A Times examination reveals thousands of threats against state judges, in addition to assaults and fatal attacks. Judges say local law enforcement agencies often can’t offer adequate protection.

CreditCredit…Bethlehem Feleke, Josh Hansbrough and Caroline Kim

By Katie J.M. Baker

The reporter interviewed judges and law enforcement officials and requested data from all 50 states, analyzing court, police and legislative records to document rising threats.

In an animated video, a man in an American-flag-print face mask who called himself “the Patriot” tracked his target, Judge Jennifer Johnson, with a hatchet in his hand.

The man followed a cartoon version of the judge, who sits on a county court in rural Florida, down a sidewalk as he muttered insults about her appearance and shared personal details about her marriage and children. Then he announced that it was “takedown time.”

“Judge Johnson, let’s bury the hatchet,” the man said, striking his virtual target in the back until she fell to the ground. Then he swapped the hatchet for a gun and shot her in the head. As blood pooled around her corpse, the man celebrated her “execution.”

Judge Johnson knew exactly who had made the video, which was uploaded to YouTube and TikTok in September 2023. The man had been threatening her since soon after she heard his child dependency case in 2016, at one point calling her “target number one.” But local authorities had told her that his incessant social media posts and phone calls were too legally “gray” to act on, she said.

So she bought a gun, as the sheriff had already advised her to do, and enrolled in courses to learn how to shoot it. When the video was posted, she installed a home security system, altered her daily travel routes and stopped sitting with her back to the door in restaurants or in the same pew at church.

“I was treated like threats were part of the job,” Judge Johnson said. “But it should not be a part of the job description to deal with threats of violence against your person. I didn’t sign up for that.”

For judges across the country, threats and harassment have become an inescapable occupational hazard. The Department of Homeland Security issued a nationwide alert late last year to law enforcement agencies: Harassment of judges has surged, and the trend is likely to continue.

The New York Times has identified thousands of threats targeting state judges in the past three years alone, among more than 14,000 broader security incidents involving state courts and their employees across the country. These figures offer a look at a problem that has historically gone uncounted because of a lack of record-keeping; they almost certainly understate the true scale, given that many states fail to formally track the issue.

Some of the violence is high-profile: In January, Judge Steven Meyer and his wife survived a shooting at their home in Lafayette, Ind., an attack that the police said was orchestrated by a defendant in an upcoming domestic battery case. In 2023, a Maryland state judge was shot and killed in his driveway, and in 2022, a retired Wisconsin state judge was killed in another targeted home attack.

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But many more incidents never reach the public. Records show that state judges have been subjected to stalking, death threats, physical assaults and assassination plots. They have reported being struck in the head, shot and pelted with feces.

Threats are also on the rise against federal judges, of which there are around 2,700. Such threats have more than doubled in four years, from 224 cases in 2021 to 564 in 2025, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

But there is no centralized security force that tracks threats against the estimated 30,000 state judges who are on the front lines of some of the most contentious cases in the country. Nor is there the same mandate to protect them.

Federal judges benefit from high-level threat monitoring and subsidized professional home security systems. But state judges typically rely on local law enforcement agencies for help and pay out of their own pockets for those services.

In interviews, some state judges said they had spent thousands of dollars to protect their homes after receiving death threats. Many said they felt that local authorities were not equipped to properly investigate such threats, and that they themselves were not given enough security training. Several state judges said that local authorities had admitted to not having the resources to protect them at all times and advised them to arm themselves. A 2024 judicial survey of hundreds of state judges found that nearly a third of respondents reported carrying a gun for protection since taking the bench.

Ever since she took the bench as a lower-court judge in 1998, Chief Justice Loretta Rush of the Indiana Supreme Court has been the subject of harassment, including threats of vehicle sabotage, a bomb scare and graphic threats to burn her alive.

Justice Rush said that judges had always been targeted but that she had never seen a climate like the present. The danger isn’t just personal, she said, but a structural threat to the American legal system.

“The idea of shooting a judge because of the role they have fundamentally affects what it means to live in a free society,” Justice Rush said.

Judicial Independence at Risk

There is no conclusive research on why threats against judges are on the rise, although they are part of a larger national trend of rising political violence. Some federal judges have pointed to President Trump’s rhetoric — he has slammed judges as “disloyal” and recently called on lawmakers to pass a crime bill that “cracks down on rogue judges.” But other judges said they did not blame Mr. Trump and instead pointed to a broader, corrosive distrust of public institutions and increased partisan tribalism. Judges in rural areas where everyone knows everyone say they feel particularly vulnerable.

Even when harassment does not escalate to physical harm, the psychological toll can be profound. It may be difficult for judges to be impartial if their decision-making is clouded by concern for their or their family’s safety.

“These threats affect the independence of our judiciary and people’s willingness to serve,” said Julie Kocurek, a state court judge in Texas. In 2015, she survived an assassination attempt in her own driveway by a man who had a case pending in her court. Local authorities had been made aware of a death threat the man had made shortly before, but dismissed it as “not credible,” a police officer later testified at trial. The shooting resulted in extensive wounds to her face and body and the loss of a finger.

The Times requested data on threats directed at judges from all 50 states from 2020 to 2025. Many do not track that information systematically. However, an analysis of 15 states that provided specific data on judicial threats revealed a surge, with threats climbing in all but two of them.

In Texas, general court-security-related incidents, which include seized weapons, disorderly conduct and physical assaults, jumped from 447 in 2023 to 2,129 in 2025. In New York, judicial security investigations more than doubled from 204 cases in 2020 to a peak of 514 in 2024, and remained at high levels with 487 new cases opened in 2025. In New Jersey, threats against judges have climbed from 444 in 2023 to 550 in 2025. In Pennsylvania, threats against judicial officials have grown from 104 in 2022 to more than 200 annually ever since.

