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It’s officially squeak season.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s March Madness is right around the corner. The National Basketball Association (NBA) is fresh off its All-Star break, with the playoffs on the horizon. The playoffs for the women’s three-on-three league Unrivaled start this weekend—and Angel Reese will be back!

So turn on your TV and pump up the volume. Try tuning out the color commentary, the pulsating music, and the “defense” chants, and what you’ll hear is basketball’s true soundtrack: a symphony of squeaks.

Today, in a study published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists have made a “Wemby”-sized stride forward on the timeless scientific mystery of why basketball sneakers make those joyful noises.

“We were not expecting to find so much richness and depth, from a physics point of view, underneath the sole of a shoe,” says Adel Djellouli, a scientist at Harvard University and co-lead author of the study.

Most scientists who had considered the problem believed that shoe squeaks were a straightforward example of the common “stick-slip phenomenon.”

It’s easy to see stick-slip in action. Just plop a heavy book on a table and try to gently slide it across. Instead of a smooth slide, you’ll get a jerky, stop-and-start kind of motion.

Basketball squeaks, the theory went, were an example of the same phenomenon. When a player stopped on a dime, their shoe’s rubbery sole would slip slightly—many times per second in the same stop-and-start pattern—producing a squeak. This is how violins work and why a squeaky door hinge rings at a lower pitch when you open it slowly.

But with the power of high-speed cameras and acoustic analysis, Djellouli and his co-authors have shown that basketball shoes are special. 

It’s all about the bumps. Those long, raised patterns of ridges that line the bottom of a sneaker are really the maestros of basketball’s soundscape. Watch the bottom of a shoe rubbing against the hardwood in slow motion, and you’ll see.

The sole’s ridges don’t lift and stick all at once. Rather, only a tiny part of each ridge separates from the ground at any one time. That pocket of separation glides down the ridge until it reaches the end of the sole, at which point the air outside the shoe receives a little kick. Those separation waves ripple down the ridges thousands of times per second, kicking the air rhythmically. The rate of kicks is exactly the frequency of the squeak—the faster the kicks, the higher the pitch.

That frequency depends on the shape of each ridge, which guides the waves down with a characteristic speed. “The idea of a waveguide for friction was not known,” says Gabriele Albertini, a structural engineer at the University of Nottingham in England and Djellouli’s co-lead author. To demonstrate their finding, the scientists reverse-engineered rectangular blocks of synthetic sole with distinct pitches. They were even able to play Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars on a piece of glass. “It took us three days to rehearse,” Djellouli says. “We could have just shown it in a graph, but where’s the fun in that?”

The sneaker study falls under the larger umbrella of “bimaterial friction,” the special physics of two different materials rubbing together. The phenomenon of two different faults slipping against each other to produce an earthquake, for instance, is much like a sneaker rubbing on hardwood. Rather than the entire fault stopping and starting, ripples of separation move along it, similarly to what happens with the sneaker. The team believes its rubber setup could become an easy way to study earthquake physics in a lab.

“This is a more advanced and technically sophisticated analysis of a problem I dipped my toe into 20 years ago,” says Martyn Shorten, a stick-slip expert at BioMechanica, a consulting firm in Oregon. “I love it!”

So next time you see NBA player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander take someone’s ankles, remember that the spectacle’s squeaky score is something to behold as well. And when you cop your favorite player’s new signature shoe, you’re buying a finely tuned musical instrument that simulates an earthquake with every step. Who knows—maybe we’re just a few years off from “signature squeaks!”

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As I cheer on my sister, Amber Glenn, during her first-ever Olympics, I’m so proud of the person and athlete she is. And, of course, with that love comes a fierce desire to protect her from the ugliness and hate I’m seeing online.

Recently, Amber was interviewed by our longtime friend Ashley Cain, the cohost of the Flame Bearers and Culxtured series Making It to Milan, about Amber’s journey to the Games, equity in sports, and her advice for young athletes. I was thrilled to be a part of her episode, too, and talk about what it means to me to see someone I love so much finally get the honor and recognition she deserves.

Amber has always been exceptional. In a sport where longevity often leads to burnout, she has stayed relentlessly devoted to her dream. After more than a decade in international figure skating, three consecutive US national champion titles, and now a gold medal at her very first Olympics, she’s shown the world that she fights for her dreams and doesn’t give up.

