred mercenary with a healing factor, has largely drifted toward retirement and a life of hanging out with his pals from the previous two movies. But then he’s tossed into a cosmic in-between zone run by the Time Variance Authority (from, uh, TV’s Loki), the bureaucrats managing every cinematic universe seen and unseen. A fussy stuffed suit named Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) tells Deadpool that his world is vanishing and irrelevant, but that he’s been chosen for a brighter future: the MCU, where mysterious overlords have decided he belongs. So he goes on a timeline-hopping adventure, assisted by a particularly drunk and miserable Wolverine on the way, to try to save his friends from deletion.
My head hurt typing that out, and it’s probably just as inscrutable to read, but it also doesn’t really matter. Deadpool is here, Wolverine is grunting alongside him, and they stab lots of folks and make lots of jokes while exciting actors make nostalgic cameo appearances. It’s a movie that’s playing to the back of the house—assuming the house is Comic-Con’s Hall H—and it’ll get lots of laughs in return. Can Deadpool himself save the faltering MCU? Probably not. But with four more MCU movies slated for release in 2025, it’s a little relieving to watch someone poke fun at how pompous they’ve become—as much fun as Feige allows, that is.
Like the character that gave the festival its name, Sundance may be about to take a big leap into the unknown.
After 40 years in Park City, Utah, the Sundance Film Festival announced in April that it was welcoming bids for a potential new home starting in January 2027. The festival has played down the reasons for leaving its longtime host, citing only a desire to ensure that “inclusivity and sustainability are always at the forefront.” Reading between the lines, the former seems a reference to anti-LGBTQ laws recently passed by the Utah state legislature, the latter an acknowledgment that Sundance may have outgrown Park City, a town of 8,000 that sees its entire Main Street booked for private events for the duration of the festival, leaving hardworking journalists no other option but to sustain themselves on grocery-store sushi for a week. But I digress!
Fifteen cities reportedly applied to be Sundance’s new home, and last week the festival officially narrowed its search to six finalists. Left off the list were hopefuls like Minneapolis (even colder than Utah), Athens (doesn’t have an airport), Savannah (already has the SCAD Film Festival), and Nashville (not really a film town; it’s more Hawk Tuah than Talk to Her). Sorry to all of them; perhaps they’ll have better luck applying to be the new hosts of Cannes.
A selection committee will visit each of the remaining contenders over the next few weeks, which should absolutely be the setup for a short-form documentary series. But before any final decision is made, it’s imperative that Sundance hear from a very important stakeholder — me. As a festival connoisseur who has learned to type an entire blog post on my phone in between bites of a chicken Caesar wrap, which city would I most like to spend a week rushing between theaters, trying to catch three, four, or even five movies a day?
The contenders will be judged on the following statistical criteria:
— What’s the weather like in January?
— How easy is it to get there, and once I’m there, how easy is it to get around?
— How much of Vox Media’s money will I be squandering to get a decent Airbnb?
— Can I get a tasty, moderately healthy meal in a 45-minute gap between screenings?
— Are there enough movie theaters to host a full-size festival? (Note that this is not necessarily disqualifying: One of the defining experiences of Sundance and Telluride is watching a premiere in a high-school auditorium or a converted ice-hockey rink.)
In addition, I will also offer a more amorphous vibes-based judgment. That the festival is keepings its traditional January date indicates it will attempt to maintain its role as an indie showcase that stands outside the winter awards circus. So we must also ask how well each prospective host fits with the established Sundance atmosphere. I want my celebs doing their Chase Sapphire Lounge photo shoots in quirky sweaters and the world’s most gigantic puffers. I want flat-brimmed hats and big ol’ boots. Sundance should not be Santa Barbara. A sense of being cut off from the outside world is a plus, as is a vague (and false) feeling of roughing it.
Is the grass always greener bluer on the other side? Let’s run down the likely candidates:
6. Louisville
Photo: Getty Images
Average January temperature: 36 degrees.
Flight time from NYC: About two and a half hours.
