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“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”

In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.

can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct

More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.

its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak.

Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private

accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorde

These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism

it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.

A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists

“Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,”

The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,

To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example”

The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?

Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office

The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.”

The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements?

(2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance

(3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people?

Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians.

(4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump wa

(5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

(8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death;

(6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape.

Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy

The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound.

“It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’

What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.

A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder

Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands.

Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s

And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October

In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism

articular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.

The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality

Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in

In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”

Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline.

His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”

when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.

To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard

Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect

Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security.

All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation

hat constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account?

it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism

In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into pla

One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’

Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.

why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament

Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury

As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.”

As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.

It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.

there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer.

He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet

The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys

Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?

the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast

The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.

how many mainstream entertainers routinely expose their audiences to Harvard biologists? Or climate-change experts? (The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells, episode No. 1259.) Or biosocial scientists? (The Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, episode No. 1274.) Or ethical-leadership lecturers? (The NYU Stern business-school professor Jonathan Haidt, episode No. 1221.)

“Learn, learn, learn, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe said at the start of one podcast episode this winter, wrapping up an ad read for the online education platform Skillshare. “That’s what I’m getting out of this. I think it’s very important to continue to challenge your mind.”

He’s right! It is! And don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? Don’t we want them striving, setting goals, learning, learning, learning? Don’t we want more Joes?

Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets

if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to

There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention.

Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble.

the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society.

that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that.

The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization

It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.

Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.

His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.

a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.

At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.

In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump.

More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.

if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies,

All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time

like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic

Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.

It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.

His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”

I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron

And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite.

My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.

Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,”

Cooper pressed Goodman on how she would ensure coronavirus was not spread at the city’s hotels and casinos, describing the tourist attractions as a “Petri dish” for possible infection.

The talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel referred to the interview as “bonkers” and said she “should resign before lunch arrives today”.

That’s up to them to figure out.”

“the single most embarrassing thing” he had seen from a state politician in 35 years.

Goodman said it should be up to casinos to weigh the odds of spreading the virus.

The casino workers’ Culinary Union, which represents about 60,000 bartenders, cooks, housekeepers and other employees, said Goodman’s remarks were “outrageous considering essential frontline workers have been dealing with the consequences of this crisis firsthand”.

“Workplaces need to be safe and healthy, not a petri dish,” said Geoconda Arguello-Kline, the union’s secretary-treasurer. The union said 11 of its members so far have died of Covid-19.

Brian Knudsen, a Las Vegas City councilman, said Goodman “does not speak for all of us”, and reopening now “is reckless and completely contrary to the overwhelming consensus of medical experts”, while Dina Titus, a Democratic congresswoman who represents the Las Vegas Strip, said the mayor doesn’t represent the area “literally or figuratively” and the advice of scientists telling people to stay home should be heeded.

“Assume everybody is a carrier,” Goodman said on Tuesday on MSNBC. “And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”

In late March, images of homeless people sleeping in a converted parking lot prompted widespread condemnation after officials turned the outdoors lot into a temporary shelter.

The shelter consists of a series of tents for homeless people who have coronavirus but are not sick enough to go to the hospital.

Goodman’s comments came a day after public health officials in Nevada reported 119 new cases of Covid-19 and nine additional deaths overnight in Clark county, where Las Vegas is located. Statewide, officials have tallied more than 4,000 coronavirus cases and 172 deaths.

Donald Trump has fanned the flames, suggesting some places have gone too far in issuing restrictions.

More than 80 members of Congress, 55 civil rights groups and Democratic presidential candidates have demanded Miller resign in response to the leaked emails.

Miller’s extreme language in public is under renewed scrutiny following a series of reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that revealed how leaked emails showed the White House aide espousing white nationalist views and injecting that agenda into Breitbart.

Much of Miller’s interview with Bannon is centered on attacking two of Trump’s Republican rivals in the 2016 presidential race, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

Miller spent most of the interview criticizing Rubio, who was part of a coalition of four Republicans and four Democrats in the Senate, known as the Gang of Eight, who attempted to pass bipartisan immigration reform. Miller said if the bill they put forward had passed in Congress and become law, “America would be decimated”.

He also said Rubio’s election would lead to open borders and “the destruction of US sovereignty”.

An SPLC report published on Tuesday alleges Miller had an outsized influence on the output at Breitbart, pushing stories the site should cover and suggesting where those stories should be arranged on the homepage. The emails show that Miller specifically pushed articles attacking Rubio, who Trump has called a “great friend” since becoming president.