The same goes for her beliefs and values. Amber has always been unapologetically exactly who she is. For Amber, being the first out LGBTQ+ woman on a US Olympic figure skating team means more than just a footnote in her bio. She wears the Pride flag pin not for attention or because it’s on trend, but because she’s had to fight to love herself unconditionally, and she wants the same for LGBTQ+ people across the country.

You may be wondering what my sister said to bring on such vicious hatred. When asked at a press conference about her views on Trump’s impact on the LGBTQ+ community, she responded: “It’s been a hard time for the [LGBTQ+] community overall in this administration. It isn’t the first time that we’ve had to come together as a community and try and fight for our human rights.”

She never expressed a lack of respect or a lack of appreciation for this country. She simply spoke about what millions of Americans are living right now, as shown in the more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that have been introduced in the US so far this year, according to the ACLU. That’s when the hate started pouring in. This isn’t criticism; this is an attempt to strip away someone’s humanity, all because what she’s saying is different and scary to them.

Especially now, as Amber prepares for one of the biggest moments of her career, she should not have to carry the hate she has received while also trying to land her jumps. No athlete should. We say we want people to be authentic, then we recoil when they are. We say athletes are role models, then we demand they stay silent about their own lives. We celebrate them right up until they make us uncomfortable, and then we say they are horrible people.

For me, there was never a question of whether or not I would love and support my sister unconditionally—love doesn’t have strings attached. Neither does allyship. Our parents taught us to treat all people with love and respect, even if we don’t understand where they’re coming from. You don’t have to be LGBTQ+ (or even understand what it means) to agree that people deserve to be who they are, and love who they love, without receiving hate.

Allyship is supposed to be uncomfortable. That’s kind of the point. It gives us just a taste of what the people we care about deal with day in and day out. If it makes us feel overwhelmed, we can imagine how they must feel all the time. Through the years, I’ve seen the beautiful and terrifying sides of people reflected through sports. I’ve seen how sports can bring people together across divides, and how groups and platforms like Flame Bearers champion women exactly as they are. I’ve also seen the way that people use sport as a space to promote bigotry, declaring that there’s only one way to be an athlete, a woman, an American.

When I see my sister with her teammates, beaming with pride, I think of the good in sports. Beyond any medal, seeing my sister happy is the greatest victory. Seeing all the positive comments in Flame Bearers’ feed reminds me that there are other people out there who celebrate diversity and lead with compassion. I’m going to keep looking toward the light, and doing all I can to outshine the dark.

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“Something like this dispute was inevitable,” said Michael C. Horowitz, who worked on A.I. weapons issues in the Defense Department during the Biden administration. “Because the technology is advancing so quickly, we’re having these debates now. A.I. has moved from being in a niche conversation to something really at the center of global power.”

An hour before the deadline on Friday, President Trump weighed in on the fight, posting on social media that he would “NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!” That decision, he said, “belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.”

The clash centers on the Pentagon’s use of a classified version of Anthropic’s A.I. model, Claude. The company wants to embed safeguards in its technology to prevent its use for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons with no humans in the loop.

The Pentagon has said that it has no plans to use the technology for those purposes, but that a private contractor cannot decide how its tools will be lawfully used for national security, just as a weapons manufacturer does not determine where its missiles are dropped.

At the Pentagon, the dispute comes at an important moment. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News contributor who has lashed out at policies and companies he sees as too liberal, wants to aggressively integrate A.I. in war planning and weapons development. Mr. Hegseth is echoing Mr. Trump, who has made the expansion of A.I. a cornerstone of his policies.

But Anthropic, a five-year-old company worth about $380 billion, has staked its reputation on A.I. safety and raised concerns about the technology’s dangers, even as it has collaborated with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. It is the only A.I. company currently operating on the Pentagon’s classified systems.

In recent days, the Pentagon and Anthropic have showed no signs of backing down. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, posted on social media on Thursday that the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic allow it to use A.I. “for all lawful purposes,” saying it was a “common-sense request.”

In response, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” Anthropic was prepared to lose its government contract and help the Pentagon transition to another company’s technology, he said.

Without a compromise, Mr. Hegseth has threatened to invoke the rarely used Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to work with it on its terms, or designate the company a supply chain threat and block it from doing business with the government.

The confrontation has created new divisions between Silicon Valley and Washington at a moment when the industry seemed in step with President Trump’s tech-forward agenda, especially as Google, xAI, and OpenAI are also involved in A.I. work with the Pentagon.