Flight time from L.A.: There are no direct flights; it’s around six hours with a layover.
Average per-night cost of a “guest favorite” 1BR on Airbnb: $130
Are there copious fast-casual restaurants? Apparently, there’s a food hall downtown. And, of course, there’s also the Hot Brown, a riff on the Welsh rarebit that’s basically an open-faced turkey sandwich topped with bacon and Mornay sauce, which I would absolutely need to try.
How many movie theaters are there already? Not many, though there are a couple performing-arts venues downtown that could be converted. Funnily enough, one local landmark is a marquee for a movie theater that no longer exists.
Louisville is only 100 miles away from another finalist, and they’re both in the same liminal region: not quite the Midwest, not quite Appalachia, and not quite the South. So it’s kind of funny that Sundance put both of them through to the finals, and even Louisvillians aren’t quite sure how they made the cut. (Conspiracy brain: Since Kentucky’s LGBT-rights rating is even worse than Utah’s, either the inclusivity thing is a red herring, or Sundance is stacking the field with red-state tomato cans to clear a path for the two cities it really wants.) Anyway, I guess the best argument you can make for Louisville is that it’s temperate and used to accommodating visitors. The local culture here seems mostly built around whiskey and horse racing, which doesn’t feel super Sundance-y to me.
5. Cincinnati
Photo: Getty Images
Average January temperature: 31 degrees.
Flight time from NYC: About two hours.
Flight time from L.A.: The only nonstop option is a Delta red-eye, if you’re up for it. Otherwise, you’re looking at a layover and a six-hour journey.
Average per-night cost of a “guest favorite” 1BR on Airbnb: $98, which is also the number of degrees in the city’s most famous band.
Will I need to Uber everywhere? Consensus says public transit is “not that bad.”
Are there copious fast-casual restaurants? I am perhaps the only member of the East Coast media elite willing to defend Cincinnati chili, but I would not want to eat it more than once a week. Anyway, it seems like most of the places worth checking out are around the university, not downtown.
How many movie theaters are there already? There’s only one theater downtown, though as with other finalists, there are a few performing-arts venues that could accommodate film screenings.
I used to live in Cincinnati. Here’s my review: good playgrounds, excellent Chuck E. Cheese, gigantic kindergarteners. (I was a toddler.) I haven’t been back since I learned how to read, so I boned up on the copious “Louisville vs. Cincinnati” posts online to see which to rank higher. Cincy seems to edge it in terms of infrastructure and vibrancy, but let’s be honest — unless one of them knocks the pitch out of the park (which would be great for the aforementioned short-form doc), Sundance probably isn’t choosing either of these random midsize red-state cities.
4. Salt Lake City
Photo: Getty Images
Average January temperature: 31 degrees.
Flight time from NYC: Around five hours.
Flight time from L.A.: Around two hours.
Average per-night cost of a “guest favorite” 1BR on Airbnb: $80.
Will I need to Uber everywhere? There’s a light-rail system called TRAX and a bus network. Residents hail the public transit as “reliable.”
How many movie theaters are there already? There are a few multiplexes downtown.
This is actually a hybrid bid for Sundance to be jointly based in Park City and Salt Lake City, with the assumption that the larger locale would pick up more of the slack. Essentially, it’s the continuity option: SLC has hosted Sundance in the past, and the festival already schedules multiple events downtown. (Plus, unless you’re among the PJ set, you fly in here anyway.) There is an argument that SLC is the best of both worlds. It gives the festival all the infrastructure of a proper city while still feeling indisputably Sundance-y. Reporters would barely have to change their tweets! However, the home of the Jazz comes with one major sticking point. If Sundance really does want to leave Park City because of Utah’s anti-trans laws, simply moving 30 miles down the road won’t cut it.
3. Atlanta
Photo: Sean Pavone/Getty Images
Average January temperature: 44 degrees.
Flight time from NYC: Over two hours. (In fact, 80 percent of the U.S. population lives within a two-hour flight of the Atlanta airport.)