And even before the shooting in Indiana, a 2023 court survey of 214 judges in that state found that 159 had been the subject of threats, with jurists reporting litigants who brandished firearms during remote proceedings or vowed to set them on fire.

Ron Zayas, the chief executive of Ironwall, a company that contracts with courts to provide data protection and security services, said the number of what he considered credible threats of violence against the state judges his company supports rose by more than 40 percent in recent years. Death threats among them have increased by 65 percent since 2024, with women and judges of color bearing a disproportionate burden.

In interviews, surveys and legislative testimony, judges recounted confrontations at churches, election sites and hair salons. Despite some legislative efforts to shield judges’ privacy, in many states their homes remain vulnerable targets. Incident reports from just the last six months in New Mexico, for example, revealed a plot to assassinate a jurist at his home, coordinated over jail phones, and a separate case in which a woman tracked down a judge’s personal address to confront her over a custody issue.

Judges consistently report feeling inadequately protected. In a 2024 randomized national survey published in Court Review, the quarterly journal of the American Judges Association, more than half of 398 state judges who responded reported receiving threats of harm. One judge reported receiving a letter threatening the rape and murder of her family, but said the police didn’t follow up on it; another reported sleeping with a shotgun for about two weeks before authorities arrested a neighbor who had threatened to infiltrate his home.

Half of the judges surveyed reported receiving less than a day of official security training, far less than what the U.S. Marshals offer federal judges.

In 2024, after the murder of a retired judge by a former defendant, Wisconsin jurists testified in support of a package of security bills. The Wisconsin court system documented 232 threats against judges in the year preceding the hearing, 114 of which were direct threats of physical harm or death.

One judge described an attempt by a divorce litigant to hire a hit man from jail, while another recounted how litigants had photographed her home and scared her children. Another judge testified that a man who had also tracked down her home address online entered the courthouse and left her a pound of leaking raw meat accompanied by a note: “Here is some burger to fry and burn like you burned me.”

In interviews, judges across the country described having to take measures to protect themselves because local law enforcement agencies did not have sufficient resources.

Vivian Medinilla, who recently retired as a state judge in Delaware, said she and her staff began receiving telephone calls with death threats against her and her children in 2021, but state court security would not act on them, telling her that they did not rise to the level of a crime. After she thought she heard someone in the back of her home, she purchased and installed her own home security system. She said she wished the authorities had conducted even a cursory investigation.

“Follow up and come back and tell me that you at least looked into it,” she said. The state agency that oversees Delaware court security declined to comment on her account.

Judge Carroll Kelly, who presides over domestic violence cases in Miami, received threats from an Army veteran last year after she issued a risk protection order that temporarily took away his firearms.

County law enforcement officials posted a patrol car outside her house after she learned of the threat. The next morning, they notified her that they believed the man had driven past her house in the middle of the night. A multiagency team gave her a blunt assessment: “If he wants to get you, he is so highly trained, he’s going to get you,” she recalled.

Terrified, Judge Kelly packed a bag and decamped to a hotel for five days. Soon law enforcement officials delivered more bad news: They were sorry they couldn’t guard her home indefinitely and said she should think about getting a gun. She ultimately paid out of pocket to install an expensive home security system.

“We have no resources for judges when this happens,” she said. “We’re really out there alone.”

A Terrifying Video

When Judge Johnson joined the Dixie County court in Florida in 2015, the small-town dynamics there made her a direct target for those unhappy with her decisions.

Family law is the most dangerous judicial assignment, experts say, because the intimate nature of domestic disputes can pose a greater risk of targeted violence, especially when adjudicated in small-town courthouses without tight security. Judge Johnson said she had received other threats, but Christopher Cambron, the man who would later call himself “the Patriot,” stood out from the rest.

Mr. Cambron had started threatening her after she heard his 2016 child dependency case, a civil court proceeding that determines whether a child requires the protection of the state. She had issued a security order against him after he threatened state child protection team workers, inspiring his fury. The harassment persisted for years.

He called Judge Johnson’s office and left rambling, vitriolic messages about her appearance and her divorce, she said. She became even more alarmed, she said, when he attacked her on social media, called her an “inbred pig” and said judges like her needed to die. None of his threats were specific enough to warrant a law enforcement response, Judge Johnson said the sheriff’s office told her.

But in the September 2023 video, Mr. Cambron declared that the time to execute Judge Johnson was “today.” He somehow knew how Judge Johnson wore her hair when she wasn’t in court — up in a ponytail, instead of down and blow-dried.

Still, the authorities did not take action. Because Mr. Cambron had moved to Louisiana by then, local authorities told her they didn’t have jurisdiction, so Judge Johnson spent months pressuring a state-level law enforcement agency to help. Judge Johnson said she pleaded with them to conduct a simple “knock and talk” check at his home to assess how serious a threat he posed.

The Dixie County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment.

There is a high bar for what constitutes a true threat under the First Amendment. But the police don’t always have the staff, resources and training to fully determine whether a threat is credible. Even the most well-meaning local police departments are organized around making arrests after a crime occurs instead of intervening earlier to neutralize threats beforehand, said John Muffler, a retired U.S. Marshal who is now a private security consultant.

“I hate to say it, because I respect the law tremendously, but I don’t think that they took it seriously,” Judge Johnson said.

But Judge Johnson continued to push. In February 2024, five months after the video was posted, a Louisiana police officer knocked on Mr. Cambron’s door.