On Thursday, nearly 50 OpenAI employees and 175 Google employees published a letter calling on their leaders to “refuse the Department of War’s current demands.” More than 100 employees who work on Google’s A.I. technology expressed concern in another letter to company leaders about working with the Pentagon. Prominent technologists, including Jeff Dean, a top Google executive, have also said they are concerned about how A.I. can be misused for surveillance.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)

A little over two years ago, A.I. safety and regulation was a top concern. At a global summit hosted in Britain by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the United States, China, and 26 other countries signed a pledge to address some of the technology’s potential risks, such as giving hackers new attack methods and accelerating disinformation.

But as the A.I. race ramped up, the issue has faded as a priority. Last year, the Trump administration revoked safety policies imposed under President Biden. Mr. Trump signed an executive order in December aimed at undercutting state laws that regulate A.I. He has also lifted restrictions on exports of A.I. semiconductors, despite concerns that the components could help rivals like China.

The European Union, which passed far-reaching A.I. regulations in 2024, is now considering rolling some back. At the United Nations, a yearslong effort to ban certain A.I. weapons has been stalled by opposition from the United States, Russia, and other countries.

On the battlefield, the war in Ukraine has ushered in an era of drone warfare that turned autonomous weapons from a futuristic possibility to a near-term reality.

“As A.I. becomes more powerful and more capable, the incentives to use it also become much stronger,” said Helen Toner, an A.I. policy expert at Georgetown University and former OpenAI board member. “At the same time, people’s appetite to talk about risks and how to solve them has gone down.”

Ms. Toner said the Anthropic-Pentagon dispute showed a fundamental disconnect. In Washington, officials view A.I. as a new tool that can be harnessed for specific goals. In Silicon Valley, creators of the technology see it becoming more like an “entity” with sophisticated reasoning that may behave in unexpected and dangerous ways without oversight and refinement, she said.

The fight between the Pentagon and Anthropic began on Jan. 9, when Mr. Hegseth published a memo calling for A.I. companies to remove restrictions on their technologies.

“The time is now to accelerate A.I. integration, and we will put the full weight of the Department’s leadership, resources, and expanding corps of private sector partners into accelerating America’s Military A.I. Dominance,” he wrote.

Underpinning Mr. Hegseth’s strategy was a fundamental shift in military technology. Hardware is in an age of decline. Military contractors have struggled to deliver ships and fighter planes on time and on budget.

Software has become an increasingly powerful tool. Tech executives, including Alex Karp, the chief executive of the data analytics company Palantir, which works closely with the federal government, have argued that America’s competitive edge over adversaries will be found in its advances with software.

Anthropic has been a willing partner, providing the government with a special version of Claude that has fewer restrictions. Yet some in the Pentagon viewed the start-up with suspicion. Its openness to talking about safety risks put off some in the department’s leadership, who have called the San Francisco company “woke.”

When talks between the Pentagon and Anthropic began over a $200 million contract for use of A.I. in classified systems, lawyers from both sides quietly traded emails over contract language, said two people involved in the discussions.

Anthropic asked for two things. The company said it was willing to loosen its restrictions on the technology, but wanted guardrails to stop its A.I. from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved. Without those, Anthropic risks damaging its safety-first reputation.

“This is really about the power of the state to determine how A.I. is being deployed in the world versus companies,” said Robert Trager, co-director of Oxford University’s Martin A.I. Governance Initiative.

Cordula Droege, the chief lawyer for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has called for global limits on A.I. weapons, said the violent risks of introducing swarms of autonomous weapons on battlefields is being lost in the wider debate.

“Throughout history, warfare goes in parallel with the development of technology,” she said.

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Inquiry of Ex-Officials: A U.S. attorney in Miami is said to be expanding the scope of an investigation into former officials involved in scrutinizing Trump during his first campaign and term.

• Downed Drone: The U.S. shot down a drone belonging to the Homeland Security Department over a Texas border town, prompting the F.A.A. to shutter nearby airspace, according to four people familiar with what transpired.

• Iran: As they made their public case for another U.S. attack, President Trump and his aides made claims about Iran’s weapons and nuclear program that were either false or unproven.

• Voter Data: The Trump administration sued five states to obtain unredacted voter registration databases, in pursuit of baseless claims of voter fraud.