Flight time from L.A.: Sorry, L.A., you’re in the 20 percent. It’s about four hours.
Average per-night cost of a “guest favorite” 1BR on Airbnb: $120.
Will I need to Uber everywhere? Atlanta has the MARTA rail network, which is underwhelming.
Are there copious fast-casual restaurants? When I was a kid, I used to love the Varsity, and the city is now a pioneer in the grain-bowl space.
How many movie theaters are there already? This is the eighth-largest metro region in the entire country, so there are a bunch.
Over the past decade, Atlanta has become a center for film and TV production. I’ve heard from people who work there that they often feel left behind or ignored by the power centers on the coasts. Sundance coming to town would fundamentally change Atlanta’s relationship with the industry. Considering that what gets made there is usually more commercial than the typical Sundance fare, it would also fundamentally alter the nature of the festival itself. This would be the opposite of sticking with Utah — a vote for Atlanta is a vote for radical change. (It’s worth noting that Georgia’s record on LGBTQ issues isn’t great, either.)
2. Santa Fe
Photo: Getty Images
Average January temperature: 30 degrees.
Flight time from NYC: No direct flights; it’s around seven hours with a layover. You could also fly into Albuquerque, which is an hour away, but there are no direct flights there from New York, either.
Flight time from L.A.: Albuquerque is only a two-hour flight. Flying into Santa Fe requires a layover, making it a four- to five-hour journey.
Average per-night cost of a “guest favorite” 1BR on Airbnb: $170.
Will I need to Uber everywhere? There are buses, but they’re slow and not always reliable.
Are there copious fast-casual restaurants? Are breakfast burritos and green-chile burgers necessarily conducive to a lifestyle where you’re sitting in a movie theater nine hours a day? Perhaps not, but who cares.
How many movie theaters are there already? A couple independent theaters downtown — one of which is owned by George R.R. Martin — and a Regal in a mall about 15 minutes away.
It’s really expensive and a trek for New Yorkers. But otherwise, there’s a lot to recommend about Santa Fe, including a thriving local arts scene and the scale that’s ideal for a festival town: small enough to feel cloistered in a world of pure cinema, big enough to handle an influx of dorks in lanyards. I sense that the local vibe is kind of kooky, which is worth a lot of points in my book.
1. Boulder
Photo: Getty Images/Getty Images
Average January temperature: 34 degrees.
Flight time from NYC: Around four hours to Denver, which is 45 minutes away by car.
Flight time from L.A.: Over two hours to the Denver airport.
Average per-night cost of a “guest favorite” 1BR on Airbnb: There are almost no such 1BRs in Boulder on Airbnb.
Will I need to Uber everywhere? Transit is decent, and many residents say they’re able to get by without a car.
Are there copious fast-casual restaurants? Alongside cannabis shops, Patagonia fleece, and microbrews, my mental image of Boulder includes health-conscious fast-casual dining, and I’m pleased to report that the stereotype is correct.
How many movie theaters are there already? There’s the Art Deco Boulder Theater downtown and a Cinemark a mile away.
Boulder is the Goldilocks pick. It’s got the same small-city vibe as Santa Fe, but it’s cheaper and easier to get to. It’s conveniently located next to, but not in, a major urban center. If my map is correct, Colorado is only one state over from Utah, so the aesthetic won’t change too much. And it even has a Robert Redford connection — the star attended CU Boulder in his pre-fame days. The lack of quality Airbnbs is a bummer, but all things considered, I can live with it. THR’s Scott Feinberg says Boulder is the odds-on favorite, and though he notes some potential awareness around the preexisting Boulder International Film Festival held in March, he holds out hope for “some sort of an alliance that would keep all parties happy.” Redford’s daughter Amy is apparently helping out with the search, but I don’t think they’ll need to cajole her: In the eye of this beholder, it’s Boulder!
The Trumpist justices on the Supreme Court had a very serious problem: They needed to keep their guy out of prison for trying to overthrow the government. The right-wing justices had to do this while still attempting to maintain at least a pretense of having ruled on the basis of the law and the Constitution rather than mere partisan instincts.
