Last week, the Trump administration announced a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal would allow the kingdom to develop nuclear power using American technology and could eventually pave the way for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. But the agreement must first undergo congressional review — and survive President Donald Trump’s social media feed.

When the Trump administration announced its agreement, it made no mention of the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But that omission and the possibility that Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium alarmed Israelis — and Trump quickly threw in both conditions in a Truth Social post.

The chaos around the agreement comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, this week to meet with Trump. The Saudi deal — as well as growing friction over differences on the goals and trajectory of the renewed US war with Iran and frustration in Washington over Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon — will undoubtedly be topics.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswame spoke with Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, about the relationship between the two countries and its leaders ahead of Netanyahu’s visit. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are we expecting from the meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump?

I suspect this will be among the most tense meetings that they have had because there are a number of issues on the table where President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are on different pages. The issue that they used to be on the same page about was Iran, and I don’t think that is the case anymore. 

As we’ve seen the Iran war unfold, the Israeli view is still the view that they had at the outset of the war, which is that this is necessary to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, with its ballistic missiles, with its proxies. And ultimately what the Israelis wanted to see, and what they still want to see, is a different regime in Iran. President Trump may still share those goals, but it’s pretty clear that, as the war has not gone the way he anticipated, he’s looking for an exit strategy and his main focus is the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something that the Israelis care about at all. 

I think at this point, when Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives at the White House, he’s probably going to try to convince the president that the original goal should be on the table, that the US and Israel should keep going, and President Trump seems to have a different view of things.

And now we have this new deal with Saudi Arabia. Was Israel taken by surprise by the deal? 

It absolutely took Israel by surprise. When the deal was announced on Wednesday, it was a deal to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear power and nuclear infrastructure. There was no mention of Israel. There was no mention of normalization. There was no mention of anything outside of the bounds of a nuclear agreement. 

President Trump on Thursday put out his Truth Social where he said that the deal is absolutely contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. And what’s curious about that is that when the deal was announced, there was no mention of it, and the deal was actually signed. So either the president is intending to change the terms of the deal after it’s been signed, or he’s willing to back out of it if this new condition is not met. 

Or, and I suspect that this is the actual answer, he will secure some sort of commitment from the Saudis to examine joining the Abraham Accords at some point down the road when Israel has met a number of conditions and there’s been progress toward a Palestinian state. And if that is how it unfolds, it will leave the Israelis behind. And I think this comes as a pretty big shock to [Israel] given that President Trump’s previous policy was that a deal between the US and Saudi Arabia would involve normalization.

Was Netanyahu himself surprised by this deal? 

I think he must have been surprised by this deal. It is true that Trump and Netanyahu have seemed to have had a very cushy relationship, not only during this term, but during President Trump’s first term as well. But it’s not a relationship of equals.

We’ve seen President Trump — particularly over the past few months, I think in response to criticism here in the United States over the role that Israel and the role that the prime minister may have had in convincing President Trump to go to war — repeatedly talk about the fact that he is in charge, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to do what he says, that he is the decider and Prime Minister Netanyahu is not. 

I do think they have a good relationship, but President Trump, at least publicly, seems to be signaling that he is in charge and he wants everybody to know that. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu undoubtedly is feeling some stress in this relationship. And when he shows up here tomorrow, he’s going to do whatever he can to try and repair any rifts that there are.

Israel wanted this war, but hates this deal that the president may very likely complete with Saudi Arabia. Did they miscalculate somewhere in here? 

I think the Israelis have miscalculated in a number of ways. And the biggest is that consistently since 2017 or 2018, you hear Israeli officials, political officials, security officials, even ordinary Israelis, talk routinely about President Trump being the best friend that Israel has ever had and exhibiting a faith in President Trump that he will never do anything that will hang Israel out to dry. 

And a lot of what they’ve done has proceeded on that assumption. And even though everybody is aware of President Trump’s transactional nature, even though everybody is aware that he is relatively volatile, that he slips on policy issues all the time, the Israelis had this faith that they would always be an exception to that rule. And I think what we’re seeing is that they’re not necessarily an exception to that rule. 

And it’s important to stress that when it comes to this Saudi nuclear deal, the problem for the Israelis is not just that it was signed without any hint of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia being part of the deal itself. It may open the door for countries that have signed more restrictive agreements in the region, like the UAE, to do the same. And ultimately, all of this is a bet that the trajectory of Saudi Arabia is going to continue, that it’s going to continue modernizing, continue becoming more moderate and pragmatic, and continue improving relations with Israel. 

If that’s not the case, once you’ve handed the Saudis a nuclear program, that’s irreversible. People shouldn’t forget that Iran’s nuclear program started off as a civilian nuclear program that the United States provided for it under the days of the Shah. So for Israelis, the normalization part of this is absolutely worrisome, but the deal itself is problematic too. And I think that’s where the Israelis are feeling panicked.