• Sanctions Against U.N. Official: The family of a U.N. expert on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories sued Trump and top officials, challenging sanctions imposed against her over her views of the war in Gaza.

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The Pentagon has said that a private contractor cannot decide how its tools will be lawfully used for national security. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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Heart disease is the top cause of death for women in the U.S.; it kills more of them than all forms of cancer combined. But the unique signs and symptoms of heart disease in women are more likely go undetected and untreated than those in men.

The dangers heart disease poses to women may be about to get worse, according to a new analysis. Based on national data between 2010 to 2020, researchers project that, by 2050, the prevalence of serious cardiovascular disease and stroke in women in the U.S. will rise from 10.7 percent to 14.4 percent—affecting more than 22 million people. And that’s not counting high blood pressure.

The study, published today in Circulation, also shows an alarming uptick of disease in younger women: nearly a third of all women between age 20 and 44 will be diagnosed with some form of cardiovascular disease by 2050.

Amanda Montañez; Source: “Forecasting the Burden of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke in Women in the United States through 2050: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association,” by Karen E. Joynt et al., in Circulation, Vol. 153. Published online February 25, 2026 (data)

The projection is “really a wake-up call,” says Karen Joynt Maddox, lead author of the study and a cardiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also vice chair of the Council on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research at the American Heart Association, which publishes these forecasts every year.

“Despite all of our amazing advances in treating cardiovascular disease, we have not made many advances in preventing the disease. And in fact, the projections would suggest that we’re doing worse and worse in preventing the cardiovascular risk factors,” she says.

The estimates represent a setback in the fight against cardiovascular disease, says C. Noel Bairey Merz, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.

“We had this idea that maybe by the end of this century, cardiovascular disease would be a rare condition,” Bairey Merz says. “Up until 2010, we had gotten cardiovascular disease down to one in four women, and now we’re back to one in three. It’s a sad reality.”

Hypertension—a form of high blood pressure that is an early risk factor of heart disease—could spike, according to the projections. Nearly 60 percent of women will have high blood pressure by 2050—up from 50 percent in 2020. And the rates of numerous cardiovascular conditions, such as coronary disease, heart failure, stroke and atrial fibrillation could all rise slightly, according to the study. By 2050, the prevalence of diabetes could increase by 10 percent, while that of obesity may increase by about 17 percent. Similar trends were observed in girls aged two to 19, with obesity predicted to increase from 19.6 percent to 32 percent by 2050.

“Cardiovascular disease is a life course disease. We can see risk factors start in childhood,” Joynt Maddox says. “I worry a lot about the increases that we’re projecting in young people, about setting people up for having heart problems when they’re in their 30s and 40s and 50s instead of their 60s and 70s and 80s.”

Amanda Montañez; Source: “Forecasting the Burden of Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke in Women in the United States through 2050: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association,” by Karen E. Joynt et al.,

Older women have a higher prevalence of disease, but cardiovascular risk factors are high and rising in younger groups. Those two trends could feed each other in a vicious cycle, Joynt Maddox explains. As women age, they might experience greater rates of cardiovascular disease associated with a prior heart or metabolic issue. People with a past history of stroke and heart attacks are more likely to die from heart failure years later.

Similar trends could be seen in men, Joynt Maddox says. “It’s not that women are uniquely experiencing the increase in obesity or high blood pressure, but there are additional layers on top of that,” she adds.

Part of the reason why women may be at particular risk could relate to the significant hormonal changes they experience throughout life, including during menstruation, pregnancy and menopause, Joynt Maddox says. Determining how these life events affect heart health will require more research, but these are “issues that we can definitely build upon,” Bairey Merz says.

Socioeconomic and demographic factors also affect outcomes. For example, Black women have the highest incidence of high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes, which are all cardiovascular disease risk factors, and this is expected to still be the case in 2050. They could also see the gr

eatest jumps in heart failure and stroke, according to the new predictions.

“The double whammy is these intersectionalities—you’re Black or brown, and you live in a rural or underserved area, and you have absolutely no access to health care or insurance,” Bairey Merz says.

These racial health disparities are well documented, but the new forecast underscores the need for better prevention measures and health care policies, Joynt Maddox says. New glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1) drugs, for example, could help mitigate rates of cardiovascular disease and obesity. How much GLP-1 drugs will do this “is an enormous unanswered question,” says Joynt Maddox, adding that the data the projections are based on do not fully overlap with the rise in GLP-1 drugs. “But I’m optimistic that it’s going to be part of helping us bend the curve.”