He readily admitted to the officer that he had created the video, according to police records of his interview. His goal, he said, was to inspire “fear.”

But the police officer’s visit changed the investigation’s momentum. “He came back and was like, ‘No, no, this is legitimate,’” Judge Johnson recalled. “And the fire got lit.”

Mr. Cambron was arrested and extradited back to Florida, where he was charged with “written or electronic threat to kill.” A jury convicted him and he was sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

During the trial, the defense argued that Mr. Cambron was “trying to redress his grievances” through the video, as was his constitutional right.

“The First Amendment is very valuable, and most of all for people saying unpopular things, especially things that criticize people in power,” said his lawyer, Yancey Burnett, in a recent interview. “And if we can’t do that, then the First Amendment doesn’t mean that much.”

In court, the prosecution countered that the Constitution did not give people the right to terrorize others. “You do not have the freedom to claim that you’re going to execute someone,” the prosecutor told the jury.

A Push for New Laws

Some states find the political will to enact tougher judicial security measures only after a tragedy occurs.

Following the murders of judges in both states, Maryland and Wisconsin enacted laws in 2024 to, in part, scrub jurists’ home addresses from the internet and establish more centralized systems to track threats before they turn deadly. Texas offers some of the country’s strongest protections for state judges because of the near-fatal failure in Judge Kocurek’s case.

The 2020 murder of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, by a gunman at their home in New Jersey became the catalyst for a namesake federal law that helps judges remove their personal data from the internet. But there is still no comprehensive national legislation. This year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers hopes to pass a bill that would establish a national resource center providing state courts with more technical assistance and threat-tracking infrastructure.

But the most difficult shift, judges said, may be cultural: moving away from the idea that threats are a standard occupational hazard.

After Mr. Cambron’s conviction, Judge Johnson began speaking out for the first time, sharing her story at judicial conferences. She said she was stunned by the flood of colleagues who came forward with their own accounts.

“I’m not going to tell you where that line is between viable threat and First Amendment, because judges fight for the First Amendment and the Constitution,” said Judge Johnson. “But I wish the public understood that these aren’t just threats to judges. They are threats to authority, democracy and our nation.”

Georgia Gee contributed research. Steven Rich contributed data reporting. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.

Katie J.M. Baker is a national investigative correspondent for The Times.Read 40 comments

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By Jia Lynn Yang

April 10, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ETSee more of our coverage in your search results.Add The New York Times on Google 

At his Senate confirmation hearing in March to become the next secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin explained how his tenure would be different from that of his attention-seeking predecessor, Kristi Noem. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said.

Gone for now are the concentrated surges into American cities leading to dramatic — and sometimes deadly — clashes between immigration agents and protesters. Mass raids of Home Depot parking lots in search of undocumented day laborers are no longer routine. Immigration enforcement officials continue to deport nearly 1,000 people a day, many of them with no criminal record. But the Trump administration is also ramping up another strategy: to take apart immigrants’ lives, piece by piece, until they decide to leave the country altogether.

In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a new federal rule blocking “mixed status” families from living in publicly subsidized housing, which could cause an estimated 80,000 people to lose their homes, including about 37,000 children, nearly all of them U.S. citizens. Starting in March, roughly 200,000 immigrants began losing their commercial driver’s licenses, under a new ban on truckers who are asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. The Trump administration has reportedly weighed an order that would require banks to verify their customers’ citizenship status. Access to capital has already been curtailed. Starting last month, noncitizens can no longer obtain small business loans through the federal government, even if they are here legally.

Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, is lobbying Republican-led states to cut off services. In a meeting last month in Washington, he asked Texas lawmakers why they had not already passed a bill ending public education funding for undocumented children.

In this, the administration is learning a lesson familiar to past presidents of both parties: Millions of people without the right papers are deeply embedded in American society. Even with the world’s most expansive — and expanding — deportation apparatus, the United States does not have remotely enough bureaucratic bandwidth to remove immigrants en masse. And as the public turns against the administration’s most visible, aggressive methods, it’s no surprise it is resorting to another strategy.

Self-deportation is an idea with deep roots. Well before the United States established its first immigration court, the government systematically pressured people to leave by making their lives intolerable. But perhaps no president has made self-deportation such an explicit policy, or taken it to such extreme lengths, as Trump. The Department of Homeland Security regularly trumpets a standing offer to pay $2,600 to any immigrant who exits the country, more than double the sum being offered a year ago. “Home is just a few clicks away!” the department posted on X last month, while also offering a free flight to a home country.

As the Trump administration shifts its strategy away from audacious, citywide raids, it seeks to apply pressure at every point of contact between immigrants and the government, using the country’s vast bureaucracy. But the most important tool for encouraging self-deportation today is the same as it was more than a century ago: fear.

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A History of Fear

Immigrants decide to leave this country all the time. They might have always had temporary designs on the United States, a place to simply earn a degree or save some money. A 2010 study found that about one-third of immigrants eventually return to their home country.

Others make the decision less freely. Many unauthorized immigrants, when confronted by a government agent, are pressured to leave rather than fight an official deportation order and risk detention. Adam Goodman, author of “The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants” and a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, estimates that about 85 percent of all deportations in U.S. history fall into this category.

Self-deportations are a hazier, unofficial category. The immigrants who self-deport may never cross paths with an agent of the government, making them nearly impossible to count. They may even be in the country legally. And while historians have documented that some leave because their neighbors made their daily lives miserable, many are undeterred.

