Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment.

The Hearing Confirmed That Kennedy Is Trump’s Kind of Guy

The final push from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. toward becoming overseer of America’s health care system got off to a spicy start on Wednesday in his opening hour before the Senate Finance Committee. There were protesters. A threat to bring in the police. A fiery performance from the usually low-key Michael Bennet!

Dramatic value aside, the early back-and-forth also supported the widespread assumption heading into this confirmation: Regardless of how rough the confirmation questioning gets or how squirrelly Kennedy’s answers, the Republican majority will jam him on through.

The panel’s Democratic members came out swinging, confronting Kennedy with his controversial, at times contradictory, statements on everything from vaccines to abortion access. Republicans, in turn, mostly steered hard toward issues that were more generic — or at least far afield of Kennedy’s trouble spots: department transparency, pharmacy benefit managers and, somewhat peculiarly, children inappropriately placed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Kennedy’s performance was notably unsteady. Yes, he has a neurological condition that makes his voice raspy, but he also seemed a little shaky and decidedly nervous. He got some stuff wrong. And he repeatedly let himself get sucked into trying to deny or explain away questionable statements for which the Democrats had brought the receipts. As this process rolls on, someone might want to remind him of Ronald Reagan’s observation that “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” The periodic outbursts from the audience weren’t helping his flow.

But at this point, whether Kennedy can explain himself coherently, much less convincingly, may not matter. If the president is thinking of his cabinet secretaries more as entertaining front men and women than as top-tier leaders or managers, then Kennedy fits the bill better than most: He’s a celebrity, he’s generally pretty charismatic, he’s into performative masculinity, he is thirsty for attention, he’ll say pretty much anything …

As for the weirder elements of Kennedy’s record, it’s hard to see Republican senators getting all that worked up about the things like the bear carcass or the conspiracy theories involving the C.I.A. or his disrespectful treatment of women or his youthful delight (per his cousin) in puréeing small creatures to feed his pet falcon. If anything, those tendencies just make him seem more on brand for Trump world. And, as Pete Hegseth’s confirmation showed, Trump world is eager to steamroller over the concerns and objections of even Republican senators.

Kennedy is a first-class disrupter — and one willing to change his shape as Trump sees fit. He could have 30 bear heads in his freezer and a dozen manifestoes denouncing modern medicine, and my money would still be on his getting confirmed.

What It Would Take to Build Trump’s Iron Dome Over America

With one of his new executive orders on Monday, President Trump called for the construction of an Iron Dome-like defense shield over the United States.

It may sound like a good idea to anyone who has watched footage over the years of Israeli interceptors blasting apart rockets and missiles fired into that country by regional foes. But in practical terms, Israel is the size of New Jersey, and the missiles fired into Israel are often unguided, slow-moving projectiles lobbed from nearby — not the world-spanning missiles U.S. military planners fear most.

It’s cat-and-mouse, but simply put: It’s cheaper, quicker and easier to build missiles and offensive systems than it is to intricately engineer a shield to defeat them. It’s difficult work to develop the radars, sensors, interceptors and associated systems that detect, track and engage flying missiles. It’s even more complex to hit a ballistic missile as it zips more than 14,000 miles per hour. The metaphor most often used in military circles when it comes to shooting down an intercontinental ballistic missile with an interceptor is “hitting a bullet with a bullet.”

The United States has spent roughly $300 billion on a range of missile defense systems over the past four decades. The military has achieved remarkable success in developing short- and midrange defense systems that can defend troops on the battlefield or at sea. But when it comes to defending the homeland, the United States has yet to develop anything reliable.

America’s current program of record against ICBMs, known as Ground-based Midcourse Defense, hinges upon just 44 long-range interceptors installed in silos in Alaska and California. The system is designed to blast apart a handful of missiles launched by a rogue actor, like North Korea or Iran. Recent government figures show it has a roughly 50 percent success rate in tests.

An adversary like Russia or China could easily overpower defenses by firing hundreds of missiles, each of which could spray decoys and countermeasures to confuse defenses. Warheads are certain to slip through the most capable shields in existence today. (Russia explicitly built a new generation of nuclear-capable missiles and delivery systems to breach America’s global network of early warning and defense systems.)

To build an actual “Iron Dome for America,” the Pentagon would likely have to blanket space with satellites and the homeland with sensors and missile batteries if the United States were to be confident in stopping such attacks. The executive order directs the Pentagon to submit an implementation plan for the shield within 60 days, which should include “space-based interceptors” and a strategy to fund the program before next year’s budget is finalized. It could mark the beginning of a gold rush for contractors.