Welcome to the first edition of The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one thing I’m thinking about — a big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries — and one thing I’m hearing, from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea

There are two ways of looking at the current divides within the Democratic Party. The first — and more dominant — narrative is that the party’s left wing is on an upward march, one that began with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election in 2025 and has continued through this year’s Democratic primary season.

The second, and I believe more accurate, explanation is that the party is rudderless — an ideological fight to be settled in the next presidential election — and that the left’s success in New York City, Colorado, and even Maine (before Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed) grows out of a void left by a bigger, less-talked-about story: an establishment in free fall, on the wrong side of fundamental shifts across its own rank-and-file base.

The difference between those interpretations is fine, but important. I don’t think the Democratic base agrees with every position articulated by successful left-wing candidates — like “all deportations are wrong” (as NYC’s Darializa Avila Chevalier told me) — or have suddenly become committed democratic socialists. But I do think the left is on the right side of the gateway issues the base is currently prioritizing: a working-class-led affordability agenda, a skepticism of artificial intelligence, and a moral opposition to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran and to Israel’s campaigns of violence in Lebanon and Gaza. Those issues, more than any others, have defined the Democratic Party’s internal battles since 2024.

Progressives have also benefited from a moderate wing that, in many cases, has yet to lay out an affirmative vision. After the signature policies of the Biden administration flopped as political motivators, the center has seemed frozen in time, unable to offer its own blueprint for the electorate’s concerns (“abundance” aside). When I sat down with Third Way president Jon Cowan, he had no trouble assailing Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed, or any number of the party’s most prominent progressive figures. But when I asked whether Third Way was actually responding to the clear shifts among the electorate — on Medicare-for-all, on abolishing ICE, on foreign aid to Israel — his answer was far less sure.

Cowan on America, Actually:

We’ve never said that there’s a problem with Hasan Piker because he advocates for Medicare-for-all. … I think Medicare-for-all is still very problematic as a political issue, and if someone were nominated for president on the Democratic ticket and they were for Medicare-for-all, I think it would be a major barrier to getting elected. But that’s not our beef with Hasan Piker at all.

It was the same evasion whenever the conversation turned from the messengers to the message. In a recent interview with US Rep. Jim Clyburn — the powerful South Carolina Democrat who has endorsed US Rep. Haley Stevens’s Senate run in Michigan — he bluntly defended insider politics, insisting party leadership was not at fault for the 2024 result. The blame, he told me, belonged to the Black voters who hadn’t turned out for Kamala Harris.

Clyburn on America, Actually:

When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is. … If that 59 percent had been 69 percent, she would’ve won.

When I asked him directly whether the argument was that Black voters had let Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” It is a remarkable thing to hear from a member of leadership — the base failed us, not the other way around — and it is exactly the instinct that has the establishment on its back foot.

This is why I think it matters to read the Democratic Party’s post-2024 convulsion as a story of establishment collapse rather than left-wing ascension. Stevens, Clyburn, and the party’s leadership would prefer to make this a referendum on the left — on the acceptability of its candidates and its media figures. But the base is communicating something else: a lack of confidence in the center, and in a version of establishment politics that prizes seniority and loyalty over voters’ values. Establishment collapse also explains the Democratic results that don’t fit neatly on the moderate vs. progressive binary: like Attorney General Phil Weiser’s victory in Colorado or whatever is happening in the Wisconsin governor’s race.

The center’s other problem is that its core general-election pitch — we may not thrill you, but we’re not Trump — is losing relevance the weaker that Trump looks politically. I spent a night at Trump’s UFC event on the White House lawn in June, an evening engineered to speak to the young men who broke his way in 2024, and found plenty of them cooling. “He was promising lower prices on everything,” one told me. “We didn’t know wars were gonna start.” Even the MAGA operative Jack Posobiec conceded that “the numbers are softer today, there’s no question about that.”

When the opposition’s own coalition is cracking, branding yourself as an inoffensive vessel who can gather up the most anti-Trump voters looks less compelling. The establishment needs an affirmative reason to be chosen — and it hasn’t found one.

So here’s my amendment to the narrative of the moment: The story isn’t a left-wing party discovering its confidence. It’s an establishment losing its own — and a base voting, in New York, in Colorado, and soon in Michigan and Wisconsin, on how much faith it still has that the center will name what it actually wants and fight for it. 

What I’m hearing: A Michigan reporter’s take on the Democratic Senate race

I reached out to Samuel Robinson, a reporter for the state’s oldest Black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle; he also has a Substack, Detroit One Million. Robinson is based on Detroit’s east side, and he’s someone I’ve known for a while, as we’re both members of the National Association of Black Journalists. 