Going back to the colonial era, there have been efforts to pressure people into self-deporting. In the late 19th century, state and local officials on the West Coast passed laws designed to make Chinese immigrants leave: denying them admission to hospitals and public schools, banning their firecrackers and ceremonial gongs. When these measures didn’t substantially reduce the Chinese population, or temper the anger of white residents, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted Chinese immigration and expanded the government’s power to deport.

Citizens still turned to racial terror: They set fire to Chinese businesses and homes, erected gallows, hung effigies and even murdered Chinese residents. In 1885 and 1886, at least 168 communities drove out their Chinese residents with mob violence, the historian Beth Lew-Williams writes in her book “The Chinese Must Go.” Yet all these threats ultimately yielded only partial results. Many Chinese decided to stay in the country. And despite the ban, unauthorized immigrants continued to arrive.

At the turn of the 20th century, amid a nationwide anti-immigrant panic, the federal government passed laws to restrict immigration and deport more people. In 1924, Congress established the Border Patrol. But self-deportation endured; it was too convenient a method when the number of unwanted people outstripped the government’s resources. It also became intertwined with the formal deportation system: Officials learned that the more terrifying they made the prospect of deportation, the fewer people they would have to remove.

During the Great Depression, local officials across the country blamed Mexican Americans for the sudden lack of jobs. State and federal agents worked together to conduct surprise sweeps designed to terrify people into leaving. One local director of immigration in Los Angeles explained that while “the machinery set up for deportation would be entirely inadequate on a large scale,” he believed that “with a little deportation publicity, a large number of these aliens, actuated by guilty self-consciousness, would move south and over the line on their own accord particularly if stimulated by a few arrests.” Between 1929 and 1939, at least half a million people left the country, according to Goodman.

Half a century later, the West Coast again played host to the old idea. Anti-immigrant feeling swelled in California as the state faced an economic downturn and rising unauthorized Mexican migration. In 1994, California passed Proposition 187, which barred hospitals and schools from serving undocumented immigrants. Federal courts would eventually strike down the law, but many states followed suit. At the time, the national effort was pushed by Kris Kobach, a conservative law professor who later became Kansas’ secretary of state, who argued that with a full-blown self-deportation policy, the country could halve its undocumented population. And the government would not need to remove anyone “at gunpoint,” as Kobach explained in an interview, calling his self-deportation plan “a more humane way.”

In 2010, Arizona passed a landmark anti-immigration bill that was unmistakably designed with self-deportation in mind. Lawmakers declared in the text of the bill that “the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement,” borrowing from the title of a 2008 paper by Kobach on self-deportation. The law allowed the police to demand “papers” if they suspected a person was undocumented. The police could also arrest a person without a warrant if they suspected the person should be deported. Elements of this law, too, would be struck down by courts, but not before it had its intended effect. An estimated 100,000 Hispanic residents left Arizona the year the law was passed, though some might have left because the state was in the middle of a recession.

Under the second Trump administration, the federal government is making national policy from the ideas that drove the California and Arizona laws. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, passed last summer, cut health care benefits for immigrants, including many who are here legally. It also imposed a 1 percent tax on remittances and significantly raised fees for immigrants seeking humanitarian protection through due process.

But the most powerful incentive for self-deportation, in the past and today, is the legal deportation process itself. In expanding the number of immigration agents and warehouses, Trump’s bill fortified a national architecture of fear, one that is reinforced daily by the reports — in the news media and by word of mouth — of inedible food, inadequate medical care and the denial of religious rituals in detention centers.

Reshaping the Country

But does terrifying people into leaving the country work? Only partly, and it’s difficult to measure. Those who go of their own accord tend to leave no paper trail. A CNN report last month found that only 72,000 had taken the Trump administration’s much-advertised financial incentives to self-deport — nowhere near the promised 2.2 million.

Most people cling to their lives in the United States — however difficult they become — because they can no longer imagine being anywhere else. Nearly half of the country’s undocumented immigrants have lived here for two decades or more. More than 30 percent are homeowners. And the more difficult it becomes to traverse the border, the less likely some people are to leave, for fear that they won’t be able to return.

“Some people more risk-averse will leave, and the ones who stay will be terrified,” says K-Sue Park, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who argues that the threat of deportation is a way to keep certain people, especially low-paid workers, in check. “They won’t be able to do anything. They won’t even attempt to exercise any of the rights they might exercise.”

A self-deportation campaign of fear can still reshape the country, though. What such policies succeed most in doing is driving undocumented people further underground. They vanish from schools and churches, retreating to an ever smaller circle of daily life. They avoid seeking basic medical care, including vaccinations that are important for protecting the health of the broader public. They are more likely to drive without insurance or a license, making roads less safe for everyone.

And the terror spreads well beyond those who are ostensibly being targeted. By definition, the net is broad, catching far more people than the number who can be deported. The threat of profiling based on race and ethnicity — now permitted by the Supreme Court — has led some citizens to carry their passports with them. Green card holders, once close legal kin to citizens, are being advised by their lawyers to take extra precautions when they leave the country and return. A decades-old misdemeanor charge, however minor, can now lead to detention. As the country has seen, people with green cards, student visas and temporary protected status — legitimate under one president, then void under another — have discovered the fragility of their status.

With Trump retreating for now from showy street-level crackdown, self-deportation is the growing shadow zone of our immigration system, in which threats and intimidation operate where the law will not or cannot go. It is less visible by design. But whether or not people decide to leave this country, the fear that has been let loose is here to stay.

Jia Lynn Yang is a senior Times writer.