So they settled on what they thought was a very clever solution: They would grant the presidency the near-unlimited immunity Donald Trump was asking for, while writing the decision so as to keep the power to decide which presidential acts would be “official” and immune to criminal prosecution, and which would be “unofficial” and therefore not. The president is immune, but only when the justices say he is. The president might seem like a king, but the justices can withhold the crown.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity combines with its regulatory decisions this term to remake the executive branch into the ideal right-wing combination of impotence and power: too weak to regulate, restrain, or punish private industry for infractions, but strong enough for the president to order his political opponents murdered or imprisoned. To ordinary people, the president is a king; to titans of industry, he is a pawn. Given the work the Trump justices have done here, the billionaire class’s affection for Trump, often presented as counterintuitive, is not difficult to understand.
Yet when it comes to the justices’ decision on immunity, they were too clever by half. They seem to believe that when a president goes too far for their taste, they can declare that he’s not immune and constrain him. But there is danger in a ruling that invites presidents to test the limits of their power. By the time a rogue president goes too far, he is unlikely to care what the Supreme Court says. A president unbound by the law is shackled only by the dictates of his own conscience, and a president without a conscience faces no restraint at all. And because the Court ruled as it did, when it did, and on behalf of a man lawless enough to try to overturn an election, Americans may pay for the justices’ hubris sooner rather than later.
Rather than leave such momentous decisions in the justices’ hands as they intended, the ruling empowers anyone amoral enough to commit crimes to do so without any fear of the law or the Supreme Court. The decision implies that this immunity would extend to anyone acting on the president’s orders—meaning that a president is free not only to commit crimes, but to turn the federal government itself into a criminal enterprise, one in which officials can act with impunity against the public they are meant to serve. That the executive branch has all the guns was true prior to the Court’s ruling. But until the justices had to find a way to keep Donald Trump out of prison for trying to stay in office after losing an election, few people believed that the presidency was as unbound from the law as the Supreme Court has now made it.
The American government was constructed with one basic idea in mind: that the three branches would prevent tyranny by counteracting one another. As “Federalist No. 51” put it, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” But a subsequent clause is just as important: “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
The Framers were decidedly not angels—their acceptance of slavery being an obvious illustration of their fallibility. They understood that, to sustain itself, the structure of the government would have to account for vices as well as virtues. The Roberts Court’s ahistorical ruling reversed the entire purpose of the Constitution, from creating a government that did not need to be led by angels to creating one so imperial that only an angel ought to be allowed to govern it.
We could speculate on how presidents without fear of the law might act, but we already have a historical example in Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson.
In 1831, the Supreme Court decided 5–1 in favor of a pair of missionaries who had been assisting the Cherokee in a dispute with the Georgia state government. The justices ruled that because the Cherokee constituted a sovereign nation, only the federal government had jurisdiction over them. Georgia had passed a series of laws authorizing the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee from any lands claimed by the state, and as a result of the ruling, those laws had become invalid. But Jackson had no intention of upholding the Supreme Court’s decision and preventing Georgia from seizing those lands and displacing the Cherokee.
According to the Jackson biographer John Meacham, the president did not say, “Well, [Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” the popular misquote of Jackson’s reaction. Instead he said, “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” But the effect was the same. Neither Jackson nor the state of Georgia wanted to follow Marshall’s opinion, and so they ignored it. The federal government had already passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, so the decision would not have prevented the ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears even had it been heeded. Nevertheless, the incident showed that the Supreme Court had no power to enforce its decisions; it relied on the good faith of the executive branch.
In the history of presidential crimes, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans dwarfs anything Trump has done. Jackson acted as he did not because he believed that the text of the Constitution granted him immunity, but because in 1831 the United States allowed only white men to vote and there was no constituency large enough to oppose his actions. In other words: He did it because he knew he could get away with it.