“You have the second highest carbon emissions per person on Earth and you are burying your head in the sand. You aren’t a climate sceptic, you are a climate denier,” she said.

Cutting off the interview, Morgan said: “I’ve got to say: wake up. Wake up. Climate change and global warming are real and Australia right now is showing the entire world just how devastating it is.

“And for senior politicians in Australia to still pretend there’s no connection is absolutely disgraceful.”

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.

“My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.

Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity.

In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates

“Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment,”

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

That night Ms. Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. President McCartney weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith places.”

Ms. McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave that day.

Ms. McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview, she said that Ms. Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” Ms. McCartney said. “She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity with Ms. Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”

Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.

In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”

It's not clear that investigators ever had concrete evidence of a relevant bank transfer from the Egyptian bank. But multiple sources said there was sufficient information to justify the subpoena and keep the criminal campaign finance investigation open after the Mueller probe ended.

Justice Department confirmed that when the special counsel's office shut down in 2019, Mueller transferred an ongoing foreign campaign contribution investigation to prosecutors in Washington. Some of CNN's sources have confirmed that the case, which Mueller cryptically called a "foreign campaign contribution" probe, was in fact the Egypt investigation.

The probe was confirmed this week by a Justice Department senior official who responded to CNN's queries: "The case was first looked at by the Special Counsel investigators who failed to bring a case, and then it was looked at by the US attorney's office, and career prosecutors in the national security section, who also were unable to bring a case. Based upon the recommendations of both the FBI and those career prosecutors, Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney, formally closed the case in July."

there could have been money from an Egyptian bank that ended up backing Trump's last-minute injection of $10 million into his 2016 campaign, according to two of the sources.

Yet neither the special counsel's office, nor prosecutors who carried on the case after Mueller, got a complete picture of the President's financial entanglements. Prosecutors in Washington even proposed subpoenaing financial records tied to Trump, before top officials finally concluded this summer they had reached a dead end, the sources said.

Mueller's primary task was to investigate Russian government attempts to interfere in the 2016 election, which had consumed the political and investigative conversations in the early days of Trump's presidency. But Mueller's mandate also allowed him to take on related criminal investigations, which in this case included another probe of potential foreign influence connected to the campaign.

Zainab Ahmad, a former international terrorism prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a national security and counterintelligence specialist, co-led it, according to sources. Public records also show they focused on cases separate from other trial attorneys in the special counsel's office and had senior titles equivalent to other Mueller team leaders.

Mueller's team tried to understand both the $10 million contribution Trump gave to his campaign 11 days before the 2016 election and the Trump campaign's ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to sources and redacted interview records released from the Mueller investigation.

One official familiar with the work said some investigators believed the Egypt inquiry presented a more direct avenue for Mueller's team to examine Trump's finances, in part because it did not have an obvious tie to Russia.

Needing a final push before Election Day as the polls tightened in 2016, the Trump campaign was running low on cash. Trump's top campaign officials scrambled to convince Trump to inject money, according to memos of witness interviews from the investigation and contemporaneous news reports. Trump lagged well behind a pledge he made to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Trump wrote his campaign a $10 million check, publicly calling it a loan. Campaign finance records showed it as his single largest political contribution, by far, and not one the campaign would reimburse him for.

Mueller's office pressed witnesses to explain how the Trump-Sisi meeting in late 2016 came about. Ahmad, whose aims on the investigation were cloaked in secrecy, was repeatedly present in interviews touching on both Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign and the campaign's ties to Egypt.

In a session months later, Bannon was asked about Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign, according to another recent release of Mueller's interview memos.

Mueller asked the President, "Did any person or entity inform you during the campaign that any foreign government or foreign leader, other than Russia or Vladimir Putin, had provided, wished to provide, or offered to provide tangible support to your campaign?" Trump wrote back in his written answers that he had "no recollection of being told during the campaign" of support from a foreign government.

Soon enough, the bank was arguing it shouldn't have to give Mueller records because it was interchangeable with the foreign government that owned it. The US courts disagreed repeatedly, saying the company couldn't be immune from the Mueller team subpoena.  

When the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, heard arguments in the case in December 2018, security cleared journalists from an entire floor of the federal courthouse, allowing attorneys involved in the case to enter and exit the building and the courtroom without being seen.

The case even landed before the Supreme Court in early 2019. The high court ultimately declined the company's bid to block Mueller's subpoena in March 2019.  Even then, however, the standoff between US prosecutors and the Egyptian bank ended in a stalemate. 

In the end, it was the bank's word against the investigators. The court proceedings ended with prosecutors getting nothing more than what the bank was willing to turn over, and the bank was excused from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that had accrued for defying the subpoena. It appeared to be a dead end -- and not justification enough for Mueller to keep his office open to finish this case alone.