It’s telling that Trump’s order mentions President Ronald Reagan’s space-based missile defense program. Billions of taxpayer dollars went to contractors for more than a decade before the technological realities set in and the program was canceled.

However, it’s also true that the program spooked the Soviet Union leadership into diplomatic engagement with Reagan in a series of arms-control talks. Those conversations led to bilateral treaties, which ultimately reduced tensions and slashed both nations’ nuclear weapons stockpiles. Let’s hope history can repeat itself four decades later.

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DeepSeek’s Two Seismic Possibilities for American A.I.

Last week, something potentially enormous happened for artificial intelligence: The Chinese company DeepSeek released an open-source, free-to-use reasoning model that is — by crude measures, at least — on par with the best American equivalents. In its announcement DeepSeek offered one cost estimate: Its new R1 model was built for one-thirtieth the cost of OpenAI’s flagship product.

Presumably, in the weeks ahead, geek specialists will be chewing over the claims that R1 was so cheap to produce and that it performs roughly as well as the best-in-class models. But already R1 looks like an earthquake, generating a storm of debate over the weekend, rattling the whole stock market this morning and suggesting two truly seismic possibilities about the technological future on which so much of the American economy has recently been wagered.

The first possibility is that the much-ballyhooed American advantage on A.I. may be much smaller than has been widely thought. Just a few weeks ago, the venture capitalist, President Trump supporter and futurist Marc Andreessen — who spent the Biden years lamenting how far behind America had fallen on building big new things — was consoling himself that the country still had a massive lead on A.I. Last week he called R1 “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.” The A.I. analyst Zvi Mowshowitz quickly called it “the first serious challenge to OpenAI’s o1.”

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the suit’s claims.)

The second, related possibility is that the R1 breakthrough calls into question the whole approach to improving performance by building out ever-larger and more expensive data centers for training — an approach that has dominated work on A.I. in America for years and explains, among other eye-popping recent pledges, the announcement at the White House last week of up to $500 billion in investment in A.I. infrastructure by a new consortium called Stargate.

The basic gamble is that the returns to best-in-class A.I. will be so enormous that they will justify whatever it takes to cross that threshold — in terms of energy demand and water use, in terms of intellectual property and, particularly and most mercenarily, in terms of sheer spend.

Even before the DeepSeek breakthrough, there were growing questions about that. In June, David Cahn at Sequoia Capital called it “A.I.’s $600B Question,” and Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs, who estimated $1 trillion would soon be spent on A.I. infrastructure, suggested the benchmark figure was even higher.

In America, those most frustrated with the sorry state of our infrastructure and how little seems to ever get built like to emphasize the high cost of subway construction, pointing out that cities in Europe can produce impressive additions for far less. In the past few years, there is nothing the American economy has tried harder to do than engineer progress in A.I.; the Chinese appear, if the claimed price is close to accurate, to have almost matched that progress at a small fraction of the cost.

The Oscar Nominations Are a Sign Hollywood Still Wants to Counter Conservative Cultural Vibes

When I heard that the comedic actors Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott were chosen to announce Thursday morning’s Oscar nominations, I suspected that their presentation would provide a sort of rebuke to the bro-y, conservative vibe shift we’re all living through. Yang and Sennott came up through independent comedy and podcasting in New York — something that Sennott quipped about during their presentation: “For those of you who don’t know, the alt comedy scene is sort of like regular comedy but for women and gay people.”

The nominations further confirmed my suspicions that Hollywood’s first impulse is still to be oppositional to the conservative, Donald Trump-infected mainstream. Most notably, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong were nominated for their performances in “The Apprentice,” a Trump biopic. It’s safe to say he is probably not a fan: He threatened to sue to block the release of the film. Stan is nominated for best actor for portraying a young Trump, and Strong is nominated as best supporting actor for his role as Trump’s adviser Roy Cohn.

But it wasn’t just that nomination that felt like a rebuke. Karla Sofía Gascón is the first openly trans person to be nominated, for “Emilia Pérez,” the same week Trump signed an executive order stating, “Women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”

The box office darling “Wicked” was nominated for multiple awards, even though The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Zoglin griped in December, “After voting Donald Trump back into the White House in an apparent repudiation of woke ideology, the nation is flocking to a movie that could be Hollywood’s poster child for diversity, equity and inclusion.” “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” a short film about the first woman to become a full-time member of the New York Philharmonic, was also recognized with a nomination.

“Sing Sing” — which is about incarcerated men who come together to perform in a theater group and was “built on a revolutionary profit-sharing model where all cast and crew share equally in its success,” according to The Grio — was also multiply nominated.