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A Columbia University student was detained Thursday morning by immigration agents who misrepresented themselves by saying they were looking for a missing child to get access to a residential building, the university’s top administrator said.

Elmina Aghayeva, who is from Azerbaijan, was later released, but the school’s acting president, Claire Shipman, and others condemned the agents’ actions in the alleged 6 a.m. incident in an off-campus Columbia building.

“This was a frightening and fast-moving situation and utterly unacceptable for our students and staff,” Shipman said in a statement.

The Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Aghayeva and said her student visa had been terminated in 2016 “for failing to attend classes.”

“The building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment,” the DHS statement said.

Aghayeva said Thursday afternoon in an Instagram story that she had been released and was on her way home. “I am safe and okay,” she wrote, adding that she was in “complete shock over what happened.”

The hours before she was released were marked by growing outrage and concern over how she was arrested.

Shipman said five federal agents entered the off-campus Columbia building “without any kind of warrant.”

“The agents gained entry by stating they were police searching for a missing child,” she said. “They made their way to the apartment of the student they were targeting with the same story.”

A representative from DHS said its agents wore badges around their necks and verbally identified themselves.

Shipman said the agents flashed a photo of the purported missing child, which was captured on security video, as part of the false story. She also said the agents did not show a university public safety officer any warrant.

“A public safety officer arrived, asked multiple times for a warrant, which was not produced, and asked for time to call his boss, which was not given,” Shipman said. “The agents took our student.”

Public officials were alarmed over the university officials’ allegation, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, who is in Washington, wrote on X that he spoke with President Donald Trump about concerns over the arrest.

“He has just informed me that she will be released imminently,” Mamdani wrote shortly before Aghayeva shared news of her release.

Gov. Kathy Hochul condemned the detention of the student and said “a rogue deportation agenda is operating with zero transparency and even less accountability.”

She also referred to Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind refugee who was found dead in Buffalo, New York, after authorities said Customs and Border Protection left him at a coffee shop.

“Yesterday, a blind father was released from federal custody and left alone on the street to find his way home. He never made it back to his family. This morning, ICE agents misled campus security and took a young woman from her college dorm without a judicial warrant,” Hochul said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., described the allegations as “unacceptable” on X. He said his office was working closely with Columbia and authorities on the matter.

“It is outrageous that ICE agents falsely represented themselves to arrest a Columbia graduate student by entering university-owned housing without a warrant,” he wrote.

Aghayeva is an international student with a visa, according to a statement her friends released through a faculty organization, the American Association of University Professors. She is in her senior year, majoring in neuroscience and political science.

The statement added that she was taken from her Columbia housing building on West 121st Street. 

Aghayeva’s lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition with the Southern District of New York on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News. It says that she entered the U.S. in or around 2016 on a visa and that no reason was given for her detention.

An attorney for Aghayeva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several student groups, including Columbia Student Apartheid Divest, called for an emergency rally “to protest the detention of an undergrad from a Columbia building.” The demonstration outside the university gates drew about 100 people, according to the college newspaper, the Columbia Spectator.

In the letter, Shipman reminded the campus community that law enforcement agents must have judicial warrants or judicial subpoenas to access nonpublic areas of the school. If law enforcement requests access, she said, students, faculty and staff members should ask the agents to wait and then contact the university’s public safety office.

“Do not allow them to enter or accept service of a warrant or subpoena,” Shipman urged.

“An administrative warrant is not sufficient” to access nonpublic areas of the campus, she added.

NBC News has reported that an internal ICE memo in May said agents are allowed to forcibly enter a home using an administrative warrant if a judge has issued a “final order of removal.” That is a departure from previous norms, in which a warrant signed by a judge or a magistrate was necessary for agents to forcibly enter homes.

The university said in a letter sent to the campus Thursday that it was deploying additional patrols and staffing to residential buildings.

Columbia residential staff members were instructed, in nonemergency situations, not to allow any law enforcement entry into its buildings without Columbia Public Safety present and guidance from the Office of the General Counsel.

Columbia University has become a political flash point over the past two years amid protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, high-profile ICE arrests, and criticism of the university from Trump himself.

The Trump administration ordered the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants last year after he accused the university of failing to act “in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

A letter was sent to the Columbia University trustees and the former interim president laying out conditions to restore its federal funding, which included a ban on masks on campus and comprehensive reform of its admissions “to confirm with federal law and policy.”