In late March 2019, shortly after Mueller's investigation concluded, Howell, overseeing final court proceedings in the Egyptian bank's subpoena case,  asked a prosecutor point-blank if the investigation was over. "No, it's continuing. I can say it's continuing robustly," David Goodhand of the DC US attorney's office told the court.

Liu told prosecutors she didn't believe they had met the standard needed to seek the records. The investigation stagnated, but Liu didn't close the case. She declined to comment for this story.

It's unclear how much activity occurred after Liu rejected the subpoena request. Prosecutors who disagreed with her decision believed it was now impossible to resolve questions about Trump's 2016 campaign contribution. Liu told people in her office that if the investigation had produced enough evidence, Mueller would have made the decision to take additional steps, according to sources.

On paper, Mueller described the investigation with only three vague words: "Foreign campaign contribution."

before a Trump event in West Salem, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, a woman interviewed by CNN said Biden would not be capable of running the country due to his mental capacity.

The videos appear to be gaining traction among Trump supporters.

In August, White House social media director Dan Scavino shared a video that purported to show Biden falling asleep during a TV interview. Expect the TV interview never happened; the whole thing was fake.

the misleading clip the Trump campaign has been pushing all this week that purported to show the former vice president saying he was running against Bush.

The full interview was part of a virtual "I Will Vote" concert, which was hosted by comedian George Lopez and Ana Navarro, a CNN political commentator. The 27-second isolated video that was widely shared on social media failed to contextualize Biden's response to Lopez's question, giving the impression that Biden had confused Trump with George W. Bush.

About 12 minutes into the event, Lopez asked Biden, "If someone is undecided, or maybe thinking about not voting, why should they vote, and why should they vote for you?"

"Well, first of all, the reason they should vote is that there's a lot on the ballot this year. I mean this is the most consequen- not because I'm running, but because of who I'm running against. This is the most consequential election, uh, in a long, long, long time. And the character of the country, in my view, is literally on the ballot. What kind of country we're going to be."

"Four more years of George, uh, George, uh, he, uh gonna find ourselves in a position where if, uh, Trump gets elected, we're gonna be, we're gonna be in a different world."

The video sent by the Trump campaign does not inform viewers that Biden was answering a question from George Lopez.

In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense

Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”

Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.

Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.

In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.

The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.

The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”

After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.

But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.

Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.

“He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”

“To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.

The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.

Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”

The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.

Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.

“He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”

In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”

Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X,

The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”

The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, Amichay Eliyahu, who told a Hebrew radio station that there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”

Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States,

Such reassurances are also belied by the language Mr. Netanyahu uses with audiences in Israel. His reference to Amalek came in a speech delivered in Hebrew on Oct. 28 as Israel was launching the ground invasion. While some Jewish scholars argue that the scripture’s message is metaphoric not literal, his words resonated widely, as video of his speech was shared on social media, often by critics

“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,”

“When ministers make statements like that,” Mr. Sfard added, “it opens the door for everyone else.”

“Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Mr. Golan said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15.

“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas

In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.

On Saturday, the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.”

The rise in incendiary statements comes against a backdrop of rising violence in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes.

the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is not surprising, and even understandable, given the brutality of the Hamas attacks, which inflicted collective and individual trauma on Israelis.

“People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. “You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want to see a world of good guys and bad guys.”

“Leaders understand that,” he added, “and it leads them to use this kind of language, because this kind of language has an audience.”

Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.

It will also make Israelis more inured to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has isolated Israel around the world, he added. A civilian death toll of 10,000 or 20,000, he said, could seem to “the average Israeli that it’s not such a big deal.”

In the long run, Mr. Sfard said, such language dooms the chance of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, erodes Israel’s democracy and breeds a younger generation that is “easily using the language in their discussion with their friends.”

“Once a certain rhetoric becomes legitimized, turning the wheel back requires a lot of education,” he said. “There is an old Jewish proverb: ‘A hundred wise men will struggle a long time to take out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.’”

Andrew Adams, a federal prosecutor leading the task force, said in an interview that “targeting people who make their living by providing a means for money laundering is a key priority.”

Along with the Amadea, Imperial Yachts oversaw the construction of the Scheherazade, a $700 million superyacht that U.S. officials say is linked to Mr. Putin, and the Crescent, which the Spanish police believe is owned by Igor Sechin, chairman of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft.

Mr. Timchenko and his partners designed the Scheherazade — seized in early May by the Italian police — as a gift for Mr. Putin’s use, according to the assessment. Together, the three vessels may have cost as much as $1.6 billion, enough to buy six new frigates for the Russian navy.