See more on: U.S. Politics, Homeland Security Department, Kris W Kobach, Stephen Miller, Kristi NoemRead 59 comments

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Steve Contorno

Updated 2 hr agoDonald TrumpThe Middle East

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President Donald Trump stands in the Blue Room before walking out onto the balcony to address the crowd during the annual Easter Egg Roll, on the South Lawn of the White House on April 6. Brendam Smialowski/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

The right-wing media ecosystem that has long served as a useful bullhorn for President Donald Trump unraveled into disarray this week, as deepening fears over his management of the war — and fragile ceasefire — with Iran spilled into public infighting among some of his most prominent allies.

From its start, the Iran war has divided prominent MAGA figures, with many supporting the president’s military push and others arguing it betrayed his avowed “America First” foreign policy. That split has grown sharper in recent days, as Trump’s erratic swings — from bellicose threats of sweeping destruction early in the week to an abrupt search for an off-ramp days later — have drawn sharp backlash from longtime conservative voices.

Tucker Carlson encouraged US officials to resist Trump’s orders if it stopped nuclear war, Megyn Kelly effectively accused Trump of gaslighting Americans to “save face” for an unpopular conflict and Candace Owens has called for Trump to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment.

Trump responded to the criticism Thursday in a 482-word social media screed calling Carlson, Kelly and Owens “stupid people,” and “troublemakers” who “will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”

“They’re not ‘MAGA,’” Trump wrote. “They’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA.”

Tucker Carlson attends President Donald Trump’s meeting with an oil industry executives, held at the White House on January 9. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

CNN has reached out to Carlson, Kelly and Owens for comment. Responding on X, Owens wrote: “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home.”

The dissent has extended to figures central to Trump’s past outreach to younger and male audiences. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon have grown increasingly exasperated with the administration and its close alliance with Israel. Comedian Theo Von drew widespread attention this week for likening Israeli leaders to “terrorists.”

At the same time, Trump stalwarts online have stepped up to counter the criticism, fueling an escalating series of online feuds. Alex Jones, the far-right conspiratorial broadcaster who opposed the war, is now at odds with Laura Loomer, the conspiratorial Trump loyalist who supports it — and who is also openly sparring with Roger Stone, the conspiratorial Trump political operative.

One faction of Trump’s online stalwarts has accused rival conservative influencers who support the war and object to a peace deal of acting as foreign proxies and have called for federal investigations into their finances.

Public polling has consistently shown Trump’s war with Iran is backed by a large majority of Republican voters and has even more support from those who consider themselves MAGA-aligned. Nevertheless, the administration and allies have scrambled to contain the fallout. Speaking this week from Hungary, Vice President JD Vance discouraged people from disengaging from politics because they don’t agree with the administration.

First responders inspect a residential building hit in an earlier US-Israeli strike in Tehran, on March 27. Vahid Salemi/AP

“If we do something you don’t like, the response should be to get more involved, to make your voice heard,” Vance said, “and to try to push things in the direction that you want them to be pushed.”

The fissures are emerging at a precarious time for Trump and Republicans as they confront a challenging midterm environment. The president’s decision to thrust the US into an undefined, high-risk conflict has compounded those concerns, particularly as American voters grow increasingly uneasy with his close alliance with Israel.

Until recently, Republicans had counted on a distinct advantage in their fight to hold onto their congressional majorities this November: a vast and highly effective network of conservative media personalities and digital influencers. That ecosystem — encompassing staunch MAGA allies, established conservative figures and a growing universe of right-leaning, male-dominated podcasts — spanned traditional outlets and newer platforms and had entered Trump’s second term largely aligned behind him.

Fractures, though, have since emerged, largely tied to Trump’s military movements abroad and an affordability crisis that has persisted despite his campaign pledge for a quick resolution. The divisions have pronounced themselves on X, the social media site owned by billionaire Elon Musk, but also at public conservative gatherings. Last month, at the annual conservative gathering known as CPAC, attendees and speakers clashed on and off the stage over Trump’s war with Iran.

People wave a pre-Islamic Revolution flag of Iran, at CPAC 2026 in Grapevine, Texas on March 28. Laura Brett/Sipa USA/AP

Those tensions erupted in response to Trump’s profanity laden Easter Sunday threat to strike Iranian infrastructure sites if the country’s leaders didn’t “Open the Fuckin’ Strait” of Hormuz by Tuesday night. He followed it up Monday with a threat to wipe out an entire civilization “never to be brought back again” if Iran didn’t comply.

Carlson called Trump threatening Iran’s civilian infrastructure “a war crime” and said his message on Sunday was “vile on every level.” Kelly on her SiriusXM show said she was “sick of this shit.”

“Can’t he just behave like a normal human?” she said Tuesday.

The opposition further intensified in the wake of a New York Times report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressed his case for military action against Iran to Trump in a February meeting in the White House Situation Room — using arguments that, according to the report, were met with skepticism from US intelligence agencies and senior Cabinet members. Critics of the war on the right have seized on it as evidence that Trump was drawn into the conflict by Netanyahu and not American interests. Even some MAGA stalwarts, like the conservative influencer Benny Johnson, have expressed alarm over the dynamics described in the report.

A ceasefire deal Trump announced ahead of Tuesday’s deadline has done little to appease these objections — and has sparked new fury from those who initially defended Trump’s war. Longtime Iran hardliners on the right, including Fox News’ Mark Levin, are lamenting that Trump appears willing to back away from military action that could further cripple the country.

“Everybody says no regime change,” Levin said. “Then the regime survives in one form or another. The fundamentalists survive. … But if we can’t do (regime change) because of the political winds, if we cannot do it for other reasons, then how are we going to keep them in a box?”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist and skeptic of the war, mocked Levin’s objections during Wednesday’s broadcast of his popular television show and podcast, “War Room.” But he also acknowledged that the ceasefire agreement appeared flimsy and exceedingly deferential to Iran, a prime concern of Levin.