One could retort that the fact that the republic did not fall after a president ignored a Supreme Court decision should provide some comfort. But that is not the lesson here. The lesson is that presidents and governments are capable of doing monstrous things to people they consider beneath them or to whom they are unaccountable. The extraconstitutional presidential immunity invented out of whole cloth by the Roberts Court offers to make presidents unaccountable not just to a portion of the people they govern, but to all of them.
Whatever crimes Trump has committed in the past, or chooses to commit in the future, he will, unlike Jackson, have the Supreme Court’s blessing—so long as he can disguise them as official acts. But even if Trump loses in November, this concept of presidential immunity conjured up by the Roberts Court has made the current crisis of American democracy perpetual. Until it is overturned, every president is a potential despot.
The Jackson incident is a well-known cautionary tale of presidential lawlessness. Trump’s entourage however, sees it differently—as inspiration.
Trump’s newly announced running mate, J. D. Vance, has said so himself. In 2022, Vanity Fair reported that Vance had appeared on a podcast in which he said, “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” and added:
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say”—he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is not a view of executive power that is going to submit to whatever legal technicalities the justices might use to restrain it, if they even wanted to. One likely reason Vance was picked is that, unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, Vance has openly said he would have tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election using the vice president’s ceremonial role in electoral-vote certification. In other words, he would be a willing accomplice to a coup. We might view Vance’s lawlessness here as a kind of audition for the next Trump administration, one he apparently aced.
The originalists of the Roberts Court, supposedly so committed to the text of the Constitution, the intent of the Framers, and the nuances of history, conjured out of nothing precisely the sort of executive office the Founders of the United States were trying to avoid. They did so because their primary mode of constitutional interpretation is a form of narcissism: Whatever the contemporary conservative movement wants must be what the Founders wanted, regardless of what the Founders actually said, did, or wrote.
The right-wing justices, in rewriting the Constitution in Trump’s image, have clearly diverged from the intentions of the Founders. In “Federalist No. 69,” Alexander Hamilton wrote that former presidents would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Expanding on his point, Hamilton wrote, “The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.” The Roberts Court turned the office of the presidency the Founders had made into the kind of monarchical office they had rebelled against.
The justices, less independent arbiters than the shock troops of the conservative movement, wanted Trump to be immune to prosecution, and so they conjured a rationale for doing so, with a narrow window of legal accountability that only they have the right to determine. But that window might as well be barred from the inside: What Jackson’s story shows is that the feeble, arbitrary restraints the justices put into their own grant of royal immunity to Trump will not withstand any president with the capacity to violate them. Unfortunately, the day a rogue president shows the Supreme Court just how powerless it really is, it will not be the justices who suffer most for their folly.
EVERY WEDNESDAY NIGHT in the early 2000s, my parents and I watched Voyager (VOY, 1995–2001) and subsequently Enterprise (ENT, 2001–05). Interspersed with reruns of The Next Generation (TNG, 1987–94) and episodes recorded on VHS before I was born, the Star Trek universe provided a foundation for my own. What may have been merely a science fiction world of fantasy and make-believe, aliens and far-off galaxies, androids and subspace organisms served as a formative investigation of what it means to be human—or rather alive in an intergalactic community of sentient beings.
Between existential threats from the Borg and Xindi, my parents occasionally opined that there was a truly dark period in Star Trek’s history that they were glad to have left behind. That six-year period was Deep Space 9 (DS9, 1993–99). All I knew about this seemingly detestable series was its fundamental departure from Star Trek’s core ethos of exploration and European liberal humanist values. DS9—in contrast to the USS Enterprise’s warp speed travels from planet to planet, solving crisis after crisis in The Original Series (TOS, 1966–69) and TNG—is rooted in place on the station from which it takes its name. Located adjacent to Bajor, a non-Federation world, DS9 remains embroiled in the aftereffects of the Bajoran people’s recent expulsion of their genocidal, materially extractive Cardassian colonizers of over 50 years, who tore through the planet, leaving much to rebuild and replenish in their wake.