Both the Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings have invested so much in the state — it’s become the proxy war in the party’s fight over its future. What is it about Michigan that you think has made the stakes so high? 

Stakes are high because of the control of Congress. But also, Michigan is like a microcosm of America. It swings back and forth every four, eight years. But our US Senate seats have been held by Democrats since 1992. Republicans say they’re going to spend a ton of money to flip the seat being opened by Gary Peters retiring. Women moderates (Dana Nessel, Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson) won big in 2018, and eight years later, all three to some degree have disappointed their own voters. Dems had a legislative trifecta from 2022 to 2024, and many people feel like Dems let down Black residents who got them elected in the first place. 

That’s one thing that unites the Black progressives and the Black establishment: Members in both camps feel the Democratic Party hasn’t done enough. 

How would you describe the difference between a Haley Stevens supporter and an Abdul El-Sayed supporter? 

Haley supporter — usually older; the young people I’ve met who support her typically come from wealthier backgrounds. Haley supporters are usually not involved in politics or people who keep up with national discourse. Haley supporters are worried about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. They are worried about Trump nationalizing elections or not leaving the White House after ’28.

Abdul supporter — usually younger; the older people I’ve met who support him often acknowledge they are in the minority of their peers. The younger people who support him are all over the place in terms of their backgrounds — rich, poor, highly educated, no college. He has the support of most young people under 35. They are mostly worried about sending American taxpayer dollars to Israel, and the influence of AIPAC. I hear more about that than I do Medicare-for-all. 

Stevens has sought to capitalize on El-Sayed’s perceived weakness with the Black vote. How real do you think that vulnerability is? 

Abdul struggles with certain Black voters mostly because they don’t know who he is. I’ve heard from countless people who have said something to the degree of, “I don’t know enough about him.” He received media attention as the Detroit and Wayne County health director, but not enough for people to feel it. Most people know that he ran for governor in 2018 with no experience. People see Haley Stevens ads and mailers. Most Black voters aren’t on Twitter.

I saw this post on X where you were talking to a Stevens supporter who expressed some pretty bigoted claims about El-Sayed’s candidacy. How widespread is that sentiment? When I was reporting on Mamdani’s election in New York City, it was clear that there was anxiety among the Black political class that the rise of Asian, Latino, Muslim communities could displace them. Is that fear at play here? 

The race is definitely a tension point between Wayne County’s Black and Muslim population. Many who have shared with me similar sentiments will point to the anti-Black racism and exploitation of our community at the hands of Arab gas station and liquor store owners. That resentment builds up and then bubbles over in a race like this. We certainly live amongst each other, like off Seven Mile on the east side, where Bengali families and Black families live side by side as next-door neighbors. But there’s a resentment that goes both ways.

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America’s right-wing elites have a theatrical new indictment of liberals that they warn will lead to catastrophe: They care too much.

 “Suicidal empathy,” the phrase coined by Canadian marketing professor and conservative influencer Gad Saad, is suddenly on the lips of everyone right-of-center — including billionaire Elon Musk, who has promoted Saad’s book by the same name. 

The catchy two-word indictment crystallizes a broader critique on the right — that progressive values aren’t just a misdirection of priorities, but an active threat to everything the West has achieved over thousands of years.  

The problem, in the view of Musk, Saad, and like-minded conservatives, is that the left is so obsessed with sticking up for those on the bottom — whether it’s aid recipients abroad, asylum-seekers at the border, or the homeless in cities — that they disregard everyone else, with deadly consequences for society.

“People have empathy for the criminals, but not empathy for the victims of the criminals,” Musk told Tucker Carlson in October 2024. 

It’s also a convenient new spin on an old idea. The billionaire tech right cohort Musk belongs to has long looked for a way to unshackle itself from the leviathan of basic social responsibility. With the concept of suicidal empathy, they have found an intellectual framework to argue that their policy preferences and bottom lines aren’t just about greed or self-interest, but a matter of cultural survival.

In their quest to make this argument, many on the right have pointed to a study that they see as a sort of intellectual checkmate. In 2019, a group of psychologists gathered participants across political ideologies and asked them to express their level of concern about different groups ranging from their close family to animals to all things in existence. In one section, you see a series of heatmaps that appear to show that liberals focus their moral concerns on groups further away from themselves, whereas conservatives value their close loved ones.

Take a minute to enlarge this image and study it.
Conservatives care most about their family, their neighborhood, their own people.
Liberals care most about "poor oppressed foreigners" they never met.
This explains so much about the cult of suicidal empathy sweeping the West. pic.twitter.com/YWSYXQgkvh

— Matt Bracken (@Matt_Bracken48) January 14, 2025

Conservatives seized on the heatmaps and turned them into a meme, arguing that liberals really do value the lives of distant foreigners and strangers over those of their own family and community. 