Later, he lamented that the events playing out this week served as a distraction from the issues that he said Trump’s supporters expected him to solve.

“All this is going to do at the end of this,” Bannon said, “is make this nation more populist and more nationalistic.”

Updated 12 hr agoReligionFederal agencies

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By

René Marsh

US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, on March 28, 2026. Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters

A “Christ is Risen” Easter message sent by the secretary of agriculture has sparked backlash inside the department, angering some of its nearly 100,000 employees and prompting a formal complaint against the secretary for the religious message.

Employees at the department’s 4,500 offices across the country received an email From Secretary Brooke Rollins on Sunday: “Happy Easter — He is Risen indeed!”

Rollins told all department staff it was a day to celebrate “the foundation of our faith.”

“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed. Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life,” the email read.

The complaint, obtained by CNN, was filed with the Office of Special Counsel by Ethan Roberts, the president of a local union for federal employees who is also an employee at USDA. The OSC is an independent federal investigative agency that investigates whistleblower complaints from federal employees with claims of violations of laws, rules or regulations.

In his complaint, Roberts said the email was a “pro-Christianity sermon” sent to all USDA employees on Easter Day, claiming it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Roberts added that the email “eroded the separation of church and state.”

Roberts told CNN the secretary’s email speaking of “sin” and “Hell” made him “feel as if that was my fate if I did not treat Easter as holy as Secretary Rollins does.”

The complaint calls for the retraction of the Easter email and a stop to any further department emails that celebrate or endorse religious holidays.

A USDA spokesperson told CNN in a statement, “The Secretary is within her rights to send a message to employees and the public on the Easter holiday. Just like Secretaries of Agriculture and Presidents have in the past.”

Another USDA employee who requested anonymity to speak freely told CNN they were upset when they got the email.

“Using government resources to promote one religion contradicts what I learned about how America was founded on separation of church and state,” the employee said. “Even though many of my coworkers were also celebrating Passover, the email didn’t address any other religious traditions.”

The Freedom from Religion Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the separation of church and state told CNN it fielded complaints about Rollins’ Easter message from nearly 30 USDA employees who expressed outrage, describing the message as “inappropriate and insulting.” The organization said it sent a formal letter to the secretary demanding she stop “promoting your personal religious beliefs through official communications.”

Under President Donald Trump, moments like this, rare in recent administrations, are becoming commonplace. Americans have been encouraged to pray for an hour each week. Some government agencies have opened their meetings with prayer or hosted regular faith services. Bible verses and Christian imagery now appear on official government social media accounts.

A series of faith initiatives championed by the White House have led to a systematic religious revival within the government’s operations, culture and policy.

This story has been updated with additional details.

By

Stephanie Yang

7 hr ago

Bulk carriers anchored at Muscat Anchorage in Muscat, Oman, on March 25. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which conveys about 20% of the world’s oil and gas, remains highly restricted during the ongoing ceasefire. Elke Scholiers/Getty Images/FileThe Middle EastOil & gasAsiaChina

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The US has negotiated a fragile ceasefire that could reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Asian allies that depend on the waterway are already being forced to rely on others for energy security– to the benefit of America’s top adversaries.

After the initial airstrikes by the US and Israel in February, Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flows.

Allies in Europe and Asia were not informed in advance of the war or asked to take part from the outset. Nonetheless as the price of crude oil surged, US President Donald Trump lambasted other nations for not sending military support and said those that need it should “take the lead” and “go get your own oil.”

They now seem to be heeding his words, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, whose economies suddenly lost their biggest source of energy imports and have been hit first by the historic global oil crisis.

US allies Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines have looked to broker deals with Iran to ensure the safe delivery of oil and natural gas. Asian countries are also buying up more natural resources from US rival Russia, while China has signaled its willingness to help alleviate fuel shortages and deepen energy collaboration with nearby economies such as Australia, the Philippines, and even Taiwan.

On Tuesday, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire under the condition that the Strait of Hormuz be reopened, providing a reprieve from climbing crude prices. However, the material impact of the agreement remained unclear.

While the US touted its success in reopening the strait, Iran said the country’s military would continue to coordinate the passage of vessels during the ceasefire, and warned that the war was not over. Since the ceasefire announcement, only a trickle of tankers have passed through the narrow passage which, before the war began, was a free and open international waterway.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of peace talks, Trump’s decision to go to war has reshuffled energy trade and partnerships in the region, with long-term implications for the US and the nature of its alliances in Asia.

An oil tanker is docked unloading crude oil at the port in Qingdao, in China’s eastern Shandong province, on April 7, 2026. Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

“The crisis has exposed a hard truth about US power,” said Roc Shi, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney whose research focuses on energy issues in Asia and Australia. “Despite decades of security guarantees, the US was unable to prevent the closure of the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. Asian allies are now quietly asking whether the US security umbrella extends to energy supply routes.”

Shi said governments in Asia will prioritize diversifying their energy sources, which includes purchasing more oil and natural gas from both the US, the world’s largest producer on both counts, as well as its rivals.

“The crisis is simultaneously strengthening and straining the US‑Asia alliance,” said Shi. “Allies will now hedge – buying more from America, but also building their own resilience.”

Challenged allies

The war in Iran has had a particularly pronounced effect in Asia, where countries have been trying to conserve energy while rushing to secure more supplies. But the differing responses highlight a broad range of vulnerability among Asian nations, researchers said, prompting those most exposed to the oil crisis to seek their own solutions, even at the risk of alienating the US.