But U.S. officials are not buying such explanations. Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, said it was the responsibility of people in the yacht services industry to avoid doing business with people under sanctions.“And if you do,” she said, “you yourself will be subject to sanctions.”

Mr. Kochman, 41, got his start in the yacht business in Russia in 2001, the year after Mr. Putin took power, selling Italian-made yachts.

“We grow with our clients like parents with babies,

Locals have never seen Mr. Khudainatov. Mariangela Canale, owner of the town’s 111-year-old bakery, said she was worried that Portofino would become a place where the homes were mere investments, owned by wealthy people who rarely visited, and the community would lose its soul. “Even the richest residents have always come for a chat or to buy my focaccia bread with their children, or have dinner in the piazza,” she said. “They live with us.”

“The client may be fully immersed in the project, he might not be,” he said in a phone interview. “I channel everything through Mr. Kochman.”

“We are not currently working with anyone on the sanctions list and we have shared all requested information with the authorities, with whom we continue to work,” the spokesman said in an email.

But according to U.S. investigators, Imperial Yachts brokered the sale of the Amadea late last year to Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian government official and billionaire investor who has been on the U.S. sanctions list since 2018. He was among a group of seven oligarchs who the American officials said “benefit from the Putin regime and play a key role in advancing Russia’s malign activities.”

Mr. Clark, the lawyer for Imperial Yachts, said the company “would never knowingly create structures to hide or conceal ownership, nor would we knowingly broker deals to sanctioned individuals.”

One thing is clear, according to the U.S. task force: Members of Mr. Kerimov’s family were on board the Amadea earlier this year, based on investigators’ interviews with crew members, reviews of emails between the ship and Imperial, and other documents from the superyacht including copies of passports.

The cast of characters restoring Villa Altachiara to its former glory is familiar. Mr. Kochman’s BLD Management is supervising the project. Mr. Gey is helping to oversee the local and international artisans restoring the interior of the mansion. Yachtline 1618, an Italian high-end carpentry company that has worked on Imperial Yachts projects, is also involved.

We buy your yachts and you buy our gas,”

“Everything is under very strict nondisclosure agreements,” Mr. Gey said. “It’s a standard in the industry.”He added, “It’s not like there is something to hide.”

The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.

The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.

Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”

Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.

The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”

Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”

Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.

Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.

After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”

As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”

Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.

Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.

Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.

A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.

Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.

At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.

Obama’s resistance to direct intervention only grew. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, “Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?”

In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.

Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square.

As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

“When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan.

The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments,

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me).

The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.

Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of “credibility”—particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”

American national-security credibility, as it is conventionally understood in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the cluster of think tanks headquartered within walking distance of the White House, is an intangible yet potent force—one that, when properly nurtured, keeps America’s friends feeling secure and keeps the international order stable.

All week, White House officials had publicly built the case that Assad had committed a crime against humanity. Kerry’s speech would mark the culmination of this campaign.

But the president had grown queasy. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta, Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. The American people seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention; so too did one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She told him that her country would not participate in a Syria campaign. And in a stunning development, on Thursday, August 29, the British Parliament denied David Cameron its blessing for an attack. John Kerry later told me that when he heard that, “internally, I went, Oops.”

Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper’s analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a “slam dunk” in Iraq.

While the Pentagon and the White House’s national-security apparatuses were still moving toward war (John Kerry told me he was expecting a strike the day after his speech), the president had come to believe that he was walking into a trap—one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do.

Late on Friday afternoon, Obama determined that he was simply not prepared to authorize a strike. He asked McDonough, his chief of staff, to take a walk with him on the South Lawn of the White House. Obama did not choose McDonough randomly: He is the Obama aide most averse to U.S. military intervention, and someone who, in the words of one of his colleagues, “thinks in terms of traps.” Obama, ordinarily a preternaturally confident man, was looking for validation, and trying to devise ways to explain his change of heart, both to his own aides and to the public

The third, and most important, factor, he told me, was “our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.

Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. “If you’ve been around him, you know when he’s ambivalent about something, when it’s a 51–49 decision,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But he was completely at ease.”

Obama also shared with McDonough a long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.

The fourth factor, he said, was of deeper philosophical importance. “This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time,” he said. “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”

Obama’s decision caused tremors across Washington as well. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the two leading Republican hawks in the Senate, had met with Obama in the White House earlier in the week and had been promised an attack. They were angered by the about-face. Damage was done even inside the administration. Neither Chuck Hagel, then the secretary of defense, nor John Kerry was in the Oval Office when the president informed his team of his thinking. Kerry would not learn about the change until later that evening. “I just got fucked over,” he told a friend shortly after talking to the president that night. (When I asked Kerry recently about that tumultuous night, he said, “I didn’t stop to analyze it. I figured the president had a reason to make a decision and, honestly, I understood his notion.”)