The university acquiesced to the demands last year to restore its grant funding. It also agreed to pay a $200 million settlement to the government to resolve allegations that it violated anti-discrimination laws.

According to the university, the agreement preserved “Columbia’s autonomy and authority over faculty hiring, admissions, and academic decision-making.”

Homeland Security agents also executed search warrants on two Columbia University residences last year, though no arrests were made at the time. The search came days after immigration authorities arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student at the time.

Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was released in June after three months in immigration detention following widespread protests and a legal battle to keep him in the U.S. Attorneys for Khalil argued that his detention was a targeted retaliation for his pro-Palestinian views and, therefore, unconstitutional.

Khalil’s status remains uncertain after an appeals court overturned a lower court ruling last month, saying he had to continue to move through the immigration court process before he could challenge whether the detention violated his rights.

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Elmina Aghayeva was detained at Columbia

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It’s my favorite “Star Trek” moment:

Shields are down, captain! We can’t take another hit!

In what seems like every movie or episode, whenever a federation starship is engaged in battle, its deflector shields are being raised or dropped or damaged by enemy fire to some oddly specific level (47 percent, say). It’s the stuff of high drama, when risk meets strategy to force a life-or-death decision. When shields are down, will the captain surrender, call for a shipwide evacuation, or launch an ingenious counterattack?

I do not claim full Trekkie status, but I’ve been thinking about those shields as I watch President Trump’s second term. Trump seems to have his own set of deflector shields: his cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whom he uses to absorb some of the blowback from his most contentious policies.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, is a shield for the Trump administration’s brutal, sometimes fatal, immigration enforcement. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, is the face of the president’s efforts to exact prosecutorial vengeance upon his antagonists and to bypass such punishment for his allies. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, embodies the administration’s crusade against diversity programs and its faux tough-guy persona. And Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, is the administration’s “tariff dealmaker in chief,” as The New Yorker put it, the implementer of the president’s stubbornly unpopular trade policies.

When the shields are at reasonable strength, they can keep taking fire, and the ship of state continues flying. But when the shields are battered and begin to malfunction, the entire enterprise is exposed. And right now, a lot of Trump’s shields seem to be faltering at once.

Cosplaying with cowboy hats and bulletproof vests, Noem oversees and defends the excesses of ICE and the border patrol, personifying all that has gone wrong with the Department of Homeland Security. The Wall Street Journal recently published an embarrassing exposé, which featured Noem feuding with senior officials and obsessing over her television appearances; and this week, The Intercept reported that a story Noem has told repeatedly about an immigrant cannibal who began eating himself on a deportation flight was fabricated, citing federal law enforcement sources. The knives are out for Noem, not only from Democrats hoping to impeach her but from within the administration itself.

At the Justice Department, Bondi has done precisely as the president has demanded — investigating or indicting his political enemies, whether they are members of Congress, prosecutors, a former F.B.I. director, or another official who served in Trump’s first administration. Yet the saga of the Epstein files hovers over her. In a spectacularly combative House hearing this month, Bondi refused to turn and face victims of Epstein’s who were present and apologize to them, and she derided members of the Judiciary Committee as “a failed politician” in one case and a “washed-up loser lawyer” in another. While the Justice Department can’t hire enough prosecutors willing to pursue her partisan agenda, Bondi melts down on live television.

velations that surrounded his nomination, by the Signal-group-chat fiasco, and by his hectoring of top military officers regarding fitness and haircuts. But more recently, his missteps have escalated. First, with the strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean (including a potential war crime that Hegseth blamed on the “fog of war”), and second, with the Pentagon’s approval of the use of a laser weapon by border protection agents, which resulted in the brief shutdown of El Paso International Airport. The “warrior ethos” that Hegseth purports to represent is morphing into the incompetence that one would expect when a Fox News host is tasked with running the Pentagon.

And Lutnick, already charged with pursuing the Trump administration’s tariff policy — which 60 percent of Americans dislike — is now known to have misled the public about his connections to Epstein, which were more extensive than the secretary had previously stated. (It seems Lutnick visited Epstein’s island and did business with him after he had supposedly cut off ties.) When Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, calls this government “the Epstein administration,” this is the sort of thing he’s talking about.