The Philippines was the first country to declare a state of national energy emergency. It is now buying Russian oil for the first time in five years, has negotiated with Iran to assure safe transport of its own vessels through the strait and resumed diplomatic talks with China over energy cooperation, despite the two sides’ heated territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Japan, which holds one of the world’s largest strategic petroleum reserves, released a historic amount of emergency stockpiles last month to cushion the blow of higher oil prices. However, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said this week that she was working to arrange talks with Iran’s president, while Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported that a handful of Japan-linked ships have recently passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil storage tanks at Fuji Oil Nakasode Crude Storage Base, one of the sites designated for releasing Japan’s national oil reserves, in Sodegaura, Chiba prefecture, on March 25. Yuichi Yamakazi/AFP/Getty Images

People refill their vehicles with fuel at a petrol station, following the arrival of Russian crude in the country amid a global energy crisis, in Limay, Bataan Province, Philippines, on April 2. Daniel Ceng/Anadolu/Getty Images

South Korea, another US ally, said Friday it would send a special envoy to Iran to discuss the safe passage of its vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. It has already sent envoys to Kazakhstan, Oman and Saudi Arabia to secure supplies of crude oil and naphtha, a petroleum byproduct needed for producing petrochemicals like plastic and gasoline. The country has also taken advantage of a temporary waiver on US sanctions to buy naphtha from Russia for the first time in four years.

“The approach of each country will represent a combination of leverage, capability, and urgency,” said Robert Walker, an economist with the Indo-Pacific Development Centre at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute. China, which could quickly liaise with Iran, was one of the first to see its own cargo safely through the strait. “Diplomatic capability and access matters in a crisis,” Walker added.

John Coyne, director of the National Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that while the energy crisis will likely spur greater regional collaboration, it could also strain US bilateral relationships.

“The struggle point will be how the US responds if there’s a move to take more Russian oil, or those negotiations of what countries are allowed to take crude oil from the strait and from Iran,” Coyne said. “There’s a number of unknowns here. Will Iran be happy for that crude oil to be refined and sent to, say, Australia? And how will the Americans respond to that?”

The pressure on American allies is not limited to Asia. France and Italy are also negotiating directly with Iran to allow their ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Iran has launched airstrikes against US Gulf allies including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain in retaliation, targeting US military bases and energy infrastructure.

Rocket trails are seen in the sky above the Israeli center coastal city of Netanya amid a fresh barrage of Iranian missile attacks on March 9. Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

Smoke rises from a high-rise building following an Iranian drone attack in Kuwait City on March 8. AFP/Getty Images

Material advantage

For Russia and Iran, major economies’ desperate search for fuel has resulted in an inadvertent windfall.

Those oil industries had been sanctioned by the US in an attempt to stymie military and nuclear development. But as gas prices rose at home, the Trump administration waived sanctions through mid-April on products that were already loaded onto vessels.

That decision could have brought Russia between $3.3 billion and $5 billion in additional oil revenue in March, according to a post by Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow in national security for the Council on Foreign Relations.

A separate analysis by Louis-Vincent Gave, founding partner at the research firm Gavekal, said that Iran had gone from exporting about 1 million barrels per day for $40 to $45 a barrel before the war, to about 1.7 million barrels for over $100 a barrel. If Iran is charging ships $2 million to pass through the strait as some reports suggest, that could bring in another $60 million per week, Gave noted.

“The White House is caught in a trap of its own making if the April expiration dates arrive without lower oil prices,” Vigil wrote. “The Trump administration will soon face a difficult choice that will now be scrutinized by both sides of the aisle: double down by renewing the waivers that benefit US adversaries or reimpose sanctions on a market the United States helped destabilize.”

President Donald Trump stands in the Blue Room of the White House on April 6. Brendam Smialowski/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

Another country that could indirectly benefit from the oil supply shock is China.

With inroads among major oil producers, large crude stockpiles and an extensive renewable energy sector, China is better positioned to weather the energy crisis than its Asian neighbors. That has afforded the country more geopolitical leverage at a time when the US is actively looking to counter its influence in the region.

In order to protect its domestic industries, China has imposed controls on fuel exports but said it would work with Southeast Asian nations to address energy shortages. China also offered energy security to Taiwan, which it claims as part of its territory, if the island democracy agreed to peaceful unification. And on Tuesday, Chinese Premier Li Qiang discussed deepening cooperation on clean energy and electric vehicles in a phone call with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

“China has the reserves and the overland pipelines to be Asia’s energy anchor,” said Shi from the University of Technology Sydney. “So far, it has not articulated its plan. If it does properly, the region’s geopolitical map will shift with it.”

Analysis by

Stephen Collinson

Apr 8, 2026The Middle EastDonald Trump

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President Donald Trump, accompanied by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, speaks with reporters at the White House on Monday. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

The day began with Donald Trump warning a “whole civilization” of 90 million Iranians could die.

It ended with the world — after tense hours fearfully hanging on his every outburst — trying to understand his climbdown.

One extraordinary by-product of the 40-day war is the difficulty in judging the relative credibility of statements not just from Iran’s brutal rulers, but, at times, also from the president of the United States. The fog descended again Tuesday, about 80 minutes before Trump’s deadline to destroy every Iranian bridge and power plant, when he claimed a win on Truth Social and postponed a new escalation.