The president asked Congress to authorize the use of force—the irrepressible Kerry served as chief lobbyist—and it quickly became apparent in the White House that Congress had little interest in a strike. When I spoke with Biden recently about the red-line decision, he made special note of this fact. “It matters to have Congress with you, in terms of your ability to sustain what you set out to do,” he said. Obama “didn’t go to Congress to get himself off the hook. He had his doubts at that point, but he knew that if he was going to do anything, he better damn well have the public with him, or it would be a very short ride.” Congress’s clear ambivalence convinced Biden that Obama was correct to fear the slippery slope. “What happens when we get a plane shot down? Do we not go in and rescue?,” Biden asked. “You need the support of the American people.”

At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal—a program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even acknowledge.

The arrangement won the president praise from, of all people, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, with whom he has had a consistently contentious relationship. The removal of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles represented “the one ray of light in a very dark region,” Netanyahu told me not long after the deal was announced.

John Kerry today expresses no patience for those who argue, as he himself once did, that Obama should have bombed Assad-regime sites in order to buttress America’s deterrent capability. “You’d still have the weapons there, and you’d probably be fighting isil” for control of the weapons, he said, referring to the Islamic State, the terror group also known as isis. “It just doesn’t make sense. But I can’t deny to you that this notion about the red line being crossed and [Obama’s] not doing anything gained a life of its own.”

today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.

“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”

By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”

over the past few months, I’ve spent several hours talking with him about the broadest themes of his “long game” foreign policy, including the themes he is most eager to discuss—namely, the ones that have nothing to do with the Middle East.

I have come to believe that, in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East—countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American “muscle” for their own narrow and sectarian ends.

“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

For some foreign-policy experts, even within his own administration, Obama’s about-face on enforcing the red line was a dispiriting moment in which he displayed irresolution and naïveté, and did lasting damage to America’s standing in the world. “Once the commander in chief draws that red line,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then as secretary of defense in Obama’s first term, told me recently, “then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn’t enforce it.” Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”

Obama’s defenders, however, argue that he did no damage to U.S. credibility, citing Assad’s subsequent agreement to have his chemical weapons removed. “The threat of force was credible enough for them to give up their chemical weapons,” Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told me. “We threatened military action and they responded. That’s deterrent credibility.”

History may record August 30, 2013, as the day Obama prevented the U.S. from entering yet another disastrous Muslim civil war, and the day he removed the threat of a chemical attack on Israel, Turkey, or Jordan. Or it could be remembered as the day he let the Middle East slip from America’s grasp, into the hands of Russia, Iran, and isis

spoke with obama about foreign policy when he was a U.S. senator, in 2006. At the time, I was familiar mainly with the text of a speech he had delivered four years earlier, at a Chicago antiwar rally. It was an unusual speech for an antiwar rally in that it was not antiwar; Obama, who was then an Illinois state senator, argued only against one specific and, at the time, still theoretical, war. “I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein,” he said. “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man … But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors.” He added, “I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.”

This speech had made me curious about its author. I wanted to learn how an Illinois state senator, a part-time law professor who spent his days traveling between Chicago and Springfield, had come to a more prescient understanding of the coming quagmire than the most experienced foreign-policy thinkers of his party, including such figures as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, not to mention, of course, most Republicans and many foreign-policy analysts and writers, including me.

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.”

“isis is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told me in one of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” Obama explained that climate change worries him in particular because “it is a political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention. It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the agenda.”

At the moment, of course, the most urgent of the “seemingly more urgent” issues is Syria. But at any given moment, Obama’s entire presidency could be upended by North Korean aggression, or an assault by Russia on a member of nato, or an isis-planned attack on U.S. soil. Few presidents have faced such diverse tests on the international stage as Obama has, and the challenge for him, as for all presidents, has been to distinguish the merely urgent from the truly important, and to focus on the important.

My goal in our recent conversations was to see the world through Obama’s eyes, and to understand what he believes America’s role in the world should be. This article is informed by our recent series of conversations, which took place in the Oval Office; over lunch in his dining room; aboard Air Force One; and in Kuala Lumpur during his most recent visit to Asia, in November. It is also informed by my previous interviews with him and by his speeches and prolific public ruminations, as well as by conversations with his top foreign-policy and national-security advisers, foreign leaders and their ambassadors in Washington, friends of the president and others who have spoken with him about his policies and decisions, and his adversaries and critics.