Keen to fill the gaps of my Star Trek education in adulthood, I watched the entirety of DS9 but with the blinders of my preconceived notions, feeling this to be a laborious exercise in simply doing my due diligence as a self-identified Trekkie. A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by David K. Seitz has, however, revolutionized my understanding of what I now see as a widely underappreciated and understudied series.
Seitz unveils how DS9 throws the blind optimism and utopian ideals of the other series into doubt, complicating the clean prognostication of a better, egalitarian, postcapitalist society. Within the Star Trek series, the true inner workings of the Federation’s postcapitalist, post-scarcity, merit-based, welfare system are never laid bare. Despite Starfleet’s interstellar treks, ships’ crews remain isolated from fully immersing in other worlds and cultures, due to Federation values and practices. Consequently, it’s the clash of customs, currencies, and cultures on the ever-stationary DS9 that unveils the Federation’s relationship to not only money but also religion, colonialism, militarization, and interpersonal conflict.
In six chapters, Seitz examines the full spectrum of DS9’s dynamics: he analyzes its queer subtexts by way of Dr. Julian Bashir’s (Alexander Siddig) friendship with Garak (Andrew J. Robinson), the Cardassian tailor and former spy, as well as Jadzia Dax’s (Terry Farrell) embodiment of seven past lives, both male and female, that she experienced as a Trill host. Seitz questions the place of social reproduction in Star Trek’s theoretically classless, anti-racist, post-sexist society via Chief Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) and Keiko O’Brien’s (Rosalind Chao) domestic relationship. And Seitz elucidates the proliferation of commerce adjacent to—or perhaps, he suggests, always inherent to but unacknowledged within—the Federation through Quark (Armin Shimerman), his bar, and his Ferengi brethren.
But at the core of A Different Trek is Seitz’s examination of Bajor. Just as the Bajoran people declare independence from their Cardassian oppressors, the Bajoran Provisional Government welcomes a Federation “peacekeeping” presence in their sector and on their space station, the former Cardassian ore-processing facility renamed DS9. Starfleet Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) is assigned to command the station and help shepherd Bajor toward Federation membership. Through analyzing the broader allegorical geography of Bajor, predominantly via Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), the Bajoran first officer assigned to DS9, Seitz presents a reading of the planet and its people as a lens for Palestinian resistance, Black freedom struggles, and Indigenous challenges to settler colonialism. Through this analysis, Seitz problematizes the Federation’s vaunted position as an enlightened, morally superior union of planets. When the Federation’s relationship to Bajor is juxtaposed with the not-so-distant Cardassian occupation, the Federation—so often framed as a beacon of equity and liberalism—begins to look like a new, soft imperial power, meddling in the affairs of alien worlds.
By centering Bajor—and teasing out their long-term process of reckoning with past traumas, a violent history, and the role of religion as a unifying force in the struggle for independence—DS9 served, Seitz observes, as a “counterpoint, corrective, and critical intervention” in the Star Trek universe. Defying cardinal prohibitions against religion and money, DS9 and by extension Bajor contradicts much of what the Federation strictly upholds, throwing Star Trek’s utopic vision of the future into stark relief and, as such, revealing the messy, morally ambiguous workings of an intergalactic community that ultimately serves as a corollary to our own messy, far-from-utopic present.
Beyond his examination of Bajor’s allegorical nuances—and the ways in which it challenges accepted conceptions of the Federation as an undeniable force for good—Seitz embraces in A Different Trek an expansive definition of the Star Trek universe, weaving into his examination perspectives not only from all series but also from the movies, the fan fiction, and the actors themselves. Seitz’s choice to examine the defining impact that DS9’s actors had on its political and emotional resonances, plotlines, and central conceit serves to enrich the characters, their experiences, and my own. I’m ashamed to admit that I originally found Sisko dull. The poetic cadence of his speech, I thought, damped and often qualified the meaning of his words. He was not Captain Jean-Luc Picard of TNG, nor did he make grand unimpeachable declarations in the face of seemingly impossible moral quandaries. Instead, when rewatching DS9 after reading A Different Trek, I saw Sisko in a new light. Seitz’s cultural geography teases out connections between people and place within both real and fictional worlds in such a way that Sisko’s poetry now reads as an enlightened realism, a constant balancing act, an inner struggle between what he might want, need, or know to be true, and the many actors (in both senses of the word) that play upon his decisions.