And those are just a few examples of the progressive politics on display this year in what Hollywood is choosing to celebrate with its highest honor. Artists will continue to push back against the vibe shift, and they’ll do it with humor and verve. As Sennott noted when announcing a nomination for a film called “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent,” “Many such cases.”

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What It Means That Republicans Aren’t Acting on the Pete Hegseth Allegations

Update: The Senate voted to proceed on the nomination, 51-49, on Jan. 23. Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted against moving forward to a final vote on Mr. Hegseth’s nomination.

Why aren’t more Republican senators opposed to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense, particularly in light of new allegations, delivered in a sworn affidavit this week by his former sister-in-law, of excessive drinking and “abusive” behavior in his second marriage ?

The obvious answer is party loyalty. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush picked John Tower, a former Republican senator from Texas, to serve as secretary of defense. Like Hegseth, he was a military veteran who had been dogged by charges of womanizing and heavy drinking. Unlike Hegseth, he had top-level experience in defense matters, including the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A history of heavy drinking should be disqualifying in nearly any leadership role, never mind one with responsibilities as vast and consequential as the Pentagon’s. Even so, only one Republican senator — Kansas’s Nancy Kassebaum — voted against Tower, who went down in defeat, 47 to 53. If Hegseth’s candidacy, which could come to a vote as early as Friday, is opposed by any Republican, it will most likely be from another independent-minded woman, Maine’s Susan Collins.

(Through his lawyer, Hegseth has denied his former sister-in-law’s claims, and denied as well that he has issues with alcohol. In a statement to NBC News, his ex-wife said, “There was no physical abuse in my marriage.”)

In the case of Hegseth, the power of party loyalty is compounded by three additional factors: fear of Trump, the Cult of MAGA and the boomerang effect of liberal scorn.

As to the first: At least Kassebaum didn’t have to fear a social-media fusillade from Bush, and Bush would have been too much of a gentleman to do more than fume in private over her vote. Today, any Republican senator who defies Trump risks not just public mockery and belittlement from the president, but threats of a primary challenge, too.

Then there’s the MAGA cult, whose bro culture Hegseth typifies: the big tattoos, womanizing and fervent Christian piety. When Hegseth questions the capacity of women to serve in combat, or when he is quoted as having once drunkenly chanted, “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” (which Hegseth said last week was an anonymous false charge), it doesn’t dim his star in MAGA world. Instead, it signals that he’s reliable. That’s a bond that neither Trump nor most of the G.O.P. caucus will want to mess with.

But nothing will do more to persuade Republican senators to support Hegseth than the torrent of scorn now pouring over him from the organs of the perceived establishment. In December, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published a devastating exposé on Hegseth. In a different era (say, 10 years ago) the article would have destroyed his chances. Instead, it resuscitated a candidacy that, for a brief moment, looked dead on arrival in the Senate. Similar unflattering reporting by other news organizations only further abetted his comeback.

That doesn’t mean journalists shouldn’t do our jobs. It just means that, in this moral and intellectual climate, we shouldn’t expect it to make a whit of political difference.

An Invitation to a Witch Hunt to Root Out D.E.I.

Talk about cultural whiplash. The Biden administration — which was elected on the heels of gigantic racial justice protests — made consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion the law of the land. Now the Trump administration is not just rolling back those programs and getting rid of the people who ran them; it’s encouraging workers to rat out any colleagues who might have slipped through the cracks.

Following President Trump’s executive orders ending government diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs, the Office of Personnel Management sent out guidance on how the sudden stop will be carried out — including a template for the chilling message that agency heads are supposed to send to their employees.

“We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since Nov. 5, 2024, to obscure the connection between the contract and D.E.I.A. or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to the DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days,” reads the template.

The suggested notice to agency employees goes on to warn, “Failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.” On Wednesday, federal workers started receiving the message; for Department of Homeland Security employees, the template was tweaked to say failure to report “will result” in adverse consequences.

To be clear, there are reasonable people who oppose D.E.I. as wasteful and divisive, as Trump’s executive order describes. But the government’s move to encourage workers to inform on one another should give all of us the heebie-jeebies. It’s easy to imagine the bureaucratic knife fights going on in the federal offices right now, as people competing for power — or perhaps just survival as federal employees — seek to prove their loyalty and suck up to the new administration by starting whisper campaigns about who is a proponent of “similar ideologies.”

After railing for years about being the target of witch hunts, Trump appears to be setting the stage for what could be one of the most disturbing witch hunts since the McCarthy era. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1949 novel “1984,” in which the government is always watching. Americans ought to know that nothing good comes from the government threatening those who don’t tell on their friends and co-workers. History is going to judge the cure for D.E.I. worse than the disease.