Over the course of our conversations, I came to see Obama as a president who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s ability to direct global events, even as he has, late in his presidency, accumulated a set of potentially historic foreign-policy achievements—controversial, provisional achievements, to be sure, but achievements nonetheless: the opening to Cuba, the Paris climate-change accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and, of course, the Iran nuclear deal.

These he accomplished despite his growing sense that larger forces—the riptide of tribal feeling in a world that should have already shed its atavism; the resilience of small men who rule large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests; the persistence of fear as a governing human emotion—frequently conspire against the best of America’s intentions. But he also has come to learn, he told me, that very little is accomplished in international affairs without U.S. leadership.

Obama talked me through this apparent contradiction. “I want a president who has the sense that you can’t fix everything,” he said. But on the other hand, “if we don’t set the agenda, it doesn’t happen.” He explained what he meant. “The fact is, there is not a summit I’ve attended since I’ve been president where we are not setting the agenda, where we are not responsible for the key results,” he said. “That’s true whether you’re talking about nuclear security, whether you’re talking about saving the world financial system, whether you’re talking about climate.”

One day, over lunch in the Oval Office dining room, I asked the president how he thought his foreign policy might be understood by historians. He started by describing for me a four-box grid representing the main schools of American foreign-policy thought. One box he called isolationism, which he dismissed out of hand. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said. “Withdrawal is untenable.” The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal interventionism, and internationalism. “I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real impact.” He also noted that he was quite obviously an internationalist, devoted as he is to strengthening multilateral organizations and international norms.

If a crisis, or a humanitarian catastrophe, does not meet his stringent standard for what constitutes a direct national-security threat, Obama said, he doesn’t believe that he should be forced into silence. He is not so much the realist, he suggested, that he won’t pass judgment on other leaders.

Though he has so far ruled out the use of direct American power to depose Assad, he was not wrong, he argued, to call on Assad to go. “Oftentimes when you get critics of our Syria policy, one of the things that they’ll point out is ‘You called for Assad to go, but you didn’t force him to go. You did not invade.’ And the notion is that if you weren’t going to overthrow the regime, you shouldn’t have said anything. That’s a weird argument to me, the notion that if we use our moral authority to say ‘This is a brutal regime, and this is not how a leader should treat his people,’ once you do that, you are obliged to invade the country and install a government you prefer.”

“I am very much the internationalist,” Obama said in a later conversation. “And I am also an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like democracy and human rights and norms and values

“Having said that,” he continued, “I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.”

If Obama ever questioned whether America really is the world’s one indispensable nation, he no longer does so. But he is the rare president who seems at times to resent indispensability, rather than embrace it.

“Free riders aggravate me,” he told me. Recently, Obama warned that Great Britain would no longer be able to claim a “special relationship” with the United States if it did not commit to spending at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense. “You have to pay your fair share,” Obama told David Cameron, who subsequently met the 2 percent threshold.

Part of his mission as president, Obama explained, is to spur other countries to take action for themselves, rather than wait for the U.S. to lead. The defense of the liberal international order against jihadist terror, Russian adventurism, and Chinese bullying depends in part, he believes, on the willingness of other nations to share the burden with the U.S

This is why the controversy surrounding the assertion—made by an anonymous administration official to The New Yorker during the Libya crisis of 2011—that his policy consisted of “leading from behind” perturbed him. “We don’t have to always be the ones who are up front,” he told me. “Sometimes we’re going to get what we want precisely because we are sharing in the agenda.

The president also seems to believe that sharing leadership with other countries is a way to check America’s more unruly impulses. “One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris,”

He consistently invokes what he understands to be America’s past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness. “We have history,” he said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”

In his efforts to off-load some of America’s foreign-policy responsibilities to its allies, Obama appears to be a classic retrenchment president in the manner of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Retrenchment, in this context, is defined as “pulling back, spending less, cutting risk, and shifting burdens to allies

One difference between Eisenhower and Nixon, on the one hand, and Obama, on the other, Sestanovich said, is that Obama “appears to have had a personal, ideological commitment to the idea that foreign policy had consumed too much of the nation’s attention and resources.”

But once he decides that a particular challenge represents a direct national-security threat, he has shown a willingness to act unilaterally. This is one of the larger ironies of the Obama presidency: He has relentlessly questioned the efficacy of force, but he has also become the most successful terrorist-hunter in the history of the presidency, one who will hand to his successor a set of tools an accomplished assassin would envy

“He applies different standards to direct threats to the U.S.,” Ben Rhodes says. “For instance, despite his misgivings about Syria, he has not had a second thought about drones.” Some critics argue he should have had a few second thoughts about what they see as the overuse of drones. But John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, told me recently that he and the president “have similar views. One of them is that sometimes you have to take a life to save even more lives. We have a similar view of just-war theory. The president requires near-certainty of no collateral damage. But if he believes it is necessary to act, he doesn’t hesitate.”

Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia

He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a way, a Hobbesian optimist.

The contradictions do not end there. Though he has a reputation for prudence, he has also been eager to question some of the long-standing assumptions undergirding traditional U.S. foreign-policy thinking. To a remarkable degree, he is willing to question why America’s enemies are its enemies, or why some of its friends are its friends.

It is assumed, at least among his critics, that Obama sought the Iran deal because he has a vision of a historic American-Persian rapprochement. But his desire for the nuclear agreement was born of pessimism as much as it was of optimism. “The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the U.S. and Iran,” Susan Rice told me. “It was far more pragmatic and minimalist. The aim was very simply to make a dangerous country substantially less dangerous. No one had any expectation that Iran would be a more benign actor.”

once mentioned to obama a scene from The Godfather: Part III, in which Michael Corleone complains angrily about his failure to escape the grasp of organized crime. I told Obama that the Middle East is to his presidency what the Mob is to Corleone, and I started to quote the Al Pacino line: “Just when I thought I was out—”“It pulls you back in,” Obama said, completing the thought

When I asked Obama recently what he had hoped to accomplish with his Cairo reset speech, he said that he had been trying—unsuccessfully, he acknowledged—to persuade Muslims to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.“My argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel,” he told me. “We want to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.”

But over the next three years, as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned. Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category: Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so

Obama has also not had much patience for Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his understanding of the region. In one of Netanyahu’s meetings with the president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Other leaders also frustrate him immensely. Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West—but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria

In recent days, the president has taken to joking privately, “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.” Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally contained technocrats, telling aides, “If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy.”

The unraveling of the Arab Spring darkened the president’s view of what the U.S. could achieve in the Middle East, and made him realize how much the chaos there was distracting from other priorities. “The president recognized during the course of the Arab Spring that the Middle East was consuming us,”

But what sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011

Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster.

“So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion—which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

Mess is the president’s diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a “shit show,” in part because it’s subsequently become an isis haven—one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism.

Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off—except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight.”

Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly.”

Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”

Obama did not come into office preoccupied by the Middle East. He is the first child of the Pacific to become president—born in Hawaii, raised there and, for four years, in Indonesia—and he is fixated on turning America’s attention to Asia

For Obama, Asia represents the future. Africa and Latin America, in his view, deserve far more U.S. attention than they receive. Europe, about which he is unromantic, is a source of global stability that requires, to his occasional annoyance, American hand-holding. And the Middle East is a region to be avoided—one that, thanks to America’s energy revolution, will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy.

Advisers recall that Obama would cite a pivotal moment in The Dark Knight, the 2008 Batman movie, to help explain not only how he understood the role of isis, but how he understood the larger ecosystem in which it grew. “There’s a scene in the beginning in which the gang leaders of Gotham are meeting,” the president would say. “These are men who had the city divided up. They were thugs, but there was a kind of order. Everyone had his turf. And then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire. isil is the Joker. It has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That’s why we have to fight it.”

The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.

The traveling White House press corps was unrelenting: “Isn’t it time for your strategy to change?” one reporter asked. This was followed by “Could I ask you to address your critics who say that your reluctance to enter another Middle East war, and your preference of diplomacy over using the military, makes the United States weaker and emboldens our enemies?” And then came this imperishable question, from a CNN reporter: “If you’ll forgive the language—why can’t we take out these bastards?” Which was followed by “Do you think you really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland?”

This rhetoric appeared to frustrate Obama immensely. “When I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims; when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted,” Obama told the assembled reporters, “that’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

he has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period in 2014 when isis was executing its American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. “They’re not coming here to chop our heads off,” he reassured her.

Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do

Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ “resilience” in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society. Nevertheless, his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its “proper” perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people.

When I noted to Kerry that the president’s rhetoric doesn’t match his, he said, “President Obama sees all of this, but he doesn’t gin it up into this kind of—he thinks we are on track. He has escalated his efforts. But he’s not trying to create hysteria … I think the president is always inclined to try to keep things on an appropriate equilibrium. I respect that.”

Obama modulates his discussion of terrorism for several reasons: He is, by nature, Spockian. And he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into panic. The sort of panic he worries about most is the type that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American openness and to the constitutional order.