“A double-sided CEASEFIRE!” Trump proclaimed, adding that in return for his two-week halt to bombing, Iran agreed to the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”

If hundreds of stranded oil tankers can soon escape the Persian Gulf, cataclysmic damage to the global economy — an issue that has already helped tank Trump’s approval ratings — might be averted. Stock futures immediately spiked on the hopeful news. “It is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution,” Trump wrote.

That’s not how the Iranians see it. In a 10-point plan described by the country’s Supreme National Security Council, Tehran demanded the right to coordinate all cross-strait traffic to secure “unique economic and geopolitical standing” over a critical oil choke point.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also made clear Iran won’t relax any of its leverage even during the two-week ceasefire. “For a period of two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and with due consideration of technical limitations,” he wrote on X. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency, meanwhile, reported that Iran and Oman plan to charge transit fees for ships passing through the strait during the ceasefire.

Trump derided the Supreme National Security Council statement as a fraud and attacked CNN for reporting it.

It will be up to Pakistan, which brokered an agreement for the US and Iran to hold talks starting Friday, to clear this up — if the deal lasts that long. The Islamabad government, which has shrewdly used its friendships in Tehran and Washington, must fashion off-ramps neither Trump nor Iran could find themselves.

The great contradiction lurking in Trump’s claimed triumph

Even the possibility that many lives can be saved — those of Iranians, US service personnel and civilians caught in the crossfire throughout the Middle East — is a blessing. The prospect that the grave global consequences of the war could be mitigated will also alleviate the gloom of six alarming weeks.

But Tuesday’s first details of the diplomacy offer reasons for pessimism.

Any outcome, temporary or permanent, that handed Iran control of the strait would mean the most lasting result of Trump’s war would be leverage it could use to hold the global economy hostage at any time. While the US and Israel say, probably correctly, that their joint attacks have demolished most of Iran’s missile programs and military forces, ending the war with an Iranian chokehold over the strait would be a strategic disaster and a defeat for Trump.

It is too early to tell whether the fearsome joint air assault has loosened the control of the Iranian clerical regime — or just handed power to more ruthless leaders.

President Donald Trump departs after speaking with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Monday. Alex Brandon/AP/File

As always with Trump, reactions to Tuesday’s ceasefire agreement were conditioned by the highly emotional and polarized emotions that he inspires.

Some critics lampooned another TACO (“Trump always chickens out”) moment. On the surface, the president’s decision is just another where he adopted a maximalist position only to back down in a way that erased his red lines and raised doubts about his credibility. If Iran does indeed get to control access to the strait during the two-week ceasefire, it would underscore perceptions that Trump has no good options in a war that slipped out of his control and that he is desperate to end.

Trump fans, however, will credit the president with snatching yet another win with the shock negotiating tactics of a real estate shark. Conservative media quickly swung into action to spin up a Trumpian triumph. The implication is that Trump’s unorthodox threats drove Iran to the negotiating table.

But the reverberations of a scary day Tuesday went beyond the critical details of who will control the strait, which was open to free navigation before the war.

On one level, Trump was in his element. He was the critical actor in a storm of his own making, spinning the planet around his own axis.

“Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, as the hours dragged in a countdown to doom.

Yet Trump’s chilling threat, delivered over social media, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” crossed a line that no American president had previously dared or wanted to approach. His qualifier that “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will” did little to calm nerves.

The comment, which seemed barely believable at first, posed the most acute issues yet about 79-year-old Trump’s temperament and judgment. It might have reflected only the president’s frustration over the war — one of those reflexes that his supporters say should be taken seriously but not literally.

But the words of presidents matter. Even publicly speculating about the mass killing of civilians is dangerous and inappropriate. The threat raised an implicit question for those around Trump and the country: Is this acceptable conduct for the commander in chief of the world’s most lethal superpower?

Notwithstanding his decision not to carry out the escalation, his words suggested the president has crossed moral and behavioral thresholds never approached by his modern predecessors. They underscored how the US, for decades regarded as a pillar of stability, is now — as personified by its president — the world’s most volatile force.

Trump’s threat to Iran sent shock waves through across the political spectrum, drawing condemnation from MAGA personalities and demands from Democrats for the invoking of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

Even some Republicans pushed back. “This type of rhetoric is an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250 years,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, wrote on X. And Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, normally a strong Trump supporter, said the president would lose him if he attacked civilian targets in Iran.

Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned in a statement that Trump had “become as fanatical as the regime leaders in Tehran.”

Demonstrators gather near the White House to protest the war in Iran on Tuesday in Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images

The constitutional questions raised by a scary day

Trump’s day on the brink also raised grave constitutional questions exemplified by Leavitt’s statement that “only the President knows … what he will do.”

This is not how the American system of checks and balances and divided power is supposed to work. For many hours, a president who believes he has unrestrained authority was credibly believed to be on the verge of killing millions of foreign civilians in a war for which he sought no congressional authorization; which has been plagued by vague, contradictory rationales; and for which he has no apparent exit strategy.

In years to come, Trump’s vise in Iran may be seen as a cautionary tale of what happens when a president appoints a pliant Cabinet and when a one-party Congress abdicates its duties of oversight.

A traumatic day underscored the perils inherent in the president’s erratic, unorthodox leadership style.

His tendency to personalize every clash, to over-invest US strategic prestige and to adopt extreme positions pushed the latest crisis to a dangerous precipice.

His decision to step back — while welcome, in averting greater human tragedy — left the United States and its global allies that rely on an uninterrupted flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in potentially worse positions.

Trump may also have reinforced impressions among adversaries that he’ll always back off and that his severe threats are not serious.

But one day, he may confront an enemy with the capacity to do far more immediate damage to the United States. In such a scenario, careless escalations and mixed signals could prove catastrophic.

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