Venture capitalist and AI Super PAC megadonor Marc Andreessen, for instance, is a fan of the heatmap meme. Rob Henderson, a conservative author, claimed the heatmap proves that “conservatives devote the majority of their empathy and care to family and friends and liberals devote most of their concern to plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks.” Even the Trump Department of Homeland Security has posted it to respond to a group of protesters opposing the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García.

But things may not be so simple as this now-infamous set of heatmaps portrays. New research published in the journal Political Psychology last month decided to study liberals’ and conservatives’ moral concerns in a more exhaustive way. It came to a very different conclusion.

What the research says about empathy and politics 

Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Utah and one of the authors of the study, decided to embark on the research in part after seeing the heatmap memes. 

“The assertion going around was that liberals had come to care more about strangers and distant causes than about their own families and communities, and that claim is testable,” he told me. “It also sat awkwardly against decades of evidence that favoring close others is a widespread default in human social cognition, so we wanted to check it directly rather than assume either side of the debate was right.”

The problem, in Law’s view, was that the 2019 study was not robust enough to really tell us who liberals and conservatives prioritize. 

“The 2019 studies measured how far moral concern extends, and they did that well,” Law wrote to me in an email. “They were not designed to detect whether concern for distant others competes with concern for close others, because both tasks built an outward-expanding structure (e.g., from close humans to distant humans to non-human life to eventually the natural world and non-sentient targets) into the measure itself.”

Instead, Law and his colleagues surveyed liberals and conservatives with what’s called the Moral Expansiveness Scale. This scale lets people rank every group independently, which lets us see how much they value them relative to each other (you can do a simple version of examining how much you care about different groups with the test here). 

What Law and his colleagues found was that it isn’t so much that progressives value foreigners and other distant groups more than their close family; they simply extend their moral concern outward further than conservatives do. 

“Close others came first everywhere,” Law said. “Across all three datasets and essentially the whole ideological spectrum, people gave their inner circle the highest moral concern, and we found no evidence of an inversion among liberals at any level.”

 The only thing ideology seemed to predict in their study was how far out someone’s moral circle of concern goes.

 “[Liberals reached] further toward targets like animals, plants, and future generations,” Law said.

They did ask respondents about tradeoffs, and liberals were willing to allocate more theoretical points to outsiders than conservatives did. But the differences were small. 

When people were asked to divide a fixed pool of 100 points, people close to them received “by far the largest share in every group, roughly 56 to 62 points out of 100,” Law told me.

Law’s more robust study suggests that the heatmap meme is essentially fake. 

“In our data, extending concern outward did not come with reduced concern for close others,” he said.

How far should empathy extend?

But disproving the heatmap meme only tells us how liberals and conservatives tend to think; it doesn’t tell us how they should think.

Tradeoffs are a fact of life. Whether we should be willing to modestly increase the national debt or taxes to increase foreign aid, for instance, is a question of values rather than something that can be empirically derived.

But the heatmap memes and pop psychology theories around “suicidal empathy” that have become so common on the right — from the world’s richest man to the folks who serve in the Trump administration — miss something deep and relevant about human beings. 

As a species, we succeeded not just because of our capacity to defend our in-groups — our family, friends, community, nations — but because of our ability to understand the interests and values of those far away. 

After World War II, for instance, multilateral organizations —  like the United Nations — were established to prevent another global conflict by having diplomatic channels that we can use to anticipate and ameliorate the concerns of other countries; even “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the doctrine that prevented a nuclear war, is based on the shared understanding that you cannot destroy someone else’s country without them deciding to do the same thing to you. 

It’s ironic that Saad’s suicidal empathy concept has taken off right as the Trump administration is actively disproving the idea that we can prosper by disregarding everyone else in the world. 

Trump’s trade wars and actual wars have been conducted under the concept that we can simply bully the rest of the planet and profit as a result. 

By trying to run roughshod over other countries’ economic interests, we’ve helped push them to find support in other major countries, like China. Repeated military attacks on Iran, powered by the idea that we should simply impose our terms on that country instead of coming to a mutually beneficial agreement as former President Barack Obama did, have cost us tens of billions of dollars in warfighting and threaten the global economy.

None of this has been popular with the people close to home that it’s purportedly meant to prioritize. Far from empathetic, the Trump doctrine seems to be suicidal cruelty — lashing out at foreigners even when cooperating with them is in our own best interest. 

The heatmap memes and quips about suicidal empathy may make for great social media fodder. But in the real world, seeing life as a constant zero-sum game where we win only if others lose is just as foolish as any progressive who suffers from an excess of empathy.