The president also gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly as it relates to rebalancing America’s global priorities. For years, the “pivot to Asia” has been a paramount priority of his. America’s economic future lies in Asia, he believes, and the challenge posed by China’s rise requires constant attention. From his earliest days in office, Obama has been focused on rebuilding the sometimes-threadbare ties between the U.S. and its Asian treaty partners, and he is perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to draw other Asian nations into the U.S. orbit. His dramatic opening to Burma was one such opportunity; Vietnam and the entire constellation of Southeast Asian countries fearful of Chinese domination presented others.

Obama believes, Carter said, that Asia “is the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future, and that no president can take his eye off of this.” He added, “He consistently asks, even in the midst of everything else that’s going on, ‘Where are we in the Asia-Pacific rebalance? Where are we in terms of resources?’ He’s been extremely consistent about that, even in times of Middle East tension.”

“Right now, I don’t think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation in the Middle East,” he said. “You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You’ve got a violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged through social media. You’ve got countries that have very few civic traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organizing principles are sectarian.”

He went on, “Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems—enormous poverty, corruption—but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty stark.”

In Asia, as well as in Latin America and Africa, Obama says, he sees young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity, education, and material wealth.“They are not thinking about how to kill Americans,” he says. “What they’re thinking about is How do I get a better education? How do I create something of value?”

He then made an observation that I came to realize was representative of his bleakest, most visceral understanding of the Middle East today—not the sort of understanding that a White House still oriented around themes of hope and change might choose to advertise. “If we’re not talking to them,” he said, referring to young Asians and Africans and Latin Americans, “because the only thing we’re doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we’re missing the boat.

He does resist refracting radical Islam through the “clash of civilizations” prism popularized by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington. But this is because, he and his advisers argue, he does not want to enlarge the ranks of the enemy. “The goal is not to force a Huntington template onto this conflict,” said John Brennan, the CIA director.

“It is very clear what I mean,” he told me, “which is that there is a violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation of Islam by a faction—a tiny faction—within the Muslim community that is our enemy, and that has to be defeated.”

“There is also the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society,” he said. But he added, “I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush.”

In private encounters with other world leaders, Obama has argued that there will be no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity and undergoes some of the reforms that have changed Christianity.

, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.

Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family, Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.

“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked.Obama smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said.

But he went on to say that the Saudis need to “share” the Middle East with their Iranian foes. “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace,”

“An approach that said to our friends ‘You are right, Iran is the source of all problems, and we will support you in dealing with Iran’ would essentially mean that as these sectarian conflicts continue to rage and our Gulf partners, our traditional friends, do not have the ability to put out the flames on their own or decisively win on their own, and would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East.”

One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize. Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of much of the Muslim Middle East’s problems, and it is another source of his fatalism. Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of tribalism—part of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, concerns the way in which tribalism in post-colonial Kenya helped ruin his father’s life—which goes some distance in explaining why he is so fastidious about avoiding entanglements in tribal conflicts.

“It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me. “I understand the tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I’ve been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it’s the source of a lot of destructive acts.”

“Look, I am not of the view that human beings are inherently evil,” he said. “I believe that there’s more good than bad in humanity. And if you look at the trajectory of history, I am optimistic.

“I believe that overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant, healthier, better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference. But it’s hugely uneven. And what has been clear throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is that the progress we make in social order and taming our baser impulses and steadying our fears can be reversed very quickly. Social order starts breaking down if people are under profound stress. Then the default position is tribe—us/them, a hostility toward the unfamiliar or the unknown.”

He continued, “Right now, across the globe, you’re seeing places that are undergoing severe stress because of globalization, because of the collision of cultures brought about by the Internet and social media, because of scarcities—some of which will be attributable to climate change over the next several decades—because of population growth. And in those places, the Middle East being Exhibit A, the default position for a lot of folks is to organize tightly in the tribe and to push back or strike out against those who are different.

“A group like isil is the distillation of every worst impulse along these lines. The notion that we are a small group that defines ourselves primarily by the degree to which we can kill others who are not like us, and attempting to impose a rigid orthodoxy that produces nothing, that celebrates nothing, that really is contrary to every bit of human progress—it indicates the degree to which that kind of mentality can still take root and gain adherents in the 21st century.”

“We have to determine the best tools to roll back those kinds of attitudes,” he said. “There are going to be times where either because it’s not a direct threat to us or because we just don’t have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet.”

I asked Obama whether he would have sent the Marines to Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide as it was happening, had he been president at the time. “Given the speed with which the killing took place, and how long it takes to crank up the machinery of the U.S. government, I understand why we did not act fast enough,” he said. “Now, we should learn from tha