Nichelle Nichols wouldn’t have continued to play Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on TOS were it not for Martin Luther King Jr.’s encouragement, affirming that she was making a difference in the Civil Rights Movement by painting a picture of what was possible for the Black community, perhaps most iconically partaking in the first interracial kiss on TV. Similarly, Avery Brooks asserted that he wouldn’t have been on Star Trek were it not for the many influential Black figures that came before him, most importantly, Paul Robeson, the Black American musician, communist activist, lawyer, and athlete whom he had previously portrayed onstage. Seitz pushes far beyond a reading of Sisko as a simple hallmark of inclusionary liberal politics to instead paint a full and lively picture of a multidimensional character whose cultural legacy (one shared by Brooks) is not merely Earth lore but also consequential in the lives, politics, and social formations of DS9’s present.
Sisko is not simply a fan of baseball (particularly the Negro leagues), a collector of African diaspora art, and an excellent cook of Creole cuisine, regularly making jambalaya and gumbo like his father who runs a restaurant in New Orleans. As Seitz suggests, Sisko’s worldview is heavily informed by Brooks’s own politics and experiences, which manifest in the character via fiercely anti-colonial sentiments, a moving treatment of the existential pain of anti-Blackness, a deep knowledge of Earth’s history and the revolutionary work of Black freedom struggles, and, perhaps more importantly, the tenderness exhibited between Sisko, his father, and his son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton). No other Star Trek series of the era delved as deeply into the nuances of an interpersonal relationship, particularly one between two men. What makes the dynamic between Sisko and Jake so special and lifelike, Seitz explains, is the real love the actors exhibited for one another.
DS9 does away with the kind of multiculturalism that relied on hollow tokenism—which in Star Trek has manifested as Black characters inherently othered by way of prosthesis—whether that be Michael Dorn’s ridged forehead as the Klingon Worf on both TNG and subsequently DS9; LeVar Burton’s visor, which he wore playing Geordi La Forge, a blind engineer on TNG; or Tim Russ’s pointy ears as Tuvok, a Vulcan on VOY. Brooks’s embodiment of Sisko is not whitewashed for a future in which racial divisions no longer exist, but rather rich in complexity and contradictions, laying bare the work, the stories, and the traditions that paved the way for the 20th century to become the 23rd—all without suggesting that the latter is free of all difference like the rest of the Star Trek opus might have us believe.
The two-part episode in season three titled “Past Tense,” for example, transports Sisko, Bashir, and Dax back in time to the year 2024, which Sisko knows well as the time of the Bell Riots in Los Angeles. This episode paints an all-too-realistic picture of our present, wherein the US government jails aspiring immigrants, repeatedly decamps the rising homeless population in efforts to hide such “unpleasantness” from a more affluent public, and strips the right to basic dignities from so many.
It’s consequently easy to marvel at Star Trek for its prescience—its forecast of cell phones, tablets, and video calls enables us to hold tightly to the hope that its creators will soon be right about replicators, transporters, space travel, and interracial if not interspecies equity as well—though what DS9 foretold was not a far-off future of technological advancement but instead a grim allegory of the present and immediate future. DS9 was a dark period in Star Trek’s history not because it diverted from the show’s core principles but because it held up a mirror to the darkest truths of the present. Although Star Trek has always allowed us to believe, to hope, that these realities are a passing phase on the road to something better, they can be a far more illustrative guide than the aspirational principles of the Federation that are so firmly proselytized by the other series. DS9 thus forces us to sit in the consequences of our actions, to live in the tension of our differences, and yet to still find the strength to boldly go.
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