During his first term, Trump was quick to eject top officials who displeased or embarrassed him. By this point in his first administration, the president had already moved on from the national security adviser; the F.B.I. director and deputy director; the White House chief of staff, press secretary and chief political strategist; and the secretary of health and human services. (Soon to go were his secretary of state, his top economic adviser, his secretary of veterans’ affairs, and another national security adviser.)

In the second term, by contrast, Trump has endured few major personnel losses. Mike Waltz was ousted as the national security adviser last year but received a consolation prize as the ambassador to the United Nations, while Elon Musk, who caused so much harm in his brief tenure as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, departed the unpaid post when his time as a so-called special government employee ran out.

So, why does Trump seem less willing to dismiss top officials and advisers this time around?

Part of it may be pique. After Trump gave up on Matt Gaetz, his initial choice for attorney general, who withdrew from consideration in response to allegations of sex trafficking and drug use, the president became reluctant to buckle again. Backtracking on other cabinet choices, even dubious picks such as Hegseth for the Pentagon or Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, might have signaled weakness, which we know this president cannot abide.

But there’s another explanation. When Trump cut loose senior officials during his first term, it was often because they espoused worldviews or priorities different from his own; in some cases, they obstructed his decisions or subscribed to norms he found useless and constraining. Remember Jeff Sessions, the attorney general whose unforgivable sin was to recuse himself from oversight of the Russia investigation, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel? Or Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state who repeatedly clashed with the White House over policy? “We were not really thinking the same,” Trump explained to reporters when he pushed out Tillerson.

The offenses of Trump’s second-term cabinet members tend to be ones of loyalty or sycophancy, rarely of independent thought. Whatever damage the secretaries inflict on their country or their reputations is done on the president’s orders and on his behalf. In Trump’s first term, sacrificing cabinet members meant firing them, or pushing them to resign. In the second term, it means keeping them in the job for as long as those shields retain even marginal power.

The cabinet secretaries understand their purpose. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state (and national security adviser and onetime national archivist), is among the more respected members of the administration; he was confirmed in the post by a unanimous Senate vote, as Trump recalled in his State of the Union address this week. “People like you,” the president marveled, to Rubio, perhaps thinking of the contrast with his own weak approval ratings. But Rubio knows the deal, which Trump made clear when he mused about retaking the Panama Canal during his address to Congress last year. “Good luck, Marco,” he said. “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”

Cabinet secretaries have often taken the fall for the president they serve. Jimmy Carter’s entire cabinet and senior White House staff offered to resign in July 1979, hoping to re-energize his troubled presidency. (Carter accepted a handful of resignations and reorganized the White House, but he still lost to Ronald Reagan the next year.) And after the Republican Party suffered “a thumping” in the 2006 midterm elections, as President George W. Bush memorably put it, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary overseeing the unpopular war in Iraq, quickly stepped down. (Stuff happens.)

Trump himself seems to be tiring of the cloying cabinet meetings, a staple of both terms, in which officials take turns gushing over their leader. (Personnel once meant policy; now it means flattery.) After he appeared to doze off at a recent gathering, Trump explained that it had gotten “pretty boring.” If affordability worries or violent immigration enforcement continue undercutting Trump’s standing, producing another midterm thumping for the Republicans this November, perhaps some of the cabinet secretaries will find the exits, no matter how fawningly they’ve praised Trump in public.

After all, it’s nice to have people to blame if anything goes wrong.

For the moment, though, Trump is sticking by his team, even those members who seem especially vulnerable. “Secretary Lutnick remains a very important member of President Trump’s team,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, recently declared. “The president fully supports the secretary.” And at Homeland Security, a top spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, is leaving, but not yet Noem herself, no matter that the department is so toxic on Capitol Hill that Democrats have blocked its funding.

The president can afford to dangle these battered shields by his side a little longer because he still has others at his disposal: a subservient congressional majority; a Supreme Court that, no matter its ruling on tariffs or on the deployment of National Guard troops in U.S. cities, still granted him “absolute immunity” from prosecution for official acts; and a vice president who will remain a trolling Trump loyalist as long as he thinks it will get him the Republican nomination in 2028.

For all the attention devoted to Trump’s deteriorating popularity, his public standing may not matter that much to him. Trump knows he is not going to appear on a ballot again; whatever the price for the incompetence of his cabinet or the venality of his administration, he will not be the one to pay it.

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Photo illustration by The New York Times; source photographs by Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images

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